A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  ‘Going far?’

  ‘No. I’m waiting for a friend.’

  He looked her over. There were old stains down the front of his suit, and it was crumpled as if it had been slept in. He smiled confidentially and the effect upon the tiny eyes was quite horrible.

  ‘Someone’s lucky, eh? Us poor travellers don’t know what home comforts are. Rocky next stop-off and heaven knows when nex’ the missus and me’ll meet. Gets a man down.’

  He blew on his tea and it washed over into the saucer. A piece of bun floated in it, but he rescued it and popped it into his mouth. His lower jaw worked over it busily.

  ‘When’s your friend coming?’ he asked. He smiled again, with his mouth unpleasantly filled with bun, and winked meaningly.

  Helen pretended blindness, deafness. The man placed a hand testingly upon her arm.

  ‘I said when’s your friend coming?’

  Helen’s arm shuddered in withdrawal. Sipping her tea, she said without turning, ‘Soon. Soon, I hope.’

  Silence. Then –

  ‘Gent?’

  His look sidled all round her, stroked her cosily, interpreted her silence rightly.

  ‘Gent it is. He’s lucky, eh? Late, isn’t he? Catch me!’

  Helen gulped the last of her tea and sacrified her sandwiches, shoving the cup and plate back across the counter.

  ‘Hey! What’s the hurry?’ he asked. ‘We were just getting matey.’

  Helen turned and saw him crumpled, stained, unlovely. The tiny eyes stared boldly into her own.

  ‘Boy-friend here already?’ He shook his head in sorrow at her deception. His thinning skull waggled foolish reproof.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. And left.

  It was unfortunate, but she seemed to be pursued by incidents that spilt a sordidity over the whole affair. More and more, she felt, the week-end was being turned into a hole-and-corner scramble, furtively undignified. She looked up and down the platform once again, but there was still no sign of Moller and, uncertain what to do next, she turned and glanced through the refreshment room door. The traveller was watching her. He jerked his head with an unmistakable meaning. Helen turned away confused and walked along the platform to the women’s waiting-room and entered into the clasp of the brown walls, the unswept floor. One window looked blearily out upon the stacked handles of a trolley pile. She could see a goods train shunting on the far track. All around her in an intense mural effort childish pornographies invited her to gross behaviour through injunction or sketch; name was linked with name in erotic bravado above pencilled anatomies that achieved only yawns. She felt that perhaps it would be better if the government railways arranged for semi-abstract murals by well-known artists to be prepared containing all the monosyllables and drawings so beloved by the bored traveller. If they were added in pleasant burnt orange or sienna or delicate blues and greens as an automatic part of the station décor she felt the public would be far more cheered than by these drab reminders of their primary duties. She found herself laughing as she washed her hands at the tap over the filthy porcelain basin. Careful not to touch its sides, she shook the water from her fingers and wiped them on a handkerchief.

  It was ten-thirty. Robert had allowed this fifteen-minute interval very wisely. Feeling that he would probably be coming, she went outside again, handed in her ticket, and waited at the head of the concrete stair flight; and then, although she had expected him, his actuality shocked her into trembling as he ran up the stairs to meet her. The sudden touching of his lips to her cheek was almost the first conscious jolt that reminded both of them of the purpose of their meeting. His eyes explored hers. She felt almost ill at the hunger in them.

  ‘Thank you for waiting. I thought – I knew it would be safer. The Cantwells passed me, although they didn’t see me, half a block back, and several of the mums and dads as well. The devil, my dear …’

  He touched her arm and took her bag.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Helen said. ‘I fought a deathly struggle with my conscience last evening. Please. Please, Robert. Let’s think of nothing but being happy for a Saturday and a Sunday.’

  ‘That’s entirely my view. Narrow, exclusive, and cannot be built out.’

  He said ‘Helen’ and ‘darling’ and squeezed her arm very gently and pulled her against him so that she stumbled slightly, and then they walked in silence down the hill to his car.

  He had parked it a short distance up a side lane, and after they had got in he drove slowly down the steep road past the dull houses to the main street with its close-set shops and its tin awnings. Something of the frontier town atmosphere lingered on in this ghost relic of the gold rush days, Helen thought, something so unsophisticated one felt an obligation to stride in buckskin shooting from the hips. She said as much to Moller, who laughed into the dry blue air.

  ‘They were dozens of brawls in the old town’s heyday, some of them pretty serious. I don’t think a mining town ever lives down its reputation, you know. And of course, although the output is finished now, there’s always the stray dreamer who hopes he’ll happen on a vein one day.’

  He pulled in at the top of the town beside the post office.

  ‘Sending off some rude holiday cards to the Talbots.’ He grinned hideously. ‘ “Plenty of sights around Gympie!” “It’s breezy up here in Gympie!” “I’ve struck rock-bottom in Gympie!” ’

  Helen wrinkled her nose at him. ‘If you don’t hurry you’ll miss the midday sorting. Different, isn’t it, from the days when Andrew Petrie ran his dray down to Brisbane?’

  She found herself measuring his retreating and returning figure with a lover’s eye that discounted shabbiness and the ageing disproportion of the body. She was thirty-two and felt older and at once younger than she would have thought possible, on this burning morning in September. And he was forty-seven, the hair still thick but greying, the face kindly but pouched a little and lined. Yet she felt nothing but tenderness for him; his physical defects gave him a vulnerability in the unkind light that brought her close to tears, so that when he sat once more beside her and started the engine running he was surprised at finding her hand resting across his own. Loving should not be so sad, she told herself, nor seek in the inevitably cruel way it does a sort of nostalgia in fine weather, in days of irresistible blueness and greenness, as if the rain that was not visible in the physical world were gently falling within the mind. Nothing, not even the most pellucid of moments, was ever recalled without a certain misting in the effect, a regret for loss, for the impossibility of repetition. She remembered a winter in the south when she was only a child, and the limned July outlines in plane-tree and elm, in maple, in poplars piercing the cold winds from the west; days when, moving about the house, you stepped with near-sighted care over the ragged papers of sunlight on the floor. Fires ate up the mallee logs at night as you sat with the plate of toast hugged between crossed legs. The changing shapes within the heart of the fire drugged the eyes into sleep. She tried in later years to recapture just the glassy quality of cold of that one particular winter of that bony deciduous season – but it was never the same.

  The car swung out along the Tin Can Bay road and Goomboorian fell away to the west as they entered the Toolara pine forests, plunged into breakers of resined air swept up in tides, in waves, on a beach wind.

  ‘Pinus caribaea,’ Moller said. ‘Impressed? I am a fund of technical information.’

  ‘God! That heavenly smell! How long does this go on?’

  ‘Practically the whole thirty odd miles. Close your eyes, Helen, and forget school and Gungee and Talbots and Farrellys and just bask. Sheerly bask.’

  I can look, I can try to imprint these miles and miles of forest ocean on receptive traces of the brain, she thought, but the end of the journey will be here, and the whole week-end will be vanished tomorrow afternoon, and not a thing will be left of it. She gazed pitifully across at the
man.

  ‘Nothing lasts,’ she said mournfully.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Moller exploded. He half turned from the wheel. ‘Helen, get out of those disgusting deeps of triteness. Good God! I’m surprised at you!’ He slowed up for a moment and flung her a brief glance of curiosity. He saw the hurt on her face and relented.

  ‘My dear, I’m sorry. But don’t say things like that. This week-end has only begun. There will be others. I’m afraid you’re incurably female the way you must take mental dips in the past. Try to be a bit male. Live ahead. You’ll feel a lot better.’

  He banged his horn at a curve. A truck coming west swung in savagely close, and was gone before he even had time to yell an oath.

  ‘You see? Not a regret!’

  The road closed before and behind, a green cocoon of silence that fell not between but around them. Helen pressed her cheek to the frame of the window and parted her lips to the kissing of the rushing air. After a while road and trees became a kind of rhythm, and they spoke little, and the minutes slipped away as quickly as the miles. Nearing the coast they turned east to little Teewah Creek and then curved back north again, and the wide flat waters of the bay surprised them on their right and the first shallow inlets of Snapper Creek on their left. The air was bright, so bright that it seemed composed of millions of separate points – gold-pointillism, dust-stippled and dreadfully alive. Moller slowed the car as they came along the peninsula past the week-end shacks, the stores and the caravan park. Under the late morning sun in sharp angle, sun on blue water, the broad illumination of the sky, curved brightness, fire and sea reflection met in fathoms of air and beat the yellow beaches like brass. Gulls curved in over the strait following the hulls of fish-hungry craft speckling the sea. There was utter stillness.

  He pulled up outside one of the sleepy stores and they bought milk and butter and bread.

  ‘There’s a reasonable stove at the house according to the agent,’ Moller said, ‘but I don’t fancy messing around with fuel, do you? Let’s live on tins and the primus.’

  They called at the agent’s home and collected the key; then, having received directions, drove slowly along the beach front until they came to the house. Moller braked and cut the engine and they sat there with the sea wind blowing straight through the car. Scrubby trees along the waterfront, tangled and torn by salt, rested their heads against the sky. A hundred yards away a lonely fisherman reeled in, rebaited, and swung his line gracefully out again across the water. Off shore a motorboat chugged a diagonal towards the point and the noise of its engine seemed to arch and enclose them.

  The house was very squat and ugly and the windows across the front were blinded by fly-screens. A chainwire fence creaked under the weight of westringia bushes and the front gate swung agape upon sand and tussocks.

  ‘Inside,’ Moller said, ‘there will be one bedroom with a frighteningly large double bed, one with two sagging stretchers, and a living-room with a rococo side board and a lino-topped table. I can see it all. The apricot-coloured glass-ware and the two desert scenes above the sofa.’

  He took Helen into his arms, kissing her mouth for a very long time, and the wind blowing across their closed eyelids felt unbelievably cool.

  On Sunday morning they hired a rowing boat from the boatshed farther along the beach and took it across to Smooger Point. The weather was still holding. Big puffs of cumulus floated in the strait and the keel sliced them and the mirrored gulls correlated sky colour with sea colour and wing with fin. The shore-line behind them was a melange of green, grey, and smoky blues, shadow dribblings across white sand and the wet tongues of tidal inlets.

  After they had beached the boat they carried their lunch bag up the grassy dunes until they found a hollow, tree-hedged, sea-sound-muffled. Hardly could they restrain eyes or hands from each other’s person, so sharp was their present tenderness, their infatuation, though it was more than that really – yet going through the primary process all the same of divining one’s own godhead in the other. Lying among their own lunch wrappings, they explored the preciseness of their affection verbally, under a vertical sun that wrung sticky-sweet scent from the grass, made a spikenard as it were of the yellow flowers twisting across the multiplicity of purple bloom on the land side.

  ‘We are too old for this sort of thing,’ Helen suggested. She picked up a handful of sand from one of the many little lakes of white that scattered about the grove, and let it sift through her fingers.

  ‘You sound like an early Nöel Coward,’ Moller said. He lay flat on his back beside her under the ragged shade of a sand cypress. ‘Of course we are. At least, I am. Not you, my dear, with your incredibly young body. But you mustn’t say it, and certainly not in those reproving tones. Even if we are – what the hell?’ He paused. ‘But it’s not a physical oldness that you mean, I know, but mental. You feel we should have grown beyond this sort of thing.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Nonsense. What delicious nonsense! I have wanted these two days for nearly a year now. Nearly a year.’

  She looked across the hollow that held them to the top crests of the ocean-side dunes and did not reply.

  He stared into the sky spaces. ‘Even now that I’ve explored your body I’m not content. I want to learn it by heart. But that’s not enough. There’s the mind to learn, and the emotions, and the lovely unreliable intuitions that are essentially female. A week-end isn’t enough. Not for all those things. I don’t know, Helen, really I don’t know.’

  ‘What don’t you know?’

  ‘How or when I can get all those things. Time does seem limited.’

  ‘Yet yesterday you chided me for the same regret.’

  ‘Not quite the same. I’m not lamenting what I’ve had. Only what I mightn’t achieve.’

  Helen looked straight at him as she asked, ‘Are you content so far with your discoveries?’

  He took her hand and held it against his mouth so that she could feel his lips moving against her palm as he replied.

  ‘Content and most uncontent. There’s my fullest compliment. Even after these two days, Helen, whenever I shall see you coming towards me along the verandas at recess or in the classroom you turn as I enter, I’ll see you as I saw you last night coming towards me for the first time in that tiny bedroom awash with moonlight.’

  Helen trembled involuntarily. ‘Not for long,’ she said. ‘You won’t remember for long.’

  ‘At present I think for very long indeed,’ Moller said. He sighed. ‘But I know you are right – ultimately. We are too old to be taken in by storybook imagery. Yet really, Helen, it will be a long time before I forget the consolation of your – of your body.’

  She was silent for a moment and then she said, ‘After today I never want to see that house again.’

  He was surprised at the violence in her voice. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Do you find it shameful? Won’t it have some sentimental connotation?’

  ‘Now you’re being female!’ Helen smiled.

  ‘Touché!’ He was relieved to see the tension on her face relax. ‘But tell me why.’

  ‘I’m frightened,’ she said, ‘that both of us might find it tawdry, tawdry enough to spoil it all. Repetition might make more than a joke of the faded orange silk bedspread and the ripped horsehair sofa. You know, I had a bad moment on Gympie station when I was waiting for you.’

  Moller rolled over and sat up. The anxiety in his eyes was doubled in hers. ‘Have care with an ageing man,’ he joked, not really joking.

  She told him about the traveller in the refreshment room, and grimy salacity of the washroom walls.

  ‘It was the sudden connection of the idea,’ she explained, ‘the harshness of its animality. For a few minutes I was on the point of turning back.’

  She saw his face. The pain was understandable, but unbearable, too, and she was glad when finally he pulled a face at h
er and flung his old cynicism forward.

  ‘I’ll defend that situation,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have me discount the physical – animal, if you like – side of any relationship such as this, would you? Do you really want me to lie and pretend and excuse and paint it all on a high spiritual plane – ‘my-dear-this-thing-is-bigger-than-both-of-us’ women’s magazine stuff? Do you? Do you?’ he persisted.

  Helen smiled into his near-angry face.

  ‘No. I suppose it’s as you said – we need the right props. But of course I don’t discount the physical. You’ve made an honest woman of me.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Why lie to suit the gossips or the prudes that live in the shallows of our own conventional selves? Don’t let’s pretend that this is all such a beautiful magic we have no bodies. I doubt if there’d be any spiritual affinity between us if it weren’t for the primary impulse of our sex. I don’t know. I may be wrong. What happened at Gympie was unfortunate, badly timed perhaps. If it had happened a week later it might not even have impinged on your fastidiousness. Who knows?’ He rolled himself a cigarette and there was a silence; the hot stillness dripped from trees in the sun to pools of shadow. ‘But know this, Helen. My body wants yours. Terribly, I’m afraid. And I cannot excuse it. You have an inner comfort and the unquiet in my own mind craves that, too. It’s knowing “flesh in terms of spirit”. Bist du bei mir. Good old Bach.’ He hummed a phrase or two. ‘Quickly, Helen. I have to kiss you. Bend over me and blot out that light and that sky.’

  So little things swing bigger ones into scything motion; moments have the vengeance of hours and days and years, even, waiting upon the misplaced use of seconds. A folly to count back through time to this or that as a factor in disaster, but so often the casual movement means seriousness for the mover. And thus it was that Helen and Moller, rowing back to Snapper Bay later than they had intended, timed their shore arrival with that of a smart launch nosing in towards the breakwater.

  Helen was leaning sideways over the stern trailing one hand in the wash when she heard an oath from Moller and felt the boat swing as he backwatered on one oar and swung the bows in to shore at a sharper angle. She turned and saw the concern on his face creased into a frown.