'Come, Miss Leplastrier,' he said good-humouredly, and 1 opened the door leading to his own office. 'Come. We will have tea brought to us.'
But behind his back he heard a little 'snick.'
Lucinda stepped into the clerks' room. There were so many men in there, and rows of desks. It was not such a bad office, better than her own. She noted the big stove, the wallpaper. It seemed ordered and businesslike, although a little dim. She saw a little man-no taller than herself-come walking towards her. She wondered where Oscar sat.
Mr Smudge
The little man, she guessed, was Jeffris. He was broader in the shoulder, more handsome and athletic than she had imagined. He was attractive, but in a dark, unsettling way she knew better than to dwell on. He seemed to prance. He had little metal taps on the soles of his shoes. She heard him come towards her. Tap, tap, tap. She was, without having any reason, suddenly, frightened. She had opened a gate and found a black dog bristling at her, growling in the dangerous part of its throat.
In her ear she could hear (but not understand) Mr d'Abbs: 'I have let him have this office, you see. A head clerk is everything. It is what it is all built on. You see, you understand. A head clerk is basalt, granite, you see, although it may not have occurred to you before.' The words were dead leaves rustling. She felt him plucking at her with fingers like a begging gypsy, sharp little fingers plucking at the crepe shoulder of her dress, the flouncing on her sleeve. Lucinda did not care for the look of this Mr Jeffris. He had dark and hostile eyes. She had earned his hate just by opening his door. It was too late to retreat and she walked beyond the reach of Mr d'Abbs's plucking invocations and out into the office, between the desks of clerks who, although they were grown men, and some of them quite stern and military in appearance, shuffled their feet and hid amongst their books like schoolchildren. She saw Oscar at last. The light was bright outside the window so he appeared to her in silhouette-the tangled shape of his hair was what marked him out. It was only when she was very close that she could see the expression on his face. He would not deny her. She saw that. He looked up and smiled but it was a pitiable expression. Oh, Lord, she thought, the poor man will have to stand. She swung on her heel. She felt the eyes of all the clerks. She smelt the alleyway, the sour smell of urine. She felt their scorn for her small body, her womanliness, for the sound of her tread on their boards. She nodded to Mr Jeffris, and to Mr d'Abbs who had returned to the open door like a dog forbidden the parlour. When she reached him, she turned.
'Thank you,' she said.
That night she heard the puzzling postscript to her visit. Everything in the office had been thrown out of kilter. Mr Jeffris had stormed into Mr d'Abbs's office. There had been shouting. The clerks had stayed
3t their desks, not looking at each other.
irn
77
Happiness
She did not
She had not known she was happy, but it had been silently remarked on by others, by the glass blowers, by Mr d'Abbs, by Mr Chas Ahearn who had paid her a visit and brought her a gift of bantam eggs. They noticed, because her manner was gentler, because they were spared those ironies and sarcasms which Mr Ahearn, for one, had thought much too pronounced of late. She kissed his cheek and called him 'uncle' and the old chap blushed to the lobes of his big fleshy ears.
Yet she had not recognized the moment when her scales had tipped from 'down' to 'up.' She had been too busy to notice, until this morning, the Sunday before Advent. She was walking with her lodger down past her piebald cottage (half of it whitewashed, half red brick). It was an hour or so before early service and the Bal main bells were still silent. Sleek Herefords (the property of the bankrupt estate of Whitefield's Farm) gorged themselves on the new spring pasture. Lucinda wore a long white cotton voile with tiny roses worked into it. She carried her gloves and prayer book in one hand and her bonnet in the other. She walked along the thin cattle track along the spine of the point. There was still dew, not a lot, but she felt it soak into the hem of her dress. She did not mind. Oscar strode through the calf-high grass beside her. Nothing happened. Nothing was
Happiness
said. But she thought-I am happy.
She looked at Oscar. He did not notice her. He was busy looking out for snakes, surveying the harbour-a sea of rough hills poured full of silver glass. H had his head up, his head down, his eyes everywhere at once. He had stuck a tiny blue wildflower into the band of his tall black hat. She thought what a pleasant companion he had turned out to be, and if they were in such disgrace that the barely educated vicar of Balmain should think it best not to 'see' them as they filed past him out of church, it was a most superior kind of disgrace. She had judged him too hastily. This was a bad habit. It had caused her trouble before. She had compared him to Dennis Hasset and had pursed her lips when he picked up his tea-cup in a certain way, or placed the pot back on the table a little too heavily. She had felt slighted when he had scurried back into his room and shut the door on her. And yet-how quickly it happened-she had come to be proud of the propriety with which they now shared the house, the sense of measured discipline (a virtue she much admired) that they brought to their conduct so that there was a great closeness, the closeness of intimates, but also a considerable distance, the distance not of strangers, but of neighbours. They occupied a positon well above those Philistines who snubbed and slighted them. God, who saw all things, would not find their conduct unbecoming. They did not gamble or take hazards of any type.
Oscar had no experience of female friendship. At first he was shy with her, stammered, tripped over himself, tried to make himself invisible around her. Only in his unholy dreams did he ever imagine anything even slightly more intimate. And if there had been a maid, this is how it might have stayed. But Mrs Froud had retired due to being in a certain condition, and there was no maid at all. There was a cottage that must be looked after, a fireplace that must be red-leaded, soap to be made, carpets beaten, the brass doorknobs taken to with halves of lemon. Seeing how the young mistress worked-quick, small steps, slap of brush, flick of duster, smack of mop, clatter of bucket, an energy quite in excess of what was promised by her physical size-the lodger took off his shiny jacket, rolled up his sleeves to reveal thin milk-white arms, and worked beside her. Lucinda was embarrassed at first. She did not think it manly.
And yet this is how they became friends, by scrubbing the pitted,
Oscar and Lucinda
checkered tiles of the kitchen floor, working side by side, creeping backwards. They did their jobs inexpertly. They drank tea by the potful and kept the leaves to use in rug-cleaning. And when they had at last finished, usually around midnight, Lucinda would kick off her shoes and let them drop on the damp floor and Oscar would put his feet up on a chair. He would be smudged with red-lead, or W. G. Nixey's black-lead, and have sticky wax on his elbows. She thought him an 'old woman,' a 'kind soul,' 'odd fellow.' Sometimes she looked at him and saw him as if she had never seen him before-a 'vision,' humming, stirring his tea with the blunt end of his knife, hooting with high laughter, talking Latin which he expected her to understand. He was, in his conversation, so elliptical, so tangential. He made her feel plain, uncultured, inelegant. She did not guess her cast-off shoes were 'dainty,' the object of his admiration. She saw what she had seen aboard the Leviathan-that he was not a man to be so easily patronized, that he was a passionate man, an enthusiastic man, who would plunge into the jungle of ideas, not fearfully, but impatiently (thwack, slap, wet clothes from the copper), but also a pleasure.
He was very homesick and liked to talk about England. It was a different England from the one which had so disappointed her. It was a dear, green place, and she could not know that the Strattons' house was damp and cold or that the Baptist boys had made him eat a stone. He talked fondly of the Strattons whom he called 'my patrons' and did not tell her that Hugh Stratton, having as much success with horse-races as he had had with farming, had used Oscar's system to lose all his capital and was into debt so deep he was now begging money from men he had not known since Oriel.
There was a bright white pack of cards in the cedar sideboard by Oscar's elbow. He saw it there, sitting
