The Slow Natives (15 page)

“Oh dear,” Miss Trumper said. “Oh dear, Verna. But we were safe.”

“Safe!” scoffed the other. “Safe! . . . I'll have to be starting back,” she said abruptly. The older, the huffier. There was some ratio. She fluffed about quite a bit before she actually edged the heavy garden chair back, Bernard assisting sombrely. “Who wants to be safe?”

Miss Trumper's eyes popped. “We all do. Oh, I know I do. Don't you think everyone does, Mr Leverson?”

“We're never safe,” Bernard said rather sententiously. “There's unexplained nastiness squinting across any unexpected lull, eyeing us off and waiting to pounce.” But he smiled.

“Lovely!” approved Miss Paradise, quite viciously, a rainbow monster. “I like that. I like the feeling of something about to happen even if it never does. And it never does. You and your stuffy little school womb! All tight with authority and chalk and hours for prep and prayer! Oh, those gay times with the short-sheeted beds!”

Miss Trumper retreated and fiddled with her tea-cup and then removed her hands suddenly as if . . .

“You've never lost it,” Kitty Trumper suggested, “or you'd never say.”

“Neither have you, you silly thing,” Miss Paradise said
rudely, “only you just won't realize it or believe it. You love to crucify yourself. You're a born martyr. You know what they used to call her at school, Mr Leverson? Alma Martyr!” She laughed and laughed.

“Please,” Miss Trumper pleaded, anguished before the visitor. “Please.” Her voice almost flapped away.

Bernard attempted to appear engrossed with the potted plants. He strolled a few feet away into a late square of afternoon sun, but in the silence at his back could be felt the protestations of the one and the amusement of the other.

“Good-bye then, Kitty,” he heard Miss Paradise say. “I'll see you later on when you feel more cheerful. Good afternoon, Mr Leverson.' She looked him up and down and held his eye for ten pulsing beats. “I like big men,” she said, “with pock-marks.”

“Sorry I can't oblige,” Bernard said, taken aback. His tongue seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth. “Good-bye.”

Maypole straight and mad she went down the path between the ornamental cabbages and the gerberas.

“Don't take any notice please,” Miss Trumper said, battling with something she was not prepared to reveal. “She's a bit—well—crazy, you know, and doesn't mean a thing by it.”

“Thank God I'm not pock-marked,” Bernard said drily. “Now, just before we get side-tracked, let's settle about young Garnett.”

Before he left, Miss Trumper, putting all her coin on the red, asked if he would care to try her piano; after all, she pointed out coyly, he had visited her several times and never yet . . . (never yet what, sad Trumper?) . . . and it was a rather pleasant little Carl Mand and she wondered what he . . . she would like his opinion . . . her father had imported it direct from Germany, Coblenz to be exact.

“Show me,” Bernard said, practising charity.

Horrible as a museum, the sitting-room was a photographic Tussaud's with only one subject. Impressions of a striped wallpaper barred like a cage gave way before the fixed tinted plight of the paper prisoners. Here was Kitty Trumper at three in a ballerina's tutu with one chubby leg extended in an awkward arabesque (her hands clutched two wires
eliminated by photographic processes), and the little subject glanced shyly backwards at the camera lens which had caught her candid eyes gleaming from beneath a completely geometrical fringe line. And here she was at seven in Cossack costume, one leg heel-toeing it, hands on hips; and again at ten (plaits this time and a brace), tutu stiff as pudding performing a
bourrée
on
pointes
, her round, smiling face upturned. And surely not much older, there she was at a baby grand, her unplaying fingers resting on the eisteddfoded keys, her face a map of musical rapture. (“Imagine you are far away, my dear. Do you hear the lovely music?”) All her poor shrunken little soul was looking out of those large eyes. And again at fourteen and eighteen and twenty-two (a straight photograph, this, in a lacy pink sweater with a lot of cleavage and two blond curls glued into false positions below the ripple marks left by the curling grips). When she had begun to give lessons: “I'm nice the first time, but not so nice the second!” And it was only two and six a time, nice or not, with abridged versions of the Moonlight Sonata and the Rachmaninoff Prelude and Mendelssohn's Spring Song.

They were everywhere, at every age and with every face—full, profile, three-quarter—starry-eyed glancing up, gazing into misty distances; looking down shyly, peeping coyly, and one (a mistake obviously) almost leering out of a leprechaun's costume. They were framed and hanging. Mounted on stands. Turned into glossy plaques. They were in high gloss, sepia and tinted.

Bernard blinked, re-focused, blinked again. It was as if he had raped a diary. Later on the padded blue furniture came into being and at an occasional table, set also with twin plaques of Miss Trumper as a shepherd and shepherdess, the ultimate insanity of the ego.

“What do you think of it?” she asked proudly.

He coughed desperately until he remembered she meant the piano. But where? he asked himself. Where? And there it was, a gay walnut upright, a little beauty, bearing the weight of a massive plaster stag that reclined casually along its lid and looked down at the performer.

“Amazing!” Bernard said. “Truly amazing!”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” Dear Miss Trumper was pink with pride. “There were candlesticks, but I had them taken off and polished.” She jerked away and set a framed photo rocking metronomically on the veneer.

“Do try it,” she urged. “I have it tuned every six months. Tell me if you think it's worth the trouble.”

“Ooooh,” Bernard said. Like most music teachers he hated performing and at this stage in his life remembered fragments from scores of things but hardly anything in its entirety. “You'll mark me out of ten and not give me a pass.”

“No, no! No, no.” Masses of exclamations and protestations, and Bernard, pelted by these gasped rebuttals, seated himself heavily at the brow-beaten piano and rushed through one of the earlier Bach preludes. Oppressively close, Miss Trumper lowered her face to watch him and all the other Misses Trumper pranced or peered and the stag impassively observed him make a couple of sloppy mistakes.

Now, decided some insane gambler in Miss Trumper. Oh now. And she laid one gabbling hand on his sleeve as he played the last chord and shook her head from side to side as if words had collapsed or abandoned her.

Some mumbled thanks were managed, some garbled inquiry achieved.

“A lovely instrument,” Bernard soothed, rather astonished at the piano's full tone.

But it was like being buried in pot-pourri, and burrowing through rose-leaves he attempted to rise, flapped tweed wings, not a ministering but an escaping angel.

Miss Trumper burst into tears.

Before he could slide from the polished seat, she had dropped to her knees beside him and his horrified eyes riveted on her head which she had rested on his lap.

“Please? Oh please please please?” she asked, several times.

Instantly he understood what she wanted, but he could do nothing except put her back gently and not ask what was the matter.

I shall die, Kitty Trumper told herself deliberately. I must.
I shall take pills or drop from moving cars or walk into space. I shall court locomotives and precipices and open windows. I shall cut off this knot that pretends to be me.

“Once,” she dribbled into the tweed thigh that sought to escape. “Once. . . .”

But Bernard merely said “Now” awkwardly or “Don't” or “There. You're over-tired.”

Her humiliation could not prolong itself like some litany of self-abnegation, yet she did not know how to end the situation that struggled weakly in the wild flare of the lighted moment. Bernard managed to get to his feet and he bent down to help her also, unwilling to have her suffer by seeing him out. Putting one hand under the desperately fragile arm protected only by silk, he helped her into a chair. Her mouth kept breaking words to pieces as if she were feeding them to the youngest and tenderest of animals and he felt very near to weeping himself as he saw her, an old velvet-framed ballet dancer, collapsed on cushions.

Somehow he conveyed his own grief through the touch he gave her shoulder before he escaped into the garden.

Chookie was still trembling with his rage when he returned through the side gate and went round to the back of the garage where the rakes and hoes were stacked. He didn't quite know why he had come back. Maybe it was to look at the harmonium again or maybe it was to conceal himself from home and repercussions. Inside there was some fierce acid burning steadily that seemed to be in control of his veins through which no blood could flow, only the heavy pulsatings of anger and frustrated needs.

He sat steadily on an upturned box and had a quiet fag to steady himself, but nothing was any good any more and he found the cigarette drooping from his hand, spilling ash tell-tale on the concrete floor while he watched the sleepy afternoon house through the door. There wasn't any sign of the old girl any place, not even a sound from the house. He hoped she'd gone out. He hoped this and he hoped this and he pulled a bit of paspalum up near the door and chewed it for a bit and watched the wet end dribbled across his knee
and said crikey, O Gawd, and threw both grass and cigarette away and lit another fag. I never meant to touch her, he said, he told himself. I never hurt her none. Just give her a bit of a shaking. Strewth. What the hell will I do? I only shook her up a bit and off she went. Am I glad she went or aren't I? Glad, I suppose. O Gawd. He sat on the box and leant his head against the door, and the trembling, for another reason, took him and he bent over his stomach and moaned and spat tobacco shreds and coughed a bit too loudly, for somewhere back in the house he heard a movement and then the old girl calling out something.

He stared steadily at a clump of bright leaves and waited for her to call again. I'll just get what she owes me for that extra day I did last month, he thought, and push off. Now he shivered under his jumper.

Someone was fumbling at the side window, making ineffectual pushes at the stuck casement. Watching, he almost grinned. She looked so funny struggling with the catch and peering blindly through to see who it was in the garden. He slouched over to the doorway and stood against it until she focused into recognition and he could tell by the shape of her mouth that she was calling him, for her hand appeared to be beckoning, too, in a spidery fashion behind the lace; so he ambled across the lawn and path and went round to the back.

“Coming,” he called, but not really loud enough for her to hear, and he leapt spindle-leg over a hydrangea clump and put on his sandy grin to the bland back door.

“Come through, Chookie,” he could hear her cry, faint as cobwebs, as distant as death, from somewhere away in, and it made him hestitate, the house was so dim. No light anywhere. The afternoon of watered silk cut off as he pushed the door to behind him and stepped down the too-glossy linoleum. Even the kitchen clock had stopped. He was aware of his own heart. Or hers, pounding in another room. Bumping against the dining-room table, he narrowed his eyes into cat vision, and heard her movement in the music-room beyond.

“Yeah?” he asked, pushing past bead curtains into the haunted arcades of Trumperie.

There she was, curled up funny on the settee. Something was wrong. He took another look. Her face was mucked up as if she'd been crying and the funny thing was she turned away when he came in and he could see she had bare feet and was sitting there in nothing but an old sateen slip. White and sad, her shoulders looked as if they'd been crying, too, and the small shiny mounds of her breasts, tokens, preserved a lonely little sorrow. Sadly her thin knees pressed against each other for comfort.

Some awful curiosity and excitement lunged back through Chookie as he looked at her coiled up on her pathetic sacrificial table and he swallowed a couple of times and kept very still by the end of the sofa, waiting for her to say something.

But Kitty Trumper said everything in her tearless silence, in her pleading dress, in the dejected rejection of her slopped-down figure. She wept inwardly and the tears ran inwardly and threatened to drown. She wanted and was not really sure what she wanted.

Me? wondered Chookie. Kind. Frightened. Lustful. Appalled. Me? Me?

He prickled all over and was so silent she, who did not raise her eyes lest he observe too closely, imagined for a moment that he had slipped backwards through irresolution and escaped. Hoped so.

But he had not and remained, gauche, unable to murmur the most clumsily hewn of consolatory words, too young to do anything except the one terrible final thing which she both wanted and rejected. Slowly he advanced his feet over the deserts of carpet, draggingly, touching before resting weight as if he were on some crumbling margin—as indeed he was—and came at last to pause before her lowered eyes and soul. He heard her breath gasp like an old tyre. One hand jerked convulsively on her black sateen lap and one raised itself to him to be hauled up this mountain.

Chookie put an opened awkward palm, patting, comforting upon the thin hair and he marvelled, as touch nearly brought him to his senses, at the fragility of the skull under
his fingers. His tongue was looping itself about words that refused to untie themselves into proper sounds. Gawd, he prayed. Gawd. And then they were both blinded.

And afterwards, when they had fled to opposite poles like mad creatures, he ducking out in the early darkness stamped all over with watching photographs and she rushing from pretended rapine towards the angelus gates of the convent, that patting horny hand remained raised like an eternal blessing, recalling, at least to her, endless pictures of tear-stained benedictions.