Oscar and Lucinda

  The Bishop began this interview provocatively. He did not imagine himself provocative. Rather he saw himself as understanding—he came right to the heart of what he thought the problem was: “Of course, Hasset, we all have our appetites.”

  Dennis Hasset did not imagine himself unduly fastidious, but he found this way of approaching Lucinda Leplastrier quite disgusting. She was a milk-breathed child he watched over when she slept by his fire. For a moment his handsome mouth looked as if it held a putrid oyster, but only for an instant, and Bishop Dancer did not notice.

  The bishop was one to talk about appetites. He was a great fellow for hanging game until it was maggoty. Dennis Hasset tried to make him see the nature of his relationship with Miss Leplastrier. He spoke well and honestly. The Bishop nodded, rubbing his big hands across his high, bald dome, let his tongue show between his teeth, screwed up his eyes.

  “Then post the banns,” he said, with perfect misunderstanding.

  “No, no,” laughed the vicar of Woollahra, “we are too queer a pair to contemplate.”

  “Well,” said Bishop Dancer, who was sick of trying to understand what the man was saying, “you would be wise to marry someone.”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  And on that puzzling note, the interview ended. The Bishop imagined he had instructed the vicar to give up his “petite amie” and the vicar thought he had satisfactorily explained the innocence of their relationship: they were too queer a pair to contemplate.

  37

  A Game of Cards

  Later, when she knew Mr d’Abbs’s house well—and she grew to know it very well indeed—she could smile at how she had perceived it, how she had exaggerated it in her mind, stretched and tangled it until it was a palace, a castle, the sort of home a peer might have, stretched out along the shores of Rushcutters Bay.

  It was not nearly as grand as she had, in her country innocence, imagined it. But it was the sort of house that leads to exaggeration. It was a ball of string. An untidy confusion of passages and stairs, the sort of place where you are always arriving where you do not expect. There are long gloomy passages leading to bright alcoves containing nothing but a pair of uncomfortable chairs with dusty antimacassars. You go looking for the library and find yourself in a large laundry where the cement floor is covered with piles of tangled sheets. You look to retrace your steps and find yourself in a garden where terraced paths lead down—via steps whose treads are far too high—to the harbour. The hydrangeas are clipped for the winter and there is a gardener with rum on his breath (and odd socks on his feet) who offers to show you the scars on his back, the droppings of a wallaby, the scratchings of a bandicoot or a leech which he will pull inside out with the aid of a twig—“T’only way to kill’un, missus.”

  The house taught Lucinda almost as much about Mr Ahearn as it did about Mr d’Abbs. It was obvious that Mr Ahearn had never seen the house. It would have offended him in every way imaginable. He would have thought it to be wasteful, ostentatious, unchristian. He could not, Lucinda realized, know Mr d’Abbs at all, and yet such was his desire to deliver her to “the right hands” that he had pretended acquaintance of a man he had only heard of.

  Mr d’Abbs was a small man of forty years and very particular and precise in all his movements. He dressed expensively, artistically. He favoured serge and corduroy in olive green or navy blue. His ties were wool or even silk. He liked a walking stick, although he had no limp. He had a small smile, quite ironic, and it twisted his thin moustache and made him look not quite respectable. He enjoyed being thought of in this way—it was no commercial liability in Sydney—and yet it was not the truth at all.

  Mr d’Abbs was married and had three children, and yet it seemed this family was insufficient for his needs. His wife was small and pretty. Everyone remarked on her smile and her golden ringlets. Lucinda was immediately drawn to her. She wished to sit and talk quietly with her, but it was not a house of quiet talk and Mrs d’Abbs would sit at table with anger in her eyes and, more often than not, excuse herself halfway through the pudding. And perhaps it was because of this, because the marriage was so unhappy, that Mr d’Abbs liked to collect people around him and assemble them, not just one night a week, but every night, in his drawing room.

  Lucinda could not have imagined a room exactly like it, and although she had read descriptions of many grand rooms in novels, there was nothing in her literary experience which prepared her for the carelessness of Mr d’Abbs house, the way a rug might be thrown across a gilt-backed couch to hide its bursting innards, the length, the breadth, the scandalous quantities of dust, the giddy electric view of the crags and battlements of the eastern shore of Rushcutters Bay. Within this grand expensive tangle danced the pristine Mr d’Abbs. He was a honey-eater amidst raging lantana, a lyrebird scratching the sticks and leaves of its untidy bower.

  Neither Elizabeth Leplastrier nor Mitchell’s Creek had prepared her for this sort of habitat. You do not find this sort of character in a milking shed, and this was something of which Mr d’Abbs was himself aware. He would stand at his favourite place, his back against the glass-doored bookcases, a glass of good French cognac in his hand, and look around his wonderful drawing room and not quite believe that it was him, Jimmy Dabbs, Ditcher Dabbs’s boy.

  The walls of his drawing room were crowded with pictures of every style and quality. They were crammed and jammed into every space available—water-colours with dusty glass in front of them, oils with grand gilt frames, chromos of masterpieces, caricatures, a colour engraving (from the London Illustrated News) showing Lord Elgin marching into Peking, a crude pen rendering showing blacks attacking a settler’s cabin. He propped paintings by Sir Arthur Gibbs, RA, against the skirting board so that they could make way for the landscapes of his new discovery, Mr Calvitto, who was, at this moment, standing out on his veranda gazing out into the evening gloom of Rushcutters Bay. Mr Calvitto had a commercial interest in promoting the Tuscan wheat varieties, which he claimed to be immune to the rust disease that still plagued the colony. But he was also an Italian, an artist, an atheist, and these were all interesting things to be. Mr d’Abbs was pleased to hear him talk about anything he chose to talk about. Mr d’Abbs did not have a lot to say himself, not now. He would rather smile and nod and be amazed at the turns life can take. And in this last respect he shared more than he knew with his new protégé. Miss Leplastrier, although he found her, for all her obvious pluck, uncommonly dull. Later in the evening, he knew, she would come out of her shell, but this was no use to him now. She made him feel a little stiff, and it was not how he liked to feel. She had taken a chair next to Miss Shaddock who was doing her needlework beside the little walnut table. He understood Miss Leplastrier was unhappy. She was an orphan, of course, and new to Sydney. He winked at her. She looked away.

  Lucinda sat with her hands in her lap and presented a perfect wall to the room. No one could have guessed her feelings, which were so contradictory it is a wonder she could contain them without fidgeting.

  First: she was, like Jimmy d’Abbs, amazed to find herself in such a place. The room, with its tangle of paintings and rugs, its odd mixture of fastidiousness and sloth, suggested more complex possibilities in life than she had previously imagined, and while it offended her carefully inculcated senses of order and restraint, it was also most attractive.

  Second: she was grateful to Mr d’Abbs for his kindness, and she would continue—no matter what evidence arrived to say she should not—always to be loyal to him on this account.

  Third: she was disturbed by Mrs d’Abbs whose eyes she found continually glancing in her direction. She now wondered if she had done something to offend.

  Fourth: she did not like the way Mr d’Abbs had held his children—out, away and at a distance as if they were, even when bathed, too sticky to be encouraged to affection.

  Fifth: she felt very lonely. Mr d’Abbs’s friends made her feel alien. Miss Malcolm, Miss Shaddock, Mrs Burrows, Mr Calvitto—they were polite to he
r, she thought, but were in no hurry to have her a member of their circle.

  Sixth: she was disturbed to find Mr d’Abbs and Mr Calvitto irreligious. When Mr d’Abbs winked she pretended not to see him.

  Seventh: she would rather be in her own bed, drifting into sleep. This territory, between sleep and waking, was her only real home and it was this she sought in Dennis Hasset’s armchairs.

  Eighth: she was waiting for Mr Calvitto to come in from the veranda so the real business of the evening could begin.

  They were waiting for Mrs Burrows to leave so they could play cards. Mrs Burrows would not leave until Mr Calvitto was ready. Mr Calvitto was admiring Rushcutters Bay as it appeared in the evening gloom. Although he was a recent arrival in the circle he had already formed a friendship with Mrs Burrows although no one could speak clearly about what this friendship amounted to.

  Mrs Burrows, a vocal supporter of the American rebels, was the widow of an army captain who had been killed by blacks in the “Falls” district near the head—waters of the Manning River. Lucinda did not like her at all. She had reprimanded Lucinda on the subject of the blacks. Mrs Burrows would have them given “bye-bye damper,” bush bread made from strychnine-poisoned flour. She knew this was extreme. She liked to be extreme. She was one of those who claimed no white man should be hanged for shooting blacks in self-defence. Her opinions suited her face which was red in the nose, drawn in the cheeks, pinched. She was a critical woman and one would not have expected her to have a friendship with Mr Calvitto, on the grounds of atheism alone. She was so strongly against card-playing that they must all wait before they could play. But here she was, meekly waiting for an atheist to return from the veranda so she could announce her intention to go home.

  Then they could play cribbage. Lucinda pressed herself back into the wing—back chair. It was doubtless sinful, but she did like cribbage. She liked it very much indeed. She found herself, during the day, looking forward to the game as she might not so long ago have looked forward to golden-syrup dumplings. When she played cards she was not dull or angry. She laughed. She looked prettier. She could feel her own transformation. People smiled at her.

  She was moved by playing cards in a way she could not explain even to herself. She had a feeling, not the same, but similar, to when they fought the grass fire on Bishop’s Plain—that line of people, men, women, children, with their sacks and beating poles, even nasty old Michael Halloran, but all lined up in the choking smoke. Cards was not like this, and yet it was. They were joined in a circle, an abstraction of human endeavour.

  But now she was lonely, and aware of her isolation, and everyone’s isolation one from the other.

  There was a Dutch lamp—it was made from black iron filigree and had a gracefully shaped white mantle—above a round walnut table with three legs. Beside this table sat Miss Malcolm, the governess. She was a pretty young thing, or had been not so long before. On the other side of the table sat Miss Shaddock with her needlework. While Miss Malcolm was light and wispy in her nature, Miss Shaddock was dark and heavy. And while Miss Malcolm gave the impression of greater innocence than her age would agree with, Miss Shaddock gave off an odour of foreboding, as if whatever venture was discussed must come to an unhappy ending.

  And yet Mr d’Abbs, leaning against his case of books, was obviously so contented, so pleased to have the company of Miss Shaddock, to value her every bit as much as Mr Calvitto who was now—Lucinda could hear his leather soles squeaking—beginning to stir from his reverie on the veranda.

  Mr d’Abbs collected people. It was his passion. It was a distinction that Captain Burrows had been killed whilst bravely defending isolated settlers, that Miss Malcolm was the sister of a tenor, that Miss Shaddock’s needlework had been presented to the Prince of Wales. Every now and then Mr Horace Borrodaile would drop in. Once he had brought Mr Henry Parkes (Mr d’Abbs still held his IOU). Here was Mr Calvitto, now, standing at the open door and speaking authoritatively about the landscape.

  Lucinda did not listen to Mr Calvitto immediately. There was a cow bogged in the mangrove mud flats below the house. No one in the room thought to rescue it. It was not their cow. They were waiting for Mrs Burrows to leave so they could play cards.

  “Shouldn’t we do something about the cow?” she asked Miss Malcolm, but Miss Malcolm, although she looked at her, did not seem interested in what she said. Lucinda was indignant, but did not know what to do. No one would look at her. She felt a great sense of boredom, of purposelessness, sweep over her. The beast bellowed. It knew it would die. Its own kind would not help it.

  “Yes, yes,” Mr Calvitto was saying to Miss Shaddock, “but it is not a Christian landscape.” Mr Calvitto had sunken eyes and a doleful countenance. He had black curly hair and a strong, wiry black beard. At the back of all this, like lamps placed at the back of a long room, one was aware of his eyes glittering. He was like a man who had been robbed of something precious and is waiting for others to see the injustice so they might restore it to him. “It is not a Christian landscape at all.”

  “You are not a Christian,” said Miss Shaddock, her voice shaking as it always did when the conversation took this turn.

  “That is not the point, Irene,” said Mrs Burrows.

  “God made all the landscape,” said Miss Shaddock. “Surely you believe that, Mildred?”

  “Of course,” said Mrs Burrows but turned to Mr Calvitto.

  Lucinda was impatient that this conversation should continue. It was hypocritical to proclaim your Christianity whilst this suffering continued. And yet she knew what Mr Calvitto meant. She had felt it herself, and her mind drifted to the back creek. In this place the water had been dark and still, brown from tannin, cut by church-like motes of sunlight. Here she had plucked her doll bald. Here she had wept when her papa died. Here she had seen two blacks standing as still as trees. She was sixteen years old. She held her breath. There were two more. Another two. This was in the years when the blacks of Parramatta were defeated. Their trunks were brown with mud, cracked like iron bark. She was frightened, not that they would hurt her, it was a bigger fear than that. She turned and ran, ran across the flat green pasture with plovers shrieking above her, ran out into the sunlight where the yellow sap-bright fence posts, peeled of slippery bark, with round shiny backs and rough straight sides, were lying in a higgledy-piggledy pile on a bed of stringy bruised bark.

  She knew what Mr Calvitto meant. You could feel it in the still shadows along watercourses. She felt ghosts here, but not Christian ghosts, not John the Baptist or Jesus of Galilee. There were other spirits, other stories, slippery as shadows.

  She would have liked to say so. She was capable of ordering her ideas and her thoughts and presenting them properly, but she knew that only Mr d’Abbs would welcome it. He was standing there, leaning against his bookcases, swilling his brandy balloon. He looked at her and winked again as if to say: “What a jolly show Calvitto makes. What fun, eh?”

  The beast in the mangroves bellowed. Lucinda thought: I should not be here.

  “What I do not understand about you, Mr Calvitto,” Miss Malcolm said, “is how you live.” She did not say “without faith” but everyone understood the meaning of her question.

  But Mrs Burrows began to rise, and whether this was intended to prevent the answering of the question or no, this is what it did. She made a small exclamation of pain, holding her bony back. “Your business would be more prosperous,” Mrs Burrows said, “if you were earlier in bed.”

  Did this mean that Mrs Burrows knew about their gambling? Miss Malcolm turned her head a sharp, fast ten degrees to catch Miss Shaddock’s eye. Miss Shaddock’s eye remained steadfastly on her needlework but her white plump neck turned slowly red.

  “Stay the night,” said Mr d’Abbs. “I will have a bed made up for you.”

  “Please,” said Mrs d’Abbs who had, until now, remained still and silent, her knitting in her lap (it always upset Miss Shaddock to see how slowly Mrs d’Abbs knitted)-they
were, none of them, none except Lucinda who was new and did not count, sympathetic to Mrs d’Abbs. “Please do stay.”

  “Thank you, no, Mr Calvitto will drive me home.”

  “We will deliver Miss Leplastrier to her hotel,” said Mrs Burrows, arranging her shawl.

  “Oh, no,” said Lucinda looking to Mr d’Abbs for help. “Not yet.”

  Mr d’Abbs raised an eyebrow. Miss Shaddock looked over her rimless spectacles, frowning. There had been too much passion in this outburst.

  “Mmmmm,” said Mrs Burrows. It was a technique she had. It suggested she knew things.

  “We are not right for you,” said a great booming male voice from the doorway. “We are below you, Mrs Burrows. You would not be seen dead with us. And who can blame you?”

  “Nonsense,” shouted Mr d’Abbs, obviously very pleased.

  “You think me a scoundrel,” said the newcomer to Mrs Burrows who, whilst departing with Mr Calvitto, managed to look at once severe, but also pleased to be teased in such a way.

  “Fig, you are a rogue,” said Mr d’Abbs, making a face at the pink-cheeked bald-headed man with the tight, round little paunch. The face, a crumpled-up grimace, begged Mr Fig to be quiet for just a moment.

  “Has the second sitting begun?” asked Mr Fig, winking hugely and miming card shuffling while Mrs Burrows was helped into her coat.

  “You must away,” he said to Lucinda, wagging a finger and sucking in his cheeks in what was a very poor imitation of the woman who was now—at last, Miss Malcolm’s shoulders lost their tense edge—leaving the house. “This is a madhouse,” said Mr Fig with relish.