The Slow Natives (12 page)

“I'm sorry,” he could hear Leverson saying futilely behind the closed door.

“Sorry! It's a bit late for that now indeed. And so y' should be,” the Mons added rudely. “We've got the good name of the parish to think of. But that wouldn't mean a thing to you, I suppose, with yer city ways and yer fleshpots and all.”

“Look,” Leverson began to explain desperately. “We were unhappy. Unhappy, do you understand? You should understand. I told him a little of my own problems and, believe me, I have them. But he said nothing of his. And I think he, too, is a desperately unhappy man. Can't you overlook a silly little thing like this?”

“Don't teach me me job now, Mr Leverson, please. I think I know what ought and ought not be overlooked.”

“Ach, you stuffy provincial Irishman,” Leverson hissed, losing his temper. “I don't think you do.”

“You—what?”

“I said I don't think you do. You're supposed to be a man of sympathy and understanding and all you offer to someone in need of kindness is a suburban sense of outraged propriety.”

“God give me strength!” Monsignor Connolly said. “Father Lake, will y' remove this impertinent man from me consecrated house?”

“He doesn't have to. I'm going. I can say no more than that I'm sorry. I think kindness might be more effective than censure.”

The sick white of a dying man spread over Connolly's outraged face. Fence-sitting on a Sunday after ten o'clock Mass and greeting his flock, he would recapitulate by his presence the affirmation of doctrines, convince of the efficacy of prayer. There was a dogmatic assurance in his no-nonsense Irish brogue that was the speech medium of poetry and fantasy and every delicious deviation or tricksy reapplication of the truth. But he was flabbergasted now.

“Make me a pot of tea, Father Vince,” he commanded,
speaking from the seat of the Fisherman, the leather smoking chair before the television set. “And make it strong for the love of God. I've never been spoken to like that at all before.”

Do you good, thought red-head, who had squirmed through countless sulphuric sermons. (“Yes, y'd rush rush quick as a flash now if y' was told y'd won the lottery. But catch y' rushin' to Mass for fear y' might be five minutes late! Oh, not at all. Not on yer life.”) Or in the litanied evenings, after Benediction was over, making a late consolatory call to a sick parishioner on a farm, as the car skittered round dirt roads at sixty. (“I just say a Hail Mary now. It's me best insurance.”) The Mons, he thought. The Mons. Parish figurehead, death-pale, snow-white, inflexible, stubborn as a mule. His soul, doily-neat, had scalloped edges of predictable pattern, and forty years in the confessional had made no difference to his expectations of the conventional. Monthly he still lashed the Children of Mary on the viciousness of alcohol and cigarettes, and although he had inveighed for a long time against the Jezebels who flaunted their cosmetic-bright faces, sheer weight of behaviour had defeated him.

“Tell me now, girls,” he pleaded once, “tell me now, why is it a woman shouldn't drink or smoke?”

“Please, Monsignor,” some wilful suffragette smart alec had said from the side of the room, “it reduces us to the level of men.”

He'd kept quiet for a long time after that.

Now he sulked in the front room, sucking his teeth and tugging unprayerfully at his rosary beads; but after a while the pull of the brave cowboys was too much and he was off with the cussing, drinking men, the Galahads of the saddle, with the volume turned up extra loud—for, while he was a good old man, he had a venial sinner's simple belief in the virtue of punishment.

“
Libera nos domine
” Father Lake prayed, and went out to the kitchen solitude with his thriller.

Leverson went back to the Focus and the compressed cooking smells superimposed like transfers of the day before the day before—steak, cabbage-rolls, pie, mince, roast. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he took out the photo he always
carried with him and inspected with some curiosity these stranger faces—a woman called Iris and a boy called Keith.

Quite beside himself with his hollow-sounding soul, Bernard could not refrain during the week from writing some sort of letter to Doug Lingard, a letter that contrived to be friendship without unction.

. . . this final balm [he wrote—rather too artily, he felt, but could not avoid] that you talk to me about, this solace one can expect at the end—I simply cannot believe in it. In any case it's hardly for myself I'm concerned but you whom I seem so terribly to have embarrassed. Did you manage to smooth things over? Are you friends again (forgive my humour!)—if not with God, at least with the Mons?

I think my Protestant wilderness may be less frightening than yours. No saints turned raveners lurk in the coverts. No fleshed images have reverted to plaster. The incense hasn't failed and there never were any candles to go out. There's just this rolling dullness in human relationships and only myself in it, though I must confess that a few days ago some remnants of feeling did seem to return to me. I wanted badly to strike Keith, who has been pestering like a genius. Surely this is a sign of returning life! Could I suggest it to you as a pick-me-up or are personal relationships quite closed?

There should be a new page for mundanity, you understand. But I'll be back in Condamine for two days at the end of the fortnight. We can mundate then.

Yours,

L
EVERSON.

Three or four days later he opened Lingard's reply with an excitement he could not decipher, it so hung streamers above his bare walls, coloured windmills out of place, out of time.

I admit myself flummoxed. Endure is the watchword [Lingard had written]. Perhaps when you're here we'll have a chance to discuss this further—unaided by spirits!—but I write now because you deserve some warning of a rather unpleasant series of happenings. Forgive me, my dear Leverson, for thus rushing it at you, but I must.

A week or so ago Connolly received a quite scandalous letter, unsigned of course, alleging that your conduct with the examinees was more interested than might be proper in the circumstances. Euphemism on euphemism, you understand. The Monsignor's first reaction, of course, was to rush to the Convent where the nuns very properly were outraged and sceptical. Following upon this, he next decided to send a furious denunciation to the Board demanding an investigation, but we managed to calm him and reduce him to sense after the Sisters had assured him that no parent had ever made the slightest complaint. Finally he agreed that when you return next week you should be shown this appalling letter and be allowed to take whatever action you think fit. Unbelievable victory!

I can't say how upset I am to have to write like this. Forgive me. I don't have to assure you, do I, that I know it is nonsense.

Yours in Jesus Christ,

D
OUGLAS
L
INGARD.

The seasonless country was barely changed by frost when Leverson returned at the end of the week.

In the deadly brown smoking-room of the Focus, Leverson watched Father Lingard cautiously. The room harboured the stale breaths and jokes and hopelessness of commercial travellers in wine and underwear, of spielers in farm machinery and irrigation, of overnight politicians who had to cadge special votes and out-of-town tract-bearers, of belchings and one-too-many and the terrible dreariness of forced good cheer.

Father Lingard might have been unrolling one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so carefully did he prise back the paper from its envenomed folds until the centre of its deadliness was exposed.

“It's ridiculous,” Bernard said, having read. “And rather pathetic. One can only ignore it.”

“Yes, I thought it sounded like the petulant outburst of some failed candidate. Hardly the parents of one, do you think? Have you any enemies?”

“Oh my dear Lingard! What a question! Of course. But who knows them? My wife. My son. My wife's lover.”

Lingard winced, but not from outrage.

“Please,” he said, “you cannot be so cynical.”

Then Leverson did laugh, for he was angry enough with this letter. His soul felt as if it might heat and vanish through the lattice of his bones. “How about you?” he asked too loudly. “How about you? You have the most wonderful enemy of all—God. Oh, I envy you that. Remember what Wilde said, ‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.' And you have the most wonderful antagonist of all.”

He puffed and was red with the climax of irritation and popped two humbugs at once into his mouth for control. Lingard, however, understanding right to the marrow of the moment, held the greyness of his lips in tight check before he could spit out the protests and cries.

“I wish I could see that.”

“See what? What I say?”

“Yes. That mine is the most—well, most wonderful.”

“Ah well,” Bernard said, calming down and sucking away, but not intending the patronage. “Be happy in my envy. My genuine envy.”

The convent door looked twice as thick and swung back like a chunk of stone when Sister Matthew opened it to him, letting both the man and the sunlight in.

“How are you?” he asked, observing some feverish shimmer of youth behind the skin. She was so small he might have blown her aside with one breath of annoyance. But she avoided his eye, which she remembered as being directly and disconcertingly blue. A forlornness enveloped the bird look of her. Had she read the letter or heard of its content? He hoped not, quite urgently, for some inexplicable reason.

Sister Beatrice bustled him away to the music block, where he examined the few pupils who had missed the examination the previous month. He was surprised when the same frightened child that he had failed before reappeared and sat desperate before the piano. She was even less capable of playing this time and her plaits hung more sadly than life, dangling on the keys. Bernard was about to pat her shoulder when he remembered the letter. He would, he imagined, be
pricked by this over and over again in like situations. He withdrew his paternal hand.

“We could try again next year, couldn't we?” he suggested. And some muffled voice agreed vaguely. Was Christine—it was Christine, wasn't it?—he consulted his lists—a pupil at the convent? No. She was Miss Trumper's. And did she like Miss Trumper? Only a bit? Well, never mind, he would be going to see Miss Trumper and he would see what could be seen.

Just as he was finishing packing his books away, Sister Matthew entered without knocking. Having closed the door and heard it click, she leant back, clutching her music and regarding him steadily.

“Well, now,” Bernard said, baffled, “what can I do to help?” And he experienced once more the unorthodox persistence of emotion.

“May I try again?” she asked. “May I try that Bach again for you?”

He was staggered by her seriousness.

“But you passed most creditably,” he argued. “You couldn't have wanted to do much better, could you?”

Her fingers seemed stripped to the bone; the flesh, her only protection, was gone. “I have been working on it.” She faltered. “I think—I think the interpretation has improved.”

Neither looking at him directly nor waiting for his answer, she jerked across to the piano and began to play with terrible emotionalism what she had once performed with such mathematical accuracy. He waited until she had finished, impatiently, but resigned.

“Would you like me to show you?” he asked gently, attempting to align himself with her, but she did not stir.

“Here,” he said, “sit in my chair, and I'll show you my version.”

Years ago one of his pupils had told him his fingers smelt of tobacco and biscuits and, watching now the reddish hairs on the back of his fingers, he wondered if they still affected pupils that way. Slyly he glanced at the little nun but could see nothing except the curve of black shaping her neat and, he suspected, crazy head. Preposterously, all the same, when he finished and lifted his hands from the keys, swivelling on
the stool so that he could look directly at her, she was crying silently with her eyes shut tight, her mouth open as a child's, rebelliously unsure, and as a child making no effort to hide her face.

“I'm sorry,” he apologized. The grating timbre of his voice was grotesque. “I didn't mean to upset you.”

He ground his teeth over this mundanity, its idiocy; but she unexpectedly replied with her eyelids still gripping each other as if she might let the world in should they open, “I'm fit for nothing. Neither in this life nor any other.”

The room whirled with embarrassment. Should he be involved like this in personal confidences? He thought not. The reversal of what he had assumed secure hit him blow upon blow. Three of a kind, he told himself. And the numerical situation gave him comfort.

“That's a drastic statement,” he said weakly. (One could hardly pat the hand of a religious.) “Do you mean life in general? The religious life?”

“Perhaps.”

“How long have you been professed?” he asked.

“Nine years.” She opened her eyes. “Since my eighteenth birthday.”

“You don't know much about any other sort of life, then, do you? Do you think it's so much better?”

“Are you lonely?” she inquired, changing the subject with an abruptness that was outrageous.

“I suppose so.” Bernard smiled at her but she stared whitely into his face, cold as wax, and he added to placate her, “Everybody is. All knotted up inside.”

“But you have a family, haven't you?”

“Yes. I have a boy. But we are very much apart these days. He's growing up. He doesn't seem to need me any more. I wish he did, you know.”

Impossibly the memory of the eight-year-old recurred. “Dad, Tommy told Chris he was a dirty rotten bloody bastard.” Eyes radiant. “True. He did. He says dirty rotten bloody bastard. I'd never say dirty rotten bloody bastard.” Coming at sin obliquely for a week after that until the novelty wore off. “Dad, is it really wrong to say ‘dirty
rotten bloody bastard'?” And he had ruined it all for Keith by saying, “No, son. Not really.”