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Oscar and Lucinda
"Oh, dear God, forgive me," she said. She was sitting in her kitchen at Longnose Point. She did not bother to thnk where the maid might be but went, straight away, on her knees and pushed her hands into her eyes and rubbed at them as if she might, in making all this lightning in the blackness, undo what she had so carelessly done.
She thought: I should not be allowed abroad. This is the second man I have ruined. She sat up and folded the Mail in her lap. She would go, this instant, to Randwick and apologize, or to the Bishop or whoever was important in the matter. Her next thought was that she must stay away and not compromise the poor nan any more. Her third thought-and this was the one that she finally acted upon-was that she must present herself and see what aid she might render. She dressed herself in her most drab and proper clothing, an unpleasant brown wool and a severe black bonnet which only served, against her best intentions, to accentuate her lovely complexion so it was, like a Ribstone pippin, a soft underwash of crimson overlaid with murrey brown. She drove herself out to Randwick. There she encountered not the Reverend Mr Hopkins but Mrs Judd who stood her ground high on the veranda and would communicate nothing except the pleasure of finding herself in so obviously powerful a position.
Lucinda drew her whip along her gelding's flank and sped out of the vicarage, rattling the cattlegrid and leaving a cloud of talcum-fine clay dust for Mrs Judd to sweep off her veranda. She thought: I have made it worse. She thought: I will leave it alone. She made towards the ridge road through Darlinghurst, intending to visit the glassworks. She did not articulate this to herself, but her face, which had, through the agency of her tense upper lip, grown long, now softened and regained its more usual contours. The idea of this visit to the glassworks was a formless, nameless, anticipated pleasure, such as a tobacco addict has when coming out of church. It was the next thing. The next nice thing. But it was only a habit, and when she saw what it was she had been thinking she saw that the packet was empty. It was three weeks since she had promised Arthur Phelps-he who called his gut his bellows-that she would mot visit the works. How had she promised such a thing? Was she not the owner, after all?
Arthur had kept his broad hands busy with his tobacco and papers. His eyes had been absorbed by the business of licking and lighting, he had not looked at her, but she had looked ait him, at the great sweating girth encased in wet hessian bagging, at the male, foreign otherness of his white-haired skin. He had spoken to her-all the time
The Good Samaritan
fussing with a dainty cigarette he could have attended to blindfoldwith great politeness and discomfort. He had taken her out into the yard where the window glass was being packed into wooden crates. The wood was newly sawn and sweet and sappy in the spring air. Yellow straw was lifted by the nor'easter and hung like scratches in the sky. Arthur kicked at the dry rutted clay with his big blunt boots.
Lucinda waited for him. She saw he had a great sense of his own authority, a "natural" sense, far greater than that which would lead her to book a first-class cabin.
When he had finished fussing with his little cigarette he lit it within the sheltered cup of his hand.
"Mum," he said, "it is better if I am sent for and come to see you at your office." The timber mill next door screeched, a long shrill line of pain up the heart of a new cedar log. Arthur had gone to work there before. If he did not like it at the works he could, doubtless, find work at the mill again.
"You mean no harm, mum, I grant you. But it makes my boys be edgewise and standing on politeness, and then we see the gob-gatherer get the gob wrong and the second blower have his walls uneven and the item not worth taking further, mum. They are poor ignorant lads, and easily distracted by a lady."
This simple speech made her feel a despair too deep for tears, or even anger. Her mouth opened.
"If by chance you wish to visit," Arthur said, "then perhaps, mum, you let it be known aforehand."
"How long aforehand, Arthur?" She watched the glasspacker. He was using insufficient straw.
"Oh, just one day, mum, no more. You let it be known, and we will be ready for you, mum, and a proper inspection it would be, mum, like in Her Majesty's Navy, and not all rags and bags and odd socks either-all lined up and shipshape."
"But this is my business, Arthur." There was no edge to her voice-a voice that was often thought to be too easily icy or sarcastic. There was no will. Her eyes were dry and scratched like the straw-littered sky. "I am the proprietor."
And Arthur Phelps said: "I know, mum, but it be our craft, mum, you see. It be our craft." And she had accepted this. She had accepted because she could never forget the emptiness, the hollowness which had occupied the very centre of her being when she had returned from London and found the works empty, the furnaces cold, and that kitten-the murdering
Oscar and Lucinda
crunch of its skull was part of the same feeling-that loneliness, sickness, with nothing bright or soft or sympathetic. She knew she should not have accepted Arthur Phelps's demands. She was angry that she had. She now went to the works at night when the firemen were working, stoking the furnaces or, sometimes, putting in a new clay crucible. She made the firemen uneasy, too, but they had not the conceit or the craft, and dared not ask her to leave the wooden throne on which Arthur drank his pints and practised his trade. It was warm and dry in the works. She was there almost every night. She brooded. And now she would brood about Oscar Hopkins as well. The furnace doors would swing open silently and clang shut abruptly. The firemen's shovels would scrape along the floor. She would sit on Arthur's throne and drink brandy from a flask. She would think of homes, homes she did not have, homes she had lost.
She day-dreamed of letters to the bishop which she did not send, advertisements in the personal columns of the Sydney Morning Herald which she did not place. She went to Ah Moy's but did not see him. She attended Homebush and Randwick. She gambled as if there were a horse that might, by the churning force of its hooves amongst the mud, blot out the pain she felt. She bet fiercely. She did not see him anywhere; and when at last she did, in the post-office yard, she did not recognize him, not at first. The gap between her memory of him and the figure he had become produced a most unsettling feeling.
"Mr Hopkins?"
The man spun. He had a pimple on his top lip, although pimple is perhaps too polite a term for such a swollen infection whose surround was of a deep and angry red. He had a cut on his cheek and this also had the appearance of infection. When he saw who it was, he buttoned up his coat as if by doing this he would hide the way his gaunt neck poked out of his oversized secular collar.
"Miss Leplastrier," he said. He had no hat to lift. He produced a letter from his pocket and waved it in the air instead.
She also had a letter. It was to Mr Paxton asking details of some channelling he had designed to prevent condensation dripping from glass ceilings. She waved it.
They posted their letters. She tried not to watch Oscar count out his farthings to make up the price of the stamps. She saw the back of his hands marked with their praying stab wounds. She had never before in all her life been aware of causing so much harm. All the qualities which had before so irritated her, the nervous frailties, the boyishness, the innocence which she had