The Slow Natives (11 page)

Through late afternoon air, ale-pale, Bernard drove back from Stanthorpe, sucking a humbug, longing for a cigarette, and promising faithfully across his untuned heart a double Scotch as soon as he reached town. Events followed their deadly sequence. Ten miles out he had to refill his petrol tank, and between the space of that and one more boiled sweet he found the outskirts of Condamine again, crunched the last bits of lolly, and was all in order sluicing cold water over his face, his soul coming up for air. Jupiter Pluvius in shirt-sleeves, he made chopping movements with a comb, straightened a less conservative tie, and went shaggily down to the lounge where he waited for Father Lingard to join him for lunch.
He arrived sick, late, calm, pushing through the gluey pre-summer air of the pub like a drowning man.

“Are you ill?” Bernard asked, concerned.

“Not really.” Lingard gave what he intended as a smile. “Nothing the medico could put his finger on. There was some worry with a parishioner. Monsignor Connolly asked me along and it all took more time than we expected. I'm sorry. Why, do I look sick?”

“You're very pale.”

“Hunger, perhaps. Shall we go in?”

There were two travellers, the dusty men in suits two years out of date, the wide-lapelled boys with the wide line of talk. They had red faces and gluttonous eyes, and expense accounts that worried them even as they diddled their bosses. They were spooning up soup. And at the proprietor's table a proprietorial wife managed a steak and put it in its place.

“Everything finished now?” Lingard asked out of politeness as they separated salad leaves in a search for ham.

How true! Bernard thought, sensing irony. He extracts it from me, this prelate with the persuasive voice and the unhappy eyes.

“Yes. Everything. After everything is finished there's a feeling of complete relaxation.”

“True,” the other agreed with his own irony. “True, true. Yet I cannot say relaxed is the exact word . . . more butter? . . . empty, rather. Or nothingness.”

“Yes, thank you,” Bernard said. He greased another fraction of his bread roll. “That gets very close to my feelings lately. Seven days ago it hit me at last that I was adult and freed of certain relationships that had bound me for years. For a couple of days, you know, I was sustained by a tremendous exhilaration. Saw things for the first time. Read posters and the legalese on the back of bus tickets. It felt exactly like the time I had a stroke and afterwards discovered I'd sharpened a semitone.”

The gloom lightened.

“A semitone?”

“Yes. After perfect pitch, you know, very odd my dear fellow to hear things like the Bach Passion in C when you're
expecting it in B minor. Everything—well, not exactly—had a rebirth. But there was certainly a fillip to everything.”

“And your feelings? You were saying something about your feelings?”

Bernard paused. The volta in the sonnet. He saw Keith come up the back stairs in his creased jeans, his jumper wrinkled and grimy, his face sullen, his words insolent. He watched Iris plead with him and he said, “Well, my marriage is—not on the rocks—one hardly knows what to say when that is a positive condition which would be better than it is now. My marriage is not on the rocks, but should be.”

“It perseveres then?”

“Yes. It perseveres.”

“Against reason? Against comfort?”

“Against all those things.”

“Without love, too?”

“Yes. Certainly that.”

His doggy eyes became curious. Here was that confessional precision that insisted on the exact nature, and how often and with whom.

“But your boy? You have a son. There's your love.”

Bernard waggled his head. “No. There is something wrong. Lately he even hates—I think that may be the word—his mother. I can't say that the love is there for me.”

With the penultimate care of the executioner Father Lingard placed knife and fork together over a piece of beetroot.

“Perhaps he has discovered you hate each other,” he said.

“But we don't. Not at all. That's what I'm trying to explain. There's nothing positive like hatred. There's simply—nothing.”

Lingard almost smiled. Brother, he said inwardly, come in! And welcome!

“Does this upset you, this conversation?”

“No. You see, not even that. It
would
upset me if I cared. I think maybe I do care about Keith and his mother—but not sufficiently.”

“Have his feelings towards you changed?”

“Not appreciably. He's been going through a difficult spot.
Goes he won't say where. Arrives home at impossible hours, dresses shockingly.”

“That's natural enough, though,” Lingard said. “Every third family has teen-age sons behaving that way. But it does seem odd he directs his hostility towards only one of you.” He reflected. “You know, Leverson, on second thoughts, maybe that is not so odd. His age. His mother. Curiosity and hostility might be intermingled. Sex does idiotic things with boys.”

Bernard, although unwilling to release his son's conscience, managed to admit awkwardly, “He insists he is no longer innocent.”

“Oh?”

“Some woman picked him up one night when he walked out.”

“The top of the iceberg, as the brain-shrinkers say! Why did he walk out?”

“Who knows?”

“Do you believe him?”

“No. Not really.”

“It's an explanation, of course.”

“Yes, of course, but it's one of those histrionic remarks Keith is rather given to.”

“Well, there's his guilt, and then there's the simple fact that at fourteen—is that his age?—he simply hasn't the maturity to cope with the situation. It could be perfectly true. And he could be suffering the most fearful shock. You didn't punish him, did you?”

“No, of course not!” Bernard protested indignantly. “You surely don't think I'm a complete medievalist.”

“Shouldn't I be?” Lingard inquired wryly. “No, I never suggested it. You anticipated me. I was only going to say we carry our own hells within.”

They ate sombrely, dealing with geometric custards and stewed tea from some eternally brewing urn. Yet after lunch the attraction one unhappiness has for another trapped them together, so that despite a generalized sense of guilt and sloth, Lingard sat defiantly on in the lounge, gloomily matching Leverson beer for beer. The room filled up with crustaceans—varnished
hard-jawed mums and small-bit farmers all coated with the same malty staleness that made disgust palpable.

“They'll think I'm a whisky priest,” he said. “Occasioning bad example.”

Leverson smiled. “Would you care to take your vices farther afield?”

“It might be better,” reflected Lingard, looking out of the window at the winter flies and the trail of dead ones cluttering the inner sill. The pale gradations of umber and fawn shivered away behind the war memorial and the Masonic hall. There was a time, he knew, when he had been more aware of the liturgical seasons and the changing colour of vestments than he was of actual summers or springs; the sonic modulations of the Latin Gospels troubled him more than July westerlies blowing from the gold-streaked, cold-blinkered skies, washing with wave and waft of cloud.

Crosses melted into swastikas, symbols of light and dark, ball, crescent, winged like gannets that zoomed around a wartime sky that was as devoid now, he could see, of actual bird, of bird heart (which meant spirit) or bright-bird eye (that was perception) as he of grace-greeting or welcome at Lord's table.

But he could not bring himself to confide in apparent grumble-heavy, comfy-confidence that faced him sympathetically across the table, yet was still a stranger who then drove him to drunken careering scenic outlooks, a vast number of loquacious grogs and a multitude of moral and technical arguments about marriage and the uninterest of God that brought neither closer to solution when they came, tipsy with a variety of things, back along the late western road.

Someone hailed them at the five-mile turn-off, and Bernard, kind to hikers, drew up to find a face familiar, though it could have been years away. There were skin-tight matadors and a slick shirt, a knowing eye and a skin prettier than paint and without any, a lot of confused and phoney thanks. She was wheeling a sick bicycle with a dreadfully limp tyre and Dali wheel-frame. No explanations were really needed, and with it hoisted into the back of the sedan she
smirked and said, “Thank you, Mr Leverson”, to his appalled astonishment.

“Do I know you?” he asked. “There's something familiar . . .”

“You examined me,” she said, inching her worldly thighs away from Father Lingard's now pivoted upon the handbrake with his bony knees knocking the gear-stick.

“Did I? It must have been a long time ago.”

“Oh please,” she complained pertly, “not that long. I'm Eva Kastner. I was doing Associate.”

“Yes, of course,” said Bernard, remembering suddenly and acutely. She carried a climate of danger about with her. “I hope you are keeping your playing up?”

“Yes and no,” the dreadful girl said with unbearable archness.

Yet she was more taken in observing Father Lingard, his mournful profile stamped against the other's ginger abstractedness. He smelt strongly of liquor and, fascinated, she watched while his head lolled and dropped forward on his chest so that he looked sawdust-filled and limp. Just like a rag doll, she thought. Just like. And giggled, recalling the nun dolls (Dress them yourself!) unbelievably for sale in the local toy-shop some years ago until Monsignor Connolly's purple-faced protests had the shocking things withdrawn. Suddenly he collapsed against her and closed his eyes as she tried to prop him up.

“Heavens, Mr Leverson,” the little liar said, “is Father Lingard sick?”

Something slowed down within and the car followed suit.

“Yes, he is,” he said shortly, drawing in to the grassy edge of the road. “Would you mind climbing in the back with your bicycle, and I'll try to make him comfortable in the corner?”

Lingard made lizard eyes.

“Feel ghastly,” he said. “But impenitent. Yet still ghastly.”

His one slowly expanding and contracting sponge could not keep pace with either the alcohol or the false excitement his behaviour had top-whipped and that his guilt insisted
upon. Lazy legs in the back swung her limbs across the bicycle frame pert as she, nickel-plated and also built for speed. But her glossy smiles met with no reassurance, her conversational openings were blocked, and the pressure of her personality eased when she was dropped off at a side-street near the convent.

“I'm thinking of doing a higher grade one of these days,” she said. “Maybe I'll see you next year.”

“Perhaps,” Bernard said, tolerant now she was going, and added absent-mindedly, “Keep up your practice.”

“Ooh, I
will
” she said with such appalling innuendo and breathiness that Bernard was flabbergasted and could not bring himself to acknowledge her wave.

Outside the presbytery of St Scholastica's the sprinklers rained through the brown evening, but not as the quality of mercy, for there was in the air a silent hullabaloo of doom, on which Lingard's eyes opened but could not focus.

“Don't move me,” he said. “I'll be ill.”

“Will I fetch someone out?”

“Heavens, no! Just let me sit for a minute while I regain balance. Shouldn't drink like that, you know. Not used to the stuff. Can't cope with my bunged-up innards.”

He leant heavily against Leverson, almost falling as he struggled from the car, and like a couple of Mack Sennett comics they wobbled up the path to the veranda, where Monsignor Connolly was watering the staghorns that hung all along the railing between the pots of maidenhair and begonia. He was pretending not to notice while he watered yet watched from a crafty Irish eye. They reached the foot of the steps.

“What's the matter, Father Lingard?” he asked, all formal, his brogue thickening in mysterious ratio with splenetic secretions.

Father Lingard looked hazily at the two monsignors glaring down like Moses from the top of the veranda.

“I'm drunk,” he said. “Let me past.”

“Oh, and that's very obvious now. Good God, you ought to be ashamed to be seen at all, let alone announcing the fact to all and sundry at the top of yer disgraceful voice.” His
anger swung round on Leverson's distress. “And as fer you, now, are y' responsible for this? Taking a man of God off on one of yer drunken orgies for the whole town to see?”

“I suppose in a way I am.”

Monsignor Connolly swung his watering can like a weapon. “Git out!” he ordered thickly. “Out with y' or I'll throw you out, God give me strength!”

Lingard flapped his hands like wings.

“Now,” he said, “not his fault at all. Leverson, dear fellow, forgive him. He knows not what etcetera.”

“Blasphemy, too, Father Lingard!” thundered the Mons.

“Profanity, I think,” Lingard corrected maddeningly. And swayed.

“Dear God, that I should live to hear it,” moaned Monsignor Connolly. “The Bishop will have to discipline you. I wash me hands of it. It's beyond me, it is.” He squawked down the hall, “Father Vince!” and flapped excitedly and without direction. “Father Vince! Father Vince! Come here, will you?”

Father Lake hovered his discretion in a bedroom door and tried placatory devices.

“Now, now, Monsignor,” he said, “please no fuss. What's a drink too many? Surely half the parish is guilty.”

“Half the parish!” screamed the Mons. “What's half the blithering parish when it's us that should be leading them to virtue?”

“That's true,” soothed Lake discreetly. “True, true.” He came down the steps and levered Lingard up them. “Come on, feller. We'll sleep this off.” In his room the priest flopped on his bed amid the failed prayers, like so many dead roses of twenty-five winters, not even the fragrance as reminder, but the thorns of failure, the dead twigs of pleas and pleas and pleas. Not until the others moved away could he begin to contemplate the nonsense that Connolly was going on with, the sanctimonious hubbub frozen all over the room like non-fail novenas or miraculous medals. But above a slow-burning Pascal candle the other handsome tragic face of the Christ figure, essentially human and sympathetic, moved in across confetti-leaved lawns of his pastures. Christ, the friend
of pimps and prostitutes, he prayed with humble reverence, and sensed the drunken tears move from behind his shuttered eye.