Oscar and Lucinda Read online

  Mrs d’Abbs stood up. She tucked her knitting in the hatbox she used for that purpose. Lucinda did not hear what she said.

  “Accepted, Henny,” said Mr d’Abbs to his wife.

  Lucinda was sorry that Mrs d’Abbs should slink away like this, put her arms around her breast, round her shoulders, and be so apologetic with her body while all the time—anyone with half a soul could see it—her eyes were filled with a grey and watery fury.

  She did not like the things that happened in her house. She therefore had a right to put a stop to them. Her husband had an obligation to support her. If he were one quarter of the good fellow he pretended to be, he would feel it to be no sacrifice. Yet even whilst Lucinda was incensed on Mrs d’Abbs’s behalf she also acknowledged that she wished to play cards, to empty her purse upon the table, and therefore she must be one of those whose will kept Mrs d’Abbs’s shoulders rounded, for if she stood up straight she would, surely, send Miss Malcolm off to prepare her lessons for the morrow, Miss Shaddock home to her rooms in Macquarie Street, and tell Mr Fig to return when he was sober.

  Mrs d’Abbs, of course, did none of these things. She kissed her husband on the cheek and nodded and smiled agreeably before taking herself off to bed.

  Lucinda rose from her chair and went to Mr d’Abbs who was removing the cards from their hiding place in the bookcase.

  “Are you feeling lucky?” he asked her.

  “Indeed, yes,” said Lucinda, “but the poor beast is most unfortunate.”

  “Fig,” called Mr d’Abbs, “you should hear the names you are being called.”

  “No, no,” said Lucinda, laughing. “Mr Fig, it is not true. There is a beast caught in the mud flats.”

  “Yes?” said Mr d’Abbs.

  “I wondered if perhaps you might send a man to free it.”

  Mr d’Abbs looked at her and blinked. Lucinda was embarrassed. She had offended him in some way, but could not see how.

  “I will see to it immediately,” said Mr d’Abbs, but although he smiled, Lucinda did not feel easy.

  “I hope I have not spoken out of turn.”

  “Of course not, of course not.” But the truth was that he could not bear to be given what he thought were “orders” in his own home and although he went through an elaborate mime of leaving the room to order Jack the gardener to attend to it, he did no such thing at all.

  38

  A Duck to Water

  “Ha-ha,” Lucinda said. “You have beaten me, Mr Fig.”

  “I have, Miss Leplastrier,” said Fig who had recently appeared in the “Ethiopian Concert” at the Balmain School of Arts. Then he had aroused much mirth with his impression of a nigger ticket-taker, but now he rounded his vowels and rolled his r’s. “I have robbed you blind,” he said. “I have bailed you up and relieved you of your doubloons and ducats.”

  “Beaten,” said Lucinda, “but I promise you I am not defeated.”

  Mr d’Abbs liked Lucinda now. He liked her pluck, the way she laughed. He liked her plump lower lip, her sleepy eyelids, the feeling that she would be capable of the most unspeakable recklessness. Her upper lip was almost irresistible as it stretched and tightened—it was a charming little twitch—whenever she was excited.

  “Shall we all take a trip together?” he said. He was less calculating that he might appear. He gathered the cards in across the grey blanket he had spread across the walnut table for their game. “Harry Briggs has brought a steamer. He will hire it out to us. We could take her up to Pittwater.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Miss Shaddock. “Oh, I do so like Pittwater.”

  Miss Malcolm stared at Miss Shaddock with a dreamy, dazed, slightly contemptuous expression. Mr d’Abbs understood what secret this expression advertised. Soon he would be forced to dismiss Miss Malcolm from his service.

  Miss Leplastrier took the cards from Fig and shuffled them. Two weeks earlier she would have spilled them everywhere, but she had taken to the game like a duck to water. He found it both comic and endearing to see a pretty woman shuffle with the finesse of a croupier in a club.

  It was ten minutes past two o’clock. Lucinda was not in the tiniest bit sleepy. She took a sip of lukewarm cinnamon punch and began to deal another hand.

  Miss Malcolm yawned.

  “Have you had enough of cards?” asked Mr Fig, but would not address the question directly to Mr d’Abbs.

  “Oh, please,” said Lucinda, “let us play one more hand.”

  “You have already lost three guineas,” said Miss Malcolm. Her tone was not friendly. She looked at Lucinda with the same heavy-eyed contemptuous expression she had bestowed on Miss Shaddock.

  “One more,” declared Mr d’Abbs, looking at Miss Malcolm through visibly narrowed eyes. “A chance for Miss Leplastrier to win her money back.”

  Lucinda dealt a card to Miss Shaddock. It slid across its fellows, and sailed through the air. Miss Shaddock snatched at it but sent it flying towards Lucinda. It bounced off Lucinda’s shoulder and fell at her feet. Lucinda leaned to pick it up.

  She did not allow herself to see the suit of the card, but she did see that Mr Fig had taken off his boot. He had his leg stretched beneath the table. His stockinged foot was somewhere in amongst Miss Malcolm’s skirts. Lucinda noted it with far less degree of shock than might be thought likely. She thought only: My mama would think this household horrid. She answered the question about her losses.

  “One more game,” she begged.

  “Like a duck to water,” said Mr d’Abbs.

  Lucinda knew she would win this hand because she had dealt it. She knew she could control the cards with the strength of her will and there, now, here, the proof: four red threes and a two of spades. She could discard the spades and have a king. She would do this now. It was not a king. It did not matter. She would win anyway.

  I am rich, she thought. I can do what I like. It is only pennies. It is only a little fun. My mama would not condemn me to loneliness forever.

  Tomorrow she would have won or lost, but whatever happened, happiness would be denied her. She could be happy now, not then. For if she won, she would know herself a robber. She was already rich. She had wealth she had not earned. To wish for more was sinful, greedy. But if she lost, it would be worse. Then she would feel not remorse, but terror. Her money was her cloak, her armour. She was a miser, counting it, feeling panic to be parted from it. She knew this already. She would go running to the Woollahra vicarage with her tail between her legs. She would read her Bible and attend Evensong. But now she was drunk on the game and only wanted more of it. The cards were sharp and clear, their blues pure ultramarine, their reds a brilliant carmine like the hearts of popish effigies. She saw the expression in Miss Malcolm’s eyes. She heard the beast bellow from the mud flats. She patted her neck and felt her palm licked by loose, untidy flames of hair. The sight of her! It would drive her mama to a brushing frenzy, but Lucinda did not care about anything except cards and how to get the next hand moving.

  “Come,” she said, “look how attractive I can make the stakes.”

  And she emptied the contents of her purse—the equivalent of sixteen jam jars—on to the blanket.

  Mr d’Abbs was amused and pleased. He was about to pigeon-hole her childlike and then she looked up and he caught the clear green challenge in her eyes and then he did not know what it was he felt.

  9

  Personal Effects

  Mrs Burrows did not like to be needed too much. It put her off. It was this which was the impediment in her relationship with Mr Jeffris, not the fact that he was a clerk employed by Mr d’Abbs. Where Mr Calvitto had cold eyes and would allow himself to show no passion, Mr Jeffris had an incendiary nature which one felt to be only just held in control. Tears sprang easily to his tortoiseshell brown eyes. His hands were often clenched or thrust hard in his pockets. He was a stranger to irony and sarcasm. He was as direct as a knife. And apart from his great passion for the widow of Captain Burrows, his great obsession in life was that
he should be an explorer of unmapped territories. He was not tall like Burke, or well educated like Mitchell. But you could not hear him talk and doubt that he would finally triumph.

  Mr Jeffris was really very handsome. He had a great mane of coal-black hair, a high forehead, finely shaped full lips and fierce, animated dark eyes. He was neat, precise, self-critical. He was the youngest son of Covent Garden costers and dedicated to his own improvement. He was, in almost every respect, a perfect match for Mrs Burrows, except that he needed her.

  Mr Calvitto had passion, but it was of a different type. It was as cold as a windowpane in a warm room. It was this she trusted. She liked a little distance, the emotional equivalent of what Captain Burrows, always billeted up-country, had provided her with in miles.

  The difference between Mr Calvitto and Mr Jeffris is best illustrated by their reaction to that small tin trunk which Captain Burrows’s commanding officer had labelled “Cpt. Burrows—Personal Effects.”

  The trunk contained a pair of gloves, some letters from Mrs Burrows, an envelope containing certain cards depicting Cossacks, and sixteen leatherbound diaries containing maps, descriptions of journeys, raids against the blacks, and small pen sketches of various bivouacs, river crossings, etc.

  Mr Calvitto, on being invited to inspect the diaries, told her plainly that her husband had no talent with the pen. He made disparaging remarks about his English composition and drew her attention to the dashes which Captain Burrows used instead of commas and full stops. He did not end there. He read a sentence out loud and made it sound ridiculous. He showed her how the “settler’s hut attacked by blacks” could not help but fall flat on the ground the minute the sketch was complete.

  Mrs Burrows, like Mr Jeffris, believed in “improvement.” Mr Calvitto offered “improvement” in large dollops, or at least that chastisement which Mrs Burrows had learned to be the precursor of improvement. And although she twice slapped his face in response to things he said, she could not help but be spoiled for Mr Jeffris’s enthusiastic response.

  Mr Jeffris arrived on Tuesdays and Thursdays with his own writing paper and pen. He wore an old-fashioned box-pleated jacket in the style of his hero, Major Mitchell. He sat down at the gate-legged table in the parlour and transcribed from Captain Burrows’s diaries. He had a neat, graceful hand with certain flourishes of his own invention. He did not make rude faces about the little brass gewgaws and porcelain knick-knacks with which Mrs Burrows had decorated the room. Mr Calvitto, on the other hand had, on first being alone with her in her house, told her bluntly that she had no taste. He had picked things up and put them down. She had been standing in the parlour. She had a small porcelain elephant in her hand. He had been opposite her, with his back to the window. He had his top hat in his hand.

  She had the elephant in her hand when they kissed. Later she found it on a dressing table.

  When Mr Jeffris admired this elephant, he put himself on her level, and this level was not high enough. Paradoxically, his natural affection for the elephant made her as fond of him as of a friend survived from early childhood.

  Neither Mr Jeffris nor Mr Calvitto realized what a peculiar state Mrs Burrows was in. She gave no appearance of being anything but in control. Her period of mourning was over and her widow’s weeds given to a charity, but she was still rocked and buffeted by the wake left by Captain Burrows’s murder, the news of which had reached her in three successive waves.

  First there had been a polite letter of condolence delivered by a major. Then there had been the newspaper reports. Burrows had been hacked with axes the blacks had stolen from shearers on the Manning. He had been thrust through the neck and eyes with spears.

  And then, when she was still gasping, the personal effects arrived. Amongst the diaries was an envelope containing sixteen picture cards, numbered one to sixteen, like the cigarette cards little boys collected. Each card bore the title “Rape by Cossacks.” She was not shocked by the coupling there depicted (or less shocked than she might have imagined), nor by the exaggerated male genitalia, but rather the combination of this with sword and scimitar, with hacked breasts, with women’s mouths screaming wide with pain, eyes bulging with terror, and not even this, horrible as it was, but the question as to why Captain Burrows, who had liked to nestle his head sleepily at her breast, should carry cards like this upon his person.

  She could not get these pictures out of her head. They disturbed her and frightened her. There was no one she could speak to about them. And when she laid them out, like a hand of patience, on the gate-legged table on a Tuesday night, she was not in her normal mind at all.

  When Mr Jeffris arrived, she took his coat and led him to his normal seat. He saw he was to sit down. He sat. She held his coat and watched him while he studied the cards.

  “Do they please you?” she asked.

  “Please me?”

  She looked at him, with his slippery pretty lips half-opened. She did not need to hear his answer. She saw his eyes. He was not in control of himself. He was frightened of what he had seen. This was no use to her at all. She was already frightened. What use was it for him to be frightened, too?

  She gathered in the cards and put them in their envelope. She refused to discuss the matter with him. He was concerned for her. She liked him to be concerned. But she did not like the timidity. She had always thought him a brave man, strong, manly. She now began to say frightful things to him, in a perfectly ordinary way. She talked quickly; breathlessly, it is true, but this had been her style before. She straightened out the white tablecloth on the gate-legged table and said that the blacks should straight away be poisoned.

  She did not know why she said these things.

  It did not occur to Mr Jeffris that she was not well, for the views she was expressing were only different from much opinion in New South Wales in that they were unambiguously put. He was, himself, fearful of the blacks in the Manning and the Macleay. It was likely he would one day have to confront them himself. He attempted to explain their behaviour to Mrs Burrows, not so much to calm her as to still, through explication, his own anxiety. These blacks, he said, were the most murderous of all, having been dispossessed of their lands and driven into the dense, tumbled country of the “Falls.” They had their backs against the wall.

  But this sort of talk did nothing to ease Mrs Burrows. She did not hear the words, but smelt something she would name as “unmanly.” Her cheeks got hot spots on them and her face took on a chiselled look, pointed, clenched around the jaw, with tendons showing in her neck.

  She talked of calling out the army, of a final all-out war against the blacks. Mr Jeffris replied, but what he was addressing was only the thin, sharp ice on the deeper puddle of Mrs Burrows’s argument in which blacks, the Cossacks and Captain Burrows all took on the forms of fish with teeth like knives.

  Mrs Burrows did not feel safe. She said this often, but was not understood.

  When she returned from Mr d’Abbs’s with Mr Calvitto, she resolved to show him the cards also. It was all that was on her mind while they disported in her bed. She placed them on the little night table where she would put the tea things afterwards. She made the pot which they then drank—it was their custom—sitting up in bed.

  It was then that she gave Mr Calvitto the envelope. He lit a cigarette and blew a thin trail of smoke into the air. And then, in the manner of one performing a wearisome duty, he opened the envelope and looked at the cards, one by one, occasionally sipping his cup of tea, occasionally inhaling smoke from his cigarette. He nibbled at a biscuit. He said nothing.

  Mr Calvitto was dark with long wiry muscles, black hair which grew all over him in small tight whorls. He was lean like a racing dog. He had a long, thin, hooded penis which now, as he turned one more card, rose visibly beneath the sheet.

  He looked at her and smiled, an unsugary expression, not weak, as austere as whisky with no water. She pressed herself against him, shivering, as once, in the potteries of Stratford, she had pressed wet cl
ay against a plaster mould.

  She would be a plate, God save her. Let the aproned decorators paint dancing Cossacks around her rim, or dead blacks like spokes around a poisoned water-hole.

  40

  Not in Love

  The vicar of Woollahra was not in love. She was not pretty enough for him to be in love with. She was also too young. She was not “suitable.” A great deal of this judgement about suitability was a function not of his assessment of his personal needs but of his highly developed social sense.

  Sydney (or that tiny part of it he knew as “Sydney”) would not think her suitable. And he liked to be liked. He did not like, although he thought himself a radical, to feel himself outside the comfort of the fold. He did not like to be criticized. And yet this was what was now happening to him all the time. No one—barring the Bishop—said anything to his face. But he could not accompany the girl to the waiting room of a solicitor-at-law without feeling, even amongst the clerks and message boys—this social shiver. He did not know about Jimmy d’Abbs and the games of cards, and yet he knew—without naming it for himself—that there was something. He saw the signs, just as you can posit, from the whorled skin of the sea, the presence of an unseen rock.

  Three weeks ago Sydney did not know her, and then only that she had put a cauliflower on the front desk at Petty’s Hotel. Then it was remarked—this was before she abandoned the crinoline Mrs Ahearn had made for her in Parramatta—how oddly she dressed. And then they switched and said how well.

  She played cards with Jimmy d’Abbs et al. But afterwards she took tea with the vicar of Woollahra. It was as if she had broken some law of nature, been ice and steam at the same instant—the two activities were mutually exclusive.

  The vicar of Woollahra then took her shopping and Society, always feeling shopping to be a most intimate activity, was pleased to feel the steam pressure rising in itself as it got ready to be properly scandalized—its pipes groaned and stretched, you could hear the noises in its walls and cellars. They imagined he had paid for her finery. When they learned this was not so, that the girl had sovereigns in her purse—enough, it was reported, to buy the priest a pair of onyx cufflinks—the pressure did not fall, but stayed constant, so that while it did not reach the stage where the outrage was hissing out through the open valves, it maintained a good rumble, a lower note which sounded like a growl in the throat of a smallish dog.