Oscar looked at him, and then down. He was ashamed of what he had done to his father's eyesyellow whites, red veins, a red contusion in the corner of the left eye. He had caused this torture. There was a cut on the forehead, sand glued to his beard in two places. Lucy Millar cut the scones into squares although she knew Mrs Stratton liked them stamped out round, but there was no time for Oxford tricks today. The Holy Hypocrite was whispering to his son. He held him oddly, by the finger, and leaned across the corner of the table. The boy should wipe his nose. She looked away.
"You are travelling down the tide of time," his papa said. The voice was tangled, all wound around on itself like toffee. To Oscar's ear, this voice was a thing that had lost its bones. It was soft and floppy, without conviction.
But when Lucy Millar heard Theophilus speak, she felt a strange feeling, not unpleasant, at the back of her neck. She greased the tray.
"And you have chosen-or so Mr Stratton has, last night, informed me-to throw away the chart your Lord has revealed to you. What a dreadful thing it will be when Our Lord says, on 53
Oscar and Lucinda the Last Day, 'Come, ye Blessed/ and says it not to you." Mrs Millar goose-pimpled all over.
Oscar was embarrassed by his father's lost authonty. He wanted to free his finger from his grasp but did not know how.
"It is not as if you have been tempted, and given in to temptation," Theophilus said. Oscar did not listen to the words. It was the tone he heard. He thought: He is in error, and he knows! He felt pity, but also anger.
"It is not a weakness of your flesh," Theophilus said. "A weakness of the flesh is soon conquered. Itxis an arrogance of spirit. You must listen to the voice of God." His son had a smudged red mouth and green eyes that looked at him as though he were a stranger. He could not bear this lack of love. He rubbed his beard. Sand fell on the table. He brushed the sand on to the floor. He thought: Oh Lord, how have I offended Thee?
"I have listened to the voice of God, Papa."
He was frail-boned like a girl, thought Mrs Millar, and tangle-footed. His voice squeaked and farted and had no authority. His face showed his feelings like a pond that wrinkles in the slightest breeze. And yet, bless me, he could be a magistrate. She picked up the tray of scones and rushed them to the oven.
She came back to ask about their breakfast. It was too late for a fuss. She would offer them some tea and toast. The father was asking the boy: "Then why are you here, child? Why are you sitting in a household of this type?"
The boy was a fidgeter. His trunk twisted against the wooden rungs of the chair and his hands, in his lap, were at war with each other. His legs kicked the table. But although everything he did with his body suggested a sort of panic, his eyes were calm. Mrs Millar saw something in him which would make her defend him against all the coals Hennacombe would heap upon his head, something she could only name as "good."
She asked them about their breakfast. She offered them things the household could not afford. She would do them kippers, eggs, she would coddle some if they liked, or fry some in pork fat with a slice of bread. She felt moved to offer the boy gifts, but they looked at her and ignored her. This seemed to her to be arrogance on the father's part, and she was mostly right, but the son was also imitating the father. She went to make them toast, cutting the loaf thin. When she returned with the toast ihe thing she was struck by was the sinews-the father's, the son's, both of them-they were showing
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Scuffed Boots
taut sinews along their necks. Tears ran down the father's cheeks and were lost in his beard. She imagined he was imploring his son, but she was wrong. He could not implore. He could only endure.
Oscar had just, at the moment, realized the extent of his father's selfabsorption. All this, everything that Oscar had done and felt, was seen by his papa as something God was doing to his father. Oscar was merely an instrument of God's wrath.
He would not be invited to return home.
He could hardly breathe. His stomach hurt. A panic struck him and bound him still. He lifted his head oddly high, like a child drowning, and it was this that made the sinews stand out on his long neck.
They took their napkins and unfolded them on their laps. The air was wet with tears.
"I will not order you home, Oscar. I will pray for you each day."
"I will pray for you too, Papa."
And then they were both crying, and Mrs Millar placed toast in racks in front of them and filled their cups with tea. They sat isolated from each other, no longer connected by hands, and wept, bowing their heads as if it were a form of prayer.
Scuffed Boots
It was known about in Teignmouth and Torquay. Mrs Stratton heard it discussed at Newton Abbot markets by two women who she judged were hardly Christians. On Sundays the Baptists from Babbacombe, walking to chapel at the Squire's, now chose to take the longer route via Hennacombe so they might observe this new phenomenon: the Plymouth Brethren congregation kneeling and praying outside the Anglican vicar's broken-down front gate. There was not trimmed grass for them to rest on. There were blackberries and nettles, but this did not stop them. They flattened an area like cattle seeking shelter from
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Oscar and Lucinda
the wind. The way they knelt, so still and neat, you would not think their knees were pierced or ankles bleeding. The men wore red handkerchiefs and some of the women scarlet shawls, and although you would see one or two dark suits, the menfolk were mostly in their smocks. Here and there you might notice a blue smock with a pattern of white thread on the breast, but most of the smocks were a brilliant snowy white. They were all abloom, like a garden, and nothing suggested pain.
The Baptists hied past them silently and did not speak until they were round the corner of the lane.
The Plymouth Brethren never announced what they were praying for. The Reverend Mr Stratton imagined it was for his downfall, but those who kept this vigil knew that the Reverend Mr Stratton could not be saved. It was Oscar, little Oscar, they were praying for. Big men with white beards, young women with snow-white bonnets-they screwed up their faces and furrowed their brows. There would be great rejoicing in the Lord's house when this one sinner returned to the fold.
The Anglicans, walking briskly past, noted only that Theophilus was still not present. There were not many Anglicans, just the four. They knew, as everyone knew, that Theophilus disagreed with this praying, that he believed the boy had been taken from him because of his own pride. It was his sin that had done this, and it was for him to be punished and no one else. He could not approve of kneeling amongst blackberries, but no one believed it was his fault at all. Hennacombe thought Oscar unnatural. It could not accept what it might have accepted from a more robust boy. A sturdy young fellow, already a fisherman at sixteen, might come to blows with his father and even bloody his nose. This would not be welcomed, but no one would gather in gateways to pray because of it. There would be no detours on the way to chapel either. But Oscar was so girlish, so harmless, so gormless and it was this-this harmless, heart-shaped child's face which made it so unnatural. He was like a goblin or a devil in a story-what other being appears with the body of a child and the voice of a man? They would give him no credit for filial feelings, although, of course, he was boiling with them. He suffered the pains adults imagine reserved for them-those lonely, murderous, ripping feelings that come with the end of marriages or the death of babies. He was free from the disciplines of his father's house, and although it might be reasonable to hope that he would feel some lightening of his soul now that he no longer lived in a place where music and dancing, poetry and puddings were all seen to be the work of the devil,