A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  ‘Any chance of a lift in early to Cooroy?’

  The man behind the desk smiled happily.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not a chance in the world. Not from anyone here, anyway. The two travellers staying only got in this afternoon and they booked for a couple of days.’ He fished in his desk and dragged out a big register. ‘Like to sign the book?’ he asked. ‘Both of you if you like.’ He leered up at Helen.

  Moller scribbled his name at the bottom of a dirty page.

  ‘Where’s your phone?’ he asked.

  ‘In there,’ the other said, pointing to the parlour. He tried an insinuating smile on Helen again. ‘Bad luck, wasn’t it? There’s a chair there while your hubby’s phoning.’

  Moller closed the parlour door behind him and crossed to the old-fashioned wall-phone and booked his call. I’m not good at this sort of thing, he thought as he waited. An artificial voluptuary. The phone shrilled its agony across the undusted tables and chairs and he picked up the receiver nervously.

  On the other side of the closed door only the faintest sound of his voice came through to the woman in the hall and the man listening behind the office grille. He must be speaking very softly, Helen thought. She glanced over at the barrel of a man totting profits, and was sorry to deny him his scandal. But he wouldn’t deny himself, she knew. He would have it in spite of them. And she caught his eye and smiled.

  There was a click from the next room as Moller replaced the receiver on its hook. The door opened and he came out, his face unemotional as he met her glance.

  ‘Here’s your key, Mr. Moller,’ the licensee said. ‘No need to take you up, is there? It’s the second on the right at the top of the stairs. Breakfast’s at seven and there’s no hot water now till the morning.’

  He grinned as he emptied this cornucopia of information.

  Helen followed Moller up the stairs, and they were all hotel stairs, and along the corridor that was all corridors, and into a room that shut them in with each other and the lumpy, uncomfortable furniture.

  With the shedding of their clothes they lost their perplexity as well; and somewhere between the long kisses Moller forgot completely the unkindness Findlay had offered him.

  Eight

  Feverishly Mrs. Lalor joggled needle and cotton in her arthritic fingers, squinting redly and hopelessly in the light from the weak bulb.

  ‘Keep still, love,’ she pleaded as Vinny wriggled in her being-made-over dress, itching against time, against madeoverness, against excitement in spite of herself. ‘Only another three inches.’ The hem submitted to her nervous stitching and resolved itself gracelessly into final folds round Vinny’s knobbly legs. Mother and daughter stared dubiously into the mirror.

  ‘You look real nice, Vin,’ her mother said without enthusiasm, but bravely lying, hoping to be proved wrong miraculously.

  Vinny could have wept when she saw herself unsuitable in crêpe, her unformed breasts made mockery of by the suggestively gathered bodice and the two dreadful flounces parenthesising her bony shoulders. Inwardly she declined despair and proved it like a theorem, until, observing her mother’s unhappy anxiety, she forced a tight smile.

  ‘The colour’s not bad, is it, mum? This paley sort of green goes with my hair.’ She shook the overlong skirt out as she had seen Rene do, in order to admire the expensive finish on the black suede shoes she had borrowed from her eldest sister. But it was chilly comfort. Her mother reached over to the dressing-table against the bed wall and produced, as if from a feretory, a tarnished lipstick tube that contained still a creamless, cracked resistance to time.

  ‘Just a touch,’ she urged, ‘so as to give you a bit of colour. You look real pale, Vinny, and so you ought, eating no tea and hiking all the way out to Pratten’s farm just to get those posies for Mrs. Striebel. Just see if she uses them, anyway. I don’t know why you want to run around after her the way you do, even if she did take you to Brisbane.’

  ‘Oh, mum!’ protested Vinny.

  The old jousting, the tourney, the same verbal thrustings, a litany of pale recriminations and tired responses. To divert her mother she took the lipstick and with unpractised finger smeared a little colour across her mouth, noting with astonishment her youth more manifest by the uneven red lines. And so, chrysalis emerged, her mouth barbaric for the first time in her life, she bent forward and smudged a kiss on her mother’s cheek.

  ‘Got your hanky and your purse?’ Mrs. Lalor asked.

  ‘Thanks, mum.’

  ‘And your ticket?’

  ‘Yes. In my purse.’ She wished she could thank her mother for fixing the dress, but something kept stopping her. She wasn’t really grateful because she knew it didn’t look much. ‘I’ve got to hurry, mum,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I’ve got to get those posies round to the supper room for Mrs. Striebel.’

  ‘Oh, those posies!’ gibed her mother with a momentary spasm of annoyance, jealousy perhaps, and the constant irritation of the throbbing in her joints.

  Merciless for the instant, she watched her daughter run gawkily down the hall, down the steps into the heavily scented garden soft with moths and dew. Then partly because of griefs older than this, and partly because of the impossibility of alleviating the present one, she found, in spite of the violent upsurge of tears within her mind, that she could not weep at all, and set to resignedly to gather thread from the floor, the bedspread, the sewing-table.

  Vinny paused beside the door of the sagging toolshed to gather up the tray of flowers that she had left there to retain their freshness in the damp night air, and then went back over the uncut lawn to the front gate and the melting grey night in Duncan Street. Just below in the valley the lights of the station ticket-office and waiting-rooms splashed across the metals and the humped lines of timber trailers delayed in the siding until the Gympie mail passed through. In the house across the road the Gilham boy practised uncertainly the same piece he had been practising for weeks and weeks, and with unerring certainty made the same mistake in the same place. Vinny, listening for it in the darkness, smiled to herself, hugging the tray more closely in her thin arms, smiled because for weeks the irritation of that one trifle had driven her nearly crazy every night. She tottered in the unaccustomed height of Jocelyn’s shoes, wincing as pebble after pebble caused her to go over first on one ankle and then the other. The brumous green of fig-trees wearing the evening lateness blurred the road for a hundred yards at this point where the hill’s declivity met creek, bridge spanning it, and the main road that lead up over the tracks to the shops and school. Standing in shadow, Vinny removed the shoes and, holding them clumsily beneath the tray, padded along in the powdery dust, her stockinged feet stretching in relief. Ahead of her two figures came in from the branch road and the moth mad street-light at the bridge’s eastern end shone like grease on bulbously profiled lips gossip-gabbling of Pearl Warburton’s mother and Pearl.

  Vinny’s empty stomach contracted unpleasantly as she sensed, seconds before she heard, the frou-frou of starched white frock suitably girlish, expertly made, and then glanced down at the skimpy flatness of crêpe still looking made-over in the twilight. Pressing herself back into the bays of the trees, she stood perfectly still, praying that they would not turn and, finding her, clap her in the cage of their mockery. Their voices became fainter. Vinny shuddered in the darkness and, putting on her shoes again, wobbled after them up the next hill towards the town.

  When she came near the hall the lights were quite dazzling on the black and the wine and the sea-coloured metal of the cars parked at right angles to the paspalum-rank gutter. There was a noise and an excitement, a scuffing of feet among the paper bags and emptied cardboard drink cartons that flooded her with a rising wonder as she looked nervously in the wide open doors at the dance floor now reverberating to the shouts and skiddings of uncomfortably dressed boys from the senior classes. Around the walls mothers sat in corseted groups eyeing of
f their giggling daughters, maddening them by plucking at a hem or twitching rebellious belts and sashes. The girls twisted and preened, conscious all the time of the furtive glances of the boys who skylarked in the corners near the stage, smacking back the brilliantine on their hair, fingering the new eruptions on their skin. Streamers, balloons, paper lanterns quilted the ceiling with gaudy colour.

  There were no members of the staff visible except Mr. Moller, looking completely different in a dinner jacket. He was on the stage helping the three-piece band shift the piano from the wings. Vinny ducked back past Perce Westerman, loud with an alcoholic goodwill, who was collecting tickets at the door, and went round the side of the sprawling timber hall, down the slope to the basement supper room. Three parallel rows of trestle tables stretched over with cream paper and loaded with cutlery, crockery, and jars of sugar, ran the full length of the room. At the far end a rough work section had been hastily set up near the tea-urn, and round the counter thus formed dodged senior prefects carrying top heavy platters of sandwiches, tomato, cheese, baked bean, from the labouring, near-disembodied hands of staff and school committee. Lost in this crush of effort against time, Vinny felt more confident that her appearance would not even be noticed. She edged crabwise with the flower tray, jostled but strangely happy, especially when she saw Mrs. Striebel calm and golden and untouched by Howard’s libels working stolidly over the butter bowl as she pounded milk and fat into an economic elasticity. Breathless, eye brilliant under electric light, animated by noise, dust, and the intermittent bursts of jazz from upstairs. Vinny offered the tray with the sprigs of wattle, the cabbage roses tied with blue silk, the daisies bedded back in maiden hair, offered and was received by a startled Helen as the tray thrust forward impatiently before her.

  ‘Why, Vinny, my dear, how lovely they are, and how kind of you to go all the way to Pratten’s! I hope you managed to get home for tea.’

  Vinny squirmed with love and embarrassment. She dropped her lashes over the shallow curve of freckled cheek.

  ‘Have a sandwich now, anyway,’ Helen continued briskly, and reached behind her for a plate piled up with triangles of bread.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs. Striebel,’ Vinny murmured, worshipping. Furtively she looked at Mrs. Striebel’s dress, loving and envying. ‘Who’s getting the posies?’

  ‘Not me. I’m not nearly important enough. They’re for Mrs. Findlay, the women on the judging committee in the cake competition, and the wives of all the important local men. Sprinkle some water on the flowers, Vinny, from that glass there, and then put the tray up on the shelf out of the way.’

  How Vinny adored her when she said things like, ‘I’m not nearly important enough.’ It was a descending to take Vinny into her confidence, making them equals in the levelling of jocularity. Friends. Almost.

  Behind her Pearl Warburton’s voice shocked the warmth. ‘Hullo, Mrs. Striebel. Hullo, Vinny.’ She paused deliberately. ‘Got a new dress?’

  Vinny swung round to see Pearl, plump, powdered, staring insolently at both of them. She thrust forward a pink hand to touch, ever so gently, the ruching across Vinny’s breast and, as soon as she did so, flourished her own beautiful organdie skirt. Her full lips were moist and smiling unkindly. Her eyes wandered slowly over Vinny’s person. She smiled again and turned away.

  ‘Anything I can do to help, Mrs. Striebel?’

  Incontinent rage swept words of accusation to Vinny’s trembling mouth. How dare she? She who had scribbled filth all over the lavatory walls. Only hope that Mrs. Striebel had not even heard of the matter kept her from shouting out the truth. She had not told Mr. Findlay the names of the wrongdoers. She was afraid. She felt with a primitive superstition that it was better to keep that ammunition as reserve, that it would be a permanent form of control over the group.

  Helen was angry for a different reason. She had looked on helplessly at the calculated offensiveness of the older girl, and now, feeling the blood refluent once more, as if it had paused in its flow, gripped the trestle edge nervously until her anger had withered away and she was able to speak with calm. Her eyes sought Vinny’s indefinite grey ones when she replied, sought uselessly, for Vinny, ridicule eroding all the happiness and excitement she had felt earlier, stood with her face turned away, now the first anger had passed for her too, pale with shame for her appearance and oddly afraid.

  ‘Nothing, thank you, Pearl. Just behaving yourself inside and outside the hall will be sufficient help.’

  Pearl flung a suspicious look at the bland face. There was nothing to discover. If she were snubbed, her features quickly resumed their mask of enigmatic indifference, her aplomb appeared not one degree dislodged. She stared brazenly once more at Vinny’s flounces, said goodbye to Mrs. Striebel, and wandered off arm-in-arm with Elizabeth Turton, who had been giggling foolishly a few yards away.

  Vinny’s hands trembled as she lifted the tray to the shelf beside the urn. ‘Leave me alone,’ she prayed. ‘Please, God, make them leave me alone the rest of the night.’ But she knew in her heart it was no use. God only answered Warburtons and Klees and Turtons.

  Neither she who was so disconsolate nor Helen who was so angered found continuance of that earlier pleasure in each other’s presence, and so Vinny drifted out of the supper basement into the warm anonymous night. The crowds were fairly streaming in now from Murray and Jerilbee roads, in pairs, in trios, in quartets of varying degrees of anticipation according to the age of the person and the propinquity of the opposite sex. Station-wagons, motor-bikes with side-cars, and decrepit semi-utilities were all blurring and clattering down the dirt roads, honking good-naturedly at each other before spilling their occupants, their pleasure offensive.

  At eight-fifteen sharp the band whined into life, progressing through hesitant disharmonies towards the intricate pattern of a fox trot. Hulking youths from the outlying farms, still smelling of the beer they had been drinking straight from the bottle in the deserted grass paddock at the back of the hall, swept into motion with grinning confidence, the nipped-in-waisted, high-busted pouters who slatterned out their living in the milk bar, the hotels, the Gympie stores. The drums exploded under Mack Stevens’s massive wrists, the saxophone whimpered up to orgastic heights, and the dance was under way.

  Vinny slid shyly past Perce Westerman and sidled along the wall to find an empty space. All around her the heavy sweaty serge was selecting with finical caution the tarty nylon, the voile, the stiffened cotton. A few of the older pupils had filtered into the adult group that seemed to dominate the hall, though the dance was run ostensibly for the school, and with over-red faces shamblingly invited their schoolmates to partner them. Vinny watched the girls on either side of her go off, haughty at the favour they were conferring, coldly, not glancing again at their partner once they had assured themselves that he was worthy. She longed, but hopelessly, for someone to ask her, ruining her very chances by looking up too eagerly whenever a boy approached and smiling or saying, ‘Hullo, Trev’, or ‘Hullo, Johnno’. They would look at her for a moment, smile crookedly and mutter backwards, escaping. At nine o’clock she was a thin, isolated figure twisting her hanky round in her moist palm, pretending beneath the bright paper ribbons, the crimson and the tangerine, that she was having a good time.

  Moller was standing at the door when he noticed her. Immediately the recollection of what she had done for him stabbed him with its frightening kindness. He searched round the walls of the hall for a likely partner for her, but there was not a boy in sight who was not dancing or busy talking in the middle of a group. He walked from the lights of the hall into the smooth night and felt as if he were entering a pearl. The blackness was richly round and the parallels of mist that had padded out the valleys in the town’s centre had merged into a low-lying white sea over which the archipelagoed tops of trees lay holding their branches very still. Muffled giggles and protestations floated to him from the rear of the hall, and he smiled sardonically a
s he thought how the indentations in the long Kikuyu grass would reveal wordlessly the evening’s folly to the garrulous small-town sunrise. The paling fence jettied into the night, and it was here that Moller found Tommy Peters busily chalking short and obscene phrases.

  The boy’s face was lit up by the glow sifted through the hall’s dirty side windows. Moller watched him for a while. Tommy was a study in concentration, his tongue resting on his downy upper lip, his splodgy hands deformed by thirteen winter’s chilblains, lining out the words with as much loving care as if he were writing a treatise. Four- and five-letter words were about the only ones he could spell accurately, Moller mused. He hated to interrupt and mar a work of art. Tommy straightened for a minute to admire his statements. Because he was not really dull enough to make use of slander, none of them was libellous. He was merely interested in completing as large and varied a list as he could of all the words he knew drove old Findlay mad. From his pocket he drew a crushed, half-smoked cigarette which he relit.

  ‘Boy,’ Moller said softly.

  The chalk and the cigarette dropped together, but the latter continued to burn in the long grass. Tommy moved a cautious foot to crush it, but before he could do so a mammoth boot smashed down upon it, a steady hand seized his right arm and he was pinioned. He waited for the sarcasm to flay him. It did not come.

  ‘Boy,’ Moller repeated very gently, and he turned Tommy so that he was forced to look at the fence panels on which he had written.

  ‘Sir,’ Tommy said uncertainly, and wondered just how much punishment lay in store.

  ‘A lover of Anglo-Saxon derivatives as well, Peters. You shouldn’t spend too much time in serious pursuits. You’ll stunt your growth, lad. Smoking is bad, too.’ He twisted Peter so that the boy was forced to look straight into his eyes. ‘Is this your first attempt at sign-writing?’ he asked.