"That there is no Virgin birth."

"That Christ died for our sins that we might be redeemed through His blood, that we might sit at the side of God in heaven."

She was surprised by the passion in his voice. She was too used to hearing him say he had none, and too ready to accept it without cornplication. They had discussed church politics, but never once religion. They had talked on her subjects: glass, factories, the benefits of industry. He had catered to her needs and enthusiasms and she had been conceited and self-centred, and yet today, at this moment, she would rather not be an industrialist at all, would rather, if she could be persuaded it was Christian, have a little farm somewhere

up-country.

"So," she said, nodding her head, mentally listing her discoveries, "so there is a part of you that wishes to be sent away?"

"Quite a large part," he admitted.

"And all this," she gestured at the shattered room, the crates, the papers spilled across the floor,

"in a sense it pleases you."

He nodded, suddenly self-conscious. He rubbed his hands together, looked down, then out of the window. He was hiding his pleasure from her. She told him so. He admitted it. And these words, the accusation and the admission, were uttered, on each side, so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that they were like the slash of a razor which, being so sharp, causes no pain when it first cuts. But when Lucinda saw that the great weight she had placed on their friendship was far greater than the one he did, she felt more than simply foolish.

"Will you take all your books?"

"They say there is a problem, generally, with mould."

"So you will leave them here?"

"Oh, no, I will take them."

Looking at his handsome, smiling, apologetic face, she hated him.

Oscar and Lucinda

It was a spasm, coming and going in a moment. "Oh, don't you care?" she exclaimed. "Must you wait for mould to happen to you?"

And Dennis Hasset watched her, alarmed, unhappy, nervous of what might happen next. It occurred to him that he might propose to her and she would accept him. This was an odd idea, perfectly new-she had been a child when she went away, and he had been her protector-and the novelty was not unattractive. He glimpsed a passionate life, freedom from the tyrannies of bishops, something quite original. He had always imagined marriage to a tall and handsome woman. He did not think Lucinda handsome. It was no impediment.

The impediments were elsewhere. The first concerned the salvation of his soul and, peculiar though it might seem, he agreed with Bishop Dancer about the benefits of Boat Harbour. He did not feel his faith sufficiently. It was too much the creature of his intellect and he yearned for something simpler, rougher, more true to Christ.

The other impediment was no more than a rock under a wheel. (He hardly knew it was there, but it was enough to stop the wheel turning.) Dennis Hasset was a snob when it came to commerce. And as much as he would love to be free of the tyranny of bishops, he could not bear to walk down the street and be thought a merchant or a manufacturer. He thought glass a substance of great beauty, but the very originality of the life that Lucinda Leplastrier suggested to him, the very thing that made it so attractive, was what made it absolutely unacceptable. He did not dwell on any of this. The ideas and feelings were too much a part of him. He gave Lucinda no clue as to why he should now, ever so subtly, withdraw himself from her. She had one glove on, one glove off. She was barely aware of herself, turning over books in an open crate. She did not understand the reason for her rejection and humiliation. At the time she most wished to flee, she willed herself to stay. She forced herself to enquire about his journey and even made an appointment to drink tea with him before he sailed. But when she at last left the Woollahra vicarage, it was with the bleak understanding that there was no one in Sydney left to see.

She had to send a boy to call her coachman from a nearby tavern. He was not steady on his feet. She did not care. She could not remove the picture of Dennis Hasset's sad and smiling face from her mind's eye. It was to stay there a long while yet, no matter what instruments she used to scratch at it.

63

Longnose Point

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely. When Lucinda came down the Parramatta River in Sol Myer's boat, she imagined her life would be a lonely one, and she felt strength through recognizing it. And yet what she imagined was not loneliness, which is boggy and sour, but something else which is bright and hard. The difference between what she imagined and what she finally experienced is the difference between a blade of a knife — an object of chilly beauty-and the chronic pain of an open

wound.

She imagined she had been lonely in Sydney and London, alone in her icing-sugar cabin aboard the Leviathan but until Dennis Hasset sailed for Boat Harbour, she had kept ahead of it. She had been a dancer racing a burning fuse. She had been busy, had plans, been on the way to London, on the way back. Her life had been a series of expectations, and even in her first years in Sydney, when she had spent many nights alone with nothing but the cornpany of her cats, she had always the prospect of company if she wanted it. She had thought herself lonely, but she had enjoyed her solitude.

She had moved out to the edge of Balmain and rented the fallingdown cottage on Whitfield's Farm, down along that rocky promontory which ends in Longnose Point. It was two storeys, stone, with a big old kitchen overlooking the Parramatta River. Joubert and Borrodaile (yes, the same) had not yet begun to subdivide this land. It was a bankrupt estate, with just a caretaker at the farm and the orchard heavy with the sweet, drunk smell of rotting windfalls. The grass grew waist high in summer and the road to her door was a silvery green-the grass rolled flat beneath the jinker she drove herself. She repaired the leaking stable. She planted some snapdragons and pansies. She had her crates of books

91Q

Oscar and Lucinda

delivered and carried up the loud, uncarpeted stairs. It was a romantic place to be, and it did not cease to be so the instant the vicar disappeared from Sydney Heads on the Susanna Cuthbert. She had plans. She had equipment to install. She met with Mr d'Abbs, but rarely socially. Rushcutters Bay now seemed too far away and she imagined the urge to gamble had quite left her. Her work was so demanding she would be asleep an hour after she had eaten. She woke early. She was alone, but not yet lonely. Her head was burning with dreams of glass, shapes she saw in the very edges of her vision, structures whose function she had not even begun to guess. She would build a little pyramid of glass. ' '

A tower. \

An arcade to cover all of George Street.:x*'

She did not think of farms or marriage.

She ate her porridge left-handed with a pen in her right. There was a peak of anger in her passion, a little of the Ill-show-you-Mr-Hassetwhat-it-is-you-could-have-had. She could not draw. She put her visions on paper and made them seem gross and malformed. She found a Frenchman, a Monsieur Huille, an artist, a friend of Mr d'Abbs. The lessons were not a success. Monsieur Huille, while very free with his own criticisms, would not put pencil to paper himself until, finally, as a result of his pupil's blunt insistence, he executed the most dismal oak tree. Pigs (or possibly dogs) grazed beneath its wispy limbs. The drawing was so very bad that Monsieur Huille, pretending to be posthumously affronted by her insistence on this "proof," resigned. He took the evidence of his incompetence with him. He said it was worth twenty pounds, but later she found it, leached by rain, blown in amongst the hay in the stable. At Easter she attended service in Balmain by herself, although that evening she rode across to Rushcutters Bay. Mrs Burrows was there, so there was no cards. She found the conversation dismal. She was separate, but not lonely.