Oscar and Lucinda

"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

355

Oscar and Lucinda

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," a

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, He

And all the while He

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 ma

Oscar and Lucinda

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

A Lecture Based upon a Parable

to keep in or out was not exactly clear. There was a cow tethered in its front garden. Mr Ahearn checked his gold fob watch. It was a gift from the Parramatta Benevolent Society of which he had been chairman for twenty years. He did his jacket up around his cardigan and knocked loudly on the door.