Текст книги "Oscar and Lucinda"

Автор книги: Peter Carey

Соавторы: Peter Carey,Peter Carey
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"Oh, do not be so hurt," she snapped.

"It is on your behalf I hurt."

"I thank you, but on my behalf it would be best if we did not discuss the matter." Lucinda did not like herself like this. She knew herself wrong and also in the wrong. She was poisoned by that hateful sermon, by its crudeness, its intolerance, its certainty of its own whiskyand-tobaccosmelling strength. And now she snapped and slapped at the one soul whose goodness and kindness she would not question. She was acting like a spoiled child, like her mother had acted on the days when her daughter hated her, and although she knew all this, she could not stop herself. She was tearing Christmas Day to shreds.

She had put such store in this day, and not merely in the care with which she chose a turkey and a pair of pale blue poplin shirts for her dear friend. In her imagination she had seen all the unspoken things between them come, at last, to be spoken of directly. She had imagined the shirts laid across the faded damask of the parlour armchair, seen crumpled paper and golden ribbon discarded on the blood-red Turkish rug. And other things, like kissing, but not quite so sharp and clear, with furry unfocused edges like a water-colour.

But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love. She drew herself into herself, and when they let themselves into the cottage she could not even look at the table she had set with so many feverish thoughts. She told herself: It does not matter what bigots think of me.

But it did matter. She could not bear to be so hated.

She took down the chipped brown-glaze tea-pot. She put the kettle on the stove and riddled the grate and then, feeling her tears well up inside her, she hurried upstairs to her room. Oscar saw the tumescent top lip and understood her intention. She was going to her room to cry.

Christmas Day

But he was to propose to her.

If he delayed the matter further all courage would depart him. And this is why he went chasing after her, up the clattery uncarpeted stairs, two strides at a time. He caught her on the landing and he dare not ask her to accompany him downstairs to some prettier place-he saw she would almost certainly refuse this for, not understanding his intention, she had a cornered, wild-eyed look. So it was here, in the gloomiest corner of the cottage, the sticky place were Prucilla Twopenny had once spilled a pot of honey from her mistress's breakfast tray, that Oscar put his proposal to Lucinda Leplastrier.

Some peeling wallpaper tickled against Lucinda's neck. She hit at it, imagining a spider. Oscar put his hand in his pocket and jiggled his pennies and threepences together. He wished to be principled. He did not wish to take advantage of a situation where a Christian and gentlemanly act would so benefit his personal desires. He therefore excluded from his breathless speech everything good and noble in his heart. He jiggled his change. He tapped his foot. He offered to marry her to "save your reputation in Balmain."

"Oh, no," she said, "you are too kind to me."

And thus fled to her room. There she wept, bitterly, an ugly sound punctuated by great gulps. She could not stop herself. She could hear his footsteps in the passage outside. He walked up and down, up and down.

"Come in," she prayed. "Oh, dearest, do come in." But he did not come in. He would not come in. This was the man she had practically contracted to give away her fortune to. He offered to marry her as a favour and then he would not even come into her room.

Later, she could smell him make himself a sweet pancake for his lunch. She thought this a childish thing to eat, and selfish, too. If he were a gentleman he would now come to her room and save her from the prison her foolishness had made for her. He did not come. She heard him pacing in his room.

It was into this environment that Mr Jeffris came with his hock bottle and his meticulously wrapped little gifts. He brought a packet of Eleme raisins for Lucinda and a brass compass for Oscar. And although he was not exactly a jolly man, and was, indeed, for the most part angry and when not angry rather doleful, he was capable of charm when there was sufficient reason for it. He was compact and good-looking with a great deal of lustrous black hair and very white even teeth beneath his big moustache and when he engaged you in conversation

Oscar and Lucinda

he had the trick of holding your eyes-no matter where his obsessive mind was really dwelling-as if what you had to say was of great importance to him. He was, as Mr d'Abbs would later claim, an actor, although not such a good one that he would, in normal circumstances, have deceived Lucinda.

But the circumstances were not normal and it was Mr Jeffris who rescued them from the embarrassment and estrangement of their ruined Christmas Day. His hock was warm and more than a little acid, but they drank it thirstily and ate his raisins and shared their shortbread and laughed gratefully at his jokes and talked about the journey to Boat Harbour in such a shy and tentative way that Mr Jeffris, not understanding the personal aspect of the matter, began to think that his own speech had "put them off."

"You should not pay much heed to my little speech in Sussex Street," he said. He smiled and tugged at his moustache and seemed to be debating as to whether he would continue to take them into his confidence. "I will tell you," he said. "My situation is that I am employed, eh? For the present at any rate. And while I am employed it is a case of he-who-pays-the-ftddler-calls-thetune, isn't that so, Miss Leplastrier?"

"Mr d'Abbs required you to answer in this way?" Lucinda asked. Mr Jeffris could see he did not have her full attention. He could not know that her mind was much occupied with the question of the lamp and whether she had turned it down low enough to hide the evidence of her red-rimmed eyes. Mr Jeffris thought the expedition in grave danger of being stillborn.

"He did not specifically tell me to answer as I did, Miss Leplastrier, but I understand my employer well enough. You must have noted how happy the little chap was with the answer I gave." (He said "little chap" on purpose. It was calculated to communicate the complications of their relationship.) "It has been on my conscience ever since. I mean, that I deceived you. I thought I might write you a note, and then there was too much delay involved in such a plan. I never like delay. There is so much of it that can be avoided. It is true in business and in journeys. So I said to myself, this is unnecessary delay, and besides," Mr Jeffris smiled at them, first at Oscar, then at Lucinda, "it was Christmas, so I called in person."

"It is very kind of you," said Oscar, squirming in his seat and hazarding a smile towards Lucinda whose moods and motives were of far more importance to him than Mr Jeffris's; so although he was, indeed, puzzled by the pleasant transformation of the head clerk's character,

Christinas Day

his interest in the man was of a much lower order than his interest in Lucinda Leplastrier who now, in the lamplight, bestowed such a sweet smile on him that he knew his rude assumption about marriage now to be forgiven. He might not be loved, not yet, but neither was he to be hated as he had feared all through the dreadful afternoon. He would not propose again until he had made the journey which Mr Jeffris was, at this very moment, so enthusiastically discussing. Oscar heard him say that there was, contrary to what he had said in Mr d'Abbs's office, a safe way to Boat Harbour.

"Provided," Mr Jeffris said, spreading butter on his shortbread and thereby causing Lucinda's eyebrow to raise itself, "provided you will gently-gently catchee monkey." It did not occur to Oscar that this philosophy did not mesh with one that could not tolerate delay. He was more interested in the butter on the shortbread and raised an eyebrow of his own and thereby-ah! – caused Miss Leplastrier to smile.

"You have probably heard about the butchering habits of the northern blacks," said Mr Jeffris. They had. They did not raise any more eyebrows. Mr Jeffris had their complete attention.

"This is the direct result," said Mr Jeffris, "of rushing. They are incompetents. They go straight through the centre of the niggers' kingdoms. It is like thrusting your bare hand into a beehive and it gets them hopping mad, ma'am, whereas if you took your time, as I should, and went around the boundaries," his whole demeanour changed; you could see his shoulders loosen; his hands soften, "why, as you can imagine, Jacky-Jacky would be pleased to let you be." The woman was alert and thoughtful. She asked: "Who knows these boundaries?" He answered: "I do."

He liked that. An answer like a pistol shot.

It was a lie. He had read some thoughts on the matter in the journals of Mrs Burrows's late husband (not a clever man) who had spent his last months like a chap rolling amongst beehives with a blazing torch. Mr Jeffris took these musings (you could not call them theories) and developed them as he spoke. He did not think that he was lying. Neither, had he paused to see what he was doing, would he have denied it to himself. He would now say anything which would result in him being put in charge of this expedition. He would write such journals as the colony had never seen. Every peak and saddle surveyed to its precise altitude. Each saw-tooth range exquisitely rendered. His

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prose would have a spine of steel and descriptions as delicate as violet petals, Mr Jeffris was a coster's son and although he now despised salesmen he had a salesman's skills and he spoke to Lucinda directly and often, not because he valued the opinions of women (he did not) but because he saw that this one was at least as important as Mr Smudge in deciding whether or not his lovely journals should e'er be born. He did not flirt because he saw this would not be welcome, but if it had been welcome, then he would have flirted without Oscar being aware of it.

Lucinda opened the bottle of claret she had intended for their lunch. And when Mr Jeffris finally departed, sometime in the early hours of Boxing Day, she and Oscar sat at the table in the garden and-midst the heavy perfume of the citronella which they rubbed on their faces and arms to keep away mosquitoes-ate cold dry turkey and drank strong black tea.

They said nothing to each other about the incident on the landing. Yet they thought of little else and all their tender feelings, their shyness, embarrassment, hurt, their edgy, anxious, sometimes angry love, were like loose flecks of precious thread caught in the warp of a sturdy carpet, incorporated in that conversation which concluded with them wondering if it might be (a) possible and (b) ethical to persuade Mr Jeffris to take a leave of absence from Mr d'Abbs so he might lead the expedition to Boat Harbour.

87

Gratitude

Long, scythed sweeps of sunshine ran across the carpet, cutting through dull olive and leaving it a mown and brilliant green. Mr d'Abbs sat with his mustard-checked knees in sunshine, his face in shadow. It was difficult to see his expression, but his voice, no matter what

•«n

Gratitude

private outrage he might feel about the theft of his head clerk, revealed only his own great satisfaction with himself, and if he was put out by these uninvited visitors, he did not show it. Lucinda sat on the edge of what was normally "Mrs Burrows's chair" facing Mr d'Abbs. She rolled open the plans, but they were not inclined to stay open and so Oscar held one edge for her. The plans were beautiful. Oscar was surprised that anything so light and fanciful had come from the gold-ringed hand of Mr d'Abbs. Fine graphite lines, soft crinkly yellow tissue paper-it was as though he held the map of a thought between thumb and forefinger.

"Mr d'Abbs," said Lucinda, "this plan has taken you eight weeks." Oscar thought: She is already doing that which, not half an hour before, she has sworn she will not do. She has not even complimented him.

Mr d'Abbs stiffened slightly. He crossed his legs. He had dainty feet and slender ankles. "Rome," he said, "was not built in a day."

Oscar crossed his legs too, in sympathy. His right knee clicked. He worried about his knees. Soon he would have to walk beside the wagons Mr Jeffris was commissioning. He would have to walk day after day, week after week. It was for this reason that he soaked his feet in methylated spirits every night and why, by day, he wore these extraordinary boots which caused his feet such pain.

"And what size sheet have you planned for?" asked Lucinda. She smiled, but she was not an actress and her cheeks-as they always did when she was unhappy-seemed to disappear; the smile was as bleak as a cipher scratched on the wall of a house.

"Oh," Mr d'Abbs's rings fluttered through the sunshine, retreated into shadow) "oh, 111 leave that to your discretion."

"But, Mr d'Abbs," she pronounced it Mis-ter, "I specified a particular sheet size." Oscar watched with alarm as Lucinda tried to hold her anger in its place. Her sinuses seemed to swell visibly. Her nostrils flared. Her hands were leaving damp stains on the crinkly yellow paper. She said: "That is the whole point."

"Your point." Mr d'Abbs uncrossed his legs and then crossed them the other way.

"My point, yes."

"But not my point."

"It is my life that is involved here, and yours only to the most limited extent. Your point, with respect, Mr d'Abbs, does not matter."

"There is no respect in that at all, Miss Leplastrier, and simply

«I

Oscar and Lucinda

saying 'with respect' does not put it there."

There was an alarming silence. Oscar could hear Lucinda breathing. He was afraid she did herself no credit with this behaviour and, in truth, he did not understand why she should be so very angry. It was a fanciful church, he saw that, and perhaps a little pagan, but that, surely, was not the root of the problem. He prayed: Dear Lord, grant her patience, and charity. But all Lucinda could see was an irreligious nightmare, a bloated monument to ignorance and tastelessness-curved canopies, Moorish screens, Tudor gables, Japanese "effects." It was a monster, too-one hundred feet across.

"An artist," Mr d'Abbs was saying, "cannot be constrained by blacksmiths."

"But, Mr d'Abbs, don't you see-you have taken eight weeks and I cannot build what you have drawn."

"Miss Leplastrier," (Mr d'Abbs's voice had a tremor in it) "eight weeks is nothing." He stepped into the full glare of morning sunshine. His eyes were baleful. His chin was quivering. The hands that had begun by gesturing so freely were now clasped tight, one manacled to the other behind his back. He sat down. He looked around the walls at all his crowded landscapes. He smiled. His eyes pleaded. "Eight weeks is nothing for a building that will last a century." As Mr d'Abbs spoke and as Lucinda looked at this tawdry church she began to suffer a tight, airless feeling in her chest. The fact that the object of their bet was now made to appear at once so vain and mediocre and that it was, in any case, impossible to build, conspired to act as a catalyst in Lucinda's soul, to make a focus for all the vague unease she harboured about the bet, and fearful thoughts which she had hitherto managed to keep submerged, now bubbled up like marsh gas and burst, malodourous, in the very forefront of her conscious mind. The tight band across her chest was a not unfamiliar feeling. It normally came on her after a night spent at the gaming tables. It was a panic produced by the fear of throwing away her fortune. She pressed her forearms against her abdomen. She looked to Oscar, wishing only that he would dispel her panic with a smile.

Oscar uncrossed his leg. His knee clicked again. He folded his arms which were sore as a result of Mr Jeffris's recommended dumb-bell exercises.

Mr d'Abbs leaned forward. He rubbed at the yellow paper as if he were a salesman in a Manchester department and the plans were fabric he had set his mind on selling. "You may not see the work in this plan."

Gratitude

"Oh," Lucinda sighed, "I see it, Mr d'Abbs, I really do." However she was not looking at Mr d'Abbs, but at the green-eyed man she had allowed herself to believe might love her. She could not see this man. She saw another, a queer stranger who rubbed his hands together like a praying mantis. She had made a bet with him and that was all. You could claim that it was code for a betrothal, a token of love, but not if you were sane. It was a bet, and only a mad woman would imagine anything else.

"With respect, Miss-you cannot see it. It is not here, but in all the scraps of paper, all the scribblings, the full-drawn plans that were flawed. I have been up early in the mornings. I have talked to my many artistic friends. I have pursued this most diligently, Miss Leplastrier, and not to make money."

"I am most appreciative," Lucinda said.

"You are not appreciative." His voice rose and the tremble could not be ignored. Oscar saw how the brown eyes pleaded, even while they closed down with anger. "I tender no fee, merely the pleasure of doing the job well for you because I care for matters of the spirit. ." A small vertical frown mark appeared on Lucinda's high forehead.

". . more than most men in this town. As you know, as you know. And I take it," his voice rose even more as a flock of white cockatoos rose shrieking from the Moreton Bay fig beside the window, "I take it most uncivilized to be hectored on account of it. Do you see my bill attached?" (Oscar crossed his leg again.) "Do you see an account of my worry? Or my hours?

Who protected your interests when you arrived in Sydney? You were lucky you were not robbed blind in daylight. Who invited you into his home, and provided you with friends? Here, in this room. How often you thanked me."

"Please," said Oscar, who could not bear the little man's pain. "Please, Mr d'Abbs…"

"You will hold your tongue, sir," said Mr d'Abbs, rising suddenly to his feet. He began to stride around the room picking up leatherbound volumes and banging them together. They.gave off a smell like old bacon fat. There seemed to be no sense in the action except the exercise of anger.

"I took you in when nobody would touch you. You were not a clerk's bootlace, sir. You were a smudge. A disgraceful, cast-out little smudge. You ruined my journals. I will always be able to look at the pages and remember your untidy habits. So do not," he shrieked, "presume to tell me how to draw a plan."

"I was not," said Oscar.

"Then do not," said Mr d'Abbs, quiet again. He took a breath and

Oscar and Lucinda

then expelled it. He turned to Lucinda, speaking to her even while he continued to pick up the books which last night's party had left abandoned on sideboard, sofa, table, ottoman. "I have not the skill to draw in perspective, miss, and I am not the only architect with this disability. Greenway-so Mr Fig informs me-was the same. But I have commissioned Mr Hill, from my own pocket" (by now he had half a dozen volumes clasped to his chest) "from my own pocket, to provide the perspective you have in front of you. You will see it is signed" (it was an untidy nest of books he held, quite unstable) "and if you do not like it" (a thick brown volume dropped and he kicked it-thwackagainst the skirting board) "if you do not like it, you may take it to Lawson's and sell it for ten guineas."

Oscar still held one corner of the plan between thumb and forefinger. He was now crouching awkwardly with his backside hovering above Miss Shaddock's low-slung sewing chair. He looked at Lucinda, expecting to see a sympathetic softening of the face, but saw, if anything, the opposite.

"Mr d'Abbs," she said, relinquishing the plans to Oscar. "You have been complacent about the most serious matter imaginable. Good taste aside, this church cannot be made. You ignored the information I provided you with. The sheets must be three feet long and eighteen inches wide. Did it ever occur to you," she cried, her voice shaking, "you who call yourself my friend, did you ever think what might depend on this?"

Mr d'Abbs was so loaded with his own emotions that he had no space to take on Lucinda's anguish or wonder what might cause it. He looked like an actor stabbed on stage. He opened his mouth and then shut it. He caught a book as it slipped from his grasp.

"There is a wager dependent on this, Mr d'Abbs. I stand to lose my fortune." In her heart Lucinda expected this revelation to have some effect on Mr d'Abbs. It was an expectation carried from the time when she had placed a cauliflower on the front desk at Petty's Hotel.

But she was not a little girl and Mr d'Abbs was not her protector. "What do you know about stakes?" he hissed.

Lucinda thought: So! He hates me. So be it. Why shouldn't he?

"You little brat. You are playing with money as if it were windfalls in an orchard. What do you know about business?"

This insult had a most salutary effect on Lucinda. It dismissed her panic. It unlocked all those not inconsiderable opinions which told her that she was a better person that Mr d'Abbs. She drew herself up to

1

Gratitude

her full height, unclenched her hands and rubbed their palms together.

"Do not patronize me, Mr d'Abbs," she said. "You are a dabbler. You are all dabblers." She felt herself at one with Oscar Hopkins. They stood together, outside the pale, united. "You are children."

"We are children?"

"Oh, yes, indeed," Lucinda said, imagining that the day would come when she would regret this outburst. "Indeed you are."

"We?"

"All of you," said Lucinda, indicating with a sweep all the empty chairs, thus summoning and dismissing the images of Miss Malcolm, Mr Calvitto, Mr Fig, Mr Borrodaile, and even-there-Mr Henry Parkes. Thus, with a disdain worthy of Elizabeth Leplastrier, she burned the last of her social bridges in Sydney.

Mr d'Abbs affected spluttering. "And you, I suppose, are adults?"

"We are wagering everything. We place ourselves at risk."

"Oh, how noble you are," cried Mr d'Abbs, his face quite twisted with passion, "how elevated."

"We are alive," said Lucinda and at that moment she felt herself to be what she said. "We are alive on the very brink of eternity."

Lucinda took the plans from Oscar and placed them gently on the low walnut table beside her chair.

"You get out of my house," said Mr d'Abbs, snatching up the plans. He looked as if he might cry if not obeyed. "You, sir, Mr Smudge,

go now."

"Do not call him Mr Smudge, if you please."

"This is my house and I will call him what I like."

For a moment Oscar thought Lucinda intended to strike Mr d'Abbs with her hand. Mr d'Abbs anticipated the same. He screwed up his face and this gave his hatred a slightly pathetic cast. Luanda's cheeks were flushed and her lips, hitherto so rightly rucked away, were now released and slightly parted. She gazed at Mr d'Abbs with an expression related to, but slightly kinder than, contempt. Her passions rushed through her veins declaring their intensity (but not their tangled nature) in lips, nostrils, in those extraordinary large green eyes. Oscar thought: How beautiful she is.

"You have no head for business," said Mr d'Abbs.

Oscar held out his arm. Lucinda took it. Oscar thought: I love her.

"She takes his arm," hissed Mr d'Abbs. "Not that door, unless you wish the sleeping quarters. You have no head for business and no eye either."

They found their way into the hallway. Oscar saw a woman (it was

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Mrs d'Abbs) holding the front door open for them. She was applecheeked with golden curls and she looked at them both with her eyes bright, her mouth open. As they passed through the door she pressed an orange into Oscar's free hand.

"Thieves walking out the door," announced Mr d'Abbs, running into the passage. "An idea stolen and no thanks given."

He stood beside his pretty wife watching Oscar and Lucinda walk arm in arm up the garden steps to their sulky.

"You are not the maid, Henny," he said. "It is hardly seemly that you open and close our door for riff-raff." But his tone was not as harsh as his words suggest and all the time he spoke, his eyes quizzed hers on quite a different subject which related to how much she had heard and what she thought of him as a result.

And all the while Henny d'Abbs was picturing her orange. She saw it peeled and broken into segments and thought how all that was good in it would soon be incorporated in a completely different world.

A Lecture Based upprj a Parable

That Mr Ahearn chose to walk four miles from his hotel in Pitt Street all the way to Whitfield's Farm, was partly the result of his habit of early rising, a good habit at home when one could light the stove, feed the hens, study the newspaper, and still be at one's office half an hour before one's clerks, but there was also, in this long slow walk, a kind of conceit. For to soak one's shoes in dew-wet grass, to pick one's way along a foot-wide path of the meandering type more often made by cattle than by humans was, to Mr Ahearn's mind, evidence of a kind of honesty, and this differentiated his advice (the advice he was about to deliver, the advice he carried with him) from that of people who travelled in hansoms at speed, cut a dash in traps, sulkies, broughams, phaetons. He could see himself in his mind's eye, a view from up and T;A

A Lecture Based upon a Parable

looking down-a man with a staff on a road, a traveller in a parable. Mr Ahearn was aware of how he looked to such a degree that, were he at all good-looking, it would be obvious that he was vain. But he was not good-looking, knew himself not good-looking, and yet he had a knowledge of his appearance so exact that it could only have been obtained by examining himself not with one mirror, but with two, and sometimes-there was a silver-backed one of his wife's he sometimes

used-three.

Mr Ahearn's face had become, in the five years since he saw Lucinda on Sol Myer's boat on the Parramatta wharf, more so. It had become more blotched and leathery. The cheeks seemed to have sunken, the Adam's apple to have risen, the long strands of hair across his bald pate to have reduced themselves in number while they increased their thin black definition. The nose craned forward while the belly had swollen, and underneath his cardigan he had permitted himself to leave a button undone. His shoulders were narrow, but his arms were long and powerful and his hips wide. And he did not need you to tell him it was so-he saw it all. He thought himself the tortoise, and from this, unlikely as it may seem, he drew great strength, and he saw, with all this peering at himself with two and three mirrors, not merely imitating the behaviour of a vain manhe was a vain man, although he knew perfectly well that most of the world would class him as downright

ugly.

Mr Ahearn believed his adult form was one for which he was personally responsible, that he had made his own face and manner through the habits of his life. He had cultivated goodness and propriety. He had begun as a poor clerk and thought himself lucky to have got that far. His mother was a rag and bone merchant and his father the same, but mostly drunk or absent. When he was twelve years old he had copied down the parable of the talents. He had written it on a small piece of white paper. He had a good hand, mercifully free of fashionable flourishes, and he was able to ht Matthew 25:14–30 on a piece of paper the size of a postcard. He folded it in four and kept it in his wallet, and he had the parable in his wallet now, fifty years later, as he walked across the rickety wooden plank bridge at the entry of Balmain, where Mullens Street is these days. It was a single plank, and often stolen, and in that respect Balmain has not changed very much, but it was not Balmain which was the subject, but this piece of paper, measuring six inches by four which was not the same piece of paper, of course not, as the original, for it was a piece of paper that received much wear, was taken out, folded, shown, to a child, to a 357

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grandchild, to a stranger in a coffee palace, and even the best paper will not withstand this, and so Mr Ahearn had, over the years, got himself into the habit of transcribing the parable on to a new piece of paper on every New Year's Day. He would begin: "For the kingdom of heaven is a man travelling into a far country…" and work slowly and painstakingly until, just as his wife was laying the roast potatoes out on a bed of brown paper and popping them back into the kookaburra oven, he would, with much satisfaction, transcribe: "And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." And thus, as Chas Ahearn folded the piece of paper into four between the thick pincers of his nails, a new year would begin. What talents he had been given, he had used. He was a man of property but a careful man, a Christian man, and if the Lord had seen fit to bestow on Lucinda Leplastrier an amount of capital equal to the sum of all his lifetime's labour, he had not been resentful of this. But he had watched her. He had watched her carefully, sometimes from close by, but more normally from a distance, via rumour and hearsay. He watched her as he might have watched a stranger's child playing with a crystal glass. In other words, it was not his right to say anything but he sat, on edge, waiting for the crash, hoping perhaps to catch the glass between the child's hand and the floor, unable to rest or read a newspaper for fear of what might happen. He had not approved of the purchase of the glassworks. He had thought it impulsive, illconsidered. But when he heard about the glass church, he was beside himself. He was angry. He could not help this anger, but he was now making this journey, not to chide her or vent his spleen, but to avert the crash. It was his Christian duty.

He came, at last, along the rocky ridge past Birchgrove House, a solid enough property which she would have been wise to purchase herself. He had told her so, four years ago. He had directions from a farmhand knee-deep in pig mire. The man pointed down through the orchard to a small half-painted cottage above the western side of the peninsula. He had burrs caught in his socks and in his trousers. There were burrs caught even in his shoelaces. The pasture was in poor condition, and Chas Ahearn, observing the burrs, the state of the sheds, fences, the piebald cottage, could not help himself valuing the property. If it had been his he would have had surveyor's pegs dotted like cribbage pegs throughout the orchard. The gate all but fell off the cottage fence. What this gate was meant 358