The Slow Natives (25 page)

But it hadn't been a bit like that, not for him. He'd prayed like mad all through the Offertory, keeping his eyes closed tight like fists and his fists closed tight like eyes and he'd gone up to the altar rails behind the other blue-serge boys and white flouncy little girls. He'd opened his mouth and put out his tongue ever so gently for God and then it was all over and he was walking back to his seat, shuffling and edging past the other kids. And nothing happened. The sky didn't burst like a cracker or flare like a Roman candle—although next day Barbie Jazz Garters told everyone she had seen a vision. He had trouble swallowing and after, at the breakfast, he got bellyache looking at the cold ham sandwiches. Breakfast was bacon and eggs and that was what he'd expected and what he wanted. You'll love the Communion breakfast afterwards, they'd all said. They'd all been saying it all his life. There's no bloody glory, Chookie mumbled into the hessian, and turned over and saw mum walking him home in disgrace from the school hall where he'd howled because there wasn't bacon and eggs and taking him the angry way home shortcutting through the Methodist churchyard with her fingers like pincers on his muscleless arm. But Sister Teresa had meant it nice and he liked her and so he'd got this funny feeling now when he looked around and saw the corner of the building where he split his eyebrow open and the old bougainvillea where they'd had their first fags.

He could still remember the day that mad Joey Finn had climbed up fifteen feet into the branch tangle and sat there like a monkey peering down through the leaves at the class underneath. Sister Bernadette nearly burst trying to get him down to the rest of them who were having a tables lesson out in the open. But he stayed squatting on a branch, chanting
after them mockingly, one table behind, and after a while ole Bumface said in her oiliest tones, “We will ignore him, children, and pray for him.” And they did. And then the mad blighter prayed back just one word behind like a litany and it was gorgeous and he wanted to laugh so much he nearly died hiding his face and pretending with the others it was terrible.

Good-bye. So long. Bung-ho. The lump in the throat, in the stomach. And vaulting the fence from primary into the playing yard of the Brothers next door, down to the handball courts where some wit had managed to scrawl up B
ROTHER SYLVESTER
at the top of the concrete wall.

“How could the boy have got there?” grave saintly Brother Leopold had asked the assembled school when the outrage was discovered.

“Levitation, sir,” a suave anonymous senior had suggested.

“Who said that? Come out the boy who said that!” But there was nothing except the discreet movement of laughter waving across the other three hundred faces.

So long, chapel. So long, brimstone missions and unspeaking unspeakable mystic retreats filled to the brim with spiritual reading and reluctant examination of conscience. So long. Hooroo. Hooroo to that sub-junior window through which he shot pellets at the infants, the littlies in their hot blue serge. So long.

“You do well to leave, Mumberson,” Brother Leopold had said. “You do the best thing. I feel an academic career is not for you.” He placed an indicting forefinger on the non-committal reference he had just completed. “But there are many openings for your special abilities.”

“What are they, sir?”

“What, my boy? Your special abilities?”

Chookie had smiled warily. “Well . . .” he said.

“Indeed there are many openings,” Brother Leopold went on, avoiding mutual embarrassment. “Trust in God, lad. Ask and ye shall receive, remember. We have only to ask. God bless you now.”

They were anxious to leave each other. Neither was quite
sure what to say and although each knew that platitudes were in order, these did not soothe.

You ask, all right, Chookie thought, you ask and you end up on the back of a ute heading nowhere, with a mortal sin heavy as lead weighing you down on the tray. Groaning, he pushed the sin back but it rolled and crushed him and at last, like Keith, he and his sin fell asleep.

“Feeling better?” Miss Paradise asked, not nastily, but not sweetly either, as though she were jealous or had an unpleasant steel weapon to grind. Under the dry violet light of the trees in Kitty Trumper's garden, she sat beside the swing-hammock and knitted something shapeless and terrible in expensive wool.

“What's that called?” inquired Miss Trumper with the languor of the invalid.

“Mohair. Kitty, there's so much you've never been able to answer or seemed to be sure of, perhaps because you never really hear. Remember the time that colonel proposed?”

Kitty Trumper's sad orbs began to water. “Don't.”

Her protest did not even ruffle the poise of the monster who clicked needles and occasionally teeth (in a moment I shall run you through, Kitty dear!). But—“I'm sorry, darling,” she said leaving a snail-trail of reference. “What I can't understand, though, is why you didn't report this to the right authorities.”

Rock, rock. The hammock wobbled uncertainly its striped but split chrysalis, on the brink of discarding the dried-out pupa.

“Has there been any word?” nagged Miss Paradise. “About him?”

“I don't know.”

“He seems to have vanished. I've made a few discreet, very discreet inquiries, you know. Father Lingard. I saw him at the library. In the Westerns. Isn't that funny, dear? He said, by the way, ‘I'm doing a thesis on the Western for a higher degree.' Do you think he meant it?”

Miss Trumper closed her eyes gently so that even that might not disturb her companion.

“It seems strange his family does nothing.”

“They don't care,” said Kitty Trumper, still with her eyes closed.

The burning centre of the sun fired a black pit through her lids. She preferred dull rainy days when blotting-paper skies soaked up the guilts of weather and soul, not letting the sun expose. The stained sky was washed with self but concealed by the bruises of thunder.

“Poor old Chookie.” She expelled her sadness. “Poor old Chookie.”

Miss Paradise was exasperated. “Oh Kitty, really!” she said. “You baffle me. Truly you do. Two days ago you were hysterical with what we all presumed to be shock.” She let that one sink in. “And hate. Now it's ‘poor old Chookie'!”

“Poor old Chookie and poor old Kitty. Verna, what has happened to that strange little nun I met in the convent garden?”

“Who was that?”

“I don't know. I couldn't see in the twilight. She ran from me after a moment. Someone pulled her away. She was trembling and so thin, even with all that heavy habit, those mounds and mounds of clothes. I was conscious of the bone.”

Miss Paradise finished another row, stabbed her needles viciously into the ball of wool, and creaked upward.

“I'll make cocoa,” she announced. It was like the pronouncement of one about to sacrifice all and enter the tropical jungles of the Congo.

“Do me a favour, Verna?” pleaded Kitty Trumper's voice. Her eyes were still closed—perhaps against negation. “Only a teeny favour.”

Angrily Miss Paradise swung about.

“You always did seem to think, Kitty, that teensy-weensy adjectives removed half the difficulty from the request. Modified it. Made it the teensy-weensiest of demands. Ach! You saints!”

“No, but—”

“No but about it! Lie there while I get the cocoa.”

When she returns I shall broach the matter, Miss Trumper
told herself, but when her friend returned with two angry cups clashing on their saucers and sat aloof and righteous in the winter garden where the concrete steps led up between succulents to a terrace of Rousseau green, she could not speak. One of the yuccas was in flower, with its proboscis a mass of bees and bloom, curving dangerously and sexually over the fish-pond's gold-finned water. All the trains, Miss Trumper thought, have gone out. I have missed the last train, and now, unlike Anna Karenina, I cannot even heave my grief to oblivion on the rails. The disappearing vans, but the guard leaning out waving a last-halt flag had the familiar face of a dream or an acquaintance one cannot place—the ubiquitous traveller in half a dozen European towns or chartered buses; on paddle-wheels or Rhine steamers, or in cafés on terrasses; passed along escalators (you riding up, he down—but always away). You saw him on the liner coming back six tables away at second sitting and once in Colombo rickshaw whirled; and after in a smoky goods grinding up the Gap; but never never. . . .

She cried openly into the cocoa and the white drops widened and thinned a mixture of grief and chocolate.

“Verna, I shall ring Father Lingard.”

Miss Paradise expressed her doubt with the faintest grimace, the shadow of a shadow.

“Do you think he can help you now? Really? I mean—you've been over and over it with me and where did it ever get you? Sometimes I think you'd do better never to discuss it at all. Every time you do you only remind yourself. Haven't you thought of that?”

I'm very humble, Miss Trumper hoped, and knew she would say yes . . . but, “No,” she said. “I want to. I have to. Please, could you do it for me?”

“My dear,” Miss Paradise, said, superiorly Christian, “he likes Protestants a great deal. More than they ever care for him, I'm positive.”

“Don't shame me,” begged the other. “I'm not very well at all.”

The hammock creaked in duet with its sobbing burden and
the branches, gripped by ropes, moaned and tugged to get free, then capitulated, sagging with her.

“Bikky?” Miss Paradise asked, chirrupy to the end.

Father Lake was crooning softly in the presbytery garden as he polished the entire range of priestly footwear—a self-imposed penance—especially as the lumpy leather brogues of the Mons were nicked and cracked.

“
Caint use yer cors yer feet's too big
!” he sobbed over-slowly. “
Caint luv yer cause yer feet's too big
!” Except for that tiny section of his spiritual page, one bottom corner turned whimsically over like those small ears in the autograph books of teen-age girls (“Don't look” on the outside and “Sticky-beak!” on the inside), he was sonorously happy.

Happy as Monsignor asleep in unsafely green vales, padding past Clongowes, not rich enough to go there; seeing Mourne on a trippers' holiday with the other goggling Dubliners, leaving it all for God and coming here now to this rolling brown land of flat voices and beer and dust and sins dry as overbaked scones. He snored untidily and dreamt the Virgin was scolding him about something and he clutched the wheel and spun it and spun it. “Pray for us now,” he mumbled.

Father Lingard came out from the telephone, dangling a collar on one finger.

“Don't wake the Mons,” he said into the sunny air of polish. “I've got to go on a call.”

“Someone sick?”

“No. A Miss Trumper up near the convent.”

“Not the old lady who ran across there the other night?”

“That's the one. Don't worry about mine. I'll do them.”

“No, sorry. I have to. Hang on a moment. Do you think she knows something about Sister Matthew? Why she went? I must confess, Doug, the excitement of the scandal has done me a world of good.”

“That proves what I've always said; we feed on each other's misfortunes.”

“Shouldn't I fight it?”

Lingard laughed.

“You're honest. That's the main thing. I cannot bear the long sanctimonious clucking face. See you in about an hour. God bless.”

If He could be bothered, he would have added.

Yet he himself bothered now, about some fragile plea through a courtesy he could not shake off, no matter how his soul corroded within, and each hour, of which each action seemed a deadly explicable second rusted, piled up its uselessness. Out of courtesy, too, he thought, I turn in the gate, gently reclasp the latch, pad down between hydrangea bushes to the front elkhorned veranda as much a stereotype of colonial living as steep galvanized roofing and ornamental timbering on gables.

Something scrubbed, something painful about the house hesitated with him as he heard Japanese wind-bells make glistening sounds above the plop-plop of an end tap weeping into a pot of maiden-hair. The door opened on Miss Trumper buckled into the armour of a Sunday suit, backing away, but still in control. He examined her face with interest. It was narrow and nervous and in the eyes was that frightening honesty that preludes disaster. Her hair was badly tinted and could not make up its mind to be one thing or the other, though it had settled largely for copper, a startling eruption above her pale washed-out face and faded blue eyes.

“Father Lingard,” she said, “come in, please.” And put one hand upon his sleeve as if he mightn't.

They faced each other in the haunted living-room packed with dozens of Miss Trumpers who observed them from the protective frames of glass and gilt.

But she did not seem to know how to go about starting and could hear the priest making flattering remarks about the garden and the garden and the garden.

Garden meant Chookie.

Miss Trumper flinched.

“No,” she said. “No.”

“I thought it quite lovely,” he persisted out of ignorance, but wondering at the agitation that made her hands journey for rest along the seams of the aseptic settee cushions with their fragrance of Dettol and lavender.

“I have to tell you something,” she gasped suddenly. “Something that has worried me for years.”

“Yes?” he prompted, in a familiar situation at last.

She could not look at him across the surface of this great lake in which she was sure she must drown. Help, a small voice cried a long way away. Heeeeelp.

She looked at him. He was aloof and not especially reassuring, although there was a despair about his mouth that had familiarity, that suggested he might not only understand but forgive. Putting off the deadly moment, she managed to pack a tea-tray, to fuss about helping him to sugar before she should offer the bitter pill of her guilt, struggling with the biscuits. Observing her antics with a milk-jug, Lingard was at once aware. God help her, he prayed. God help. And his own automatic appeal registered within his prayer-dry soul and gave him a pleasure he had not now had for years. He smiled.