by Thea Astley
Peter winced. He knew about the notice in front of the school gate. He knew who had done it.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘Honest.’
Moller stared at him thoughtfully. ‘I think you’d better get in to the dancing. Vinny Lalor is without a partner.’
He turned Tommy towards the hall which now throbbed, a prism of gaiety, paned in yellow, busy as an ant hill, the mothers, the queen ants, seated along the sides storing up slanderous impressions with which to sweeten their week-day yokes, the girls flaunting, the boys loud-mouthed, boastful to each other of victories they would achieve at the evening’s close. Forcefully he propelled the boy through the door towards the lonely figure on the bench, and then turned quickly away, unable to bear to watch the denouement.
After leaving Peters, Moller sought Helen in the supper room, where he found her weary over the masses of food. She turned to him a face frank with love and fatigue. Because she knew they would soon be unmade as lovers by time and distance she felt she could afford the simple pattern of honesty to reveal through eyes and lips what for months she had been trying to dissemble. This might have been finality, she thought, the aim of all I ever hoped to have, the culmination of a life’s love wishes realised in the one person; somewhere beyond these days there lay a trust that all the greener longings of the mind would find fruition responding to a new compulsion of time to be kinder. But, bright as a symbol, the official letter lay within her purse, total in its warning; and although eyes spoke and bespoke passion, lips trembled at what they might say, all she did was take Moller by the arm and walk with him from the parakeet chatter of the women’s auxiliary to the jazz-hot-heavy dance floor.
Held angrily against him, she dared to tell him, her voice hesitant at first against the splenetic saxophone.
‘Robert.’ She waited for him to look at her. Sweeney, two-stepping vulgarly past with Rose Jarman, dug Moller between the shoulders, then was sucked into the knotted couples. ‘Robert, I received a transfer today.’
He stopped dancing immediately. She jerked against his arm and clutched him to regain her balance. All about them the grinning faces whirled. Some stared, but soon an island formed round their consternation and at its fringes the ocean of dancers broke and receded in waves.
‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Where to?’
‘Camooweal. There wasn’t time.’
‘Camooweal! Jesus Christ!’ Moller threw back his great head and laughed maniacally. ‘Oh, the separation of loving must be secured! We were warned, Helen, but it’s hard to take! What can it be? The Welches basically, or Findlay’s fear for his job? When do you go?’
‘Robert, please. People’ll hear you, and I want to keep it quiet until I actually leave. Monday week is the date I’m due there.’
‘That means you’ll have to leave here on the Friday.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Oh God! Helen, I don’t think I can stand it.’
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please let’s dance.’
He looked at her with gentleness and touched her face with his lips so lightly it could be an accident, then delicately he edged her among the dancers until they were again an ingredient of festivity, solving the complicated rhythms of the band with their bodies.
‘Will you be telling the staff before you go?’
‘No. No. And I’ve asked Findlay not to mention it.’
‘They’ll want to give you heat-proof ovenware,’ he said bitterly. ‘How cruel of you to deny them the pleasure!’
He hummed with the band. But his forehead and his hands had started to sweat and the assumed nonchalance did nothing to hide the trembling that seemed at first to be a mental thing but that later would take control of his limbs.
‘So we have a week left, Helen. A mere week to conclude – is it? – a relationship that has barely started.’ He pulled her more closely against him and rubbed his cheek across her hair. She could not bear to look up, nor was there need with the verbosity of hand clasped in hand, the devious methods of communion. Where there was no joy left, at least there was pleasure for the flagellant, Moller reflected, the imminence of separation sharpening minutes into tiny daggers; where there was no laughter there was that other most lovely affinity – tears, quick springing, born of hopelessness and so fed. He wondered if Helen were crying and, placing a finger under her chin, forced her to look at him. He had not let her hand fall while he did this and she met his gaze in surprise.
‘You see?’ she said.
‘You cannot dance like that,’ he said. ‘They’ll accuse me of unkindness as well.’
He danced her through the open hall door and into the porch. A great number of people were strolling down the slope to the basement. Helen peered at her watch as they stood at the foot of the steps in the half-light. It was five minutes to ten.
‘Feel like supper?’ Moller asked with a deathly weariness in his voice.
‘Among the hordes?’ Helen pulled a face. ‘No. But I am supposed to be helping.’
‘To hell with that! The school’s had enough sweated overtime out of the staff today. Let’s get out of it. Have you a coat or anything?’
‘Wait here. I won’t be a moment. My things are in the basement.’
Helen left him and pushed her way through the stares and the greetings to where she had left her purse and cardigan alongside the urn. She hoped no one on the staff would notice she was leaving, and then quite suddenly didn’t care. See me, watch me, she thought and strode arrogantly, slipping her jacket on as she went, her head tilting defiance. Within a week I’ll be an old name to smear in this town and a source of unkindly speculation in the next. Poor bloody Robert. She nodded with anguished brightness at Jarman and Sweeney, waved at Millington and his wife and spoke briefly to Mrs. Findlay, curbing the curiosity on the older woman’s face with the most unemotional of expressions, and then passed with outward unconcern the ash-grey daubings of incurious eyes whose owners now disowning the sun’s anxieties, numb-drunk with night and its connotations, held tomorrow at arm’s length.
In the township’s one milk bar it was utterly silent. The floor clean-swept, Szamos leaned laconic behind the till reading the real-estate reports, supreme amongst the cheap mirrors and chromium plate, the deeply curved counter with six flavours in its milky maw, and the glass-top sweets bottles. Fortressed by wine gums, bull’s-eyes, peppermint sticks, he watched them enter; he was ramparted by chocolate boxes and cigarette cartons, a stack of yesterday’s menus spotted by the greasy thumbs of bank clerks, and pay-chits spiked on wire. And he was sick, sick to death of being foreign and lovable and accepted.
He looked hard at Moller and Helen and smiled in oleaginous fashion, but inwardly. The pair of them. Doing it. Under the town’s sticky immense nose. He did not know how the knowledge was his. Perhaps he had heard the girls gossiping. But there it was, and in a sly way he admired them for it. For two pins he would come out on their side when the criticism broke and storm-lashed them. Who cares? He wanted to wind up his business, anyway, and spend the rest of his days trolling Spanish mackerel off the Tin Can Bay shores. He rubbed his hands with a gentle warming motion over his obese stomach and waddled round the counter to serve.
‘Iffning, Mrs. Striebel. Iffning, Mr. Moller.’
He placed his plump fingers fanwise on the laminated table surface and shaped his features into a question.
‘Just coffee,’ Moller said. ‘One white. One black. Nothing to eat, thanks.’
Szamos went off again wordless to the urn near the kitchen door. He lit the gas, rattled two cups on to saucers and poured watery milk into one. While he waited for the coffee to heat he hummed richly, a vibrant nasalisation in which the occasional sung word stood out like a plum, and watched the two of them out of the corner of his eye. After filling the cups at the urn he carried them across to the table, wiped off its surface with a damp dish-cloth, and repla
ced the tea-stained sugar with a fresh bowl. He smiled on them magnanimously. He felt like giving them his blessing.
Helen and Moller sipped their coffee. Each sought in the other’s pained face reassurance for what the day had done to them and found only the reflection of insecurity. Insecurity more than grief that, strangely enough, was thin as the washed-down sickle moon scything the crest of Bundarra.
‘Do you think,’ Moller asked when Szamos had left them, ‘do you think there is any way we can solve this? We will be so far apart. Our only meeting time will be the holidays. Is that enough for you?’
‘No.’
‘Nor me. But what can we do? We could both give up our jobs, I suppose, and go to Brisbane to find some sort of employment. That would be a very drastic action, though. I must – Helen, please understand this if you can – I must consider Lilian.’
‘Of course.’ Helen stirred and stirred the coffee in her cup. ‘There is nothing at all we can do but accept the situation. Letters, meetings – sometimes, and a gradual shifting of our affections.’
She looked up from her cup and met his eyes steadily.
‘You’re too bitter,’ he said.
‘No. I just don’t hope for the impossible. It is an impossible situation now. Remember how I dreaded this happening when we were on our way to the Bay that time? Well, here it is. Bearable, really, when it actually confronts you.’
‘I remember.’
‘I’ve always been unlucky.’
‘You’re accepting the situation without much fight.’
‘And you.’
‘Helen,’ he said, ‘please. What can I do? I have a terrible responsibility to my wife. Successful philandering is the prerogative of the wealthy.’
‘Philandering?’
‘Oh God! I was making a phrase. You know I was only being flippant.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. But this doesn’t seem the time. I’m sorry. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.’
‘Helen,’ he asked desperately, ‘do you think I’m any happier than you? Do you?’
‘Men are always involved far less. I love you,’ she whispered.
‘Finish your coffee,’ he said, ‘and I’ll take you home to the house. You’re too upset. We have seven days, Helen, and if you’ll allow me I’ll make every one of them tell, starting tonight. We’ll rise like the phoenix from our burnt-out reputations and startle this stinking little town.’
He lit a cigarette with sad hands. He thought of Lilian and then deliberately put her from his mind, and until the following week he was not to think of her again. On the surface of his mind he kept telling himself there would be some way out of the impasse, but underneath it all he knew there wouldn’t be. He was buffeted by his love and his confusion. He heard Helen saying, ‘You may compromise me, Robert, with all my heart,’ and he watched her finishing her coffee with tiny nervous sips. He leant forward and held her hand as he lit her cigarette and became conscious of Szamos watching them. He sat back. The smoke from her cigarette rose straight upwards and tracking its course seemed to steady both of them. Lapped by a false content they knew that for the next few minutes, amidst the desultory phrases and the glances, they were awaiting with what impatience the opening of the gate, the sound of their steps along the path, the hall, and then the silence of the room embracing them.
As soon as Vinny saw the boy edging along the side towards her, the magnitude of the unhappiness that bravely she had outdistanced for half the evening became too much. Tears scorched under her pale lashes, and in an effort to repress them she turned away to stare fixedly at the stage. Diffused through her sorrow the rostrum lights blurred, fringed, held three melting black shapes that writhed, squeezing their harmonies out, came together, separated amoeba-like, black and gold. The floor whirled giddily, as she, when the clumsy touch came upon her shoulder. Grinning in embarrassment, Tommy Peters stood there, scuffing his large unpolished boots. Words would not come. He felt so soppy asking a girl to dance. Who’d want to dance with him? The over-tight shiny trousers caught him painfully in the crotch and he wriggled from one foot to the other trying to ease the discomfort, furtively dragging at his pants with one hand. Knobbled wrists, red from morning milkings, jutted out well past the cuff-ends of his shirt, and it was at these Vinny first looked before her eyes were raised fearfully to his face. She gaped miserably.
‘Dance?’ Tommy finally managed to ask.
The hard damp ball of the handkerchief in Vinny’s hand was stuffed down the front of her bodice from where it rolled to her waist and stuck out in a funny little lump. She tried to smile, but her jaws, aching from the fixed enjoyment she had forced them to register for nearly an hour, would not respond. She stood and their arms moved unaccustomedly about each other’s bodies as they stumbled in and out among the dancers.
Tommy wished he could stop. Neither was able to dance properly, although the knowledge did not hurt him as it hurt Vinny who, foolishly, had thought of her first school dance as a lyrical floating of the untrained feet in patterns of three-four, two-four, two-two. But he didn’t dare stop. He thought old Moller would have it in for him good and proper. Cripes! What a belting he’d get if Findlay got on to the notices and the smoking! Perhaps if he kept on dancing with this Lalor sheila, Moller would let him off. Her shining red hair tickled his pimply chin. Not bad-looking stuff, really. He tripped when he saw Pearl Warburton smirking at him over the shoulder of the factory foreman.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled to Vinny.
The agony in Vinny’s mind matched the physical agony of this staggering, tottering motion. Dredging up pride, she said, ‘I think I’d rather stop.’
But Tommy remembered the threat in Moller’s voice and dared not take her back to the side bench. He thought desperately.
‘It’s nearly supper time,’ he suggested. ‘There’ll be supper real soon. Let’s go down and wait.’
‘Oh, all right,’ Vinny said. She was beginning to feel ungracious.
She followed him outside and down to where a queue was forming near the side door. At least one-quarter of the crowd was assembled, chattering with that excess joviality that spreads at an assured meal-time. There was a great deal of private chyacking amongst the adults and the older pupils, while the children giggled and pushed and shouted daringly about the staff, drunk with the spectacle of dress-up. Yet Tommy and Vinny were not part of these hungry yelling mobs. They were still too shy of each other, too upset at the poor fish each had netted, to pretend overt enjoyment. Tommy kicked sulkily at stones and kept his head bowed. Vinny fidgeted uncomfortably beside him, watching the actions of his great bumbling feet.
‘I’ve seen you play footie,’ she ventured timidly.
Tommy glanced across with the faintest show of interest in his puffy eyes.
‘Las’ week? Las’ week when we beat Gympie High?’
‘Yes. Then. You run fast, Tommy.’
‘Yeah. You gotta when you’re winger. Gee, they’re onto you, though.’ He stopped kicking to look at her. ‘You like footie?’
‘Yes. I think it’s a real exciting game. Like a battle. Remember those battles Mr. Moller told us about they used to have in the olden days? Each side would pick out its champions to fight and sort of represent them. That’s what I think football’s like, for a school, I mean.’
Her eyes shone with the point she was making. Tommy looked at her respectfully for he like being called a champion, even indirectly. Ole Vinny wasn’t too bad. An’ her hair was real pretty. Pity about her dress. He didn’t know what was wrong with it except when he looked at the others, hers looked different somehow. Still, she wasn’t bad. Had a few ideas. More than that stupe Warburton or her pal, Klee.
‘Gee, I’m hungry!’
He swung his arm to send an imaginary cricket ball into the crowd. His elation was growing. They exchanged grins and even joined in the mocking ‘hooray’
that greeted the official opening of the supper-room barrier a few minutes later. The crowd spread like a sand slide once it was through the narrow opening as couples raced wildly for the seats along the trestle tables. Bannered under school flags and cardboard replicas of the badge with its motto separately picked out in painted wooden letters swinging above the room, they sprawled over forms, grabbing places for their friends; getting near the cakes or the sandwiches or close by the urn for doublings up on tea. Vinny and Tommy found themselves hustled into one of the narrowest angles in the room. But they did not mind. Squeezed affably against each other, their faces moist and genial from the sudden rush and the excitement, they felt an urge to be companionable. Tommy grinned round at everyone, whom he knew by sight if not by name. They were seated with a group of older people who had come in from a pineapple plantation as far away as the Glasshouses. But he still knew them to nod to, for he often went through on his father’s truck when he picked up cases of fruit for the Brisbane markets.
Vinny was relieved, relieved to see no critical schoolface near, eyeing her appearance disparagingly. Furtively she glanced at the frocks farther away to note how they were made and mentally to plan one for herself. Cotton, white, crisp, she fantasied, and was awakened by Tommy nudging her gauchely with a plate of sandwiches.
‘Tomater,’ he said. ‘Lovely.’
His jaws worked with gusto. His eyes gleamed. Vinny took a sandwich and found she was enjoying herself immensely. The adults at their table ignored them after the first nods and reciprocal smiles and she listened to them plunged into technicalities about cars and later a horse one of them had interests in for the Doomben. So thrown back on their own conversational resources, at first the boy and girl were hesitant, but later, mellowed by cake and an anaemic fruit syrup, they found themselves contentedly swapping hatreds for their several teachers. Vinny had searched the room for Mrs. Striebel and, not seeing her, felt her absence with a pain only one so young could feel.
Shyly she volunteered, ‘I went to Brisbane a couple of weeks ago with Mr. Moller and Mrs. Striebel.’
