A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  ‘You have a choice,’ Helen said, smiling up into the jacaranda trees lacing the official buildings and the sky. ‘We can get a tram home for lunch and race back to the show at two. Or eat in a leisurely fashion here in town and then go straight to the theatre. Which would you like, my girl?’

  Vinny’s eyes closed in bliss and opened again to the iron fence of the gardens rolling away in greens and yellows of mown grass, down curves as gentle as a kindness to the clumped groves of cotton palms and the children playing in the shifting rags of sun and shade.

  ‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Stay here.’

  So they went through the gates of the park and ate a refreshment room lunch together – which meant nothing in sophisticated eating to Helen but was all the enchantment and magic possible to the child who had never eaten anywhere but at home. She sipped her tea, looking through the lattice of the tea-rooms and watched the pigeons nubbling the grass for crusts. Marvellous, Helen thought, that three thin slices of devon sausage, two triangles of beetroot, and a lettuce leaf could translate anyone into such a condition of pleasure. She, too, sipped her sugarless tea and gazed over the potted plants, the monstera now climbing the side walls, to the older ladies knitting in the sun, in their dumpy browns and angular black, at the women without men and the technical college students cutting downhill towards the river and the Edward Street ferry. Canna lilies burned in the shrubberies, great beds of early zinnias candled the pathways flowing in asphalt streams across the lawns.

  There were only a few people in the tea rooms apart from themselves, and now and then a student on the way from morning classes would drop in for a milk shake or a chocolate bar or a pie. The woman at the next table rose and went to the counter. She was shabby and pregnant, each factor seeming to complement the other. Helen noticed Vinny look quickly at the bulging stomach and the shoulders thrown back above the hips to support the weight. Then Vinny turned away to stare out at the lawn dotted with burdenless bodies – girls, young men, and elderly seedless women. They carried no personality but their own, they bore no other body and no other destiny. Pregnancy frightened Vinny. She still remembered three years ago, just before her dad left, her mother talking about the new baby, swelling gently under her apron and her worn out dresses; bulging horribly in the summer months and becoming crosser, and all the rows and then her father leaving and her mother suddenly taken by the ambulance one night, sweating the pain in rivers, in tides, in oceans, and then no baby, but her mother back home again, thinner than ever under the warped timbers of the house, just at the time when the seed pods were splitting open on the cassias. She never saw a tree in seed now without thinking of that time.

  It was one-fifteen.

  The clock hands nudged them out of the tea rooms down through the swooping gardens under the fig tree basilicas towards the river where it slid olive grey and quiet below the cliffs. The bank on their side gave a steep and tiny plunge to the water and the spatulate mud flats, chocolate shining under the sun. It was too early for the lovers, Helen mused, watching the park seats dotted with old men warming crusted joints or reading their papers. But the day augured benisons for them.

  She found the photographer at the entrance where she had always found him, for years it seemed, since she had visited the park, and she made Vinny stand awkward before his tripod and veiled head to partner the mystic rite. Vinny accepted the ticket with a feeling of mixed reluctance and pleasure – reluctance to see herself as she knew herself to be, ginger and skinny and not even waif-life and appealing, just ginger and skinny and dressed in what she called her best and had thought to be all right until she had seen the other girls in the shops and the trams.

  But she was pleased to fix this day, to have a tangible reminder of herself grinning up Edward Street through the passers-by and the iron gates. She shifted her parcel up to the crook of her elbow and hugged it to her, while she fumbled the ticket into her purse with the few pieces of small change and the scent.

  Moller after tea, replete, unhappy, lay among the cigarette stubs and the dead matches, lay drunken, but not on liquor. Self-pity, retrospective gloom washed, belched over him, flung him into a heap of floatsam in the lumpiest of the armchairs. His relations had gone out half an hour before, crimped like the sand of a low-tide beach, sparkling with knick-knacks and crackling with currency. The over-vacuumed carpeting and the primped, the shaken-out curtains gulped him up.

  He thought of Lilian and then thrust the thought back behind his desire for Helen and the loneliness and emptiness of the house. In fifteen minutes he would ring Margaret Reisbeck’s. Tea should be over, Helen free for the evening from that damnable little girl. God, he loathed her at this moment! Irrationally he blamed her for the desolation of the seven o’clock news, the seven o’clock house, the Helenless quality of the day. Not that other week-ends had been different from this one, but having made his decisions, having fought past the oranges and the books and the flowers to a little pleasure for himself, he resented not being able to grasp it. He thought of the Lunbecks, the male, the rake – but sly – and the wife suffering gladly for income and prestige and the mixing with the wives of the other professional men in the town. Sourly Moller arranged them in descending order of social importance – the doctor (Jaysus, he breathed), the bank manager, the dentist, the mill owner. Piddling small time.

  He lit himself another cigarette and puffed viciously at the family-group photo upon the sideboard, saw Ted and Vera and Lance with dog vanish in a kindly screen of smoke. Findlay must come somewhere near the mill owner, a little above the Anglican parson but well below the bank manager. Tricky, that. He drew a pencil from his vest pocket and scribbled on Vera’s telephone memo pad a whole feudal socio-economic system for Gungee. He used little squares for the men and triangles for the women; then, amused, drew lines and arrows and equation symbols for misalliance, sharp business deals, nepotism, and so on. He threw back his head and roared. Where was Rome? He added an insignificant black square well below the town clerk, who was himself below the parson and the itinerant solicitor and equated it with the representative of the law. He could see the upper layer with their bridge-party faces, drinking hard in the privacy of their homes, and condemning the farm and factory hands who spewed their dislike of the day in public outside one or other of the hotels. He saw Lunbeck pawing the hostesses at the intimate little gatherings in one dull living-room after another, getting them to one side of the kitchen at coffee time, holding a breast in one hand and a canapé in the other, hiding under the clatter of the women’s tongues snapping up and down over clothes and money and cars and clothes and money and was she expecting or wasn’t she and my dear her clothes and she is and so on. And the men, big and important in their tiny spheres, carping over their employees: ‘Sacked him, by God! His eyes were too bloody close together.’ ‘Stepped up the production a bit. Snipped a couple of minutes off their morning tea break, and they never noticed.’

  He saw the town and the rival streams on a Sunday flowing implacably towards their version of Christ revealed one day in seven, leaving six for primitive tribal taboos and ostracisms, for scandalising and detraction, for the too rare act of charitable restraint. Farrelly stood resigned with his canary-faced wife twittering her aves and paternosters alongside Constable Rossiter. Town Clerk Meerson, abstracted from reality by one of the more fearsome nonconformist gospels, kept his pale, vice-hating face a map of righteousness and dyspeptic texts. The chemist was an atheist – he thought he was daring. (‘But are you a practising one?’ Moller used to ask.) But doctor Rankin and missus doctor Rankin and bank manager Cantwell and missus bank manager Cantwell joined with the Lunbecks and the Findlays and the Talbots in cautious established worship. And the whole town, the simple farming families and the factory workers, all followed close behind, passing through Anglicanism, two sorts of Methodism, and the Lenten sulphurations of Father Concannon with an unprotesting piety.

  Moller saw them all and yawned h
orribly at the ceiling and the family group risen from fire and the clock pointing to seven-thirty. He crushed out his cigarette, and with a forefinger of each hand pulled his mouth corners down and up. His plump face made the Grecian masks of comedy and tragedy, became a Janus, and he reached for the phone, divided in his feelings, and dialled and listened to the ringing in Margaret Reisbeck’s empty hall and felt the beginning of union in the sound.

  ‘At last,’ he said, hearing Helen’s voice. ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘Wonderful, thanks, Robert. Vinny was quite transported by The Gondoliers. Poor sausage! The music, the dancing, the matinee crowd had her nearly delirious. We ate an entire box of chocolates and we are very ill and very happy.’

  ‘My dear, we are both in love with you.’

  Helen was silent a moment. Moller, holding the receiver to his ear, could not share her vision of the eager child in the darkened theatre, tensed to such a point of enjoyment she seemed brittle with pleasure, trembling now and again as she sat forward on her seat, her eyes absorbing the light and colour and movement on the stage. Bouncing home in the tram afterwards, still dazzled by the images in her mind. Vinny had watched the neon signs, the trouser advertisements striding on the spot on the facades of buildings, the cigarettes lit up gigantic by the river, the flickering tea pot pouring tea through a dozen bulbs into a neon cup. She had leant forward across the toast rack seat and smiled with such fearful intensity that Helen had drawn back slightly.

  ‘This has been the first day of my life, Mrs. Striebel.’

  Helen was silent, remembering, then she said, ‘I don’t know whether that pleases me altogether, Robert. The obvious thing, that is.’

  ‘Natural adolescent fervour. Healthy in its way. Certainly natural. It will fade in time. Some boy, perhaps.’

  ‘I hope so.’ There was another tiny silence stretched thin as a veil between them. ‘How was Lilian?’

  ‘As ever. Very ill, but only a little unhappy. Her hospital life and her fellow patients are becoming the real things to her now. Our little cosmos has split, and we find we have practically nothing to talk about. Incredible, isn’t it, after fifteen years of marriage?’

  ‘Not really. Perhaps you’ve reached saturation point.’

  ‘A clever woman.’ Moller shifted his legs over one arm of the chair and leant back against the other. ‘The explanation of the failure of all human relationships. Are you prepared to reduce ours to the same point?’

  ‘That sounds rather coquettish.’

  ‘Nevertheless I’m asking. This evening, for instance? How are you saturated for this evening?’

  Helen laughed. ‘I’m very tired.’

  ‘Too tired for coffee or supper? Nothing social, nothing dressy. Just plain natter and coffee.’

  ‘If Margaret is back in time to baby-sit. She was due half an hour ago. As a matter of fact, I think I can hear the car now. Yes. There she is booming up the veranda. All right, Robert. Let’s say eight, shall we? And where?’

  ‘I’ll pick you up if it won’t cause scandal.’

  ‘My dear!’

  He replaced the receiver, humming ‘Wie bist du meine Königin’ with syncopated pauses and little batches of mordents and semi-quaver variations that gave the song a nightclub significance. He washed his face, but it still looked greasy and certainly flabby, and then he brushed his nicotine coated teeth uselessly; and after that he put on a tie. The whole effect – the sports coat, the rounded trousers – was not one of being en fête, so with a hideous groan he stripped them off and struggled into navy serge, buttoned rather too snugly across his chest, creased a little too sharply on each leg. Still, this was more – more … He went still singing to the car.

  They confronted each other in the angle seat of an upstairs lounge with the wary eyes of rivals. Outside the window behind them a vertical neon sign switched from red to green and back again, subtly altering the values of the light about their table. The lounge was filled with drinkers whose talk made barriers of privacy round the two by the window. The pedestrian platitudes bubbled up like froth on beer and settled between the groups in tarnishing rings. A waiter on wheels skated in and out, twirling his drink tray, clinking his gins and brandies, his whiskies and crêmes, like castanets among the fleshy and the fleshless, the hard and the flaccid. The rubber bound bodies of the women bent in their prisons towards the legs-apart-sprawled men using their chairs like saddles. Mouth signalled to mouth over rim, or the eyes were wildly bright and insincere or watery and maudlin above the big and the little noses, the red pores, the powder. In rhythm with attenuated tea-room music pressed from piano and violin by two blasé boys, the washroom doors swung open and shut monotonously, and at each opening Helen glimpsed the stained tiles, a figure re-masking before a wall mirror, the chromium of the taps. And all the time, out here in the large smoke-hung room, the bawdy utterance burst among the red faces pressed together and flung them apart with the bomb of the obscenity into explosions of laughter. Quiet and systematic character-felling went on at tables for two, which stood among the jig-sawed pieces of personality like fortresses of virtue, stone-hurling turrets.

  Helen felt the artificial excitement of the setting, the tawdriness, and, feeling it, did not know whether to be pleased that they had made the decision to solve their friendship erotically. The adverb crossed her mind with a temporary embarrassment and involuntarily she lowered her eyes to her gin. Moller was watching her. His heavy eyes said nothing at all, and it was some time before he spoke.

  ‘Tell me, Helen, are you sorry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Quite.’

  He nodded. ‘Now another question. Did young Vinny hear your end of the conversation tonight, or know you were meeting me? I think perhaps it’s unwise that the adolescent population of Gungee should feed on our indiscretions.’

  Helen lit herself a cigarette. The sign outside the window fell across her in green bands.

  ‘I don’t think she could have heard. The phone is in the hall as you know, and Vinny was in the sitting-room with the door closed between us. No, I don’t think she could possibly have heard, and I certainly didn’t tell her I was meeting you. All she knew was that I was going out for a short time. I hope to heaven Margaret has the good sense to repress her Bohemian descriptions. In any case, Robert, Vinny would hardly discuss it with the rest of her class. She wouldn’t get a chance, poor kid.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Moller said. ‘This is a God sent opportunity for establishing herself as an oracle. She might use it to make a bid for favour.’

  ‘How would that sort of behaviour tie in with the crush on me that you say she has? And I don’t know that I like the idea of that too well, either.’

  ‘A point. Still, she could be jealous of me. Don’t look so incredulous, my dear. Remember the scandalous fate of my predecessor at the school after his idyllic episode with young Crewe. Now, hold hard! I’m not suggesting Vinny nourishes a passion of that extent for you, but you must admit she does worship a little. Who can blame her? You’re the only one who is kind to her – unalterably kind.’

  ‘Why,’ Helen asked, ‘why is adolescence such a difficult time? Why has it got to be so distorted and painful?’

  ‘Mine wasn’t,’ Moller said complacently. ‘I did all the things boys do at all the normal times. I went into boils in second year, long ’uns in third year, and spent most of fourth studying nature magazines and swotting up unnecessary biological facts in medical texts. I was a charming, natural, unspoilt boy.’

  Helen laughed loudly and spontaneously. A man at the next table winked. She winked back.

  ‘It’s the gin.’ She explained away her action to Moller who was looking at her amusedly.

  ‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘I like to see you unbending. But while we’re still sober, a word of warning. We must be oh so circumspect at school. Deny each other more
than thrice, my dear.’

  He said, suddenly sentimental across the tiny wobbling table, ‘My very dear’, and knocked his glass, spilling some brandy on the floor. ‘They are so full of conscience and God, our village playmates, they would feel it a duty to inform Lilian to make her sickness more unbearable and our happiness less tolerable.’

  He sighed and finished his drink. The neon sign changed from green to red. The man at the next table swayed across space towards him and called him ‘sport’ and borrowed a match and swayed back. The big clock on the wall above the door leapt five minutes and took the room to nine-fifteen and a higher straining of the voices towards enjoyment, towards packing popularity into fatuities and shallow yap, while the door of the women’s washroom swung open and shut upon the blonde and the brunette, all sisters under the liquor, who got pally over the wash basin or shared their waiting discomfort outside the lavatory door with comradely patter from the external sexual warfare. They belched and apologised as one.

  ‘What can we do?’ Moller apostrophised the air, ignoring the appetent leer from the man at his elbow. He spoke more softly and leant across the table. ‘What can we do, my girl, but sleep together? A dull denouement for the warmest of friendships. Hark at my cynicism! But I can think of nothing else.’ He complained into his third brandy. ‘I have seen nothing of you this week-end, except tonight, and soon you will have to go, I suppose. I planned this week-end hoping – well, no, of course I didn’t hope really – I knew the child was to have the pleasure.’ He made a face at Helen and took her hand between his sweaty ones. ‘Go on smoking,’ he said. ‘Do it single handed. So, post hoc, I have decided that I want an entire weekend of you. Schoolless, Lilianless, conscienceless.’ A muscle moved with a sudden desperate flicker along the line of his jaw. His kindly, unromantic face looked at Helen’s. ‘I shall take you away,’ he said, ‘and we shall don our sanbenitos afterwards.’