Oscar and Lucinda

• August is the first month of the westerly-rude, bullying winds that I cut across from Drummoyne or scream down the river from Bedlam

I Point and Hen and Chicken Bay. By August the upstairs rooms in Lu-cinda's cottage had become cold and dark. There were no slices of silver sunshine on the cedar floor. The cat had retreated downstairs where it had inflicted one more wound on the already scratched

pine door, miaowing bad-temperedly until its mistress had let it in by the hre.

So what might we expect to find downstairs? The young manufacturer with drafting board and ruler? Or, with the day's work over, deep in the spell of Mr Dickens or Sir Walter Scott. Both Waverley and Bleak House lie on the floor beside her chair. But she cannot read them. Every word leads her, by one course or another, to Dennis Hasset, to her own situation, her lack of industrial education, practical skills, to the publicly pitied condition of spinsterhood and isolation.

Lucinda is asleep, her head collapsed on her shoulder, her book lying where it has fallen on the Turkish rug. The lower lip which looked so shockingly sensuous to Dennis Hasset not two months before, now, in sleep, seems sulky and disconsolate. Her cheeks seem quite flat. The eyes quiver behind the heavy blue-veined curtains of her lids. Her jaw is heavy, lifeless. The wind rattles the windows in their sashes. The fire hisses. There is no gas light but a smoky paraffin one whose blackened mantle needs

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Oscar and Lucinda

attention. The cat, alert, stares at the rattling window.

This is not the sleep of exhaustion. It is produced by two glasses of brandy, by the lack of oxygen in the room, but most of all by the viscous, sour, treacly chemicals of loneliness. You may suggest that she should have a maid. But she has a maid. All right, then-a maid to live with her. She has had. But she no longer wants a maid to live with her. Maids are young and alive. They have young men. They sit in the kitchen giggling. They only serve to make her feel more lonely.

Well, then-she should go out. To where? To Mr d'Abbs, of course, where she had so many pleasant times before. But it was not just the mediocrity of Mr d'Abbs's menage she found depressing, not that peculiar Sydney combination of ignorance and bull-like confidence, it was Mr d'Abbs's determination that she not live a lonely life. There was always now some

'philosopher' or 'poet' (feeling old and finally in need of marriage) placed at her lefthand side. Then she should have accepted other invitations. And, indeed, she would have liked to drink tea and talk about the most ordinary things. She would be interested in dancing the quadrille and discussing the adventures of babes in arms. Were not these things of interest in novels? Then why would they not be of interest in life?

But Lucinda had alienated all the people she might now wish to cultivate. It was not merely that her stride was wrong or her hair inadequately coiffured, her fashions, generally, inconsiderate of other feelings. She had held herself aloof. She had indicated she felt no sympathy for that loose congregation which one might call 'her class.' Even her house, the house she chose herself, placed her apart from people. Her display of arrogance would not be forgiven. Society would not invite her in a second time.

Fortunately, she did not yet realize that she was not welcome in her own works. She imagined this dry, brick-floored factory to be her home. It was her only connection with life. She liked the smell of working men, and I do not mean that in any vulgar sense, but rather that she valued the smell of common humanity. The smells suggested labour, warmth, usefulness. In winter her own house was cold. It smelt of floor polish. She could no longer bear to be there.

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She had been happy once, properly happy, deeply happy. Now, as she hung her lantern on the nail in the stables and fussed with her stubborn gelding, she could not believe what she had become.

It was nine o'clock at night. And she was going for a trot.

She did not think where this trot would end. She did not even think very much about the place in which it began. It was frightening out here on Longnose Point.

There were so many things she could not think of. Her mind was dashing along corridors while she kept just ahead of it, slamming

doors.

She was going for a trot. She tightened the harness. She walked the horse along the mud-heavy track past Birchgrove House. The caretaker was singing. He was alone and singing, drunk, too. Last week he had burned down the cow bails in the night. Lucinda kept two pistols wrapped in a blanket underneath

her seat.

Rain came in long rips and ripples. She sought out the time when she had been happy. She shut out the drunken singing. She withdrew from the westerly wind. She was in Parramatta with her father. They were going home. Their big four-wheeler crossed the cobblestones and set off, their old Waler biting at his familiar enemy, the Percheron, beside him. They got up a nice trot, a linle too fast, through the High Street (look out there!) past the doctor's phaeton, the farmers'

buckboards, the swarms of drays and sulkies. There were big-skirted women, frock-coated shopkeepers, fanners with bow-yangs tied to their trousers so their thick legs looked like sausages with their ends tied off with string. When the Waler tried to bite the Percheron, her father hit it with a long stick. She laughed to see the little jump it gave, and did not know a horse could kill you.,-,,

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Oscar and Luanda

They carried scents behind them. She could still list them, the smell of bran, of pollard, oats, the soft, dusty, yellow smell of seed wheat. The smells joined to other smells, a necklace of smells, with some in Parramatta, others along the way home where, for instance, you might find the air suddenly rich with honey, and beside the road the privet hedges not yet called a noxious weed and shaking their luxuriant white blossoms at you, or appearing to, for it was not the privet itself but rather-see, Lucy, lookee see, quick-a splendid parrot, no, three, four parrots-brilliant red, blue, such jewellery shaking the white clouds of honeyed privet.

Past Grass Corner they thundered over a wooden bridge and through a little cutting. Once her father stopped there. He gave her the reins to hold and jumped down. He was short and; wide, strong in his arms and shoulders. He did exercises to; strengthen his legs but they always stayed the same. He smelled of apples and sometimes-on the trip to Parramatta-of eau-de-; Cologne. He carried paper bags with him at all times. Any bag that came his way was carefully folded and he would not hesi- ] tate to beg or borrow from anyone who possessed a bag but did not seem to value it. Lucinda was never embarrassed by this. She; never knew that stage of life where everything her parents didthe way they spoke or combed their hair-was an embarrassment. She was not critical of paper-bag collecting. She knew the bags were there to hold her papa's soil samples and that he might at any moment (like this one now, as he jumps down from the buckboard and unfolds the handle of his neat little spade) might use the bag that had hitherto held jelly crystals to contain a scoop of astringent sand, or a pungent, black, heavy soil, heavy with humus, or a clay so perfumed it seemed, to her senses, anyway, to be as luxuriant as privet. The clay in this cutting was a wonder. You might pass through it like a lesser person, a neighbour called Houlihan, Molloy or Rourke, a person who thought no more about this clay than he thought about Livy or Montaigne, but once you stopped you could contemplate a crimson bright enough for all the robes of paradise, a nankeen yellow that might-her papa jokedbe mustard off your plate. This joke led to her eating the soil when they were off again (labouring up Dyer's Hill from which broad plateau they would descend into their own little valley) expecting she would taste, at last, that hot forbidden substance; she found it only gritty mud which her laughing

The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

father wiped off her solemn face with a handkerchief.

It was this very clay her father used to make the kitchen pots. Her mother made fun of these pots and it is true that they were lumpy and there was always trouble with getting a good seal with the lid, so much so that precious paper bags were used to fill the gaps, like the papier-mache which served to plug the gaps between the slabs of their hut, and in neither case did the paper succeed as a seal against ants (red and small black) who came to contaminate the food with the scent of formic acid.

Her mother put down a plank of timber and showed her how to roll the clay to make a snake, and with the