Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda
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Oscar and Lucinda
Protestants and Catholics alike, Mrs Leplastrier 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. 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-thegrocer'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.
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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.
1 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 herpouchy-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 slabsides. Someone had misspeUed
"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
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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 thatthis was not clear immediately, but it became clear soon enoughprevented 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
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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 woolwrapped 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 talk 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
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instead of two, a clever construction for our feed bins which will-it is quite clever-drown the mice who plunder me. And this, which I have done to myself, I can tolerate, but what I have done to my pretty little Lucinda, I cannot bear to think about. She is so happy that I am, often, irritated that she should be blind enough to be so. Yet it is 1 who have made her blind, I who have kept her away from Parramatta and isolated her from every neighbour and member of the congregation who might, by some casual comment, reveal to her how society really is. I fear my Maker will judge me harshly for what I have done, but, dear Marian, / could not have been otherwise. My daughter lives in a fairy world I have made for her, and they would not tolerate her in open society in New South Wales where they hate women like us with a passion you would not believe without seeing their angry resentful little eyes. It would chill you, Marian, to walk down a street in Parramatta. All this is my great achievement as a parent, that I have produced a proud square peg in the full knowledge that all around, to the edges of the ocean there are nothing but round holes. We must return home.
"I know farming bores you, although you are polite enough to only admit this very occasionally. However my latest farming news, I suspect, will prove an exception and unless I exaggerate your feelings for me, will have you clapping your strong and sensible hands together and crying: At last!
"I have said some wicked things about poor Leplastrier's "bargain" land purchase, but now, with the poor man unable to witness his vindication, I am about to reap the benefit. There is, as he always said, enough land here for five good farms and the prices are sufficient to make even the sanest woman (a creature I could not claim to be) quite giddy. In short: I shall sell. I am to have Ahearn, my very Low Church solicitor, over so he can arrange to have the place surveyed. That is how it is here-solicitors are great dogsbodies in this colony and it is no great shock to find them owning an inn, reading the lesson, and serving you three yards of muslin in their lunch hour. Once I am surveyed, I shall-God give me strength to tell my daughter-sell.
"I give up, Marian, I retire, not quite defeated."
By the time this letter arrived in Bayswater Road, its writer had contracted Spanish influenza. While Oscar Hopkins read Greats at Oriel, Lucinda Leplastrier nursed her mother. Dr Savage (no relation to the grocer) came out from Parramatta to be told he was not needed. The Reverend Mr Nelson came
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from Gugong and found himself criticized for the ostentation of his vestments. Lucinda nursed her mother alone. She was two years older than Oscar-seventeen-and sensible and able, but no amount of praying or sponging, no broth or poultice could do anything to give ease to the red-faced, sweating woman whose only thought was that the harvest be brought in before it was ruined.
It had already been brought in. Lucinda carried a whole stock and placed it by the bed. A stock was not enough to persuade her. She was dying, but did not say so. She fretted about the unharvested wheat. She had visions of canker and rust, mouldering stocks with Parramatta grass growing through their hearts. The fence posts went loose like bad teeth in decaying gums. They lay at odd angles. She straightened them. She tamped new soil around their bases but butcherbirds alighted on them and sent them crooked. She could not speak.
The stocks turned into blacks. She knew they were not real. They were ghosts. They stood in the stubble-slippery fields keening.
She had been implicated in something terribly wrong. It was hot and her thirst could not be slaked. It was Epiphany. The O'Hagens were already burning stubble and laying blue strands, like a pipe smoke, across the foothills of the mountains. She could smell the smoke. She thought it was summer, and the MacCorkals had "dropped a match" again. It made her twist her limbs in anxiety. She turned and turned on the bed and the stocks turned into blacks, and the blacks into stocks, and the stocks into blacks. Leplastrier had made this bed. Such a fussily made bed. How could a man who could kill a black man with his rifle make such a stupid, romantic bed? A knowingly rustic bed made with saplings and greenhide. Her husband had been a secret admirer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was a reactionary fool. She thought of sarcastic jokes about Rossetti and his women, but she could not say them. In any case there was something more important. She needed a pen.
Such a small word. Possibly she could say it. Lucinda's face loomed. Such a dear top lip, but her paternal grandmother's frightful hair. There was a noise of blow-flies. Pen-such a tiny word. It became a bead, a small black bead in her mind. Then the bead was stuck in her throat. It had been rolled in butter to ease its way. But then it had fallen on the floor. Oh, curse the earth-floored huts of New South Wales.
Now the bead was covered with dirt, with sand; it stuck in her throat. She had made a mistake. She had made a truly dreadful mistake. She
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civilized society in this town in the shape of Oxford-educated clergy, French-speaking schoolmasters, intelligent magistrates and aldermen, that it can scarcely be credited that the Domain of Parramatta is being made such a haunt of infamy that no respectable lady, no innocent child, can venture to walk there morning, noon or night-it was no later in the day than three o'clock when, in taking a walk through the public park, that I saw the outrage which, I already said would be unfit to describe.
The parties in question are of that class of society which have ample means to avail themselves of all the advantages held forth by education and religion: they would be the least likely, judged by appearances, to turn public vagabonds, I hope, by calling your attention to the infamy through the columns of your journal, that the laws of society are not to be outraged without exposure to public reprobation. Yours, etc., C. Ahearn, Parramatta.
