Oscar and Lucinda

After Easter she advertised for a woman to learn the art of glass blowing. She had imagined she might thereby create a partner for herself. She found a woman who played the trumpet at Her Majesty's. The woman was strong. Her lungs were good and she had large and powerful hands, but the men would not work with her. The furnaces went cold again, and Arthur Phelps, having come back to work for her, went back to the timber mill.

•wn

Longnose Point

She wrote angry letters to Boat Harbour. But even these letters, once one is above the undergrowth of irritation, are celebratory. She described, with obvious pleasure, the scene in her own crate-filled study on the Easter holiday of 1866. And if she could not draw, she could execute a still life with words. She showed the exiled De

slowly.

I In a letter dated 22nd of August she reflected that an intelligent reader I need never be alone when she could spend her evenings in Barchester I or with Mr Nickleby, for instance.

• August is the first month of the westerly-rude, bullying winds that I cut across from Drummoyne or scream down the river from Bedlam

I Point and Hen and Chicken Bay. By August the upstairs rooms in Lu-cinda's cottage had become cold and dark. There were no slices of silver sunshine on the cedar floor. The cat had retreated downstairs where it had inflicted one more wound on the already scratched

pine door, miaowing bad-temperedly until its mistress had let it in by the hre.

So what might we expect to find downstairs? The young manufacturer with drafting board and ruler? Or, with the day's work over, deep in the spell of Mr Dickens or Sir Walter Scott. Both Waverley and Bleak House lie on the floor beside her chair. But she ca

Lucinda is asleep, her head collapsed on her shoulder, her book lying where it has fallen on the Turkish rug. The lower lip which looked so shockingly sensuous to De

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Oscar and Lucinda

attention. The cat, alert, stares at the rattling window.

This is not the sleep of exhaustion. It is produced by two glasses of brandy, by the lack of oxygen in the room, but most of all by the viscous, sour, treacly chemicals of loneliness. You may suggest that she should have a maid. But she has a maid. All right, then-a maid to live with her. She has had. But she no longer wants a maid to live with her. Maids are young and alive. They have young men. They sit in the kitchen giggling. They only serve to make her feel more lonely.

Well, then-she should go out. To where? To Mr d'Abbs, of course, where she had so many pleasant times before. But it was not just the mediocrity of Mr d'Abbs's ménage she found depressing, not that peculiar Sydney combination of ignorance and bull-like confidence, it was Mr d'Abbs's determination that she not live a lonely life. There was always now some

"philosopher" or "poet" (feeling old and finally in need of marriage) placed at her lefthand side. Then she should have accepted other invitations. And, indeed, she would have liked to drink tea and talk about the most ordinary things. She would be interested in dancing the quadrille and discussing the adventures of babes in arms. Were not these things of interest in novels? Then why would they not be of interest in life?

But Lucinda had alienated all the people she might now wish to cultivate. It was not merely that her stride was wrong or her hair inadequately coiffured, her fashions, generally, inconsiderate of other feelings. She had held herself aloof. She had indicated she felt no sympathy for that loose congregation which one might call "her class." Even her house, the house she chose herself, placed her apart from people. Her display of arrogance would not be forgiven. Society would not invite her in a second time.

Fortunately, she did not yet realize that she was not welcome in her own works. She imagined this dry, brick-floored factory to be her home. It was her only co

64

The Multitude of Thy Sorceries

She had been happy once, properly happy, deeply happy. Now, as she hung her lantern on the nail in the stables and fussed with her stubborn gelding, she could not believe what she had become.

It was nine o'clock at night. And she was going for a trot.

She did not think where this trot would end. She did not even think very much about the place in which it began. It was frightening out here on Longnose Point.

There were so many things she could not think of. Her mind was dashing along corridors while she kept just ahead of it, slamming

doors.

She was going for a trot. She tightened the harness. She walked the horse along the mud-heavy track past Birchgrove House. The caretaker was singing. He was alone and singing, drunk, too. Last week he had burned down the cow bails in the night. Lucinda kept two pistols wrapped in a blanket underneath

her seat.

Rain came in long rips and ripples. She sought out the time when she had been happy. She shut out the drunken singing. She withdrew from the westerly wind. She was in Parramatta with her father. They were going home. Their big four-wheeler crossed the cobblestones and set off, their old Waler biting at his familiar enemy, the Percheron, beside him. They got up a nice trot, a linle too fast, through the High Street (look out there!) past the doctor's phaeton, the farmers'

buckboards, the swarms of drays and sulkies. There were big-skirted women, frock-coated shopkeepers, fa

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Oscar and Luanda

They carried scents behind them. She could still list them, the smell of bran, of pollard, oats, the soft, dusty, yellow smell of seed wheat. The smells joined to other smells, a necklace of smells, with some in Parramatta, others along the way home where, for instance, you might find the air suddenly rich with honey, and beside the road the privet hedges not yet called a noxious weed and shaking their luxuriant white blossoms at you, or appearing to, for it was not the privet itself but rather-see, Lucy, lookee see, quick-a splendid parrot, no, three, four parrots-brilliant red, blue, such jewellery shaking the white clouds of honeyed privet.