The Slow Natives (3 page)

“In Mexico,” Keith overheard him saying to Bernard, “I did a whole series based on the sombrero. Everything was sombrero-shaped. Buildings, pools, cacti, breasts, the lot. Marvellous people—simple, superstitious, fanatical, Catholic or Communist. It didn't seem to matter about extremes in a climate like that. Even the landscape was extreme.”

As he munched tea-cake he breathed heavily, not always closing his mouth, exposing strong yellow teeth and thick busy tongue that flickered rapidly after lost crumbs. His mind's like that, Bernard thought, listening to him investigate a memory evoked by a memory, and inside that penultimate box another even smaller—and in that . . . atrocious.

“More dip?” he asked, watching Keith sideways watching both of them. “How's my boy getting along with his French?” Keith looked away as he listened for the answer, and Mr Varga paused to wipe his mouth vigorously on a week-old handkerchief that he wore tucked into the cuff-opening of his gleaming sleeve before he gazed across the room at Keith's too-large head now bent over a sandwich tray that he inspected with flicking finger.

“Reasonably, reasonably. He responds well to coaching, you know. It's never for the dull pupil.” He had smiled. That was the face, the attitude he reserved for interested parents, a kind of testudo to shield against questions that might prise him open like an oyster and reveal his pearl-less state. Someone joggled a coffee-cup into his balancing hand and self-defensively Mr Varga caught Harry Geoghegan's eye and rearranged the group while Dr Geoghegan, who had been shuffling records in a corner, distracted Keith in an appeal for advice.

The doctor, Keith mused. He almost admired, despite his adolescent arrogance that forbade overt admiration of the adult.

“Do you stomp?” she was asking his bitter baby face and not waiting for an answer. “Keith, dear, have you ever thought of using vast slabs of iambics when you've run out
of records? Chanted fast, heroic couplets are devastating for the twist, and stomping needs the same two-stress beat!” She was really way out, that zany, so far it was on the point of embarrassing. “Know
then thyself
, pres
ume
not
God
to
scan
, the
proper study of
man
kind
is
man
!” she intoned rapidly, swishing her wide thighs. Keith had wanted to laugh, but was uncertain, for she coddled his genius. Years later, people referring to him and evoking the absurdly babyish face with its thin curly mouth, would dismiss him as one of Julia Geoghegan's mistakes. But now it was hard to tell who was whose disciple. “My dear,” continued Dr Geoghegan, still gyrating, “I made my two biddies learn the whole of the
Essay on Man
this way. Ruined the poem of course, but then that's what it deserved. Here we are—'Pipeline Stomp'!” She slid the record on to the turntable and, guiding Keith to a recess formed by a bamboo wall-screen, locked her hands behind her back and began bumping from one foot to the other. Soon the Seabrooks came over.

“What I like about it,” Dr Geoghegan panted, “is that only one need play.”

Gerald Seabrook grinned in the accommodating way that made him popular (“Let's ask Gerald Seabrook. He's always so nice!”) and, facing her, made more or less rhythmic duplicating patterns. For that moment, observing their turtle necks, lined cheeks and awkward bodies, Keith could not smile, the inward grimace showing through.

“Conformist!” heaved out perceptive Julia Geoghegan between polished lips, a stinger that urged him, unbearably tight pants and all, into their group.

“Darkness after light,” Kathleen Seabrook said apologetically to Mrs Coady, who did not hear as she watched her husband bend over Miss Lumley. Oddly enough, Miss Lumley's pancake face was disapproving, her displeasure aimed at the stompers, primitively tribalistic, waving sandwiches in a free hand and snapping with the other. But not, not at coarse-pored, heavy-pawed baboon Gus.

By eleven the bored guests regrouped themselves in the dining-nook and bright Kathleen Seabrook with her wide charming smile and incredulous eyes talked musical shop with
Bernard. Professor Geoghegan was listlessly turning the pages of an anthropological work that should never have been allowed through the Customs (“It's been done before,” he yawned, pursing a critical mouth) while beside him Gerald Seabrook and Berenice Coady and Dr Geoghegan were losing their tempers over State aid for schools. Mr Coady and Miss Lumley were no longer in the room but had unobtrusively moved to a darkened lobby or laundry where he pressed her somewhat harshly against the gleaming corner of the chrome tubs, accepting her agony as ecstasy. Meanwhile Leo Varga, cosily knowledgeable, demonstrated yoga positions to Keith in as nearly an unobtrusive corner by the wall divider, sitting at the moment oddly mute in lotus position, concentrating on an enviable nothing.

The room dizzied with pattern. The adolescent ear missed nothing.

“I saw exorcism practised in the country once,” Professor Geoghegan was saying, “strangely reminiscent of this, for instance.” He flourished a not quite indecent picture at Iris Leverson, who was wedged between him and his wife. “Two seasonal pineapple-pickers up in the Wollum. He did it by loud prayers and rolling with his pal in an old tin lean-to on the boss's property. As they rolled they screamed together.”

“It sounds disgusting,” Iris said, taking a prophylactic sip of black coffee and leaning across to pat Mrs Coady's knee with a comforting hand as she fought and fought the impulse to go out through the kitchen.

“No, no,” Geoghegan assured her. “It was most intriguing. Most intriguing.” He was seized with a terrible coughing fit. “Anyone who cared could join and roll with them. Most cathartic. Afterwards the fellow being exorcized claimed he felt free of his incubus at last. The physical work-out, that's the thing.”

“What is it that roareth thus, can it be an incubus?” parodied Bernard softly. “It must have been invented for tired married couples.”

“What's that?” Iris asked who had not quite heard. “What's that about tired married couples?”

Keith smiled, watching them, observing how they sprouted
out of their chairs like a lot of tired old fungi, yellowed, browned, spotted. You were always a tired married couple, he accused, from way back. Way back when we went each year for a beach fortnight and you wrestled with sand and surf and kerosene stoves and trailed round the merry-go-rounds and the beach-garden competitions and the roller-skating rinks and the hamburger stalls—all, all to keep me happy. Your feet ached, Iris, and Bernard's sensitivities when the speaker-crowned life-savers' tower at Kirra used to spew pop tunes all over the bathers and both of you used to moan; because I remember and would run off to the rocks and lie with my nose over a pool, not wanting a conducted joy-tour. I didn't need you and I didn't know how to tell you then. Hot dogs eaten solo were twice as good as hot dogs paid for by you, consumed with you. Once I put a handful of raw peanuts in the pockets of my shorts. I wore a clean white shirt and my sunburn had settled into tan and I felt brave and strong and free and I sneaked off for an hour across the dunes under the twisted salty scrub and watched the twisty salty breakers eat away at the beach while two lovers coiled in a hollow fifty yards away. You never knew. I never told you. And I was eight that year and Bernard used to sing on the sea-beaten glassed-in veranda in the after-bed dark me father kept a boarding-house hullabaloobelay and only last week I discovered how he'd guarded me even then from a word.

“Excuse me?” the boy asked Varga. “Excuse me, Leo. I won't be a minute.”

As soon as he rose to edge across the living-room he felt his mother's eyes swivel with inquiry that probed his new adult anger. Even if I told her I only wanted to go to the john, he thought, she'd still be curious. He went out to the kitchen where he found the remainder of the savoury tray resting on top of the refrigerator. Swiftly he scooped up some biscuits and then pushed back the laundry door behind which his host was most terribly engrossed.

They did not hear him at once and then, after that paralysed moment, wrenched themselves apart under the confrontation of his knowingly innocent face.

“Sorry,” Keith mumbled through savoury.

He sidled past them, past the lavatory and round the side of the house into the maze of privet and japonica. All of a sudden his sophistication had gone where? He could not support the flimsy child who began walking groggily to the gate but who still did not look back once at the lighted windows behind which adults talked and corrupted each other, slandered, hated, betrayed, remained pathetically loyal and pretended—above all, that was it—pretended self-containment, assurance, all the adult virtues he had regarded himself as having.

The slopes down to the river were sticky with moonlight that fawned all over the posh houses and the blocks of flats between which he then strode, not looking really, not seeing the wet moonlight or the tiger gardens crouched across the river. Curled tight as a fist he went smashing, punching darkness that syruped out thinly to the ferry hill, below which the river, seen suddenly, its swoop and the deep grooving of it and the boat hulks, was black as lusting Coady, lusting for the sea. It was so still that behind the chug-chug of the ferry dripping drunk across on its cables, drunk as Coady and as purposefully finding the shortest distance from A to B, he could track the rattle of a Queen Street tram.

As he waited in the ferry-shed his thumb smoothed over the impersonal face of his watch and in the half-dark he rested on the sweep of the hands that now, greenly luminous, moved up on midnight. Later, he decided, later he would go home. But some time before that his parents would be anxiously pestering Mr Coady's embarrassed ear, a Martian projection that caught up the delicate sound-waves created by girls' skirts.

Rattling his small change, he stepped aboard the rocking ferry. Ten minutes to walk up town. Another thirty to circumnavigate the shoppers' coasts. Perhaps twenty for a coffee. Ideally absorbed, Keith had watched the minute hand move steadily up the dial. It seemed to become slower, sweeping across the moon's face, bridging craters of sixty seconds deep down which Keith plunged again, again. Soon, he told himself. Soon. The river quivered. Fish-tail lights flickered.
The town's big gold teeth grinned. Soon they would be home.

Prowling downtown, all-absorbing, he slipped into an arcade cellar, where he huddled on a late-night-diner stool, prodding the nerve-spots of the last two hours.

Lay me down baby blues
 . . ., bawled a crooner, canned, from a corner microphone, moaned loudly and dreadfully above the chairs and tables and the three other patrons. Keith watched the electric wall-clock creep down the next day, sensing his smile brazen as a juke-box, as the machine now whimpering:

Pay me down baby,
Never say maybe,
I've got the want you blues
.

There they would be. The old folks at home. They would call “Keith”, then “Keith” again, with interest and increasing urgency, and while Bernard looked hopelessly at the smooth bed Iris would pick up the receiver and start dialling.

He kicked the chrome legs of the stool and nodded sadly to the music beat . . .

Lay me down baby,
Pay me down baby,
I've got the want you blues
 . . .

Sometimes in spring Iris Leverson, who normally lived her life in the contrived activity of organized theatre groups, diet charts, weekly “sets”, and shopping at what her circle was pleased to call the “village”, had thought it might be pleasant to take a lover. All pipe and tweeds, she imagined, influenced by some replays of old films on the telly where engineers ran off with girls who simply had to play Rachmaninoff concertos at Carnegie Hall, forgetting that thereby she would more or less duplicate Bernard. When this first adulterous thought tipped her with tentative finger, she sought back for what might have been the incitement and saw only that last holiday, that last season, the snoozing beach town with its skirt of bitter blue surf, the dangerous green river and beat-up stores with sharks' teeth for sale and last year's
hats like hollyhocks or everlastings growing out of magazine mulch and views of the town. There had been long evenings, lavender-stippled air floating over the sea and beach in that terrible nostalgia that comes with sundown and the porpoise shoals cruising and curving fifty yards out in the cold threatening desert of water. And in this romantic ambience, Bernard's mild voice saying amusedly, “You know, Iris, after twenty years of marriage you feel as if you're the same sex.”

Her initial reaction was laughter, standing there seeing the mellow gold cliffs reflecting some reluctant glory in the west and everywhere else bottle-green and silver and weed-purple darkness of the sea, the headlands and beach that rhymed with a hundred other eastern coves gobbled out by wind and surf. That was her initial reaction, and she clutched his elbow, laughing boisterously, and told him he was a funny old thing and then, as she leant against him with her well-cared-for hand tucking itself under the warm flabbiness of his arm, she was conscious of terrible shock and thought. Yes, indeedie, we're standing here like a couple of middle-aged ladies, comfortable enough together, with nothing much at all to say to each other. She removed her hand, but Bernard did not notice and continued smoking and gazing out to sea. So, with the finicky calculation she might have given to the intention to have a permanent, or a tooth jacket-crowned, she made her decision, just as carefully, as deliberately, though moral implications did not come into those matters certainly. Nor did she imagine for the moment that infidelity would be hard to achieve.

She took vague mirrored stock of her forty-one, forty-two years. Fair—but not tartily so. Thickened, of course, but reasonably shapely. There were one or two lines she didn't like about her eyes, but the general effect was youthful with straight bob and blond-brown skin pulled tight over her cheek-bones. She peered at herself in half-lights, by shaded bed-lamps, and in late spring evening rooms before the lights were on—and she felt sufficiently confident. She would justify her casuistry! I'll be working in lights like this, she told herself, and with cool-cookie brazenness, some of her resentment of Bernard evaporated. I am a courtesan at heart,
she hoped as she bought herself unfrockery of a frivolous kind with the attention one might give to preparation for an exam. Was it not? Yet she was not yet certain she might sit for this one. There had to be an examiner. Who? Who?