Oscar and Lucinda Page 16

  “Yes,” he said, impressed, not caring that Frazer had come to signal the arrival of lunch to which he had invited three distinguished ladies of the parish and a Mr Jenkins, newly arrived from Edinburgh with a letter of introduction. He waved away his gesticulating servant. Lucinda imagined a fly. It was not the fly season.

  “You are appointing me your proxy, then,” the clergyman said, “is that it?”

  “You are making fun of me, and most likely there is justice in that. I am being cowardly,” she nodded her head, but the nod was for herself, not her listener. “It is obvious to anyone that I am being cowardly, but I have thought about it and it seems I must work within the limitations of my character.”

  “I was most certainly not making fun of you.”

  “You would have every right …”

  “Whoa, Dobbin!” cried Dennis Hasset.

  Lucinda stopped.

  “You wish to buy a factory to make glass. ’Tis a simple enough matter. Is that it?” He smiled. The smile did what the Irish accent never could have.

  “Oh, yes, it is!”

  “And you need a little help.”

  “I do know factories, you see,” she said leaning forward. “We—I mean my dear parents, when they were alive—inspected many of them, and I am well aware that they are most usually foul and frightening places, but I do not wish this to put me off. I will face it, of course.”

  “I will be there in a moment, Frazer,” said Dennis Hasset. “Yes, yes. Don’t worry about him. No, stay, please. Soon, soon, though, I have clergyman’s business to attend to. Not nearly so amusing as glass. But yes, I will help you. I did not know you half an hour ago, Miss Leplastrier, and I will tell you I am surprised to hear myself say ‘yes’ with such enthusiasm, but upon my word I do believe I am looking forward to the exercise. We will need to co-opt, of course. I have a friend, a very clever chap called Dawson …”

  “I have more than ten thousand pounds.”

  Dennis Hasset, who had risen to his feet to conclude the interview, sat down again, his face animated by a quite remarkable smile. “The deuce you do.”

  “I only wish to invest half in this venture.” She was apologetic, sorry she had mentioned the sum. She was only a girl. She had done nothing to deserve such a sum. She imagined she saw censure in his eyes.

  “And the rest?” he asked, plunging into the question before his natural politeness could restrain him. If he had “more than ten thousand pounds” he would leave the confusions of the Church tomorrow.

  “As for the remainder, I am being cautious.”

  “Miss Leplastrier, you are being quite the opposite. You are being admirably reckless. When we began our little meeting I imagined it would be my stern duty to warn you off your passion. Now it seems to me that you possess it—I mean the passion—and you would be a fool to squander it on anything less. And I will tell you, too, before Frazer comes to cane me for disobedience, why it is that I will so willingly assist you.”

  “Because you have an affection for glass,” suggested Lucinda. “Surely,” she spread her neat little hands above the desk on which the glass curios still rested, “you made your motive most apparent?”

  “You are unduly confident. No, it is not because I am amused by glass, but because you have a passion. It is the passion I am helping you for. I am a cold man warming himself in front of someone else’s fire.”

  “But surely a passion is not an admirable thing?”

  “A dangerous thing,” allowed the clergyman who was now sorting out his little objects, the square of blue, the cut yellow, the melted beer with the face of a bishop, the glass brick, the phial of sand, the Prince Rupert’s drop, placing them all in their correct places, folding his journals, clearing his desk in preparation for less interesting work, remembering his afternoon christening, his football training, his choir practice, his evensong, the sermon to be written, the penknife to be purchased, the paper for the sermon to be cut in the way he liked it, the size of a postcard. “A dangerous thing,” he agreed, remembering also that he had only two days before the “inquisition” on his recent sermons. The Bishop thought him a Latitudinarian. He wished he had that much faith.

  “I am jealous of your passion, Miss Leplastrier. I will enjoy helping you to exercise it.”

  “But you will help me to exercise it carefully, I trust.” She stood also, collecting her mother’s gloves and purse. “You will stop me from coming to harm with it, for I am very young and as yet know nothing of the world.”

  She held out her hand, like a man. He hesitated, then took the hand and shook it. It was very warm. You could not help but be aware of the wild passage of blood on the other side of its wall, veins, capillaries, sweat glands, tiny factories in the throes of complicated manufacture. Dennis Hasset looked at the eyes and, knowing how eyes worked, was astonished, not for the first time, at the infinite complexity of Creation, wondering how this thing, this instrument for seeing, could transmit so clearly its entreaty while at the same time—Look, I am only an eye—denying that it was doing anything of the sort.

  35

  A Betting Ticket

  As Oscar slit open the long blue envelope and found it “empty,” he smiled, imagining that the Reverend Mr Stratton had sealed it at the dining-room table. This was, as Mrs Stratton liked to remind him (forcefully, apologetically), a dangerous habit because he would have all his letters jumbled up amongst the pudding dishes and the sherry glasses and there had been at least one instance of a letter to a bishop being dispatched to a gossipy friend and—it was here that serious damage was done to Hugh Stratton’s career—and vice versa.

  But on this clean summer morning it at first appeared that the envelope, rather than containing the wrong letter, contained no letter at all and had not Oscar, who was more cautious than his jerky impulsive manner might suggest, held it up to the light, he would not have detected the most unpleasant message Hugh Stratton had slipped inside.

  It was this: a betting ticket, Oscar’s own betting ticket, not Hugh Stratton’s. It was issued by John Rush, Bookmaker, c/o Tattersall’s Club. There was more than one series of marks on this ticket. The first was the fat pencilled scrawl of John Rush’s hunch—backed clerk who had bet Oscar 8-1 against a filly named Nigger Princess. After this there were some other marks in a finer pencil: the notations Oscar made on every losing ticket-punter’s code for such things as position at the start, condition of the track, and what, if any, unexplained phenomena (acts of God) had prevented his scientifically calculated victory. In the case of Nigger Princess, she had been boxed in at the rails and never found her way clear. Had you been able to decipher these notations you might have gathered this fact was in some way Oscar Hopkins’s fault.

  The winning slips, of course, were all kept by the bookmaker’s clerk, but the losing ones were all carried back to Oxford and ordered as meticulously as he had once ordered his mother’s buttons. Their contents were transferred to a smudged journal ruled up with careful columns and the tickets themselves were held in a series of small manila envelopes in a shoe box marked Private which was kept in Oscar’s bottom drawer.

  How this betting ticket came to find its way to Hennacombe was a most unpleasant mystery. Oscar, who had, until this moment, shown a lightness, even a jauntiness in manner as he sat himself at his little table, was now prickled by a hot and suspicious sweat.

  It was a violation. It suggested other violations, other secret and improbable intrusions. Mr Stratton had said: “If you walk to prayers at Kidlington, I will know about it.” As he turned over the betting ticket and found the clergyman’s tight black hand there, this no longer seemed hyperbole.

  Hugh Stratton wrote this on the betting ticket: “Can I assure your father that this is not yours? Or can you, instead, assure me that such a game can indeed be played for profit?” It was signed H.S.

  It did not occur to Oscar to label Hugh Stratton mad; that his mentor should attempt to blackmail him surprised but did not shock him. His pity for
the clergyman enabled him to forgive this and all the other peevish and petty acts he continually committed against all those who came into his orbit. It was Hugh Stratton’s nature that, as he became more seemingly unlovable, he was loved the more.

  But what did shock Oscar was that this very private piece of paper should be spirited from his room to be used as ammunition against him. Who was the thief? Had Hugh Stratton himself paid one of his “flying visits” while Oscar was safely in tutorial? He did not know. He also saw it did not matter.

  Oscar fetched his pen and ink and—without thinking that Hugh Stratton was, once more, responsible for making his porridge cold wrote:

  My dear Mr Stratton, how excited I was to receive today one of your rare (and therefore much looked forward to) epistles, and how disappointed I was therefore to discover that it was not what it appeared to be, that you had sealed the envelope, and thereby excluded what we had both wished you to include. I am sure the good Mrs Millar has, by now, discovered the letter amongst the dinner dishes and I enclose a stamp in order that it might be sped on to me and I may hear how things go in Hennacombe and how the fund for the restoration of St Anne’s progresses. Professor Arnold asked to be reminded to you and said something about a borrowed book but I am afraid I have forgot the message and, if this makes no sense to you, I will go and ask him again in order that I may deliver it more faithfully. My fondest remarks to Mrs Stratton. Your, etc., O. Hopkins.

  From that date Oscar left his betting tickets at the course and all the while he was at Oxford, wrote his form records in a code decipherable to no one but himself.

  As for Mr Stratton, he believed every word of Oscar’s letter. It was neither right nor fair that a gambling student should make him feel so soiled.

  36

  Une Petite Amie

  Lucinda did not really want a factory. She was frightened of it. She walked down to Sussex Street and watched working men emerging from the mills and wharves there. She was repulsed by them just as she was moved by them—the condition of their trouser turn-ups, the weariness of their jackets. They were alien creatures. She watched them as through a sheet of glass, as we, a century later, might look down on the slums of Delhi as a jumbo jet comes in to land. She could not know that she would, within two years, beyond the boundaries of this history, be brought so low that she would think herself lucky to work at Edward Jason’s Druitt Street pickle factory, that she would plunge her hands into that foul swill and, with her hands boiled red and her eyes stinging, stand on the brink of the great satisfaction of her life.

  But at this time (1859) her hands were white and dry. She pitied the workers their poverty and weariness. And yet there was a way they looked at her that made her fear and hate them. It was her age, her sex, her class. She knew it. She knew it as well as you do, but the knowledge did not make it any easier for she was, so to speak, contracted to proceed. It was the factory, she felt, that gave her the entrée to the vicar of Wooilahra’s home. It was glass that gave her this comfort. And as a result of her meeting with Dennis Hasset a kind of a reduction, an intensification, took place so that whilst, previously, the town of Sydney had been wide and windy, the streets rude with larrikins and so many “proper” people prepared to hoot and laugh and point at anything outside their narrow experience of life, and the whole place a-clatter with hooves and rolling iron and such a wide and formless canvas of spitting, coughing strangers that she could not endure an hour without the onset of a headache, and even though the library in George Street (her chosen retreat) had reassuring walls of books, busts of Voltaire and Shakespeare, it remained a cold, green, formal place, the territory of glowering men in high collars who might—this happened, too—“tsk, tsk” to see her there—so she remained, even amongst her books, a foreigner, friendless, without a map, until, finding the vicar of Woollahra almost by accident, the world shrank back around her.

  Only then did she allow herself to see how frightened and lonely she had been.

  Having discovered that glass was the medium wherein a friendship could flourish, she did not intend to let it go. Her need was such that the lamps stayed burning in the vicar of Woollahra’s study until an hour better suited to an illegal Pak-Ah-Pu parlour in George Street. Such an offence would not go unremarked in Sydney, although had you brought this to her attention she would have asked that you refrain from patronizing her. She was her mother’s daughter. She felt that she and Hasset were above the “ruck and tumble.” They were business associates with business to discuss, manufacturers combating chemistry, philosophers with philosophy to deal with. They must study the musty journals of the Prince Rupert’s Glassworks as silently as detectives investigating forgery. There were also sample bottles. My bottles, she thought. Blue, amber, clear; bottles for acid, pickles, poison, beer, wine, pills, jam, bottles with vine leaves, laughing jackasses, flowers, gum nuts, serpents and PROPERTY OF imprinted on their underside.

  Years later when she remembered how she and the vicar had looked at bottles, with what abstracted superior curiosity they had examined them, so removed from the loud and sweaty business of sauces and pickles and jams, she judged her young self harshly and forgot how much of what she would become was already there. She was neither as ignorant nor as innocent as she would later imagine she had been. But she did enjoy handling these bottles, and she could not see how one could be judged “improper” for staying up late at night to do so. She was not ashamed, not of this, not of, sometimes (usually, often) falling asleep in the leather armchair beside the fire where she would, some time later, be woken with a mug of cream-rich cocoa. She clasped her hands around the mug and looked into the fire, wishing only that she did not have to travel the moonpale clay tracks to her hotel.

  The girl did not know enough to care about the opinion of bourgeois society, but Dennis Hasset had no such excuse. He knew better, but gave way—although not without a certain amount of irritation—to the clearer demands of his protégé.

  Lucinda had the habit of arriving at any time that suited her. She always apologized. She always hoped she did not inconvenience or interrupt, but such was the way she tilted her chin that she did not appear apologetic at all. He would come back from giving a lecture on “Common Salt,” say, at a Mutual Improvement Association, and find her sitting by his fire in his study, or reading a book at his desk. It was true, as he often said from the speaker’s lectern, that he saw education as a ladder standing on earth and reaching up to heaven and that to every high and glorious position there was a way from every condition of life, but he would not, just the same, have suffered anyone else reading his books as Lucinda did. She removed his crenulated leather bookmarks and put them back too early in the story. He would ring for a sandwich and only after he had waited too long for it would he discover that Cook was busy making apple pancakes for the girl who was now ensconced, reading, in the dining room.

  And yet he thought her, against all this evidence, to be quite independent. On the nights she was absent he imagined her reading at Petty’s Hotel; he had no suspicion that she had—as a lonely cat will always present itself at more than one back door—also found a place in Mr d’Abbs menagerie.

  Mr d’Abbs, as you will recall, was the principal of an accountancy firm, and supposed to be an associate of Mr Chas Ahearn. Lucinda had consulted Mr d’Abbs in secret because she was unsure of Dennis Hasset’s business acumen. She lacked the courage to tell the vicar of Woollahra that she had sought this second opinion, that she had, as a result, been invited home to dinner and eaten goose at the long dark table beneath walls crowded with landscape paintings of the country Mr d’Abbs dubbed “Paradise.” On those nights when she judged that Dennis Hasset had had enough of her, this is where she went, to sit with Mr d’Abbs, Mrs Burrows, Miss Shaddock, Miss Malcolm and Mr Calvitto. She liked to be with people.

  Dennis Hasset’s diary shows Lucinda’s arrival in his life. It records the first meeting—the thirty minutes allocated Monsieur Leplastrier on the first Tuesday after Whitsunday, a
nd, thereafter, a great number of red slashes across previous appointments, committee meetings particularly (St Andrew’s Building, Ragged Schools, Hot Breakfasts for the Poor) but also the Zoological Society, a dinner with an old friend, and even a vestry meeting which was shifted three times within a month. He could never refuse her, and although he often imagined that he would, on the next occasion, send her packing, he never did. He was thirty-three years old, a grown man, but he was no match for her. Besides—and this surely is the heart of it—no matter how irritated he might be to see her sitting so proprietorially in his study chair, he always felt invigorated by her company, and when she fell asleep he sat contentedly opposite her and smiled while she snored.

  But he knew his behaviour was reckless. It was not consistent with his character. He wished success, and comfort. He hoped he would end his days in a bishop’s palace with an intelligent dean to work beside him. And yet he drove this girl—biologically a mature female of the species—drove her himself to Petty’s Hotel on three, sometimes four nights a week. She was rarely there before midnight, and often it was two a.m. when he rang the bell for the night porter. This night porter knew the young lady was also a friend of Mr d’Abbs. He found the situation amusing. But when this night porter winked at Dennis Hasset, the vicar was so tickled by the man’s scurrilous misunderstanding, that he chuckled all the way home, sitting up on the box seat where his servant should have been, a parson in a parson’s clothes in a city given over, at this hour, to footpads and the push.

  Before August was properly started, Bishop Dancer had him in to give him what he liked to call a “caning.” They did not like each other, anyway. The Bishop was a hunter after hounds, a High Tory with no tolerance for the subtleties of Whig theology. This was not the first of their disagreements. There had been a fierce fight about a sermon in which Dennis Hasset had argued against eternal damnation by suggesting (“You are not there to suggest,” the Bishop had roared) that it was ridiculous to postulate a God with a less well-developed moral sense than our own and that damnation was, therefore, unthinkable. The Bishop would not waste his time arguing the point. Hasset was not to preach this Latitudinarian rot. When the vicar said he was not a Latitudinarian, the Bishop’s face became as purple as his surplice.