The Slow Natives

by Thea Astley

  The pale closed lids forbade criticism; the ginger hands clenched God between them and made you afraid of your irritation. Even Sister Philomene, whose elderly body inclined dangerously to one side as it moved its gravity-defying path through dormitory, refectory, and chapel, was not nearly as maddening. She was old, cranky, and prejudiced, but the other was virtuous, cold, and frightening. She told her beads in no uncertain manner. Sister Beatrice envied that sureness, that confident belief in the infallibility almost—no, surely that was unfair—of her smallest action.

  Mother Rectress rose and the community rustled to its feet. Guimpes crackled, beads chattered brief aspirations and, on the way out of the chapel when they must pass, their eyes regarded each other briefly and turned away lest God split the husks off their souls as if they were nuts and reveal each dazzling kernel of love-hate to the other.

  Reverend Mother, a square-jawed intellectual (frozen grey eyes, cheesy skin, two higher degrees and fluent Italian) beckoned Sister Beatrice into the downstairs office. Reverend Mother painted a little, abstracts by taste but icons and medal containers worked in blanket-stitched leather through necessity. Fleurs-de-lis and bouquets of Lisieux roses, scrolled rosary cases and imitation-skin missal holders—all would later be sold absurdly cheaply at convent fêtes. A glass-fronted press in the corner of the room held many of these objects, all executed with a kind of standard workmanship and love-lessness but the same mania for perfection that she was also giving to a translation of sections of the Inferno suitable to be used with senior pupils. The manuscript sections of this lay beside the neat piles of scapular cases. Reverend Mother took little credit for either.

  “Come in, Sister Beatrice,” she ordered, “and close the door. I have something to discuss with you.”

  Even through the closed door the busy silence of the community’s movement along the passage came with its swirling voluminous displacement of air, the subdued voices, cool fingers, white skin, fanatic cleanliness, and a vocal detachment from the world.

  “How did the examinations go this morning?”

  “Satisfactorily enough, I think, Reverend Mother.”

  “I don’t want mere passes, you know, Sister. I want high passes.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well?”

  Sister Beatrice went quite red. “I can’t say. You must make allowance for examination nerves.”

  “Mmmm.” Mother St Jude regarded her calmly for some moments.

  “Would young Eva Kastner suffer in that way?” she asked drily.

  “Eva? Oh, I don’t imagine so.”

  “Then you think she would have done—say—superlatively well?”

  “It’s quite possible.”

  “That’s good then, Sister Beatrice, for I’ve decided that Eva will have to continue her musical studies elsewhere. She is leaving soon, any way. And I’m afraid I could not consider her returning here for lessons next year.”

  Sister Beatrice rose in her instant indignation, but subsided under the surprised eye of the other.

  “But why?” she asked. “Why?” She noticed how Reverend Mother’s lower jaw fitted in front of the upper and reflected on the hopelessness of argument.

  “I am not satisfied with her behaviour.”

  “I see. Has she done anything specifically terrible?”

  “Are you making fun, Sister Beatrice?”

  “No, Reverend Mother. Not at all. But you can’t expect me to be overjoyed at losing a pupil into whom I’ve put so much work.”

  “We all have to make sacrifices.”

  “Yes. But who is being sacrificed? Eva or me?”

  Reverend Mother breathed heavily and the finger-tips of each hand sought and rested against each other for more than physical support.

  “Really, Sister Beatrice,” she managed after an almost asthmatic pause, “that strikes me as rather impertinent.”

  “I’m sorry, Reverend Mother,” Sister Beatrice said without in the least meaning it. “But the child still has one more year before matriculation.”

  “Yes. Well, that will no longer be our problem.”

  “I think it is our problem. If we have any influence for good, surely it is worth helping her.”

  Reverend Mother put down her pen (To dear Sister St Jude from Senior 1948) with which she had been doodling and said firmly, “What I am afraid of is that her influence may take effect on other pupils before ours does on her. Now, Sister, that is all I have to say on the matter.”

  Sister Beatrice waded through a neap tide of indignation on her way to the door which she might wish to slam but would not.

  “Oh, and one more thing . . .”

  They faced each other, but Sister Beatrice retained hold of the doorknob and endured.

  “How did Sister Matthew acquit herself, do you know?”

  “Quite well, I should imagine.”

  “Now she would be more nervous than Miss Kastner, I think.” When Reverend Mother “thought” it was not to express doubt—it was a pronouncement, entirely dogmatic. “Did she mention any particular difficulties?”

  “No, Reverend Mother. None at all.”

  I shall not ask you why, decided Sister Beatrice. I will not give you the satisfaction of refusing to say. And thanked God for the little sins that acted as release for her.

  In her cell that night sleeplessness and a cold moon in the full drove her to the rear window that opened out on the courtyard and the practice-rooms. A diffusion of light appeared to come from the end room where the dumb piano was kept, but she could not be sure, for the rimy glass glittered cruelly and tree movement tumbled papery shadow. She began a Litany, sky-gazing as she had not done since childhood, returned to her narrow freezing bed, and fell asleep half-way through, conscious of a few bars of uneasy music as they entwined dream images; but she did not wake until the five o’clock bell that Sister Matthew rang on the guillotine stroke of the hour.

  Make me more kind, she begged during Mass, and added hopefully, or perhaps less intolerant. Perhaps that will do.

  The day was to be waded through as well, tides still in and beating about Convent Primary School, music appreciation classes, and an almost biblical battle with the senior choir after school as they pounded through a four-part version of “Nymphs and Shepherds” and a Dom Moreno Mass.

  “Fake Gregorian. Tumtittitum! I love it,” she had said, to Mother St Jude’s disapproval. (Dufay? Palestrina?)

  “Too arty,” she defied. “I leave that to the Sacré Coeur!”

  “Really, Sister Beatrice!”

  So when Father Lingard came to conduct mid-week Benediction she was too tired altogether even to play the harmonium with any enthusiasm.

  “May I?” Sister Matthew had whispered in the corridor on the way in.

  With his especial flourish of the cope (a spiritual veronica!) Father Lingard, in a glitter of white satin and gold, strode from the sacristy and began the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Incense flowerets whorled, spiralled in the chapel bowl above the bony glossy stalls and the red plush where Sister Celestine watched for one dazed wordly second her beautiful and strange reflected Renaissance twin singing back to her from the wooden mirror . . . quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia eius . . . in the long distended rhythm of the chant. Behind her Sister Beatrice’s full contralto dropped each syllable like a rich gold pebble into this holy pool and the ripples widened as behind them came some unusual concentricities of Sister Matthew’s dangerous experimentation with chords of a most secular kind. Sister Imelda, meanwhile, swung the censer in a voluptuous arc whose perfume drenched the room. Flowers could scarcely breathe. Ecstasy, believed little Sister Celestine. Ecstasy.

  At the end of the chapel Sister Matthew had turned the page of her music, which served only as the barest of guides. Her profile carved itself against the whitened wall and for a spasm Sister Celestine was distracted by the smile behind the smile she imagined she detected there. One lifts back the flesh of mirth and beneath, curved in an
entirely different way, is uncovered the second smile, the real mouth-mirth and recoil. It glimmered like a white knife against the grey clouds of love that were being swung, cutting its dangerous crescent into it. Like a stamp, a tiny stamp with a double image. Sister Mary Celestine lowered her Byzantine eyelids and saw the high hard arm-rests, her fully flowing gown, and herself lost inside this medieval robe, still the small girl she had always been at early Mass. She knew nothing else.

  When the organ voluntary was over Sister Celestine came down to earth, watched Father Lingard replacing the fiery dandelion of the monstrance, and in the currents of arum lily and incense the voices launched a sturdy ship of Latin that sailed over horizons of stained-glass blue and the green leaf waters, window-reflected by Fitzherbert Street.

  Afterwards there would be tea and pikelets in the front parlour, some genteel exchanges about the town and parish, and then the reverend gentleman would belt away in the Monsignor’s car. The inroads of modernity into medievalism constituted barbaric jokes: telephones, electric intercommunication—they functioned better, it seemed, oiled by prayer. Visiting sisters from the mother house drove their own car daringly over the western highway from the coast to laugh at the unsophisticated buggy that driver Paddy rattled across the downland town.

  Sister Celestine went to the refectory. For the good of her soul it was her turn to assist this week with kitchen chores and she had to set the long community table for early supper. As she pushed open the kitchen door her arm was touched feather-lightly, and, turning, she saw Sister Matthew flushed and strange. Her lips still smiled above that secondary smile and both her hands curved up like—like—Sister Celestine thrust aside the obvious word and stepped back just a little.

  “Tell me,” Sister Matthew was unbelievably pleading, with her lost eyes fixed on the other’s face, “how did my playing sound?”

  “Sound? When?”

  “During Benediction. Just now. Tell me, Sister, honestly. How was it?”

  “Oh, very nice, I thought,” Sister Celestine replied limply.

  “No, no! Not nice! Oh please!” Sister Matthew seemed to have lost her normal poise and was teetering on some kind of collapse that needed others to aid. “Was mere any feeling in it?”

  “Oh!” Sister Celestine was relieved, but embarrassed, yet had to contribute. “Of course. Of course there was. It affected me—” she nearly said “oddly” but managed “deeply. Especially during the Tantum ergo.”

  “Did it really?”

  Sister Matthew’s hands flashed and clung most thinly, strongly and horribly to Sister Celestine’s wrist.

  “Yes, indeed. Please, Sister Matthew, you’re hurting me.”

  She did not hear. “I was improvising, you know,” she explained with a deaf enthusiasm.

  “Were you? Oh please, my wrist.”

  “Yes. I couldn’t help thinking I rather improved on Sister Beatrice’s arrangement. Hers is somewhat unemotional, I think.”

  She dropped her hands. “Tell me,” she whispered, “do you think our way of life—I mean—do you think in this state, the holy state, one should forgo all emotion?”

  Sister Celestine nearly died of shame. There was something unhealthily prolonged in the anxiety and the questioning.

  “I really don’t know, Sister Matthew,” she said. “I only . . .”

  But the other had turned away, some of the colour gone from her face, one plump lip bitten terribly by her strong teeth. Find truth and you find God, some earlier instructress had stated. But by then you would be dead, she had wanted to reply. Yet never had.

  She went away, but her insanity remained, that replacement for an earlier grief which had fragmented her spirit long before she had sought solution within the convent rule, and that evening while the community ate its meal in compulsory silence, listening to one of the sisters reading from the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, Sister Matthew dropped her spoon with an enraged clatter and said, “Apple crumble again!”

  The lector stopped on the prong of a word and looked for guidance to Mother Superior, who could only frown.

  “Continue reading, Sister,” she suggested. The skin on her face appeared to have been tightened like drumskins, over-pitched to the point where they might give off unaccustomed sounds that would not merely startle but shock.

  Sister Matthew had made her point. Completely satisfied, she laid down her spoon and watched the others eat. Too outraged by the breach of rules, they could not immediately resume their meal, and when they did so the intrinsic virtue in the way each spoon conveyed its load of pudding to the lips was reproachful. Long since she had learnt in private circumstances that the outsider must be spiritually self-sufficient—and it was recent failure that so disturbed, that revoked images she had not forgotten but managed to conceal beneath layers of sacrifice; that made her hand tremble on her concealed black lap, her profile hint at some interior crumbling.

  The evening drew in one petal of spiritual perfection after another, folded them through the ritual of vespers, office and evening prayers. The toothbrushes worked, teeth were placed in glasses, veils hung neatly on chairs, and last-minute consecrations before slumber, like a calyx, tightened the safe knot of the flower.

  O rose, Blake said, thou art sick.

  Insomniac Sister Mary Matthew, rerobing in the winter chill of her cell, shook about like fine sand the piled-up hour-glass frettings of the last year into a powder at the bottom of midnight’s black glass, and, slippered for safety, glided down the stairs through the re-set, gleam-thick refectory to the bare moon-lapped grounds.

  Taut as madness, fine as frenzy, she found her way to the practice-rooms behind the hedges and there, in the blazing exposure of the bare light bulb, played angrily, worried the keys and the same theme with her mad uncontrolled dissonances, an emotional rubato that shocked, shocked.

  During this terrible reshaping which awoke both Sister Beatrice and Mother St Jude, the light bulb failed, and when they came across in the crisp saner air of silence it was to find her pivoting madly, tiptoe on the revolving stool, while she attempted to replace the globe with another she had brought from the next practice-room.

  Mother St Jude did the only thing that seemed feasible in the circumstances. She knelt them all down and proceeded to say a decade of the rosary.

  IV

  FATHER LINGARD, on the back veranda of the presbytery, considered the roll of film he had developed. Coils of it snaked over his alpaca in the unravelling easiness of the basket chair, and those colour transparencies he held to the lamp flowed from his hand like a rainbow. Kin Kin, Gungee, Mount Bilpin, the road up through the Mary Valley above the dairy-squared landscape. His eyes moved down the transparencies again and the landscape periphery became the high lush walls that trapped him so that he felt he could hack through the country jungle longingly into some macadamized desert where petrol smells supplanted pasture and the petrol pumps sprang up like trees and buildings of steel and glass and concrete blossomed in thickets.

  He sighed. Little did the good sisters know when he presented them every so often with scenic movie strips for their projector that they were flashing across the screen for fifteen minutes his silent, anguished protestations.

  There were domestic irritations, too. Irascible Monsignor Connolly, squinting over his shoulder in the dark-room he had set up at the end of the laundry:

  “Now that one, Father. I don’t think that’s at all suitable, do you?”

  “Which one?”

  “Ah. There. It’s gone now. Run it back, man. There. God love us, Doug, you’ve missed it again. With the boys swimming.”

  “I couldn’t see much wrong with that. They all seemed clad.”

  “No. It’s not that. It’s the spirit of the thing, now. It had a sort of pagan flavour, you might say. Remember, as their spiritual pastor I ought to know what’s good for them and what isn’t.”

  He was very old. He won all arguments.

  “I’m sure you do,” Lingard would sigh, ca
reful not to excite him.

  “Well, there’s a good fellow. We’ll snip it off before we send it up now.”

  “Skyros Skouros,” said Lingard good-humouredly enough to Father Lake, and they called the Mons that privately, but not even the jokes and the shared smiles could warm the coldness that seeped in from his own Antarctic.

  Yet God being on his side should have made the difference that palpably touched his one lung, his thin blood, even his seedy suits. Gardening, getting the air in a grey cardigan and braces, the festival wear of relaxing clerics, his handsome ashy face rose above the collarless neckline of his shirt where the stud still plopped dangerously, a second Adam’s apple wagging and glistening in the sun. The thin grey biretta of his thin hair was worn a little uncertainly. His lips compressed over aphides or scale on the lemon or grimaced tenderly at his dog’s ripped pad. He was good with all manner of growing things, blessing them perhaps unconsciously and without unction or sentimentality, for he was a man who gave few backward glances at his own kindnesses. During his seminary years he had pasted to the surface of his desk a few lines of Hopkins:

  I remember a house where all were good

  To me, God knows, deserving no such thing . . .

  Someone had scraped it off without reading it a few months after his ordination and parish appointment, but it could not be scraped from him. He was fond of quoting Saint John of the Cross, recalling his “where there is no love, put love, and there you will find love”. And sometimes he went so far as to say this to various people he knew who were wrestling with God and each other—but never didactically, for he had believed since his illness that over-active apostleship did more harm than good. (One day in the Sanatorium not long after his lobectomy, a tract-bearing enthusiast had insisted on praying aloud over him for his conversion to a more acceptable faith, and he had joined his voice with the other man’s, for reasons of the most exquisite charity.) Yes, he would say it absentmindedly, as if recalling the advice for himself, so that not a soul could have been affronted by aggressive pietism.