Oscar and Lucinda Page 9

  The back creek had once been the main creek, until, in the big rains of 1821, it quite suddenly changed its course. So the Mitchell’s Creek beside which the Leplastriers had built their hut was a new Mitchell’s Creek and the trees that grew there were no more than thirty years old, whilst the back creek contained a richer, tangled growth of old gnarled trees where you could see the scars the blacks had made cutting barks for canoes and other implements.

  It was dark under the trees by the back creek and the water was stained with fallen leaves and moved slowly. Light came in motes from the ceiling of the canopy and there were small birds which lived on the ground and made alarming scuttling noise in the undergrowth right next to you. It was Blackfellow territory.

  Lucinda placed her doll on a springy khaki-green tussock, the glue-pot on some dust-dull river gravel. She then collected twigs and bark.

  She elected to build her little fire competently. She arranged two rocks on which the glue-pot would sit. She had wax matches in her pinny pocket. She lit the fire and watched it, squatting with her bent knees cloaked by the calico pinafore. She had a thoughtful, intelligent face—a high forehead, perfectly arched and clearly denned eyebrows, a mobile, slightly thin but prettily bowed upper lip, which betrayed—by its constant contraction and expansion—her enthusiasms, and a full lower lip, which would one day suggest sensuality but now, set against her large, heavy lidded green eyes, made the false promise of a wry, precocious humour. Her hair was reddish brown, more brown than red except here, by the creek, where a mote of light caught her and showed the red lights in a slightly frizzy halo.

  She did not like her hair. It dragged and snagged on her mother’s tortoiseshell hairbrush. Both her mother and father had straight black hair through which a comb could pass as if through water. She loved the way the strands of their hair lay so neatly, side by side, like pen lines. She had assumed—until her father had gently disabused her—that her own hair would change when she grew older, that the brush would one day cease to pull and the hairpins might at last have her as neat as she was meant to be.

  Indeed the sole purpose of this illicit journey across the back paddock was all to do with her admiration for straight black hair. It was her plan to give a present to her doll, and while the glue-pot began to give off its comforting and distinctive aroma, one inextricably linked (like the smells of bran, pollard, tweed, apple peelings and ink) with her father, she took the doll in her lap and began to pull the hair from its head.

  The hair was like her own—curly and frizzy to touch—but blonde, of course, where hers was frizzy brown. She pulled the hairs out in little tufts, grimacing and screwing up her eyes.

  “Oh, do be still,” she said. “If you squirm and slide you’ll only make it worse.”

  She placed the hair in an envelope on the back of which was written the name of John Bell, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the man—by the by—responsible for Abel Leplastrier having such a large entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  Soon the envelope was fat and spongy and the doll’s head was not bald and shiny as she had imagined but sticky and brown with a substance a little like a hessian bag.

  “There,” she said. “You see. it wasn’t so bad.”

  But she felt a little frightened, not only of what she had done, but of where she was doing it. She looked around her, peering into the deep shady tangle of bush.

  “I like the blacks,” she told the doll loudly, “I like them better than the Mayor of Parramatta.” But she had lost some of her earlier composure and when she reached for her other envelope—the one in which she had the hair her father had trimmed from the Percheron’s black tail—her hands grabbed and her fingers pecked and, quite suddenly, nothing would go right.

  The glue ran down the doll’s face, across her wide blue eyes. She used the shawl to wipe it clean, but the glue would not come off and then she saw she had made a nasty brown stain. She tried to wash this in the creek.

  As for the hair—she had seen, in her mind’s eye, how it would fall. She had seen it clearly, often, particularly after she had said her prayers and was drifting into sleep. But now the hair did not behave as she had imagined. It lay flat and sticky, matted together. She laid the doll down flat on the gravel bed and thought how she should now proceed. She rubbed her neck and forehead and left brown marks there. Then she coated the doll with more glue and this time she pushed the hair on in handfuls. What fell loose she pushed on again. It did not look how she had imagined, and although a part of her was alarmed, another part was thrilled by the great change she had wrought in Dolly who was—as if by magic—a different person, a native of a land where maps were not yet drawn. Her father would know which one, and if did not, then, why, he would make believe.

  She was not prepared for the upset she created. There was no bread and butter when she brought her doll back into the hut in the late afternoon. Indeed, finally, there would be no supper. Dreadful things began to happen around her. Her mother slapped her leg. She had done this once before. Her mother had passions; she recovered from them quickly. But her father had no passions, did not shiver and shake. He was steady and even and never fussed, even when he lost the mail from Home somewhere in Parramatta. Her father saw the doll. She held it up to him. He drew himself up, he opened his mouth, he shuddered, he threw their best serving dish across the room where it nearly broke a burning lantern. Lucinda held her doll up in the air. Her mother threw a frying pan through the open doorway. She threw it so hard it clattered down the boulders on the creek. These missiles were not directed at her, but the air was filled with a violence whose roots she would only glimpse years later when she lost her fortune to my great-grandmother and was made poor overnight. Then she wondered how much the doll had cost.

  “Why?” they asked her. “Why?”

  And all she could say, through her tears, was that she wanted her Dolly to be neat.

  This was not an event one would easily forget, and Lucinda did not. And yet, paradoxically, when she came, as a young adult, to think about her own neatness, a habit she was always at war with herself about (suggesting as it did a great construction, a lack of generosity) she somehow failed to realize that it must have been with her from a very young age. She did not remember how great a virtue neatness had been held to be in her early childhood. This early childhood was always “quite normal” in her recollection. She imagined that her neatness was something she had “caught” from her mother after her father’s death, for then Elizabeth, left alone to farm, became like a caricature of her former self and would demand neatness in the most ridiculous degree.

  It was—as we have seen—not so; although her confusion of memory may be explained by the curious coincidence that the death of her papa also involved hair, and when she thought about the death she would always see a sticky black mess of hair like the one she had made herself at the back creek so many years before.

  On the Saturday before Palm Sunday in 1852, her papa was thrown off his horse in Church Street, Parramatta. He cracked his crown and was dead almost immediately.

  Mr Chas Ahearn brought the body out to Mitchell’s Creek in a wagon borrowed from Savage the grocer. He had wrapped a gaudy checked blanket around her papa, tucked it in tight around the sides and it was when this was undone that Lucinda, clinging to her silent mother as someone might clutch hold of a tossing log in a flooding river, saw the hair which would now grow for ever—matted, sticky, suffocating—in the gloomy undergrowth of her nightmares.

  It was only after this, so Lucinda remembered, that they suffered the disease of neatness.

  Elizabeth Leplastrier believed, as many still believe today, that you can tell everything you need to know about a farmer’s skills by the condition of his sheds and fences, and whilst this may be true enough in a way, it became, for Elizabeth, such a tenet of faith that fences and sheds were attended to in preference to sheep and wheat and, on one occasion that was soon notorious in the district, amongst Protestants and Catholics alike, Mrs Le
plastrier chopped down a Bartlett pear, a ten-year-old tree, healthy and fruitful in every respect, because she could no longer abide it standing out of line.

  These small madnesses were not much beyond what one might term extremes of character, and although they had an effect on Lucinda, it was not exactly the one she imagined. It was not that she “caught” them, but rather that she came to feel herself inhabiting a cage constructed by her mother’s opinions and habits, one she could not break free from. She longed to stretch and fracture whatever it was that held her in so neatly, and when one considers the personality of the young woman she became, it is easy to see the push and pull of these unresolved desires. There was, in Lucinda Leplastrier, she who became known as the “Glass Lady,” a sense of containment, of order, a “clean starched stillness.” But the stillness was coiled and held flat. Like a rod of ebony rubbed with cat’s fur, she was charged with static electricity.

  22

  Elizabeth

  Oh, you are a witch, she thought, a wicked, loveless witch. God save you, Elizabeth Leplastrier told herself, God save your wretched soul.

  She bit the inside of her cheek, bit it good and hard so that she tasted blood inside her mouth.

  “Clear the table,” she told Lucinda who was still perched on her cushioned chair at the kitchen table.

  He is dead, Elizabeth thought. She took off her pinafore and folded it neatly as she watched the wagon come down the track, waited for it to slip and lurch at the bog-hole. It was Savage-the-grocer’s cart and there were men, six of them, all clinging to it, all black angles of knees and elbows, like vultures. The sun had not gone yet, but the shadows were long and there was a chill in the air.

  Her husband’s horse, that silly, nervous, prancing horse, trotted behind. Pandora she was called. Was ever a beast so aptly named?

  You fool, she thought. It was a stupid horse to buy. I said nothing to you, God knows I should have. Why did I bite my tongue? I let you spend thirty pounds on a horse, a horse. And now you have gone and killed yourself.

  I will go Home, she thought. There is nothing for me to stay for. God save me. Do not think these things.

  She rubbed her hands together. They were dry and horny. She thought: I am an essayist. I am an intellectual. I should not have hands like these.

  Dear Lord Jesus, do not let him be dead. He has broken his arm, he has fractured a collar-bone. When she thought of broken bones she was not angry with him. She loved him. She would miss him.

  But now the men and their wagon were at the gate of the home paddock and turtle-necked Chas Ahearn was fiddling at the gate and she could see (“Hurry, Lucinda, clear them away. Kettle, kettle—put the kettle on”) that there was someone in the cart wrapped in a yellow and black checked blanket. She saw Ahearn look her way. The sun had gone. It was very cold. She shivered. She thought, I have wasted ten years in New South Wales to be rewarded by this moment. The silly man has widowed me. But when she saw Ahearn’s face as it turned to her—pouchy-eyed and turtle-slow-grief came on her. It was like a punch in the stomach. It caught her hard and winded her. She steadied herself against the daub—dusty wall, her mouth wide open, her hand patting her neat, braided hair. A great gust of grief blew down her open mouth, so much air she could barely stand. She was a sail. A great hard curve pushed inwards inside her guts.

  The wagon had Mr Savage’s name in gold letters on its black slab-sides. Someone had misspelled “vicuals.” The killer horse bent its head to eat, but there was no grass here, you stupid beast.

  Chas Ahearn imagined the woman had not understood her plight. She held out her hand and shook his. She smiled, a little vaguely, but she was known to be aloof and also quite eccentric. Only the furrows on her high forehead suggested any understanding at all. As the men brought the body from the cart and laid it on the kitchen table, she made a fuss about his boot being lost.

  Elizabeth was thinking about London. She thought: There is nothing to keep me. I am quite free. The reason I must stay exists no more. And then she bit the inside of her cheek so hard that the morrow would find it infected and she had to gargle salt water for a month before it passed.

  But it was true, she had no reason to be in New South Wales. She did not care for farming. Farming was her husband’s concern. He was a soil scientist but secretly romantic. It was he who had such dreams of country life and she who was careful not to pry into the wells from which these desires sprang lest she find something so foolish she would cease to love him altogether.

  Elizabeth Leplastrier was Elizabeth Fisher—that Fisher—whose great passion in life was factories. In London, this passion had been something of a joke. (She is that person Carlyle refers to in his correspondence as the “Factory.”)

  Like her daughter after her, the diminutive straight-backed woman was a great enthusiast and it was said that there was not an object, idea or person she could not “lasso” and drag into the stable with her hobby horse. She had seen industrialization as the great hope for women. The very factories which the aesthetes and romantics so abhorred would, one day soon, provide her sex with the economic basis for their freedom. She saw factories with nurseries incorporated in their structure, and staffed kitchen, fired by factory furnaces, that would bake the family dinners the women carried there each morning. Her factories were like hubs of wheels, radiating spokes of care.

  When her husband became enamoured of New South Wales, Elizabeth thought about it only in terms of her obsession and she saw, or thought she saw, that innovations of the type she promoted would be more easily made in a place where society was in the process of being born. And, besides, they could slough off the (for Elizabeth) uncomfortable weight of an inherited house in Sloane Square. They could, at last, use their capital. And it was this—and only this—that lay behind her enthusiasm for the colony. She would have her factory. She saw it in her mind’s eye, not as something fearful and slab—sided, belching smoke from five tall chimneys, but as others might see a precious mineral. It emanated light.

  And yet somehow it did not happen like this. She let gentle passive Abel somehow persuade her that it would be wiser, in the short term, to invest in these twenty thousand acres at Mitchell’s Creek. It was a bargain. It was a bargain made them poor. It was a bargain that—this was not clear immediately, but it became clear soon enough—prevented the factory, which he had promised they would lease in Parramatta, ever being more than a dream. She had had better dreams in London.

  She did not know how angry she was until that odd collection of men came down the track on the Saturday before Palm Sunday. And then she thought such bright and bitter thoughts that it occurred to her, in passing, that the devil had taken possession of her soul.

  She berated Chas Ahearn for having lost her husband’s riding boot.

  The hut soon filled with the smell of Irish. Damp fustian, stale wool—wrapped skin, the warm, mouldy smell of her neighbours. There was old Mrs Kenneally with whiskers on her chin who tried to persuade the widow she should cry. She would not cry. She would rather slap someone. (God save me, she thought, vouchsafe my soul.) Mrs Kenneally tried to persuade the rigid little woman to drink rum, but she would not even unclasp her hands to hold the glass. The O’Hagens and the MacCorkals took possession of the body—this was later, when it was properly dark—and they set up candles and lanterns and washed poor Abel on the cold grass outside, but politely, modestly, and all the time singing in high keen voices, as alien as blacks. And they, too, came, the blacks. They stood on the edges of the lamplight amongst the wattles by the creek.

  As her daughter was to be, so Elizabeth was now, and not merely physically. In the face of grief, she became energetic. She made decisions. In the face of guilt and uncertainty, she became definite. Now she gave orders. They were obeyed. The MacCorkal boys, the smallest of them taller than six foot, brought chest and trunk across from the hayloft in the barn. It was now around nine o’clock at night. There were people everywhere, but Elizabeth, although a socialist, had no friend to ta
lk to. She had only the neighbours who cooed around her, were alien and gentle, brought her a pot of stew, milked her cow, stacked her pumpkins against the veranda, offered to take her butter in to Parramatta to sell.

  Elizabeth became a door her daughter could only press against. She would not wear black. She announced it that night. She maintained her resolve on the cold and widowed morrow. They neither of them wore black, not even to the funeral, the first ever burial at the cemetery—it was only a paddock with two cypress trees not four foot high—at Gulgong.

  They were all set to go Home. It was this Elizabeth would discuss with Lucinda, and nothing else.

  “We must not give in to grief,” she said. “This is what your papa would expect of us.”

  But it was anger, not grief, which was her dominant emotion. It lay there like a poacher’s trap ready to snare the unwary. Lucinda learned to step around her very carefully. Mr O’Hagen also knew to tread carefully but his knowledge of the territory was insufficient.

  Mr O’Hagen was short and barrel-chested, of a height and build so close to Abel Leplastrier that—Elizabeth remarked this—it was uncanny to think that Abel’s entire wardrobe would end its days half a mile further upstream.

  Mr O’Hagen was a young man, and although he had six children, he was no more than twenty-six. He was polite and shy and would not let himself take an entire wardrobe but must have each item pressed on him, one at a time. On this night he could accept only a waistcoat and a pair of boots. He took his leave. To him, no doubt, it seemed an ordinary leave-taking. He stamped his boots (it would leave mud, but never mind, never mind) and said it was a good time to be selling the land “for you ladies won’t be having to worry your pretty heads about such things as harvest.”