Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey

"You need not protect me."

"I embarrass myself. However., it is ecstasy we are feeling." She nodded, smiling, her eyes swimming. "But also mad."

"No, no, no." He banged his fist on the table. The cutlery jumped. The gentleman with the chapbook stood up and left. He said something, more than three words, less then twenty, but it does not matter what it was and did not matter at the time.

"And you," Lucinda said, "would it be amusing for you to assist me in this endeavour?"

"I am a practical man," said Oscar, giggling.

She paused, not knowing if he meant it ironically or literally. "But perhaps you might assist me none the less."

"With pleasure," said Oscar, who, now he had part of what he had coveted, was guilty and uneasy, as if he had stolen something from her.

"Can you imagine Hasset's face?"

The face she meant to conjure up was astonished, gawp-mouthed, sad to have been excluded from the manufacture of such a miracle. But the face Oscar saw was a man whose love has been rekindled. That was the risk inherent in the venture.

"But it is you, dear lady," Oscar said, "who must see his face. For it is you, surely, who must deliver it to him."

"Oh, no."

"But surely. ."he protested, his heart already lightening.

"Oh, no, I cannot leave the works."

"You would not…"

"It is quite impossible," she said sternly. "They are only just recovering from my last absence."

Oscar in Love

"Then I shall," cried Oscar, "on your behalf." *

Lucinda did not understand the source of his jubilation. She frowned, wondering if the balloon of their dream was not about to be pricked.

"It is approached by sea," she said. She remembered, although she had no wish to, his behaviour in the storm aboard the Leviathan.

"Then I shall go by land," he grinned, and clasped his hands contentedly and dropped "But, Mr Hopkins, I do not think you

understand."

He thought: It is difficult, yes, and dangerous. It is a bet against the odds, but if I am the adventurer then the odds, surely, must be swinging in my favour.

His smiling face made Lucinda fear for him. He was so frail, and white. He brought his fingers together and flexed them underneath his pointed chin. He could not imagine-she knew he could not-what this countryside was like. He used soft words like brook and lane and copse. He could not imagine its saw-toothed savagery.

"I will be your messenger."

"Mr Hopkins, please, no."

"You think it outside my scope?" asked Oscar. He was not offended, and the reason he was not offended was that there was no room in his soul for such a thing. His body was awash with all those chemicals he had hitherto found only at the racetrack.

"Say it," he said. "You think it beyond my scope."

"There is no shame in that," she said, and reached across to pat his sleeve.

"There is no truth in it either," he said jubilantly, feeling a caress in the pat. "I wager you I can do it. You may nominate the date."

His face was very pale yet also very bright. The skin was taut, the eyes were glistening and fixed on hers. She thought it best to take her

hand away. "Mr Hopkins, I like you too much to encourage you to injury."

"But I must."

"Come, please, this is madness now.,"

"I must," he said quietly. "It would mean a great deal to me." It was then she knew that he loved her. "You are doing this for me?"

It was not a question he wished to be asked. He felt his own silence humming in his ears. He would not look at her. "Yes," he said.

"Do you think I wish you dead?" "I am too happy to wish for death," he said. "I have no intention

Oscar and Lucinda

of becoming dead. Mr Judd, for instance-and I know you do not care for him…"

"Care for him?"

"But I take him as an example. Mr Judd makes journeys like this all the time. I am prepared to wager you I can have the glass church in Boat Harbour by, say, Good Friday." He had no basis for this date. He plucked it from the air. It felt appropriate. He had no idea how long the church might take to manufacture. This aspect of his wager, the financial part, was of no interest to him,

"And what can you bet?" she asked.

He saw heir face change as she spoke. Her eyes became sleepy-lidded, and her lower lip pouted.

'Ten guineas.". .-<.>.;.•:.;:•-•> K-. •-;.•-.-,,., .'..-.••• .-•••;••:?•. -••.-•

"It is not enough." ',•->:••..•*'•.*. > — ./>, ..-,•,:. <. ;'

"What is enough?". — "-d — ^ .-.'«-. v••>-.;-••. She opened her mouth and closed it. It was so quiet in the dining room Oscar heard the noise of the skin of her lips as they separated.

He placed his hands palm down on the table. "What is enough?" he repeated.

"Your inheritance," said Lucinda quietly. She had not bet in two weeks but she had never, in all her life, made a bet like the one she was about to make with Oscar Hopkins.

"My father may live until he's one hundred. He is not a rich man, anyway."

"It makes no difference."

"And you would bet?": *

"The same."

"The same amount?"

"The same. My inheritance."

"You already have it."

"Yes." •-,.(•:..',•-. — "Your works.":

"Yes. Everything."

"You wager all that?" ' ' <

"Yes."

"Then you are mad," said Oscar. "You are mad, not I. For heaven's sake." He scratched his head and looked around the dining room, surprised to find it empty. He felt himself the subject of her passion and yet (she loves Hasset) did not understand it.

"Five weeks," he said, "without even a game of penny poker, and now this."

Orphans

Lucinda smiled at him. She felt light. She would have him taken care of. She would employ the best tracker, an explorer, a surveyor. They would carry him safely, and they would bring him back. He would win. She would lose. She would give him all the armour she had hitherto used to keep herself safe. She was mad. She was pleased to be mad. She loved him. She would be looked after.

"Sleep on it," she said. "There is no requirement that you accept."

"But I must go."

"Sleep on it."

"I am not sleepy," he said. He was awed by her. He loved her.

"Then come home with me," she smiled, "and we will play penny poker until you are." She could marry this man, she knew, and still be captain of

her soul.

83

Orphans

Our history is a history of orphans, or so my mother liked to say. She used the word in a sense both literal and sentimental. She did not mean it in the sense that it is true for the nation as a whole, but only as it applied to the three corners of the family history, to Oscar, to Lucinda, to Miriam Chadwick, who lost her mother when the Grafton was wrecked crossing the bar at Bellingen Heads.

Miriam Chadwick would never forget how the black dye came and took her lovely peach silk dress. The dress fell like a rose, "Prince's Pride," into a copper of Indian ink. It sat there a second, its colour all the more precious and intense because of the glistening ebony framing of the dye, sat there as if it might have the will to resist the insinuations of death itself, and then-like the withering of a flower, but much accelerated-the dress sucked in the black and first it ran in blurry lines along the fine pleats and then it spread, a rush of grey, a blanket of

Oscar and Lucinda

black, and Mrs Trevis took the laundry stick and poked it, shoved it down into the dye, like a stake to the heart, and stirred.

Miriam never forgave her employer that stab. Everything else, but not the way she drowned the dress. There was a slight grunt, and then a strong-armed stir. She saw it, in the year that followed, over and over again, saw the mole on the wrist, the black hairs on the pale arm. Mrs Trevis had not expected a governess so young or one so beautiful. She was not sorry-you could not blame her if you knew her husband — to have her wrapped in mourning, and yet she did not mean the dyeing viciously. It was impatience and nothing more. She felt Miriam's upset about the dress and was inclined to judge her harshly for it, that she seemed as much grieved about finery as she was over the human being whose demise occasioned it. And if you are inclined to think the same, that she makes too much of the loss of a dress and not sufficient of her dear mama-whose body was delivered by the tide on to the flat at Bellingen Heads, found by crows before people-then you must consider her position, which was not only to be marooned, an orphan in a hard and hostile environment amongst people whom she would, at Home, have regarded as her inferiors, not only to be quite impoverished, but to have been plunged back into mourning when she had, at twenty years of age, spent almost all her adult life in black.

First there had been her maternal grandmother, then the paternal grandfather. Her mother, a dressmaker, had been most particular as to the correct etiquette for mourning and had followed, as far as her intense curiosity could reveal it to her, the Royal Precedent. Thus there would be three months of deep mourning, an entombment so complete that neither hands nor face should be shown without their covering of black. The process back to life was taken in gradual stages, like a diver ascending from the deep, until, at six months, one could eat in a public place, in nine months be seen at the theatre, and at the end of a year one might cast off one's black and, with luck, be asked to dance the Grenadier Waltz.

She was eighteen, and still in mourning for her paternal grandfather when her father, also in mourning himself, went down with pneumonia. It was winter. She sat in the coal-sleepy room, and even while she nursed him, while she sat beside his bedside, lifted his heavy body to a sitting position so he might more easily breathe, and saw his face all blotched, lost, suddenly old, his eyes shut, his lips dry and swollen so they were the size of the black boy on the Church Missionary Society money box, even while she waited and wept and heard him gurgle and

Orphans

choke himself to death, she felt another grief, another despair, an anger, selfish perhaps but intensely felt none the less-that she would end up an old maid because she must now spend another year in mourning.

But in the end it had not been a year, for her mother-although strict on matters of etiquette-was also a practical woman. She did not wish to waste precious space in their trunk with clothes they would never use once they were in New South Wales.

The mother was a strong-willed woman. The emigration had been her idea. She had announced it without consultation. It was she who found the daughter a position as a governess at Boat Harbour. In her ignorance she had imagined a town like Bournemouth. It would be a healthy place, she said, and gay. She made their new clothes, scandalously bright, it seemed to her daughter, to suit this new location. She chose taffeta and "Peking" silks. They had boarded the Sounion in a style that elicited much admiration (from strangers-the family had been farewelled in Hammersmith). They wore, mother and daughter, dresses of the palest and prettiest colours, the daughter in peach, the mother in a moiré grey, but both of them in bright petticoats and Miriam's crinoline cage producing an effect like a trumpet flower you might imagine growing in exotic latitudes: once on board, of course, this finery was packed away, for they could afford no better than steerage, and it was in that very trunk, the same big wooden trunk, all bound around with black iron bands, that the dress had travelled in the little brig from Sydney, transferred to the whaler outside Boat Harbour, and which had floated to the shore when all those souls had drowned.

This was on Christmas Day in 1858. Miriam had been the only one of thirty passengers saved from drowning. Her left arm was broken, and never quite set right, but she was alive. Her whole trunk was delivered to the Trevis house, for it was there she was to be employed as a governess. And on her first morning Mrs Trevis filled her copper with black dye and put her lovely new clothes into the copper, one by one. Miriam felt sick in her heart, as sick about this blackness as anything else. She would never forget that moment. The peach dress, a fallen bloom in a copper of ink.

When the clothes were dyed and dried and ironed, she put them on. The black got into her skin. It was the humidity. There was nothing to be done about it any more than there was to be done about the sandflies, the mosquitoes, the tropical rains that flooded the river and took the stock floating away. She taught the children as best she could. There were few books to help her. '.n i,

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W1

Oscar and Lucinda

There was dancing, of course, quite a lot of it, too. But it would not be possible for her to go. She wrote long letters to Mrs Carson, who ran the governess agency in London. They pretended to take a cheerful or optimistic line while exactly communicating her despair. She begged to be sent to a place where learning might be appreciated. She complained she was asked to set the fire, to sweep the house, to "muck in." She put this term in sarcastic inverted commas. Nowhere did she make a comment on the Trevises' class or education and yet, somehow, it was made clear that they were below her.

Miriam could not have known it, but all of Mrs Carson's life was dotted with letters like this. They irritated her, and although she would permit two or three of them, the fourth was likely to attract a strong rebuke.

In January 1862, a year of floods so great they would not be repeated until 1955 (floods George White and his cohorts on the council like to forget when they issue development permits) Miriam Mason was married to Johnny Chadwick by Dennis Hasset's predecessor, the one who was thrown into the Bellinger River. There is no parish register showing this marriage, but there is a photograph of Johnny Chadwick in the local museum. He is standing in front of a log hut which the Historical Society has decided was his schoolroom. In fact it was his house. He is surrounded by his pupils, and you will read, on the little typewritten note George White had Sellotaped on to the bottom of the photograph that he died as a result of snakebite in 1863. It does not say that the snake was enraged by being thrown around the school ground by the pupils. They had long sticks which they used to flick it through the air towards each other. Johnny Chadwick, it seems, had tried to kill the snake.

In any case, Miriam had to dye her clothes again and she went back to work for Mrs Trevis who, of course, did not remind her that she, Mrs Trevis, had cautioned her against ripping up her old mourning clothes for dusters.

But with, oh, what zest, she had, in her optimism, Tom up her black and did not care it was a waste. And she had got herself again her lovely fabrics, silks and taffetas sent up from Sydney, and made the long dresses which were cool and light, and she began to see the beauty of the place, the long slow sweep of the river, its wide green banks, the green ever widening, pressing in against the khaki of the bush, and Johnny Chadwick was very quiet, but handsome and gentle, and they would sit in front of their hut and he would read her Walter Scott by the light of a lantern while white ants hatched, swarmed, and died and she had been foolish enough not to see this as a poignant symbol of mortality.