Oscar and Lucinda - Peter Carey

When my father spoke of the scientific history of celluloid (which, having a diploma in industrial chemistry, he was entitled to do) she felt that he was contesting her ownership of its original use, its meaning, its history.

And she was right. When my father said 'long-chain hydrocarbon," he was saying: "I am right. This one's mine."

But my mother would not let him have it. The celluloid was hers. The meaning of it was hers. The lines ruled on it were-I was brought up on this-lines of latitude and longitude. She would lay the yellowed, scratched material across a Shell road map and explain to us how it would have worked.

She became emotional, as she often did, when discussing the past, and because she wished Oscar to be a "missionary" and a "pioneer Anglican," we gew up imagining Oscar travelling out on steerage, on a clipper ship, crowded in amongst poor immigrants. We imagined our greatgrandfather with his map and celluloid, his Bible, his Book of Common Prayer. We saw himeven while we squirmed in embarrassment before my mother's holy-toned recitation-conducting sad funeral services for babies lost, a toothless sailmaker stitching up a sad little parcel in canvas, and young Oscar, his hair flaming red, his milkwhite skin burnt raw, squinting into the antipodean sun with the ultramarine sea swelling up above him.

My father surely knew what kind of ship it was Oscar sailed on. He knew its name, and if he knew its name he probably "looked it up." In any case, he said nothing about the Leviathan which was no more a clipper than the celluloid was a grid of latitude and longitude. j The Leviathan was 690 feet long, 83 feet wide and 58 feet deep. The I Ark (if one allows the cubit as 20.62 inches) was 512 feet long, 85 feet '.; wide, and 51 feet deep. This coincidence was not lost on Oscar who "discovered" the Leviathan two weeks after his fateful evening at Cremorne Gardens.

At this stage Ishmael Kingdom Legare's controversial liner was undergoing one of its crises in the Tyneside shipyards and it was thought the company would go bankrupt. These uncertainties were nothing to Oscar. He ignored them. He saw only that this was the ship he must travel on. It was unsinkable. Punch wrote that a man might travel from Southampton to Sydney and-so vast were the dimensions, so multitudinous the passages, alleyways, gangways, etc.-that the poor chap-although he might dance till he had no shoe leather, and dine till his buttons burst-might go all that way and never find his way to that most simple essential of an ocean voyage-a porthole with a view of the sea.

This was just the sort of ship that Oscar required. It had twin hulls (in case of icebergs), a cellular deck, and the capacity to carry its own coal for the journey.

Oscar Hopkins travelled to Australia not as my mother imagined but in the greatest luxury. And while he appeared, to those around him, to be so unworldly as to take no notice of this aspect of his journey, to be insensitive to the pleasures of "portières of carmine silk/' one should remember that Oscar chose Leviathan just as he chose Cremorne Gardens. Someone who had grown up in the limestone austerity of Theophilus's house could not be oblivious to either. The Church Missionary Society, of course, would not pay his fare on anything so grand. That he should have the nerve to suggest they should produced a certain degree of ill-feeling which he did not notice.

He would pay his own fare. Only God could provide so large an amount. He bet on dogs and horses.

In his heart of hearts he did not know if he was good or bad, holy or corrupt. He bathed in cold water when there was hot available. He went without coal when he could afford to buy it. He met with Wardley-Fish on Friday afternoon and drank pink champagne.

Wardley-Fish would have dearly loved a little flutter. But he had a curacy in Hammersmith, a fiancee, an impending wedding, and this combination of circumstances had meant that he had not only been forced to abandon his apparently "questionable" address near Drury Lane-no one seemed to think there was anything "questionable" about him coming here to live in the same house as his future wife-he had also given up the sporting life. There were good reasons to give up, but he would have liked to have had just an hour at the Holborn Casino, say, or even better, at Epsom. And he would have liked to do it with his hooting, embarrassing friend. However, they were grown up now, and he was a handsome fellow engaged to a bishop's daughter. His fiancée, Miss Melody Clutterbuck, did not know that Wardley-Fish would, in a moment, use the Bishop's coach to pay a visit to the loathsome person he always made such fun of. She understood this friendship to be almost finished. She had put the prickly subject from her mind, or almost, for there was always the anxiety that the ship the chickennecked madman had chosen to go to Australia-that this ship might somehow (The Times said it quite likely) never get built. She could not hear the Leviathan discussed (as it lurched from stasis to crisis in the City) without seeing my great-grandfather's prayingmantis head and his ridiculous long white wrists extruding from his grime-polished sleeves. Not being privy to the history of the unlikely friendship, she imagined the Reverend Mr Hopkins to be a bad influence, and although this misunderstanding made her fiancé most uncomfortable he lacked the courage to set her right. She had no sympathy for the Odd Bod and to learn, for instance, that he sat beside an empty coal skuttle because it would be wicked to spend his winnings on his own comfort-it was this which was presently agitating Wardley-Fish-would merely have confirmed what she knew already: that the silly little Evangelical was as mad as May-butter.

After all the jokes he had made at the Odd Bod's expense, WardleyFish could not have justified himself to her. There were things he could not explain, and this was one of them: why he should tiptoe down the staircase of her father's house with a pretty cane basket containing "things" wrapped in cast-out tissue paper. His fiancée was with her mother at early service in Knightsbridge. There was only the Bishop to contend with. The Bishop-no stickler for the observation of the sabbath-was in his study cataloguing what he called his "brimborions and knick-knacks" by which he meant certain items of the loot that Lord Elgin's victory had flushed out of Peking. The Bishop's focus of attention was intense. It was most unlikely he would hear. But just the same Wardley-Fish came down the stairs so slowly he made them groan and creak unnaturally. He reached the gloomy patch at the bottom of the stairs where black umbrellas hung like flying foxes from their cedar stand. In a moment he would be safe and out of the door towards the stables, but before the moment arrived the Bishop-intent on fetching the crackleglaze vase from the drawing room-had flung open his study door and stood not two feet away.

"Ho," he said.

It was not fright. The Bishop did not startle easily. It was a form of shyness, of politeness-the two men were always nervous with each other. They were each anxious to demonstrate goodwill. The Bishop was in his shirt sleeves. He had his cut-down glasses on his stubby nose. He held a stack of pink index cards in his hands.

"Apples?" he said jovially, and grabbed. When the hard irregular shape benath the tissue told him that it was not an apple at all, he was embarrassed. He felt he had walked into his guest room and found his guest unrobing. He did not know what to do, whether to carry on as normal, or to place the object back in the basket and retreat into his study. He looked at Wardley-Fish with his bushy eyebrows pushing up beneath his furrowed brow.

"Coal," said Wardley-Fish, but only because he did not have the nerve to stay silent. The Bishop pushed back the tissue paper and, indeed, it was as the young man said. The Bishop crumbled some between his thumb and forefinger and put it to his nose and smelt it, but once he had done that he had nothing more to do. He did not like to ask what this extraordinary arrangement might be for. His future son-in-law did not seem free to tell him. Wardley-Fish could not, standing there at the bottom of the stair, with twenty lumps of coal held in a silly little basket, explain it, not even to himself. =

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Hymns

On the following Tuesday, Wardley-Fish happened to be in Martindale's bookshop. His fiancée had a fondness for the romantic novels of Mrs Plumber, and it was whilst she was enquiring after the most recent (in a voice that seemed, in that environment, too loud and confident) that he came across a copy of the elder Hopkins's Hennacombe Rambles. And here, with his umbrella hooked over his arm, he found a younger Oscar described as "the little botanist in skirts." This made him smile, of course. But for the rest of it, the smile became less certain and soon completely disappeared. It was as if he had netted Oscar in his home pond and could see 162

Hymns

him properly for the first time. And although he had visited the bare, wooden-floored cottage in Hennacombe and, indeed, listened at length to the elder Hopkins (who was immune, it seemed, to the freezing wind blowing through the open window) as the old man spoke of his wish that

"Christ's Kingdom should come in our lifetime," he now realized reading the book-that the pond was neither as he had seen it nor as Oscar had described it.

Wardley-Fish had an impression of a killjoy, love-nothing, a man you could not send a birthday present to in case he smelt the racetrack on it, a man who would snatch a little Christmas pudding from a young boy's mouth. But where he might have expected to find a stern and lifedenying spirit, he found such a trembling and tender appreciation of hedgerow, moss, robin, and the tiniest of sea creatures that even Wardley-Fish (it was he who thought the "even") was impressed and moved. Leaning against the counter at Martindale's with all the heavy physical awkwardness of a fellow waiting for his wife at the milliner's, he read this passage: "the pretty green Ploycera ocellata was numerous; but the most abundant, and at the same time most lovely species was the exquisite Eolis coronata, with tentacles surrounded by membranous coronets, and with crowded clusters of papillae, of crimson and blue that reflect the most gemlike radiance."

Now Wardley-Fish thought himself a man's man, steeped in brandy and good cigars, and ifexpediently-he had renounced the racecourse, he had no intention of abandoning the hunt, which he still rode to at Amersham whenever it was possible. Further, he imagined himself stupid. He had been told so long enough, and had this not been his father's opinion also, he would never have been pushed into a life as a clergyman. His early wish had been to study law, but he was told he had not the brain for it. He had not questioned this assessment and had therefore decided, whilst still at Oriel, that he could only hope to advance himself through connections, the most effective of which would be made through marriage.

He claimed to have no ear for poetry or music and yet he was moved-it nearly winded him-by the elder Hopkins's prose. Where he had expected hellnre and mustard poultice, he found maidenhair and a ribbon of spawn. "I found the young were perfectly formed, each enclosed by a globular egg, perfectly transparent and colourless."

To be able to feel these things, to celebrate God's work in such a lovely hymn, Wardley-Fish would have given everything and anything. He felt, in these simple, naturalist's descriptions, what he had never felt-what he should have felt-in the psalm beginning "I will extol 163

Oscar and Lucinda thee, my Cod, ^,

He stood at tK Kin8; and J wil1 bless Thy name for ever and ever." one would expet)C°unter' his head bowed, with that moist-eyed look returning to di^, f° ** Produced by a sentimental story. His fiancee, the saucy-eyed JVer both the changed mood and the parcel which the one had caUs'stant was wraPPingfor him, saw immediately that disposed towar^ the other' and was therefore not sympathetically liked him best», he book-She knew him as bright and jolly. She They found a ^ red Jacket fifteen hands high, ton. Riding throu!nsom outside the shop and ordered it to Kensinggreen, he contin^ Hyde Park' with a11 the deep black trees shooting his secret visit w% to think/ as he had thought, continually, since a room with only the coa1' of his friend who had jailed himself in of a terrifying vo> birdless sky for company and only the prospect

Once when he failed to look forward to.

Harrow, he had iv *s voun8' so y°ung he was not yet a boarder at a single blue starry dled with a stamP in his father's vast collection, so reverent almost With a Picture of a swan. He had been so careful, damaged. His fath^j.and yet' somehow, the perforations had been ing which made hJ' °f course' had noticed, and it was not the birchafterwards, but that? blubber into his nanny's white starched bosom caused harm, and t?e had intended only admiration, and instead had It was his charaq is harm was irreversible.

and so it would be ^.to carry the burden of his mistakes with him, not clear his mind,^Uh Oscar'

He could not put it down. He could

The carriage lurcj^ lt-Wardley-Fish, Jiearihed °n to the brid8e across the Serpentine and her and knew he diq 8 his fiancee exclaim bad-temperedly, looked at gusting to him. He f^.not like her-Her Httle plump wrists seemed disso by the powder oh choked' claustrophobic, was made particularly He wished he had u her dimPled cheek.

He had put the idea j ne out to Africa-He had thought of it for a while, ing to Africa togeth^to the Odd Bod's head-They had talked of goGardens-but there, r~this was well before the day at Cremorne now he knew he sho *d been the Problem of the water phobia. But tion that had made V^ have 8one to Africa anyway and the ambicontemptible. him court the da" ghter of a bishop seemed

He knew she would

he asked if he might j,110'like the.elder H «pkins's book, and yet when but rather in the hop Cad her a little' he d>d not do it provocatively, "Melody,"hesaid, '-^ that he might be wrong. must share my secret with you." They had not

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spoken since they left the West End and, as this silence was unusual, he knew she would be uneasy. He did not normally read at all, and he knew his purchase of a book would seem strange. Still, he pulled the string on the green parcel, smiling queerly in her direction.

"We are almost there, dearest," she said, but took the paper and string from him and began to tidy it. Wardley-Fish did not see the reproof intended.

"A little only," he said. "Here. It is written by the Odd Bod's pater and not in the least what one would expect."

She nodded, severely, she hoped.

Wardley-Fish opened the book, not at the beginning, but at random. " The body is about one and a half inches thick.' " he said (this was not quite the sort of thing he sought) " 'and the same in height, of a purplish brown hue marked with longitudinal bands of a dull lilac, each band margined with a darker colour.' "