Oscar and Lucinda Page 31

  In a letter dated 22nd of August she reflected that an intelligent reader need never be alone when she could spend her evenings in Barchester or with Mr Nickleby, for instance.

  August is the first month of the westerly—rude, bullying winds that cut across from Drummoyne or scream down the river from Bedlam Point and Hen and Chicken Bay. By August the upstairs rooms in Lucinda’s cottage had become cold and dark. There were no slices of silver sunshine on the cedar floor. The cat had retreated downstairs where it had inflicted one more wound on the already scratched pine door, miaowing bad-temperedly until its mistress had let it in by the fire.

  So what might we expect to find downstairs? The young manufacturer with drafting board and ruler? Or, with the day’s work over, deep in the spell of Mr Dickens or Sir Walter Scott. Both Waverley and Bleak House lie on the floor beside her chair. But she cannot read them. Every word leads her, by one course or another, to Dennis Hasset, to her own situation, her lack of industrial education, practical skills, to the publicly pitied condition of spinsterhood and isolation.

  Lucinda is asleep, her head collapsed on her shoulder, her book lying where it has fallen on the Turkish rug. The lower lip which looked so shockingly sensuous to Dennis Hasset not two months before, now, in sleep, seems sulky and disconsolate. Her cheeks seem quite flat. The eyes quiver behind the heavy blue—veined curtains of her lids. Her jaw is heavy, lifeless. The wind rattles the windows in their sashes. The fire hisses. There is no gas light but a smoky paraffin one whose blackened mantle needs attention. The cat, alert, stares at the rattling window.

  This is not the sleep of exhaustion. It is produced by two glasses of brandy, by the lack of oxygen in the room, but most of all by the viscous, sour, treacly chemicals of loneliness.

  You may suggest that she should have a maid. But she has a maid. All right, then—a maid to live with her. She has had. But she no longer wants a maid to live with her. Maids are young and alive. They have young men. They sit in the kitchen giggling. They only serve to make her feel more lonely.

  Well, then—she should go out. To where? To Mr d’Abbs, of course, where she had so many pleasant times before. But it was not just the mediocrity of Mr d’Abbs’s ménage she found depressing, not that peculiar Sydney combination of ignorance and bull—like confidence, it was Mr d’Abbs’s determination that she not live a lonely life. There was always now some “philosopher” or “poet” (feeling old and finally in need of marriage) placed at her left-hand side.

  Then she should have accepted other invitations. And, indeed, she would have liked to drink tea and talk about the most ordinary things. She would be interested in dancing the quadrille and discussing the adventures of babes in arms. Were not these things of interest in novels? Then why would they not be of interest in life?

  But Lucinda had alienated all the people she might now wish to cultivate. It was not merely that her stride was wrong or her hair inadequately coiffured, her fashions, generally, inconsiderate of other feelings. She had held herself aloof. She had indicated she felt no sympathy for that loose congregation which one might call “her class.” Even her house, the house she chose herself, placed her apart from people. Her display of arrogance would not be forgiven. Society would not invite her in a second time.

  Fortunately, she did not yet realize that she was not welcome in her own works. She imagined this dry, brick-floored factory to be her home. It was her only connection with life. She liked the smell of working men, and I do not mean that in any vulgar sense, but rather that she valued the smell of common humanity. The smells suggested labour, warmth, usefulness.

  In winter her own house was cold. It smelt of floor polish. She could no longer bear to be there.

  64

  The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

  She had been happy once, properly happy, deeply happy. Now, as she hung her lantern on the nail in the stables and fussed with her stubborn gelding, she could not believe what she had become.

  It was nine o’clock at night. And she was going for a trot.

  She did not think where this trot would end. She did not even think very much about the place in which it began. It was frightening out here on Longnose Point.

  There were so many things she could not think of. Her mind was dashing along corridors while she kept just ahead of it, slamming doors.

  She was going for a trot. She tightened the harness. She walked the horse along the mud-heavy track past Birchgrove House. The caretaker was singing. He was alone and singing, drunk, too. Last week he had burned down the cow bails in the night. Lucinda kept two pistols wrapped in a blanket underneath her seat.

  Rain came in long rips and ripples. She sought out the time when she had been happy. She shut out the drunken singing. She withdrew from the westerly wind. She was in Parramatta with her father. They were going home. Their big four-wheeler crossed the cobblestones and set off, their old Waler biting at his familiar enemy, the Percheron, beside him. They got up a nice trot, a little too fast, through the High Street (look out there!) past the doctor’s phaeton, the farmers’ buckboards, the swarms of drays and sulkies. There were big—skirted women, frock—coated shopkeepers, farmers with bow-yangs tied to their trousers so their thick legs looked like sausages with their ends tied off with string. When the Waler tried to bite the Percheron, her father hit it with a long stick. She laughed to see the little jump it gave, and did not know a horse could kill you.

  They carried scents behind them. She could still list them, the smell of bran, of pollard, oats, the soft, dusty, yellow smell of seed wheat. The smells joined to other smells, a necklace of smells, with some in Parramatta, others along the way home where, for instance, you might find the air suddenly rich with honey, and beside the road the privet hedges not yet called a noxious weed and shaking their luxuriant white blossoms at you, or appearing to, for it was not the privet itself but rather—see, Lucy, lookee see, quick—a splendid parrot, no, three, four parrots—brilliant red, blue, such jewellery shaking the white clouds of honeyed privet.

  Past Grass Corner they thundered over a wooden bridge and through a little cutting. Once her father stopped there. He gave her the reins to hold and jumped down. He was short and wide, strong in his arms and shoulders. He did exercises to strengthen his legs but they always stayed the same. He smelled of apples and sometimes—on the trip to Parramatta—of eau-de-Cologne. He carried paper bags with him at all times. Any bag that came his way was carefully folded and he would not hesitate to beg or borrow from anyone who possessed a bag but did not seem to value it. Lucinda was never embarrassed by this. She never knew that stage of life where everything her parents did—the way they spoke or combed their hair—was an embarrassment. She was not critical of paper—bag collecting. She knew the bags were there to hold her papa’s soil samples and that he might at any moment (like this one now, as he jumps down from the buck-board and unfolds the handle of his neat little spade) might use the bag that had hitherto held jelly crystals to contain a scoop of astringent sand, or a pungent, black, heavy soil, heavy with humus, or a clay so perfumed it seemed, to her senses, anyway, to be as luxuriant as privet. The clay in this cutting was a wonder. You might pass through it like a lesser person, a neighbour called Houlihan, Molloy or Rourke, a person who thought no more about this clay than he thought about Livy or Montaigne, but once you stopped you could contemplate a crimson bright enough for all the robes of paradise, a nankeen yellow that might—her papa joked—be mustard off your plate. This joke led to her eating the soil when they were off again (labouring up Dyer’s Hill from which broad plateau they would descend into their own little valley) expecting she would taste, at last, that hot forbidden substance; she found it only gritty mud which her laughing father wiped off her solemn face with a handkerchief.

  It was this very clay her father used to make the kitchen pots. Her mother made fun of these pots and it is true that they were lumpy and there was always trouble with getting a good seal with the lid, so much so that precious paper
bags were used to fill the gaps, like the papier-mâché which served to plug the gaps between the slabs of their hut, and in neither case did the paper succeed as a seal against ants (red and small black) who came to contaminate the food with the scent of formic acid.

  Her mother put down a plank of timber and showed her how to roll the clay to make a snake, and with the snake to make a pot. She remembered the way it began, always, so pleasantly, her fingers dry, the clay malleable, but somewhere, she did not know why, it would go wrong. Her mother, beside her, could make the clay obey her, and even if she made a mistake, she could nip it in, smooth it over, while the clay in Lucinda’s hands was soon wet with slip and worked and reworked until, slimy, slippery, without form, it would break in her hands. And it did not matter that Mama had words for it (she always had words for things) and showed her how the coil could contain itself no more, had changed its structure from one state to another, from butterfly back to grub; nor did it matter that she understood perfectly how this was. It did not help. It could not stop the feeling—her hands first slippery, then desperate dry, the skin puckered, all life gone—the awful feeling of despair when a lovely pot she had begun to make was nothing but a twisted mess, like something you might stand in by mistake.

  The melted-mustard roads of her memory led her, tonight, to this spot. It was not the escape she had intended. It brought her full circle, from despair to despair. She was up on the ridge that they had named after Governor Darling. There were houses now, all pushed close together for comfort. Through soft yellow windows she imagined she heard women’s voices, women with round stomachs stirring pots, wiping children’s faces. It was nine o’clock at night and squally and wet, but inside the houses she imagined children, zinc baths, steam, red, cooked little bodies. The manufacture of glass once more felt pointless. It collapsed inwards, like overworked clay. She would have liked, she thought, to sit at a table and polish cutlery. She would not recoil from the sweet milk-sick smell of children.

  And yet she did not stop. Of course she did not stop. She knew no one in these cottages. She drew her big oilskin coat around her and pulled her sou’wester down to the edges of her eyebrows.

  There was a fire over at The Rocks. She made a Christian symbol of it, and then drove the symbol from her mind by thinking of why there might be, in real life, a fire at The Rocks. There were plague rats. They piled them up and burnt them in the streets.

  She came down the rutted track of the ridge. She was frightened again, to be out by herself. These fears came and went, like the cold pockets of air by creeks. She did not believe in ghosts, but now she was easily frightened and jumped three inches in her hard seat when someone in a long coat rushed across her path. She wished she were back home, and then she reminded herself what it was like to be home. She used her whip unsentimentally, drawing a deft flick along the gelding’s flank. The flick produced a skip of rhythm, a toss of the head, and they set off at a brisker pace, following the slippery clay-white lines of the track round the shores of White Bay.

  There were racing fools with no lanterns. A drunk wagoner with half his load tumbling off behind him. How cowardly Mr Hasset had been! To abandon her, here, when he did not even wish to go away.

  She was angry, with Dennis Hasset, with the hallooing gallopers who rushed out of the dark, with the rutted track and the mud-churned soak where the drunker wagoner dropped a plank which almost jammed between her wheels.

  Anger made her reckless. She drove fast. She was going for a trot. She went all the way into George Street although she did not like it at this time of night. She dared herself. She did not care. She brought her jinker up past the theatres. Her Majesty’s. The Rappallo. Lyceum. The weather had not kept the crowds at home. The street was a river of wheels and horses, the banks awash with the flotsam and jetsam of men’s hats.

  There were gangs of larrikins afoot, up from The Rock with their hands boasting against their braces. She was afraid. Inside her big coat, she was small and white, soft-breasted, weak-armed, all soaked with sweat in the wind-cold night. A man spoke to her from a carriage. She put the tired gelding into a canter. There were shouts of, “Gee-up, Nelly.” Laughter. She came in under the shadows of St Andrew’s. The loathed St Andrew’s. It stood grim and dark, the castle of Bishop Dancer. A crowd by the nave door announced not late service but a fight. Two policemen ran towards it, momentarily brilliant and livid-faced in the gaslight. She swung into Bathurst Street at the last moment, nearly colliding with one more unlit sulky. The sulky gave up a wail of silk-and-feathered screams. Lucinda felt contempt. It curdled in her jealousy. She struck her horse and followed the line of wide verandas as if she were going to see her dear friend at Woollahra. But there was nothing at Woollahra. There was a too-pretty child with a hoop who said the house was hers.

  “I am going mad,” she said. She said it out loud. “I am unlaced and not connected.” It was a frightful city in which to contemplate madness, all hard with eucalyptus, snapping sticks, sandstone rocks with fractured faces and cutting edges. You could not, not in Sydney, dear God, allow yourself to fall nto such a weakened state.

  “A mad woman,” she whispered. “Trrrot up.”

  She was going for a trot. The horse knew this. He knew the destination. “Not a mad woman,” she said, as they went down into the smoky dark of The Rocks. You could not see the fire so close. It was on the other side. The drains reeked. They reeked everywhere, but it was worse here towards the quay. Her nerves were on edge. “Dear God, forgive me.”

  She intended nothing more than a little Pak-Ah-Pu. This was a lottery run by the Chinese down at that end of George Street. It was dark down there, and dangerous. The front of the establishment had a candle burning—no gas—inside a glass lantern. There were men standing around in twos and threes. She could smell putrid meat but also liquor. These two smells were carried on the salty air of the harbour. The wind played on the rigging of the tall-masted ships. She tied the rein to the railing. Even before she betrayed her sex by the sound of her walk, the men around her were unnaturally silent. The big wet coat was an inadequate disguise. She affected a stiff-spined haut froid. she told herself this: “You’re the boss.”

  The front room pretended to be a shop. Everyone knew this was not the case, even the policemen on the beat (who wore gold rings and heavy watches). Lucinda did not look at whatever dusty goods were displayed, but walked—she heard her boots echo on the wooden boards—towards the curtained doorway at the back. She could hear how small her feet were. She felt their unmaleness.

  The truth is that she no longer wished merely for a Pak-Ah-Pu ticket. She was having a trot. There is nothing to Pak-Ah-Pu except a lottery. There is none of the sting (her term) you get in a good game. But she began, once she reached the table, as she had originally pretended. It was nearly half past nine, time for the last draw of the day, and there was therefore quite a crowd standing around the table. Several of them were drunk, but they did not sway. They had that rather sullen stillness which is the mark of a betting shop late in the day. The floor was littered with crumpled paper, cigarette ends, matches broken nervously in three. The men had a look at once scuffed and glazed. She felt—or imagined—an anger, barely contained, but the anger may well have been her own.

  She gave the Chinaman at the table her sixpence. She was given her ticket and she marked, quickly, urgently even, ten of the Chinese characters on the paper. There were eighty all told. She did not know what they meant. They were printed on coarse grey paper. Twice she pushed the unpleasant little chewed pencil stub (property of the house) through the paper. She wrote her name (not her real name) on the paper and gave it to the Chinaman who put it into a bowl, which appeared to be black but was probably a dark Chinese blue. The light was bad. She could see the squashed stub of a fat cigar near her foot. She tried to look at nothing while she waited for half past nine.

  It took three and a half minutes. All this time she stood immobile. The air around her was still. Occasionally a man said someth
ing in a low voice. This would be followed by laughter. Once she heard a word she knew referred to copulation. She was quite drenched inside her oilskin coat. All this fear she felt, this hostility and danger, was but the aura surrounding something else, a larger body of feeling which was dense, compacted, a centre of pure will—Lucinda was willing herself to win. Her anger became as inconsequential as blue-flies, then less, like summer thrip.

  Six correct marks would bring her ten shillings. Seven would deliver four pounds, eight shillings and eight pence. Eight good marks was twenty-three pounds, six shillings and eightpence. This was all written on the blackboard above the back wall. She was not silly enough to waste her will on ten. She decided on eight, imagining that this was within her limit. There was a smell of incense, another like wet dog, and that other smell—the bodies of men who work hard sweaty work and only bathe once a week. You can produce a similar smell by leaving damp cleaning rags in a bucket. Not an attractive smell, but Lucinda liked it. The cigar smoker had lit another cheroot and made the air slightly blue and streaky. Through all this there came the soft crying of a baby in another room. Many of the Chinese, she had been told, had European wives. It was said the Chinese men were kind to their women. These were fallen women, beyond the pale. It was said—the reverend friend had said so—that they were loved and found happiness. She tried to block out the sound. She shut a large and heavy door on it and pressed it—for it did not wish to go—firmly shut.

  There was movement now. A shoulder, blind of feeling, pressed against her. The men pushed, like fish feeding, or piglets rushing the teat—all feeling concentrated in the mouth, the rest of the body quite numb. There were eighty characters. They would put twenty in a bowl. Of these twenty, they would select ten. They were doing it now. She was crushed all about. The Celestial, one eye half-shut against his own cigarette smoke, drew out ten yellowed ivory counters and placed them on a little wooden tray.