Страница 30 из 125
The river journey was picturesque, with so many pretty farms along its banks. Lucinda could not look at them without feeling angry. She looked straight ahead, shivering. It was cold, of course, but not only cold that caused this agitation. There was a jitteriness, a sort of stage fright about her future which was not totally unpleasant. She dramatized herself. And even while she felt real pain, real grief, real loneliness, she also looked at herself from what she imagined was Sol Myer's perspective, and then she was a heroine at the begi
SALE sign tacked to it-as nothing more than the desire to unburden herself of all this money, and this may be partly true. But the opposite is true as well, i.e., she knew she would need the money to have any sort of freedom. It is better to think about the purchase as a piano manoeuvred up a staircase by ten different circumstances and you ca
Oscar and Lucinda
tricky turn on the landing. But of all the shifting forces, there is this one burly factor, this strong and handsome beast, i.e., her previous experience of glass via the phenomenon known as larmes bataviques or Prince Rupert's drops.
You need not ask me who is Prince Rupert or what is a batavique because I do not know. I have, though, right here beside me as I write (I hold it in the palm of my left hand while the right hand moves to and fro across the page) a Prince Rupert drop-a solid teardrop of glass no more than two inches from head to tail. And do not worry that this oddity, this rarity, was the basis for de la Bastie's technique for toughening glass, or that it led to the invention of safety glass-these are practical matters and shed no light on the incredible attractiveness of the drop itself which you will understand faster if you take a fourteenpound sledgehammer and try to smash it on a forge. You ca
It is not unusual to see a glass blower or a gatherer scrabbling around in a kibble, arm deep in the oily water, sorting through the little gobs of cast-off cullet, fossicking for Prince Rupert's drop. The drops are made by accident, when a tear of molten glass falls a certain distance and is cooled rapidly.
You will find grown men in the glass business, blowers amongst them, who have handled molten metal all their life, and if you put a Prince Rupert's drop before them, they are like children. I have this one here, in my hands. If you were here beside me in the room, I would find it almost impossible not to demonstrate it to you, to take my pliers and-in a second-destroy it. So it was a Prince Rupert's drop, shaped like a tear, but also like a seed, that had a powerful effect on Lucinda Leplastrier. It is the nature
I
Prince Rupert's Drops
of these things. You can catch a passion from them, and the one in question, the first one Lucinda saw-at an age when she had dimples on her knees-was a particularly beautiful specimen, twisted red and milk-white glass from the damp brick island of Murano. It was sent to Abel Leplastrier by his great friend John Bell, FRS, the author of the enthusiastic piece in the Brita
The post-office steps were made from wood and there was a great fat swathe of sunshine spilled across them. It was winter and the sunshine was welcome. She could feel it through the cotton of her dress. The packet steamer had just arrived from Sydney. Her papa sat beside her on the step. He had Mr Bell's parcel. It was this that took his attention and he could be no more bothered by the complaints of the owners of passing skirts and trousers (sour-smelling wool, velvet with mothballs) than by the demands of all the other mail from Home; these last he threw into his sugar bag.
His hands were like his body-board strong-but they were shortfingered and surprisingly delicate in their movements; they attacked Mr Bell's parcel like a pair of pale-bellied spiders. Pick, pick. Red sealing was shattered. Brown paper was Tom in such a way it could never be reused. Lucinda pressed close against her papa. She liked the rough feel of his jacket on her cheek, all the hairy smells of bran and tweed and apple skins. She saw the Prince Rupert's drop emerge from its nest of wrinkled paper but mistook it-ooh! — for a humbug or a sally twist. She reached out her hand, but her father held it from her.
"No," he said. He did not look at her. He read the letter which accompanied it. Her father made a noise-a little moan-and jumped to his feet. Lucinda stood also.
"Stay, Lucinda."
She felt herself shot through with dread. She did as she was bade. She sat on the steps. She cradled the sugar bag in her lap for comfort, and watched her father run away from her. Down the steps he went, two at a time, pushing past brilliantined clerks and bent-backed lags. He sprinted-a broad man with short legs-across Church Street. He raised his arm and hurled the glass at the sandstone wall of the magistrate's court. A policeman rose from his chair on the veranda of the court. He watched as her papa picked up the glass humbug. The policeman called out something over his shoulder and another policeman-a thin man
Oscar and Lucinda
with a grey beard almost as wide as his chest-came out to join him. Together they both stared at her papa who, without knowing himself observed, now walked back across the rutted street, fouling his boots on steaming ox dung, wiping them clean on a surviving patch of tussock grass. The thin policeman went back into the court. The other policeman resumed his seat. Her papa trudged up the steps and-no longer smelling quite so sweet — sat beside her. He put his hand into his jacket pocket, and produced his clasp knife. His hands were trembling. He had difficulty setting the knife the way he wanted it-with the largest blade pulled out just a fraction. He looked at Lucinda and gave a gruesome sort of grin. Then he put the tail of the Prince Rupert's drop between the blade and handle and forced the blade hard home.
The drop shattered, of course. It sprayed like brown sugar across the post-office steps, sprinkled a young widow's bo