The Slow Natives (7 page)

He stopped at Helidon for a drink, glooming through the pub windows at a rain plastering the sky and the countryside as far as he could see. Hills had vanished. As he drank he thumbed down the list of examinees—fifteen convent pupils, six private, only three elementary, thank God. Some strays at Stanthorpe and Toowoomba. If he shot through that lot smartly he could polish off the rest in a day as he had planned and his little lie to Iris would bear fruit. He'd have a nothing-night away from home.

For a few vicious seconds he thought of wiring Gerald, but a vision of Iris, her curlers scarfed up from the dust, propelling a niftie-swiftie of a vacuum cleaner through the spiritless rooms, pumped away behind the bar with such domestic absorption he could have wept at the nonsense of it all and ate no lunch but drank another, and felt like cutting his throat.

He drove into the garden city through tender drizzling emotional trees.

It went as he had planned.

Hotel sheets embraced him that evening and in a dream of pianos and convent parlours, a never-ending line of pigtailed girls played a Grieg
Albumblatt
and stumbled in exactly the same spot until thanks to God the tea and the thin bread-and-butter rolls and the gem scones. “I want the downlands tour,” old Bathgate had badgered at the last staff examiners' meeting. “I want to go to that convent on the range where they make those marvellous gem scones.” He had eaten four, the gutser winner and grinned all through his second and third cups of tea, thinking of Bathgate stuck up along the coast in the wet. “I've got it all plotted with flags,” Bathgate had pronounced. “Drew it up for today!” And he had unrolled a crazy map of the State with all the centres marked with flags inscribed “pikelets” or “tea-cake” or “asparagus rolls” or “éclairs”. “There's not much to choose,” he said thoughtfully, “but I'd say the Ursuline convents have it every time. Flavour and lightness and size of helpings.” The ten other men looked incredulously at the map on the table.

“What are those little multiplication signs for?” one wanted to know.

Bathgate had looked up innocently.

“My dear fellow,” he explained carefully, “this is the result of enormous research and widespread but delicate questioning. I've done this solely for the benefit of all of us. Photostat copies will be issued. Those places marked with a cross are the ones without a gents!”

Soon after breakfast he went down to Condamine in sun patches between showers that lit up the wonderful greens of nearness and lilacs of distance, and as his car raced along the straights of the downlands was conscious of nothing but speed and quick scenery, the comfort of having recently breakfasted and well, the pleasure of aloneness. Yet this was dissolved when he came downstairs two hours later in the Condamine Focus and found awaiting him in the lounge a handsome, gloomy cleric who had been meeting him in this manner for several years now. They smiled briefly.

“The good sisters?” Bernard asked.

“The good sisters indeed. Anxious as ever. I'm to drive you over.”

“Have I time for a beer?” Bernard glanced at his wrist-watch. “I'm not due there till ten-thirty, you know. Just a quick quick one.”

He speculated on a patina of greyness that covered Father Lingard and a new habit he seemed to have of rubbing one ruminative finger-tip along the corner of his mouth. “Ah yes,” he would say to fill in the gaps, and when Leverson looked at him once too suddenly, too inquisitively, he explained, “I am nature abhorring a vacuum.”

“How is your family?” the priest inquired, out of politeness, guessed the other, rather than real curiosity, and I could shock his calm by saying, “My wife's an adulteress and my son has been seduced”, but then he remembered it was almost impossible to shock priests and that all Doug Lingard would say would be a grave “Tell me about it”, that was indeed exactly what he did say when, next morning as they lunched together on his return from Stanthorpe, he finally admitted, “My wife is unfaithful, my son has lost his innocence.” (Note that gentler wording, Bernard, he said to himself.) But at that time and in that place, he was unable to qualify the new
emptiness that exhilarated as it isolated each tree in the forest and singly discovered the birds.

He could shrug merely.

There were, he noticed, some careless stains on Father Lingard's stock.

“I'm a little tired, I think perhaps of this town.”

“Aren't you being heretical?”

Lingard smiled wryly. “Well, that would be something. A stir. I think I could bear the Inquisition and a panel of beady-eyed Dominicans pinning me to the wall.”

Leverson sipped thoughtfully.

“But I didn't think you people ever suffered from boredom. You're so wrapped up in sacrifice, wouldn't even the boredom be part of the pleasure?”

“You sound most Dominican yourself.” Lingard managed a small laugh. “It's not a boredom so much. It's hard to explain. A kind of spiritual aridity when all the springs dry up, you know, and there seems to be pointlessness about it all.” He inspected his bony wrist. “Look, it must be a problem of my years.”

“We all feel it,” Leverson said.

“You too?”

“Me too.”

“And how does it attack you? The same restlessness, the same discontent? The examination of the heart in the hours when others are asleep? The wish to strip oneself right down to the bone and escape?”

Bernard nodded.

“One must persist, persist, persist. You know what we say—believe in spite of appearances, trust despite all evidence to the contrary, hope against hope. It should be easy, but it's damned hard work. I say damned advisedly.” He pushed his beer away and left it unfinished, sad and flat. “I think we'll have to go now. They'll be rushing about in twenty different directions.”

Condamine's main street remained unchanged for ever. It was, and still is, a scrubby little town drowned in dust and flies. Around the corner Lingard had angle-parked his car with its nose poked in at a second-hand store. The car was
black and clerical, too. It had white side wall tires that repeated the liturgical motif and it stood, expensive and desperate, ready to rush into life and drive both of them nowhere.

The convent was a double-storeyed timber building with a brick façade, a chapel on the southern wall beyond which tennis courts lay behind a grape trellis, and a big barn of an assembly hall in the northern shoulder of the grounds. Plaster saints idled in the front garden, peering over the wall at Condamine's Fitzherbert Street—all leaf and old colonial (three verandas, bow windows, hallway)—that sauntered by to join the main highway east. At a variety of points along this road, camphor-laurel trees tangled lushly overhead, obliterating the sky with a turbulent scrawl-screen of leaves whose shadows lay felt-thick across concrete. From the privacy of grape trellis in the winy summer, various white coifs might be seen moving and observing the cars travelling east or west; observing with envy or pity or indifference or a kind of jealous rage that Sister Matthew endeavoured to repress each time she discovered the world she had given up years ago, so close its pulsing might still be felt in her blood.

Pallid as last winter she slipped quietly now from the practice-room block near the stables and glided across to the main buildings to ring the period bell, for she was portress this year, her junior classes being so small she had netted half a dozen further irritating chores that she performed not always lovingly. In high winds she might use hammer and nails to good effect on clashing windows or imprison vine tendrils on a fly-away trellis. Her practicality unclogged hand basins and mended fuses, but was sometimes unable, more often as she grew older, to mend human relationships.

A ginger tuft of hair sprouted grassily beneath her starched coif. Her thin face, clever as an eagle's, was impassive when she reached the waxy hallway where parlour clock swung its pendulum fifteen seconds off ten. Exactly on the hour she pressed the button, and deep in the convent's conscience a peal, virginal and icy, claimed all eight women in the classrooms and two lay nuns plaiting a net of pastry across a
community apple tart. Sister Matthew's acid breath misted the clock's glass as she leant close to watch the cog-wheels, so like her own unhappy heart, while mechanically she drew her watch from inside a deep apron pocket and adjusted it, took note of her white clever face in the mirror of glass and polished oak, looked hard for a second into her own undeceived eyes, and went gently down the hall towards the parlour.

The bells had rung like twins.

Through the translucent jujubes of stained glass, even before she swung the door open, she could see the dark shadows of both men.

In this asexual world they were exotics.

“Father Lingard,” she said, and waited.

“This is Mr Leverson, Sister. Sister Matthew,” he said. “Mr Leverson is our Board music examiner, I'm sure you will look after him. Not that he's new here—years and years of it. Isn't that so?”

“That is so,” Bernard agreed. He wondered where all the children were, what they would be like, recalling Keith, smart as paint, quiz-kid bright, blond, rude, withdrawn.

Father Lingard fiddled his hat round on a white impractical hand.

“If you will wait,” Sister Matthew suggested, not quite absorbing them with her strangely illuminated eyes. “I will fetch Sister Beatrice.”

“I shan't wait,” Father Lingard said. “But you might ask Reverend Mother to send the Monsignor a list of First Communicants before Saturday week.”

“Yes, Father,” Sister Matthew said. She had not the near-fawning acquiescence of so many nuns, even her voice conveying not indifference but a self-sufficiency that made Leverson think of Scott or Sturt or Magellan—or any man at all with a desert within that must be explored.

Leverson found himself alone. The small nun had made him uneasy, for she kept her eyelids down and below the ghost of a moustache her mouth was too full and too clever, and for the few moments they had all confronted each other, they had stood like antagonists gripping nothing but space.

Then she was gone, and through the window, he could see Father Lingard thinly striding to his car; and he sat on with his heart suddenly overturned for no reason at all, waiting and fingering the pages of a religious monthly. Priests surrounded by lepers in Sierra Leone and smiling shiny black acolytes in Mombasa seminaries grinned back. His Protestantism was both affronted and moved. “‘St Joachim, pray for us',” he read softly. A flock of aspirations beat up in an echelon from the page but he could only repeat the words cynically, standing on his own bland desert, and watch the birds flap away. They were not homing pigeons.

Sister Beatrice rattled in and startled the last one.

A big, warm creature, she was given to enormous gusty spirals of laughter whose vulgarity shocked some of the community that retained a special memory of her, coloured according to the personality of the recorder, singing “Macushla” in a throbbing mezzo-soprano at a St Patrick's night concert. Phrases like “your red lips are saying” came back startlingly to each. There she had stood, lumpy, generous, and lovable in her habit, one hand on the piano lid, the other, forgetful of circumstances, merely that of Miss Moira Stanners underlining the passion of an Irish love song. “That death is a dream and that love is for aye,” she had sung richly and ripely above the mellow tones of the three-crown Ronisch. And the audience had gone quite mad and stamped until she had sung once more, her own enjoyment glowing across the hall. Reverend Mother St Jude had reprimanded her rather acidly later—“A woman in your position, consecrated to spiritual things . . . overtones of the music-hall!”—a reprimand which still could not drown the echoes, a year old, of community choruses dominated by the lovely unused voice; nor later that of Father Lake (phoney American accent, red hair) who had done Bing Crosby imitations that same evening and was entirely unselfconscious in his clerical black. “To the point of profanity,” remembered Sister Philomene, compressing her elderly lips whenever she recalled his “Dearly beloved, as the collection plates go round I will sing for you ‘Pennies from Heaven'!” Cheers and cheers! Shocking!

Sister Beatrice laid her warm moist hand briefly on Mr Leverson's.

“We are ready to begin,” she announced. “All the little girls are waiting in the hall, including those from private teachers. While we're walking over to the practice block I shall send for the first one.”

He marvelled at the discipline of organization.

“If you don't mind,” Bernard suggested, “I intend starting with the beginners—to shorten their anguish.”

“Of course. Of course. There are only three of them.” Sister Beatrice braced herself for gentle bribery and said, “Don't be too hard on the babies, Mr Leverson. They're a timid little lot this year.”

“We shall do our best,” Bernard said, not committing himself. “I don't feel particularly fierce. I shall save it for the seniors.”

Sister Beatrice opened the front door and they walked out into the garden alongside the convent, through the May damp and across to the old block of music-rooms near the stables. She opened the door of the last room and Bernard, gazing in, saw it had been decorated for his benefit with a great bunch of leaves in a concrete pot in one corner against the wall. A terrible print of Saint Cecilia playing a primitive pipe-organ hung over the piano. He felt the familiarity in this room and all rooms like it entrap his fingers so that they went automatically through preparatory movements: the laying out of papers on the table, the syllabus lists, the question sheets. The piano lid had been opened; it was an elderly Lipp, black, loyal, but with sad yellow teeth. He hit a few melancholy chords—and discovered its brilliant tone.

“As soon as you're ready, Sister,” he said.

One pupil seemed no different from another, but the small anemone hands uncurled over the keys with different mannerisms. By eleven-thirty he was only on his fifth, a horribly nervous child with licorice plaits and unhealthy fudge skin. At first she had trembled so much her hands could barely impress tone from this over-willing keyboard, so Bernard had instructed her to stop for a minute and he chatted to her about school until she was almost at ease and able to play,
though not well. As he watched the smudged profile he thought of his own son's withdrawn and sulky confidence. He wanted to say to this skinny plaited mite, “And do you love your parents? Tell me honestly. I won't tell a soul.” And he knew if he crossed his empty heart she would believe him. But he could not. She would choke with fright or giggle and some misinterpreter would complain and he would become the bogy man under the house where the rainwater tank sheltered the frogs or the unseen sound glanced at over the shoulder, the padding nothing that one must beware of.