A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  There should have been a certain fragility about this moment, a suspension of all ambient crudeness, but behind him, sudden as his statement, the washroom door opened like a rip in the wall, and a young and incredibly thin woman in scarlet lurched over the threshold to fall heavily amongst the tables and the chairs. Torn as it were from their context, Helen and Moller watched as her friends lifted her up and carried her from the room, and their real horror was that no one displayed any more surprise than a temporary turning of the head, a pause in the litany of sips. The man at the next table chose this moment to lean his red face across, his watery eyes glistening with apology.

  ‘’Scuse me,’ he said to Helen.

  Moller glared. ‘Beat it!’ he said. ‘Go on!’ He swung his bulky shoulder between the drunk and their table, shifting his chair further along. ‘Christ!’ he snarled softly. ‘Christ! I said coffee! Why in God’s name did I choose this joint to impress you with? To ease what could be a sordid situation right over the edge. It could be sordid, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ Helen replied, gravely intent on not seeing him. ‘Very easily.’

  ‘The quick extra-marital excitement, the ultimate scuffle, the revulsion. That isn’t what I want. At least, that is what it might be, what it probably is essentially, but we must change it with the right props. We must be a little insincere, or artificial, so that we don’t disgust one another.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette and rose.

  ‘Don’t even finish your drink, Helen. Quickly. Let’s get away from this place. It’s like a merciless conscience.’

  She pressed her bag and her gloves together and looked up at him furtively. Sweat oiled his forehead and his neck. He is neurotic, she thought, and yet who would find him so, punting the ball round the practice yard amongst the boys or fence vaulting or music-listening wrapped in an inner and an outer stillness? It is he who remains most urbane during examination pressure or inspection rounds; he who puts brash Sweeney down with more kindness than he deserves and bothers to talk trivia with Findlay. She followed his large body through the uncaring crowds; she kept close beside him as they passed the piano which was skimming in fulsome glissandos across the barest outline of a tune cartooning the original; she put out a hand and touched lightly with her finger-tips the warm serge of his coat as they went down the staircase laid with hotel-smelling carpet where the darkly varnished walls pressed them together before squeezing them out into a bud of a reception foyer with the closed registration desk, the stale gladioli, the loungers. Queen Street and the trams blazed in at them, yellow and black in prisms of clanking light under the exploding overhead wires, the green and purple dust-ticklings at the tongues of the jolly-poles. The streets were half empty, and in the theatres the crowds sat jammed together in their unreal worlds, cuddling the dark and the fantasy of each other, and sucking toffees and shushing. Oh rapture, thought Moller, hearing the united burst of laughter muffled but still audible from behind the closed doors and the epauletted commissionaire. The shops illuminated their death-faced models draped in silk, the hats displayed on basket frames, the underwear shameless under fluorescent light. Helen took Moller’s left hand and tucked it warmly beneath her arm.

  He looked down at her in affectionate surprise, and said, ‘We won’t count this evening at all. I hate remembering my failures. I’ll plan something a little more tasteful, I promise you. For the moment I’ll have to content myself with seeing you home.’

  Helen found the parcel on her bedside table next morning. There was a piece of notepaper tucked under it, and the edges of the paper were jagged from being trimmed with scissors. The note said:

  Dear Mrs. Striebel, thank you for a wonderful week-end, from Vinny.

  Helen opened the little brown-paper parcel, frightened of the contents even before she saw them, knowing they would be an embarrassment. She took the ornament out carefully and placed it on the table where it wobbled rachitically under its stuffed burden of roses and violets. The morning sun laid a colder gilt along the falsity of the edges. It stood there, vulgar and tawdry and filled with affection. She braced herself for the insincerity of gratitude, but really there was no necessity for her to pretend emotion, because she was so strongly aware of the effort behind the act, the privation for even such a cheap article, the difficulty of choice.

  She took it out to Margaret who was in the kitchen preparing pancakes.

  ‘O God!’ she said. ‘How sweet! And how really awful!’

  ‘Hush! For heaven’s sake,’ Helen pleaded. ‘It would break her heart if she thought I didn’t find it perfect. This must have been the thing she carried round all day yesterday. I remember she hung on to it very carefully, and once when she dropped it in the theatre foyer she went white as death. I know it’s hideous, but how lovely of her to do it.’

  ‘Changing the subject for a moment,’ Margaret said, ‘How’s Robert?’

  Helen looked at her sister amusedly. ‘Now what?’ she said. ‘What are you wanting me to say?’

  ‘I think,’ Margaret said carefully, ‘I think you might be – pardon the expression – in love.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather brave of you in a town the size of Gungee?’

  ‘What is the reason for this concern?’ Helen asked mildly. ‘Surely I was in at a respectable hour last night.’

  Margaret paused in her mixing and looked straight into Helen’s eyes.

  ‘You look tired – not physically but emotionally.’ Her face became impish once more. ‘How will you have your aspirin, honey? Scrambled or poached?’

  They both laughed and hushed each other and glanced at the wall behind which Vinny was sleeping.

  But she was awake by now, woken when the sun had first splintered the venetian blinds, snug in her cretonne womb, in the grottoed warmth of sheets and blankets, imagining with delicious apprehension Mrs. Striebel’s opening of the packet. She had slipped into her room during the night, long after she had heard her come down the hall and rustle out of clothing and into bed, and had stood at her bedside for a trembling moment seeing her, Olympian, lying vulnerable upon her pillow, pale and dream-wasted and not at peace, with her head turning angrily against the lip of the sheet. She had not dared linger and, having put the gift where Mrs. Striebel could not fail to see it in the morning, had gone tiptoeing back to her room. It was a long time before her excitement subsided sufficiently to allow her to sleep. For an hour she lay listening to the stertorous wind outside the house heaving and grunting through the oleanders and shifting the last ribbons of storm cloud farther west. She kept wondering, too, where Mrs. Striebel had been. Perhaps with Mr. Moller. She felt jealous. Anyway, he had no business being with Mrs. Striebel. His wife was sick. She’d heard Pearl Warburton say some pretty mean things about Mr. Moller and Mrs. Striebel. Nasty, sneering little things she wouldn’t listen to. Though she had felt last night they might be right.

  She burrowed under the sheets and held them up above her to make a tent. It was very dark and warm. She said, ‘Dear Mrs. Striebel’, and put a kiss on an imagined cheek. She raised the corner of her tent slightly and saw the sunlight striping the wall opposite the window in bands of lemon and grey. From the room next to hers came the sounds of someone stirring unwillingly through sleep to wakefulness, plunging her feet into the sea of springtime morning air. Vinny sat up in her faded pyjamas to worship as her goddess paused.

  This is it, she told herself. She has seen it.

  She hugged her knees tightly against her flat chest and pressed her chin into the hollow between them hard enough to hurt. She will love it, she told herself. She will think it beautiful and keep it for ever. With my note. She heard the sounds of dressing recommence and then Mrs. Striebel going out to the kitchen. She could hardly wait to show Miss Reisbeck, she thought. She crept to the door and opened it, but could hear nothing. So, having waited for a while rubbing one foot against the other,
she dressed once more in the baggy skirt and the second of her two jumpers. It was navy blue and larger. Above the depth of colour her pale skin took on a transparency and her eyes a more definite hue. Mirror searching, she loved herself for the first time, where once she had found no excuse for so loving, and with an excess of feeling embraced, as it were, but timidly, the whole house, the silent hallway, the kitchen all pancake-scented-hot, with the morning fragrance of the potted pelargoniums along the sill and rain-wet loam beneath the window.

  Margaret’s baroque face appeared above the gingham smock as foolishly, misplacedly monkish. She beamed. Helen smiled. The gift stood askew upon the centre of the breakfast cloth, among the canisters and the salt and pepper containers, threatening the day with its implications of devotion and gratitude. During the exclamations that followed Vinny’s appearance she became translated to a state of euphoria that prohibited clearness of hearing or comprehending, and allowing phrases like ‘a very kind girl’, ‘a most thoughtful action’, ‘charming’, to monument the moment.

  She ate her breakfast, hardly aware, drunk on approval.

  All day it was the same.

  There was sun and not much wind and a great deal of very blue sky along which boats and buildings battled, pricking and wedging and slicing and scooping with spire or tower or city block or dome. Wherever there were holes in the bitumen, the rainwater puddles glared glassily up at the sky. Gulls came over the city like a drift of flowers sky-planted. The smell of salt was enough to make one cry with a hungry nostalgia for the sea.

  They wasted and fretted the morning with talk and tea and household tasks, and in the afternoon, when the thin streamers of breeze blew over the reach, tossing wing and wave and the dried-out tram tickets, Helen and Vinny packed their suitcases into the boot of Margaret’s car and got in. She drove them slowly to the Valley and along the tram lines towards the art gallery.

  ‘All set for culture?’ Margaret asked. ‘You know you’d do much better to pop into Carya and see some real stuff, good strong meaty work. None of your wishywashy representationalism. Helen, you’re too conservative. Next time you’re down I’ll have to work on you very seriously.’

  ‘Next time I’ll be your victim, I promise, Margaret. But today you must think of Vinny. Let her see what is normally regarded as painting before you shock her with young – what’s his name?’

  ‘Lawrence Reid.’

  ‘Yes. His great orange nudes with light-bulbs. Terribly exciting for you avant garde types, but I have a sensitive plant here from a more than sensitive village. She mustn’t take back any of these extremist notions or they’ll be drumming us both out of town.’

  Vinny smiled, only partly understanding. The dirty blocks of flats angled steps and tiny courtyards to the west and netted the leaves and papers swung in on the wind’s tide. Dogs raised legs against telegraph poles, but they were city dogs. Everything had a magic. Dogs, leaves, papers, grubby apartments, the occasional small shop, the Sunday afternoon couples all belonged to a fascinating design.

  ‘– delicious little gouache,’ Margaret was saying, narrowly scraping alongside a tram and just missing a cyclist. Her face, inanely apologetic, swerved to the rider and then back to peer along the roadway. She swung the car down a side-street near the museum.

  ‘Here, dears,’ she said. ‘Dust and dullness together. I shall remain quietly on the lawn reading if you attempt to enter this nauseous hole. In fact, I don’t think I can even face the Fathers of Australian Art. Just look for me under a cotton palm when you’re ready to move on. And don’t forget you have to be at the terminus by four.’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ Helen said. ‘It’s only a little after two now. Robert is sure to be a bit late. He so prides himself on being early, Fate nearly always has some mishap lined up for him.’

  So Helen took Vinny’s arm, waved to Margaret who was striding off to a secluded bench down the lawn, and guided Vinny through the gloomy foyer and turnstiles into the main hall of the gallery. They walked slowly through hall after hall in the poor light, where heavy oils loomed over the unvarying expressions of the public gazing up at them. A few young children skittered across the floor and giggled at the nude sculptures. But Vinny was thrilled, even by the mediocrity. She had never been in such a place before, and her knowledge of art was limited to the few pictures at the school and the yearly calendar issued by their grocer. In her immature way she felt that the whole week-end had been a cultural feast – which it had been really for one who had had so little – and impressionable, was demolished by the lovely, the trite without distinction. Helen watched with amusement and compassion her eager craning to read the names of painters and, after observing adults doing it, the standing back from the picture to achieve the right light and distance. Even if the older woman were bored, the girl was not, and tireless for an hour went from gallery to gallery inspecting closely every picture that appealed to her. When they emerged at last in the slanting light on the curved areas of grass they felt as if they were coming back to actuality after a period of time held still.

  ‘How was it?’ Margaret asked. She was stretched comfortably along a seat with her back against the arm rest. On her nose rested a gigantic pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. She twinkled when she observed Vinny’s startled glance.

  ‘My dear, the wider the rims, the larger the intellect. Actually they have no lenses. They’re merely for show.’

  Helen laughed heartily. ‘Journalists, bookmakers, and radio types! God bless you all with your corduroy beards and your psuede shoes – the ‘p’ is silent as in ‘pseudo’. Actually we enjoyed ourselves, didn’t we, Vinny?’ She gave the child’s arm a friendly squeeze and Vinny looked up at her devotedly.

  ‘It was wonderful,’ she breathed. ‘I can’t believe there can be that many pictures all in the one place. The whole week-end has been marvellous. Especially the play yesterday.’

  ‘Please, child,’ Margaret admonished in a kindly fashion, ‘all this gratitude is bad for Helen. Can’t you see her basking in it, getting inflated notions of herself as a cultural fairy godmother?’

  Vinny grinned uneasily, whereupon Margaret, seeing the uncertainty on her face, said quickly, ‘Of course we’re glad you’ve had a wonderful time, my pet. But right at this moment I’m afraid my tastes are earthier than Helen’s. What I need desperately is tea – tea and cakes, to be precise – large, sickly, unhealthy cakes. What do you say?’

  She swept them unprotesting before her to the car and drove quickly to the place where they had arranged to meet Moller. It was a large sprawling suburban centre, deathly still on Sundays, with its propped bikes, ownerless it seemed for ever, and the empty parked cars and the closed shop doorways. There was one shop of every kind – the newsagents with the hoardings leaning askew in their wire cages, buckled from the attentions of passing dogs; the fruit shop with the speckled apples and the juiceless oranges; the cash-and-carry grocer’s blazing with pasteboard price reductions; the chemist’s.

  ‘Surely,’ Margaret said, ‘surely there must be something. It’s practically the end of the world. Don’t they have depots for all you Burkes and Willses?’

  She cruised the car slowly up one side of the shopping block and down the other until finally they found a narrow fronted bakery still open and with an ‘afternoon teas’ sign fly-specked in the window.

  So in there they sat, knees touching under the unsteady table, drinking weak tea and eating pink and white iced cakes, red cherry centred, and laughing because it wasn’t what they wanted, and yet as they sat there became the very thing for each of them.

  Through the doorway Helen could see the tired shadows stretching lazily longer under the awnings and settling comfortably down for the evening along the kerbs. She, too, was somehow tired of the sun. With a wonderful leap of the heart she thought of Moller with a spasm of such longing she felt she could not tolerate the waiting. The day was the beginning and the end o
f a journey. From this moment on, despite the bathos, she would never again be able to eat a plain iced cake without thinking of him. She looked across at her sister and found the frayed art-weary face an unexpected map of tenderness.

  ‘You were right this morning,’ Helen said. And there was no need to explain. ‘There is no ‘perhaps’ about it at all. You were perfectly right.’

  Four

  The mystique, the impedimenta of ritual lay in long boxes on the lawn under the striped foliage of the crotons, awaiting the weekly agape that brought together in a select sporting coterie the highest income brackets in the township. Frank Rankin as chief celebrant unpacked a half-dozen bats, an assortment of shuttlecocks, and the long poles and badminton net. It is wonderful, thought Moller as he sprawled under the mango tree with the others, to see the technical mind on holiday, the town’s medical practitioner acting just like any ordinary person, smacking a badminton pellet backwards and forwards to other gods all disporting like himself, being human and lovable and decent fellows, and keeping well within their social class. He nibbled the thick white end of a grass stalk and lay flat on his back with his eyes closed. He wondered why they bothered to ask him to their little afternoons, and he wondered why he bothered accepting invitations that so patently bored him. Perhaps the fact that Lilian had been away five months now drew on him the self-conscious charity of his neighbours. ‘Me betters,’ he told himself, and giggled with eyes still shut under the dark green shadows of the leaves; whereupon he found his stomach prodded in provocative and playful fashion by a feminine foot and a hard shallow voice as bright as benzedrine saying girlishly, ‘Penny?’

  He recognised Ruth Lunbeck’s kittenish tones, the chromatic tonguing of the threadbare thought from a mistress of the suburban phrase. He could not tolerate opening his eyes to that stunted nose, the long jutting jaw, and the eyes stony blue with coyness laying a film over the ruthlessness and the acquisitiveness. She punished her husband’s infidelities with regular large purchase accounts at the city stores. Each revelation of a breach of marital trust was followed by a spending spree so outrageous that even Lunbeck wondered if his pleasure were worth what it cost. But in spite of this, in spite of any side effects his treatment of her might have upon her prestige amongst the other women of her group, she clung to the marriage rock like a limpet because it gave her a social standing in the town that she could certainly not have achieved otherwise, being devoid of both intelligence and distinguished appearance. Her body alone was beautifully made, but topped off with that crackling inanity of voice, that striving-after-never-to-be-achieved-but-still-striven-for girlishness, its effect was largely negatived – at least for Moller, who continued to lie very still upon the shaggy lawn.