The Slow Natives (28 page)

S
TUBBORNLY
B
ERNARD REFUSED
to take any action.

“No,” he said to Iris. “No. He has to work this one out himself. He's alive, not far away, and in no trouble, thank God. He'll be home. If anything were wrong we would have heard.”

Iris tantrumed for three insane hours while Bernard, far more anxious than he would for one tremblingly satisfying moment have revealed, made several pots of tea and continued to speak with a quiet reasonableness that only served to stimulate her rage.

“Why?” she screamed. “Why?”

“I simply forbid it,” Bernard explained, exerting moth-eaten authority.

Iris said, “But you hate me, you bastard! You're only doing this because you hate me. Because it makes me sick with worry. You're attacking me through him. Don't you feel anything for your own child?”

After two hours of it, he lost his temper.

“Shut up, you madwoman,” he said, “or I'll say a few things you won't like.”

She narrowed her bloodshot eyes and challenged him.

“Go on! Say your worst. You've never been a proper father to him, I mean a normal father, stuck in there with your music, your books.”

“At least I am his father,” Bernard said carefully. “But if we had a child now I wouldn't be so sure.”

The blood paused in Iris's face. “What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. And, my dear Iris, so does Keith. And that is partly the cause of this bother. Oh, don't cry. If you do that I'll want to hit you. You entered on
your whole little romance dry-eyed—and I knew—yes! Don't be surprised. I was the willing cuckold. And don't deny. I thought it might brighten your life. After all, we didn't seem to be going anywhere. What had I to lose—that I hadn't already lost?”

Now that he exposed his indifference to her she hated him, perversely, longing for him to want what he gave away so readily.

“No,” he went outrageously on. “You had my blessing for what it was worth. Gerald was a clean, dull bore. But clean, Iris. I did like that clean bit. And I felt sorry for him, too, you know. It's no good being hurt when I say that. Only another man understands what I mean. After all, what was he depriving me of?”

“You go on about it now quite a lot for a man who didn't care.”

“But I didn't, Iris. Rest assured. That was a nice comfy cliché, wasn't it? But there was someone who did. Keith cared.”

“He never knew.”

“Ah yes. But he did.”

“How do you know?”

“In half a dozen ways that if you had been a more observant mother you might have noticed. The chief clue was his sudden aversion to you. Poor old Keith. He'd always missed out on something parental—father-love, you say. Yes. And then . . . boom! Mother virtue collapses.

“I don't believe you. You're only saying it to cover neglect.”

“No? Well, we can always ask him.”

Iris really wept then. “You couldn't do that.”

“My dear, there is no need. Have you never watched young Seabrook and Keith together? Didn't you ask yourself why they developed this unexpected attachment? They never used to be great friends, if you recall. Surely you asked yourself. Do you think for a minute that they haven't spent days talking about it? Perhaps young Tom was speculating on you as a step-mama.”

Iris went into the bathroom and began to vomit while
Bernard, in between heartbeats and sips of tea, went out to the front porch and watched the long road to the bridge down which his son must come. Early afternoon traffic. The gardens beyond the river. Everything was in its set place, with accustomed attitudes to reassure him. Asphalt walks and cut lawns, the roly-poly slope that somersaulted straight over the retaining wall to the river flats. Fifteen years up here, Bernard moaned within, is too long. And yet when he first moved into his domestic nook, nothing was capable of being long enough, and he had been, he recalled, afraid to examine the gyrating circumference of mortality that spun, flashing ominous light-shafts. Turning aside, he had imagined some infinity of material bliss, but found he had peered into the shifting nebulae that clouded a desperate unknown, that his tolerance of for ever and ever was sickeningly limited to the duration, say, of a hire-purchase span or Iris's plans for the Christmas holidays or the quartet he was always half-way through writing: the end was never really in sight, yet one had an idea of the whole that had all the muted prismatic colours melting into one shimmering, elusive, incomplete thing. I do not hate you, Iris, he discovered in that moment. Not at all now. Whatever it was that scorched or burned I have expelled in my last fire-breathings upon you. All I want, all I will ever want, is the warmth of my son, our mutual toleration, for his running away has at last convinced me of his love.

When he inspected the sky-shadow above him, the sombre quality of trees along River Terrace, when he calculated that although there might be no general rain ever again, he was yet aware that in this particularly secret and tantalizing acre the drought had broken and he could see Keith clearly through the glass that had divided them from each other, clearly as if he had only to reach out to touch with father fingers the firm arm, the still straight shoulder. They faced each other through the transparent barrier and each was mouthing something at the other, was crying, “Come in”, was answering, “I want to, I want to.” Boy, he shouted silently, rubbing his soft musician hands through his straggling hair, boy. You were right all those years ago when you
lusted after denial. He began to smile, a smile that overpowered him, brought him back from the lost country to definite decisions in his own well-charted landscape.

He walked slowly back to the house.

“I'm sorry,” he was just starting to say to Iris, when the telephone began to ring.

At four Mr Varga left his Wednesday rooms stone cold sober and drove out towards the coast road, nagged by conscience, the silence of the Leverson family, and a sense of doom. Searching seemed pointless, but a night at the shack might drag off the fog that settled, sticky, oppressive, each time he attempted to think. His own peculiar neurosis, he had discovered, was an inability to sort out problems even after hours of extensive analysis. In fact, the lengthier the probing, the hazier, the more autumn-toned the solution. I will not think of this at all as I drive, he rationalized, and in this way I shall eventually bring a sharper mind to the whole matter. He was glad Leverson had avoided police action. And he especially refused to analyse this gladness. Taste the moment, Leo would advise gaily. It may be your last.

He drove with
brio
, with the elegance of a man confident of his dress and the condition of his bank account and bowels. There were times when he barely remembered being a child, and that was the impression he created wherever he went—a circumfusion of permanent gecko-faced adulthood, the eyes blinking against the secret sins; the thick hide of the rationalizer horny and coated with the self-induced imperviousness he must maintain to preserve his balance.

He coffeed and sandwiched along the highway. He wiped a fastidious mouth. He selected his favourite menthol-flavoured cigarette and he drove doomwards through early summer languors, the somnolence of rising sap and heat coming and the eye-burning blueness of the coastal road.

Eheu
, sighed his classical fly-screen door as he pulled it back.
Eheu
. The room hooded its eyes, and yawned in his face while he pottered, plugged in an electric jug to hear the purring and final bubbling with the gratitude of one who has clung to a raft in a never-ending desert of water. Keith
would have gone south, he supposed. Anything else was ridiculous. He could visualize young Leverson charming the hauliers all the way to Sydney until the city's skin drum was before him ready to be tapped by the most sensitive of fibrillating fingers.

His big male muscular pin-ups flexed continually from the walls, giving an illusion of crowdedness with all those impassive, unaccusing but commemoratory figures. What was it Julia Geoghegan had said?—“Beef patties, darling?” Of course she was an amusing bitch, he knew; but there was probably something awry with her own sexual drive. They had all been squatting about the fire last winter at the Sea-brooks. Julia was dazzling despite her age, with heavy green-blue lids and a lot of fake rings that she wore with her own special flair together with shockingly expensive clothes that never quite fitted. The skirt had ridden up above her bony knees so that he caught a glimpse of nylons held up by old chewed garters and then a mass of white thigh blotched with networks of varicose veins. Every gesture was dramatized and underlined by her ring-cluttered hands as she talked swiftly, intelligently, and breathlessly, holding them all on lines which she twitched.

“We were never teen-agers,” she was saying. “Never-nevernever, Tobralco prints of animals and flowers or the gathered crepe suitable for forty-year-olds. There was never this cult. Fashion designers left us alone because we were at the awkward age. Now the only awkward age is ours.”

“The menopause,” suggested snaky Leo.

“My dear, you flatter me. I'm way past. But no. That's really what I meant, you know. The forty-five plus group nobody wants.” Her husband laughed into his Scotch like something demented.

“There's an enormous wasted labour force there,” Julia said, “rotting away at bowls or in front of the telly or going on to quiz shows to be insulted by pup announcers and nearly win things they don't really want.

“But they think that's their reward,” Kathleen Seabrook said, “after years of baby-minding and getting up at night. It's a well-earned rest.”

“It might be,” agreed Dr Geoghegan, “for those who have had four or five children, but hardly for those with one or none.” She could not be bothered being kind to Kathleen, whom she thought a fool. “That's what puzzles me. How on earth do you fill in your time?”

And then, of course, Leo had made the one remark that no one could ever forget—now that the facts were established: “Oh, there's reading and shows and a little adultery on the side.”

“The back, surely,” Dr Geoghegan had suggested quick as birth-pangs. But they had all looked at each other, not diverted, and they knew.

Varga locked the house up on the savoury traces of his meal. The shack was like a false heart which he entered and set vibrating. Tick. Tick. He regarded its plumb square glassy walls with the despair of one who has tried for years to achieve an intimacy with another and failed. “I'll sell you, you Judas,” he snarled at it in the darkness. “But for three times what you cost me.” The restlessness that poisoned him drove him out again in dissatisfaction. He was for ever driving to and then away, the attained proving empty and desolate. Perhaps he had half expected the boy would have been there making use of the place. But there was no sign at all that anyone had trodden for one moment on his sea-grass matting. Even the cushions were still lying where Tommy Seabrook had pitched them. The car sounded angry as he, snarling on the U-Turn, while his radio throbbed savagely and he sang with it in a kind of tuneless rage that augmented his arrogance, his defeat, his emptiness. He was tired of these purposeless high-speed excursions that like drugs became so necessary he was constantly haring down highways at dangerous speeds while the inner distortion took over and the outside world streamed by in a joyless scuttling of pedestrian or lurching of oncoming car. His technique was startling, but the eyes did not see. Instinct guided the twisting wheels and so, raging, singing, he was three-quarters of the way back to the city when a new night-club beckoned with glittering eye from a side-road.

It was the biggest, glassiest purveyor of no-joy he had seen
for weeks. “Sea Urchins”, said a sign, flashing on and off provocatively. The shrimps were drawn up in shoals and had been sucked in by a blare of youth and jazz. Speakers screeched across the car-park and falsely green lawns, across the fountain that fell like flowers, across the no man's land of footpath. Leo drove into a narrow space near a side wall and swam up the stream of light and noise.

Couples, untouching, gyrated to the pulsations that came from a small platform where five young men, wielding guitars like sub-machine guns, thrust phrases over and over at the tumescent mob. Polo necks and beards became confused. Girls in cotton sweat shirts and tight jeans waggled their behinds and flung their manes of hair forward with screams. The foyer cage of glass looked in on this tank of trapped fish, and shark Leo prowled up and down the black and white tiles until a pink-sequinned girl sidled out of a pouffe booth and attended to him. There were mobiles of harmless artiness, unframed nudes, lots of potted cotton palms and rubber plants, and a whole wall of hand-printed anemone, mollusc, stone-fish (hoped Varga), trochus, nautilus and conch.

Moodily he sat at a side table and forked up oysters, stirred up an entrée of mussels in a thin wine sauce. No one looked at him. He was too old. There raged about him adolescence with its hair bleached, straightened, thudding and thumping to the music. The guitarists vanished. A spaghetti-tube pianist hit the stage while the girls went mad, screaming before and after he began to play, stroking imperfect minor chords in beguine time. Cameo faces swayed behind curtains of hair. Surfie boys moved with the undulating ease of those who have been on top of the world. Leo attempted to hook on to one submissive eye, but they glazed, swept past, and under his fishy breath Leo cursed.

I've got you tender my skin
, the pianist crooned in a rich fruitcake voice.
I got you deep in the heart of me
 . . . somewhere close by in the pearl-grey smoke fuzz a girl-kid squealed. Lordy, thought Varga half-turning and seeing the face, the jeans. Not here. Not again. . . .
simply a part of me
. . . . Drool, drool, and another squeal from the rear and half a
dozen swaying youngsters let loose, pushing through the late fad bead-craze curtains.