Oscar and Lucinda Page 19

  Society—if you call it that, Lucinda would not—did not know what to do. It could not tolerate to see the two of them together, and yet it was in some way tickled. It squirmed and grimaced and hooted with derision to see him move with such a confident and manly stride, as if nothing were wrong. It could not have been funnier if he had walked beside a billy-goat and called it sweetheart. And as for “her”—she swung her arms. Indeed she did. Like a toy soldier. This might not have been so irritating if she had not walked beside “dear, good Dennis Hasset.” Let her walk like this beside Jimmy d’Abbs or Harvey Fig or the Italian atheist. Let her drink wine and dance with them, and jolly good luck to her, in this life at least. But let her not walk in the places where Miss Barley Wilkes or Miss Harriet Crowley might more rightfully, and virtuously, tread.

  They watched the handsome vicar of Woollahra like a sleepwalker on a window ledge. He went with her to Jimmy d’Abbs’s office to discuss the purchase of a glassworks. Even then he did not get it. He emerged as innocent as he went in. His friends tried to speak to him but he would not hear them. On this account he broke off relations with his friend Tom Wilson, the professor of classics at the university, the man he liked to call “the only educated man in Sydney.” This happened on the very day the glassworks were finally purchased and when, in theory anyway, his association with Miss Leplastrier should end.

  His “friend” Wilson had turned out as small-minded as the rest. He had claimed Miss Leplastrier stayed up all night gambling with “types” like Harvey Fig. This made Dennis Hasset’s hands into tense claws and he cried out: “Agggh.” He had reached a state which he could call “unhappy.” He wrote the word on a piece of paper, then tore it up and threw it in the fire. It seemed to him, swivelling back and forth on his squeaky chair, that he had been, until his offer to assist with the purchase of the Prince Rupert’s Glassworks, a mostly happy man. And he soon became nostalgic for the time he could sit reading alone in his study, or feel his long, athletic form being admired as he stretched across the pleasant slippery chintz surfaces of Mrs Wilson’s armchairs. And even if there were moments—like this one—when he could sit alone in his study, it was not the same as hitherto.

  Anger, like a blow-fly, had been let into the room and buzzed against the sunlit glass. He did not understand this anger. He thought it all his, but a great deal of it was Lucinda’s. She carried an intensity, a nervous tension, with her. She could not sit in a hitherto peaceful armchair without your being aware of a great reservoir of energy being somehow, against all the laws of physics, contained. Even when she was not here, he felt her restlessness. And he was angry—although it was unchristian of him—that this one calm corner, the place in his life where he might be free from the demands of parishioners had now been stolen from him. He could not concentrate on his Dickens or his Wilkie Collins. He was irritated, even whilst praying. If Lucinda was sitting in the house, he would wish her gone. If she was not, he might sit in a small chair by his window, looking constantly up the dusty road, wishing—he did not think it right to pray for it—for the plume of dust that might herald the arrival of her hansom.

  But on the evening of the day he had ended his friendship with Tom Wilson, he did not need to wait for her. She arrived promptly at dusk, in order that they might celebrate the purchase. She was on time, but they were somehow not synchronized. They did not feel the way they were meant to. Lucinda had that fearful, tight-chested sensation she experienced after she had lost too much money at her cribbage. But this feeling was not caused by anything so doubtful, but by something which should be morally uplifting, i.e., the purchase of a factory. She was expected to be triumphant. She tried to be.

  Dennis Hasset was still living the hurt of his argument with Professor Wilson. He was sick at heart, and angry. He poured dry sherry for a toast but launched straight into the story. It gave his voice a hard metallic edge and his eyes, although he did not intend it so, looked balefully, accusingly at Lucinda who could not, in the face of this, bring herself to sit down. She stood upright as if it were she, not Wilson, who was in the dock.

  Dennis Hasset was inclined to forget Lucinda was only a girl, just as he was also inclined to forget she was not a child. He told her what was said about her.

  Lucinda held her shoulders square and smiled. Her upper lip became very thin, but otherwise she did not show him how hurt she was. She could not see why she should be hated so much. She could see, of course. They did not like Mr d’Abbs because he laughed and had a little fun, because he wore a velvet smoking—jacket and was Christian enough not to be frightened when an atheist sat at his table. But she could also not see. She felt so small and weak in the face of the moving water-wall of hatred.

  She should be sorry that Mr Hasset had argued with his friend. It was her responsibility. She should care for him and nurse him in the loss, just as she should properly celebrate the purchase she had begged him negotiate on her behalf. She raised her glass and smiled in a way she now knew was attractive. It involved a pursing of the lips, sleepy lids around the eyes. She knew, because she had performed it for the mirror, that it gave her a humorous, dare-devil appearance.

  But the room was cold. The curtains were drawn. The glass, greenish stuff from Melbourne, seemed black-kand being an excellent conductor it was very cold to touch. She stood behind it. She imagined herself a portrait suspended in the gloom.

  “Well,” she turned. “I must go.”

  She had not known she was going to say this. She looked at Dennis Hasset’s face. His mouth slightly open, his forehead suddenly carved by two deep clefts of frown.

  “We are having beef,” he said. He put his glass down. He put his two hands together. She felt his misery come out to swamp her. She could not bear his disappointment. She could not look at his face and feel its pain.

  “I am so sleepy,” she yawned.

  All she could think was that she must play cards. She was a despicable person. Then she was despicable, and that was that. But she must go. She told a number of lies, one after the other, teetering above each other, a house of cards, all constructed in order that she might abandon the vicarage and fly—as fast as she could down the Glenmore Hill—to the house in Rushcutters Bay where they would lay a hand of shining cribbage across a grey wool-covered table.

  41

  If He Ask a Fish, Will He Give Him a Serpent?

  Notting Hill, you may not know it, derives its distinctive street plan from the racecourse which finally bankrupted its developer, Mr John Whyte. And while it is true that four years at Oriel had not only given Oscar a passion for racehorses, but produced sixteen smudge-paged clothbound notebooks in which were recorded not the thoughts of Divine Masters, not musings on the philosophy of the ancients, but page after page of blue spidery figures which recorded—you could not sit on your backside at Oxford and collect data like this but must travel, by train, by coach, by foot, so that a map of your journeys would be a spider web across the south of England—the names of horses, their sires and dams, their position at last start, the number of days since the last start, the weight carried at the last time, whether they were rising in class, or falling in class, who was the owner, who the jockey and so on, and so while he had this great passion (it was more extensive than I have suggested—his system of weighting would require a bigger book than Pittsburgh Phil’s) and had wed his father’s scientific methods to the sweating, mud-stained bride of racing, he had come to live in Notting Hill totally in ignorance of the fact that a ghostly imprint of a racecourse lay over its streets.

  He did not hear the thunder of two-year-olds down Lansdowne Road. He did not see mud fly in the right turn on Stanley Crescent. He saw the name of Ladbroke, of course. You cannot miss a Ladbroke in Notting Hill. It is there on Square and Road and Terrace. But Ladbroke’s was not yet a famous firm of London bookmakers and if the street names were coded messages from the future, Oscar did not know how to read them.

  He came to Notting Hill, or so he insisted, only because he
was familiar with the area, or the more genteel part of it. He had been accustomed to staying at the Wardley-Fishes’ town house in Ladbroke Square, an address the Queen’s physician, being unaware of the piggeries a mile away in Notting Dale, and having visited, presumably, on a day the wind was blowing from the south-east, had claimed to be the most salubrious in London.

  Oscar, being permanently in London, could no longer expect to be billeted at Ladbroke Square, which was, in any case, closed down again, with the servants left starved on half-pay and no scraps of fat to sell off at the back door while they waited for Lady Wardley-Fish to decide she was, once again, bored with the country.

  Oscar’s accommodation was on the south side of the Uxbridge Road, a block away from the rattle of the omnibuses and wagons and coaches. He had become a schoolteacher, and had a room in the third-floor attic of Mr John Colville’s School for Boys. He was a Reverend Mr and chose to wear the collar but at this moment you would not know whether he wore it or not for he was lying in his bed, fully clothed, with the sheet clenched between his neat white teeth.

  His disgraceful shoes—scuffed quite white around the inner heels—lay where they had recently fallen, the right one on its side on the black floorboards, the left standing upright with its toe curling upwards. You would not need to be a cobbler to know my great-grandfather’s shoes were too big for him.

  The room was cold. There was a grate but it was empty. The brass kindling box was shut but it did not serve to hold kindling in any case, but those letters, written in Theophilus’s tight, small hand on an inexplicably expensive crisp white bond, which served to lacerate a conscience which was already as unhealthy as Sir Ian Wardley-Fish’s liver.

  He knew he was vile. His eyes were wide, staring at the sloping attic ceiling which bore brown marks like an unsavoury old mattress. It was the sabbath. The bells of St John the Evangelist had stopped some ten minutes before but the note for the day was declared more exactly, it seemed to him, by the stench of pig fat being rendered by the dangerous inhabitants of Notting Dale.

  Greyhound Row, where Mr Colville’s school was situated, was genteel and quiet. Only the whisk-whisk of Mrs Fenn’s straw broom broke the silence of the sabbath. Mr Fenn, the tailor, had his freshly painted bright green shutter firmly closed. The butcher’s shop next door had a bright brass hasp and staple threaded with a heavy black enamelled padlock. Mr Brewer—he whose establishment was next to the butcher’s—would, on this day, sell no cheese, no corn, no paper cones of boiled sweets and was, this could be relied on, in his pew with his family at St John’s.

  The Swann Inn, near the tollgate, was firmly closed but Oscar, lying in his bed above Mr Colville’s empty school, could see the smudge of Brickfield’s smoke across the yellow sky. He could hear the barking dogs. It was a great place for dogs, for dog-fanciers and dog-stealers. Certain individuals also wagered on the dogs.

  He had become vile. The vileness was perhaps the product of the shape of Notting Hill, that he was made by this map, or chose the map without knowing he was doing it, was drawn to it like iron filings towards the magnetic horseshoe shapes of its street plan. Ever since his association with Wardley-Fish he had come to Notting Hill, and ever since that time he had been vile.

  He did not blame his friend for this. His friend gambled no more.

  Wardley-Fish had a parish and worked hard on his sermons. And in any case it was not the gambling which was vile. Through gambling, imbued with God’s grace, he had managed to feed and clothe himself. It is true there had been hard and hungry times when he felt himself alone and lost. (One bad spell in 1862 lasted from after Easter almost up to Trinity.) But although he had lost he was, as they said at the track, “ahead.” He worked hard. He travelled to Newmarket and Newbury, Catterick and Sandown Park. He collected his information and classified it. Indeed, you could look at his results and say he did it all himself, without God’s help. But this was not how Oscar saw it. He saw God’s hand everywhere about—bookmakers’ favourites boxed in at the rails, carried off at the turn, interfered with, broken down, playing up at the barrier and particularly the case of the 2–1 favourite Sailor Boy who—he had this from Jim Clements, the jockey—held his breath from the top of the straight in the two-year-old handicap at Newmarket and thus allowed Desire to win at 33–1.

  He also bet without his system. He had lost money to Magsmen and Macers. He had bet on dried peas, spinning tops, and the progress of ants along a gold-tipped walking stick. He had played cribbage for two or three pounds a game. But he had never bet from greed or avarice. The state of his coal scuttle, the condition of his shoes, all attested to that. He would only bet for a proper godly purpose.

  It was not gambling itself which was vile. What was vile was his passion, the extraordinary excitement he felt, the appetite which made him place a bet on every race on the card, not because it was wise, but just so he could maintain his frenzy and cheer home his chosen beasts until he was almost too hoarse to make himself understood at the railway ticket counter. What was vile was the need that took possession of him at a moment like this when he knew that, at this very instant, in Notting Dale, they would be gathering their dogs together.

  He shifted his bite on his sheet.

  No matter what godly purpose his gambling was turned towards, it was not godly to pursue it on the sabbath.

  This business with dogs was evil. It was Wardley-Fish—though not, dear Lord, his fault—who had taken him to this place. Oscar had been shocked, but excited too. There was the dangerous smell of the city poor: musty cotton, fustian, toasted herrings. Men sat in rows on benches with their dogs. Later, when the clock was running, they would cry out, but at first, when they were just entered, there was a curious quiet about the men and their dogs. They stroked and patted. There was a soft cooing like a dove house.

  They all looked towards the pit. It was not a very large pit, about six feet in diameter, and painted a bright white. In the middle of the pit was a dark grey mound. The mound was soft, moving. The mound was composed of rats, clustering together, crawling over each other.

  The men cooed.

  Then they stopped. They shifted on their seats, spat, coughed, said something softly to a neighbour or called out a raw-throated joke.

  A fox terrier was placed into the ring. The fox terrier was called Tiny. It wore a woman’s bracelet for a collar. It took the rats one by one, picked them up like fruit from a bowl, broke them while the clock ticked and the men roared so loud you could not hear your companion speak to you.

  On the day he first witnessed this, Oscar would not have believed he would ever be tempted to bet on such a thing. But the temptation came, not because he wished to see creatures put to death, but because it was a sabbath and there was no other betting to be had. Betting was like this: a monster that must be fed.

  He bit his sheet, and wondered, as he wondered often, if it might not be this, his need to feed the monster, that lay behind the scrubbed face of his seemingly Christian desire, i.e., to accumulate money in order to dare the formless terror of the ocean, to bring the word of Christ to New South Wales.

  And yet the monster could not be the motive. For when he had made the commitment—two years before he lay in bed fretting over rats—he had imagined there would be no money to raise.

  The Church Missionary Society would pay his fare. He would need a sun-helmet (3s) and, apart from that, only a piece of celluloid (10s) to overcome his panic of the sea.

  2

  Called

  Wardley-Fish did not like the people that he knew. They bored him. He imagined them as sturdy beasts grazing in a dense and matted pasture, chewing, swallowing, regurgitating at one end, plopping at the other. Naturally he did not show them what he felt. He acted jovially, even fondly, and what he showed was not exactly false—he felt all these things in a distant sort of way—but were certainly greatly magnified. He worried about his father’s bleeding face, and he laughed at his brother’s stories about the poacher he had netted in a pit
-trap. He could ride with them all day and drink with them all night—they were round and comfortable in every part, and not a sharp edge to cut through the cushions of complacency.

  And this was the quality that he valued in his embarrassing friend—that he was itchy and angular in every sense, and whatever there was to disapprove of, you could not put complacency on the list.

  There were so many things about the Odd Bod he did not approve of, phobias, fetishes, habits of mind so alien that they could not even be accounted for by the peculiar parent who, no matter how alarming he might be in his belief (“Are you saved, Mr Wardley-Fish?”), was at least neat in his appearance. But the son, no matter how the bookmakers pressed their wads of beer-wet currency on to him, would not spend money on his appearance. He had no money of his own. This was his view. The Lord saw fit to grant him money for his education, and it would be sinful to use this for gratification of what was, so he imagined, nothing but worldly vanity. Thus he bought his clothing from stinking stalls run by the Jews in Petticoat Lane, his shoes from a scrofulous pedlar who had nothing else to sell but a few herrings and a green silk handkerchief, an old-fashioned kingsman probably pickpocketed by his grandfather.

  This mode of dress seemed to Wardley-Fish to be conceited. And when, for instance, he found the gawkish Odd Bod, excluded from Cremorne Gardens because he had not made the slightest concession to fashion, he was momentarily enraged.