The Slow Natives by Thea Astley Page B

defied. “I leave that to the Sacré Coeur!”
    â€œReally, 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.
    â€œMay 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, strodefrom 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 medievalismconstituted 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.
    â€œTell me,” Sister Matthew was unbelievably pleading, with her lost eyes fixed on the other’s face, “how did my playing sound?”
    â€œSound? When?”
    â€œDuring Benediction. Just now. Tell me, Sister, honestly. How was it?”
    â€œOh, very nice, I thought,” Sister Celestine replied limply.
    â€œNo, no! Not nice! Oh please!” Sister Matthew seemed to have lost her normal