Текст книги "Oscar and Lucinda"

Автор книги: Peter Carey

Соавторы: Peter Carey,Peter Carey
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Oscar and Luanda

my breasts. He had his mother's gorgeous hair and milk skin, his mother's animations and enthusiasm, her wide eyes and, most of all, her hope. This was not a dark face that would fall prey to pride of jealousy. It was a better face, a better face by far. He offered the gift. It was all he had.

The box, as you know, was a tin box containing implements for soldering, a technique Theophilus set great store by, but one never properly mastered by his son. He had made not just the box, but the wooden handles for the soldering irons themselves. He had given up his two best bottles (ones with ground-glass stoppers) for the acid and flux. He had made a smaller box to hold the resin. On the lid of the box he had riveted a little copper plaque on which he had etched:

"O.J.P. Hopkins, a gift from his father."

But even when the son had accepted the box and thanked him for it, Theophilus could not contemplate him without agitation. He wished to kneel with him and pray. It was not shyness prevented him from doing it on Southampton railway station. (He was never ashamed publicly to bear witness.) It was the fear of being overcome with emotion. This was his flaw, the crack in his clay, and the more dreadful for being so unexpected: that one who preached so fearlessly in front of even the most hostile audience could also break down and lose control in public. He had disgraced himself at the boy's mother's funeral. He had tried to say a prayer for her. They had led him away. He had not been able to say the words. His voice had become a stranger in his throat. When he heard the name Leviathan they were in a hansom, travelling across the slippery streets towards the docks. He did not think of a ship. He knew it was a ship. He had heard the Strattons lecture him with great authority on this subject. But when he heard the word Leviathan in Southampton, he thought of the giant whom God made to impress Job with his ignorance and powerlessness.

I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportions. Who can discover the face of his garment? Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up close together as with a close seal. Out of his mouth go burning lamps and sparks of hre leap out. The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are hrm in themselves; they cannot be moved.

This was the Leviathan Theophilus saw. He stood on the wharf and stared at it.

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

He saw his son tremble before the face of Leviathan. ;

Rain stood on the edges of his hair as on a holworth blossom.

"Surely, Oscar, surely," Theophilus said, "surely you can walk." But suddenly there was a stretcher, a blindfold, a cage. He wished to say his prayer but when he began no one noticed him. The pain from his arthritis was sewn through the fabric of his day, like a bright needle threaded with dull wire. The pain prevented proper concentration, but the name Leviathan stayed with him and gave him a curious and unexpected comfort, reminding him that he should not question the will of God, that he was ignorant in His sight, that his son might not be damned after all. Theophilus Hopkins did not see the ship as the work of Satan. And what he did not like-satin, silk, plush-he did not look at. If the interior reminded him of anything, it was an Anglican cathedral, but he chose not to retain a single detail of it. He wished only to remember the face of his son.

He wished to go up on deck. He had a hunger for plain air. The sea was clean and uncorrupted. Oscar could not go up on deck. They therefore stayed below, walking up and down, arm in arm, as Theophilus had seen men do in Italy.

Oscar praised the natural lighting and thorough ventilation. He had a firm grasp of the principles. They went into Oscar's cabin where there was a sheet of celluloid, the new substance Theophilus had read about but never seen. The celluloid was marked with squares and was affixed to the porthole. He could get no proper explanation of its function, but did not persist. He thought they might say a prayer. He was wondering if the prayer he had devised on the train was the correct prayer after all. (It had been devised in jealousy and pride.)

Oscar showed how the bed folded up at day, and down at night. When the bed was down, Theophilus sat on it and was momentarily more comfortable in his joints. Oscar sat opposite him in a low chair with a carved back, but he could not be still and jigged his knee and played with his hands.

It was then that Theophilus gave Oscar the second present. It was tiny, wrapped in white tissue and wrapped with a black ribbon. It looked ominous, and the black (some leftover mourning ribbon from Theophilus's cabinet drawer) was perhaps in honour of the woman from whose womb the present had kept it, because it was said-superstitiously, of course-that such

Oscar and Lucinda

a thing would protect the child from drowning.

"Here," he said, holding it out with a hand that shook visibly. "It is your caul." And when Oscar did not understand: "From off your little head."

He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and unleashed the fragrance of Mrs Williams's ironing board. He blew his nose, not looking at his son. He was remembering a child and wife in a Devon lanemyrtles, perfumed hedges, luscious red mud, which caked so thickly on their boots that their feet became heavy and padded as creatures in a dream.

Oscar put the caul in the soldering box. It did not fit easily, but he crammed it in, jamming it around the bottle of acid, squashing it against the little box of resin, crushing the paper, kinking the mourning ribbon. He did not wish to harm it. He was much moved by the present. He clasped the lid shut and made a fuss of arranging the box on a long shelf behind his head. When he at last turned to face his father, his own expression was wary, hooded.

He was frightened of Theophilus's emotions. He could not name them. He could not guess their shapes and colours, and although he would spend the rest of his life wondering what these emotions were, now, when it appeared likely that they might be laid before him, as bare as knives and forks on a white tablecloth, he shrank from them.

He remembered his father's skin, that part of it where the black beard grew thin across the cheek, from there into the rippled mud-flat bay beneath the eyes. The skin looked like something that had been wrapped up too long. And there was a smell, a disturbing and familiar smell, which he recognized like the smell of a family home when it has not been lived in for a season. This combination of familiarity and distance was most disturbing. Also there were noises. They had been sounding for some time: electric megaphones. It would soon be time to go. Oscar felt the water stretching out endlessly behind his neck. The lines on the celluloid sliced through it, cut it into neat squares, which bled and joined again, were sliced, rejoined, sliced, rejoined. Oscar did something jolly and scuttled out on to the promenade.

The air smelt of new paint and electricity. There was also something vaporous, like brandy, and leather, like a St James's shoemaker in the week before Ascot. Through all this there threaded, subtle but insistent, the smell of the sea. Oscar imagined he detected movement in Leviathan. He stood outside his cabin door.

18/1

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

His left hand grasped the wall rail. He grinned at Melody Clutterbuck. Miss Clutterbuck barely saw the death's-head grimace. It was the father-he in the doorway behind the son-whom she was anxious about. She watched him creep from the top-tier cabin and thought he gazed around as from a pulpit. When he walked it was slowly; she did not think to attribute this to pain.

She stood and moved towards the other stair, like a customer in a bank who feels there are bank robbers in the queue in front of her but is not quite confident of her intuition. Thus she did not escape the embarrassment. She stood still, pale in the face, blood mottling the plump hands, the hands clutching the gloves she had removed for tea. She saw the elder Hopkins drop to his knees. She thought she heard a groan. She thought: Evangelicals do not kneel!

She saw a steward begin to move towards the old man, and then he stopped. The praying mantis went down beside his father. Miss Clutterbuck imagined she heard the thump of bony knees on a carpet that should have been thick enough to muffle anything. She caught, just then, her fiance's eyes, but only for a second because he-oh, you fool, you fool-was aping the fundamentalists. She looked to the Strattons but he was already on his shiny knees and she was lowering herself, resting her large hand on his shoulder. And now she saw strangers as well, those who had nothing to do with their pathetic party. A short man who smelt of wet animals came and knelt beside her. There was something horribly intimate in the sight of his balding crown. Others, some with crystal wine glasses in their hands, followed suit. The stewards remained standing, but even they folded their hands in front of them and bowed their heads like so many Baptists. Outside the megaphone continued blaring, but inside it was very quiet, and Melody Clutterbuck, not wishing to be thought a Dissenter herself, knelt.

There was a long silence, a minute, perhaps two, before Theophilus Hopkins, FRS, began his prayer.

"Oh, Lord God," he began. His voice was tangled. He began again: "Oh, Lord God, this is my son."

The next pause was shorter, but felt more painful.

"These are his friends, and fellow voyagers."

You could hear Mrs Stratton's asthmatic breathing. She was swaying a little on her knees. Mr Stratton rubbed her back.

"Oh, Lord my God," said Oscar's father, the deep voice so broken that many did not hear the last words: "What can we do?"

Oscar and Lucinda

Then he was on his feet. He touched his son, so briefly, a brush so light Oscar would always wonder if he had not invented it himself. He walked up the stairs quickly and in pain. He went out of sight with a peculiar hobble: fast, short steps and a tightly screwed up face. The congregation rose slowly, and were not keen to meet each other's eye. Down on the wharf, Theophilus Hopkins prayed again. He stood before Leviathan and a crowd gathered around him. But the scales of the giant were fitted tight together and the sound of his voice did not reach the son who would not leave the promenade.

Oscar waited for his father to return. And while he waited, while it became clear, even to him, that his father had left forever, he could look nowhere but towards the busy bulkhead through which the old man had departed. A great pain took possession of his heart and clamped around his lungs so that although he stood, in the midst of his friends, with his red lips parted, no air came to rescue him.

He thought: I will never again look upon his wise old face.

He thought: I have been a poor son to leave him all alone. He embraced Mrs Stratton, shook hands with Wardley-Fish, Miss Clutterbuck, Mr Col ville and the pupils from the school. There was a great fuss of sirens, bells, fireworks. Lucinda, watching from above, wondered why the clergyman sat by himself on the bright red chaise-longue.

Oscar was caught in the web of his phobia in the geometrical centre of the ship. He imagined everyone had gone.

49

The System

Mr Stratton gave Oscar a fright. He pushed his face close up. He did not give a warning. He came creeping over the carpet with one last glass of complimentary sherry in his hand. The boy did not look up, but Mr Stratton did not imagine himself invisible. Quite the

The System

contrary. He was the only visitor left on the promenade. He had been requested, twice already, to leave the ship. He felt his defiance bathed in limelight.

He imagined the young man waiting for him. It was only natural in his view, for there were matters too long postponed which must be spoken of between them. He had expected them to be spoken of earlier, but as they had not been, they must be spoken of now. He was a man with a nervous respect for clocks and timetables. Bells, alarms, sirens, all had a direct effect upon his physiology. But he would not be cowed by sirens today. They could row him ashore if necessary. Mr Stratton sat on the settee three feet from Oscar. He placed his sherry on its back rail. He balanced it nicely there and really did not care that the alcohol might scar the varnish. Oscar did not see him. All Oscar could see was the image cast on his retina by his departed papa's face, most particularly that pennysized area of vulnerable skin beneath the eyes.

"You can no longer put me off," said Mr Stratton. He pushed his face up close to Oscar's. Oscar leapt a good two inches from his seat.

"Hooo," he said. <•••

Mr Stratton's face stayed complacently where it was, although the hand which served it went back, searching blindly along the edge of the settee for its master's sherry. Oscar had remained very fond of both the Strattons and his pity for Mr Stratton had not diminished his feelings, quite the contrary, but today he was repulsed by the too-obvious signs of cunning he saw on the face which had once been-the past showed through the corruption of the present-so innocent and boyish.

Oscar was too preoccupied with the loss of his papa properly to grasp the clergyman's intention. He laid his hand on Mr Stratton's shoulder. "It's time," he said, "and a sad time too." But Mr Stratton's face had become tight with suspicion. It was a face that knew the world was not as it is commonly presented. It knew there were tricks and larks played everywhere, by bishops, provosts, kings, even rural deans. It was a face ripe for some heresy, one that would make even the Lord God of Hosts nothing but a vain and boastful demiurge whose claims to omnipotence were based on ignorance and pride.

"There has been enough of cat and mouse," said Mr Stratton, pinning his eyes to Oscar's, "you must tell me now."

When Oscar looked at Mr Stratton's eyes, he felt that he must never have done so before this moment, that he must have, through

Oscar and Lucinda

politeness, even squeamishness, have slid around them, knowing he would see only unhappiness there. Today he was not permitted to avoid them. They were blue and watery; the whites were yellow, veined, stained, like the porcelain basin at the Swan in Morley. Mr Stratton's hand brought the sherry glass to his mouth. The lower lip reached out to anticipate it. The foot of the glass came close to Oscar's nose.

"We have looked after your poor father," he said, "as best we could. We fed him when we could barely afford to feed ourselves and we could have no expectation of reward, at least not on this earth. Similarly, we looked after you. You could not imagine we had profit in mind," Mr Stratton laughed, a shallow noise made from old air at the back of the throat. "We educated you so you might bear witness. We did not think we were assisting a wealthy man." Mr Stratton looked around the promenade, underlining the opulence of their surroundings in a manner which, had it occurred upon the stage, would have been pure ham but which here, driven before the rough current of his hurt, served only to fill Oscar's heart with shame.

"I thank you," Oscar said, "I have always-"

"I have been thanked before," said Mr Stratton. "I cannot think that it has been beneficial to be taunted with fancy coffee or mysterious packets of currency." For a moment Oscar was angry. The amounts he had sent the Strattons had not been insubstantial.

"Naturally you wish to speak to me," said Mr Stratton. "You do not wish to taunt me any longer." And he opened his mouth a little as was his habit when waiting for someone to speak. The tip of his pink tongue flicked quickly across his sherry-sticky lips.

The sirens were blaring. They had changed their tempo and were now short, sharp, insistent, like dagger thrusts into taut white canvas.

"Now you will tell me, God help me. You cannot leave without it." He took Oscar's wrist and squeezed it. He would not let it go. It hurt. "How does a Christian clergyman acquire the funds to travel in such luxury? I am not a cadger. I do not come to you with a begging letter. I am sunk low enough, but not so low. You must tell me how it is you have managed."

"You would not find the story pretty."

"You need not worry about my sensibilities, little lad." He gave the wrist a harder squeeze and his mouth, for that moment, was twisted by the spasm of his anger. "My poverty does not allow them."

"You would not be proud of me."

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The System

"Would not? Am not. Oh, I pray You, stop him prattling."

"If I were to tell you and my papa were to hear of it, it would be a torture beyond his toleration."

"You have my word he never shall," said Hugh Stratton and, seeing that Oscar still hesitated,

"oh, dear Oscar, you must accept my word."

"I have gambled," said Oscar, "as you long ago suspected."

"So," said Mr Stratton, and let out some air, "gambled."

"I think the ship is moving."

"You have a system, then? Is that what it is called?"

"A system?"

"Yes, a system. Temple has explained them to me. You have a system and you will write it down for me."

And, indeed, he was selecting, from the over-full pocket of his shiny coat, a used envelope and a stubby pencil which he now managed to push at Oscar without ever once letting go his painful hold on the wrist.

"It is not so simple. It is not a thing you can just write down. We have left it too late." Mr Stratum's hand relaxed its grip on the wrist and his jaw was slack and all the skin on his face seemed lifeless and crushed, a second-hand substance from the bottom shelf in the scullery. Oscar wished to retrieve his wrist, but did not.

"Write it down, boy, please, I beg of you."

He did not know what it was he was asking. It was not possible. The charts and tables that made up the system were contained in sixteen black clothbound journals. They were at once as neat as the boxes of buttons he had classified in his father's house, all ruled with columns and divisions, and, at the same time, smudged and blotted. His hand was a poor servant to his mind-the first was a grub whilst the second was a fastidious fellow with white cuffs on his sleeves and a tyrant for having everything in its place.

These notebooks were in his trunk. They would be worth nothing to him in New South Wales. Surely there was time to run to his cabin and thrust them into Mr Stratum's hands. The clergyman would not understand them, of course, but the explanation could be conducted by mail and what was important was the gift. For the books did prove that a man could make a good living at the track if he should apply himself with Christian industry. But no, he could not relinquish them.

He did not know why he could not. He had not expected to be asked, and when it happened he felt not generosity, but anger and confusion.

Oscar and Lucinda

The books were so intimately involved with his life, were his life, his obsession, his diaries, his communion with his God, his tie to the monster who must be fed. They were private. They were secret. They were five years' work. He had travelled all over the south of England recording the coded information therein. He had assembled a history which, blots and smudges aside, was superior to any bookmaker at Tattersall's-the record of five hundred and twenty-five racehorses, positions, weights, whether rising in class or in weight, distances of race, conditions of track, etc, etc. And although he did not bet on mares or fillies, he had the information on them just the same.

"Please, I ask you to leave me, Mr Stratton," said Oscar gently. "You hold a very dangerous secret and can therefore be confident I will write to you from New South Wales. I will tell you how I have achieved it."

He was a miser. He was unchristian. He must give away the books. Even if he had owed the Strattons nothing, he should give away the books. But he was a weasel, cunning with excuses, with substitutes.

"I will send the letter to you by return post from Sydney. I give you my solemn word before God. And you are quite right that I have been thoughtless and unkind in not thinking of your situation. I feared only that you would inform my papa."

Hugh Stratton held the gaze of the young man's clear eyes/not quite daring to trust them.

"Write it down."

"It is not so simple. I cannot." '

"You swear before God?"

"I do."

What did he swear? Simply that he could not transcribe the books in five minutes. This was true, quite true, but he had become too clever at this weaseling kind of "truth," which was not a truth at all.

"Is it horses?"

Give him the books. Give them.

"It is."

Mr Stratton let go the wrists. He nodded. He opened his mouth to say something, but the sirens triumphed. He nodded once more, then again. He was making a dangerous decision on how to fund his betting programme. He ran up the stairs, grimacing with the pain in his sciatic nerve. At the top of the stairs he called out something but Oscar did not hear. He was examining the bright red bracelet Mr Stratton had imprinted on his skin. He sat in the sumptuous cavern of the secondclass promenade, alone with this new knowledge of his corruption.

50 Pachinko

In order that I exist, two gamblers, one Obsessive, the other Compulsive, must meet. A door must open at a certain time. Opposite the door, a red plush settee is necessary. The Obsessive, the one with six bound volumes of eight hundred and eighty pages, ten columns per page, must sit on this red settee, the Book of Common Prayer open on his rumpled lap. The Compulsive gambler must feel herself propelled forward from the open doorway. She must travel towards the Obsessive and say an untruth (although she can have no prior knowledge of her own speech): "I am in the habit of making my confession."

But even this, a conclusion which requires, of the active party, a journey as complex as that of a stainless steel Pachinko ball (rolling along grooved metal tunnels, sloping down, twisting sideways, down into the belly of Leviathan, up, sideways, up, up, and out of the door to face the red settee) might not have taken place if the ventilation system of Leviathan had not displayed a single eccentricity of which its designers had been totally unaware. The eccentricity was this: it carried conversation from one stateroom to another, and that was how Lucinda was haunted by the sounds of bored stewards playing cards all night. They were not in the stateroom next to hers. That was empty, as were all the other first-class staterooms which she had imagined, when looking at the shipping company's brochures, would supply her with companionship for the voyage. (There were Bavarians in Imperial first class, but these were separated by a silken blue rope.) The stewards were several empty staterooms along, and such was the design of the ventilators that had they been closer, she might not have heard them at all. Their conversations were perfectly transmitted, as if every one of them had a voice tube of his own.

She could not read because of it. It was not the noise. It was the subject matter. Now, she thought, it is Tuppenny they play, now Blind

Oscar and Lucinda

Jack, now poker. The cockney with the high voice is the best player. She liked him. She imagined him with sandy, spiky hair and a habit of screwing up his eyes. He would grin a lot. Sometimes he would suck a match. He would give away no secrets. There was another one who always spoke more quickly when his hand was good. This one was from Liverpool. He was, of all of them, the most worried by his new job. He was previously chief steward of the Sobraon and Lucinda would have learned, if she had not known already, that the Sobraon was a wellregarded ship. This man's chief had been so outraged that he would depart his post for another ship that he had said that the chief steward would never be signed on again by him, "Not," he kept repeating, "under no circumstances whatever."

The stewards thought of themselves as the "crème de la crème." They were proud of their work. They were not the simple snobs that Melody Clutterbuck imagined. It was she who was the snob. These men were perfectionists. They were as proud as glass blowers. They had been tricked. They expected to serve people who would respect, or at least recognize, their finesse; but instead they found a preponderance of colonial bullies who wished to lord it. Down in second class there was a Mr Borrodaile, a rich and argumentative man who got drunk and threw biscuits down the ventilator.

Lucinda liked them all without seeing them. She would like to sit around a table with them. They could smoke and have a drop too much. She would not mind.

She did not belong in this stateroom with its vast curved empty space, its maroon carpets, its shiny icing of luxury. She did not even belong in the clothes, smart clothes from Marian Evans's dressmaker in the Burlington Arcade, and she recognized, the first night in her stateroom, with Barchester Toivers resting in her lap, that it was only at Mr d'Abbs's house that she could be relaxed amongst ordinary people.

If these stewards had met her in the company of Mr d'Abbs, Mr Fig and Miss Malcolm (and it was by no means possible) they would play cards with her and not think about it. They would see that she could laugh, even drink and, if they were not careful, fleece them of their shore pay at three in the morning. It was a vulgar house, it was true, and in many ways, quite morally doubtful. It was a shock to realize that one "belonged" there-it was so second rate, colonial, even ignorant, but she could sit at the table there and not feel herself constrained by the corsets of convention. She did not have this dreadful tightness, in the throat, the arms, the chest. In the dining room these stewards were actors in a play-they used

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Pachinko

different voices. She could not match the voice she heard at night with the voice that served her in the morning. When she sat at table she felt complicitous with them. She imagined that they, like her, felt restricted by their parts.

Meals, in any case, were an embarrassment. The dining room was all Grecian, with fluted columns, empty tables. There were four reluctant officers appointed to dine with her. She entered, blushing red. She ate as quickly as politeness would allow. She knew (or imagined) that her character, her passions, her occupation would all be unacceptable, even shocking, at this table. Her companions thought her a mouse. So she was. They made her one. She would rather have been playing Blind Jack or poker. There was, she thought, as she sliced her grey roast beef, so much to be said in favour of a game of cards. One was not compelled to pretend, could be silent without being thought dull, could frown without people being overly solicitous about one's happiness, could triumph over a man and not have to giggle and simper when one did it. One could kill time, obliterate loneliness, have a friendship with strangers one would never see again, and live on that sweet, oiled cycle of anticipation, the expectation that something delicious was about to happen. Which is not to say that the pleasures were all related to gain or greed. One could experience that lovely lightheaded feeling of loss, the knowledge that one had abandoned one more brick from the foundation of one's fortune, that one's purse was quite, quite empty, had nothing in it but a safety pin, some dust, its own water silk lining, and no matter what panic and remorse all this would produce on the morrow, one had in those moments of loss such an immense feeling of relief-there was no responsibility, no choice. One could imagine oneself to be nothing but a cork drifting down a river in a romantic tale by Mr Kingsley. In her first months as proprietor of the Prince Rupert's Glassworks she had played a hand of cribbage with the men during their breaks. She had seen this as a way whereby she could get to know them. But within a month they sent a message to her (back through Mr d'Abbs of all people) that they did not think it "proper" that this practice continue. She would never be able to think of this message-delivered by an embarrassed Mr d'Abbs in the foyer of Petty's Hotel-without feeling the sting of their rejection. It hurt out of all proportion. It would not go away. She thought: All the time I have enjoyed the games, they have thought me a tart or something worse. She wished to weep for her stupidity, or slap them for theirs. She had been proud of what the works produced. She was moved

Oscar and Luanda

by the process as she always would be by the collaborative nature of human endeavour. She saw she had purchased a hell-hole that must always be a hell-hole and yet she was much affected by the way the men made themselves into a chain with chaos at one end and civilization at the other-the cockeyed little first gatherer, the sturdy, barrelchested second gatherer, the handsome old third gatherer who would never be a master, the blower himself with his great grey beard and his arms as big as a boy's legs, the finicky stopper-offer who ran about, fast, bent over, like a mynah bird on a branch. She had felt it wrong to be the proprietor of such a hell-hole where the men must work in water-doused chaff bags, be awake at three a.m. (or ten p.m. or dawn) to meet the demands of the furnaces. But even though she could never become romantic about the hardness of their lives she also came to envy them their useful comradeship and it was through the doorway of a game of cards she hoped to enter it. She aspired only to play a useful part in manufacture, even though she was their "master."

Their rejection of her produced the most unchristian passions in her breast. "No gentleman," they told her, "would gamble with a lady." Her feelings were of the same order as those of a parent who wants to dash a howling baby to the floor.