It was an out-of-focus town of men with seas of bobbing hats.īut on this night she felt the streets accept them. Lucinda was accustomed to looking at no one in the street. They had both grown used to the attentions that are the eccentric’s lot-the covert glances, smiles, whispers, worse. They were different, and yet not ill matched. “She had no criticism of his dress, which was bagged at the knees, dropping at the lapels, rucked around the buttons, while she-although she wore a flowing white cotton-appeared (she knew it and wished it was not so) as starched and pressed as a Baptist in a riding habit.

― Peter Carey, quote from Oscar and Lucinda She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.” Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web-the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams-window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor. She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand.

Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.' As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship.īut she said not a word. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. “Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard.

Oscar and lucinda by peter carey