Oscar and Lucinda

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Oscar and Lucinda

of which had reached her in three successive waves.

First there had been a polite letter of condolence delivered by a major. Then there had been the newspaper reports. Burrows had been hacked with axes the blacks had stolen from shearers on the Ma

"Do they please you?" she asked.

"Please me?" ;.' c

She looked at him, with his slippery pretty lips half-opened. She did not need to hear his answer. She saw his eyes. He was not in control of himself. He was frightened of what he had seen. This was no use to her at all. She was already frightened. What use was it for him to be frightened, too?

She gathered in the cards and put them in their envelope. She refused to discuss the matter with him. He was concerned for her. She liked him to be concerned. But she did not like the timidity. She had always thought him a brave man, strong, manly. She now began to say frightful things to him, in a perfectly ordinary way. She talked quickly; breathlessly, it is true, but this had been her style before. She straightened out the white tablecloth on the gate-legged table and said that the blacks should straight away be poisoned.

She did not know why she said these things.

It did not occur to Mr Jeffris that she was not well, for the views she was expressing were only different from much opinion in New South

Personal Effects

Wales in that they were unambiguously put. He was, himself, fearful of the blacks in the Ma

But this sort of talk did nothing to ease Mrs Burrows. She did not hear the words, but smelt something she would name as "unmanly." Her cheeks got hot spots on them and her face took on a chiselled look, pointed, clenched around the jaw, with tendons showing in her neck. She talked of calling out the army, of a final all-out war against the blacks. Mr Jeffris replied, but what he was addressing was only the thin, sharp ice on the deeper puddle of Mrs Burrows's argument in which blacks, the Cossacks and Captain Burrows all took on the forms of fish with teeth like knives.

Mrs Burrows did not feel safe. She said this often, but was not

understood.

When she returned from Mr d'Abbs's with Mr Calvitto, she resolved to show him the cards also. It was all that was on her mind while they disported in her bed. She placed them on the little night table where she would put the tea things afterwards. She made the pot which they then drank-it was their custom-sitting up in bed.

It was then that she gave Mr Calvitto the envelope. He lit a cigarette and blew a thin trail of smoke into the air. And then, in the ma

He looked at her and smiled, an unsugary expression, not weak, as austere as whisky with no water. She pressed herself against him, shivering, as once, in the potteries of Stratford, she had pressed wet clay against a plaster mould.

She would be a plate, God save her. Let the aproned decorators paint dancing Cossacks around her rim, or dead blacks like spokes around a poisoned water-hole.

40

Not in Love

The vicar of Woollahra was not in love. She was not pretty enough for him to be in love with. She was also too young. She was not "suitable." A great deal of this judgement about suitability was a function not of his assessment of his personal needs but of his highly developed social sense.

Sydney (or that tiny part of it he knew as "Sydney") would not think her suitable. And he liked to be liked. He did not like, although he thought himself a radical, to feel himself outside the comfort of the fold. He did not like to be criticized. And yet this was what was now happening to him all the time. No one-barring the Bishop-said anything to his face. But he could not accompany the girl to the waiting room of a solicitor-at-law without feeling, even amongst the clerks and message boys-this social shiver. He did not know about Jimmy d'Abbs and the games of cards, and yet he knew-without naming it for himself-that there was something. He saw the signs, just as you can posit, from the whorled skin of the sea, the presence of an unseen rock. Three weeks ago Sydney did not know her, and then only that she had put a cauliflower on the front desk at Petty's Hotel. Then it was remarked-this was before she abandoned the crinoline Mrs Ahearn had made for her in Parramatta-how oddly she dressed. And then they switched and said how well.

She played cards with Jimmy d'Abbs et al. But afterwards she took tea with the vicar of Woollahra. It was as if she had broken some law of nature, been ice and steam at the same instant-the two activities were mutually exclusive.

The vicar of Woollahra then took her shopping and Society, always feeling shopping to be a most intimate activity, was pleased to feel the steam pressure rising in itself as it got ready to be properly

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Not in Love

scandalized-its pipes groaned and stretched, you could hear the noises in its walls and cellars. They imagined he had paid for her finery. When they learned this was not so, that the girl had sovereigns in her purse-enough, it was reported, to buy the priest a pair of onyx cufflinks-the pressure did not fall, but stayed constant, so that while it did not reach the stage where the outrage was hissing out through the open valves, it maintained a good rumble, a lower note which sounded like a growl in the throat of a smallish dog.

Society-if you call it that, Lucinda would not-did not know what to do. It could not tolerate to see the two of them together, and yet it was in some way tickled. It squirmed and grimaced and hooted with derision to see him move with such a confident and manly stride, as if nothing were wrong. It could not have been fu