A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  The moon was wrecked on a cloud-bank when they took the car back up the hill and Helen said quite suddenly, ‘I have a feeling that something is building up for us – we’re not safe any more.’ She was surprised that she did not feel like crying.

  ‘What do you mean? You’re frightened of Findlay?’

  ‘Yes, Robert. Yes, I am. I feel he’ll break this apart without a care. How could I ever hope to keep anything made of happiness when all my adult life I’ve failed?’

  ‘You’re merely being feminine and nervous. And even if the worst did happen – and please, Helen, please don’t imagine I don’t care when I speak so casually, I’m merely being as realistic as I know you are at heart – would it ultimately be more than either of us could bear? I always remember back in my student days – it was my final year, and I had a bad case of infatuation for a girl a year behind me. I had a small sports car in those days that made my morals suspect through the whole faculty, and sometimes we used to skip lectures and drive out along the river somewhere, I suppose, where the new university is today. The roads were practically not, and we walked a good deal once we had settled the car safely, and we always seemed to end up in the same little hollow by the water. We went up at week-ends, too, on Sundays in the milder parts of summer, and after a while this particular spot became quite littered with our luncheon wrappers and sheets of the newspapers we took with us. I imagine it was fairly slummy, but we were in love and didn’t notice – too busy necking. Anyway, the whole thing fell through. Student romances nearly always do. I went out of town on appointment and she stayed to finish her course.’

  ‘How’s all this relevant?’

  ‘Wait a moment. We met about six months later. I was back in town during the August vac, and I ran into her quite by accident. Just for old times’ sake, and because I’d got over the worst pain of being wiped off, we went out again to the same spot. I insisted. I think, perhaps, I had ideas of trying to patch things up. But here’s the rub, Helen. We got there and all the old magic was gone. Completely. The newspapers we’d left on our last visit half a year before were still there, weathered and dirty from rain. And all I felt, looking down at a place I thought I’d never want to see again because of the pain it held for me, was nothing but a mild aversion. It looked bedraggled, unromantic, and just the smallest bit cheap.’

  ‘Did you stay?’

  ‘Only a few minutes – half an hour maybe. And, funnily enough, it was she who wanted to be kissed, to be wanted. But it was utterly impossible. We talked for a while and then left. I never saw her again.’

  Helen wondered if this were a forecasting for their own affection. She looked at his blunt profile, perplexed, afraid to speak.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, as they entered the township and rattled along the dark streets. ‘Wait, Helen, and I’ll answer you. Wait until I find a place for coffee in this seething town.’

  He drove slowly along the main shopping block, and on a corner shelved in with dead shadow they found a milk-bar still open, where the ranked eating booths promised a hot meal of some kind. They slipped into one of the green painted pews and faced each other solemnly across the stained table. Moller held the deep-pink menu like a hymn card and read the items for the evening service with a lugubrious expression. They settled for fried eggs with the sullen, the grudging permission of an eighteen-year-old youth. He slouched to the hot range in the window of the shop, slapped grease on it with a spatula, and waited for it to heat up. Then he chopped lettuce laconically and scattered it on two plates with wafer thin circles of tomato. He did not look at his customers again and, while the eggs sizzled in the fat, stared sulkily across a street house-high in girls.

  ‘You’re thinking,’ Moller pursued as they huddled in the privacy of their corners, ‘you’re thinking that already I’m tiring.’

  ‘No.’ Helen smiled. ‘No. But I think you’re trying to prepare me for such an event.’

  Moller smiled in return with a sweetness quite unbelievable and pressed the fingers of each hand round her wrists. ‘You fool,’ he whispered. ‘You are the only thing I want. But let’s not be so immature we enter upon a thing like this, swearing, repeat swearing, blindly, for ever and ever. It is presumptuous even to hope for that, I feel. Helen, we’re both adult enough to know that nothing ever stays exactly the same. Something of what we start out with must be lost. But that doesn’t mean for a moment that we want it to happen. We just know it probably will sooner or later.’

  ‘Sooner, I feel,’ Helen said pessimistically. This is the second thing, she thought, that he has proved mortal or fallible. Firstly he convinced me of the necessary animality of the affair and now of its transitoriness. Is he disproving the worth of it all for me consciously? She found his next remark discordant with her mood.

  ‘Not till after the school dance,’ he said with a grin. ‘Findlay couldn’t bear to lose any of his sweated labour until that’s over.’

  ‘I shan’t mention it again. A promise.’

  Helen watched their plates of eggs being carried from the counter. They were set down in a rough design with cups and saucers and not even an interested glance from the youth who rolled back again behind the till and picked up his sex-magazine and was lost in a limb-wallow. They ate hungrily and drank the stewed black coffee. Helen frowned now and then and pulled her bread to pieces, crumbling it over the plate.

  ‘Still worrying?’ Moller asked.

  ‘Not about us. It’s young Vinny Lalor. It’s absurd, I suppose, but I keep hoping the other kids don’t find out she was cleaning off the notices. They’ll give her a shocking time.’

  ‘She’s used to it.’

  ‘That’s no justification. I imagine they’ll think up something really juicy for this. Why does she have to involve herself in our troubles?’

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Moller said, ‘but it just happened that way. If you hadn’t given her that week-end in Brisbane, perhaps her frightening acolyte spirit wouldn’t have received the final fillip that made her do what she did.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Helen asked. ‘Oh God! I hope not. I’d feel really guilty in that case.’

  ‘This is all nonsense, Helen. You’re exaggerating the whole thing. You did the child a kindness. Whether or not you happened to stimulate the crush she already had on you is beside the point, for you had no direct intention of doing so. You can’t possibly blame yourself if the kids give her a bit of curry for a few days. It will all blow over in a week as far as she’s concerned. So for Heaven’s sake cut out this crazy self-accusation. We’re the ones in the jam – a far greater mess than she’ll ever be in, and it doesn’t look as if our threatened punishment will have blown over in a week. So please. Lenta ira deorum. But it will come, don’t worry.’

  Newspapers rattled past the café doorway in the salted wind off the river. Distantly a dog yelped its nervousness to the floating moon. The kid at the counter coughed phlegmily and turned the pages of his dreams and scratched one cheek absent-mindedly.

  We look back, Helen thought, and there we are feeding the swans in the park; or travelling between this town and that, all night, standing in the corridor outside the lavatories because all the seats are taken, and talking, joking most of the way; or at our first dance with the pimply young Jew picking over the sandwiches to avoid the ham; or rolling on the lawn and the pants showing pink, over and over and over. Each moment framed like a picture and distant as a gallery. This particular moment would be added, she knew, and wondered why those times of intense emotional involvement were more shadowy than those of less. I stood off, she thought. I watched myself enjoying the externals, I had not given myself completely.

  ‘It’s fun, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Helen smiled into his face, his begging face. ‘Yes. The smallest things with someone you love are fun.’

  ‘You can stand the inexpensive setti
ng?’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘That doubting offends me.’

  ‘I’m catching that disease you had at the Bay. Hoping that the tizzy décor won’t catch us out. Not for my sake, you understand. I’m worried for you.’

  ‘I’m getting better,’ she said. ‘Soon I’ll be too involved to notice externals.’

  They edged out of their seats and Moller put the exact change on the cheque, placing it gently on the counter beside the lounging figure. It merely grunted as they left, ringing in their meal price on the cash register as automatically as a man might make the sign of the cross. Thus blessed they passed into the night-deep street and climbed back into the car.

  Moller kissed Helen quickly before he started up the engine.

  ‘Endings,’ he said. ‘We’re always coming to endings. I feel a bit of your gloom. Don’t deny that you are feeling gloomy.’ He stared out across the black and silver river, into the softness that pushed back the efforts of sight, the softness that was as hard as a wall, impenetrable beyond the few yards that didn’t matter. And then inexorably let in the clutch.

  He drove fast once out of town and easily up the first slopes. They were both utterly unprepared for the sudden lurch as the car banged into a pot-hole, and the dreadful crunching sound under the back wheels. The car seemed to scrabble uselessly on the roadside shingle and, finally out of control, pitched their terror forward in a long skid to the far embankment that butted the machine viciously and half turned it over. Helen, tumbled against the door, felt Moller’s body crushing heavily on her own, and just momentarily she cried out in fear and pain as her arm was jammed agonizingly against the handle. Too stunned to move, they lay clumsily together in the boxed-up space, but after a while Moller pulled himself upwards and managed to jerk open the door. He struggled out and then reached back to seize Helen’s arm and pull her after him. They stumbled and almost fell as she tipped through the swinging door into his arms.

  ‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ he asked quickly. In the moonlight her face was bluish-white. She nodded and rubbed her head against his arm suddenly like a child.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes. I bumped my arm a bit, but it’s nothing.’

  ‘Show me.’

  He turned her slim arm over. It was scratched and blood-scribbled.

  ‘It was the door handle. There’s something sharp on the under edge.’

  He tied his handkerchief round it carefully. ‘Be brave,’ he said, ‘till I see what’s up with this ruddy car. I think there’s a torch in the far pocket if I can reach it.’

  He plunged head first into the car again and she could see him threshing the black air like a swimmer. In a moment he wriggled out and by torchlight looked once more at her frightened face. She smiled with an effort to reassure him and he kissed her gently on the forehead.

  ‘You and your premonitions,’ he said. ‘Thank God you’re okay. I’ll just have a look at the car and see if there’s anything I can do. She might only need righting.’

  Before he even squatted, and as he shone the torch on the rear of the car, he saw what was the trouble.

  ‘Oh jesusgodanddamn!’ he groaned. ‘The bloody back wheel’s off and the hub’s all twisted. God almighty, what a bastard of a thing to happen!’

  ‘Just as well we’re only a mile out of town. It won’t take more than twenty minutes to walk back.’

  ‘Oh God, Helen! It doesn’t matter whether we walk back or go on the rest of the fifteen miles to Gungee. No one’s going to fix this damn’ thing tonight. It’s put paid to getting the car back before tomorrow. C’mon. We might as well walk back to the town and see if there’s any transport into Cooroy tonight. You never know. There might be a stray C.T. on the move.’

  He took Helen’s unhurt arm and shining the torch ahead, they trudged downhill towards the river again. The township’s lights teased them for twelve minutes before they finally came into the main street.

  ‘Let’s have a word with that kid at the café’, Moller suggested. ‘He didn’t look a very likely specimen, but he might know a thing or two about the exits.’

  The long room with its green booths was still empty except for the boy, and entering it, seeing again the shelves stacked with cigarettes and sweets, recognising the mirror oblongs stamped above each table, the soft drink advertisements sycophantic on the far wall, Helen felt the despair that overtakes the person trying to escape who finds himself involuntarily returned to the same place.

  The youth behind the cash register was still reading, but when he heard them come in he looked up from his book, marking the place with a finger, and yawned straight at them.

  ‘Our car’s broken down,’ Moller explained, ‘about a mile up the road. Can you tell me where the nearest garage is or if I could knock the owner up?’

  The boy stared at Moller coldly and then picked at a molar with exaggerated interest.

  ‘You wouldn’t get no one on to it at this hour,’ he said, tossing the words round his probing finger.

  ‘No. I realise that. I was just hoping I might be able to get a lift if anyone’s going through to Cooroy tonight, or hire a car.’

  ‘Well, Bert Simmons is the nearest. He’s just down the road a coupla blocks on the far side. Lives at the back.’

  ‘Think he’d have a car for hire?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Failing that,’ Moller said, ‘failing that, there wouldn’t be a bus, I suppose?’

  ‘First bus in the morning.’

  ‘What time?’

  The youth yawned again. Even his breath had the stale scent of boredom.

  ‘’Bout eight-thirty. It catches the nine o’clock train up to Gympie.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Moller said, turning to Helen. ‘We’re trapped. That wouldn’t reach Gungee till well after half past nine.’ He glared back at the humped shoulders, the acne-smudged forehead and chin.

  ‘You don’t know of anyone driving in tonight, do you?’

  ‘Look, mister, I don’t run the bloody town.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Moller felt testy, too. ‘Sorry to interrupt your study.’

  They went out again, a step ahead in time now. At least we are progressing to nowhere, Helen thought. It’s possible to progress and be nowhere in this no-town with the long occasional stripes of light and the shadows splitting the river into chequers, with the day cooling off in the saltiest, fishiest of breezes up through the embankment grasses and houseshop alleyways jammed with parked trucks and litter and breathing with the sleeping stray dogs. Unreality was the essence of the minutes in which they moved, and unreality meant no town and no river, no street, no then and no will be and almost no at this moment – that most of all. Disembodied, perhaps, she thought, we will find this garage – as they did – and knock uselessly – as they did – at the darkened house at the rear.

  They stood in the deep bays of the garage with its farouche petrol pillars and anxiousness unmasked upon each face sought its fellow and found it. Moller spoke softly.

  ‘I’m very sorry. Very sorry indeed. Not that that will mend the situation, but there it is. It looks as if there’s nothing for it but to try to get a room at a pub and go up tomorrow. We can’t search all night for possible transport.’

  ‘This is twice,’ Helen said. ‘Things are loaded against us. I feel like a child caught out. Imagine Findlay tomorrow when neither of us turns up and then both – both unashamedly entering at the end of the first period.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Helen. lt’s an absurd system that can make two mature adults feel like a pair of naughty babies. If that’s any comfort. The pub might know of someone going up early tomorrow. In any case we could try to fake up separate entrances, but I hardly think it’s worth it. He’s not a fool. The Talbots would observe your absence from breakfast, and it would only be a matter of days before he put two and two together – using a
copulative verb, my dear.’ He laughed. ‘No. We’ll just face the thing out. Anything else would irritate him more. In fact, I think the best thing to do would be to put a trunk call through to his house tonight, explain what has happened, and hope for the best.’

  Hesitancy of the mind, the heart. Moller’s feet paused, braked by conscience and his eyes, startled by the shrillness of his thought, caught at hers for safety in the dark.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, not looking away from her once, not daring to look away, ‘I suppose I could walk back.’

  ‘I don’t really want you to,’ Helen said.

  ‘It would only take five hours or so. I’d be back by about five.’

  ‘At sunrise probably. And then what would you say about the car, even if no one saw you come in?’

  ‘That I’d lent it to you.’

  ‘Too easy,’ Helen said. Relief. Relief. The wind blowing from the river dropped and scuppered papers sank into corners, leaves chattered into a final silence. ‘I can’t drive. And Findlay knows it. He and his wife took me for a run up the coast not long after I came and my ignorance of matters mechanical thrilled him. He likes to be the boss in all things. No. No, Robert. No go, my dear.’

  ‘You’re glad?’

  Here at the same time was his wonder and his delight.

  The dark air nuzzled their tiredness and they walked faster, their feet smacking the asphalt road, with doors and shop fronts beating back the quickened emphasis of feet on pavement; there was the hand, hard heavy around companion hand, the sudden impulse to look up, look down; and the volubility of their smiling eyes took them dreamlike to the nearest hotel broad-fronting the township with door open, still lit on the ground floor, waiting.

  The archetype of all licensees grubbed round in a rolltop desk, looking them over slyly and disbelievingly.

  ‘Broken down?’ he said. ‘That was bad luck for you and … your wife, you said?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘Mmmmm.’ He looked at them with joy, salacity achieving, sanctioned. ‘Ah, yes.’ Helen noticed irrelevantly that his hair fluffed into a nimbus. ‘Well, I think I can manage a room.’