by Thea Astley
Tommy gawped at her and dropped a blob of mock cream on his trouser leg.
‘Whaffor?’
Vinny giggled as she wiped the cream off his trousers with a paper napkin. ‘Mrs. Striebel took me to a matinee. It was beautiful. A play with singing and dancing and lovely music and costumes. And afterwards we had tea at a real posh place with lots of knives and forks and chicken rolled up in bacon. Kromeskies, that was called.’
‘Gee! Where didja stay?’
‘At Mrs. Striebel’s sister’s place near the river. Ooh, at night the lights on the water and the boats blooting were marvellous! And I saw a big liner come in Sunday morning before we drove back. I had a lovely time.’
‘I’ll bet.’ Tommy looked at her admiringly. ‘Howju keep it secret so long?’
‘Mrs. Striebel asked me not to tell anyone so people wouldn’t think she was favouring me.’
Tommy nodded. He had nearly told her what the boys were saying about old Herc and Stree, but thought better of it. He did not know that she knew, and, seeing she liked them a lot, with a precocity of finer feeling he did not want to hurt Vinny.
‘That was real decent of her. To take you,’ he said. ‘I bet you like her.’
Vinny glowed. Just for a moment her plainness vanished behind a front of pale skin and intensely sparkling light eyes. A small red patch of colour spotted each cheek-bone. But the magnificence of emotion was far too private to allow revelation.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. It was all she could permit herself to say.
‘I went down to Brissy last year,’ Tommy said, ‘but we came back the same day. I was helping Dad run the truck down with a load of bananas and on the way back he let me drive her for a while. It was beaut, too, till I stripped the gears and Dad walloped me so hard I thought I seen stars.’
‘Can you really drive?’
‘Oh, a bit. Drove nearly all the way back, like I said.’
He swaggered with braggadocio and gazed nonchalantly around the supper hall. The crowd had thinned out a great deal and they could see two or three of the staff drinking tea at the far end of the room. Overhead renewed thumpings of the jazz-angry feet compelled the band to more intense effort. Tommy’s watery blue eyes met Vinny’s grey ones. They both looked away in a confusion of warmth.
‘I have to go after supper,’ Vinny said, tricking her fingers into a pattern laced on the green crêpe dress. ‘I told my mother I’d be home before eleven.’
‘I’m going, too,’ Tommy said. He thought for a minute. ‘I live past you. I’ll double you home on my bike if you like.’
Outside the hall the smell of the dew-wet grass and the geraniums clumped along the hall front was sharp as a dream. Water-clear the sky had rolled its mists back, and the star-islands floated in fathoms of black air. All the roads leading out of town were palely definite until they washed away under the shadows of the stringybarks and ironbarks, the spotted gums and bloodwoods that clustered along the very margin of the dirt tracks. There were couples smoking near the doors and near the cars, and talking more quietly now the later evening hour amplified voices, gave them a crystallinity.
Tommy dragged his bicycle from under the side of the hall, and then, with Vinny walking beside him, he pushed it slowly up to the road. After some false starts, collapsings and laughter, she was finally seated uncomfortably on the bar while Tommy held her firmly in the skinny parallel of his arms and pedalled heavily. When they had ridden down the main street they coasted right past the darkened pub on the near side of the line and under the railway bridge. The goods train was still in the siding, but a red lamp moved along it as one of the station hands walked down the tracks to the northern end. The hill on the other side, once they were past the creek, was too steep for riding, so they dismounted and wheeled the bicycle side by side past the last town lamp. Vinny sacrificed her pride for the second time that evening and, having removed her sister’s shoes, hobbled along the road with her sore bare feet.
For her the night had been a turning point. Until this moment she had been conscious, frighteningly so, of having one friend only. And yet she could not really call a mature woman twenty years her senior a friend. The pupil-teacher relationship made that impossible. She did not include her family in her estimate of what made understanding and amicable companionship, because always there was the fear that love was displayed through duty, that concern was parental conscience. Her reasoning was not evolved in those terms, but it all came down to the same tiny meaning. Yet now, at this moment and under the slow saraband of tree-shadow along the out-of-town roads, she felt she had won what for years had been absent from the purpose of her day, a friend who liked her in spite of her dress, her face, her clumsy manner.
It was cooler suddenly as they neared the crest of the hill. When Vinny shivered, Tommy unexplainedly put an arm across her shoulders and gave her a timid little squeeze. And a strange silence fell on them both. His feet scrunched, the rubber tyres hissed through the dust, and the darkness of the figs filled in the road ahead and wrapped them like a greatcoat. In the black paddocks behind the fences the sound of cattle moving quietly came comfortingly to them, and at the top of the hill Lalor’s picket fence grinned greyly into the mosaic of leaf.
‘Home,’ Vinny said.
As if by consent they stopped where the frame of a giant casuarina threw a ragged phantom double across the roadway. Under the purple-grained twilight the children’s eyes shone with quiet anticipation, and Tommy, letting his bicycle slide into a tangled heap of wheels and handlebar, put his untried arms round Vinny’s shoulders and his soft boy lips on her shaking mouth. They were not certain what to do, and after their mouths moved apart, Vinny rubbed her head like a young animal against the breast of his serge suit. He smoothed his hands tenderly over her hair and she felt the tears spring sharply into her eyes. She did not dare look up, and her voice reached him muffled not only by serge but by years and years of loneliness.
‘I had a lovely night, Tommy.’
‘Me, too.’
They dropped their arms from each other and Vinny, tremulous with love, with tenderness beyond bearing, walked past him to her front gate. She watched while he picked his bike up, watched while he kicked down hard with his left foot before swinging his right leg over the saddle, and long after he had waved and wobbled down the stony road into the darkness, she stood there crying for very joy.
Nine
Tuesday morning unfolded its leaf in sudden gentle green. Coastal breezes played the sun-rays like guitar strings, plucking the aridity from the morning and touching off plangent monotones as the loquat-tree whacked against the half-empty water-tank. It swung Vinny through the last tumbled dreams tossed about like hay, through the hurtled bedclothes of a restless night, to run near-whipped by the drumming tree to the mirror slivered down the wardrobe front. She touched her lips with gentle fingers and pressed the pads at their tips to her mouth as softly as another mouth. Her whole body tautened with pleasure.
As if through a score of yesterdays she could hear her mother calling her to breakfast, and in the same mesmerised way she put on her dressing-gown, handed down, ripped under the armpit, and went along the hall. As she knotted her girdle, she knotted last night into place, safe and concealed from the breakfast ritual.
There they were, above the cracked china and the open packet of cereal, the sugar brown-lumped from wet teaspoons, and the milk still in the bottle streaked from the front-gate grass. She saw them as if they were all impelled by the wind to lean one way and she another. As they were. Above the stains, the gnarled cutlery, their faces still sleep-crumpled surprised hers in a smile and they racketed at her with laughter and questions.
‘How was the dance?’
‘You must’ve had a good time! You came in pretty late.’
‘What’d Mrs. Findlay wear?’
‘Say, sis, who was the boy seen you home?’
Vinny stopped grinning. The hungry pulp on her plate soaked up the milk as she stared back at Royce, holding her spoon in mid-air with the sugar grains tipping over the side.
‘What you say?’ She still hated him. She looked away. She thought she always would now, after that Saturday afternoon. Just looking at him made her want to run away. He kept at her, probing with his eyes, until she returned his look.
‘You heard. Course she did, didn’t she, Rene? I said, what boy seen you home? It’s no good saying none did because I heard you say good night.’
‘Ooh! Our Vinny!’ Rene moved her scarlet mouth into the shape of well-bred amusement. ‘Aren’t you starting a bit young? We’ll have to watch her now, Ma.’
Vinny shifted her gaze past all of them, out of the window and down the lawn to the mango-trees. She felt that if she did not listen they could not intrude their hatefulness upon last night. They could not snip away even the tiniest bit for spoiling.
‘Leave her alone, you kids,’ the mother ordered. Her hair sprayed untidily from its loose bun. Her eyes were hollowed from lack of sleep, for she had stayed awake worrying at the darkness, counting bills like sheep until she had heard Vinny come in.
‘Eat up your breakfast, love,’ she said to Vinny. ‘And try to put some weight on those bones.’
Not even you. Vinny pushed the mash angrily into her mouth. Not even you or you or you. I am quite happy alone, bending one way and all of you another. Rene has her boy friends and Royce has Pearl and Mum has Rene and Royce; but I have Tommy now, and Mrs. Striebel who is always kind and who has my present to remind her and who smiles when she speaks to me.
She finished her breakfast, the butter-smeared toast, the strong tea, hearing the words of the others fall about her like rain – the repeated anecdotes about the older married sister living in Gympie, the scandals from the butter factory where the foreman had a grudge on Royce, Rene’s titbits about the orthodontia of the town – it all blew past her angry mind mistily.
She shoved her chair in with a bang and went back to her room to pack her school-case. The books lay where she had scattered them along the dressing-table, and now she clumped them into an awkward bundle and dropped them in the battered bag. She could hear Royce saying, ‘What’s bitten her?’ and her mother hushing him. She dressed slowly, thinking all the time of Tommy, of his long thin face, his slightly pop eyes and his grinning mouth. She looked in the mirror at her own freckled features and decided that perhaps he mightn’t mind her freckles so much, seeing he was covered with them. She did not yet know it was the duty of her sex to be perfect, to offer to the male, no matter how insipid he might be, an unblemished appearance … For the first morning for months she brushed her hair very hard, and then, on an afterthought, picked clean her finger-nails with an opened-out bobby-pin. There was not much else she could do, she thought, not after she had gone to the bathroom, scrubbed her teeth, and washed her face.
And yet, these preparations done, she still looked the same except for the expectancy, the hope in the eyes.
Half-way to the gate she remembered she had not said good-bye, and on the point of turning back she scowled fiercely into the sun and walked determinedly ahead. The casuarina-tree was stripped of its magic in the clear light. It washed backwards and forwards, seaweed in the wind currents, and not the shadow of a kiss seemed to remain under its leaf-roof. But she paused and ate it up with her eyes, devoured it with tenderness, and stood there concealed from the house for five minutes at least watching the shadow rhymes swing across the fence stakes. What had happened to her last night was in no way related to what she had seen at the swimming-pool two Saturdays ago; young as she was, she could distinguish the gentle from the cruel in this basic relationship. The two actions to her were as far apart as north from south. She picked a small branch before she moved away, and she held it with adult sentimentality all the way to school where, superstitiously fearful of throwing it away, she thrust it into her suitcase underneath the pile of exercise books.
It was early again when she arrived, but she went up to the girls’ lavatory block and sat there in one of the cubicles quite a long time until the crowding of ankles seen below the door warned her it must be getting near bell-time. She went outside into the talk and the laughter, but no one noticed her. Pearl Warburton, combing her hair before a small propped-up mirror deliberately turned her eyes away as Vinny approached.
I don’t care any more, she told herself. Not any more. Tommy likes me. Not you, not any of you, but me, and he kissed me to prove it. She put her fingers once more to her lips and out in the harsh sunlight seemed to feel the tenderness once more upon her mouth.
Morning classes were a stale reaction from the excitements of the night before. Most of the senior pupils were tired and dark-eyed from lack of sleep and they yawned openly during lessons. An unsmiling and worried Mrs. Striebel hardly looked her way once during the period. Vinny kept glancing over to where Tommy Peters sat by the window, but he did not seem to want to see her this morning, and once when she did manage to catch his eye he only gave a quick embarrassed grin and then looked away. When this happened the whole day collapsed in sunlessness, though outside the window the sun was shining just as brightly on the hard trampled earth of the playground, and she kept hoping to herself in dozens of ways that perhaps he hadn’t really noticed her, he was frightened of being caught talking in class, he didn’t want the others to guess. Oh, that was it! It was preciously secret, theirs, personal, belonging to no one else.
She looked up from the patches of figures on the paper in front of her with such visible extension of relief brightening her face she immediately invited a question from Mrs. Striebel, who was poised upon the intricate escarpments of quadratic functions.
And so the day moved on, an ordinary day really, but to a few of them a dies irae, surface bubbling from undercurrents of anxiety that flowed endlessly. The large pendulum clock in the senior room ticked indefatigably towards twelve-thirty through the murmurousness of classes at work, the throbbing resonance of the cicada-swarming trees. Sticky heat and sunlight gummed the landscape together like glue.
Vinny took her lunch up to the pepper trees west of the lavatory block. It was quiet there, and she could eat and read a school library book as she sat with her back hard against a tree bole. She munched and idled with a few paragraphs and then, indulgent to her fancies as never before, sacrificed herself utterly to the nostalgia of the previous evening, moving ecstatic through imageries that could not see at this very moment, Tommy Peters, freckled and eager, boasting of his night out to a group of the more unsophisticated boys.
They lapped it up. The story was saucered cream. He added a little here and there and they stared at him with widened eyes of admiration and comments of ‘you never’, ‘come orf it’, ‘you beaut’, ‘she can’t be such a dope after all’. He didn’t do it because he disliked Vinny; he felt a liking for her that worried him. But he resented having given way to a soppy impulse to kiss her; he felt that by boasting he could square the situation with himself.
It didn’t take long for the story to spread. By the time the first half of lunch was over there wasn’t a boy in the senior class who hadn’t heard it, garbled by now beyond recognition but with its two participants glaringly, oh humorously there. Howard told Pearl Warburton beneath the senior veranda near the bubblers, told her with the supercilious amusement of the sophisticate. They giggled unbelievingly, unenvyingly together.
The clouds kept rolling up from the coast above Bundarra. One felt that if the day became any hotter it would burst like a bomb. Vinny sat in the privacy of the trees with her tunic pulled well up above her knees, shifting her legs now and again as they glued together in the heat. She finished her sandwiches, her two biscuits, and then nibbled an apple right down to the core. She picked the shiny brown seeds out and flicked them with thumb and forefinger, and then she wrapped the core up in a tight screw of lunch wrapper.
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Sitting under the trees, freckled over with shadow, she knew contentment. Shyness prevented her from seeking out Tommy and an innate caution dreaded rebuff; so that she was happy enough to sit there and merely think about the dance and the dancing and the supper and the secret held by the casuarina-tree. If she had been asked to do so she could not for a moment have probed the pain she once felt in crueller months: the time when she was seven and had lice in her hair and had to be sent home for a week, coming back with skull shaven beneath an old navy beret, martyred under the nudges and the giggles and the spoken taunt; or the time she had sat next to Betty Klee and Betty had kept moving ostentatiously away from her. ‘You smell,’ Betty had whispered, and she had known it was untrue; but the other girl had kept it up so long it had worried her, and for weeks she bathed herself with exaggerated care and burned with self-shame as her enemy, amused by the success of her campaign, spread the lie amongst the others till it was a byword when she passed, a constant prick to her wretchedness – when they all tired of it as suddenly as they had begun.
Time tortures less and less, Vinny thought (though not in those words), and she wondered if the period of sufferance in which she had moved for most of the year was because they were all growing older. She even loved her enemies this day, in spite of the heat. She felt towards all of them the overwhelming charity of the unexpectedly successful.
And so it was quite unbelievable when she found herself staring up into the victim-hungry face of Pearl Warburton, who had come upon her swiftly under the avenue of the boundary trees, cloistered like an angry nun among the groves, and on the thicker more silent grass of the fence margin. Behind her Betty Klee moved up from the hot yellow walls of the lavatory block and joined Pearl beneath the pepper trees. They both looked at her in silence and Pearl’s face bore the cruellest and tiniest of smiles; she licked her full lips and the moisture shone like oil in the light.
