Oscar and Lucinda (9 page)

He saw his father stand. He heard the chair pushed back. He registered the interest of the servant. He thought his papa about to take the matter out of his hands, that he would simply open his arms-the good shepherd, the father of the prodigal son-and sweep him to his bosom, press him into the good honest cotton of his shirt, bid him come home, away from all these musty smells to the lovely ascetic odour of floor polish, the smell most readily associated, in Oscar's mind, with sanctity.

And his father did embrace him. But he held him out, and away, in a tight grip that vibrated with a passion Oscar could not correctly read. It felt as if his father were moved more by love than anger, and yet he also wished to act sternly. Oscar imagined it was because of the servant. He was embarrassed that a stranger be a witness to this

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Job and Judas

interview. His papa obviously felt
the same.
They both looked expectantly at the servant. The servant picked up her knife and the bloodred bone scraps and left the room. But in a moment, before father and son could be seated, she was back again with a scrubbing brush. When the scrubbing was done, they imagined themselves free of her. But no, she was back, dusting another corner of the table with flour. She began to roll out dough, with no show either of apology or hurry. Then Mrs Stratton burst in carrying eggs and saying Mrs Millar would make them breakfast. But Mrs Millar, it appeared, was insolent and would not do as she was bid. They were painful with each other, aware that they must bare themselves before strangers. On any less fraught occasion they would have walked out into the garden, or down along a lane, but the father had lost his normal sense of authority and the boy was just lost and waiting to be led. There were two places set. Oscar's was marked with a white napkin and a silver ring. The ostentation of the silver ring would be offensive to the father. Oscar saw this and was ashamed. He was a Judas. His alphas and deltas had no weight in the face of this. He would be kissed, even forgiven, but he was Judas. When he was back in his own home, his happiness would be marred for ever. He would never be asked to read the lesson to the Brethren. "I have prayed for you," his papa said.

Oscar looked at him, and then down. He was ashamed of what he had done to his father's eyesyellow whites, red veins, a red contusion in the corner of the left eye. He had caused this torture. There was a cut on the forehead, sand glued to his beard in two places. Lucy Millar cut the scones into squares although she knew Mrs Stratton liked them stamped out round, but there was no time for Oxford tricks today. The Holy Hypocrite was whispering to his son. He held him oddly, by the finger, and leaned across the corner of the table. The boy should wipe his nose. She looked away.

"You are travelling down the tide of time," his papa said. The voice was tangled, all wound around on itself like toffee. To Oscar's ear, this voice was a thing that had lost its bones. It was soft and floppy, without conviction.

But when Lucy Millar heard Theophilus speak, she felt a strange feeling, not unpleasant, at the back of her neck. She greased the tray.

"And you have chosen-or so Mr Stratton has, last night, informed me-to throw away the chart your Lord has revealed to you. What a dreadful thing it will be when Our Lord says, on 53

Oscar and Lucinda the Last Day, 'Come, ye Blessed/ and says it not to you." Mrs Millar goose-pimpled all over.

Oscar was embarrassed by his father's lost authonty. He wanted to free his finger from his grasp but did not know how.

"It is not as if you have been tempted, and given in to temptation," Theophilus said. Oscar did not listen to the words. It was the tone he heard. He thought: He is in error, and he knows! He felt pity, but also anger.

"It is not a weakness of your flesh," Theophilus said. "A weakness of the flesh is soon conquered. Itxis an arrogance of spirit. You must listen to the voice of God." His son had a smudged red mouth and green eyes that looked at him as though he were a stranger. He could not bear this lack of love. He rubbed his beard. Sand fell on the table. He brushed the sand on to the floor. He thought: Oh Lord, how have I offended Thee?

"I have listened to the voice of God, Papa."

He was frail-boned like a girl, thought Mrs Millar, and tangle-footed. His voice squeaked and farted and had no authority. His face showed his feelings like a pond that wrinkles in the slightest breeze. And yet, bless me, he could be a magistrate. She picked up the tray of scones and rushed them to the oven.

She came back to ask about their breakfast. It was too late for a fuss. She would offer them some tea and toast. The father was asking the boy: "Then why are you here, child? Why are you sitting in a household of this
type?"

The boy was a fidgeter. His trunk twisted against the wooden rungs of the chair and his hands, in his lap, were at war with each other. His legs kicked the table. But although everything he did with his body suggested a sort of panic, his eyes were calm. Mrs Millar saw something in him which would make her defend him against all the coals Hennacombe would heap upon his head, something she could only name as "good."

She asked them about their breakfast. She offered them things the household could not afford. She would do them kippers, eggs, she would coddle some if they liked, or fry some in pork fat with a slice of bread. She felt moved to offer the boy gifts, but they looked at her and ignored her. This seemed to her to be arrogance on the father's part, and she was mostly right, but the son was also imitating the father. She went to make them toast, cutting the loaf thin. When she returned with the toast ihe thing she was struck by was the sinews-the father's, the son's, both of them-they were showing

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Scuffed Boots

taut sinews along their necks. Tears ran down the father's cheeks and were lost in his beard. She imagined he was imploring his son, but she was wrong. He could not implore. He could only endure.

Oscar had just, at the moment, realized the extent of his father's selfabsorption. All this, everything that Oscar had done and felt, was seen by his papa as something God was doing to his father. Oscar was merely an instrument of God's wrath.

He would not be invited to return home.

He could hardly breathe. His stomach hurt. A panic struck him and bound him still. He lifted his head oddly high, like a child drowning, and it was
this
that made the sinews stand out on his long neck.

They took their napkins and unfolded them on their laps. The air was wet with tears.

"I will not order you home, Oscar. I will pray for you each day."

"I will pray for you too, Papa."

And then they were both crying, and Mrs Millar placed toast in racks in front of them and filled their cups with tea. They sat isolated from each other, no longer connected by hands, and wept, bowing their heads as if it were a form of prayer.

Scuffed Boots

It was known about in Teignmouth and Torquay. Mrs Stratton heard it discussed at Newton Abbot markets by two women who she judged were hardly Christians. On Sundays the Baptists from Babbacombe, walking to chapel at the Squire's, now chose to take the longer route via Hennacombe so they might observe this new phenomenon: the Plymouth Brethren congregation kneeling and praying outside the Anglican vicar's broken-down front gate. There was not trimmed grass for them to rest on. There were blackberries and nettles, but this did not stop them. They flattened an area like cattle seeking shelter from

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Oscar and Lucinda

the wind. The way they knelt, so still and neat, you would not think their knees were pierced or ankles bleeding. The men wore red handkerchiefs and some of the women scarlet shawls, and although you would see one or two dark suits, the menfolk were mostly in their smocks. Here and there you might notice a blue smock with a pattern of white thread on the breast, but most of the smocks were a brilliant snowy white. They were all abloom, like a garden, and nothing suggested pain.

The Baptists hied past them silently and did not speak until they were round the corner of the lane.

The Plymouth Brethren never announced what they were praying for. The Reverend Mr Stratton imagined it was for his downfall, but those who kept this vigil knew that the Reverend Mr Stratton could not be saved. It was Oscar, little Oscar, they were praying for. Big men with white beards, young women with snow-white bonnets-they screwed up their faces and furrowed their brows. There would be great rejoicing in the Lord's house when this one sinner returned to the fold.

The Anglicans, walking briskly past, noted only that Theophilus was still not present. There were not many Anglicans, just the four. They knew, as everyone knew, that Theophilus disagreed with this praying, that he believed the boy had been taken from him because of his own pride. It was his sin that had done this, and it was for him to be punished and no one else. He could not approve of kneeling amongst blackberries, but no one believed it was his fault at all. Hennacombe thought Oscar unnatural. It could not accept what it might have accepted from a more robust boy. A sturdy young fellow, already a fisherman at sixteen, might come to blows with his father and even bloody his nose. This would not be welcomed, but no one would gather in gateways to pray because of it. There would be no detours on the way to chapel either. But Oscar was so girlish, so harmless, so gormless and it was this-this harmless, heart-shaped child's face which made it so unnatural. He was like a goblin or a devil in a story-what other being appears with the body of a child and the voice of a man? They would give him no credit for filial feelings, although, of course, he was boiling with them. He suffered the pains adults imagine reserved for them-those lonely, murderous, ripping feelings that come with the end of marriages or the death of babies. He was free from the disciplines of his father's house, and although it might be reasonable to hope that he would feel some lightening of his soul now that he no longer lived in a place where music and dancing, poetry and puddings were all seen to be the work of the devil,

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r

Scuffed Boots

this was not the case at all. His world did not open, but rather closed, and he was trapped inside the vicarage with nothing to take away his bewilderment and grief. He was angry that his father should abandon him in such a place. And yet how could he blame his father? He suffered stomach-aches and three times peed inside his bed.

He did not like the Strattons' house. He did not like its damp, its mould, its sour smell of rotting thatch which became confused, in his later memory, with the idea of failure and disappointment. The Strattons were kind to him, but it was a tense household. He did not understand it. It was full of clocks that struck hours when there were none to strike. It was nervous and on edge, and although he was certainly coached in the Articles, the two most common subjects were money and the Bishop of Exeter. No one said he was a burden on the household, and yet he could not help but be aware of it. Each night he prayed to God to give the Strattons money, and sometimes thoughts leaked into his prayers, like coarse newspaper leaving its imprint on something clean and white, and because of these thoughts God must know he wished to be somewhere else. His map shrank. The myopic fog descended around its boundary fences. Outside this border he could see the soft fuzzy massings of the Plymouth Brethren's smocks. He brought the full force of his guilt to those silent unfocused faces. He imagined hooded brows, twisted lips, judgemental eyes. He wondered if he had been tricked by the devil. He skulked inside the vicarage and hid behind the privet. He pretended an interest in gardening so that he would not have to accompany Mrs Stratton when she went out on to the fuzzy Downs to distribute largesse (withered carrots that she could not really spare) to those Baptists whom she insisted on claiming as "our little flock."

On an errand to the post office he saw a large white shape which metamorphosized into Mrs Williams and then chased him with a stick.

Once, above Combe Pafford (sent to find Mr Stratton who was, anyway, lying snoring in the bed upstairs) he met his father carrying buckets. This was later, around the tenth Sunday after Trinity. They had not seen each other in over two months. There was a strong wind blowing. It pushed against their mouths and left them stricken, winded. His father had shrunk. He seemed a good three inches shorter. The skin beneath his eyes was like a wound that had healed-it was ridged and livid. He had white dry spittle caked on the corner of his mouth. His father stopped. He put down the buckets. Oscar did not look inside them. He knew the delicate tentacles of anthea were now

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Oscar and Lucinda

forbidden him and he would not learn the names of these or see them through the microscope.

"Hello, little Oscar," his father said.

"Hello, Papa."

"I pray for you, little Oscar. Do you pray for me?"

"Yes, Papa."

Theophilus attempted a smile, but it could not hold firm and was sucked back under the shelter of the beard. He nodded, stooped, picked up the buckets and set off along the path towards his cottage, and such was the wind that, although he had seemed to approach silently, the sounds of his clanking buckets as he departed tortured his son's ears for longer than seemed possible. Theophilus knew that his son now assisted the Anglican at the socalled Eucharist. He wore a red cassock and white surplice and held the silver salver of blessed wafers. This image haunted him, continually. There was not an hour when he did not see it ten times, in detail, in his mind's eye. But now, above Combe Pafford, he carried away the vision of his son's boots. They were scuffed and scratched and gone white at the toes. They were not cared for. The lace of the right boot had been broken and had not been replaced-it was tied up in a mean little knot three eyelets short of the top.

18

The Thirty-nine Articles

"When you are before the Provost of Oriel," said Mr Stratton, "it will not be pleasant like this." He gestured around the area of grass he had scythed. Indeed, it was pleasant. It was the third Sunday after Trinity and warm and sunny. If there were thistles in amongst the grass they did not show. The sundial was at last rescued from its wilderness and showed the hours. Butterflies cast light, lopsided shadows. Mr Stratton lay on his rug upon the grass and 58