A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  ‘Look away, Helen,’ he said softly. ‘The trees. The water. Anything. The launch behind us is Sam Welch’s. I clean forgot about their bloody shack up here. Oh God! As soon as I’ve beached this hulk, head straight back to the house. We’ll try to dodge them on the beach.’

  The boat jammed in on the wet sand, and Helen, holding her sandals, waded through the warm low tide, went up the beach past the scuttling soldier crabs to the shelter of the trees along the roadway. When she turned at last she could see Moller planting the anchor and gathering up the oars to return to the boatshed. The launch dinghy was slipping quietly over the fifty feet of glassy water between it and the shore, and even up there under the listening trees she could hear Sam Welch’s shout of, ‘Hey, Herc!’

  She watched him turn in the trap to wave, to smile, to wait for him and to make one of three in an exchange of banalities, while all the time Marian Welch’s excited face sought her over Moller’s shoulder, reached for her like a gluttonous tapir to where she stood. She half turned to go, and then decided to wait. The breeze came in over the strait stiffening the water into corrugations of green and white; the whole of the bay’s craft rocked suddenly in the afternoon breeze, and she saw Moller leave them and come towards her. His face said all she needed to discover, but he spoke sourly as he came up and took her arm.

  ‘No point in your training it back from Gympie now,’ he said. ‘That wouldn’t disarm anybody. You might as well travel back to Gungee shamelessly with me. As late as we can. They spotted the car yesterday afternoon.’

  They walked along the peninsula in the shadow of the trees. Helen felt nothing but unexpected relief after all, and she smiled as she touched the inside of his wrist with her finger-tips.

  ‘Just what happened?’

  ‘Apparently they came up by car after lunch yesterday. Up for the week-end. Their shack’s farther along the point. Marian told me she saw the old Buick pulled in under the trees, but she said she didn’t think it could have been mine. Anyway, they went off early this morning for a spot of fishing up near Fraser Island, and they must have had a good look at my number plate on the way to the beach. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t been here last night. I’m sorry, my dear. I really don’t know how I kept Marian from you. She was literally itching as she peered up at you.’

  ‘They know it’s me?’

  ‘Afraid so. They saw you from the launch. Eyes like eagle-hawks.’

  Their feet slapped the red earth, the sand hollows, the stringy grass.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Surprisingly enough, no.’

  ‘What a lamentable novice at seduction you must think me, Helen.’

  ‘No, Robert, no. Not technically.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you indeed.’

  They both laughed and the long purpose of their mirth brought them to the westringia bushes on the creaking chain-wire and the tussocks and the door warped by sea air and the bedspread of faded orange silk. And it was only when they remembered Lilian that their eyes suddenly sobered.

  The costive celebrations of the foursome, the nigglings, the prurience, all festooned the evening from eight until ten when they decorated the sandwiches like parsley sprigs and became garnishings on savouries. A satisfying evening. An evening of unchristian destructiveness at which they all assisted with gossip snippets directed at their two new victims. Whenever the conversation digressed into behaviourisms less spectacular, it was drawn back to its central theme by Jess Talbot who found the topic magnetic.

  ‘I’m interested in people,’ she explained earnestly. ‘I don’t feel that by being interested one is being uncharitable. Do you?’ Her voice was loud and assured and frighteningly well educated. It ploughed through the spontaneous assents. ‘I can’t help it, you know. I make it my business to know other people’s business. I feel it all helps towards an understanding.’

  Her beautiful long hair was drawn back into coiled plaits that shone redly beneath the Welches’ table lamp. Alec looked at her admiringly. He loved the simple virtues.

  ‘True,’ Welch said. ‘Very, very true.’ He was a technical college, not a university, man, and he felt slightly resentful towards Talbot with his union tiepin, and his careful articulations. At heart he hated him, hated him for his union tiepin and his careful diction, but publicly could not bring his irritation, his dislike to the point of being rude or even cool. Now and again he exhibited just the merest shade of truculence that exploded in fountains of venom when he talked alone with Marian and the two of them stripped the synthetic social mask aside.

  ‘How long has it been going on?’ Marian speculated for the dozenth time. She never tired of flinging this query into the listening air. Titillated by the gossip, she thought of Lunbeck and ogled Talbot, who dropped his church-worker’s eyes modestly to his glass.

  ‘Who knows?’ Jess Talbot’s vowels were at the top of their form. They bowled all verbal opposition aside like gigantic iron spheroids. ‘Too long, I think. Remember, we do have the effect upon the youngsters at the school to consider if the scandal gets around’ – making mental note that it would, that it must. ‘It’s exposing them to moral danger to allow them to suffer such a relationship between members of the staff. Teachers are supposed to be looked up to, surely.’

  ‘The horrible thing,’ Marian said, loving it, ‘was that he didn’t seem a bit ashamed. Not a bit. He actually smiled when Sam asked him if he came up on Saturday. He almost seemed to be enjoying the situation. Didn’t he, Sam?’

  Sam Welch filled up his sherry glass and leant back in the moquette depths of his chair. Tonight, in some indefinable way, the enjoyment of the scandal eluded him, leaving him with the feeling that the seediness of immorality lay within this assemblage. He glanced round at the three faces, uncomplicated except from the effort of detraction, busy with a liberal transcription of the actions of others. In a moment of astonishing and impersonal clarity he saw, for perhaps the second time only in his marriage, the uninhibited sexual jealousy upon his wife’s face, slanting the eyes and the mouth into narrows of unkindness. He saw the oval faces of the Talbots filled up with false godliness, sharpened and lengthened by the shadows of the lamp. Being deliberately boorish, he gulped at his sherry and ran the back of his hand across his mouth. The three of them sickened him, and he felt suddenly that he didn’t want to be in all this, that he was sorry for having mentioned the business. Still, he told himself, nothing would have stopped Marian. Nothing on God’s earth would stop her when she made up her mind to do something.

  ‘More sherry?’ He gestured with the decanter towards Talbot’s glass.

  ‘Thank you,’ the other said, pushing it forward primly.

  ‘No. He didn’t seem upset, I must say. Not like I’d be.’ Welch threw his wife a sly look. ‘Like being caught with his pants down, wasn’t it? Most men would be upset.’

  He was rewarded by seeing the Talbots wince at his crudeness. It made him happy again.

  ‘What do you think one should do?’ Jess asked. ‘Marian, you have two girls at the school. It must affect you very closely. They’re at that terribly impressionable age.’

  She has nothing to say, thought Welch, and she says it. God, how she says it over and over and over. The sherry was having an unusual effect on him. At the beginning of the evening when the Talbots had dropped in unexpectedly he had been ready to be right in it with them. But now this eternal carping had been going on for nearly two hours and he felt, not sympathy for the victims, but a remoteness from them and their verbal persecutors. The drive back, too, had tired him and he wished above all to go to bed swagged about with liquor fumes, and to vanish into the fogs of sleep. He heaved his stout body round in the chair and glared at her from his creased face.

  ‘Well,’ Marian pondered, and the intrinsic malice of her design smiled out with a radiance marvellous to see, ‘well, I really feel that being on the parents’ committee, you know,
that perhaps I should just drop a tiny hint in Findlay’s ear.’ She pecked a segment from a dry biscuit and made little crackling sounds.

  ‘That’s a bit bloody thick, isn’t it?’ Welch growled. His half-closed eyes blinked rapidly several times as they all turned to look at him.

  ‘I don’t think so, Sam.’ Jess Talbot dealt suavely with opposition. ‘I don’t think so at all. Perhaps Mr. Findlay might be able to suggest discreetly to them that they are being a bit outré.’ (French, too, Welch thought angrily.) ‘After all, Alec’ – she appealed to him, requiring no assent really; it was merely a public marital gesture – ‘the children come before the adults, don’t they? Every time. The greatest good for the greatest number.’ She was using her aphorisms like tear-gas to make her audience weep. The meretricious arguments would pile up and swamp charity in a gigantic wave, a tide of adulterated good works. And after all, who could charge the moral worker with being a busybody without also appearing to be in connivance with the wrongdoer?

  Alec Talbot’s chin quivered. He leant forward, his eyes intent upon his wife. Their communion was complete at moments like this.

  ‘What was that business you told me of concerning the school a few years back?’ he asked. ‘That – forgive me, Marian – homosexual incident with the young maths master? Now there was a case in point.’

  ‘Oh, of course! You told me about it, Marian. Remember?’

  Jess Talbot was launched. Without hesitancy she plunged down the slipway into a sticky sea of calumny. Her listeners struggled in the wash of words, unable to surface for air under the choking weight of defamation. Welch refused to be drowned. He had had enough.

  ‘You’re looking tired,’ he said unkindly to Jess in the middle of a sentence.

  ‘Am I?’ She gave the small smile reserved for fools. ‘My mind feels as sharp as a razor. I feel quite brilliant tonight. As Alec says, there definitely was a case in point. Fortunately that unhappy man corrupted only one of the boys, but he could very easily have gone undetected and done goodness knows how much damage.’

  ‘Corrupted! Terry Crewe! Oh God!’ Welch laughed noisily. ‘What bull! What utter bull! That kid used to hang around the factory at nights when the eleven o’clock shift came off and practically ask for it. He just met a soul mate. I always did feel sorry for Russell. A victim of circumstances if ever there was one.’

  ‘You’re begging the question,’ Alec Talbot intervened.

  ‘And you, Talbot, are nothing but a bloody pedantic theorist!’

  ‘Nonsense! Jess is completely right. Poor behaviour on the part of adults, especially those in positions of authority, can set up all sorts of chain reactions in impressionable adolescents. If I were in any doubt before that something should be done, I’m completely convinced now that the best thing that could happen would be for Findlay to be informed. It’s indifference of the type you display, Welch, that lets these things snowball until they get out of hand.’

  ‘Yes, yes! Frightened Moller will unseat Lunbeck as the town rake? He’s not quite classy enough to get away with it, is he?’ Welch belched angrily and without apologizing. ‘He’s not bloody classy enough!’

  His wife’s eyes flickered uneasily between the two men. The evening was taking a wrong turn, and it had all started out so happily, a set of symphonic variations on the one delicious theme. The sunburn, which she felt suited her, shone redly like a lamp through fog under the thinning make-up sweated away by sherry and the warm night, and did not suit her at all really, with her pouched eyes and crisped hair and her forty-three years. She felt she could not bear it if Sam made a gaffe that cut them off from the town’s élite. Looking round the room, she noted with pride the different objects that implied income, that put their home in a certain class – the expensive radiogram that only ever played aborted versions of musical shows, the china cabinet threatening the guests with its gilt and biscuit-thin cups and saucers, the cocktail cabinet with all the right glasses for all the right drinks. She was home like the sailor, home from the sea of early married stringency, to a harbour of best grade wall-to-wall, of inoffensive landscapes, and a deep-freeze unit just packed with goodies.

  ‘It’s the driving,’ she hastened to explain to the Talbots. ‘It always affects Sam’s nerves. There was the most fearful glare coming back from the Bay this afternoon. We had the sun on the windscreen for miles.’

  ‘Don’t apologise for me!’ Welch was very close to shouting. ‘For God’s sake don’t apologise! I feel I’m talking normally for once. For two hours now, two solid bloody hours, you’ve been on to them. Give the poor bastards a break. Yes, I know! I know I was in it with you,’ he minced at Jess, interrupting her triumphant and accusing eye, ‘but can’t you just mention the thing and leave it? You never give friend Harold such thorough treatment. But then he’s one of the big four! Solid at lodge and lousy with dough! So he escapes!’

  ‘Mind your language, Welch,’ Talbot reprimanded primly.

  ‘What? What was that? Oh God!’ Welch roared with sudden artificial laughter. ‘She talks of perversion,’ he said, nodding towards Jess Talbot and turning to his wife. ‘Her! Perversion! And she’s married to such an old woman.’ He struggled out of his chair and lurched to the veranda door. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ he said. ‘But don’t go home on my account.’

  The Talbots took the sins of their fellows prissily away into the humped night. Roads merged flatly with grass paddocks and the houses were all in darkness. Strung out along the roads were the weak street-lights desolate as the newspapers blown around their bases. However, when they entered the downstairs hall of the hotel there was a light on in Farrelly’s thimble-size office behind the bar. They tiptoed past the half-open door, their normal extrovert arrogance subdued by Welch’s outburst, but they had not reached the foot of the stairs when Farrelly slipped through the door and called them. The downward stream of electric light exposed the fatigue, the anger, and the puzzlement on his face without mercy. The Talbots raised their well-bred eyebrows interrogatively and Farrelly hated them momentarily for seeing him in braces.

  ‘Have you seen Mrs. Striebel?’ he asked. There was very nearly a whimper in his voice. ‘I’ve had trunk-line from Brisbane worrying me all week-end – yesterday and now today. They’ve been ringing every hour tonight since six o’clock. You don’t happen to know where she is, do you?’

  In the half-light of the hall, slanted across with the shadow of the wide stairs, their eyes searched for and found each other’s. In these lacunae of communication they confessed their purpose wordlessly, gave absolution and blessed the intended action.

  ‘Well –’ Jess Talbot paused. Her voice sounded very lovely when she spoke softly, and now it had the tenderness of the executioner as well. ‘This is strictly confidential, Mr. Farrelly, but seeing the phone call is probably urgent I feel I had better tell you. We did hear, Alec and I, that she has been at Tin Can Bay this week-end with Mr. Moller. Perhaps if you rang his house …’

  She stopped in a nicely assumed confusion, and Alec congratulated himself, as he often did, on his perspicacity in choosing a wife at once so refined and so unbelievably tactful.

  Six

  Vinny found the first notice chalked on the inside wall of the girls’ lavatory block. It said simply,

  MR. MOLLER LOVES MRS. STRIEBEL.

  She would never have noticed it except for the fact that loneliness had driven her lately to loitering there, just where the pepper trees branched over the galvanised roofing and made a pocket of shade in the alleyway. The rough white lettering was modest in size, but its categorical finality shocked Vinny with the greater shock that only the dreaded and expected can give. She stared at it a long while, refusing, thrusting back the truth she knew was there; then she took out her handkerchief and tried to rub the words out. Even after she had blurred and smudged away most of the surface chalk the ghost of the message still lingered on the wall. So she wetted
the piece of rag beneath the tap and washed away the five threatening words. She knew that according to school rule she should have reported the matter to the headmaster, but some uncanny caution made her first reaction a pausing to sense the intrinsic danger of the statement. She knew it was true.

  It worried her all the rest of the day, and when next morning she found the same five words sprawling along the side fence it was with a feeling almost of relief. There was a group of giggling senior school pupils standing alongside it, fooling about before the morning bell. This section of the yard was well away from the main school block and out of bounds to all except the secondary classes. She approached the group diffidently, but their absorption was complete. She could see Howard’s smooth and over-handsome face in the centre of the group and hear him singing in a crooner’s exaggerated whine, ‘I can’t give – you anything but – love – babee.’

  She could see the Welch girls, too, usually hangers-on, flutterers at the edge of things, now being the pivot of the questions and the sniggerings and the soft replies. Her anger surprised her and she backed away again. No one noticed her go. And by the end of the week the notices had reappeared along the lavatory walls and this time their message was couched in more direct terms, in monosyllables that Vinny had seen before and, although she was unaware of their exact meaning, felt to be unclean.

  She did not know what to do. She clasped her confusion tightly within for the first few days and hoped and dreaded simultaneously that the notices would be reported to Mr. Findlay. But the staff continued serenely through the inflexible time-table of each day, the blocked-out forty minute divisions for subjects, unruffled by any undercurrents among the pupils. In class she watched the nudgings and the note passings, the insolent stares that broke out in epidemic proportions whenever Mr. Moller paused on his way out of the room to speak to Mrs. Striebel on her way in, and marvelled at the unawareness that kept their faces smiling and urbane and innocent as they turned to the class during lessons. Innocent? She flogged the little whip of a word about her and was dubious concerning the quality of guilt. She felt she had some sort of personal interest in their relationship after seeing them relaxed and at one on the trip to Brisbane. If anyone must defend them, she decided, she wanted to be the one to do it. And so began a planned directive towards erasing the more public of the notices.