introduction. He waved away his gesticulating servant. Lucinda imagined a fly. It was not the fly season.
'You are appointing me your proxy, then,' the clergyman said, 'is that it?'
After Whitsunday
'You are making fun of me, and most likely there is justice in that. I am being cowardly,' she nodded her head, but the nod was for herself, no* her listener. 'It is obvious to anyone that I am being cowardly, but I have thought about it and it seems I must work within the limitations of my character.'
'I was most certainly not making fun of you.'
'You would have every right…'
'Whoa, Dobbin!' cried Dennis Hasset.
Lucinda stopped.
'You wish to buy a factory to make glass. Tis a simple enough matter. Is that it?' He smiled. The smile did what the Irish accent never could have.
'Oh, yes, it is!'
'And you need a little help.'
'I
'I will be there in a moment, Frazer,' said Dennis Hasset. 'Yes, yes. Don't worry about him. No, stay, please. Soon, soon, though, I have clergyman's business to attend to. Not nearly so amusing as glass. But yes, I will help you. I did not know you half an hour ago, Miss Leplastrier, and I will tell you I am surprised to hear myself say 'yes' with such enthusiasm, but upon my word I do believe I am looking forward to the exercise. We will need to co-opt, of course. I have a friend, a very clever chap called Dawson…'
'I have more than ten thousand pounds.'
Dennis Hasset, who had risen to his feet to conclude the interview, sat down again, his face animated by a quite remarkable smile. 'The deuce you do.'
'I only wish to invest half in this venture.' She was apologetic, sorry she had mentioned the sum. She was only a girl. She had done nothing to deserve such a sum. She imagined she saw censure in his eyes.
'And the rest?' he asked, plunging into the question before his natural politeness could restrain him. If he had 'more than ten thousand Pounds' he would leave the confusions of the Church tomorrow.
'As for the remainder, I am being cautious.'
'Miss Leplastrier, you are being quite the opposite. You are being admirably reckless. When we began our little meeting I imagined it
Oscar and Lucinda
contents were transferred to a smudged journal ruled up with careful columns and the tickets themselves were held in a series of small manila envelopes in a shoe box marked
How this betting ticket came to find its way to Hennacombe was a most unpleasant mystery. Oscar, who had, until this moment, shown a lightness, even a jauntiness in manner as he sat himself at his little table, was now prickled by a hot and suspicious sweat. It was a violation. It suggested other violations, other secret and improbable intrusions. Mr Stratton had said: 'If you walk to prayers at Kidlington, I will know about it.' As he turned over the betting ticket and found the clergyman's tight black hand there, this no longer seemed hyperbole.
Hugh Stratton wrote this on the betting ticket: 'Can I assure your father that this is not yours? Or can you, instead, assure me that such a game can indeed be played for profit?' It was signed H.S. It did not occur to Oscar to label Hugh Stratton mad; that his mentor should attempt to blackmail him surprised but did not shock him. His pity for the clergyman enabled him to forgive this and all the other peevish and petty acts he continually committed against all those who came into his orbit. It was Hugh Stratton's nature that, as he became more seemingly unlovable, he was loved the more.
But what did shock Oscar was that this very private piece of paper should be spirited from his room to be used as ammunition against him. Who was the thief? Had Hugh Stratton himself paid one of his 'flying visits' while Oscar was safely in tutorial? He did not know. He also saw it did not matter.
Oscar fetched his pen and ink and-without thinking that Hugh Stratton was, once more, responsible for making his porridge cold wrote:
My dear Mr Stratton, how excited I was to receive today one of your rare (and therefore much looked forward to) epistles, and how disappointed I was therefore to discover that it was not what it appeared to be, that you had sealed the envelope, and thereby excluded what we had both wished you to include. I am sure the good Mrs Millar has, by now, discovered the letter amongst the dinner dishes and I enclose a stamp in order that it might be sped on to me and I may hear how things go in Hennacombe and how the fund for the restoration of St Anne's progresses. Professor Arnold asked to be reminded to you and said something about a borrowed book but I am afraid
•m
Une Petite Amie
I have forgot the message and, if this makes no sense to you, I will go and ask him again in order that I may deliver it more faithfully. My fondest remarks to Mrs Stratton. Your, etc., O. Hopkins. From that date Oscar left his betting tickets at the course and all the while he was at Oxford, wrote his form records in a code decipherable to no one but himself. As for Mr Stratton, he believed every word of Oscar's letter. It was neither right nor fair that a gambling student should make him feel so soiled.
36
Une Petite Amie
Lucinda did not really want a factory. She was frightened of it. She walked down to Sussex Street and watched working men emerging from the mills and wharves there. She was repulsed by them just as she was moved by them-the condition of their trouser turn-ups, the weariness of their jackets. They were alien creatures. She watched them as through a sheet of glass, as we, a century later, might look down on the slums of Delhi as a jumbo jet comes in to land. She could not know that she would, within two years, beyond the boundaries of this history, be brought so low that she would think herself lucky to work at Edward Jason's Druitt Street pickle factory, that she would plunge her hands into that foul swill and, with her hands boiled red and her eyes stinging, stand on the brink of the great satisfaction of her life. But at this time (1859) her hands were white and dry. She pitied the workers their poverty and weariness. And yet there was a way they looked at her that made her fear and hate them. It was her age, her sex, her class. She knew it. She knew it as well as you do, but the knowledge did not make it any easier for she was, so to speak, contracted to proceed. It was the factory, she felt, that gave her the entree
Oscar and Lucinda
to the vicar of Woollahra's home. It was glass that gave her this cornfort. And as a result of her meeting with Dennis Hasset a kind of a reduction, an intensification, took place so that whilst, previously, the town of Sydney had been wide and windy, the streets rude with larrikins and so many 'proper' people prepared to hoot and laugh and point at anything outside their narrow experience of life, and the whole place a-clatter with hooves and rolling iron and such a wide and formless canvas of spitting, coughing strangers that she could not endure an hour without the onset of a headache, and even though the library in George Street (her chosen retreat) had reassuring walls of books, busts of Voltaire and Shakespeare, it remained a cold, green, formal place, the territory of glowering men in high collars who might-this happened, too-'tsk, tsk' to see her there-so she remained, even amongst her books, a foreigner, friendless, without a map, until, finding the vicar of Woollahra almost by accident, the world shrank back around her. Only then did she allow herself to see how frightened and lonely she had been. Having discovered that glass was the medium wherein a friendship could flourish, she did not intend to let it go. Her need was such that the lamps stayed burning in the vicar of Woollahra's study until an hour better suited to an illegal Pak-Ah-Pu parlour in George Street. Such an offence would not go unremarked in Sydney, although had you brought this to her attention she would have asked that you refrain from patronizing her. She was her mother's daughter. She felt that she and Hasset were above the 'ruck and tumble.' They were business associates with business to discuss, manufacturers combating chemistry, philosophers with philosophy to deal with. They must study the musty journals of the Prince Rupert's Glassworks as silently as detectives investigating forgery. There were also sample bottles. My bottles, she thought. Blue, amber, clear; bottles for acid, pickles, poison, beer, wine, pills, jam, bottles with vine
