Oscar and Lucinda (4 page)

Oscar and Lucinda

fixed, looked straight before him and shamed the devil. He would not put up with poisoning. He had a broad nose and defiant nostrils. He was rugged, bluff, kind, and he would lay his Dissenting whip across an Anglican's face for poisoning his people.

Hugh Srratton led the lame horse up the steep path, under the bare elms. He saw no beauty in these woods. Through black dripping branches he could see the Norman tower of St Anne's, and to the left a little, the high thatch of the vicarage. It had grey rock walls with lichen, stonecrop and moss, but he was no longer the clever man just down from Oriel, charmed by the rusticity, the peace, the little sundial in the garden which bore the legend "To serve and to rule." He knew the thatch was full of rot and the walls were seeping. It was money he thought of, and how to get it. 5

Stethoscope

The stool had three legs and stood against the sloping, flaking white wall of the attic in which Oscar slept. It was a sparsely furnished room, with just an iron cot, a rag rug, and a small spirit lamp. But it was a dry room, too, and it had a sweet, sappy smell which emanated from its ancient aromatic timbers. The stool was made from Devon oak and, while generally dark, was polished to a honey colour at its knees, the point at which two hundred years of hands had picked it up, swung it, set it down, always within this one cottage.

In the mornings Oscar stood on the stool and hoisted up his nightdress so that his father could listen to his chest with the stethoscope. He had never questioned why the stool was necessary, not even now that he had begun to question other aspects of his papa's practices. He stood on the stool. He hiked up his flannel while his father tapped at him anxiously, like a young and inexperienced man called to check for death watch beetle. This would happen first thing, as soon as he

•?n

Stethoscope

woke. He would have his bladder full. Sometimes his penis would be hard, sometimes not. Having no interest in the function of a hard penis, he was not embarrassed. When Oscar lifted his nightdress, his father observed the ginger hair growing around the genitalia. He observed this with a naturalist's eye, but not only. He did not like the appearance of the hair. With the hair came the great difficulty of life.

The stool was also used when Oscar slept, late at night, when Theophilus's eyes were tired and his fingers cramped from writing. His study (it was also Oscar's schoolroom), was across the way, at the top of the staircase, and at two in the morning he would remove his shoes and come across, lifting his feet so as not to attract splinters, in his dainty yellow socks. Then he would lift the stool and place it, very quietly, next to his son's bed.

He sat and listened to him breathing.

In the morning he would listen with the stethoscope. The lungs were clear. They were always clear. He would hear himself say, "Clear as a bell," but it gave him no peace, for God had told him there was something wrong with the boy. This voice he heard may not have been what you would call God, but let it rest. You may have another word for all the things both Hopkinses (father and son) called God. It does not matter what you call it. For Theophilus it was God. It was his fear, his conscience, whatever you want, but it was clear to him. In any case, the boy had his sister's chest. The fluid in her little lung sacs still gurgled in the blocked drains of Theophilus's waking dreams.

When he sat down on the little stool he would draw up the eiderdown until it touched Oscar's little chin. The nail-bitten hand would then push the eiderdown away and Theophilus would smile and, in spite of his anxiety, he would not try to push it up again. His son had a white flannel nightdress and breath like warm milk. There was nothing to indicate the boy's troubled state of mind; for he now believed his father was in error, that he was wrong, not merely about puddings, but about many other things beside,

Theophilus, however, had no doubts about the life hereafter. It was this life he worried over. He feared his son would be "taken." He begged God to spare him. No voice came back. He would bear it if he must. If his God covered him with boils like Job, he would bear it. God took his daughter Sarah, his son Percy, his beloved wife. He had not been able to bear it, but he had borne it. There was nothing unbearable. The teeth of lions, the torture of martyrs, was a flea bite in the face of eternity.

Oscar and Lucinda

He thought himself a weak man, a sensualist.

Sometimes he wished only to lie on the bed and embrace his son, to put his nose into his clean, washed hair, to make a human cage around him, to protect his bird-frail body from harm; and what pride, he thought, what arrogance that would be.

For Oscar was already given to God. He was one of the elect. The mysteries of salvation had been divinely revealed to him. He had laid hold on Christ and would not be cast into hellnre. All this had been vouchsafed him.

And when he made himself think this last thought, Theophilus would feel the tension leave him. The muscles in his chest and upper arms would go soft and his breathing would become deeper and more regular. In his mind's eye he saw his own blood oxygenating, turning a deep and brilliant red. He stretched and felt the blood tingle in his hitherto clenched fingers. What a miracle Thou hast wrought.

He bent over his son and kissed the air above his forehead and then walked on tiptoe in that slightly exaggerated and silly way that men like Theophilus, normally gruff and bustling about their business, adopt as a sort of dance to celebrate their most tender feelings. 8

Pagan Sigijs

This was in Devon, near Torquay. To pretend-as Theophilus didthat this was almost tropical, is like referring to a certain part of Melbourne as "the Paris end of Collins Street." It is quite reasonable if you have never been to Paris, but once you have been there you can see the description as nothing more than wishful thinking.

When I visit Devon I see nothing tropical. I am surprised, rather, that so small a county can contain so vast and indifferent a sky. Devon seems cruel and cold. I look at the queer arrangements of rocks up

V)

Pagan Signs

on the moor and think of ignorance and poverty, and cold, always the cold. But Oscar had not yet seen the Bellinger River and he shared his father's view that they were privileged to live in the "almost tropics." It did not matter that he was chased and mocked by the sons of fishermen and farmers, that the Squire's cook's son made him eat a stone. This was an earthly paradise. They read London papers one day late. They gloated over myrtles and fuchsias unburnt by frost.

Half Theophilus's congregation still believed that the sun danced when it rose on Easter morning, and many claimed to see a sheep dancing with it. This was a county where cockerels were still sacrificed at the winter solstice. Theophilus had himself recorded a wassailing where a naked boy was sat up an apple tree and made drunk (he thought) on toast soaked with cider. He had not come in search of pagan darkness. He had come to study the marine zoology, but now he was here he would bear witness to the miracle of the resurrection. He was dismayed, often, at the depth and complexity, the ancient fibrous warp, the veinous living wefts, of the darkness that surrounded him.

When he found pagan signs scratched on his path one morning, he recorded them in his notebooks, thus:

Theophilus imagined he recorded this in a scientific spirit, and even if he was meticulous in rendering the exact proportion of the sign, he was not a dispassionate observer. The sign frightened him. And just as he had seen a mockery of the crucifixion at the wassailing, he now saw a heathen assault upon the sanctity of the cross.

He could not leave it. He must tilt at it. But where to tilt he was not sure. He walked all the way to Morley, briskly, imagining he would find someone in the public house. It was Bargus he had in mind, he who had been a warrener and was now the sexton. But when he entered the Swan at Morley he found it completely empty. He turned around and walked back, four miles across the fields.

Theophilus was agitated at the time he had wasted. He was completing the illustrations for his
Corals of Devon.
He must produce two drawings every day, to meet his deadline. Today he had done no drawings except this sacrilegious symbol. He was out of breath when he climbed over the stile at Hennacombe and saw Bargus sitting on the little stone bridge which was built across the stream there. He did not think himself a superstitious man, but this "coincidence" unnerved him.

Theophilus gave Bargus credit for some kind of power, which the old man would have been surprised to know. He was over seventy years old, short, broad-chested, with red cheeks and a snow-white,

shovel-shaped beard-He was one of those men whose
&eai
business in life it is, a matter more important than any other, to be liked, and in this he had been generally successful. When the gentleman thrust the notebook at him, he took it. He looked at the drawings of the markings, and then he looked at the other drawings «as well. He admired the felicity of the sketches of ferns, furze, early violets, sweet oar-weed and then, smiling, but puzzled, he gave the book back.

"Very fine," he said, and then set about stuffing his pipe. He had intended to save his last twist of tobacco for the inn, but he was discomforted--He did not know how to take the fellow's death'shead grin. He had never seen a grin like this. He thought, stuffing the pipe, "Why would the fellow grin at me in such a way?"

He looked up, squinting a little as if he might bring the meaning of the other's smile into focus. It was getting cold quickly now the sun had gone. He made some comment about this.

"So," said Theophilus, tapping his book, stamping the mud off his boots on the stone bridge, still grinning all the while. "You can make no sense of this?" "Nor hide nor hair." "It is the Holy Cross?"

"Oh, aje," said Bargus, who had thought it looked like a children's game, "I do not doubt it." jheophilus bade him an abrupt good-day. He did not believe a word Bargus said. He was a pagan. He liked to lead a coffin three times around the granite cross at St Anne's. He had walked before the coffin with his blue eyes blazing, his spade held out from him and down. When he said he did not understand, Theophilus saw this as certain

proof he did. But Bargus-who was now walking slowly across the path to the 24

Throwing Lots

Swan at Morley with his pipe still unlit-was not the one who had made these signs, and Theophilus put away his notebook without guessing their true author. Mrs Williams's suspicions were better placed. She was walking to the post office at Morley--this was two days later--when she came across another set of what were now known locally as

"witches' markin's." She was rushing noisily along, a big-bummed, whiteaproned figure on a long red hill. She wore the apron everywhere. In Morley they called her "Nurse." She did not mind the title either.

Oscar was with her, counting the steps to the village. He walked alongside her, a little behind, scratching the line of their journey with a pointed stick.

Mrs Williams was never comfortable standing still. She found it nigh impossible. She had jumped and jiggled inside her mother's womb and she had jumped and jiggled ever since. But when she came across these markings, she took a good long pause.

She would not have noticed Oscar's face, would not have thought about it at all had he not suddenly begun to dance back and forth across the symbols, at once scratching at them with his dragging heel while he tried--the two aims were contradictory-to hop across them.

"Hopscotch," he said shrilly.

Then she looked at his face. It was scarlet. His cheeks were flat, his top lip long, his lips drawn as if on a string. He would not meet her eyes and she suddenly felt very queer. Throwing Lot.

It was Oscar, of course, who had made the "witches' markin's." They were a structure for divining the true will of God.

The A. stood for Theophilus who, in turn, represented the revelation as understood by the Plymouth Brethren and all that strict system

25

Oscar and Lucinda i

of belief that Oscar had, until now, accepted without question. This was the sign that said you could go to hell for eating pudding. "Sq" was for the Baptists, being an abbreviation for the Squire who was their local representative. He had grown up believing the Baptists damned. But perhaps the God who smote his father looked upon the Squire with favour after all. The markings were a way of asking the question directly.

The VIII was the eight from Henry VIII and was a coded reference to the Reformation, a glance at the incredible possibility that the Catholic Church was not the creature of the anti-Christ, but the one true Church. Later Oscar feared his code was too obvious, so he added an X to make this square read XVIII.

The O£ was code for "A" which stood for Anglican. He almost did not put it in at all, but there was nothing else to put there in its place. He knew the Church of England to be most powerful in the world outside, but in Hennacombe it was an object of pity. No one could consider the Reverend Mr Stratton a suitable guide for the difficult path to salvation. He could not even pluck poultry without tearing its flesh. When Oscar had made these four squares, he added a "tail" of two more squares to make his system look like a child's game. He put a zero in the first square because it was nothing, and an omega at the next because it was the end. And then seeing he had the alpha and omega of Revelation 1:8, a quotation made by accident, he knew it was
not
an accident at all, and that what others might call chance or coincidence, he knew to be the word and blessing of God.

At the head he made another square and left it empty. This was a form of reverence. The first of these markings was the one his father had recorded in his notebook. Oscar had made it on the little path leading above the western side of the beginning of the combe. He had made it, shivering, just near an old wooden bench, its slats half-rotten and overgrown with ivy. It was afternoon, about three o'clock, and the day already nearly drowned by darkness. A northern gale was blowing, but it was not this that made him shiver. He felt himself, quite literally, teetering on the edge of eternity. Old leaves rushed across the path, formed parties, were sundered and scattered. He was fourteen years old. His mind was filled with death, damnation, paradise. He marked out his system with a special yellow stone he had chosen from the millions on the beach. He should have been washing the milk pail in the stream below. He could hear it rattle on the rocks as the wind caught it. He worked with the special stone. It was no more than an inch and a half