Oscar and Lucinda

He told her that his mantelpiece clock-a huge contraption with its brassy i

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Oscar and Lucinda

her mind to construct all sorts of pleasant fancies. She had thought him an angel painted by Mr Rossetti. This was before he showed himself so thoughtless. But rummy was a game you could play with perfect strangers, with a man in a mask, or even (she imagined) a clever machine. She had arrived with nothing and now she had nearly five pounds-it was all there in notes and coins in front of her. She had taken the money slowly, and she had found the process as satisfying as drawing bent nails from old timber. She had enjoyed it as much as she had enjoyed the dizzy lightness of losing at fan-tan. It did not once occur to her that she might be punishing him. She was not tired. She could not afford to be tired. She had time to go home and bathe before taking tea with Mr Rolls, a builder lately arrived from Melbourne. She began to gather in her wi

Lucinda should have made allowances for the glass. It was not plate, but crown, of uneven thickness and marred by a yellow tinge produced by chrome salts in the sand. You can say she should have reacted more scientifically. She did not. She saw a butcher's face with hairy eyebrows. She saw a pig snout of u

She could not scream.

She made a noise which may be crudely signified: "Erg." j

Oscar smiled uncertainly.

"Erg."

She made him nervous, anyway. She knew better Greek. She

•seemed well schooled in theology. She did not smile readily.

She played cards with a cool elegance and skill which shocked

him. He liked her smell. He did not know how to treat her,

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Serious Damage and when she stared at him and said "Erg," he became embarrassed.

"Well," he said, shuffling the cards. "Well, well, well." He did his fancy shuffle. He had taught himself this, although he had seen it done in a "hell" in Jermyn Street. There it had been done by a very frail and very drunk old actor who could, in shuffling cards, make a moving bridge one yard long. Oscar had taught himself this. It was, he supposed, a conversation piece. Mr Judd saw the bridge and could contain himself no more.

He banged.

Oscar's face then behaved as it had when Lucinda had called him "Crab." It lost its bones and colour. The muscles on his scalp contracted and pulled each hair to smart attention. He opened his mouth and Lucinda was treated this time, not to a clean pink tu

mid-mastication.

But then, of course, he turned and discovered Mr and Mrs Judd.

Lucinda could not credit what she saw him do. The unfriendly attitude of the intruders was perfectly clear, but the gangling vicar stood, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, went to the window, unlocked it, and let them in. Well, they did not enter, not immediately, but the man's voice entered and she did not have time to separate it from her nightmare, could not decipher all the moral outrage, felt herself to be swamped by an alien wave of tobacco-smelling rage.

"Mr Judd," she heard her host say. "Mrs Judd. Please do come in." Come in? Lucinda was incredulous. Come in? Her hand was at her hat, feeling for the silver peasized knob that marked its end. She thought about the properties of glass, not its wont to go yellow when there were chrome salts in the sand, but its tendency to shatter, to make shards which lie upon a carpet in the shape of crescent moons, scimitars, stilettos, daggers, pig stickers, a jigsaw armoury waiting to be released from its captive sheet and nothing more needed by way of a key than a pebble, a coin, a lump of coal. "Please," said Oscar, clapping his hands and rubbing them. "Please

do come in."

Lucinda removed her hat and held the pin behind her back. Oscar stepped back and both Judds, the second one with great difficultyshe was not only portly but impeded by skirts-stepped from the veranda, across the sill, and into the sitting room.

Oscar watched all this with almost as much astonishment as Lucinda. He had hardly been aware, so nervous was he, of what he had been saying. And although it is true that he invited the Judds in and that,

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Oscar and Lucinda

when he made the invitation, he was standing on one side of an open window and they on the other, he had not intended that they treat his window as their door. And yet-and he admitted this to himself later when he sat, groaning and punching his left hand with his right, in judgement on himself-it was he who had stepped backwards, and the stepping back was, in a sense, like moving a magnet back from a nail in that you must, if you know anything about the natural sciences, expect the nail to follow and it is no good-his father would have told him as muchprotesting your i