Oscar and Lucinda Read online

  After all the jokes he had made at the Odd Bod’s expense, Wardley-Fish could not have justified himself to her. There were things he could not explain, and this was one of them: why he should tiptoe down the staircase of her father’s house with a pretty cane basket containing “things” wrapped in cast-out tissue paper. His fiancée was with her mother at early service in Knightsbridge. There was only the Bishop to contend with. The Bishop—no stickler for the observation of the sabbath—was in his study cataloguing what he called his “brimborions and knick-knacks” by which he meant certain items of the loot that Lord Elgin’s victory had flushed out of Peking. The Bishop’s focus of attention was intense. It was most unlikely he would hear. But just the same Wardley-Fish came down the stairs so slowly he made them groan and creak unnaturally. He reached the gloomy patch at the bottom of the stairs where black umbrellas hung like flying foxes from their cedar stand. In a moment he would be safe and out of the door towards the stables, but before the moment arrived the Bishop—intent on fetching the crackle-glaze vase from the drawing room—had flung open his study door and stood not two feet away.

  “Ho,” he said.

  It was not fright. The Bishop did not startle easily. It was a form of shyness, of politeness—the two men were always nervous with each other. They were each anxious to demonstrate goodwill. The Bishop was in his shirt sleeves. He had his cut-down glasses on his stubby nose. He held a stack of pink index cards in his hands.

  “Apples?” he said jovially, and grabbed. When the hard irregular shape benath the tissue told him that it was not an apple at all, he was embarrassed. He felt he had walked into his guest room and found his guest unrobing. He did not know what to do, whether to carry on as normal, or to place the object back in the basket and retreat into his study. He looked at Wardley-Fish with his bushy eyebrows pushing up beneath his furrowed brow.

  “Coal,” said Wardley-Fish, but only because he did not have the nerve to stay silent.

  The Bishop pushed back the tissue paper and, indeed, it was as the young man said. The Bishop crumbled some between his thumb and forefinger and put it to his nose and smelt it, but once he had done that he had nothing more to do. He did not like to ask what this extraordinary arrangement might be for. His future son-in-law did not seem free to tell him. Wardley-Fish could not, standing there at the bottom of the stair, with twenty lumps of coal held in a silly little basket, explain it, not even to himself.

  45

  Hymns

  On the following Tuesday, Wardley-Fish happened to be in Martindale’s bookshop. His fiancée had a fondness for the romantic novels of Mrs Plumber, and it was whilst she was enquiring after the most recent (in a voice that seemed, in that environment, too loud and confident) that he came across a copy of the elder Hopkins’s Hennacombe Rambles. And here, with his umbrella hooked over his arm, he found a younger Oscar described as “the little botanist in skirts.” This made him smile, of course. But for the rest of it, the smile became less certain and soon completely disappeared.

  It was as if he had netted Oscar in his home pond and could see him properly for the first time. And although he had visited the bare, wooden-floored cottage in Hennacombe and, indeed, listened at length to the elder Hopkins (who was immune, it seemed, to the freezing wind blowing through the open window) as the old man spoke of his wish that “Christ’s Kingdom should come in our lifetime,” he now realized—reading the book—that the pond was neither as he had seen it nor as Oscar had described it.

  Wardley-Fish had an impression of a killjoy, love-nothing, a man you could not send a birthday present to in case he smelt the racetrack on it, a man who would snatch a little Christmas pudding from a young boy’s mouth. But where he might have expected to find a stern and life—denying spirit, he found such a trembling and tender appreciation of hedgerow, moss, robin, and the tiniest of sea creatures that even Wardley-Fish (it was he who thought the “even”) was impressed and moved. Leaning against the counter at Martindale’s with all the heavy physical awkwardness of a fellow waiting for his wife at the milliner’s, he read this passage: “the pretty green Ploycera ocellata was numerous; but the most abundant, and at the same time most lovely species was the exquisite Eolis coronata, with tentacles surrounded by membranous coronets, and with crowded clusters of papillae, of crimson and blue that reflect the most gemlike radiance.”

  Now Wardley-Fish thought himself a man’s man, steeped in brandy and good cigars, and if—expediently—he had renounced the racecourse, he had no intention of abandoning the hunt, which he still rode to at Amersham whenever it was possible. Further, he imagined himself stupid. He had been told so long enough, and had this not been his father’s opinion also, he would never have been pushed into a life as a clergyman. His early wish had been to study law, but he was told he had not the brain for it. He had not questioned this assessment and had therefore decided, whilst still at Oriel, that he could only hope to advance himself through connections, the most effective of which would be made through marriage.

  He claimed to have no ear for poetry or music and yet he was moved—it nearly winded him—by the elder Hopkins’s prose. Where he had expected hellfire and mustard poultice, he found maidenhair and a ribbon of spawn. “I found the young were perfectly formed, each enclosed by a globular egg, perfectly transparent and colourless.”

  To be able to feel these things, to celebrate God’s work in such a lovely hymn, Wardley-Fish would have given everything and anything. He felt, in these simple, naturalist’s descriptions, what he had never felt—what he should have felt—in the psalm beginning “I will extol thee, my God, O King; and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever.”

  He stood at the counter, his head bowed, with that moist-eyed look one would expect to be produced by a sentimental story. His fiancée, returning to discover both the changed mood and the parcel which the saucy-eyed assistant was wrapping for him, saw immediately that the one had caused the other, and was therefore not sympathetically disposed towards the book. She knew him as bright and jolly. She liked him best in a red jacket fifteen hands high.

  They found a hansom outside the shop and ordered it to Kensington. Riding through Hyde Park, with all the deep black trees shooting green, he continued to think, as he had thought, continually, since his secret visit with the coal, of his friend who had jailed himself in a room with only a birdless sky for company and only the prospect of a terrifying voyage to look forward to.

  Once when he was young, so young he was not yet a boarder at Harrow, he had meddled with a stamp in his father’s vast collection, a single blue stamp with a picture of a swan. He had been so careful, so reverent almost, and yet, somehow, the perforations had been damaged. His father, of course, had noticed, and it was not the birching which made him blubber into his nanny’s white starched bosom afterwards, but that he had intended only admiration, and instead had caused harm, and this harm was irreversible.

  It was his character to carry the burden of his mistakes with him, and so it would be with Oscar. He could not put it down. He could not clear his mind of it.

  The carriage lurched on to the bridge across the Serpentine and Wardley-Fish, hearing his fiancée exclaim bad-temperedly, looked at her and knew he did not like her. Her little plump wrists seemed disgusting to him. He felt choked, claustrophobic, was made particularly so by the powder on her dimpled cheek.

  He wished he had gone out to Africa. He had thought of it for a while. He had put the idea into the Odd Bod’s head. They had talked of going to Africa together—this was well before the day at Cremorne Gardens—but there had been the problem of the water phobia. But now he knew he should have gone to Africa anyway and the ambition that had made him court the daughter of a bishop seemed contemptible.

  He knew she would not like the elder Hopkins’s book, and yet when he asked if he might read her a little, he did not do it provocatively, but rather in the hope that he might be wrong.

  “Melody,” he said, “I must share my secret with yo
u.” They had not spoken since they left the West End and, as this silence was unusual, he knew she would be uneasy. He did not normally read at all, and he knew his purchase of a book would seem strange. Still, he pulled the string on the green parcel, smiling queerly in her direction.

  “We are almost there, dearest,” she said, but took the paper and string from him and began to tidy it. Wardley-Fish did not see the reproof intended.

  “A little only,” he said. “Here. It is written by the Odd Bod’s pater and not in the least what one would expect.”

  She nodded, severely, she hoped.

  Wardley-Fish opened the book, not at the beginning, but at random. “ ‘The body is about one and a half inches thick.’ ” he said (this was not quite the sort of thing he sought) “ ‘and the same in height, of a purplish brown hue marked with longitudinal bands of a dull lilac, each band margined with a darker colour.’ ”

  Melody Clutterbuck looked at her fiancé, perplexed. They passed a troop of guardsmen on horseback, a sight she normally loved. She did not even notice. She opened her mouth to speak, to object to the unsavoury scent—there was no other way to think of it—of this writing. It certainly did not seem appropriate for ladies. But her fiancé was ahead of her. He was already galloping on in search of better evidence. A paragraph here. A sentence there.

  “You see, you see,” he exclaimed, his eyes glistening wet. She had only seen him become this excited about horses. “The old boy is a marvel. The old boy is alarming. It is the ‘Yea!,’ Melody, isn’t it? Your father’s ‘Yea!’ Mr Carlyle’s ‘Eternal Yea!’ The one your pater speaks of.”

  “Ian, please!”

  “From this,” he waved the book with great emotion, “to a room with no fire.”

  “Dearest, you make no sense.”

  “ ‘Within a day or two after this, the other two of the same species lay their spawn.’ No, no dearest. It is botany, or zoology. The old fellow is a fearsome Evangelical so we need not worry ourselves about propriety.”

  But talk as he might, he knew he had gone too far. He surrendered the book when she held out her left hand for it and he watched it join its partner—she was, in spite of her firm chin, very agitated—as the pair of them, left and right, attempted to collaborate in rewrapping the parcel.

  I am frightened of her, he thought, and it is far too young to know such a thing.

  It was the Hon. Mary Braden-Loch’s day At Home. The young clergyman performed expertly. Melody Clutterbuck was pleased to have him much admired and had soon forgiven him his outburst in the cab. She was alarmed therefore to notice, in a break in the conversation, the dead quality of his lovely eyes. She could not guess that they held the indefinite sky of a window three storeys above the streets of Notting Hill.

  46

  In a Trice

  It was Mr Paxton—the same Mr Paxton who designed the Crystal Palace—who advised Lucinda Leplastrier to return to Sydney on the Leviathan. He spoke as an engineer, he said, and there is no doubt she would see nothing like it “so long as sanity is the general condition in my profession.”

  Lucinda expressed doubt that she should entrust her life to a vessel so described. He made it sound as if the ship were quite unsound.

  “Its ability to float at sea is inversely proportional to the likelihood of it floating on the season of commerce. Go,” he said, “it is as safe as an elephant. It will be a great experience, aye, and a rare one, too, because she will be bankrupt two years from now, and Mr Legare can go back to building bridges which is more his line of work.”

  She bought her ticket with her customary confusion about the price. It was fifty-five pounds for second class. It was too much money. It was seventy pounds for first class. She could afford it. She bought a first-class ticket, but in all her to-ing and fro-ing about the rights and wrongs of this, she never imagined that the largest ship ever built would be so empty. London had been lonely enough. This was worse. And it was because of this, because of the grand and supercilious spaces, that she had come down on to the wharf and she was, the minute her feet were on the ground, much happier.

  It was like descending from a town hall to a market place—suddenly there was life all around her—steel rails along the wharf and cranes rolling to and fro, donkey engines thumping, white blossoms of steam, and even the rain, although it wet her boots, did not depress her. She was pleased to be down here, amongst practical people. There were practical smells—coal, coke, anthracite, mineral oil. It was the mineral oil that made her think about her glassworks with which, in her absence, she had developed a closer and more affectionate relationship. She forgot the anxieties and tensions her ownership produced and felt, now, on Southampton wharf, sympathetically drawn to the man who smelt of mineral oil—an engineer, she guessed, a freckle-faced Scot with a clenched-up face who would never be welcome in Marian Evans’s drawing room. Her glassworks smelt like this. All glassworks did. At the glassworks she visited in Trent, in London itself, and even in Nottingham where they were making sheet glass for Mr Paxton, there was the same smell, the smell of her own works on Darling Harbour. The pear wood they used to turn the foot of a vase would be soaked, not just in water, but in mineral oil, and she was suddenly made impatient to return—as impatient as she had been to leave—to the aroma of burnt pear wood, mineral oil, and the acrid chemical smells of sulphates and chromates oxidizing to green and yellow.

  She was twenty-two years old and fashionably dressed in grey moiré. Her back was curved; her backside, as was the fashion, pronounced but not to the degree suggested by George Eliot in a sharp letter written at that time. The pamphleteer’s daughter, according to the famous novelist, could have sat a tea tray on the ledge of her backside, but George Eliot was fifty-eight years old and bad tempered with kidney stones and she had misunderstood the girl completely.

  She is such a “little” thing, it would appear that all conversation has been squeezed out of her. She sits with her hands pressed in her lap, totally silent, but with no consciousness of her social inadequacy and it is difficult, after the second hour, to maintain one’s natural sympathy for her. George [Lewes] was kind and took her to the British Museum and then to tea where she seems to have attempted to seduce him into a game of chance. Apart from this outburst she seems to have said little, and it is so difficult, no matter what one’s intentions, to hold a conversation with someone who will not talk.

  Lucinda had expected her mother’s friend to share her mother’s enthusiasms. But while George Eliot had encouraged Elizabeth’s essays and pamphlets, she had never shared “Elizabeth’s fanatacism” for factories. And while she was interested to learn that the orphan had actually purchased a factory, she did not wish to discuss the manufacture of glass. If Lucinda had employed female glass blowers, perhaps it would have been different, but her single attempt in that direction had been a failure. George Eliot was not interested, and she had work to do.

  Lucinda thought George Eliot was a snob. She preferred Mr Paxton who laughed at her outright but who had, just the same, explained his new project, presented her with a blueprint of the broad schemata, and written her letters of introduction to the glassworks he dealt with. To be patronized by Mr Paxton was an altogether more pleasant experience than being disapproved of by her mother’s famous friend.

  Lucinda had come to London thinking of it as “Home.” It was soon clear that this great sooty machine was not home at all. She had left Sydney with thoughts of marriage and children. She had left—although it did not make her comfortable to remember this—in a temper with Dennis Hasset who, whilst remaining her close friend and confidante, obviously did not think her a suitable candidate for marriage. She had left him to stew in the juices of his own regret. She did not doubt she would have proposals in London, if only because of her wealth. She had steeled herself to fend off undesirables. Nothing like this had happened, although the stern Mr Paxton had behaved, twice, in an ungentlemanly way.

  She stepped back to allow the steam crane to pass along
its rails and, looking up to see what it might be carrying, saw a bellowing Poll Hereford with a canvas sling under its middle. The crane stopped and began to lower its burden on to the top of that mighty riveted cliff wall which was Leviathan.

  The wharf resembled a sale yard and reminded the woman with the small bright eyes of the days she had gone into Parramatta with her father to buy a pig or sell the vealers. The air was redolent with fear and wet fur. The beasts were scouring, and thinking of this, she resolved to stand beneath no more airborne beasts.

  She walked past the corralled animals, and did not mind the stares of the oilskin-wrapped shepherds who could not imagine why a woman, one of her class, would walk along a busy wharf in the rain. She was accustomed to this sort of stare and while she felt the implicit threat in it—the voodoo of a group of men—she was now a woman who employed such men, and her old fears in the face of their insulting confidence were allayed by the knowledge of her economic strength. It was wrong that she had this strength but she was, thank God, pleased to have it. She did not make them lower their eyes, but she already had the power to do so. This power was primed by money, but it was not fuelled by it. And it was this, this turbulent, often angry sense of her own power, that was most responsible for her being lonely in London. Even George Eliot, no matter what her fiction might suggest, was used to young ladies who lowered their eyes in deference to her own. Lucinda did not do so. The two women locked eyes and George Eliot mentions (in the letter already quoted from) “a quite peculiar tendency to stare.” It may well have been this, not her bits-and-pieces accent, her interest in trade, her lack of conversational skills, her sometimes blunt opinions or her unladylike way of blowing her nose—like a walrus, said George Eliot—that made her seem so alien. And when she did, at last, lower her eyes, her lids were heavy and sensuous. They produced an effect which was ungenerously described as “sly.”