Oscar and Lucinda (34 page)

She was aghast, too much in terror about having her vice discovered

01A

Confession

to think his behaviour peculiar. She noticed perspiration on his brow, but it did not come to her mind until much later, when the incident was over.

She thought it odd he did not excuse himself for sitting while she stayed standing. "You must excuse me," he said instead, "for not corning earlier." She smiled and bowed her head. She remained standing so that his eyes, in looking up at her, would not fall upon what was on the table in front of him. He had seen already. He must have seen already. And yet, it seemed, he had not. What was he talking about? Coming earlier? On deck? She wondered if she might find a cloth to throw across the table.

"You see," he said, "I have a phobia about the ocean. It is something I have suffered from since very young. My father is a naturalist, you know, and was in the ocean all the time, and I with him, too, when I was a little chap."

"I
see." She did not see. He was agitated and sweating, but she did not notice. She was like someone hearing Spanish when she expected Greek. He had picked up a card from the table and was toying with it.

'In any event I developed a nervousness about it, like the nervousness some get with heights. So to accompany you on deck this evening, or to come up here, with all this glass-to hear your confessionwell, I feared it was more than I could manage."

But she could not confess to
him.
She wished only his good opinion.

"This is not known to Mr Smith or Mr Borrodaile," he said.

"Frankly, I would prefer they did not hear it. But I owe you an apology for not answering your call to confession when, as you see, I was capable of coming all the time.''

But she must not confess. She wished he would put down the card. (Surely he knew what it was.) She repeated what she had heard from George Lewes, although she did it at ten times his lumbering speed that the Queen had been praying with Presbyterians at Crathie and was becoming passionate about the dangers of genuflexion and confessions. So confession was, she argued, unwise.

"Ah, yes," he said, "the Queen. And yet, you see," (and here he bounced his leg beneath the little table so you might actually hear the coins jingling) "it is not enough she does not like it, because the Church of England has it written into the prayer book and it will take more than the Queen, more than our Lord-it will take an Act of Parliament-to get it out again. I do not support this way of running things, Miss Leplastrier, but you may confess as you

Oscar and Lucinda

wish and know yourself completely free from heresy."

Oscar had a tiny prayer book, just three inches high and two inches across. He was flipping this open in a practiced way, as though he heard confessions every day.

Lucinda was now in a panic. She could not confess to this young man. She could see his wristslong white bridges to beautifully shaped hands-and a little bruised shin showing between rumpled sock and trouser turn-up. He had a heart-shaped face, like an angel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She could not confess to him, and yet the ceremony had already started. He had a soft burr of West Country in his vowels. She thought she had no voice at all. It was time for her to speak. She heard a voice out on the deck. It was the Belgians crying for their Pomeranian. She clasped the back of the chair in her hands. She felt her voice very small. She watched his shoe and shin protruding like a branch from beneath the table. The shoe bounced up and down. The shoe did not match the sacrament, but when she looked up and saw his hair like the hair of angels and very still, limpid grey-green eyes, she confessed. She talked so quietly he had to lean forward to hear her.

It was a little silver voice you could fit in a thimble. It did not match the things it said. The shoe stopped bouncing. The penitent had closed her heavy lids across her eyes. She spoke swiftly but quietly, in a silvery sort of rush.

She confessed that she had attended rooms in Drury Lane for the purposes of playing fan-tan (although she had fled when stared at).

She confessed to playing a common dice game on a train full of "racing types," and although she had not gone to the races, she had boarded this train, having read that such things occurred in such trains, for the express purpose of playing dice. She had been asked to leave the game because her sex was apparently repulsive to the patrons.

She had tried to persuade Mr Paxton to take her to a cock fight.

She had eavesdropped on stewards. She had set up a table in her room like a trap for them. She had wished to play poker.

There were other matters but her confessor hardly heard them. He sat with his head bowed, trying to still his wildly beating heart. He clenched his hands and pressed them down between his legs. He groaned.

Lucinda heard this noise. She sat with her head bowed, not daring to look at him. She waited for absolution. She heard another noise, muffled, its meaning not clear. She thought, He will not be my friend now. She clenched her eyes shut to drive out such temporal thought,

Confession

clenched them so tight that luminous bodies floated through the black sea of her retina.

When Oscar tried to think good thoughts he always thought of his father. He did this now: it was this that made him groan-the loneliness he had caused this stern and loving man. The voices of the stewards came through the ventilation, but neither of them listened. Still, the priest withheld absolution.

"This dice you played on the train," he asked, "was it Dutch I Hazards?"

I Lucinda looked up quite sharply, but the priest's head was bowed

it and twisted sideways towards his right shoulder. "Yes," she said. "It I was. We also played another game."

I "Old British, perhaps."

I Lucinda felt her bowed neck assume a mottled pattern. "In New I South Wales," she said, "it is known as 'Seventh Man.' " Her feelings were not focused, were as diffused as a blush, a business of heat and blood. Oscar could not keep the picture of his father clear. A certain reckÎ. less joy-a thing without a definite form, a fog, a cloud of electricity -

replaced the homely holy thoughts.

: "And who was it," he asked, unclenching his hands and bringing them up on to the table, "who provided the Peter?"

Lucinda Leplastrier put her head on one side. She opened her eyes. Her confessor had a blank face, what was
almost a
blank face, but was prevented from being completely blank by the very slight compression of the lips.

Lucinda narrowed her green eyes. "The Peter?" 'Is the term unknown to you?" She was looking at the mouth. She could not quite believe what she saw there. "No," she said, very carefully. "No, I think it is quite

familiar."

"I thought so," said Oscar Hopkins. He closed the little prayer book and stuffed it in the pocket which contained the caul. When his hand touched the caul, he remembered the ocean behind his book. It caused no more than a prickling in his spine.

"And these terms, Mr Hopkins, are they also familiar to you?"

" Traid so." He smiled, a clear and brilliant smile.

Lucinda also smiled, but less certainly. "Mr Hopkins, this is most improper." Oscar took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped first his

Oscar and Luanda

clammy hands and then his perspiring brow. "Oh?" he said, "I really do not think so." He looked so pleased with himself.

"But you have not absolved me."

"Where is the sin?"

She was shocked, less by what he said, but by the sudden change of mood that took possession of him. He spoke these words in an angry sort of passion quite foreign to his personality. His eyes went hard. He made a jerky gesture towards the cards-ha! he had seen them after all-in front of him. "Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet-it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, although the Queen of England might find him not nearly Presbyterian enough-we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter. And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at prayer beside our bed ..." His hands were quite jerky in their movements. There was a wild sort of passion about him, and the eyes within that sharpchinned face held the reflections of electric lamps. Lucinda felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Her eyelids came down. If she had been a cat she would have purred.

"I cannot see," he said, "that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence ... It is true! We must gamble every
instant
of our allotted span. We must stake
everything
on the unprovable fact of His existence." Lucinda shivered, a not unpleasant shiver and one not caused by cold. There were so many reasons for this involuntary ripple, not least the realization that her vice would not lose her his friendship. But it was also caused by recognition: she saw herself mirrored in him, the sudden coldness of the gambler's passion-something steely, angry even, which will not be denied. She was disturbed, too, to find her confessor belittling the worth of her confession and this-the pulling out of the tablecloth beneath the meal-gave a salt of anger to her own emotions even while she delighted-celebrated, even-the vital defence my great-grandfather was assembling, like a wild-haired angel clockmaker gesturing with little cogs, dangerous springs, holding out each part for verification, approbation, before he inserted it in the gleaming structure of his belief.

"Every instant," said Oscar, and held up a finger as he said it, calling attention to a low roly-poly laugh issuing from the ventilator.

Confession

"There," he said triumphantly, as if he had caught the laugh, as if the laugh was the point of it all, and he was like a man who has trapped a grasshopper in mid-air, smiling as if the miracle were tickling

his palm. "There. We will never hear that man laugh that laugh again. The instant is gone."

It would not be apparent to anyone watching Oscar Hopkins that this was a young man who had sworn off gambling now he had no further "use" for it. His views seemed not only passionate but firmly held. So even if you had not agreed with him, you would not have doubted his conviction. Lucinda had no idea that she had witnessed a guilty defence. She thought all sorts of things, but not this. She thought what a rare and wonderful man he was. She thought she should not be alone with him in her cabin. She thought they might play cards. She thought: I could marry, not him, of course not him, but I could marry someone like him. There was a great lightness in her soul.

"Every
instant,"
he said.

She felt she knew him. She imagined not only his passion for salvation, but his fear of damnation. She saw the fear that would take him "before dawn." It was a mirror she looked at, a mirror and

window both.

"That such a God," said Oscar, "knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager ..." He stopped then, looking with wonder at his shaking hands. This shaking was caused by the fervour of his beliefs as he revealed them, but there was another excitement at work-that produced by the open, admiring face of Miss Leplastrier. "That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing a line first, unless," (and here it seemed he would split his lips with the pleasure of his smile, which was, surely, caused more by Luanda's admiring face than by the new thought which had just, at that moment, taken possession of him) "unless-and no one has ever suggested such a thing to meit might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine."

"Mr Hopkins," Lucinda said, coming at last to sit down, "we must not place our souls at risk with fancies."

She meant this sincerely. She also did not mean it at all-there was nothing she liked better than to construct a fancy. She put great weight on fancies and was not in the habit of using the word in a dismissive way. The Crystal Palace, that building she admired more than any

Oscar and Lucinda

other, was nothing but a fancy of a kind, and there were ideas like this, the philosophical equivalent of great cathedrals of steel and glass, which were her passion, and she held these to her tightly, secretly.

"Not a fancy," said Oscar.

He picked up the cards and put them together. It was not his intention that they play. It was Lucinda who suggested the game of cards. But later, when she knew Oscar better, she confessed that she had only done it because she thought it was what he had intended. 58

Reputation

It was already a scandal. It was known about by Mr Smith and Mr Borrodaile, by Mr Carraway, Mrs Menzies, Mr and Mrs Johnston. The stewards, of course, all knew-for they were not only judges but also conduits and they wound their way from class to class and even down into the rivet-studded steel innards of the ship, not quite as far as young Master Smiggins (whose task it was to ready the live-stock for the approaching storm). He knew a lady had 'lost her reputation" but he had this from long-nosed Clémence, the apprentice engineer. He did not know it was "his" lady for whom he had planned to work.

"She gone and bleeding done it now. She lost it now," said démence who was frightened by the animals.

"What?" asked Master Smiggins.

"Er
reputation. I
told you, didn' I?
Compreyvous?"

"Course I bloody
compreyvous. I
got a sister, ain't ? Now nick off. I got me animals and the sea's coming up."

"Coming up your back passage more like," said Clémence, but stepped back, ready to run. Master Smiggins kicked the llama doe in the backside and forced it into its crush. He strapped the crush shut.

"There," he said, "all tucked in now. Can't roll out of bed no matter

ttn

Thou Rulest the Raging of the Sea

what." He went to deal with the buck. "Now, don't you fuss," he said. He looked around. Clémence had gone. "Lost
her
reputation," he said. He had a stick to prod the buck with.