Oscar and Lucinda Read online

  Mr Jeffris called him Mr Smudge. This was thought to be a great joke. He was appointed as clerk responsible for mixing ink, a messy job which ruined his shirt cuffs and had him going home each Monday night with ink soaked so deeply into his skin it took a pumice stone to remove it, or remove most of it, for even after a long and painful rubbing, a shadow still remained, a blue cast lay on his skin and he named it, joking to Lucinda, as his Monday Shadow.

  Elizabeth Leplastrier’s daughter was not tolerant of his messy style—his blue ink, the unpleasant smell of the shirts. And yet she thought it her Christian duty to assist him and so she laboured with him (not altogether graciously) on Saturday morning, stirring his clothes in the copper. Her face was wet with steam. Her eyes stung with smoke. He dripped boiling water all around him, splashing her, splashing himself, ooh-ing and ouch-ing as he thwacked the blue shirt and the white shirt down into the trough.

  He was not manually dextrous, that much was obvious. He went at things in too much of a rush to do them neatly. He was ungainly, made bony angles, would hurt himself badly should he have ever needed to work in a glassworks.

  Lucinda was interested in the way men made things, how they organized themselves. She sat her guest down in her kitchen and questioned him about the way in which the ink was manufactured. He surprised her with the fastidious nature of his answer—it did not fit in with all the shirt thwacking and dripping water.

  To make the ink he must first take a brown paper bag of ink powder, a little metal cup, and a large bottle. He must carry these utensils to the alleyway which ran through the heart of the building. In the alleyway was a tap. There were other taps in the building, of course, but it was forbidden—there were signs above the taps expressly forbidding it—to make ink at these basins. No, he must go into the laneway which served as a thoroughfare, not only for snot-nosed message boys cutting through from Kent to Sussex Street, but also for the wagons and drays from the wheelwright who occupied the tangled courtyard in the centre of the building. Wind blew along this alley way even in the most clement weather and the tap was one of those wide—mouthed types with a lot of air in its gurgle, “all wind and no water” as a passing rag-and-bone man observed to him. Here, crouching against the urine-sour brick wall, Theophilus Hopkins’s son, now twenty-one years old, an age at which his father had already published two distinguished monographs, must measure out the ink powder from its paper bag with a flat steel spatula and transfer it, guessing the quantity, into a metal cup. This was not only menial, it was not easy. Ink powder blew in the wind. Specks of stinging pigment lodged in his already baleful bloodshot eyes. He must mix the powder into paste in the cup. The tap gurgled, spluttered, splashed. The spatula handle became wet, then blue. The blue was now on his hands, his face, and still he must dilute the sludge so it would pour, and then transfer it to the ink bottle and then, if there was time, and they had not sent young Summers down to tell him to hurry up, that the ink was needed as quickly as you like now, Mr Smudge, he would wash.

  He made Lucinda laugh, but when the froth had subsided she was left with a black and slightly bitter taste, and this scene did not fit with her idea of Mr d’Abbs, who, no matter what his frailties and vanities, she had always thought of as a kindly man, not one to subject another human being to comic indignity.

  She had many things to worry about at that time, things she would, herself, have imagined to be more important to her than her nervous, ink-stained lodger.

  But she could not bear that he be called Mr Smudge. It was wrong of him to tolerate it, and worse that he should joke about it. The gurgling tap stayed with her. She saw it clearly: its wide grey mouth, its verdigrised brass cock. It produced a feeling well out of proportion to its weight. It was she who was the author of this situation and she accepted more blame than she thought she should. She took it on herself while judging herself foolish for doing so. And when she had far more weighty matters to occupy herself with, she left her own office (just a little down Sussex, before Druitt) and walked—her back straight, her steps brisk and businesslike—down the alleyway towards the wheelwright’s.

  The tap was on the south wall. She had imagined the north. There was a smell—men’s urine—which would normally have made her quicken her step, certainly not stand still. There was no brass in the tap at all. It was a dull grey thing, a fat and ugly machine, dull grey, streaked with ink, the source, it seemed, of the drunk-man smell.

  She turned it on, then off. Her lower lip was tucked in tight. She splashed her shoes. If Mr d’Abbs used his poets and his astronomers thus, he was not even a shadow of the man he posed as, but a barbarian like the rest of them.

  Lucinda was suddenly very angry. She did not like her shoes wet. She would see the room wherein her friend, the “aesthete,” the Medici, housed his poets. It was, perchance, a stable, a cupboard, a chook-house, the bottom of a well.

  She went up the cedar-panelled stairs towards the offices and found Mr d’Abbs (he must have passed her whilst she fiddled with the tap) on the stairs ahead of her. He looked at her wet shoes, but said nothing about the cause of it. Indeed, they travelled together all the way to Mr d’Abbs’s anteroom without having said so much as a “Good morning.” Mr d’Abbs was flustered. Lucinda imagined this related, somehow, to the tap. But he had not seen her at the tap. He was flustered because he did not like the routine of his arrival interfered with. He was not expecting Miss Leplastrier. He did not like what he did not expect. He was, in effect, receiving her. Yet it was not his job to receive. It was Mr Jeffrie’s entitlement, and this had been settled long ago. Now he was unsure of whether to go into his office and leave Miss Leplastrier in the anteroom or to usher her in irrespective of the rules; but then it seemed she did not wish to see his office, anyway.

  She would inspect the clerks’ room.

  Oh no, she would not, not on your nelly.

  The anteroom was very small, and although its couch was comfortable enough and it had an ashtray, a brass spittoon and a copy of the London Illustrated News, it was hardly bigger than the carriage in which Mr d’Abbs had been driven to the city. They stood, therefore, very close together, both made uncomfortable by such intimate confinement with a member of the opposite sex.

  “There can be no question,” he said, making a fuss of placing his unbrella on the stand intended solely for the use of visits, checking his cuffs, and smiling in the direction of his client’s shoulder (not in calm sequence either, but as if he were a machine with some part not securely connected and he wished, against the rules of his own manufacture, to do all three things at once). “There can be no question of you disturbing the clerks.”

  Lucinda nearly invented some excuse. Then she thought, No, I shall not demean myself by lying. She drew her shoulders back and tried to find his eye. She explained she wished to see the conditions under which the clerks laboured.

  Mr d’Abbs thought: Ha!

  He judged the woman smitten. And whilst this explanation made him smirk (she wished to see lover-boy, that was all) it afforded no relief.

  She put her busybody little hand on the door of the clerks’ room. This door had a small enamelled sign. It said “Private.” There was a small chip out of the “e,” but the meaning was clear. Mr d’Abbs stared at the sign as if the sheer intensity of his staring could force Miss Leplastrier to obey it. But she turned the rattly little knob in spite of him.

  Dash it. He would tell her the truth. He would, in effect, throw himself on her mercy. You could do this with a woman. She would understand his agreement with Mr Jeffris. It was not an agreement at all. It was never spoken of, but it was understood that this, on the other side of the door, was Mr Jeffrie’s territory. Not even Mr d’Abbs, the captain of the ship, entered this room. If he wished ledgers brought into his office, he rang.

  “Come, Miss Leplastrier,” he said good-humouredly, and opened the door leading to his own office. “Come. We will have tea brought to us.”

  But behind his back he heard a little “snick
.”

  Lucinda stepped into the clerks’ room. There were so many men in there, and rows of desks. It was not such a bad office, better than her own. She noted the big stove, the wallpaper. It seemed ordered and businesslike, although a little dim. She saw a little man—no taller than herself—come walking towards her. She wondered where Oscar sat. The little man, she guessed, was Jeffris. He was broader in the shoulder, more handsome and athletic than she had imagined. He was attractive, but in a dark, unsettling way she knew better than to dwell on. He seemed to prance. He had little metal taps on the soles of his shoes. She heard him come towards her. Tap, tap, tap. She was, without having any reason, suddenly, frightened. She had opened a gate and found a black dog bristling at her, growling in the dangerous part of its throat.

  In her ear she could hear (but not understand) Mr d’Abbs: “I have let him have this office, you see. A head clerk is everything. It is what it is all built on. You see, you understand. A head clerk is basalt, granite, you see, although it may not have occurred to you before.” The words were dead leaves rustling. She felt him plucking at her with fingers like a begging gypsy, sharp little fingers plucking at the crêpe shoulder of her dress, the flouncing on her sleeve.

  Lucinda did not care for the look of this Mr Jeffris. He had dark and hostile eyes. She had earned his hate just by opening his door. It was too late to retreat and she walked beyond the reach of Mr d’Abbs’s plucking invocations and out into the office, between the desks of clerks who, although they were grown men, and some of them quite stern and military in appearance, shuffled their feet and hid amongst their books like schoolchildren.

  She saw Oscar at last. The light was bright outside the window so he appeared to her in silhouette—the tangled shape of his hair was what marked him out. It was only when she was very close that she could see the expression on his face. He would not deny her. She saw that. He looked up and smiled but it was a pitiable expression. Oh, Lord, she thought, the poor man will have to stand. She swung on her heel. She felt the eyes of all the clerks. She smelt the alleyway, the sour smell of urine. She felt their scorn for her small body, her womanliness, for the sound of her tread on their boards. She nodded to Mr Jeffris, and to Mr d’Abbs who had returned to the open door like a dog forbidden the parlour. When she reached him, she turned.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I wished to see the conditions.”

  She did not stay to talk to Mr d’Abbs. She felt a fool. She hurried back to her office, thinking how little she knew about how the world of men was organized.

  That night she heard the puzzling postscript to her visit. Everything in the office had been thrown out of kilter. Mr Jeffris had stormed into Mr d’Abbs’s office. There had been shouting. The clerks had stayed at their desks, not looking at each other.

  Happiness

  She did not expect to be happy whilst parcelled up in a grubby apron, clogs on her feet, scrubbing her own floors, or being snubbed at the greengrocer’s, kept out of her own works, denied the company of Dennis Hasset, becoming so cut off from life that her only companion was a homeless stray, a defrocked priest with blue-stained hands and a sweat-weary smell. These unpromising circumstances served to distract her attention whilst happiness snuck up on her like a poacher in the night.

  She had not known she was happy, but it had been silently remarked on by others, by the glass blowers, by Mr d’Abbs, by Mr Chas Ahearn who had paid her a visit and brought her a gift of bantam eggs. They noticed, because her manner was gentler, because they were spared those ironies and sarcasms which Mr Ahearn, for one, had thought much too pronounced of late. She kissed his cheek and called him “uncle” and the old chap blushed to the lobes of his big fleshy ears.

  Yet she had not recognized the moment when her scales had tipped from “down” to “up.” She had been too busy to notice, until this morning, the Sunday before Advent. She was walking with her lodger down past her piebald cottage (half of it whitewashed, half red brick). It was an hour or so before early service and the Balmain bells were still silent. Sleek Herefords (the property of the bankrupt estate of Whitefteld’s Farm) gorged themselves on the new spring pasture. Lucinda wore a long white cotton voile with tiny roses worked into it. She carried her gloves and prayer book in one hand and her bonnet in the other. She walked along the thin cattle track along the spine of the point. There was still dew, not a lot, but she felt it soak into the hem of her dress. She did not mind. Oscar strode through the calf-high grass beside her. Nothing happened. Nothing was said. But she thought—I am happy.

  She looked at Oscar. He did not notice her. He was busy looking out for snakes, surveying the harbour—a sea of rough hills poured full of silver glass. H had his head up, his head down, his eyes everywhere at once. He had stuck a tiny blue wildflower into the band of his tall black hat. She thought what a pleasant companion he had turned out to be, and if they were in such disgrace that the barely educated vicar of Balmain should think it best not to “see” them as they filed past him out of church, it was a most superior kind of disgrace.

  She had judged him too hastily. This was a bad habit. It had caused her trouble before. She had compared him to Dennis Hasset and had pursed her lips when he picked up his tea-cup in a certain way, or placed the pot back on the table a little too heavily. She had felt slighted when he had scurried back into his room and shut the door on her. And yet—how quickly it happened—she had come to be proud of the propriety with which they now shared the house, the sense of measured discipline (a virtue she much admired) that they brought to their conduct so that there was a great closeness, the closeness of intimates, but also a considerable distance, the distance not of strangers, but of neighbours. They occupied a positon well above those Philistines who snubbed and slighted them. God, who saw all things, would not find their conduct unbecoming.

  They did not gamble or take hazards of any type.

  Oscar had no experience of female friendship. At first he was shy with her, stammered, tripped over himself, tried to make himself invisible around her. Only in his unholy dreams did he ever imagine anything even slightly more intimate. And if there had been a maid, this is how it might have stayed. But Mrs Froud had retired due to being in a certain condition, and there was no maid at all. There was a cottage that must be looked after, a fireplace that must be red-leaded, soap to be made, carpets beaten, the brass doorknobs taken to with halves of lemon. Seeing how the young mistress worked—quick, small steps, slap of brush, flick of duster, smack of mop, clatter of bucket, an energy quite in excess of what was promised by her physical size—the lodger took off his shiny jacket, rolled up his sleeves to reveal thin milk-white arms, and worked beside her. Lucinda was embarrassed at first. She did not think it manly.

  And yet this is how they became friends, by scrubbing the pitted. checkered tiles of the kitchen floor, working side by side, creeping backwards. They did their jobs inexpertly. They drank tea by the potful and kept the leaves to use in rug-cleaning. And when they had at last finished, usually around midnight, Lucinda would kick off her shoes and let them drop on the damp floor and Oscar would put his feet up on a chair. He would be smudged with red-lead, or W. G. Nixey’s black-lead, and have sticky wax on his elbows. She thought him an “old woman,” a “kind soul,” “odd fellow.” Sometimes she looked at him and saw him as if she had never seen him before—a “vision,” humming, stirring his tea with the blunt end of his knife, hooting with high laughter, talking Latin which he expected her to understand. He was, in his conversation, so elliptical, so tangential. He made her feel plain, uncultured, inelegant. She did not guess her cast-off shoes were “dainty,” the object of his admiration.

  She saw what she had seen aboard the Leviathan—that he was not a man to be so easily patronized, that he was a passionate man, an enthusiastic man, who would plunge into the jungle of ideas, not fearfully, but impatiently (thwack, slap, wet clothes from the copper), but also a pleasure.

  He was very homesick and liked to talk about England. It w
as a different England from the one which had so disappointed her. It was a dear, green place, and she could not know that the Strattons’ house was damp and cold or that the Baptist boys had made him eat a stone. He talked fondly of the Strattons whom he called “my patrons” and did not tell her that Hugh Stratton, having as much success with horse-races as he had had with farming, had used Oscar’s system to lose all his capital and was into debt so deep he was now begging money from men he had not known since Oriel.

  There was a bright white pack of cards in the cedar sideboard by Oscar’s elbow. He saw it there, sitting askew beside a ball of grey wool and a tangled tape measure, saw it frequently, each evening when he reached out for the sherry decanter (engraved with the image of an emu) and poured out the two thimblefuls which was their “nightcap.” He said nothing about the cards. He imagined his hostess—so disciplined in her running of the household—untroubled by them. He wished he had the strength of character to fling them away, but having made himself ridiculous aboard the Leviathan he dared not.

  They did not discuss cards, but what they did not talk about gave their evenings a tense and tingling edge and left them both happy, yes, but wakeful in their beds.

  Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboad. She knew how passionate he had become about his “weakness.” She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship.