A suited man with ragged cuffs ran across the yard and disappeared into the round brick building with the rusty tin roof. Lucinda pointed towards him, at him, his cuffs, the door he entered by. She pointed with her Japanese umbrella-a sharp, short-tempered sort of polk. Oscar took all this bad temper on himself. He felt the umbrella pierce his rib cage. He knew he was not wanted here. Well, he did not wish to be here! He looked at Lucinda's bad-tempered face and did not like her. He smiled and raised his eyebrows and it was with this peculiar mask, no longer shaded by his tall hat, that he entered the works.

Nothing was as he had expected. Where outside it had been untidy and damp, inside it was very neat and pleasantly dry, like the palm of a pastrycook's hand. There were no windows in the walls; they were high up, under the roof. There were six furnaces in the middle of the room, 308

Pot and Kettle

and another five along the side. There was a long bed of trolleys and machines at present not in use. He assumed this was for making window glass, and he was right.

But what he expected least was to find the works garlanded with flowers: cornflowers, lachenalias, poppies, white and yellow daisies, freesias, flag flowers, daffodils, jonquils. They were tied in bunches to the big piers that held up the roof. They stood in great green-glass jars around the wall. They were embedded in a fishing net that hung between the furnaces and the doorway and beneath this banner of flowers the men all stood, their strong bow-legged forms pressing hard against the confinement of their suits. As Oscar and Lucinda entered, they burst into song.

"Oh, Lord, who filled our souls with love unbounded." Lucinda looked straight ahead. She was moved, of course she was moved. The fools had worked so hard to please her. But she was angry, too, and the tears that ran down her cheek were caused by quite different forces than those which were producing the identical phenomenon in her lodger. Both lots of tears were salt, I am sure, and were probably within the normal range of salinity, i.e., between one per cent and two per cent salt, but this is merely to show you the limits of chemistry, for while Luanda's tears were produced by diametrically opposed emotions, Oscar's were all in one direction and had their source in such grand territories as joy, wonder, humility, and love for these suit-trussed workers who had publicly enacted love for him, a stranger and an outcast.

79

Pot and Kettle

They were strangers to each other, two vessels on the one stove, the kettle whistling out great clouds of joy, the stew pot quietly burning, and each blind to the condition of the other. There was a glass-blowing demonstration. Lucinda imagined Oscar

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Oscar and Lucinda

to be bored and polite. He drank a pint of beer with the men; they offered her none. She put a smile on her face and despised them all as fools. She was belligerently unchristian. Mr Hopkins's tongue was quickly swollen with drink. It was bloated, as fat as an ox's inside his fine, small-toothed mouth. They had him sing a hymn for them. He had no voice. And whilst she knew her audience did not mind, she minded.

She was frump and dullard. He was as loose and floppy as a puppet. He watched them demonstrate how a tankard is made, 'i six times. No one seemed to worry about the cost of keeping the furnaces going. She could not mention it and still keep herself controlled. They spilt their ale on the brick floor and put their arm about him and called him (Michael Casey did)

"Father."

She was in the centre of a great cold space. She smiled until her face hurt. She enquired of squash-eared Billy about his wife and children and noted he could not tell her the age of his children. She did not care that he was poor. She smiled at him. He was drunk. He tapped her on the shoulder as he spoke to her. She left him as he tried to calculate the age of his middle child. Mr Hopkins was out in the yard. He had taken it upon himself to inspect her sand and coal. He was with Arthur Phelps.

She could howl. Could run round and round the yard like a dog hurt by a wagon wheel. And the sun was now so bright.

She thought herself a child. "I think, Mr Hopkins," she said, "that we have another appointment." He saw then, or so she thought. It was to his credit. He shook hands with Arthur and refused the invitation to come back inside to say farewell to "the boys." Arthur hung on his one hand with two of his.

"It is a great pleasure," he said, still holding the fine-boned hand with a clasp that felt, to Oscar, to be made from padded calico gloves, "it is a great pleasure, sir, to see our missus take up with such a gentleman as you, sir. And any time you wish to know anything at all, sir, when we have the window-making in full tilt, you just come along and we will be pleased to explain it to you." Oscar turned, his hand still held in the straitjackef of the blower's hand, and saw Lucinda, who had been by his side when this speech

Tin

Pot and Kettle

began, walking away. Her shoulders were round. Her neck was forward. He did not know what had gone wrong. Had he not been manly amongst her men?

"Thank you, Arthur, I will."

He heard cheering. He turned and saw the men had spilled out of the works and had lined up against the wall with their tankards. They were cheering their employer who was walking past, her head bowed. When the cheering began she put up her umbrella to shield her face from them.

"Goodbye, Arthur."

"Goodbye, sir, and it is a privilege, sir and I myself was never married and that is a fact, sir, and it is not that I am not a Christian. My mother was a Baptist and my old dad a Unitarian, and we attend a chapel now and then but I will tell you this, sir, for it is a comfort to me and may be one to you…"

"Thank you, Arthur."

"An old chap, a Mr Hollis, a what-you-call-them Christian Socialist, informed me that the institution of marriage-I'll walk with you, sirdon't worry about the lads. Give them a wave, sir, that's right. This old fellow, oh, what a beard he had, silver-white and down to his belt. He could tuck it in his trousers, and sometimes did when he was shickered. He told me that the institution was nothing our Lord said, but was introduced at a later date, and by one of the popes no doubt, and it was all to do with property, and not our Lord Jesus, but was related to the Church taking over the recording of things. Well, my memory is a leaky vessel. Give them a wave, sir, they're pleased to have you. They are happy for the missus, that she has a man at last. It has been hard for her. There are some of us that will regard you as a real relief, sir. Well, goodbye, and it has been a privilege."

Oscar hurried after the black, umbrella-humped figure. He waved back. And he made such a comic figure, his hat pushed back on his head, as he leaped across a puddle, waved an umbrella, jumped to avoid some oxen droppings, that the men all laughed, but not maliciously. They walked back to their barrel smiling and shaking their heads. Their new master was an odd bird, but not a knave.

What appointment? Oscar knew of no appointment. An appointment for her, perhaps, but not for him. He was disappointed for he wished to do nothing so much as talk to her. He felt he had opened a door into her life. He would like to sit somewhere, a place with marble tables. If it had been London they would go to the

Oscar and Lucinda

Café Lux in Régent Street. A glass of port wine for the lady. Or merely China tea, and then they could talk about this glass business of hers.

It had never occurred to him that a process of manufacture could be beautiful. Had you, an hour before, asked him to tell you what he would call beautiful he would have drawn on the natural world, and named the species along the lanes of Devon, or brought up for you, plunging his hands into the rock pools of memory, the anemone his father had drawn and named, these fine soulless creatures which had, just the same, been made by God. He would have shown you the Strattons' harvest stocks (and forgotten they had scratched his arms and made them itch all night) or the rolling, dangerous sea seen through a familiar window with a two-foot-thick sill. He would never have led you into a building with a rusting, corrugated roof, or taken you between lanes made from bottle crates, or littered with glittering shards. In these places you expected foulness, stink, refuse, and not, certainly not, wonder.