The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

“That is so,” Bernard agreed. He wondered where all the children were, what they would be like, recalling Keith, smart as paint, quiz-kid bright, blond, rude, withdrawn.

  Father Lingard fiddled his hat round on a white impractical hand.

  “If you will wait,” Sister Matthew suggested, not quite absorbing them with her strangely illuminated eyes. “I will fetch Sister Beatrice.”

  “I shan’t wait,” Father Lingard said. “But you might ask Reverend Mother to send the Monsignor a list of First Communicants before Saturday week.”

  “Yes, Father,” Sister Matthew said. She had not the near-fawning acquiescence of so many nuns, even her voice conveying not indifference but a self-sufficiency that made Leverson think of Scott or Sturt or Magellan—or any man at all with a desert within that must be explored.

  Leverson found himself alone. The small nun had made him uneasy, for she kept her eyelids down and below the ghost of a moustache her mouth was too full and too clever, and for the few moments they had all confronted each other, they had stood like antagonists gripping nothing but space.

  Then she was gone, and through the window, he could see Father Lingard thinly striding to his car; and he sat on with his heart suddenly overturned for no reason at all, waiting and fingering the pages of a religious monthly. Priests surrounded by lepers in Sierra Leone and smiling shiny black acolytes in Mombasa seminaries grinned back. His Protestantism was both affronted and moved. “‘St Joachim, pray for us’,” he read softly. A flock of aspirations beat up in an echelon from the page but he could only repeat the words cynically, standing on his own bland desert, and watch the birds flap away. They were not homing pigeons.

  Sister Beatrice rattled in and startled the last one.

  A big, warm creature, she was given to enormous gusty spirals of laughter whose vulgarity shocked some of the community that retained a special memory of her, coloured according to the personality of the recorder, singing “Macushla” in a throbbing mezzo-soprano at a St Patrick’s night concert. Phrases like “your red lips are saying” came back startlingly to each. There she had stood, lumpy, generous, and lovable in her habit, one hand on the piano lid, the other, forgetful of circumstances, merely that of Miss Moira Stanners underlining the passion of an Irish love song. “That death is a dream and that love is for aye,” she had sung richly and ripely above the mellow tones of the three-crown Ronisch. And the audience had gone quite mad and stamped until she had sung once more, her own enjoyment glowing across the hall. Reverend Mother St Jude had reprimanded her rather acidly later—“A woman in your position, consecrated to spiritual things . . . overtones of the music-hall!”—a reprimand which still could not drown the echoes, a year old, of community choruses dominated by the lovely unused voice; nor later that of Father Lake (phoney American accent, red hair) who had done Bing Crosby imitations that same evening and was entirely unselfconscious in his clerical black. “To the point of profanity,” remembered Sister Philomene, compressing her elderly lips whenever she recalled his “Dearly beloved, as the collection plates go round I will sing for you ‘Pennies from Heaven’!” Cheers and cheers! Shocking!

  Sister Beatrice laid her warm moist hand briefly on Mr Leverson’s.

  “We are ready to begin,” she announced. “All the little girls are waiting in the hall, including those from private teachers. While we’re walking over to the practice block I shall send for the first one.”

  He marvelled at the discipline of organization.

  “If you don’t mind,” Bernard suggested, “I intend starting with the beginners—to shorten their anguish.”

  “Of course. Of course. There are only three of them.” Sister Beatrice braced herself for gentle bribery and said, “Don’t be too hard on the babies, Mr Leverson. They’re a timid little lot this year.”

  “We shall do our best,” Bernard said, not committing himself. “I don’t feel particularly fierce. I shall save it for the seniors.”

  Sister Beatrice opened the front door and they walked out into the garden alongside the convent, through the May damp and across to the old block of music-rooms near the stables. She opened the door of the last room and Bernard, gazing in, saw it had been decorated for his benefit with a great bunch of leaves in a concrete pot in one corner against the wall. A terrible print of Saint Cecilia playing a primitive pipe-organ hung over the piano. He felt the familiarity in this room and all rooms like it entrap his fingers so that they went automatically through preparatory movements: the laying out of papers on the table, the syllabus lists, the question sheets. The piano lid had been opened; it was an elderly Lipp, black, loyal, but with sad yellow teeth. He hit a few melancholy chords—and discovered its brilliant tone.

  “As soon as you’re ready, Sister,” he said.

  One pupil seemed no different from another, but the small anemone hands uncurled over the keys with different mannerisms. By eleven-thirty he was only on his fifth, a horribly nervous child with licorice plaits and unhealthy fudge skin. At first she had trembled so much her hands could barely impress tone from this over-willing keyboard, so Bernard had instructed her to stop for a minute and he chatted to her about school until she was almost at ease and able to play, though not well. As he watched the smudged profile he thought of his own son’s withdrawn and sulky confidence. He wanted to say to this skinny plaited mite, “And do you love your parents? Tell me honestly. I won’t tell a soul.” And he knew if he crossed his empty heart she would believe him. But he could not. She would choke with fright or giggle and some misinterpreter would complain and he would become the bogy man under the house where the rainwater tank sheltered the frogs or the unseen sound glanced at over the shoulder, the padding nothing that one must beware of.

  He wrote fifteen out of thirty-five on the mark form.

  “All right,” he said when she had reached the end of the Köhler study. “That’s all. It’s all over.”

  Her mouth felt for and caught a smile. He patted her bony shoulder.

  “Off you go. And ask the next one to come.”

  He ticked the name off on his list and shuffled his papers around. This was a diploma candidate, the first of the morning. His back to the door, he sensed something unusual when this opened—a difference in quality of sound, of footstep which made him turn quickly.

  Sister Matthew, poised as a hawk, hovered in the doorway.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Where is the next candidate, Sister? I’m afraid I’m running a little late.”

  “I am she.” A smile began on the clever mouth, then gained control.

  “Oh. Oh, I see. Yes, of course,”

  “It’s not merely the indulgence of a hobby, Mr Leverson. I’m taking over some of the preparatory pupils for Sister Beatrice. Actually I’ve been teaching most of my life here—but without qualifications.”

  “They soothe parents, I believe.”

  She smiled—but a long way off. And her confidence seemed to crack a little then, for she shook her head briefly.

  “All right, Elizabeth,” he would have been saying comfily to the child he had expected. “Let’s start with the scales, shall we?” And there would have been none of this hesitancy that plucked the poise from him like feathers, leaving him awkwardly squawking.

  But she was now sitting at the piano, awaiting his directions. They went through the usual preliminaries. Something had put her out of gear, he was aware, but she answered well enough, and then he said, “The Bach, then”, glancing at his lists.

  Pianistically she was entirely equipped to investigate the Bach manner, but without the joyousness full interpretation demanded. Leaning back, Bernard admired her facility, the ginger-haired, light-boned fingers that moved transparently across the keyboard. She knew she was good. She tossed the fugue off as if she were only at practice and her indifference merely added to the technical accuracy of her playing. At the end her smile was all awry and he had to compliment her, though she did not look up.r />
  “What about List C?”

  “Bartok.”

  It would be, he thought. She thrust her crucifix like a dagger into a newer and more comfortable position in her girdle and the rosary beads smacked out a decade of amens on the piano stool.

  It was, Bernard reflected, hardly worth going through the rest of her work, and only convention made him do so, for she was so sufficient he knew it would be unnecessary to penalize her seriously on any points.

  “Very satisfying,” he said. “Would you be hurt if I made a small suggestion?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well, then, on the question of emotion.”

  “Emotion?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean my playing lacks it?”

  “Not altogether.”

  She looked amused.

  “Nuns are not given to grand passion.”

  “I suppose not.” Her frankness startled him. “But in musical interpretation surely even the celibate is allowed a little latitude.”

  “It has never been declared heresy that I know. But I can only play what the music causes me to feel, Mr Leverson. Once . . . well, never mind. The Bach is like an algebraic problem. Eventually a must equal b and there is the immense satisfaction of the logic of it.”

  “There’s joy in that. Somehow I didn’t feel you discovered it.”

  “I have probably forgotten how.” But if she were not uncomfortable—and he had no means of ascertaining, for she concealed her face behind the curve of her veil—then Bernard writhed and felt she was assessing his preoccupation with the world she had lost.

  “Well, then,” he said, edging about on his chair and pretending to fuss with his papers, “you’d better get on with the Beethoven.”

  She nodded, and when she bent over the piano he was struck sharply and terribly by the grace of her arms in the rolled black sleeves now pinned at the wrists, the carved turn of the head under black folds, and the folds themselves, a still music, the flow or the rapture of it stilled. He found he had not listened to her playing even when she lowered her head at the end, awaiting dismissal.

  The sky beyond the convent perimeters had the eggshell brittleness of late winter against which shellacked trees might crack above the papery beige grass of the frost-dry country. I am beginning to lose myself, he knew. And now this strange creature is found here, abandoned to perfection in some wasteland where even God withdrew ecstasy. The spiritual carrot of fulfilment dangled eternally out of reach.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You need have no worries, Sister.”

  “Need I not?”

  “Not as far as the examination is concerned anyway.”

  “Surely it’s rather unprofessional of you to put my mind at rest, Mr Leverson,” Sister Matthew said. She rose from the stool and went to the door, which Bernard opened.

  “Kindness in high places, Sister,” he suggested. “You must be used to that at least?”

  “There, least of all,” she said. “I will see that one of the girls brings you morning tea.”

  But there were no gem scones this time—instead a delicious half-dozen pastry cases with pockets of home-made jam, a vesper-tinted confiture that Father Lingard told him later the good nuns made out of prickly pear, a device they had had to fall back on during the war shortages in order to sate the boarders.

  Sharp at twelve-thirty, synchronizing her entry with his crumb-brushing, came his last candidate but one, a bold as brass fifteen-year-old who moved through scales, ear tests, and sight-reading without batting one of her over-long lashes, but allowing her plaits to hang very jeune fille in front of her shoulders. She played with a serious and restrained savagery.

  Leverson sucked another boiled lolly thoughtfully as he marked her slightly higher than Sister Matthew, wondering at the reaction when the lists should be officially posted back. Bonnet blanc . . . murmured Bernard with his mouth full of bull’s-eye.

  She was an unsurprised adolescent whose colouring and I.Q. were both high, with an adult ease of manner that left oldsters fish-gaping at her poise. The most innocent question—(“Did you say melodic or harmonic, Mr Leverson?”)—seemed to include an adumbration of no-innocence, of exploratory device intended to wring a response from any male around.

  “You were a good girl,” Bernard said, amused by her nonsense. “You deserve a lolly for playing so well.” And he held the bag out, hoping to put her in her place.

  But she would flirt with a shark.

  “Oh, Mr Leverson! You are so kind. And I’ve always been terrified of examiners before. Don’t I deserve two?”

  She pouted just enough and looked him full in the eye for one terrible soul-opening second before she rang a curtain of modesty across the stage.

  Little harlot, Bernard thought with good-natured amusement, and offered the bag once more as Sister Matthew knocked and entered.

  Ridiculously they were caught by the situation in attitudes of irritation and amusement and resentment.

  “You have done well, Eva?” inquired Sister Matthew who did not really ask. “I’m afraid that is your last examinee for the day, Mr Leverson. The child who was supposed to come next has not arrived. Her mother rang to say she is ill and will have to miss the examination this time. Perhaps when you return next session.”

  Bernard checked his pigtailed lists.

  “O’Donovan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well.” He drew a tired thick line through her name. “That packs it up then.”

  “You may go,” Sister Matthew suggested to the girl, touching her arm very gently with a force that was not at all physical, but held the compulsion that brings mountains to Mahomet. “Be a good child, Eva, and run over and close the hall windows.”

  “Thank you for the sweets, Mr Leverson,” Eva said, ignoring the nun. She dimpled dark as dusk, and only said goodbye to Sister Matthew after she had left the room so that the words called back through the door had their own effrontery, coming in from emptiness and empty, too, of goodwill.

  Closing the piano lid, Bernard tussled with the impulse to explain the lollies, repressed the confession angrily, and was amazed he should feel obliged to justify the most casual of gestures. My home does not justify its indifference, he thought. I do that for them. And he thought of the lepers and the self-martyring priests justifying themselves and a God he didn’t really believe in not caring a tittle whether one justified or not or sweated or suffered or spat defiance into the skies with its blistering eye forcing something profane or sanctified from each member of the race.

  He was buckling his brief-case as Sister Beatrice bounced in breathing desperately, red as purging fires and frightened of no one. She was all smiles and high blood-pressure, and in her younger days not only had taught two generations of small boys how to bowl but had tucked her skirts a little higher into her girdle and instructed fifteen grubby admirers in the art of tackling. Now, spiritually bringing Mr Leverson down, she bustled him through to the front parlour for formal good-byes to Reverend Mother, a ritualistic function he had discovered that went on at all convents. Behind him, more silent than prayer, Sister Matthew had faded away without his having time to say good-bye, but the carved thinness of her soul and her person remained in his inward eye.

  “Would you like Paddy to drive you to your hotel?” Reverend Mother asked, her square jaw defying heaven.

  “Paddy?” Leverson asked.

  “Our buggy man.” Buggy, indeed!

  “Oh, of course. No, really, thank you,” he protested. “The walk will do me good. Well, walks are supposed to do one good.” He felt dreadfully vague. “And it’s all in the attitude, probably. I sit too much, you know. Or drive. And driving one never really sees.”

  They smiled upon him beatifically and this departure seemed harder to achieve than ever, but he went through the polite door and found the rain threat had moved away. “How is your family?” they had asked as a final question, briefed no doubt as to his status by some divine grape-vin
e.

  He hestitated with one punctuating foot a step below, half turning on its comma of space and time.

  “Like Eva,” he said. “Growing up, and having difficulty.”

  And he went away between the carved saints to the roadway and the camphor laurels, and Reverend Mother puzzled over this exit line for some time.

  “Now really, Sister Beatrice,” she asked rhetorically, “what precisely do you think he meant by that? One loses, after half a lifetime of enclosure, an apprehension of the exact nature of irony in secular matters.”

  She touched her broken front tooth delicately with her crucifix while she reflected behind her closed door and her authority.

  Sister Beatrice knew, but hadn’t the heart to tell her.

  During the evening examen of conscience, Sister Beatrice admitted actively and sharply to an uncharity that had lain behind her heart for seven months. Within the minute it took for this understanding to reach home her large mind shrank from the fact and her broad face contracted with both the internal and the external annoyance. She shifted roly-poly against the polished oak of her stall and tried not to see the core of discontent. Through the chapel door in deliberate inattention she looked across the downlands.

  There was, she knew, no chronological equivalent for that past season of acid frost and snapping winds, the black veils curling in the blue-white weather, the ring fingers with chilblain cushions, the toes swollen and reshaping the black shoes; no equivalent for the purple frost-lines against aqueous sunrise or the desolate settings beyond the range to the south; no equivalent for the time spent on the clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht or the causes of the Counter-Reformation; all those months made unbearably longer as if a bell had begun to chime its statement to her outraged ears by Sister Matthew’s voice, attitude, manner of walking, eating and—God forgive the presumptuous human outrage—even of praying. For pray she did in her dry cool tones, assiduously acidulously distorting the Latin that was one of her own teaching subjects with Italianate vowels of maddening length that trailed all over the chapel, syllables behind.

  Like Sir Roger, but not as lovable.