Oscar and Lucinda Read online

  Lucinda had a maid, a Mrs Smith a childless widow just turned thirty. She was not lively or talkative, but these qualities which Lucinda had once thought essential now seemed—after ten maids had come and gone inside twelve months—no longer so.

  Mrs Smith was good at her job. She was small and thin, but you would not call her slight, for her limbs were strong like an athlete’s and she liked to scrub, and beat, and sweep. She did this work silently, as if holding her breath. When she spoke, her eyes remained quite unengaged and the only thing that seemed to put them into gear was church. She was a Baptist. She did not find the house too lonely, although this had been a common complaint with her predecessors. She did not wish to go dancing at Manly or walking in the Domain. She wished only to have every sabbath to do what she described as her “Christian Duty” and she declared this so fiercely and belligerently that Lucinda imagined that Mrs Smith’s religion was a jewel-bright and private room where an Anglican’s presence would not be welcome.

  The normal terms were fifteen shillings a week and every other Sunday afternoon and evening off, and one free night a week. But Lucinda did not try to bargain. She offered Mrs Smith sixteen shillings a week and agreed to her terms. Mrs Smith said she would give the extra shilling to the Lord.

  The arrangement was not cheerful but it was practical. The silver was properly cleaned and there was none of that bitter tasting crust on the fork tines that had so distinguished the tenure of the ninth maid.

  The bathroom smelt of bright and pungent patent formulae. Waves of ammonia seemed to emanate from the waterside windows which were always, no matter what the weather, sparkling clean. And if the house became slightly hostile and chemical by day, this was conquered in the night by the rich aromas of the stews which were Mrs Smith’s great skill. The stews were a surprise. There is something wild and generous abut the better stews. They are best put together on the winds of impulse, guided by the compass of intuition. These were all qualities that Mrs Smith would have appeared to lack. You would expect something thin and watery from her pot. There was no indication that this was a woman who threw her herbs in by the stalkful, cut her meat big and would know whether the fungus she found on the borders of Whitefield’s paddocks could be eaten even if it were a poisonous-looking yellow and shaped like a lady’s fan.

  When Oscar Hopkins was brought into the house, Mrs Smith, similarly, showed herself to be not mean as her mouth suggested but both compassionate and practical. It did not occur to her to question the propriety of introducing a man into a house occupied by single women. She saw nothing untoward with him being attended to on the dining-room table. She fetched towels from the linen press and she got good thick ones lest the heat from the water she had been asked to boil should damage the French polishing.

  Of course, she did not know who Oscar Hopkins was. She did not know he was a scandal.

  She saw his hands and, having more experience of the agonies of prayer than her mistress, recognized those half-moon-shaped infections. She tore up a cotton chemise—really still too good to throw away, but of the right softness and texture for cleaning wounds—and then she stood back, her arms folded, her head on one side, her eyes apparently as neutral of expression as a bird’s and watched her mistress tend to the man.

  She did not say anything in front of the man, but her face softened a fraction as she fitted her big-fingered hands together, rocking one hand back and forth on the tines of the other.

  In the kitchen she whispered to Lucinda: “Them cuts was made by praying,” And she demonstrated how this might be done, shutting her eyes while doing so.

  Lucinda was repulsed and excited by this fervent prayerfulness. It seemed alien, popish, like Italian paintings of the torture of saints. She felt judged by it. She respected it, perhaps excessively, she who thought the kneelers at Balmain not soft enough. She found the iodine behind the cochineal where Prucilla Twopenny had hidden it.

  The iodine hurt him, and when Lucinda would not bear to be the agent of more torture, it was Mrs Smith who took over the medication. She bound the young man’s hands and asked him did he think he could manage to hold a mug of cocoa.

  It was also Mrs Smith who made up the bed for Oscar. It would seem the question of it being sinful had not entered her mind at that stage. Indeed it did not enter until she had been to church on Sunday.

  On the Saturday she waited on them both, bringing toast and porridge to the little room upstairs, which looked through the thin grey veil of gum trees to the cobalt blue of the Parramatta River. Mrs Smith was in no way censorious. Indeed Lucinda was touched to see how bright and excited she was. You could imagine how she might be as a wife with a husband, or a mother with a son. She bullied him gently into taking golden syrup on his porridge and, with her luscious spoon held above the young man’s plate, smiled conspiratorially at her mistress across the table.

  In this nectar drop of time, Lucinda was moved. She thought: I am happy.

  There were cockatoos on Cockatoo Island in those days, and they brought their shrieks and tearing beaks to breakfast on the Monday. They gathered in the Morton Bay fig on the south side of the house and made Lucinda laugh when they raised their yellow crests or waddled self-importantly along its smooth-skinned, wrinkly-elbowed branches.

  It was then that Mrs Smith requested a word and Lucinda, having no indication from the face, went with her innocently, imagining that they were to confer on some domestic matter or that she was being asked to declare a holiday for Pentecost or Ash Wednesday. She went, still holding her napkin.

  Mrs Smith could not carry her emotions as far as the front parlour. She got as far as the bottom of the stairs when she turned abruptly and said: “I cannot stay, mum. Not while you comport youself in such a way, mum.”

  “In what way?” Lucinda felt nothing but confusion as though she had been riding a trap which has, quite silently, lost a wheel, and there she was tipped over in the rock—studded roadside when the minute before she had been reclining on a cushion and thinking dreamy thoughts about the shape of clouds.

  “The ‘gentleman,’ ” said Mrs Smith. It was all she could manage. It was as if the word itself would choke her.

  “But, Mrs Smith, it was you who made up his bed. And as you are in the house yourself, it seems to be perfectly proper.”

  “Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own.”

  “Have your friends at church been speaking to you?”

  But Mrs Smith would not answer so direct a question and her eyes took on a dark and hard and glittering righteousness. She lifted her chin and clasped her hands in front of her pinafore. The passage where they stood was a dank place. Neither of them moved for a good two minutes.

  When Lucinda returned to sit opposite Oscar at the table, he did not immediately notice the distress in her face. He noticed, rather, that she had tied her napkin in a large hard knot which she could not, no matter how she plucked at it, untangle.

  73

  Judge Not

  If you saw Mrs Smith with her dun-coloured shawl around her shoulders, her cane basket in the crook of her wiry arm, saw her come up the hill past the butcher’s in Mort Street, Balmain, you might remark, if you remarked anything at all, that here was a woman that kept the shutters of her life screwed shut, who kept herself close to the wall as she walked, and thus occupied that thin strip of dry shadow when all the rest of the street was wet with sunshine. A private women, you would think, until you found something livelier to interest you (there—a tinker sitting in the gutter mending a tiny saucepan with a burnt black handle) and then you could forget her.

  And yet, three days after Mrs Smith had left Lucinda’s employ, there was not a maid in Sydney who did not know of the unorthodox situation out at Whitfield’s Farm. This did not mean that there were no further maids or cooks available, but rather than the ones who put themselves forward were opportunists who imagined that they could, given the impropriety in the house, request a premium for their services. There was not one w
ho asked for less than a guinea a week. This was offensive enough. But there were other things, not easily graspable, about their attitude—for while they swindled, or attempted swindling, they adopted an expression (all in the eyes and mouth) of moral superiority.

  These interviews left Lucinda feeling soiled and angry, and she would have had no help at all had not Mrs Froud stepped forward.

  Mrs Froud was the wife of Lucinda’s second gatherer. She came to “do” two afternoons a week. Mrs Froud was jolly and friendly, but you could see—or so it seemed to Lucinda—that she had made an assumption. This assumption was quite incorrect. There was nothing to make an assumption about.

  Oscar lay in his room and sucked his sheet. He wrote to Mr Stratton about the dangers of gambling life.

  My dear Patron, [he wrote] I cannot help but have the greatest reservations about the serpent I have placed in your trusting at a time when I knew too well the effects of its poison. I sent my journals to you because I promised you, and now I beg you to make a promise: burn them. I regret the day I first set foot upon the track. Opium, surely, would not be so great a curse. This will all seem far-fetched to you, but let me tell you that at this moment I am kindly lodged by a fellow sufferer, and although we inhabit a small house, no bigger than my father’s cottage, we hardly speak to one another for fear that something that we say or do will lead to a horse, a game of cards and we shall, without intending to, find ourselves once more in that state of mad intoxication.

  There were pages of it, all pretty much the same. They reflected Oscar’s idea of what was happening in the house, but what was so obvious to him was not obvious to Lucinda at all. While he shrank from conversation, wary of where it might lead, she had hoped for it. While he tried to diminish himself, to make himself small and inoffensive, she sat at table and waited for him to join her. She did not like to go running to his room continually, and yet she could not leave him there alone. She imagined he was gripped by loneliness. She saw he did not hate her, and yet she felt him pulling back. The reason for this presented itself to her one night while she was preparing for bed.

  He thinks I have him in mind for a husband.

  It was only to set his mind at rest that she invented the romantic story of her passion for a clergyman whom Bishop Dancer had so cruelly exiled to Boat Harbour. She wished to make him imagine that her heart was already spoken for, that all she required from him was company and conversation. She wished him calm, steady, and to quit all this nervous scuttling about the house.

  But she told her story to a man whose emotions were in such a state that he could barely hold the load they carried, let alone the unhappy story she asked him to lash on atop. He was much moved, too moved. It was ridiculous, he knew—he hardly knew her—but it took everything in him to stop bursting into tears. He chewed his lip, he grimaced, he excused himself while there was still sultana cake uneaten on the plate. She heard him creaking up the stairs. The door shut to his room. She picked up her tea-cup and threw it at the wall.

  74

  A Degree from Oxford

  “This chap, Miss Leplastrier, is he any good?”

  Mr d’Abbs held her eye quite fiercely for a minute, but he could not sustain. He had a small smile, quite ironic, and it twisted his thin moustache and made him look not quite respectable. And while he enjoyed being thought of in this way—it was no commercial liability in Sydney—it was not the truth at all. He might let her glassworks go cold through timidity or cautiousness, but he would not break the law.

  “He has a degree from Oxford.”

  “Oxford,” said Mr d’Abbs. He was pleased, but did not wish to appear impressionable. His hands—large hands for such a small man—played briefly with his blue silk tie, then held the edge of the desk, then slid until they found the drawer, and in the drawer a cigar. The cigar was such a big one that Lucinda, when she saw it, thought it made him look like a caricature in Punch.

  “Oriel,” she offered.

  Mr d’Abbs blinked. He leaned forward a little as if he expected her to say more. When there was obviously no more to say, he frowned. “It is not just a question of clever men,” he said. He fussed with some grey ash which had landed on his green corduroy jacket. “Really, there is no cleverness required. The work itself would drive him mad with boredom. All it requires is neatness. So why do you come to me with a man from Oxford?”

  Mr d’Abbs really wanted to be flattered. He prided himself on his employees as he prided himself on the paintings and lithographs that crowded his walls at home. He was an artist himself. He liked artists. He was a philosopher. He liked philosophers. He provided them, in the midst of commerce, with a refuge.

  He could not tell anyone, not even his wife, what pleasure it gave him to know that now, at this instant, in the clerk’s room next door, he had Mr Jeffris the poet and surveyor, Mr Trevis-Dawes the pianist, Mr Coyle the water-colourist whose views of Pittwater and the Hawkesbury adorned the cedar panels of his office. He did not wish to talk to them, and he certainly did not socialize with them. But he was very pleased, more pleased about this than anything, that they were there.

  “So why come to me?”

  “Oh, Mr d’Abbs,” said Lucinda, “do not tease me.”

  “Tease?” said Mr d’Abbs, looking pleased. He relit his cigar and sent clouds of smoke into the air.

  “You told me yourself about your Mr Cloverdale.”

  “Speaks Hindi, that’s correct. It is absolutely no use to him in Sydney. But he is an honest man, Miss Leplastrier, and neat.”

  Lucinda assured him of Oscar’s character. She said nothing of gambling. (She should say. She would not.) Mr d’Abbs was now explaining that money was kept in the office. He stood, took out a big bunch of noisy keys from his pocket, and opened the safe with one of them. He showed her money. There was ten thousand pounds in his safe. He showed her the money to stress the importance of honesty, but the other reason, the real reason, was that he could not believe it was him, little Jimmy Dabbs, Ditcher Dabbs’s boy, who was standing in his own office in the colony of New South Wales, a cigar in one hand, ten thousand pounds in the other.

  “Fancy that,” he said.

  The things that moved Mr d’Abbs were clear to Lucinda. Sh was embarrassed for him, not that he should be so pleased about himself, but that he should reveal his pleasure so clearly, that he should stand naked at his bathroom window, not knowing he had an audience for all his imperfections.

  “He knows Latin,” she said, “and Greek.”

  Mr d’Abbs looked up at her and blinked. He smiled and tapped a wad of banknotes against the back of his wrist.

  “He has excellent references from his London employer. He was a schoolteacher.” She spoke quickly, leaning forward, listing his achievements until she had said Greek three times and Latin twice. She spoke on and on, not because she wished to exaggerate Oscar Hopkins’s attainments, but in order that she be too busy to notice the private reverence Mr d’Abbs showed the wad of currency—the one bright colour in this room of sombre water-colours.

  Lucinda held her hands together. It gave her the appearance of “imploring.” Her little shoulders were uncharacteristically rounded and Mr d’Abbs, without knowing quite what had triggered it, felt a stirring of the loins.

  Others found Miss Leplastrier attractive. Absalom had taken a fancy to her. Old Gerald MacKay had dubbed her the “Pocket Venus” and sworn he would have her for wife. But Mr d’Abbs, if you discount that unfortunate occasion when he had placed his hand on her knee, had forgotten how to see her in this light. Their friendship at the card table had continued, but in business he found her the complete shrew. When she had returned from England she had thumped his desk with her little fist.

  But today he found her very “girlish.” He could imagine this young Hopkins being smitten with her. She had a soft white neck.

  He tossed the banknotes into the safe—thwack, ding, money’s nothing to me—and locked its door with a heavy brass key. He returned to his new sq
ueaky leather chair to hear how she would manage to tell the story of her involvement with this defrocked priest whom she now sought to recommend to him.

  Well, she could not tell it, of course. She might slam her fist on his desk or drink Scotch whisky from a crystal tumbler, but she could not tell him about this one face to face.

  Jimmy d’Abbs knew the story. Of course he did. He was not a member of Tattersall’s, the Masons and the Sydney Club for nothing. He smiled and nodded encouragement, but she told him nothing, and there was no hint, no rumpling of her white starched collar to suggest the amours he imagined her conducting with the priest in the tangled privacy of her bed.

  Lucinda found it hard to look Mr d’Abbs in the eye. She felt her cheeks colouring but could not stop them. She told Oscar’s story without mentioning cards or horses. Mr d’Abbs noted the omission but was unconcerned. One could gamble and be honest. He gambled. He played most games a gentleman would play.

  He asked her would she be so kind as to have Mr Hopkins supply a sample of his handwriting.

  “What shall I have him write?”

  “Some Latin,” he said, “a little arithmetic.” He placed the cigar in the ashtray so it might go out. “Some Greek.”

  “Greek?”

  Don’t frown at me, young lady. “Greek,” he said. He would like the Greek as he had once liked Mr Jeffris’s trigonometry. What other accountant would demand a sample of your trigonometry?

  The thought of Mr Jeffris—who was his head clerk these days—made him uneasy. Mr Jeffris did not like him to employ new clerks without consultation. This was fair. They had agreed on it. But was it not Mr d’Abbs’s own practice? Was not that his own name on the door? Did he not have the right to employ whomever he liked without there being doors slammed and ultimatums issued?

  “There is no hurry,” he told Lucinda.

  But when she arrived at Longnose Point that night, she brought a present with her. It was wrapped in maroon tissue paper from a Pitt Street stationer’s—ink, a new nib, and three loose sheets of ledger paper.