The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  I wish I hadn’t done it, he said then. And he said now, in the hot dusty lane, I wish I hadn’t.

  He looked up at the exposing yellow afternoon light and saw himself trapped in that place, discovered, and he began to run back to the street and left past the bungalows, past the convent and the courts down towards the river-bank and the fellow-feeling willows.

  Miss Trumper. Miss Paradise. Chookie Mumberson. Miss Trumper. Miss Paradise.

  Before a cheval mirror whose surface needed loving-kindness, the once lovely Trumper made nifty waists still with a glacé kid belt not suited to her age but daringly retained from a last late spring flurry during the war.

  Still lush in her mid-thirties, but desperately discreet about the exact position of time’s finger (“I was never good at telling the time!”), she had sported an American Colonel of Distinction with iron-grey temples for three mad weeks of invasion summer. Verna Paradise had gone crazy, dyed her hair orange, plastered her eyebrows, built out her bust. They’d been in business college together and knew every pale-skinned curve of each other’s face. Foursome cosy they razzed down to Brisbane in a staff car, grogged at pubs, waved streamers, blew hooters, swooned, necked, made love and parted. Now Trumper could hardily believe it of herself. She had never been the racy kind.

  But the Yanks were different. Soft as honey. They melted with good manners. Subtle, Verna Paradise asserted, and brave spenders.

  “Got me bitta fur!” she used to mock, long after her hope had died, would never come tight-pantedly drawling. And the desperation would glare ferociously from under the blue-silver lids of her eyes. Spin that moulting rabbit, sister! Twist it this or that way. Peer out, across oceans now, and not see the lost Yanks from Minnesota or Baton Rouge or Tucson. The Brisbane streets filled up with slouch hats once more after the forage caps had gone, so that the girls who had lost their hearts or their good sense at bus-stops and good-byeing railway platforms were jolted back to terrible sanities.

  Miss Trumper tightened her belt in the flattering half-lit room and remembered the return trip to Condamine and a certain anguish and guilt she side-stepped but could never forget, and she waggled her poor sad head at her reflection.

  “How can I absorb this day?” she wondered. And the next? And the next? I am eternal, she accused herself. And groaned at her face making lipstick mouths in the glass. Eternal.

  Sometimes she read, martyred in wicker slices on the front veranda’s shady afternoon where now, still kidded along by her belt, she took her fifty plus years and sat them behind the silver spotted leaves of begonias whose fleshiness soothed. From corner posts erupted staghorns in wire baskets that netted a view of the convent wall and lawn and the weather-beaten saints impervious to her guilty bloodshot suppliant eyes.

  “It’s really,” she said aloud, for these days she said aloud more and more frequently, “it’s really that I want to be a saint.”

  “Verna,” she asked as they took tea in this leafed corner, “is it silly to want to be a saint?”

  Miss Paradise paused, stunned, in the act of adding sugar, but she did not allow this to sweeten her words.

  “Yes,” she said. “Pass the bikkies, Kitty.”

  “But truly,” persisted Miss Trumper handing them across with a few jerky retractions. “I can’t see that it is. I mean, think of all the marvellous people. St Francis and Joan and Lawrence. The one who was roasted, I mean.”

  “Why do you want to be a saint?” asked Miss Paradise, settling her rainbow-striped dress in a sickly candy flounce about the edge of her bony knees.

  Miss Trumper sipped her tea and had two goes at putting her cup back on the saucer.

  “To atone,” she said.

  “Oh Heavens!” Miss Paradise sighed. “You are feeling bad today, aren’t you? You’re one of millions. No one knows. No one cares. It’s all years away and you do yourself no good by being miserable.”

  I must be wretched, Miss Trumper decided, when I am not inanely gay, making licorice eyes at tradesmen who go away and gag over my gush. Yes. I know. Gag gag gag gag gag. Oh why, she asked herself, why did I do it? And all across her forehead barbed-wire worries writhed as she saw once more the struck-off quack’s rooms and felt every bleeding inch of the walk afterwards along the Terrace to the cab-rank. Fifteen years. And she had carried that half-hour and that walk for every day ever since until the minutes pressed their spikes into her and she told herself this is it, this is the end, and began saving her sleeping tablets like a miser awaiting the final luxury. But at the end something always intervened. She would tell herself it was nobler to go on living if you could stand it. Isn’t it, Verna? Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Seeking reassurance like a child. And, yes dear, Verna would say, of course it is. Of course it’s nobler. And they would hover, dry as sticks, over their pot of tea and pretend they weren’t quite so old and things weren’t so terrible and giggle a bit, gay-girlishly with the lipstick hooking on to the wrinkled corners of their mouths, the sad runnels, but exposing the dry lips. Or the dry souls.

  “Are you still having Chookie for one day only?” Miss Paradise inquired.

  “Oh yes,” said Miss Trumper. “Sometimes he drops in if he has left something he needs in the tool-shed. He’s not a bad lad.”

  “Just primitive,” Miss Paradise suggested, gashing Chookie wide open.

  “Well, perhaps. You know, he does do some awful things. This morning down by the back fence . . . I was going down to fetch him in for tea when. . . .” She subsided into shocked gossip that still managed to distract, for if she placed another’s transgression alongside her own the harsh light of conscience ceased beating upon her with quite as much acidity. Oh, she was avid for crime sheets and scandals and went through the paper for meaty bones which she would bury in the crumbling earth of her eroded mind and unearth much later, slightly altered in shape, for soothing comparisons. She had a shocking familiarity with famous rapers, mutilators, necrophiles, and poisoners, altogether unbelievable in this gentle tottering soul who could not now harm a fly without some pang of heart.

  “Disgusting,” decided Miss Paradise. “I’d tell his mother.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t! How could I? Could you tell anyone a thing like that? I mean, how would you say it?”

  “You certainly can. Exposing himself that way. Say if someone else had seen. . . .”

  “But it was hardly exposing. I mean, he might have wanted to go and couldn’t. . . . Wouldn’t you say it was more vulgar than vicious?” She always sought timidly for excuses after the revelation.

  “Vulgar or vicious, it shouldn’t be.” Miss Paradise was rather angrily envious. No scandal had touched her for years. “My dear,” she whispered then, “there’s someone coming. I think you have a visitor.” And her voice trailed into italics as she slit-eyed a portly figure hesitating at the wicket gate.

  Bernard had met Miss Trumper before. Six times? Seven? He was not sure, but she could have given him a total of minutes devastatingly accurate, a summation of trade, an analysis (false) of looks exchanged or emphases (misread). Her frantic hands automatically began to twitch curls into provocative positions and one forefinger, desperate digit, rubbed the corner of her mouth to erase the trapped carmine grease she knew from experience would be there. Then one hand stroked pleats, and then pushed at puffs of hair at her nape. Her hair-style had not changed since she wowed them during the war. And she went, naked as birth, across the concrete veranda to the man who had never yet really seen her.

  “Hullo,” said hearty Bernard, all pipe and chuckles. “What splendid weather for lotus-eating! And how are you?”

  Miss Trumper always found that an exceedingly difficult question to answer, some ethical principle rearing itself at one, so that she shied away like a nervous horse.

  “How are you?” she emphasized. “It must be ages.”

  “I’m sorry for coming unannounced,” Bernard said. “I’m going back this evening and I wanted to see you before I went.”

  “Oh!” S
ee me, she thought, pulsating with miracles. See me? Oh, do see me. “It’s a delightful surprise. Stay and have some tea, and meet my dear friend, Miss Paradise.”

  Miss Paradise’s paint had hardened like lacquer. A smile might have caused terrible damage. So she did not smile, but inclined her head coldly, going all grande dame. From the narrow rainbow sleeve an over-ringed hand, unlucky with opals, trembled into his and withdrew after withered contact of a minimal kind.

  “How are you,” she stated and could not have cared less for an answer, aloof behind her public image. She had always played hard to get, the cunning thing, from sixteen on, and had been noticeably more successful with men than her dear friend Kitty, so that now she carried the nonsense on into middle age by habit. Underneath the speculation bubbled, though her eye missed no detail as she stripped him mentally—but only to the underwear. She had always been a bit of a prude.

  “Tea?” Miss Trumper asked, kitty-cat cute and blessedly relieved from guilt for a few brilliant moments.

  “Thank you,” he said and tried not to watch her having trouble with the hot water that she added. During the few moments she was gone to get another cup he rumbled about in his brief-case for papers, watched by the brilliant phoenix opposite who sipped her tea and nibbled biscuits with the utmost icy composure.

  “It’s about the little Garnett girl,” he said when the tea-table settled itself. “I’ve had to fail her again. In fact, I didn’t really examine her. She was so nervous she couldn’t play a note, poor little thing. Wept like a sponge. I told her I’d come and have a talk with you.”

  Miss Trumper knocked the sugar bowl, dodging sideways in an effort to avoid contaminating it before she passed it through her agony to Bernard, who recalled her foibles acutely.

  “Not that one,” she suggested as he reached for a biscuit. “Try that top one. It doesn’t look so—so battered.” She laughed foolishly, afraid to say “germy”.

  “Thank you.” Bernard took it as swiftly as possible to cut short her indecision and nibbled into its icing. “If you like,” he said, breathing vanilla, “I’ll see if a different examiner could come up next May. She might feel happier with a woman, say. I often wonder if I’m getting too old and crusty.”

  “Oh dear!” Temporarily Miss Trumper was seized by a spasm of panic. Not come? Oh please not not come! She looked forward to these little meetings they had had for the last few years when over tea and scones they would conduct post-mortems of the trials of music-teaching and the changes in the syllabus. He was so kindly and gentle, so good, so genuinely good and worth while, she felt. No. She could not bear it if he ceased to come.

  Bold as brass, she put a racy hand on his sleeve.

  “We’d all miss you,” she said. “You’re part of the system now. Christine is a silly little girl. I’ll speak to her.”

  “No. Don’t do that. She was very upset.”

  “I do know her mother’s rather odd,” Miss Trumper said, twitching just the merest bit. “I don’t think she bothers about her. ‘Neglects’ is too strong a word, I suppose. But I don’t think she ever makes her practise, and then she gets so upset when Christine’s results are terrible. But what can I do?”

  “It’s very hard,” Bernard soothed. “Very hard. Having children is buying oneself trouble.”

  Miss Trumper went dreadfully white. “Do you think that?”

  “Well, it’s only a saying, isn’t it? But I suppose one’s worries only really begin with parenthood.”

  “More tea?” Miss Paradise interposed, attempting to save her drowning friend.

  Miss Trumper wrestled silently, inwardly, and terribly with her guilt, which cast a slime over the entire day, her face strained and absent.

  The man, aware that something dreadful was happening within her, would have made amends, but all he was capable of doing was turning to her companion and asking fatuously, “Have you lived in Condamine long, Miss Paramour, or are you merely visiting?”

  It was shocking when Kitty Trumper screeched with wild laughter then, as if a thick plug had been wrenched out. Miss Paradise was straight as a Biro, but propelled her reply with much effort so that the very sound of the words and their sense were stiff as glue.

  “Paradise, Mr Loverson,” she said coldly. “And I reside in a house across town.”

  Behind his smile he hunted round for table talk, but was inhibited by her eyes drilling him across an ellipse of tea.

  “My father was born here,” he said weakly, “across the river on the flats.”

  “Was he, indeed?”

  “Yes. We used to come up from Brisbane when I was a boy so that he could look around the old place and say how much it had changed. You know.”

  “Do we not?” Miss Paradise would never unbend now.

  “Did you really?” Miss Trumper appeared to be recovering. “Oh, that makes us school friends almost! I was at school here. This is the old family home.” She rejoiced excessively and longed at once for the innocence and the untroubled eye, the animal spirit that had once been able to lose itself in simplicities—the high tea after tennis in winter dusk and the long horse-rides out towards Toowoomba with the exaltation of movement and the daringly jodhpured leg become one freedom; a certain aspect of landscape at a turn on the Gap road when a valley revealed its sunny ripeness to the eye focusing between trees and hills. “School,” she said softly. “I wish I could be there again.”

  “You’re crazy!” snapped Miss Paradise rudely. “It was cruel and terrible, inky-stockinged, verbal, nagged and primitive.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve used that word, Verna.”

  “Is it? Well, I like it.” She could feel a quarrel beginning to boil. “Primitif. Très, très primitif. We had to kowtow and behave abnormally and fawn and debase our individualism.”

  “Oh dear,” Miss Trumper said. “Oh dear, Verna. But we were safe.”

  “Safe!” scoffed the other. “Safe! . . . I’ll have to be starting back,” she said abruptly. The older, the huffier. There was some ratio. She fluffed about quite a bit before she actually edged the heavy garden chair back, Bernard assisting sombrely. “Who wants to be safe?”

  Miss Trumper’s eyes popped. “We all do. Oh, I know I do. Don’t you think everyone does, Mr Leverson?”

  “We’re never safe,” Bernard said rather sententiously. “There’s unexplained nastiness squinting across any unexpected lull, eyeing us off and waiting to pounce.” But he smiled.

  “Lovely!” approved Miss Paradise, quite viciously, a rainbow monster. “I like that. I like the feeling of something about to happen even if it never does. And it never does. You and your stuffy little school womb! All tight with authority and chalk and hours for prep and prayer! Oh, those gay times with the short-sheeted beds!”

  Miss Trumper retreated and fiddled with her tea-cup and then removed her hands suddenly as if . . .

  “You’ve never lost it,” Kitty Trumper suggested, “or you’d never say.”

  “Neither have you, you silly thing,” Miss Paradise said rudely, “only you just won’t realize it or believe it. You love to crucify yourself. You’re a born martyr. You know what they used to call her at school, Mr Leverson? Alma Martyr!” She laughed and laughed.

  “Please,” Miss Trumper pleaded, anguished before the visitor. “Please.” Her voice almost flapped away.

  Bernard attempted to appear engrossed with the potted plants. He strolled a few feet away into a late square of afternoon sun, but in the silence at his back could be felt the protestations of the one and the amusement of the other.

  “Good-bye then, Kitty,” he heard Miss Paradise say. “I’ll see you later on when you feel more cheerful. Good afternoon, Mr Leverson.’ She looked him up and down and held his eye for ten pulsing beats. “I like big men,” she said, “with pock-marks.”

  “Sorry I can’t oblige,” Bernard said, taken aback. His tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth. “Good-bye.”

  Maypole straight and mad she
went down the path between the ornamental cabbages and the gerberas.

  “Don’t take any notice please,” Miss Trumper said, battling with something she was not prepared to reveal. “She’s a bit—well—crazy, you know, and doesn’t mean a thing by it.”

  “Thank God I’m not pock-marked,” Bernard said drily. “Now, just before we get side-tracked, let’s settle about young Garnett.”

  Before he left, Miss Trumper, putting all her coin on the red, asked if he would care to try her piano; after all, she pointed out coyly, he had visited her several times and never yet . . . (never yet what, sad Trumper?) . . . and it was a rather pleasant little Carl Mand and she wondered what he . . . she would like his opinion . . . her father had imported it direct from Germany, Coblenz to be exact.

  “Show me,” Bernard said, practising charity.

  Horrible as a museum, the sitting-room was a photographic Tussaud’s with only one subject. Impressions of a striped wallpaper barred like a cage gave way before the fixed tinted plight of the paper prisoners. Here was Kitty Trumper at three in a ballerina’s tutu with one chubby leg extended in an awkward arabesque (her hands clutched two wires eliminated by photographic processes), and the little subject glanced shyly backwards at the camera lens which had caught her candid eyes gleaming from beneath a completely geometrical fringe line. And here she was at seven in Cossack costume, one leg heel-toeing it, hands on hips; and again at ten (plaits this time and a brace), tutu stiff as pudding performing a bourrée on pointes, her round, smiling face upturned. And surely not much older, there she was at a baby grand, her unplaying fingers resting on the eisteddfoded keys, her face a map of musical rapture. (“Imagine you are far away, my dear. Do you hear the lovely music?”) All her poor shrunken little soul was looking out of those large eyes. And again at fourteen and eighteen and twenty-two (a straight photograph, this, in a lacy pink sweater with a lot of cleavage and two blond curls glued into false positions below the ripple marks left by the curling grips). When she had begun to give lessons: “I’m nice the first time, but not so nice the second!” And it was only two and six a time, nice or not, with abridged versions of the Moonlight Sonata and the Rachmaninoff Prelude and Mendelssohn’s Spring Song.