Mrs Froud was the wife of Lucinda's second gatherer. She came to "do" two afternoons a week. Mrs Froud was jolly and friendly, but you could see-or so it seemed to Lucinda-that she had made an assumption. This assumption was quite incorrect. There was nothing to make an assumption about.

Oscar lay in his room and sucked his sheet. He wrote to Mr Stratton about the dangers of gambling life.

My dear Patron, [he wrote] 1 cannot help but have the greatest reservations about the serpent I have placed in your trusting at a time when I knew too well the effects of its poison. I sent my journals to you because I promised you, and now I beg you to make a promise: burn them. I regret the day 1 ftrst set foot upon the track. Opium, surely, would not be so great a curse. This will all seem far-fetched to you, but let me tell you that at this moment I am kindly lodged by a fellow sufferer, and although we inhabit a small house, no bigger than my father's cottage, we hardly speak to one another for fear that something that we say or do will lead to a horse, a game of cards and we shall, without intending to, hnd ourselves once more in that state of mad intoxication.

There were pages of it, all pretty much the same. They reflected Oscar's idea of what was happening in the house, but what was so obvious to him was not obvious to Lucinda at all. While he shrank from conversation, wary of where it might lead, she had hoped for it. While he tried to diminish himself, to make himself small and inoffensive, she sat at table and waited for him to join her. She did not like to go running to his room continually, and yet she could not leave him there alone. She imagined he was gripped by loneliness. She saw he did not hate her, and yet she felt him pulling back. The reason for this presented itself to her one night while she was preparing for bed.

He thinks I have him in mind for a husband.

It was only to set his mind at rest that she invented the romantic story of her passion for a clergyman whom Bishop Dancer had so cruelly exiled to Boat Harbour. She wished to make him imagine that her heart was already spoken for, that all she required from him was company and conversation. She wished him calm, steady, and to quit all this nervous scuttling about the house. But she told her story to a man whose emotions were in such a state that he could barely hold the load they carried, let alone the unhappy

?RH

Oscar and Luanda

story she asked him to lash on atop. He was much moved, too moved. It was ridiculous, he knew-he hardly knew her-but it took everything in him to stop bursting into tears. He chewed his lip, he grimaced, he excused himself while there was still sultana cake uneaten on the plate. She heard him creaking up the stairs. The door shut to his room. She picked up her tea-cup and threw it at the wall.

74

A Degree from Oxford

"This chap, Miss Leplastrier, is he any good?"

Mr d'Abbs held her eye quite fiercely for a minute, but he could not sustain. He had a small smile, quite ironic, and it twisted his thin moustache and made him look not quite respectable. And while he enjoyed being thought of in this way-it was no commercial liability in Sydney-it was not the truth at all. He might let her glassworks go cold through timidity or cautiousness, but he would not break the law.

"He has a degree from Oxford."

"Oxford," said Mr d'Abbs. He was pleased, but did not wish to appear impressionable. His hands-large hands for such a small manplayed briefly with his blue silk tie, then held the edge of the desk, then slid until they found the drawer, and in the drawer a cigar. The cigar was such a big one that Lucinda, when she saw it, thought it made him look like a caricature in Punch.

"Oriel," she offered.

Mr d'Abbs blinked. He leaned forward a little as if he expected her to say more. When there was obviously no more to say, he frowned. "It is not just a question of clever men," he said. He fussed with some grey ash which had landed on his green corduroy jacket. "Really, there is no cleverness required. The work itself would drive him mad with boredom. All it requires is neatness. So why do you come to me with a man from Oxford?"

A Degree from Oxford

Mr d'Abbs really wanted to be flattered. He prided himself on his employees as he prided himself on the paintings and lithographs that crowded his walls at home. He was an artist himself. He liked artists. He was a philosopher. He liked philosophers. He provided them, in the midst of commerce, with a refuge.

He could not tell anyone, not even his wife, what pleasure it gave him to know that now, at this instant, in the clerk's room next door, he had Mr Jeffris the poet and surveyor, Mr Trevis-Dawes the pianist, Mr Coyle the water-colourist whose views of Pittwater and the Hawkesbury adorned the cedar panels of his office. He did not wish to talk to them, and he certainly did not socialize with them. But he was very pleased, more pleased about this than anything, that they were there.

"So why come to me?"

"Oh, Mr d'Abbs," said Lucinda, "do not tease me." 'Tease?" said Mr d'Abbs, looking pleased. He relit his cigar and sent clouds of smoke into the air. "You told me yourself about your Mr Cloverdale." "Speaks Hindi, that's correct. It is absolutely no use to him in Sydney. But he is an honest man, Miss Leplastrier, and neat."

Lucinda assured him of Oscar's character. She said nothing of gambling. (She should say. She would not.) Mr d'Abbs was now explaining that money was kept in the office. He stood, took out a big bunch of noisy keys from his pocket, and opened the safe with one of them. He showed her money. There was ten thousand pounds in his safe. He showed her the money to stress the importance of honesty, but the other reason, the real reason, was that he could not believe it was him, little Jimmy Dabbs, Ditcher Dabbs's boy, who was standing in his own office in the colony of New South Wales, a cigar in one hand, ten thousand pounds in the other. "Fancy that," he said.

The things that moved Mr d'Abbs were clear to Lucinda. Sh was embarrassed for him, not that he should be so pleased about himself, but that he should reveal his pleasure so clearly, that he should stand naked at his bathroom window, not knowing he had an audience for all his imperfections.

"He knows Latin," she said, "and Greek." Mr d'Abbs looked up at her and blinked. He smiled and tapped a wad of banknotes against the back of his wrist.

"He has excellent references from his London employer. He was a schoolteacher." She spoke quickly, leaning forward, listing his achievements until she had said Greek three times and Latin twice. She spoke

7R7

Oscar and Lucinda

on and on, not because she wished to exaggerate Oscar Hopkins's attainments, but in order that she be too busy to notice the private reverence Mr d'Abbs showed the wad of currency-the one bright colour in this room of sombre water-colours.

Lucinda held her hands together. It gave her the appearance of "imploring." Her little shoulders were uncharacteristically rounded and Mr d'Abbs, without knowing quite what had triggered it, felt a stirring of the loins.

Others found Miss Leplastrier attractive. Absalom had taken a fancy to her. Old Gerald MacKay had dubbed her the "Pocket Venus" and sworn he would have her for wife. But Mr d'Abbs, if you discount that unfortunate occasion when he had placed his hand on her knee, had forgotten how to see her in this light. Their friendship at the card table had continued, but in business he found her the complete shrew. When she had returned from England she had thumped his desk with her little fist.