The Slow Natives (6 page)

“He sat on a railway-station platform,” he suggested. “The foolish lad. A filthy squalid urine-stinking station littered with trash bins and lolly wrappers and dog pee. Ask him! He'll tell you. That was it exactly.”

Keith reeled within. The pompous old windbag! Clued up, forsooth! He wanted to shock them.

“No. That wasn't it,” he said. “It wasn't like that at all.”

Geoghegan huffed and lit his pipe.

“I picked up a girl.” Keith hesitated. “A woman,” he said, trying not to look at his mother.

“I hate liars.” Geoghegan stated abruptly and blew smoke over the lot of them.

Bernard put one exhausted hand across his eyes.

“You mean she picked you up?” he asked.

“Yes,” Keith agreed, warming to it. “She asked me home.”

Iris's gasp hissed out into the silence. Keith almost laughed and even this new hatred of his mother had its revenge.

“He's lying, of course,” Geoghegan insisted. “The little fool had no money, had you? Had you? And what did she look like, anyway, this street woman of yours?”

“Just like anyone's mother,” Keith said brilliantly.

“Oh, for God's sake!” Bernard had to shake his head to clear it, and instantly room detail magnified with the same sharp-edged clarity as the garden, cake bins with “cake” in black cursive; the stove revealed chips, stains, streaks, five ebony power keys studded with a sparkler of a screw. He said, “And today? You've been gone all day.”

“I told you.”

“Not really. I want to know where, please.”

“Surfers,” Keith said. “Oh, this was proper.” His guilt raged. “Relax, everyone. I was with a responsible adult like yourselves.”

“And who,” Bernard asked, letting it ride, “was this?”

“It was Mr Varga.”

“Had he asked you?”

“No.”

“Did he mind your coming?”

No indeedie, he thought, and said, “I don't think so.”

“You realize I can check on this.”

“Check away.”

“Is it the truth?” his mother asked. Keith did not, could not, answer.

“Answer your mother,” Bernard ordered. The boy turned his head from the light and the light came at him still from behind and ripped.

“I'm tired,” Keith said. “If you people don't mind, I'd like to go to bed.”

“
Answer
her!” Bernard shouted.

“No,” Keith said very firmly. “No.” He pushed his chair back, having this quorum by the throat, and said to no one in particular, “Never again. Not once again. Neither her, nor your Professor Geoghegan, nor any adult.”

“Don't!” Bernard said suddenly as Iris half opened her unpainted lips and went to him. “Leave him.”

His arrogance lasted nicely to the side veranda where he slept in a glassed-in study, lasted until he stripped off his jeans and sweat shirt and burrowed his bewilderment beneath the blankets. He knew, and he could not bear to know, that at this moment his father was aware he would be howling like a baby.

“Saint Gretta is patron of the mentally disturbed,” Bernard said mildly to old Bathgate of the Board as they creaked out of the conference room. “We need an icon.”

Bathgate gave his three-note guffaw, padding beside Leverson along the Terrace. Now and then he waved his stick hopelessly at passing cabs, but none paused, so he plodded on after the other man, his lumbering movements holding Bernard up. “Mad,” he agreed. “Quite quite mad. Lord, I could do with a drink. Couldn't you, old fellow? After listening to all that nonsense for two hours. Blithering piffle. I say, what did you think of that chestnut Garnsey cracked,
eh? Syncopation is an unsteady movement from bar to bar. Let's syncopate, Mr Leverson. Let's.”

“Sorry,” Bernard flapped his free hand gull's-wing fashion. “I have to get home. We're being social this evening.”

“Ah! Poor fellow!” Bathgate coughed violently for a few seconds. “By the bye, what did the great Clerihew want you for before the morning session, if one may be so impertinent?” He puffed and panted, looking downhill at the trolley cars.

Curious geezer, Bernard thought, but he humoured him. “Candidate trouble. Teacher says there's been terrible domestic upheaval and so on and so on and could I possibly. . .? You know how it goes.”

“Do I not? Don't want much, do they?”

“Ah well, I might pop back in a couple of weeks when things ease off here a bit. There were two others who missed out because of some transport let-down. The milk-truck couldn't get them in on time. I'll do the lot. And, to tell you the truth, I'll be glad of the run back.”

Bathgate pursed speculating lips, but said nothing. The unsaid hmmmmmmm.

“Blessings!” he chortled. “Blessings!”—as they parted at Edward Street in a tautened crowd swirl. Frantically his stick conducted some plea and a cab at last did slide to a stop.
Portamento, ritardando
 . . .

Bernard pushed sweatily through peak hour towards the Valley where, in a coffee lounge at the bottom end of Queen Street he bumped into Professor Geoghegan before he had time to conceal himself behind his paper. Cunningly Geoghegan allowed him to be seated first and then dropped into the seat opposite with such surprised warmth (feigned, decided bitter Bernard) he could only click his teeth bad-temperedly and endure.

Geoghegan was having one of his days when he talked zanily and engagingly about incredible and, Bernard suspected, mythical humans who peopled a Geoghegan Landscape, assembling antics and pranks of exquisite, detached nonsense.

“I remember my aunts,” he was saying dreamily as he sugared his coffee. “They're dead, thank God, but they were
the most awesome pair. Used to drive a car, the dear old things. A big Bentley, black, thirty feet long like an undertaker's carriage.”

“Lucky them.”

“I suppose. Oh, I don't know, dear fellow. You see, they couldn't manage it separately and one used to steer and the other used to change gears. ‘Are you ready, dear?' Zoe—that was the older one, the one steering—used to say. ‘Right!' would say Hester. And zoom—off they'd go!”

“Who declutched?” Bernard asked, interested despite himself.

“Well, that I can't really say. The steerer, I imagine. Sometimes Hester couldn't get it into gear and Zoe would say, ‘Not quite right, dear. Let's try again!'”

“It's all a fabrication!” Bernard laughed. His cheeks, plumped by time, filled out with amusement, he could observe in the flashy mirror strips all round him. Fattening Leversons smiled back cosily every way and he accused himself: False kindliness, but I'll be a lovable old daddy-oh of the music world. I'll tell corny jokes to students. I'll totter ever so slightly going in and out of examination rooms, will be caught humming bits of Purcell and forget my overcoat. Jot motifs on menus. Be Santa Clausish, Daddy Bach—and he laughed again—wrong place this time, for Geoghegan looked put out and said, “Well, I was only asking.”

About what? Keith? Gerald? Not Keith, he hoped, gazing into the sticky street where mums dragged toddlers who dragged cones and lollipops and crumpled toys. Desperate parenthood hauling its brats along, he thought, when it is the brats who really have them by the nose. Keith asleep, he remembered. Keith with closed eyes and a heavy curve of lash on a pink football cheek. Withdrawn, the head turned away on the pillow, the fists bunched in sleep, the mouth parted. Along the drooping lids the blood pulsed lavender, the shadows were delicately blue. “Little pet,” he had said softly, bending over, bending to kiss, to touch the down of skin. And there had followed a punching tiny fist, right on his throbbing nose, and a squeal of impish giggling that
still managed to endear itself, to make him utter more foolishness, to nuzzle the struggling child.

“Everything,” Bernard lied, “is all right. We are a clock-work home.”

They parted with mutual reassurances at the bridge turn-off where Bernard eyed the broad sweep of hot bitumen, the tan river, the sleeping ships. He was not even emotional enough to dislike the suburbia that crowded the far point, but paced steadily over and up the hill past the state school and went bland as junket through his front garden back into the family circle.

“Saint Gretta,” he said, repeating the fact for those who cared to listen, “is patron saint of the mentally disturbed.”

Iris plunged right inside the apple pie she was—“creating” is the word for Iris's activities, he thought—and did not even peek at him over the fluted edges; but Keith, who was scraping down a palette at the kitchen drainer, blinked with the first filial interest he had shown for weeks.

“Saint who?”

“Saint Gretta.”

“We could have one alongside the dwarfs and the gnomes.”

“We could,” Bernard agreed somewhat wearily, playing along a worn family joke.

“Dinner,” Iris said emerging, “is nearly ready if you're going to change.”

“Oh, I don't think I'll bother.”

He chose to be maddening and wandered into the living-room where he turned on the wireless and burrowed into its furry blare. Much surprised, he found his son had followed him.

“I say, Bernard,” the boy said, but speaking in a careful way that convinced the man Iris was not intended to hear. “Could I get a duffle-coat?”

“Duffle-coat? What's a duffle-coat?”

“You know,” Keith explained speaking with difficulty and a great deal of urgency against the wireless. “A sort of short overcoat. A car-coat, man. Very sharp. The young Rimbaud. Way out.”

“Oh, I don't think so,” Bernard said. “I don't quite see you
as the young Rimbaud. I can't see the need, anyway, in this climate.”

“But all the fellows are getting them.”

“I thought you were the keen nonconformist. What's up?”

“But that's it. All the keen nonconformists are getting them.”

“Aren't they rather loutish?”

“Only slightly,” Keith said with insolence he did not even try to repress, observing his father's face harden, and hating himself underneath the triumph, for these easy victories he had been scoring up for years at each little occasion made him just that much more unhappy.

“No,” Bernard said. “No. Definitely not.”

Leversons munched a sulky dinner and through baked pumpkin the boy asked again.

“But why can't I?”

Iris tossed one of her look clichés at her husband (despairing eyebrows up, shoulders hunched), a glance that claimed intimacy with this problem. Under the circumstances, reflected Bernard, she looked bloody arch, but he smiled wryly and went on eating lamb with mint sauce.

“I warned you,” Iris said. “I told you no.”

Keith would not look at her but, with the skill that had been playing it this way for years, proceeded to set parent against parent.

“You only say no because she says no, don't you?”

“Nonsense.”

“No, it's not nonsense.” He scowled. “It's true. A fundamental truth of life at the Leversons'.”

“Dear me,” Bernard said. “Sauce please, Iris.”

“If she said yes, so would you. If she said anything at all so would you. Simon says. Simon says shit. Iris says shit. Bernard says shit.”

“You know dirtier words than that, lad,” said Bernard.

“Not dirty enough for this,” Keith shouted at his father, control lost at last. “Not nearly dirty enough for this. Because she pushes you around you're afraid to have an opinion.”

“Oh for God's sake shut up! I said no no no because I
mean no, do you understand? Because you don't need this stupid garment and because you are not damn' well going to get one. And that is final. And kindly leave your mother out of it.”

Keith shovelled beans and potato into a mound and laid his knife and fork beside them with superb, lingering care, seeming to measure distance for effect.

“You stupid blind cuckold,” he said at last, deliberately and clearly, and stared straight into his father's eyes.

Plates bounced like discs as Bernard reached across and slapped him ringingly, smartingly, for immediate relief; and when Keith's crumpled face broke into tears, the humiliation erased the hatred, and essence of his antagonism seemed to present itself like the crucified Christ and he loved his father so much he wanted to die.

T
HESE DAYS
, Bernard decided during the few seconds a perfunctory wave took to his wife, we are an armed neutrality. Keith had mumbled something farewelling through a mouthful of cereal and had not bothered to look, really look, at his old dad going off to earn the family livelihood. That should hurt me, Bernard worried a little, as he drove west to Ipswich which was for ever to him the town of the burnt-up park and the slightly-off Windor-sausage sandwiches he had munched there once as a boy between his own rowing parents parked on the grass above the picnic lunch. But it did not, and today there was not even the apprehending quality of that early occasion last week when he had spun over the walls of freedom. The rain wept sadly and unforgivingly across his windscreen, whose two rhythmic lashes swept it back and forth in clean semicircles through which he saw only the suburbs standing on tiptoe and the wet sheen asphalt.

There were no problems left because he no longer cared, huddled empty in his damp raincoat, his rain-spotted hat on the bucket-seat beside him. Behind was his bag—(“Towel, Bernard? Toothpaste? Slippers?” But not—“Love, Bernard? Concern?”) Yes, Iris believed in the marital symbols of comfort, all right, but those hidden things, the genuine tenderness that survived the solitariness when the last guest was gone, the fag-ends piled into the sink tray along with the olive stones and the bits of salami, and all the scummy glasses stood easy along the formica, then did she believe in love? Not even hot-paws with Gerald (“Poor old bastard!” he said aloud) could survive that, could beat the nakedness of two souls. Bodies weren't in it when it came to stripping!