Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda
Oscar and Lucinda
She had no criticism of his dress, which was bagged at the knees, dropping at the lapels, rucked around the buttons, while she-although she wore a flowing white cotton-appeared (she knew it and wished it was not so) as starched and pressed as a Baptist in a riding habit. They were different, and yet not ill matched.
They had both grown used to the attentions that are the eccentric's lot-the covert glances, smiles, whispers, worse. Lucinda was accustomed to looking at no one in the street. It was an out-offocus town of men with seas of bobbing hats. But on this night she felt the streets accept them. She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?
They pushed past bold-eyed young women with too many ribbons and jewels, past tight-laced maidens and complacent merchants with their bellies pushing so forcefully against their waistcoats that their shirts showed above their trousers. Lucinda was happy. Her arm rested on Oscar's arm.
She thought: Anyone can see I have been crying. She thought: I have pink eyes like a dormouse. But she did not really care.
82
Oscar in Love
My great-grandfather was in love, and although he managed to hide all the signs of his despair from Lucinda, he was miserable. He made little jokes about the natty gents in checked waistcoats, laughed, patted her arm, but whatever happiness he felt he saw only as a sign of all that would be denied to him.
This was because he had an idea in his head, and I do not mean the idea that he had promised to reveal to Lucinda at the dinner table. This
Oscar in Love
was another idea, quite separate. The idea that caused the real trouble was the one that Luanda herself had lodged in his head-that she was in love with Dennis Hasset. She had done everything possible to make the idea stick. She had left the swollen envelopes on her mantel for days at a time. She had told him she was in love. She had spent hours of her Sunday at her secretaire. The letters grew so fat that they required excessive amounts of red wax to seal them properly. The idea had taken hold, and such was the stubborn set of Oscar's mind that it would not easily be knocked loose. So it did not matter that she took his arm. It was the prior action, the snatching away, that stayed in his mind. It was here the truth seemed contained, and in the second act, the taking of the arm, he saw only pity.
Oscar did not like Dennis Hasset. He had not met him, but he did not like him. Not that he imagined the man had bad qualities. Quite the reverse. He imagined hirn good, clever, handsome, generous, as a manly man who would be attractive to a lady. He could think of nothing to do to press his claim in competition, nothing except to display an excess of goodness, of selflessness, as if this behaviour, this loving self-denial, would provide him with the rewards that selfishness could not.
It was this that lay behind the dangerous wager he now planned to undertake in the dining room of the Oriental Hotel.
There were only two other tables occupied in the cavernous blackand-white-tiled dining room. A farming family occupied a table pushed gracelessly against a fluted pillar. A single gentleman in a frock coat sat beside a window; he read from a chapbook while he ate. Lucinda was not hungry. She ordered as Oscar did. Her mind was occupied with the problem of how to undo delicately the clever knitting of her lies concerning Dennis Hasset. She could not concentrate on anything as ordinary as food.
She thought: This is what it is like when you love a man. She watched him as he buttered his bread and cut it into nine small squares. Should not this hitherto alien act now feel dear to her?
"Do you know what I envy you?" she said. "It is that you are not constrained."
She meant: The way you walk, walk in here, your clothes like that, and do not give a hoot what opinion the waiters or the diners may have
of you.
He smiled, his piece of bread held between thumb and forefinger.
"You do not mind who sees you or who hears you or what they think of you. You know your own value, I think, and this puts you in a strong position."
Oscar and Lucinda
"And you?"
"Oh," she rearranged a small pin in her hair. "I am too careful." He thought about this for a moment or two while he chewed his bread, and as he had the habit of chewing thirty-two times, this gave him the appearance of great sagacity whereas he was merely wondering, whilst he counted, whether he should disagree with her own assessment of herself and cite her Pak-Ah-Pu and wonder if this was, really Miss Leplastrier, the habit of a careful woman.
But he said instead: "It does no harm to be careful."
They sat in silence. He seemed not to be discomforted by it. She was. The silence made her socalled love for Dennis Hasset seem too heavy and insurmountable an obstruction. It made her feel dull. It made her too aware of the waiters watching them. She did not like the Oriental Hotel with its crawling adoration of wealth. She began to resent the dining room and think how she would never have come here on her own initiative.
"What a lovely place it is," he said, gazing around.
She thought: Do not be irritated and do not judge. He is not Them and he is not You. He is himself, uniquely so. When he admires, he admires as someone who cannot afford this luxury, not as someone who takes it as their right. Be like your papa who would want to know how the fluted pillars were made and what sort of fish that man is eating, and where it was caught and whether it is sweet to taste.
"Shall I tell you my idea?" he asked her.
"Oh, yes, do please.",>;
"It involves glass.";«; «s?
"A subject close to my heart." * î
"We sometimes guard the things close to our hearts." «< She did not look at him. She said: "You do not need to tread so carefully with me."
"Yes," he said unhappily. He saw no invitation to intimacy in this. His preconceptions made such an interpretation impossible and so he understood her back to front. Lucinda heard his tone. She thought: I have been too bold. I am always in too much of a rush.
"And," she said, working against the current of a depression which now rose up and seemed destined to take possession of her mood, "of glass, tell me, what was your idea?" The waiter brought their consommé, not in a soup plate, in a deep bowl. Did he always have consommé? She had always thought it food for invalids.
Oscar in Love,
"You could manufacture conservatories." <
"Is this your idea?" she asked, her heart now truly leaden.
"Oh, no," he grinned.
"I would loathe," she smiled, "to manufacture conservatories." They both looked at each other, their soup spoons raised above their bowls. In that moment she felt ridiculously happy-She felt he loved her after all. She could not stop smiling. "So what," she said, laughing, "is your idea?"
He sipped his soup. He had a nice sipping mouth. She liked the way it came to meet the spoon. She desired the mouth. She breathed out very quietly.
"You must tell me," she said.
"Indeed."
But he did not tell her. Instead he bent over his soup bowl and went at it with speed. Once, halfway through, he looked up and raised an eyebrow. Lucinda felt that mixture of irritation and affection so well known to Wardley-Fish.
"There," he said, wiping his mouth with a fastidiousness perhaps induced by the quality of the napkin, "now I can speak without my soup going cold."
"You are a practical man," she laughed. She felt a little unreal-a thrumming sensation behind her eyes.
"In some respects, yes, I am, " he said. "How does your correspondent enjoy his living in Boat Harbour?"
She shut her eyes against the question's slap. She was shocked to feel its cold hostility. And even though hostility was not intended, she was not mistaken in detecting it. She straightened her cutlery. She said: "Well enough.",«-;
"And does he have a church built yet?" &S-*i
She thought: Fool, fool, do you think I care for Hasset? ',
She said: "They hold service in a room aboVe a cobbler's. They thaiv? his predecessor into the river." — "-;-1
"Oh dear."::;:
"Perhaps," she said, "they will do the same with him." Oscar looked up sharply, but Lucinda was finishing her soup. When he at last saw her face it was like a room swept clean of meaning.
A waiter took away their bowls.
Oscar said: "Mr Hasset should have a church."
She did not wish to discuss Hasset. She said nothing.
°scar did not like to think of Hasset either. It was the first time he had spoken the name out loud. When he said it he saw a hoe or a
Oscar and Lucinda
mattock, neither of them implements he had any fondness for. and yet he must say the name for he had an idea involving it, an idea that involved such a dreadful laceration of his own feelings that it is really hard to credit. And yet it was all born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light. The odds were surely stacked against him, and had it been a horse rather than a woman's heart he would never have bet on it, not even for a place.
"And what would his feelings be, do you imagine," he said, "if, when Mr Hasset awoke one morning, he looked out of his window and saw a church?"
Lucinda opened her mouth to reply.
"Made of glass," said my great-grandfather. (See! This is the sort of man I am!) It was at this point that the waiter brought the flounder. They said yes or no to tartare sauce, watched vegetables being spooned on to their plates, accepted spinach, rejected squash, and hardly knew what they were doing. All their emotions were fused together in this glass vision in which they saw that which cannot be seen-wonder, joy, the transparent traceries of angels dancing. They were smiling at each other in such a way as to be almost indecent and the chef poked his head around the door to see what he had heard reported by the waiter. The fish's flesh was white and moist. She lifted it carefully from its skeleton, and then replaced it.
"But what would one intend?" she asked, her voice very level and cautious. "What would one intend with such a gift?"
He hardly knew what he intended. That he be a perfect friend to her, that he show himself above jealousy, that she employ him, that he help her assemble this flawless thing, that he possess it in some way, that he be permitted to be a party to the manufacture of a prism, a prayer to God, that the prayer be made from glass and she would, therefore, because of it, love him. He could not see this glass church in his mind's eye without smiling. It had a force of its own. He looked at it as I once saw my own father, standing in a shiny-floored corridor in the Sydney Museum of Arts and Science, staring at a china cup inside a case.
"It would be a lovely thing," he said.
"Yes, I see that."
* He would not look her in the eye. '• "Such a gift," she said, "would not be personal?" she meant personal
Oscar in Love
as having to do with her and Hasset. So preoccupied was she with this problem that she did not even imagine the possibility of ambiguity. "Oh, no," he said, "not personal." He thought she meant personal as between him and her; he was embarrassed to have his scheme so clearly apprehended. "Oh, no, most definitely not." "Do we understand each other?"
"Yes." He looked her straight in the eye and she saw, then, the strength in him. He was so light and frail, so soft in his manner, that it was always a surprise to see this, the steel armature of his soul. She thought about kissing and then she pushed the matter firmly from her mind. She would not frighten him away.
"Yes," she said, "it would be a lovely thing." She had never dared to imagine anything so commercially senseless. She would be laughed at by all the whiskered sages of church and business. She thought: He is mad; I am mad. But when she objected, what she said was not in tune with her spirit which skipped impatiently ahead like a reckless little stone sent dancing across a river. "But it is hardly practical, Mr Hopkins."
"It is a dangerous word," he said, smiling, entranced by her upper lip. "Which word is that?"
"Practical. It is the word they use in Sydney when they wish to do something damaging to the spirit. Excuse me, you must think me rude." "No, no, although you must not hold me responsible for Sydney." "I never struck the term so much at Home. But here, you know, it is a word dull men use when they wish to hide the poverty of their imagination. But would you say it was
'practical' to sing hymns, to give glory to God, to pray, to fast? And what is the practical purpose of a church? For if it is only to provide shelter for Christians — and my dear papa would take this view-then it is better to have your congregation gather in cobblers' rooms. But if your church, no matter how small, is also a celebration of God, then I would say I was the most practical man you have spoken to all year."
"And there would be nothing personal in its intention?" "Do I appear a rogue?"
"No," she smiled, "you do not," and because he made her smile she did not think it a puzzling answer to her question. "Your fish…" She meant that his fish was cold, uneaten, although he still held a knife and fork as he had from the beginning.
"My fish does not matter. My fish is dead, but we are alive. We are gamblers in the noble sense. We believe all eternity awaits us. And am I wrong in supposing that you could pack a church in crates and
Oscar and Lucinda
transport it by cart? It is like the stairs at the library. It is what they call prefabricated. It comes in pieces. It has nuts and bolts and so on."
"Or by ship?"
"You could transport an entire cathedral and assemble it across the mountains. Can you imagine a glass cathedral?"
She could. She saw its steeples, domes, its flying buttresses, motes of dust, shafts of light. "Mr Hopkins, we are mad to think of it."
"Not mad, I pray not mad. But the sheer joy of contemplating it is hard to contain." She thought: I cannot separate love from glass; I must be just a little mad. He said: "I think it is this feeling that you are tempted to call madness, but there is a more accurate description. . but I will embarrass you…"
"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.
