A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  By the time Lalor’s fence came into view it was nearly seven-thirty. The front of the house was in darkness, but a square of light shone from a back window. Helen pushed open the gate and the shadows of the miniature jungle swallowed her, the splintered veranda steps offered her silence, and in the constantly moving night of the veranda itself with the thin moonlight probing the wistaria, she hesitated just a few seconds before ringing the bell.

  It excursioned into the bungalow recesses with an alarum like beaten gongs. The drone of voices that had reached her ears faintly ceased at the signal, and a light switched on in the hall shone through the stained-glass panels of the door with a religious significance. Bathed in a liturgical glow, she blinked and smiled as the door open widely on Mrs. Lalor searching short-sightedly for her own surprise as the worry on her face changed to the anxiety of recognition.

  ‘Mrs. Striebel!’ She rubbed her hands nervously down the front of her apron. ‘What a surprise! Come on in.’

  She stood aside and Helen went in and down the long hall. It had a nightmare quality in its narrowness and length, but the shock of light in the sitting-room ahead was the essence of comfort. Two of the other children were sitting there and they grinned at Helen as she came into the room. Helen recognised Vinny’s brother Royce and the eldest girl, Rene, who was twenty and working in the local dentist’s rooms.

  ‘Done real well for herself,’ Mrs. Lalor would boast proudly to her neighbours. ‘I always knew I could make something out of Rene. Types and does shorthand and all that sort of thing as well as helping in the surgery. Mr. Lunbeck says he doesn’t know what he’d do without her.’ (Nor would he, some of her neighbours thought viciously, knowing Mr. Lunbeck’s little fancies and Rene’s high self-evaluation.)

  The two women sat down in the cane basket chairs where cushions and arm-rests had been reduced by the violence of the children to a secure drabness from which nothing could redeem them. Now and again Mrs. Lalor, teased by magazines into an effectual activity, had licked them over with a glossy enamel in a fashionable shade or prodded the cushions to brief life and packed them into new linen covers. It was hopeless. Royce spilt ink or put his muddied shoes on them, and Vinny read and munched fruit in them, and it all came to the same thing in the end.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs. Lalor said, ‘I hope you haven’t come about Vinny. Getting into trouble or anything like that, I mean.’

  Helen picked at a loose end of cane but stopped when she noticed Mrs. Lalor’s anxious eyes on her.

  ‘It is about Vinny that I’ve come,’ she said, ‘but I assure you she’s in no trouble. Certainly not with me, anyway.’

  ‘Is she working hard, Mrs. Striebel?’

  ‘She tries very hard indeed, Mrs. Lalor. You’ve no worry at all on that score.’

  ‘That’s a relief. Always worried about that one. She never says much.’ Mrs. Lalor breathed deeply and settled back in her chair.

  Helen paused. The two women gazed awkwardly at each other. The business was harder than she had thought it would be. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ll come straight to the point. Today Mr. Moller, her English teacher, showed me the essay she had done for her holiday task. Where is she, by the way?’

  ‘Her turn,’ interrupted Royce who was now crouching by the radio. ‘She gotta wash and dry up tonight.’

  ‘You shut up, Royce,’ his mother said, ‘and lower that serial. Rubbishing stuff. Vinny’s in the kitchen. They all get their turn, Mrs. Striebel.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Helen agreed. ‘I like the closed door, too. Keeps them working without distraction and stops their unhappiness spoiling what you’re doing.’

  Royce grinned. He had just left school and was working as a grease boy at the factory. He had lost a front tooth.

  ‘You were real tough on us, Mrs. Striebal,’ he said. ‘But it was good.’

  ‘Thank you, Royce,’ Helen said gravely. ‘You always responded well to my treatment.’

  Royce’s big face, freckled and pimpled, grew red with pleasure. Embarrassedly he rubbed his large nose.

  ‘Now go on, Royce,’ his mother pleaded. ‘Listen to your old serial please, and leave me to talk with Mrs. Striebel a minute.’

  ‘Well,’ Helen said, and stopped, perplexed. ‘Look, I really don’t know how to put this without sounding as if I’m exaggerating and that’s the last thing I want you to feel I’m doing. But after I read Vinny’s essay today, I must confess, Mrs. Lalor, that I think your little girl has quite a deal of talent.’

  ‘She was always one for books, you know.’

  ‘Yes. I know that, and it’s a most important thing.’

  ‘Vin showed me some of the ones you loaned her.’

  ‘Did she?’ Helen smiled. ‘I hope you approved.’

  ‘I read them meself,’ Mrs. Lalor said. ‘Vin and me fought over who had them next.’

  Helen felt more relaxed. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now I do hope you won’t mind what I’m going to suggest. I would like – with your permission of course, Mrs. Lalor – to give Vinny some little treat – an outing in Brisbane, a play or a concert. Something like that. I feel sure she’d appreciate it and get a lot from it. And between you and me, that’s a lot more than I can of most pupils I’ve ever had.’

  Mrs. Lalor’s thin body sat up eagerly straight. ‘Why, that’s real nice of you, Mrs. Striebel, but we don’t know anyone in Brisbane she could stay with.’

  ‘That’s easily fixed. My idea was for her to drive down with me and Mr. Moller next time I go to Brisbane. I always stay with my sister at Hamilton, and Vinny could fit in nicely with us. My sister’s single, the house is far too big for her, so there’d be plenty of room. All terribly respectable, of course.’ She laughed, not nervously, but dubiously.

  Mrs. Lalor’s lumpy, overworked fingers embraced tightly. In a way she was puzzled as well as pleased by this sudden offer. It was the first time anyone at the school had taken a real interest in any of her children and she found it odd. In addition, she had no knowledge of Vinny’s unhappiness at the school or her friendlessness. Royce, the closest to Vinny in age, had never noticed, being busy with the male gangs of the upper school, and his sister kept her own unpopularity to herself. Vinny was sensitive at being a pariah even in her earliest years.

  ‘It sounds wonderful for her. I bet she’d be real happy to go, Mrs. Striebel,’ she said doubtfully.

  Helen smiled with relief and at the sight of the smile all Mrs. Lalor’s doubtings vanished.

  ‘You’re real kind,’ she said and laughed in her enthusiasm. ‘Real kind. Have you said anything to Vin?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then let me call her. Vin! Vinny!’ Mrs. Lalor heaved herself out of the chair and opened the kitchen door. The clattering ceased and Vinny, arms sud-dripping to the elbows, her old jumper white-flecked, ran in from the great pile of washed and unwashed dishes. When she saw Helen sitting calmly in the basket chair, at home in her house, the sudden upsurge of joy almost made her choke. She could say nothing. How much more satisfying it is to worship than to be worshipped! Her love for this woman shaped her entire day, caused her to count through classes to hers, to plan her lunch-hour round an opportunity of talking to her. Although she had little ability at mathematics, she slaved at the subject merely to win Mrs. Striebel’s commendation. For her the whole relationship’s huge flower spread its corolla in petals of kindliness, and tented her in with a form of affection and security, excluding the daily indifference offered by the others. And in the evening, after all, there was her home where other people spoke and moved and, to a certain extent, needed things from her. She knew already that to be needed placed one within a scheme – that therein lay the crux of her problem. At school among her contemporaries she was never needed. If she were absent the class surface showed no ripple of awareness or concern.

  Her eyes met her teacher’s. Their luminosity drew her like a moth
. Uncomfortably her arms dripped water on the floor. Then Helen said, ‘Vinny, my dear,’ with deliberation. The girl, appearing even thinner in her sloppy cardigan, stood very still glancing from Mrs. Striebel to her mother and back again. The room was caught by the moment. Here were flowers curving in sleep upon the table, there the framed wedding picture had became a lake of light. The floor slid away beneath its seagrass matting, and the walls moved in with their unpainted cypress planks. She was being squeezed forward down an interminable corridor to where the day’s purpose smiled and said, ‘Vinny, my dear.’

  In an attempt to dry her arms she rubbed them on the side of her skirt. Royce huddled closer to the radio in love with mediocrity and outer space. Mrs. Lalor took up her knitting, and her hands moved independently of her mind. And Helen kept smiling with incredible kindness into the child’s vulnerable eyes. Now I know, she thought, with surprising insight and unexpected poetry, on what frontiers she stands and for whom she knows the violent chasm of each day ahead, poised brinkwise.

  Gingerly her mind moved forward to crumble words as one would bread for swans, and she said, ‘I’ve come to obtain your mother’s permission to give you a little treat.’

  ‘Oh, Mrs. Striebel!’ the girl breathed. She accepted this material manifestation of reciprocal love as natural and miraculous at the same time. Children alone can preserve aplomb confronted with the most abnormal situations, and are able, having translated them to their own special purpose, to see in them – with reason or without being no matter – the genius of their own fantasy.

  ‘We were wondering, your mother and I,’ Mrs. Striebel continued, cunningly adopting the older woman into the freemasonry of her plan, ‘if you would like to come to Brisbane with me one week-end and perhaps see a play or go to a concert.’

  She did not volunteer a reason for the gesture because she realised that the sheer pleasure of surprise drowned all sense of inquiry. Perhaps at some later time she might mention the essay that had so impressed her and prompted her action. Certainly the child’s mother would and then Vinny could draw what conclusions she liked.

  ‘Would I!’ Vinny said. ‘Oh, Mrs. Striebel! Oh, Mum, may I? May I please? Mrs. Striebel, I’ve only been there once that I can remember, and it was so big after Gungee, and exciting, but it’s so long ago I can’t really see it much except as hot and big and dusty.’

  They laughed, in the contagion of her excitement, infected. Outside the loquat tree tapped and talked to the water-tank and shifted its black paper double across the glass. A goods train cutting a furrow through the valley screamed twice as it took the southern bend, and in the loud silence coming after, so filled with tiny sounds – the gaspings of burning wood in the stove, the soft signature tune on the radio, the grunting of the kelpie under the kitchen table – the three faces repeated the pattern of pleasure with ever such a slight variation. Vinny’s joy transfigured by worship was duplicated with anxiety on her mother’s face and behind that, further still, a shadow of jealousy of the woman whose face bore happiness and also the arrogance and the humility of the giver.

  ‘I’ve told Mrs. Striebel it’s all right, Vin. We’ve only got to pick a week-end.’

  ‘How about the Friday after next?’ Helen asked. ‘Or have you something arranged?’

  Mrs. Lalor laughed, and even Royce glanced across, hearing the bitterness in her voice.

  ‘We don’t have nothing important happening here. All week-ends are the same to us, unless maybe we waste our money on the pictures. I reckon they’ll go on being the same, too, until they carry me out of this old place.’

  ‘Oh, Mum!’ Vinny protested. This bright coin of pleasure seemed to have been come by guiltily. Helen edged uneasily along the striped canvas cushions and formulated a trite leave-taking. There were offers of tea, but she refused, wanting now her errand had been achieved to be out in the clear starlight. Mrs. Lalor kept saying how kind it was of her, and when Helen protested that the action was giving her the greater happiness, she felt gently on her elbow a hand placed lightly as a leaf. Vinny was standing behind her, testing the reality of her presence and purpose with touch. She gave the searching fingers a quick squeeze.

  ‘We’ll decide on details during the week, there’s plenty of time.’

  ‘Plenty,’ echoed the girl, vague in the corridor dimness. The three of them moved to the veranda where the moths blew whitely across the darkness from garden to hall. They brushed the softness of them from their hair and necks.

  ‘Great place for the brutes,’ Mrs. Lalor complained. She knocked down one large moth that was circling insanely about her face. ‘Mind the step, Mrs. Striebel. Vin, you never said thank you.’

  ‘There’s no need, I assure you,’ Helen said. ‘Your trust that I will look after her is quite a compliment. Good night, Mrs. Lalor. I’ll see you again before the twelfth and we’ll settle everything.’

  The two figures who had been watching from the veranda and the one figure moving into the darkness were still linked emotionally even long after the gate had clacked behind the one and the door had shut in the others. Two paddocks away a late fire burning flung an orange wind-blown rag against a sky that was curdled with cloud and moist with stars. To the west the road ran back under the fig trees to the township, and to the east it described a glimmering arc among the striated ranks of gums and came in again on the northern end of the railway-line, touching with its familiar finger the would-be suburban gardens clustered behind chain-wire and timber pickets.

  Reluctant to turn back yet to the hotel, merciless in its boredom, Helen thrust her hands into her coat pockets and strode off to the east, following the curve of the hills above the town and seeing them melt into quiet debate with hill on hill towards the sea. When at last the swing of the road took her in by the first houses, she thought of Moller, wondering if he would be in his shrub-thick garden hosing the browned couch-grass. With a sense of recklessness compelling what she knew to be a foolish action, she decided that if he were not in his garden she would still call on him. Light behind his windows banished hesitation and she opened the gate unhesitatingly and went towards the house between scent-drunken native daphne to the unfamiliar porch and door. Through the open windows poured a stormy music of cadenza’d brilliance illuminating a backdrop of mountainous brass that made the virtuosity of the pianist appear an effortless facility. It is brilliance only, Helen mused, pausing for the record to run its course before knocking. She went back into the garden and broke off a sprig of daphne. Islands of crazy paving floated away across the lawn to the side of the house swimming on the dark wet grass. Everything was so magical, she laughed, but, protesting against raptures, refusing to accept the imagery of music or garden, she even repeated the words, ‘It is brilliance only.’ As the first movement of the work drew to a close with a longdrawn warning on the horn, she climbed the steps again and knocked loudly on the door. Moller could not have heard, for she recognised the pause between bands on the record and then she heard the strings take up with moving tenderness the first chords of the adagio. She knocked more loudly, and after a little while she could hear his feet, lazy across the floor. The music stopped.

  ‘Such unconventionality,’ Moller said, after he had opened the door and had seen Helen’s pale face smiling – laughing nearly, she was so happy.

  ‘I know. I know.’ She pressed the daphne to her nostrils. ‘It was sheer impulse. I’ve just been to Lalor’s and on the way back I thought I’d like to do something different.’

  ‘The boredom of the first day back is worse than any other time.’

  ‘Correct.’ Helen laughed. ‘I couldn’t even finish dinner tonight. There was something about the pub that drove me out. Anyway, I thought I’d let you know everything has been arranged satisfactorily – for Vinny and me, that is. I feel mother was a bit dubious about it. Still, there it is. And then I wanted to tell you, and hatred of all the little gossping tongues urged me. Sheer brava
do!’

  ‘ “One braver thing than all the Worthies did,” ’ Moller quoted, ‘ “and yet a braver thence doth spring, which is to keepe that hide.” So come in quickly, my dear, before you outrage the sensitivities of the Lunbecks.’

  He held the door more widely for her and she stepped into a foreign country that was foreign only in its primary aspect, for his presence familiarised what was new. ‘They love to think of me lonely and celibate, brave in my misfortune, living from day to day all the momentous clichés of the women’s magazines.’

  ‘So in effect you’re glad I’ve come? Even if it is only for a little while?’

  ‘Of course. How often I’ve longed to ask you over for some records! But I was always afraid you’d be frightened of neighbours’ opinion. So I’m glad it was you who came to me. I hate being refused.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. Words are nothing. Are everything within their moment.

  ‘Still,’ Moller continued, piloting her into the side closed-in veranda that he kept for his own, ‘now you have dared for me, you must stay at least to hear the Fifth out, and have a coffee.’

  He turned away, large and dark, slightly flabby with his gaberdine trousers slipping untidily below his relaxed stomach muscles. His fingers were spatulate and long, gingered from nicotine; his eyes were troubled with irony and kindness, and his mouth had the mobility of self-humour. He went across to his record-player and Helen sat in a chair by the windows. Carefully he replaced the needle on the second band and they sat exposed under the glare of the unshaded light bulb to the second and third movements of the Beethoven. They smoked, and they smiled occasionally at each other through the cantabiles and the diminuendos, cloistered in simplicity until the bassoons and horns eased in on the piano’s muttered chords spelling out the dramatic final theme. The tiny silence held to just that point where it became unendurable. Attacca. They were away on the allegro and its dogmatic statements of melody, and Miller and Helen lay back in their chairs and under cover of gigantic fortissimos, shifted into more comfortable positions and lit new cigarettes.