Текст книги "Oscar and Lucinda"

Автор книги: Peter Carey

Соавторы: Peter Carey,Peter Carey
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

These glassworks were for sale. There was a sign that said so, not a new sign, but more recent than the one that said Prince Rupert's. They looked intimidating, almost evil. Very well, she thought, if that is what it is to be. She made this decision without understanding that there existed, within this city, places with trees and grass and flowers.

Sol brought his craft into the wharf, sliding it gently through the smaller craft, like a careful hand amongst bobbing apples. Lucinda stood up. The crinoline cage swayed. She moved along the edge of the boat self-consciously. She felt all the wharf looking at her, but she was wrong. She took her own case down from the cabin roof. It was heavy with books. The case banged against her thigh and bruised it. She did not know anything about Sydney. She did not know how to engage an omnibus or a hansom cab, what they cost, where they went or how they were stopped. She paid Mr Myer sixpence for the journey. He gave her a cauliflower and then, in a bristly rush, a kiss on her cold cheek. He delivered her on to the wharf amongst hessian bags and steelwheeled trolleys. Two Chinamen, one wet, one dry, were slinging heavy parcels on to long cane poles. Lucinda walked like someone unused to shoes. She struggled up the hill from the wharf with her suitcase banging against her right side, a cauliflower clutched in her left hand. The suitcase put her skirt cage violently off centre. This is how she arrived at Petty's Hotel. At first they thought her at the wrong address. She placed her cauliflower on the desk and asked them, blushing brightly, if there was a reliable library close

to the hotel. She had decided to study glass.

34

After Whitsunday

The Reverend Dennis Hasset, vicar of All Saints in Woollahra, was pleased, having received the letter to invite L. Leplastrier to discuss his queries on the "physical properties and manufacture of glass." Not Lavoisier, Leplastrier, but a Frenchman doubtless. Lavoisier was a scientist famous for gases. Lavoisier, anyway, was dead. Dennis Hasset was flattered none the less. It was the day after the Whitsunday baptisms-fourteen babes-inarms and the father of Morton the grocer. He had planned an idle day and this interview was an indulgence. He readied himself for it with a self-consciousness he found amusing. He placed around his study those learned magazines in which his work had appeared, did it in such a careful way (a self-mocking way, too, but that is not the point) that the wandering eye of a guest could not help but fall upon them. He could thus display himself like a case of Tasmanian Lepidoptera, with polished pins through his nose and earlobes. He could lay down the journals like a manservant lays out vestments, and even while he laughed at himself for doing something so childish, still approached the matter with the utmost particularity.

"You see, Monsieur," he told the empty room, "it is like this." Like what? He did not know. He placed two large red split logs on the fire and went to sit behind his desk while the first red splinters spluttered and ignited.

The study was dark, but not sombre, and the desk he had placed across one corner looked out on to a bright, cold vista: a curl of yellow road swirling through two lines of eucalyptus and then out of sight. Behind this was a two-inch brushstroke of ocean. He was burning lamps at midday, four of them. He had them dotted here and there to balance the brightness of the window. The Reverend Dennis Hasset found all this very satisfying. He placed his hands on the red leather 114

After Whitsunday

top of the desk, regretted the round stain left by a glass of claret, but was pleased to remember that the claret, a Bechyville, had been a eood one.

O

He was a tall, well-made man in his early thirties. His face could almost be called handsome, and often was, for he gave his companions such a sense of his deep interest in them that they easily overlooked those heavy eyebrows-joined across the bridge of his nose-that marred his looks. He had dark curly hair, elegant side-whiskers, a slightly long face and a dimpled chin. His natural complexion was a step short of olive, although an increasing fondness for claret made it redder than the season could explain. But claret or no, he was one of those people who-should you lay a hand on his arm, say, in comradeship-you would find to be of a surprising hardness: surprising, that is, to you, but not to the twenty-four boys at St Andrew's day school whom he coached in Rugby.

He was a bachelor and he would have said it was not by choice, that he wished nothing more in his life than a wife and children, and yet the truth-which he acknowledged now, adjusting the level of the lamp on his desk so that it cast a low and golden light on the cedar surround of the leather top-was that he had become so particular in his habits that it would have taken the most impossible charity for him to permit, good fellow though he was, his beloved to alter either the number of lamps or their intensity. Was that the truth? Or was it what he feared to be the truth?

Did he not enjoy the company of women? Would he not, as they said, "adjust"?

It had not taken him long to discover that the women were by far the most interesting of the two sexes in the colony, although you would never imagine it the case if you met them with their menfolk present. For then they affected the most remarkable vapidity. But alone, or with their own sex, they revealed themselves as scientists when it came to the vectors of the human heart. Besides-and he knew this himself-he was a vain man. They admired him and he liked to be admired. He liked to stretch his big body on their chintz-covered settees and accept another tea. He enjoyed this all a great deal and it would have been reprehensible had he not, at the same time, observed the little beetle of pride, the insect of lust, the segmented undulating caterpillar of conceit. So even while he stretched a leg to reveal a black wool ankle he was describing himself to himself, just as he might press his eye to his microscope and detail the mandibles of a colonial dragonfly. This was his great strength. It was his great weakness, too,

34

After Whitsunday

The Reverend Dennis Hasset, vicar of All Saints in Woollahra, was pleased, having received the letter to invite L. Leplastrier to discuss his queries on the "physical properties and manufacture of glass." Not Lavoisier, Leplastrier, but a Frenchman doubtless. Lavoisier was a scientist famous for gases. Lavoisier, anyway, was dead. Dennis Hasset was flattered none the less. It was the day after the Whitsunday baptisms-fourteen babes-inarms and the father of Morton the grocer. He had planned an idle day and this interview was an indulgence. He readied himself for it with a self-consciousness he found amusing. He placed around his study those learned magazines in which his work had appeared, did it in such a careful way (a self-mocking way, too, but that is not the point) that the wandering eye of a guest could not help but fall upon them. He could thus display himself like a case of Tasmanian Lepidoptera, with polished pins through his nose and earlobes. He could lay down the journals like a manservant lays out vestments, and even while he laughed at himself for doing something so childish, still approached the matter with the utmost particularity.

"You see, Monsieur," he told the empty room, "it is like this." Like what? He did not know. He placed two large red split logs on the fire and went to sit behind his desk while the first red splinters spluttered and ignited.

The study was dark, but not sombre, and the desk he had placed across one comer looked out on to a bright, cold vista: a curl of yellow road swirling through two lines of eucalyptus and then out of sight. Behind this was a two-inch brushstroke of ocean. He was burning lamps at midday, four of them. He had them dotted here and there to balance the brightness of the window. The Reverend Dennis Hasset found all this very satisfying. He placed his hands on the red leather 114

After Whitsunday

top of the desk, regretted the round stain left by a glass of claret, but was pleased to remember that the claret, a Bechyville, had been a good one.

He was a tall, well-made man in his early thirties. His face could almost be called handsome, and often was, for he gave his companions such a sense of his deep interest in them that they easily overlooked those heavy eyebrows-joined across the bridge of his nose-that marred his looks. He had dark curly hair, elegant side-whiskers, a slightly long face and a dimpled chin. His natural complexion was a step short of olive, although an increasing fondness for claret made it redder than the season could explain. But claret or no, he was one of those people who-should you lay a hand on his arm, say, in comradeship-you would find to be of a surprising hardness: surprising, that is, to you, but not to the twenty-four boys at St Andrew's day school whom he coached in Rugby.

He was a bachelor and he would have said it was not by choice, that he wished nothing more in his life than a wife and children, and yet the truth-which he acknowledged now, adjusting the level of the lamp on his desk so that it cast a low and golden light on the cedar surround of the leather top-was that he had become so particular in his habits that it would have taken the most impossible charity for him to permit, good fellow though he was, his beloved to alter either the number of lamps or their intensity. Was that the truth? Or was it what he feared to be the truth?

Did he not enjoy the company of women? Would he not, as they said, "adjust"?

It had not taken him long to discover that the women were by far the most interesting of the two sexes in the colony, although you would never imagine it the case if you met them with their menfolk present. For then they affected the most remarkable vapidity. But alone, or with their own sex, they revealed themselves as scientists when it came to the vectors of the human heart. Besides-and he knew this himself-he was a vain man. They admired him and he liked to be admired. He liked to stretch his big body on their chintz-covered settees and accept another tea. He enjoyed this all a great deal and it would have been reprehensible had he not, at the same time, observed the little beetle of pride, the insect of lust, the segmented undulating caterpillar of conceit. So even while he stretched a leg to reveal a black wool ankle he was describing himself to himself, just as he might press his eye to his microscope and detail the mandibles of a colonial dragonfly. This was his great strength. It was his great weakness, too,

Oscar and Lucinda

an excess of detachment from his own life.

He knew he was clever but not distinguished, influential but not powerful, or if so only in the most indirect way through the fathers who took an interest in the rugby-playing of their sons. Waiting for Monsieur Leplastrier, he arranged a piece of glass cullet on his desk, a large clear piece, like a great chunk of diamond, clear enough to make optical glass, made from the fine leached sands of Botany.

Glass was his enthusiasm but not his passion, and while-for instance-he had enjoyed giving his lectures ("Some Surprising Properties of Glass") to the East Sydney Mutual Improvement Society – the newspaper report of which had, he presumed, drawn the impending Leplastrier to him-he did not care sufficiently. There was something missing from his engine. It could not sustain the uphill grades.

This quality, however, was represented in plenty by the young lady who was being admitted to his household at this moment. The Reverend Dennis Hasset did not hear the doorbell. He arranged the cullet on his desk, turning it half a degree so that a ray of morning sun was refracted, just so, to strike (he giggled at the cheap theatricality) his framed degree from Cambridge. He was so taken by this preposterous showing off that he did not notice the "Miss" instead of the "Mr" when his guest was announced. |

"Jolly good, Frazer," said Dennis Hasset. "Show him in." j He was surprised, of course, to find Monsieur Leplastrier in skirts,! but he was not shocked. He was delighted. He made his petite visitor blush by continuing to call her monsieur and it took a while before he saw his insensitivity, and then he stopped it.

She sat opposite him. She was very young, but he could not tell exactly how young. Her manner, in many respects, was that of a woman in her twenties, although this impression was contradicted not only by her small stature, but in the way her confidence-so bright and clean at the beginning of a sentence where every word was as unequivocable as the unsmudged lines of her perfectly arched eyebrows-would seem to evaporate as she began, not quite to mumble, but to speak less distinctly, and her eyes, which had begun by almost challenging his, now slid away towards bookshelf or windowledge. There was also the charming, rather European way she gestured with her handsthey were very flexible and she could bend her palms right back from her wrists, her fingers back at another angle again-and there was something in these gestures, so ostensibly worldly, so expressive, even

11*

After Whitsunday

expansive which, combined with the shyness which her shifting eyes betrayed, gave an impression of great pluck. Dennis Hasset was much touched by her.

She wore an unusual garment: grey silk with a sort of trouser underneath. Dennis Hasset-no matter what his bishop thought-was not a radical, and this garment shocked him, well, not quite shocked, but let us say it gave a certain unsettling note to their interview, although the discord was muted by the quality of the silk and the obvious skill of the dressmaking. These were things he knew about. The garment declared its owner to be at once wealthy and not quite respectable. She was "smart," but not a beauty. There was about her, though, this sense of distillation. Her hands and feet were quite dainty, but it was in her face that he saw this great concentration of essence. It was not that her eyes were small, for they were large. The green iris was not a deeper green, or a brighter green. It was clear, and clean and, in some way he could not rationally explain, a great condensation of green. The eyes were gateways to a fierce and lively intelligence. They were like young creatures which had lost their shells, not yet able to defend themselves.

The mouth was small, but there was no suggestion of meanness, merely-with the lips straightdetermination or-when they were relaxed and the plump lower lip was permitted to show-a disturbing (because it appeared to be unconscious) sensuality.

She wore a wide-brimmed grey hat with a kingfisher-blue feather which was, although

"dashing," not quite the thing. Her hair-what one could see of it-was brown, less than perfectly tidy. This lack of care, when every other part of her was so neat, and pressed, produced an unsettling impression. The hair seemed wilful. It did not occur to him that her hair was, as she would put it, "like that."

In any case, he knew he had met a remarkable young woman, not his type, but unlike anyone he had known before.

"Of course," he said, pouring the leaves from Lucinda's first cup of tea into the little maidenhair fern he kept for just this purpose. "Of course you must, dash it." He gave her a lot of milk, more than she liked. (It was in deference to her youth, which he felt he must insist on.)

"But you understand that although I write a pamphlet or two, I really don't know anything about the manufacturing process. I might look at a glass factory and see no more than you might." Lucinda felt quite hot. If he would not help, she would go to the accountant whom Chas Ahearn had recommended. She would pay

Oscar and Lucinda

the accountant. She would write him a cheque and have him employ a man for her who could do what she required. Or was this man actually in the process of helping? He spoke less directly, more playfully, than she was accustomed to. Her mother had been proud to call a spade a spade. They had despised "shilly-shallyers." The tea was worse than Mrs O'Hagen's. The room was too hot. She was confused to end up with a clergyman when she had begun with a small pamphlet titled "On Laboratory Arts," a practical guide to glass work in the chemistry laboratory. She had written to the printer who had supplied her with the address of the author. She did not think of clergymen as practical people. Mr Horace (at Gulgong near Mitchell's Creek) had managed to chop off three fingers while trying to kill a sick hen. This man seemed to be confirming her prejudice, to be taking pride in confirming his uselessness.

"So I must warn you," he said, "that while I have adequate theory-in fact you have your saucer resting on it-I have no knowledge or experience of the commercial side."

"Then you cannot help me."

"On the contrary," he declared.

He saw her adjust to this. She did not say thank you, but rather: "The vendors must not know me as a woman."

"And why not?"

"They will act strange," she said, gesturing with her flexible fingers and palms, letting her eyes roll away. (Should she pay the clergyman for his labour?) "It would occupy you a great deal," she suggested. "There would be books-wouldn't there? – to examine." (He cannot be poor, she thought, if he burns four lamps on a sunny day.)

"Yes," he agreed, "a great deal to do. But the object is a lovely one, is it not? It is the object we should celebrate."

He stared at her so excitedly that she looked away, blushing crimson. When she looked up again he saw her eyes had hardened in some way. She lifted her chin. She sat straighter in her chair. He had been misunderstood.

Dennis Hasset hurried to correct the situation. He spoke about glass. He showed her a large lump of cullet, like a little piece of glass rock. She knew nothing, nothing at all. Thousands of pounds to spend, and she knew nothing about it. He insisted she handle it. From his drawer he produced a piece of waterglass. He rang for Frazer and had him bring a beaker that they might dissolve it. He showed her the green glass of Melbourne, that colour being produced by iron oxides in the

After Whitsunday

sand, and let her feel the pure white grains of Botany where one could find a good three feet of fine leached sand, its impurities washed away by centuries of rain. From this Botany sand you could produce the lens for a telescope this clear while-here, he showed her, held the two lenses side by side so she might compare-the lens from Hallet's of London had a faint yellow tinge to it, by no means desirable.

Lucinda thought this Botany lens quite lovely. She took a small lace handkerchief, one of her mama's, from her purse so she might hold the lens without contaminating it. And even when the vicar told her it did not matter if she smeared it, she would not touch it with her naked fingers, which were-she was too aware of this-damp with excitement.

Soon he had all manner of things arranged across his red leather desk. These were not placed with the artfulness whereby he had decorated his study in preparation for the French professor. No, here were particles of glass. A square of poison blue made that colour by the addition of lead oxide. A melted lump of common "beer" in the shape of an old man's face. He said it was the image of his bishop. He said his bishop did not like him, and she would see this in his expression. She saw it was true. He showed her a glass brick, the sole survivor of his compression tests. Lastly, of course, a Prince Rupert's drop which its owner offered to demonstrate.

"No, please. You must not."

"Why must I not?" Dennis Hasset was astonished to find himself peeved. For a moment he disliked his visitor. He did not like the directness of her eyes. He took exception to her tone. He fished in his bottom drawer, looking for some pliers. He found a screwdriver he thought might do, and then he rejected it because the performance would have been inelegant and-besides-he knew she was right. This did not improve his temper. "Why must I not?"

"Because you know what will happen," the girl said simply, "and so do I, and when it is gone you can't look forward to it any more." And then, seeing in his face some of the temper for which he was known-"Oh." She did not say it, but shaped her lips as if she had.

"Oh?" he asked, but in a belligerent sort of way which he watched, himself, with surprise, as if to say, Ah, so this is how I feel.

"Mr Hasset, I am so very sorry."

He felt himself seen through.

"Miss Leplastrier, there is nothing to be sorry for."

"I came to you for help. You were kind to me. I began to argue with

Oscar and Luanda

you about the disposal of your own possessions. Probably I am jealous of you."

"Surely not." He shut the bottom drawer and placed the Prince Rupert's drop on the blotting pad in front of him.

"Yes, quite jealous." She wished to look down, to bow her head, but she would not let herself. Dennis Hasset saw the eyes become excessively bright, like stones placed in water. She wore an odd smile, a neatly tied bow which only just kept the trembling parcel of the face together.

"And why," he said, leaning forward, feeling clumsy, seeking levity, and therefore imitating the accent of an Irishman. "And why," he said, "would that be now?" His brogue was perfect but she did not know that the Irish were such figures of fun that to duplicate their speech was cause for mirth. She knew only that the men walked in front while their women followed behind like prisoners.

"I am jealous because the drop is yours, not mine. Because, more than that, you can enter the glassworks."

"Through the main door, just as you may."

"But I cannot, don't you see? They will not treat me with anything but the greatest condescension. And, besides, I would be made into the creature they imagined I was. Do you understand me?"

She held him with her eyes. She was a child. She was not a child. Her eyes were clear and steady while her voice amplified the slightest trembling in her lower lip.

He was held by the strength and touched by the frailty. "No," he said, "I do not understand you."

"By the way they looked at me, by their perception of me, they would make me into the creature they perceived. I would feel myself becoming a lesser thing. It is the power of men."

"But I am a man."

"No," she said, too impatient to let him develop his argument. "Of men, men in a group, men in their certainty, men on a street corner, or in a hall. It is like a voodoo. Do you know a voodoo?"

"Yes," he said, impressed, not caring that Frazer had come to signal the arrival of lunch to which he had invited three distinguished ladies of the parish and a Mr Jenkins, newly arrived from Edinburgh with a letter of introduction. He waved away his gesticulating servant. Lucinda imagined a fly. It was not the fly season.

"You are appointing me your proxy, then," the clergyman said, "is that it?"

After Whitsunday

"You are making fun of me, and most likely there is justice in that. I am being cowardly," she nodded her head, but the nod was for herself, no* her listener. 'It is obvious to anyone that I am being cowardly, but I have thought about it and it seems I must work within the limitations of my character."

"I was most certainly not making fun of you."

"You would have every right…"

"Whoa, Dobbin!" cried Dennis Hasset.

Lucinda stopped.

"You wish to buy a factory to make glass. Tis a simple enough matter. Is that it?" He smiled. The smile did what the Irish accent never could have.

"Oh, yes, it is!"

"And you need a little help."

"I do know factories, you see," she said leaning forward. "We-I mean my dear parents, when they were alive-inspected many of them, and I am well aware that they are most usually foul and frightening places, but I do not wish this to put me off. I will face it, of course."

"I will be there in a moment, Frazer," said Dennis Hasset. "Yes, yes. Don't worry about him. No, stay, please. Soon, soon, though, I have clergyman's business to attend to. Not nearly so amusing as glass. But yes, I will help you. I did not know you half an hour ago, Miss Leplastrier, and I will tell you I am surprised to hear myself say 'yes' with such enthusiasm, but upon my word I do believe I am looking forward to the exercise. We will need to co-opt, of course. I have a friend, a very clever chap called Dawson…"

"I have more than ten thousand pounds."

Dennis Hasset, who had risen to his feet to conclude the interview, sat down again, his face animated by a quite remarkable smile. "The deuce you do."

"I only wish to invest half in this venture." She was apologetic, sorry she had mentioned the sum. She was only a girl. She had done nothing to deserve such a sum. She imagined she saw censure in his eyes.

"And the rest?" he asked, plunging into the question before his natural politeness could restrain him. If he had "more than ten thousand Pounds" he would leave the confusions of the Church tomorrow.

"As for the remainder, I am being cautious."

"Miss Leplastrier, you are being quite the opposite. You are being admirably reckless. When we began our little meeting I imagined it

Oscar and Lucinda

contents were transferred to a smudged journal ruled up with careful columns and the tickets themselves were held in a series of small manila envelopes in a shoe box marked Private which was kept in Oscar's bottom drawer.

How this betting ticket came to find its way to Hennacombe was a most unpleasant mystery. Oscar, who had, until this moment, shown a lightness, even a jauntiness in manner as he sat himself at his little table, was now prickled by a hot and suspicious sweat. It was a violation. It suggested other violations, other secret and improbable intrusions. Mr Stratton had said: "If you walk to prayers at Kidlington, I will know about it." As he turned over the betting ticket and found the clergyman's tight black hand there, this no longer seemed hyperbole.

Hugh Stratton wrote this on the betting ticket: "Can I assure your father that this is not yours? Or can you, instead, assure me that such a game can indeed be played for profit?" It was signed H.S. It did not occur to Oscar to label Hugh Stratton mad; that his mentor should attempt to blackmail him surprised but did not shock him. His pity for the clergyman enabled him to forgive this and all the other peevish and petty acts he continually committed against all those who came into his orbit. It was Hugh Stratton's nature that, as he became more seemingly unlovable, he was loved the more.

But what did shock Oscar was that this very private piece of paper should be spirited from his room to be used as ammunition against him. Who was the thief? Had Hugh Stratton himself paid one of his "flying visits" while Oscar was safely in tutorial? He did not know. He also saw it did not matter.

Oscar fetched his pen and ink and-without thinking that Hugh Stratton was, once more, responsible for making his porridge cold wrote:

My dear Mr Stratton, how excited I was to receive today one of your rare (and therefore much looked forward to) epistles, and how disappointed I was therefore to discover that it was not what it appeared to be, that you had sealed the envelope, and thereby excluded what we had both wished you to include. I am sure the good Mrs Millar has, by now, discovered the letter amongst the dinner dishes and I enclose a stamp in order that it might be sped on to me and I may hear how things go in Hennacombe and how the fund for the restoration of St Anne's progresses. Professor Arnold asked to be reminded to you and said something about a borrowed book but I am afraid

•m

Une Petite Amie

I have forgot the message and, if this makes no sense to you, I will go and ask him again in order that I may deliver it more faithfully. My fondest remarks to Mrs Stratton. Your, etc., O. Hopkins. From that date Oscar left his betting tickets at the course and all the while he was at Oxford, wrote his form records in a code decipherable to no one but himself. As for Mr Stratton, he believed every word of Oscar's letter. It was neither right nor fair that a gambling student should make him feel so soiled.

36

Une Petite Amie

Lucinda did not really want a factory. She was frightened of it. She walked down to Sussex Street and watched working men emerging from the mills and wharves there. She was repulsed by them just as she was moved by them-the condition of their trouser turn-ups, the weariness of their jackets. They were alien creatures. She watched them as through a sheet of glass, as we, a century later, might look down on the slums of Delhi as a jumbo jet comes in to land. She could not know that she would, within two years, beyond the boundaries of this history, be brought so low that she would think herself lucky to work at Edward Jason's Druitt Street pickle factory, that she would plunge her hands into that foul swill and, with her hands boiled red and her eyes stinging, stand on the brink of the great satisfaction of her life. But at this time (1859) her hands were white and dry. She pitied the workers their poverty and weariness. And yet there was a way they looked at her that made her fear and hate them. It was her age, her sex, her class. She knew it. She knew it as well as you do, but the knowledge did not make it any easier for she was, so to speak, contracted to proceed. It was the factory, she felt, that gave her the entrée

Oscar and Lucinda

to the vicar of Woollahra's home. It was glass that gave her this cornfort. And as a result of her meeting with Dennis Hasset a kind of a reduction, an intensification, took place so that whilst, previously, the town of Sydney had been wide and windy, the streets rude with larrikins and so many "proper" people prepared to hoot and laugh and point at anything outside their narrow experience of life, and the whole place a-clatter with hooves and rolling iron and such a wide and formless canvas of spitting, coughing strangers that she could not endure an hour without the onset of a headache, and even though the library in George Street (her chosen retreat) had reassuring walls of books, busts of Voltaire and Shakespeare, it remained a cold, green, formal place, the territory of glowering men in high collars who might-this happened, too-"tsk, tsk" to see her there-so she remained, even amongst her books, a foreigner, friendless, without a map, until, finding the vicar of Woollahra almost by accident, the world shrank back around her. Only then did she allow herself to see how frightened and lonely she had been. Having discovered that glass was the medium wherein a friendship could flourish, she did not intend to let it go. Her need was such that the lamps stayed burning in the vicar of Woollahra's study until an hour better suited to an illegal Pak-Ah-Pu parlour in George Street. Such an offence would not go unremarked in Sydney, although had you brought this to her attention she would have asked that you refrain from patronizing her. She was her mother's daughter. She felt that she and Hasset were above the "ruck and tumble." They were business associates with business to discuss, manufacturers combating chemistry, philosophers with philosophy to deal with. They must study the musty journals of the Prince Rupert's Glassworks as silently as detectives investigating forgery. There were also sample bottles. My bottles, she thought. Blue, amber, clear; bottles for acid, pickles, poison, beer, wine, pills, jam, bottles with vine leaves, laughing jackasses, flowers, gum nuts, serpents and PROPERTY OF imprinted on their underside.