The Slow Natives (5 page)

“He embarrasses me,” Keith explained, forgetting to take another. “He seems like a silly old fool alongside most of the fellows' fathers. Never says a thing unless it's about music. And long-hair stuff at that. But the worst thing of all. . . .”

“Yes?” prompted Leo, delicately looking away.

“Well, the worst thing of all is the way he lets Iris shove him around. In front of people, too. Only looks amused. It makes me want to curl up.”

“Yes, he does that rather,” agreed malicious Leo. “Did you know—?” He stopped.

“Know what?”

“Oh, nothing. Simply an unpleasant rumour.”

“Come on, Leo. You can't start telling me something you're not prepared to tell in full. After all, they're my parents.”

“True. But better a millstone, you know.”

“I know. Just hang one around this neck.” He remembered the biscuit.

“Sauce?” Leo, smiling Leo, inquired solicitously. Each baring of enamel was recorded by Keith as proof of success. He wanted to make Mr Varga laugh more and more.

“Well,” Leo enunciated slowly, pulling the sticky cover-all off. “It is rumoured about the place—only the faint bruitings of bastards, you understand—that your mama and Tommy Seabrook's papa are more than friends, as the film magazines put it.”

Keith went white. He gripped the sink edge momentarily and automatically, without even seeing what he was doing, filled a glass at the tap. Mr Coady, Miss Lumley in the laundry dark.

“It's not true. It's not, is it?”

Mr Varga shrugged. “You see. I didn't want to tell you. Now you're upset, silly boy.”

Keith recovered himself by hauling both at metal and
practicalities like blue water visible through a dune gap, while his mind, rocking as if it had been cuffed, refused and refused.

“Don't be crazy,” he said. “Of course I'm not.” His mouth shook.

Leo observed this with deep satisfaction and their eyes seemed unable to shift from each other's face, so filled with triumph and disaster, the false sheen of pretended friendship and the dreadful high gloss of preliminary seduction. Keith picked up his coffee-cup in a shaking hand, a small-boy hand that wanted to slog the patron and protector opposite but could not. Could only hold and quiver. Deny it, cried the voice within. Deny. Deny. But he hauled himself together, sucked in strength from an outside view of brassy wealth, and puckered his lips for the final betrayal.

“Of course not,” he said. “Who'd look twice at Iris? Or Gerald, for that matter!”

Moulding a canvas deck-chair and keeping his straw hat well down over his face that Iris might not apprehend his sleeplessness, Bernard sorted through a great number of ancient photographs thinking perhaps there or there he had missed the clue: the three of them now, and the scene later when the boy finally did turn up as he must. There would have to be one of those disgusting hearts-on-the-table show-downs. Iris, exhausted from beside-herself telephoning half the night, lay drained away in her bedroom with witch-hazel pads on her eyes—or so he had left her, still plaintively insisting they should ring the police.

“Nonsense,” Bernard had replied at once. “Keith would find that far too satisfying.”

Iris then had increased the volume of her whimpering to a little shriek at his failure to exhibit parental frenzy and uncontrollably her lover's name (a previously unclassified exotic!) flowered again and again. She would, she threatened, sweeping her striped and too-girlish brunch coat about her, she would ask him what to do. He was kinder, more sympathetic, had more keenly developed responsibilities as a father and so on, insisting until Bernard turned his back on her and
tried a short phrase that had been interesting him on the piano.

He expected Iris to hit his hand in the James Mason manner—and she did. The keys clanged back at her.

“Ring Gerald,” he said. “Ask him. But you are being completely silly. Keith is trying for an effect. Remember the other times he's tried us out. Iris”—his punished hand nevertheless took her gently by the shoulder—“calm down and remember when he couldn't have that bicycle. Remember how he hid all day at young Coady's and only emerged when hunger drove him out? And the time he couldn't go on the Cairns trip with all those kids? He's been vanishing off and on for years.”

“But what have we done? What's he punishing us for?”

Bernard rubbed his hands over his gritty eyes . . .

“God knows. Who knows? The whole system of his punishing us makes him sound like a disgusting little swine. Unless, of course, we deserve it. Or he thinks we do.”

He regarded Iris steadily and could not help enjoying a natural pleasure when her eyes dropped.

“Perhaps I deserve it most,” he could not avoid adding either. “You're right, Iris. I am a poor sort of father.”

Turning away he briefly experienced the grief he normally could only wish for but not attain and determined his own punishment would extend its full term, for he felt no real concern for his son's safety but only a strange wish to suffer himself. Now and again he would examine matters of the evening before and wonder if some adult carelessness had tipped the balance. Iris and Gerald had barely spoken, let alone communed, so there could be nothing in that. Perhaps they were tiring of each other, he reflected regretfully. They would discover that the relationship they had rejected and the one they now enjoyed and the one each might enjoy later on all went the same way.

Bernard was genuinely provoked to pity and a sudden awareness of emptiness. I have no problems, he thought, not even this. Not even my marriage is endangered, for you can only endanger a happiness and it has hardly been that for a long time. My work does not absorb me and create spasms
of pain within time. Nor yet does it lack all interest. I read. I play the piano—only a little—but still I do perform, if indifferently. I drink more than a little but do not womanize. I smoke to excess. I am punctual on the job. I play a record now and then and I am gentle, calm and completely civilized when my wife deceives me, my son leaves home.

Trellised and mesmerized leaves shuddered uneasily on their wooden rack near which mango-trees, heavy with fruit and plummy shadows, hunched, sleepily aware of Bernard's sandalled feet stuck to the bole. Shadows loitered across the lawn to watch. And Bernard found himself time-watching while the black fingers under glass shifted no more quickly than the shadow of a croton to whose final destiny—the arm-rest of his chair—he had affixed a decision to go inside.

The phone was ringing like ice-cream bells—as vulgar, as insistent.

The enemy was there first, but her irony stood aside with eyes of glass, angrily transparent, and made him do his duty, focused in silence his hand picking up the receiver, explored him as he stood with the tiny unreal voice worming its way into his ear.

“Hello.” Sombre, deadly slow, funereal vowels. They were unmistakable.

“Yes. Leverson here.”

“Geoghegan speaking.”

“Oh.”

“Is something the matter?” He had his ear always to the ground for domestic frenzies—not a sexual voyeur but one who squeezed joy out of whimsical infractions of the domestic rule. “I can always ring later.”

“I'll bet,” Bernard whispered.

“What? What's that?”

“I said not yet. There's nothing wrong yet.”

“You sound rather distraught.”

“Question or statement, Professor?”

“Oh, my dear Leverson. It's too hot. Too stinking hot. But you do sound rather screwed up like a bottle-top to the point where the thread may snap.”

“What nonsense!” Bernard attempted laughter. “You're imagining things. Or hoping for.”

“Perhaps. Look, what I really rang for . . .” Liar, thought Bernard.

Iris had moved away (Ask him, you fool! Ask him!) and had begun a neurotic rearrangement of certain week-old fronds that projected from a jardinière in a manner she classed as Japanese. She had been an Ikebana cultist for a while. “She can work at them half an hour before she achieves a climax,” Bernard used to say unkindly. “Everything seems to be all stamens and pistils and pollination processes.”

Iris's rage was willing to explode like a wonderful flare that might finally illuminate the tundra of her marriage, for now words exposed this thing to her husband who would stolidly play out her passion in his favourite sonata and discover when he had finished that she had been forced to remove her knotted person to some deaf corner of the house where neither his music nor any projection of himself through it could possibly touch her.

She was given to drip-dry suits and wooden beads. Nunlike her fingers told strings of ochre pips or smoothed the guaranteed uncrushable primness of her skirt thinly down and down so that even she felt spinsterish and wondered what voluptuous spasm had engaged Gerald.

“I can only get the score on loan,” Bernard was explaining patiently while Iris twitched with impatience. “And there is no proof anyway that the lyrics were written at the same time. He probably wrote the music long before the words were appended . . . What? . . . No, of course I can't tell by the Latin.”

Iris began to cry quietly and steadily.

“God in Heaven,” thought Bernard watching those regular and deliberate pulsings.

“No,” he said. “No. I'll get it for you. It was autographed if I remember rightly . . . what? Don't get excited, Harry. I can't hear you. There probably won't be anything on the lyrics at all. Come over, if you want, or go and have your siesta, do. Or detick the Labrador.”

He hung up. “There's cultural zest for you,” he said smiling
with an effort at his wife. “Geoghegan on some imaginary trail of a medieval lyrist. He's like a cultural Mountie. Or do I mean mountebank? Tavern songs and some rather delicious little—”

“Shut up!” Iris said unexpectedly. “Shut up shut up shut up.”

Because for years she had been afraid to explode the legend of for ever and ever, the durability of love within marriage, and had kept this lie alive along with a dozen other women with whom she took coffee breaks and who complained boastfully of their husband's incessant attentions, she was staggered now by her lapse into truth. For half a minute, perhaps, their denuded dislike glared across the hire-purchase jungle that bound them in a cocoon of habit and monthly payments—“Till final instalment do us part,” witty Bernard had murmured provokingly—and then she took her frenzy with her into the back garden and started the car.

Since there is a divination that apprehends the hawk about to fall or the branch, or the shadow within shadow, the held breath behind the darkened door, Bernard was able now to recognize that, Gerald or no Gerald, they had separated across rivers and the bridges were crumbled years ago. At this point the leaves are almost counted by the stripped brain; an exaggerated interest notes droplets swell on faucet ends and tumble into sinks, gutter, swell, tumble; nostalgia melts at last and the soul hops about like a ticket-of-leave man. Observe this frond, the spores of velvet, or this, this anguished new green bursting its sheath, or that jean-clad bottom-bouncing cookie or this fragile amber of pre-storm luminescence that might crack and reveal some horrible normalcy of the sky. Bernard could scarcely bear to look into the garden where thousands of shapes revealed piquancies he had not observed for fifteen years, could hardly withstand the blast of light let in by her repeated phrase. Groggily he raised the fly-screen and pushed the window out. Two incredibly beautiful, feather-soft, beak-sharp birds jazzed over the grass. The grass stabbed with millions of individual blades. Fence palings became identifiable with knots that rang chords, serrations that bit blue. His nothingness brimmed over and,
still trapped by minutiae, he went out again to the canvas chair under the mango-trees and sat down to wait for his son.

Yet neither flustered nor ashamed, Keith split eight-fifteen apart softly with his suede feet. He did not like the look of the anxious illumination of the porch, the clearance-waiting garbage bin too early by half, the show-boat brightness of number twenty-three that blazed its dangerous festivity on to the side lawns of twenty-one and twenty-five. Keith trod rubber silences by the side bougainvillea and came up the one, two, three, four, five back steps into the accusations of refrigerator and gas hot water switching noisily on.

Through the open kitchen door he could see in the dinette his parents not speaking over coffee.

“Hullo, Bernard. Iris.” He was the jaunty attempter but his father told him to sit down in a tone he did not recall ever having heard before. Iris could not speak for relief. He counted the plastic canisters on top of the dresser and suddenly, idiotically became aware of Professor Geoghegan's pedagogic tones talking with persistent mania into the living-room telephone.

“Where have you been?” Bernard asked.

The terror-pleasure aspect of Mr Varga's week-ender blazed like cracker-night and the sight of his denounced mum slumped there beside deceived dad choked him for a moment while his father, with outward calm, waited. Sneakily Keith kept sliding his eyes towards his mother who had become the whip-lash of the dirty joke.

“The beach,” he replied, without looking.

“But
what
beach? Where? Did you go with anyone?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure,” he said, and gave the clear-eyed look that liars by omission can always give.

“Where were you then? I want to know exactly. Where did you spend last night?”

“I walked in to town. I mean I went over on the ferry and walked about a bit.”

“That would hardly have taken all night. Where did you go in town? You're lucky the police didn't pick you up.”

“Oh, be your age, Bernard.” Keith smiled. In the other room sad Geoghegan replaced the phone and came sombrely to the kitchen door where he unobtrusively and joyfully inspected the boy.