The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  Bernard pushed sweatily through peak hour towards the Valley where, in a coffee lounge at the bottom end of Queen Street he bumped into Professor Geoghegan before he had time to conceal himself behind his paper. Cunningly Geoghegan allowed him to be seated first and then dropped into the seat opposite with such surprised warmth (feigned, decided bitter Bernard) he could only click his teeth bad-temperedly and endure.

  Geoghegan was having one of his days when he talked zanily and engagingly about incredible and, Bernard suspected, mythical humans who peopled a Geoghegan Landscape, assembling antics and pranks of exquisite, detached nonsense.

  “I remember my aunts,” he was saying dreamily as he sugared his coffee. “They’re dead, thank God, but they were the most awesome pair. Used to drive a car, the dear old things. A big Bentley, black, thirty feet long like an undertaker’s carriage.”

  “Lucky them.”

  “I suppose. Oh, I don’t know, dear fellow. You see, they couldn’t manage it separately and one used to steer and the other used to change gears. ‘Are you ready, dear?’ Zoe—that was the older one, the one steering—used to say. ‘Right!’ would say Hester. And zoom—off they’d go!”

  “Who declutched?” Bernard asked, interested despite himself.

  “Well, that I can’t really say. The steerer, I imagine. Sometimes Hester couldn’t get it into gear and Zoe would say, ‘Not quite right, dear. Let’s try again!’”

  “It’s all a fabrication!” Bernard laughed. His cheeks, plumped by time, filled out with amusement, he could observe in the flashy mirror strips all round him. Fattening Leversons smiled back cosily every way and he accused himself: False kindliness, but I’ll be a lovable old daddy-oh of the music world. I’ll tell corny jokes to students. I’ll totter ever so slightly going in and out of examination rooms, will be caught humming bits of Purcell and forget my overcoat. Jot motifs on menus. Be Santa Clausish, Daddy Bach—and he laughed again—wrong place this time, for Geoghegan looked put out and said, “Well, I was only asking.”

  About what? Keith? Gerald? Not Keith, he hoped, gazing into the sticky street where mums dragged toddlers who dragged cones and lollipops and crumpled toys. Desperate parenthood hauling its brats along, he thought, when it is the brats who really have them by the nose. Keith asleep, he remembered. Keith with closed eyes and a heavy curve of lash on a pink football cheek. Withdrawn, the head turned away on the pillow, the fists bunched in sleep, the mouth parted. Along the drooping lids the blood pulsed lavender, the shadows were delicately blue. “Little pet,” he had said softly, bending over, bending to kiss, to touch the down of skin. And there had followed a punching tiny fist, right on his throbbing nose, and a squeal of impish giggling that still managed to endear itself, to make him utter more foolishness, to nuzzle the struggling child.

  “Everything,” Bernard lied, “is all right. We are a clock-work home.”

  They parted with mutual reassurances at the bridge turn-off where Bernard eyed the broad sweep of hot bitumen, the tan river, the sleeping ships. He was not even emotional enough to dislike the suburbia that crowded the far point, but paced steadily over and up the hill past the state school and went bland as junket through his front garden back into the family circle.

  “Saint Gretta,” he said, repeating the fact for those who cared to listen, “is patron saint of the mentally disturbed.”

  Iris plunged right inside the apple pie she was—“creating” is the word for Iris’s activities, he thought—and did not even peek at him over the fluted edges; but Keith, who was scraping down a palette at the kitchen drainer, blinked with the first filial interest he had shown for weeks.

  “Saint who?”

  “Saint Gretta.”

  “We could have one alongside the dwarfs and the gnomes.”

  “We could,” Bernard agreed somewhat wearily, playing along a worn family joke.

  “Dinner,” Iris said emerging, “is nearly ready if you’re going to change.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ll bother.”

  He chose to be maddening and wandered into the living-room where he turned on the wireless and burrowed into its furry blare. Much surprised, he found his son had followed him.

  “I say, Bernard,” the boy said, but speaking in a careful way that convinced the man Iris was not intended to hear. “Could I get a duffle-coat?”

  “Duffle-coat? What’s a duffle-coat?”

  “You know,” Keith explained speaking with difficulty and a great deal of urgency against the wireless. “A sort of short overcoat. A car-coat, man. Very sharp. The young Rimbaud. Way out.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Bernard said. “I don’t quite see you as the young Rimbaud. I can’t see the need, anyway, in this climate.”

  “But all the fellows are getting them.”

  “I thought you were the keen nonconformist. What’s up?”

  “But that’s it. All the keen nonconformists are getting them.”

  “Aren’t they rather loutish?”

  “Only slightly,” Keith said with insolence he did not even try to repress, observing his father’s face harden, and hating himself underneath the triumph, for these easy victories he had been scoring up for years at each little occasion made him just that much more unhappy.

  “No,” Bernard said. “No. Definitely not.”

  Leversons munched a sulky dinner and through baked pumpkin the boy asked again.

  “But why can’t I?”

  Iris tossed one of her look clichés at her husband (despairing eyebrows up, shoulders hunched), a glance that claimed intimacy with this problem. Under the circumstances, reflected Bernard, she looked bloody arch, but he smiled wryly and went on eating lamb with mint sauce.

  “I warned you,” Iris said. “I told you no.”

  Keith would not look at her but, with the skill that had been playing it this way for years, proceeded to set parent against parent.

  “You only say no because she says no, don’t you?”

  “Nonsense.”

  “No, it’s not nonsense.” He scowled. “It’s true. A fundamental truth of life at the Leversons’.”

  “Dear me,” Bernard said. “Sauce please, Iris.”

  “If she said yes, so would you. If she said anything at all so would you. Simon says. Simon says shit. Iris says shit. Bernard says shit.”

  “You know dirtier words than that, lad,” said Bernard.

  “Not dirty enough for this,” Keith shouted at his father, control lost at last. “Not nearly dirty enough for this. Because she pushes you around you’re afraid to have an opinion.”

  “Oh for God’s sake shut up! I said no no no because I mean no, do you understand? Because you don’t need this stupid garment and because you are not damn’ well going to get one. And that is final. And kindly leave your mother out of it.”

  Keith shovelled beans and potato into a mound and laid his knife and fork beside them with superb, lingering care, seeming to measure distance for effect.

  “You stupid blind cuckold,” he said at last, deliberately and clearly, and stared straight into his father’s eyes.

  Plates bounced like discs as Bernard reached across and slapped him ringingly, smartingly, for immediate relief; and when Keith’s crumpled face broke into tears, the humiliation erased the hatred, and essence of his antagonism seemed to present itself like the crucified Christ and he loved his father so much he wanted to die.

  III

  THESE DAYS, Bernard decided during the few seconds a perfunctory wave took to his wife, we are an armed neutrality. Keith had mumbled something farewelling through a mouthful of cereal and had not bothered to look, really look, at his old dad going off to earn the family livelihood. That should hurt me, Bernard worried a little, as he drove west to Ipswich which was for ever to him the town of the burnt-up park and the slightly-off Windor-sausage sandwiches he had munched there once as a boy between his own rowing parents parked on the grass above the picnic lunch. But it did not, and today there was not even
the apprehending quality of that early occasion last week when he had spun over the walls of freedom. The rain wept sadly and unforgivingly across his windscreen, whose two rhythmic lashes swept it back and forth in clean semicircles through which he saw only the suburbs standing on tiptoe and the wet sheen asphalt.

  There were no problems left because he no longer cared, huddled empty in his damp raincoat, his rain-spotted hat on the bucket-seat beside him. Behind was his bag—(“Towel, Bernard? Toothpaste? Slippers?” But not—“Love, Bernard? Concern?”) Yes, Iris believed in the marital symbols of comfort, all right, but those hidden things, the genuine tenderness that survived the solitariness when the last guest was gone, the fag-ends piled into the sink tray along with the olive stones and the bits of salami, and all the scummy glasses stood easy along the formica, then did she believe in love? Not even hot-paws with Gerald (“Poor old bastard!” he said aloud) could survive that, could beat the nakedness of two souls. Bodies weren’t in it when it came to stripping!

  He stopped at Helidon for a drink, glooming through the pub windows at a rain plastering the sky and the countryside as far as he could see. Hills had vanished. As he drank he thumbed down the list of examinees—fifteen convent pupils, six private, only three elementary, thank God. Some strays at Stanthorpe and Toowoomba. If he shot through that lot smartly he could polish off the rest in a day as he had planned and his little lie to Iris would bear fruit. He’d have a nothing-night away from home.

  For a few vicious seconds he thought of wiring Gerald, but a vision of Iris, her curlers scarfed up from the dust, propelling a niftie-swiftie of a vacuum cleaner through the spiritless rooms, pumped away behind the bar with such domestic absorption he could have wept at the nonsense of it all and ate no lunch but drank another, and felt like cutting his throat.

  He drove into the garden city through tender drizzling emotional trees.

  It went as he had planned.

  Hotel sheets embraced him that evening and in a dream of pianos and convent parlours, a never-ending line of pigtailed girls played a Grieg Albumblatt and stumbled in exactly the same spot until thanks to God the tea and the thin bread-and-butter rolls and the gem scones. “I want the downlands tour,” old Bathgate had badgered at the last staff examiners’ meeting. “I want to go to that convent on the range where they make those marvellous gem scones.” He had eaten four, the gutser winner and grinned all through his second and third cups of tea, thinking of Bathgate stuck up along the coast in the wet. “I’ve got it all plotted with flags,” Bathgate had pronounced. “Drew it up for today!” And he had unrolled a crazy map of the State with all the centres marked with flags inscribed “pikelets” or “tea-cake” or “asparagus rolls” or “éclairs”. “There’s not much to choose,” he said thoughtfully, “but I’d say the Ursuline convents have it every time. Flavour and lightness and size of helpings.” The ten other men looked incredulously at the map on the table.

  “What are those little multiplication signs for?” one wanted to know.

  Bathgate had looked up innocently.

  “My dear fellow,” he explained carefully, “this is the result of enormous research and widespread but delicate questioning. I’ve done this solely for the benefit of all of us. Photostat copies will be issued. Those places marked with a cross are the ones without a gents!”

  Soon after breakfast he went down to Condamine in sun patches between showers that lit up the wonderful greens of nearness and lilacs of distance, and as his car raced along the straights of the downlands was conscious of nothing but speed and quick scenery, the comfort of having recently breakfasted and well, the pleasure of aloneness. Yet this was dissolved when he came downstairs two hours later in the Condamine Focus and found awaiting him in the lounge a handsome, gloomy cleric who had been meeting him in this manner for several years now. They smiled briefly.

  “The good sisters?” Bernard asked.

  “The good sisters indeed. Anxious as ever. I’m to drive you over.”

  “Have I time for a beer?” Bernard glanced at his wrist-watch. “I’m not due there till ten-thirty, you know. Just a quick quick one.”

  He speculated on a patina of greyness that covered Father Lingard and a new habit he seemed to have of rubbing one ruminative finger-tip along the corner of his mouth. “Ah yes,” he would say to fill in the gaps, and when Leverson looked at him once too suddenly, too inquisitively, he explained, “I am nature abhorring a vacuum.”

  “How is your family?” the priest inquired, out of politeness, guessed the other, rather than real curiosity, and I could shock his calm by saying, “My wife’s an adulteress and my son has been seduced”, but then he remembered it was almost impossible to shock priests and that all Doug Lingard would say would be a grave “Tell me about it”, that was indeed exactly what he did say when, next morning as they lunched together on his return from Stanthorpe, he finally admitted, “My wife is unfaithful, my son has lost his innocence.” (Note that gentler wording, Bernard, he said to himself.) But at that time and in that place, he was unable to qualify the new emptiness that exhilarated as it isolated each tree in the forest and singly discovered the birds.

  He could shrug merely.

  There were, he noticed, some careless stains on Father Lingard’s stock.

  “I’m a little tired, I think perhaps of this town.”

  “Aren’t you being heretical?”

  Lingard smiled wryly. “Well, that would be something. A stir. I think I could bear the Inquisition and a panel of beady-eyed Dominicans pinning me to the wall.”

  Leverson sipped thoughtfully.

  “But I didn’t think you people ever suffered from boredom. You’re so wrapped up in sacrifice, wouldn’t even the boredom be part of the pleasure?”

  “You sound most Dominican yourself.” Lingard managed a small laugh. “It’s not a boredom so much. It’s hard to explain. A kind of spiritual aridity when all the springs dry up, you know, and there seems to be pointlessness about it all.” He inspected his bony wrist. “Look, it must be a problem of my years.”

  “We all feel it,” Leverson said.

  “You too?”

  “Me too.”

  “And how does it attack you? The same restlessness, the same discontent? The examination of the heart in the hours when others are asleep? The wish to strip oneself right down to the bone and escape?”

  Bernard nodded.

  “One must persist, persist, persist. You know what we say—believe in spite of appearances, trust despite all evidence to the contrary, hope against hope. It should be easy, but it’s damned hard work. I say damned advisedly.” He pushed his beer away and left it unfinished, sad and flat. “I think we’ll have to go now. They’ll be rushing about in twenty different directions.”

  Condamine’s main street remained unchanged for ever. It was, and still is, a scrubby little town drowned in dust and flies. Around the corner Lingard had angle-parked his car with its nose poked in at a second-hand store. The car was black and clerical, too. It had white side wall tires that repeated the liturgical motif and it stood, expensive and desperate, ready to rush into life and drive both of them nowhere.

  The convent was a double-storeyed timber building with a brick façade, a chapel on the southern wall beyond which tennis courts lay behind a grape trellis, and a big barn of an assembly hall in the northern shoulder of the grounds. Plaster saints idled in the front garden, peering over the wall at Condamine’s Fitzherbert Street—all leaf and old colonial (three verandas, bow windows, hallway)—that sauntered by to join the main highway east. At a variety of points along this road, camphor-laurel trees tangled lushly overhead, obliterating the sky with a turbulent scrawl-screen of leaves whose shadows lay felt-thick across concrete. From the privacy of grape trellis in the winy summer, various white coifs might be seen moving and observing the cars travelling east or west; observing with envy or pity or indifference or a kind of jealous rage that Sister Matthew endeavoured to repress each time she discovered the
world she had given up years ago, so close its pulsing might still be felt in her blood.

  Pallid as last winter she slipped quietly now from the practice-room block near the stables and glided across to the main buildings to ring the period bell, for she was portress this year, her junior classes being so small she had netted half a dozen further irritating chores that she performed not always lovingly. In high winds she might use hammer and nails to good effect on clashing windows or imprison vine tendrils on a fly-away trellis. Her practicality unclogged hand basins and mended fuses, but was sometimes unable, more often as she grew older, to mend human relationships.

  A ginger tuft of hair sprouted grassily beneath her starched coif. Her thin face, clever as an eagle’s, was impassive when she reached the waxy hallway where parlour clock swung its pendulum fifteen seconds off ten. Exactly on the hour she pressed the button, and deep in the convent’s conscience a peal, virginal and icy, claimed all eight women in the classrooms and two lay nuns plaiting a net of pastry across a community apple tart. Sister Matthew’s acid breath misted the clock’s glass as she leant close to watch the cog-wheels, so like her own unhappy heart, while mechanically she drew her watch from inside a deep apron pocket and adjusted it, took note of her white clever face in the mirror of glass and polished oak, looked hard for a second into her own undeceived eyes, and went gently down the hall towards the parlour.

  The bells had rung like twins.

  Through the translucent jujubes of stained glass, even before she swung the door open, she could see the dark shadows of both men.

  In this asexual world they were exotics.

  “Father Lingard,” she said, and waited.

  “This is Mr Leverson, Sister. Sister Matthew,” he said. “Mr Leverson is our Board music examiner, I’m sure you will look after him. Not that he’s new here—years and years of it. Isn’t that so?”