Oscar and Lucinda

She stepped back to allow the steam crane to pass along its rails and, looking up to see what it might be carrying, saw a bellowing Poll Hereford with a canvas sling under its middle. The crane stopped and began to lower its burden on to the top of that mighty riveted cliff wall which was Leviathan.

The wharf resembled a sale yard and reminded the woman with the small bright eyes of the days she had gone into Parramatta with her father to buy a pig or sell the vealers. The air was redolent with fear and wet fur. The beasts were scouring, and thinking of this, she resolved to stand beneath no more airborne beasts.

She walked past the corralled animals, and did not mind the stares of the oilskin-wrapped shepherds who could not imagine why a woman, one of her class, would walk along a busy wharf in the rain. She was accustomed to this sort of stare and while she felt the implicit threat in it-the voodoo of a group of men-she was now a woman who employed such men, and her old fears in the face of their insulting confidence were allayed by the knowledge of her economic strength. It was wrong that she had this strength but she was, thank 168

In a Trice

God, pleased to have it. She did not make them lower their eyes, but she already had the power to do so. This power was primed by money, but it was not fuelled by it. And it was this, this turbulent, often angry sense of her own power, that was most responsible for her being lonely in London. Even George Eliot, no matter what her fiction might suggest, was used to young ladies who lowered their eyes in deference to her own. Lucinda did not do so. The two women locked eyes and George Eliot mentions (in the letter already quoted from) 'a quite peculiar tendency to stare.' It may well have been this, not her bitsand-pieces accent, her interest in trade, her lack of conversational skills, her sometimes blunt opinions or her unladylike way of blowing her noselike a walrus, said George Eliot-that made her seem so alien. And when she did, at last, lower her eyes, her lids were heavy and sensuous. They produced an effect which was ungenerously described as 'sly.'

She walked past the long-nosed Derby hogs, all pushed into each other like pieces in a puzzle, and found a great collection of wet and rusty cages and two men arguing over one of them, A hansom clipped past them, bursting with clergymen, or so it seemed. She noticed the unusual red hair of one of them, but only in passing, being more taken by the argument which concerned one cage only, it being, apparently through error, filled with wet and shivering rabbits.

'Crikey Moses!' said the short one. He had an eager sort of face with heavy sandy eyebrows pressing down upon his blinking eyes. 'The blessed colony is half eaten out by rabbits. Why would I want more?' He screwed up his face and sent his voice up into falsetto.

'Don't ask me, guv. It's all writ here.'

'Ill take the rest, but not the rabbits.'

'Sorry, guv, t'ain' either or. It's all or bleeding nothing.' Lucinda walked amongst the cages: rabbits, pigeons, pheasants, all addressed to a body known as the Acclimatization Society of New South Wales. There were also deer, half a dozen does and three bucks, all the males in separate cages, and one of them already bleeding badly around the head. And lastly, there were llamas, standing still and wet, each one in a separate cage, all marked with stern signs forbidding any contact. Lucinda tried to pat a doe, but it pulled its head away sharply and, when she persisted, tried to bite her.

She turned to walk back to the first-class gangway. The rain was beginning to ease back to its more usual drizzle. An officer, done up in braid like an Italian, saluted her. There were fifty-five days to Sydney. Fifty-five days before she would know if Dennis Hasset had-she bit 169

Oscar and Lucinda

her lower lip and scrunched up her eyes-married Harriet Borrodaile or Elizabeth Palmer. His letters had mentioned 'the most appalling dances' but she did not trust the description. Dear God, let him still be a bachelor, not that I might marry him, but that he may be my friend. Dear God, please leave me someone with whom I can talk.

The rain started again, heavily, and the gangway ahead would not clear. She lifted her umbrella to see properly, peering up from the fourth step. It would appear that there were problems with an invalid. She recognized the red-haired clergyman as the one who had arrived in a hansom, or, rather, recognized the hair. It was he who was the invalid. She thought it strange they should carry a man backwards up a gangplank. But then, as she watched, she saw they were no longer going up, but coming down. And this was how she first saw Oscar, although there was not a lot to see because he had his hands pressed to his face.

The Reverend Oscar Hopkins was carried, moaning, backwards, off the Leviathan. The Reverend Ian Wardley-Fish carried the stretcher at the end where his feet were, and the Reverend Hugh Stratton, in spite of his bad back, carried the other. There were also, in this entourage, Mrs Stratton, Melody Clutterbuck, and Theophilus Hopkins, a bleakfaced old man whose eyebrows needed trimming; he carried a box full of soldering implements he had made especially for his son.

As Lucinda watched, the red-haired clergyman was blindfolded.

The handsome one with the blond beard clapped his hands together. The red-haired one was still moaning. The blond-bearded one said: 'Speed. We need speed, Hopkins. That will do the trick.' Then he clapped his hands together again, and gazed around like a man looking for a stick to kill a snake. He was quite drenched.

The old man with the grey-streaked beard held his gift like a sodden magus who has arrived at a disappointing destination. 'Surely,' he said, fiddling with the neck button of his oilskin, 'surely, Oscar, you can walk?'

A large frowsy blonde woman with a loud Oxbridge voice and an enormous bosom now came forward and began to tug at the old man's coat. 'Come,' she said, 'come, we shall go aboard.' Lucinda pushed past and got on to the gangway before they could cause any more trouble. She found the English tiresome in the extreme. She acknowledged one more ostentatious salute and hurried to her stateroom. She left her umbrella dripping by the door, took off her hat, unlaced her boots, and then, with nothing on her feet but stockings, sat at the little bureau and tried to write in her journal.

170

Babylon

For all the things that had happened to her, all the people she had met, the miles of ocean she had covered, she could feel nothing worth writing except: 'An exceedingly grand apartment which I spoil by the excess of irritation and agitation I carry with me everywhere. Would dearly love cribbage.'

She heard the crane's donkey engine. She leaned forward, to see if she might catch a glimpse of one more cow, when a large cage swung past the porthole, so close she involuntarily flinched. In the cage were three clergymen, the blindfolded one, looking quite green, squatted in the middle. His mouth was open. She could not hear what noise he made. The older clergyman (he looked like an aged boy) held the blindfolded one's arms. He looked very still and very pale and his mouth was shut. But the blond one with the mole was all animation. His hands were raised. His eyes were dancing. He looked as though he would shortly spring into the air. Lucinda could hear him quite distinctly.

'In a trice,' he shouted, 'I told you, Hopkins-in a trice.' 47 Babylon

The saloons and cabins of the Leviathan were lofty and ornate. There was carving, scrollwork, plush. The grand saloon, in which Lucinda Leplastrier stood, quite alone, was almost three times her height, was sixty-two feet long and thirty-six feet wide. Two great funnels passed through this room but were covered with eight panels, four larger ones, which were mirrors, and four smaller ones, ornamented with paintings of children and emblems of the sea. There were couches upholstered in red plush, settees in Utrecht velvet, a carved mahogany organ, buffets and tables of elegantly carved walnut, arabesque panels filled with sentimental paintings. There were Brussels carpets on the floor and-those items Wardley-Fish had selected as somehow expressing

Oscar and Lucinda

the quintessential nature of the Leviathan's unseemly opulence portieres of carmine silk. One could lean across the rail of the grand saloon as Lucinda did now, and gaze down into the second-class promenade. And whilst it is true that Mr Ishmael Kingdom Legare had not been quite so lavish there, he had, just the same, been generous with comfort and with space and if brutal iron girders crossed the ceiling of second classthey were also sympathetically decorated (after an oriental theme), being painted blue and red alternatively, the underside edged with gilt and the spaces between the beams divided into panels which were very lightly decorated in colour and gold.

Lucinda looked down at the second class and liked it better than the place she was in. She thought: I have