Oscar and Lucinda

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 fiance 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 fiancee 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. =

45

Hymns

On the following Tuesday, Wardley-Fish happened to be in Martindale's bookshop. His fiancee 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