Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey

little case.

It was then that she began her lifetime habit of acting against the dictates of the "best advice." The best advice would have had her still a governess, less than a governess, a target for the milky-white spew of the youngest Trevis. The best advice would have her leave the glassworks in Darling Harbour, and have her believe it quite impractical to remove them to so isolated a post as Boat Harbour. She said (many, many times): "I loved Boat Harbour. It was my home. How could I leave it?" She sold off the land in Darling Harbour and transported what she could, including glass

AO*

Oscar and Lucinda

blowers and their families, all of whom she persuaded, by dint of personal visits, gifts, bribes, bonuses, to make the dangerous sea journey north.

She did not love Boat Harbour at all. She loathed it. But now she was rich and she began a lifetime of paying back those who she felt had slighted her. And she would, in the careful, almost feudal structure she built to hold the hierarchy of offences, place this clergyman near the top of the triangle, the apex of which was occupied by Mrs Trevis.

There was no room in the little study. You sat crammed on a straightbacked chair and looked across the vicar's shoulder to the open-sided veranda where the crates of books his present circumstances made it impossible to unpack stood greying and gathering new watermarks each time the wind came from the south. Or you could, if you cricked your neck a little, look down the long thin block of land, past the vicar's Jersey cow picking what it could from the low winter grass, to where the black bones of the glass church stood, its panes mostly cracked or crazed, with long dried strands of dead water clinging to its roof.

This church belonged to Miriam, or so it had been determined in the court at Sydney. Dennis Hasset had imagined it was his, for it had been intended as a gift and he had taken it upon himself to have it transported on to his back paddock.

Miriam sat on the chair and smoothed her skirts. She placed her hands in her lap, quite so, not attempting to hide — Dennis Hasset thought her intention to be the opposite-the tell-tale roundness of her stomach. She crossed her leg, showed a little petticoat, and looked at him in such a way he could not hold her gaze.

"I have been speaking to Mr Field from Gleniffer," Miriam said, removing a black glove to reveal than an extra wedding ring had found its way on to her pretty hand in Sydney. "He says there are now fifteen Anglican families who would be pleased to fill a plate each Sunday." Dennis Hasset thought: Fill a plate. She says it so grandly, but she has not seen the coppers and threepences looking so lonely on the green felt base. When Mr Field says he will "fill a plate" he is being a grand man with his thumbs stuck in his braces, but the reality is different. They will have me, Dennis Hasset thought, riding out to Gleniffer twice on a Sunday and expect me to do it for the love of God and twopence ha'penny.

"And that is when it came to me," said Miriam, smiling sweetly, "that we might make a present of my dear little church to them. Mr Field says he has no shortage of corrugated iron, and as for the walls, he explained to me how he would fix weatherboards to it."

"How clever of him," said Dennis Hasset sourly.

"Well," said Miriam, "indeed it is. You cannot just nail a

A Cheque amidst Her Petticoat

board on to a cast-iron frame." — ;

"I never thought of it," said Dennis Hasset. This was play-acting. A weatherboard could be secured, just as glass could, on the wooden mullions.

"Spare me your wit then, Mr Vicar, and if you are so wise in these worldly things, tell me how you would fix a weatherboard to the walls of the church."

Dennis Hasset smiled at her in a way which, in any other context, would be taken to be friendly.

"With fencing wire," Miriam said. "Like a stockyard fence. But if you are wise in these country matters, you will know how to do it. But, then again, you will not need to. The Gleniffer Anglicans will be here tomorrow. There has been so much trouble with white ant they are pleased to have a cast-iron frame. But, Mr Hasset, you look disappointed."

"As you know," he said, "I had rather hoped I would at last have a church here."

"Then we must get up a fête, and raise some money," Miriam said. "But you cannot ask me to worship in my husband's tomb."

"Still, I am disappointed."

"Your Sundays will certainly be very busy."

"I do not complain about God's work, but rather that the church was intended for me. But, but," he held his hand up as if to hold off her fury, "the courts said otherwise."

"Miss Leplastrier must have been most fond of you."

"We were friends, yes." i — '

"As she was obviously fond of my husband."

Husband? How is he husband? '

"She has been in correspondence with me again. I must say I admire

• her frankness." ' "v: :•:>; ••<'-.

"Oh?" '••••^Ji'<.-,A-,

"You are not aware of our correspondence? She does not keep you informed? And yet I understood from her when we met outside the court in Sydney that you had a detailed correspondence. Indeed, she knew so much about our little town."

"Come, Miriam, what has she said." He held out his hand to the letter that Miriam was unfolding.

"It is not gentlemanly to pry into the private correspondence of young ladies. But I will read you little pieces. She writes: 'I made a bet in order that I keep my beloved safe.' I take that ill, Dennis, that she call him Ijeloved.' I think that poor taste. What say you?"

"She was fond of him?":s<,,

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Oscar and Lucinda

"She seems fond of almost everyone. But let me read some more: 'I beg you, please, as one woman to another, to not do this to me. I am astounded to see these words come off the tip of my own pen, but still they come. Let us not have our fears make us greedy.' Our fears, "said Miriam,

"make us greedy. Really, I can't think what she means. 'When I walk the streets of Sydney I realize I cannot bear to be an impoverished woman here. Please, Mrs Chad wick, if you have any Christian charity at all, you will allow me to keep some small percentage of my fortune.' " Miriam then folded the letter and placed it in her bag.

"So," she said.

Dennis Hasset's lips parted and his eyes narrowed a fraction.

"So," he said, "and what do you reply?"

"I replied sympathetically, of course. How could I not be sympathetic, I who have spent half her life in mourning rags, as I am again. I have an intimate knowledge of the poor woman's situation. It is I, after all, who was brought to this town through ill-fortune, was shipwrecked, and although a governess have had to suffer the indignity of a life better suited to an Irish servant. I know, better than she knows, what her situation must mean to her."

"And your response?"

"I worked as a servant," Miriam repeated. "I set fires. I milked cows when I should be teaching them their Shakespeare and their Milton."

"And you would have her do the same.",-^ , t

: "Dennis, you think me hard." — .

; "Mrs Chadwick," he said. -,

"Hopkins," she corrected.

"Mrs Hopkins," he said, "let us not be enemies."

"Mr Hasset, you are in such a rush to be friends you are stamping on my feet. Have I not said I will donate my little church to your Gleniffer Anglicans?"

"Indeed you have."

"Why then, I am dispatching today my cheque to Miss Leplastrier. It is not a fortune, but certainly should be some assistance to her in her present needç." It was this cheque which occasioned the short letter from Lucinda to Miriam which was unearthed nearly half a century later amongst Miriam's darned and fretted-over petticoats. By the time it was found, her letter was as fragile as the body of a long-dead dragon-fly. Its juice was dry. It was history. Lucinda was known for more important things than her passion for a nervous clergyman. She was famous, or famous at least amongst students of the Australian labour movement. One could look at

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Songs about Thistles

this letter and know that its implicit pain and panic would be but a sharp jab in the long and fruitful journey of her life. One could view it as the last thing before her real life could begin. But in 1865, Lucinda could not be so disengaged and she had written with passionate downstrokes on poor quality paper which was speckled like a plover's egg, and spotted with dark blue patches where the paper drank over-thirstily of the ink. It was a letter written by a weary woman with red eyes and scalded arms, an employee of Mr Edward Jason's Druitt Street pickle factory.

"Dear Mrs Chad wick," Lucinda wrote. "There is no disputing that you are a thief, but a thief, I think, made so by fear and weakness and as I too understand the terror you have felt in your soul to contemplate a woman's life alone in New South Wales, then I forgive you." Miriam's cheque, for ten guineas, was enclosed.

Lucinda wrote no return address upon her envelope, but she was certainly no longer at Longnose Point for when, in June of 1865, WardleyFish came out to Whitfield's Farm in search of Odd Bod, he found the little cottage deserted and not so much as a blanket or button to provide a clue as to what passions had brought his friend to inhabit this damp and sorry place. It was a rainy, overcast day with wind driving across Snails Bay from the south. Wardley-Fish stood on the spine of rock. His beard was soaked. His eyes were narrowed against the wind and water. The only brightness on that long peninsula came from Borrodaile's shiny red surveyor's stakes which dotted the earth as regularly as pegs upon a cribbage board.

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Songs about Thistles

:%'

After only one hundred and twenty years this church, the one in which my mother sang "Holy, Holy, Holy," the one of which my father was so jealous, the one my great-grandfather assembled, shining clear, like heaven itself, on the Bellinger River, this church

Oscar and Lucinda

has been carted away. It was not of any use.

Where it stood last Christmas there is now a bare patch of earth, which is joined to the kikuyu grass by two great wheel ruts where the low-loader was temporarily bogged. There are sixteen banks of old cinema chairs which had lately served as pews for the small congregation. But there is no sign here of anything that the church meant to us: Palm Sundays, resurrections, water into wine, loaves and fishes, all those cruel and lofty ideas that Oscar, gaunt, sunburnt, his eyes rimmed with white, brought up the river in 1865.

There are thistles everywhere. They are small and flat now, like prickly sunbathers, but by the end of summer they will be three feet tall, and they will be thickest beside the short fat stumps where the church has stood. No one will slash them because this ground belongs to the church and the church is not here.

There are wheel ruts. There are thistles. By autumn their seeds will be catching in the needles of casuarinas, floating down across the shallow gravel beds of Sweet Water Creek. There are no stories to tell about thistles.

Ill

A Song for Oscar

When Oscar said goodbye to my great-grandmother he no longer thought that the glass church was a holy thing. He thought it a conceit, a vanity, a product of the deuce's insinuations into the fancyfactory of his mind. He was like a drunk waking after a spree, sour and sick and full of remorse and mixed in with all of this was the sin of fornication, his great fright to discover women have hair in "that place," the throbbing pain of his sunburn, the lesser pain of the infected blister on his heel, his itching, bleeding arse-hole, the rope burns on his wrists and the nauseous fluttering feeling that told him he needed more laudanum.

a. V

A Song for Oscar

He walked out along the ringing wooden wharf as though the water were no threat to him. The church rode on its mooring, creaking slightly as its ropes stretched against the zenith of high tide. He limped down the steps, grimacing, and entered through the cedar door which he carefully shut behind him. He walked across splintered glass and the bodies of dragon-flies and wasps. He sat on the straight-backed chair which Kumbaingiri Billy's father's sister had carried through the bush to give him as a farewell gift. He reached for his laudanum and, having raised it to his lips, found it empty. He dropped the bottle on the deck, and then bent his head to pray. He begged God forgive him for the murder of the blacks which he, through his vanity, had brought about.

He begged God forgive him for the death of Mr Stratton.

He begged God forgive him for the murder of Mr Jeffris.

He begged God forgive him for the seduction of Mrs Chadwick.

He begged God forgive him for his complacency, his pride, his wilful ignorance. But even as he prayed he felt himself polluted almost beyond redemption.

He prayed as he had prayed in his Bathurst Street boarding house, digging his nails into the backs of his hands, rocking to and fro on his chair until its legs groaned, but somewhere on the inky side of dusk, as the flying foxes began to detach their pegged and ragged forms from the branches of the Moreton Bay fig trees by the Bellinger, he drifted into sleep. Thus he never reached the final destination of his prayer which was to ask God to destroy the glass church. In the event, no heavenly intervention was necessary, for the lighters belonged to H. M. McCracken whose house stood on sinking stumps, whose wagons had wheels with broken staves. One of the lighters, the one away from the wharf, shipped water, not so much, but enough to have made H. M. McCracken tell Percy Smith to "keep an eye on 'er." It had been taking in just under half an inch of water for every hour and now it was over one hundred hours since anyone had thought to look at it. At ten minutes past eight on Good Friday eve, the old lighter passed the point at which it was buoyant and then, with no fussit sank. The clever platform Percy Smith had built dropped on one side. Water rose into the church. There was nothing to stop it.

Oscar awoke as he hit the floor. He slipped down to the low side, furthest from the door. He scrabbled up the sloping platform towards the door. He slashed

Oscar and Lucinda

his hands on broken glass. The twisting of the platform had jammed the door. It was not quite dark. Flying foxes filled the sky above the river. The tilting platform became a ramp and the glass church slid beneath the water and while my great-grandfather kicked and pulled at the jammed door, the fractured panes of glass behind his back opened to let in his ancient enemy.

A great bubble of air broke the surface of the Bellinger and the flying foxes came down close upon the river. When they were close enough for his bad eyes to see, he thought they were like angels with bat wings. He saw it as a sign from God. He shook his head, panicking in the face of eternity. He held the doorknob as it came to be the ceiling of his world. The water rose. Through the bursting gloom he saw a vision of his father's wise and smiling face, peering in at him. He could see, dimly, the outside world, the chair and benches of his father's study. Shining fragments of aquarium glass fell like snow around him. And when the long-awaited white fingers of water tapped and lapped on Oscar's lips, he welcomed them in as he always had, with a scream, like a small boy caught in the sheet-folds of a nightmare.