Oscar and Lucinda

done it again.

She had wasted money to be in a place whose privileges she somehow had imagined herself

'entitled' to, but once she had been robbed of the extra fifteen pounds involved, the privilege would only serve to make her feel squeezed and constricted and her voice would sound coarse, not just to others, perhaps not to others at all, but to herself. She could not imagine how anyone with warm blood in their veins could feel at home amongst the cool and polished distances in first class. She had pretended to herself that she was one of them, but she was not. And so she imagined that she would be much more at home in second class. She liked the way the secondclass cabins-they were in two tiers, like little terraces, one up, one down-all opened on to this central space, and she, conscious of her very public lack of wellwishers, was much attracted by the knot of people in second class; they were clustered around the men who had arrived by cage. It was not just curiosity made her wish to be amongst them, but something stronger, more physical, a need to push herself in amongst her kind, like a Derby hog or a rabbit in a cage. The crowd milling around the clergymen had increased since she had seen it at the gangplank. There were schoolboys. There had been four, but now there were three. These three were making a presentation of a memorial scroll to the red-headed clergyman who made a small speech in return. He moved his hands much when he spoke. He blew his nose. There was applause. There was a broad-shouldered man with a heavy beard-not a clergyman, but obviously a pedagoguewho shepherded the boys into one corner and arranged for them to have tea and cake. The fourth boy returned at this time. She wondered who was travelling and who staying. She considered, once again, transferring her baggage down to a second-class cabin, but faced with the bored

Babylon

and supercilious expressions of the stewards, did not have the energy. The red-headed clergyman was escorting the old man with the dark beard (his father, surely?), taking him from point to point around the second- class promenade, gesturing excitedly like a young artist at last admitted to the Royal Academy and the old man, excessively careful in his steps, was playing the part of the proud and newly frail. The younger woman of the party arranged herself (carefully, for she was fashionably dressed) on a velvet sofa, pressed her hands to her eyes, then looked up. Lucinda saw her smile, and returned it, not understanding that what she had thought was a smile was in reality a grimace.

Melody Clutterbuck-it was she who had grimaced-was almost sick with the embarrassment of being there. She was ill at ease and out of place. She was cowed by the ship, and yet it was not the ship that did it to her for she would not have felt like this in any other cornpany. Had she been here alone with Ian it would have been quite different, or with her father, or almost anyone she knew. But she was, by blind and unjust circumstances, forced into company with those for whom this ship was not intended and she was, therefore, one of them. She did not know which of her companions was the worst. They were an ensemble; their performance was too grotesque to be contemplated. There were, for instance, the Strattons, a type all too familiar to Melody Clutterbuck. She had observed their fellows at the dinner table of her father, the Bishop, since her earliest childhood. They smelled of dust and sherry and had shiny patches on their garments; the male had slippery eyes which could not hold the gaze a second; the female had great opinions and was noisy with her cutlery; they had what could be most politely termed 'hearty' manners. The Strattons displayed all the characteristics of their caste. They leaned forward over plates of buns which had been made with the intention of amusing children. When they had their mouths full, for that brief period when further biting was impossible, they cast eyes around like clerks from Sotheby's come to value furniture. They were grubby, of course, but it was not a grubbiness you could detect at a distance. It was there so deep within their fabrics that you might think it part of them, as indeed it was. They had cultured voices, and it was this last part, the contrast between how they sounded and how they looked, that made them so disturbing. But these were the cream of her present society. They, at least, had precedents in her world. They were 'types' and even if they were irritating, they also had a set place in the menagerie of life. But Oscar-Oscar made her flesh crawl and her hands dig into each other. Fingernail

Oscar and Lucinda

attacked flesh as if it might therefore create enough confusion in the brain, and with this smokescreen of pain block out of the other larger pain. She cound not bear the bony triangle of head. As a triangle it was far too long. The mouth occupied too small a space. The hair was quite beyond belief. He had a faint moustache now, but it was so feeble one wished to inform him there was no point persisting. She had a list. A long list. She could not, for instance, bear his fluting voice, his frightful flapping hands, his total insensitivity to how she felt about him which allowed him, in spite of everything, to bestow on her the most beneficent smiles. Even the way he ordered cocoa from the steward was, in the middle of this precise luxury, naive to the point of idiocy. The stewards, it was easy to see, were the most frightful little snobs and Melody Clutterbuck sympathized with them (she also judged themthey were only stewards) when they saw the type of person they would be called upon to serve. In first class, she presumed, one would not be so embarrassed. She looked up at the lady in first class, made a little grimace, and was pleased to receive one in return.

The famous Theophilus Hopkins (he had made such a fool of himself with his letters to The Times attacking Mr Darwin) was, if it were possible, even worse than the son. He struck her as a somnambulist. His eyes had looked at her without giving any indication of knowing what they looked at. He carried his tin box as if it were the ashes of someone particularly dear to him. When he sat down he placed the tin box on his lap and rested his tea-cup on it. And yet it was not a lack of manners that Melody found disturbing. Indeed he could rest his cup and saucer on his box and make it appear almost respectable. It was the knowledge that he was batty. He was a handsome man in his way, and quite properly dressed. His hands, it is true, were large and horny, a tradesman's hands more than a gentleman's. But none of this mattered. What mattered was that he was likely to take it into his head that the ship was Babylon. It was this that Ian feared. She watched the old man warily, unsure what he was capable of. She had already endured two prayers, one at the foot of the gangway, and another as the colossal embarrassment of the crane got under way. Ian thought he might begin to lay about him with a whip, as Jesus had driven the money-changers from the temple. She wondered what was really in the tin box and had, indeed, offered to mind it for him. The offer had been courteously declined. She thought he was staring at the crimson portieres. Ian claimed these would be the first to go. Their party, however, was by no means the only one gathering in the promenade. There was a preponderance of males and if some of

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

them appeared/ beneath their new suits, to be colonials of the rougher tvpe, then so much the better. The ranter would be stopped quickly. He picked up his tin box. She steeled herself. The son took his arms. They walked a little way and stopped. The father's eyes were dark and casting all around. • • * ••«,-..

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

The author of Cora/fines of the Devon Coast had an eye well trained to the nicest degree And although we would recognize this to be the result of synapses made by his own passions, millions of connections made like the kno: s in the butterfly net he had left hanging on his study wall in Hennaconbe, each knot occasioned by need and strengthened by use, Theophflis Hopkins, FRS, a proud man, was forever at war with any interpretation which gave him any credit at all. When he called his talent a 'gift/ he meant the word not as a simile for talent but an explanation of it. That the gift was considerable is attested to by those drawing of sea ceatures, which were his life's work.

In the context cf the Leviathan, this gift is worth insisting on, for we are discussing ore of the great literal describers of his age, a man who could observe a mtterfly, say, for ten seconds and accurately recall the form and cobration of body and wing parts.

This man saw lothing of the Leviathan. Afterwards he had almost no impression, exept a (needless) concern that the huge paddle wheels on its side were ts only means of locomotion. So if his eyes were, as Melody Clutterbick thought, 'all about,' then what they were looking at was not tcbe found in the second- class promenade or saloon, not in the library the games room, the dining room, or anywhere else he walked (one step at a time, no individual step in excess of twelve

Oscar and Lucinda

inches) as he tried to hide his arthritic pain from the beloved son the Lord had taken from him. Oscar had left home in 1859. It was now 1865 and they had only met four times in the intervening years. These meetings had been more painful than either could bear, and not because the son had become a 'sporting seat'-the father knew nothing of his source of income, imagining him supported by some Anglican mechanism-their disagreement had its roots in the most basic matters of theology. Yet every morning and every evening Theophilus had prayed for his son's soul, that he might yet sit beside God on.the Last Day, that they, mother, father, babes and Oscar, would all