A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  ‘Are you all right, Vinny?’ he asked.

  Two desks away Betty Klee’s amusement burst from her in a giggle, but Moller quietened her with a glance. He noticed that there were a number of grinning faces as he repeated his question.

  The child replied with lowered head.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Very well. Sit, everybody,’ Moller ordered. The policy of England in her colonisation programme in eastern America continued uninterrupted for twenty minutes through degrees of boredom and clockwatching and stifled yawns. Moller was reading a note from a supplementary text when he heard a scuffle at the back of the room. He looked up in time to see Vinny Lalor flop sideways as the girl on her left tried to raise her from the desk where she had fallen. She was diving into deepness, into nothingness, into the whole heart of the world, tumbling round and down like a stone. Moller strode forward into a startled quiet and put his arm round the girl’s shoulders. She stirred slightly, and half-dragging her, he edged down the corridor between the desks and then carried her out of the class into the staff-room. There he laid her gently on the sofa.

  Helen had been sitting in a centre of grief, unable to work, and unwilling as well. She jumped up to help, but her grief went with her like a garment, and her eyes met Moller’s with other queries in them than the one she asked.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know, Helen. She looked pretty sick at the beginning of class but said she was all right. Do what you can, will you? I can hear that bloody mob starting to buzz already.’ He kissed Helen quickly. ‘Buck up,’ he said. ‘Sursum corda.’ And raced out of the door.

  Helen gazed down at the quiet face under its mop of red hair. The forehead and mouth were shining with perspiration. Helen quickly loosened the neck of Vinny’s blouse, and then sat her up, swinging the child’s legs down over the side of the settee. Then she pushed Vinny forward until her head drooped between her knees.

  After a while a faint colour stained the girl’s cheeks and she slowly raised her head. The rocking walls steadied down, the dreadful heat and nausea receded, and the centre of her world was Mrs. Striebel seated beside her, a look of anxiety on her face and one arm round her body.

  ‘Feel better now?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ Vinny whispered. Her voice crept from her mouth, the untrue whisper of the sea that lives in a shell.

  ‘Lie back,’ Helen said, ‘and put your feet up. I’ll get you a cup of tea.’

  She prepared the tea, saying nothing more until it was ready and she had poured both cups, setting one on a chair by the child. For two days she had been unable to work, her whole person sick with the wretchedness of leaving; and her body and her mind travelled a monotonous plain of spiritual hopelessness that vanished before her into further miles of unrelieved flatness. After the first unavoidable discussion with Findlay, she had tried not to see him, had spoken to no one but Moller of her approaching transfer and awaited the oncoming-never-coming, too-soon-here week-end. This diversion in her afternoon was welcome because of the hiatus it created between this pain and that, because it gave her something to think of other than loving and being loved and the cessation of both those things.

  Vinny’s eyes had closed. Now and then, Helen noticed, a small muscle twitched in her cheek, but apart from that she lay perfectly still.

  ‘Here’s your tea,’ she said gently. ‘Think you can manage it?’

  Vinny opened her tired eyes and squeezed out a tired smile.

  ‘I’ll try.’ She sat up and reached for the cup, held it between both hands and sipped. The heat made her jump back slightly and then she sipped at the tea again.

  ‘Better? You’ll be able to stay here the rest of the afternoon in comparative privacy. I’m off until last and there won’t be anyone else in here.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs. Striebel,’ Vinny said.

  Clumsily she placed her cup back on the saucer, spilling some tea, and stared at the window, the coats, the briefcases. To have been here alone with Mrs. Striebel last week would have been an unplumbable ecstasy. She hardly cared now. Worship was failing her. Involuntarily she sighed.

  ‘What do you think made you faint?’ Helen asked, swung in by the sound of the sigh from the roadways of her own pain to those of another. ‘Tummy upset?’

  Vinny looked up quickly, wondering why she should ask just that.

  ‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘No. I guess it was the heat.’

  ‘Probably,’ Helen agreed. She hesitated, then said, ‘Would you rather go home? It is too far to your place, you know, and I think you’d really be better off here.’

  ‘I think I’ll wait a bit.’ Vinny found herself moving through the groves of conversation as cautiously as a cat. ‘I don’t think I could walk that far, anyhow.’

  Sipping some more tea, she lay back. All the indecision of the past few days, the frightening worry, seemed to have been climbing towards this period of time when the emotional whirligig took respite in this quiet, safe corner of the school with her last friend beside her. The resolve taking shape in her mind was tiny now as a figure seen at the far end of a long avenue, moving towards her, increasing in size and hope and bearing with it the tremendousness of her own request. For a long while she lay silently, her eyes closed, hearing the soft sounds made by Mrs. Striebel’s pencil as it made correction marks on the pile of books in front of her. Resolve flung its giant shadow down the avenue of trees on her face, her resting body.

  The period bell rang.

  Miss Rowan clattered in from the infants’ department to get a song-book from her locker. She stopped short on seeing Vinny.

  ‘What’s up, lovey? Sick?’ She did not wait for an answer, merely rattled on to her locker and rummaged for the music.

  ‘Culture next step for the little souls,’ she said over her shoulder to Helen, and sang ironically:

  ‘Swish, swish, I’m a tree,

  Sway – ing, sway – ing.’

  At this point she found the book and went out of the room still singing, and with exaggerated actions:

  ‘Swish, swish, I’m a tree,

  Swaying in the wind..’

  Helen did not feel like laughing, but she could not help herself at the sound of Miss Rowan’s unhappy voice. She glanced at Vinny, who had watched the scene indifferently. That is how I really feel, Helen told herself. Yet this child receives the impression with no visible emotion, but I, who am experiencing the worst week the years have given me, laugh. Perhaps because she is a child she misses the humour. Perhaps she is worried as I am. Perhaps. Perhaps. She had no wish, either, to continue marking books that after tomorrow she would never see again. All of those twenty samples of handwriting, the full, the flowing, the meanly cramped, the backhand, the semi-print, the really irritating style of Howard’s with the curlicues on the capitals and final g’s and y’s, would become by some form of retroactive inhibition as if they had never existed. From the next room she could hear Moller’s voice explaining a point, soft and rich – and male. Oh God, it was the maleness of it that made it hardest to listen. Quickly she closed her mind to its sound and flung a question at Vinny. Any question.

  ‘Did you enjoy the dance?’

  Vinny was still in the long avenue of her fancy and she stared back at her questioner through the leaves of worry and hope.

  ‘It was all right,’ she answered carelessly.

  ‘Only all right?’

  ‘Well … pretty nice, I s’pose.’

  Helen smiled kindly. She was grateful to Vinny for involving her thoughts.

  ‘I think you had a good time, Vinny,’ she joked pleasantly. ‘I saw you dancing.’

  Vinny said nothing. A memory struck at Helen’s mind of Vinny awkward in Saturday morning sunlight, grinning past her in the gardens.

  ‘That photograph,’ she said. ‘Remember the one you ha
d taken in Brisbane? We never did anything about that ticket, did we?’

  ‘No,’ Vinny said, thinking. That will be the last time anyone will see me as thin as that. ‘No,’ she said again. ‘And I don’t want to either.’

  Helen was startled. As far as her emotional state would allow her to notice such things, she had thought that the girl had seemed upset and withdrawn for the last few days, but sullen rudeness was most unlike her. She put out a tentative hand and patted Vinny’s arm.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘is something the matter?’

  Vinny turned her head away to conceal her agony. Now at this very point of help she felt her resolution fail in floods of tears of wretchedness that ran unchecked down her face. She gulped and rubbed the back of her hand across her streaming eyes and fumbled uselessly in the front of her tunic for a handkerchief.

  ‘Here,’ Helen smiled kindly. ‘Take mine.’

  She laid her hand once more on Vinny’s arm and perhaps it was the happiest moment the child ever had. After a while her sobs were less shaken, her eyes glanced shyly from under their red puffed lids at Mrs. Striebel, and gathering all her courage like a diver, feeling the warmth of the hand on her arm and the warmth in the eyes watching her, she said, ‘Please, Mrs. Striebel –’ then she stopped.

  ‘Yes?’ Helen questioned gently.

  ‘I – I don’t know how to ask this, but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Have you any books you could lend me about babies?’ The plunge taken, the body striking water that was not terrifying after all, to vanish into depths of release.

  The puppet that was Helen’s mind jerked convulsively at the end of the verbal string. She knew she must be careful or she would frighten whatever shy gazelle of fear lurked in Vinny’s mind by her next question. One thing she was quite sure about and that was that here was not the moment for asking why. So she said, as casually as she could, ‘You mean about having them?’

  The answer came faintly and effortfully: ‘Yes.’

  Helen hesitated for a minute. Vinny was staring down at her lap, at her freckled fingers knotted across her tunic. Putting forward words was delicate as web-spinning. Remembering her own adolescence Helen felt certain that what Vinny really wanted to know was the origin of the baby, how it came to the mother’s womb, not how it grew in that nine months of confinement. But she was discreet enough not to ask further.

  ‘Being thirteen can be very difficult,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like it much myself, I remember. All sorts of ups and downs and feeling out of everything. I think I can get you a book or two you might like to read. I know they’ll help. Only I’ll have to ring my sister and get her to send them if she can get hold of them.’

  Vinny raised her eyes for a moment.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs. Striebel,’ she said. But more than ‘thank you’ was in her heart.

  Helen patted Vinny reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry. How about coming down to the hotel on Saturday morning? I might have them by then. Anyway,’ she added, ‘we can have a little talk.’

  The tears had stopped flowing, and Vinny’s face shone mildly, redly, but less unhappily. Here was the plank for the tired swimmer. Her friend, her last, only, dearest and best, had promised her help. Today was Thursday, and tomorrow would be Friday, and Saturday was so close it was almost here. Once and for all her worry would be solved like a problem in algebra. She smiled her gratitude.

  The staff-room door flung open after the most perfunctory of knocks, the sound and the opening of the door coming in the same movement and Findlay cast his importance before him like a shadow.

  He looked at them both curiously and then said, ‘One moment, Mrs. Striebel, if you’ll excuse me. I’d be glad if you’d come to the office for a moment.’

  Helen’s face twisted wryly and she rose. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said softly to Vinny.

  Findlay fidgeted in an embarrassed way. Since he had met Vinny over the notices he was always conscious of the moral lapses of those who should be in authority; it undermined all the things he taught the children to believe about the importance of adults.

  ‘Not well, girlie?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You should be quite all right there,’ he said, ‘without Mrs. Striebel’s ministrations. Come along, Mrs. Striebel. There’s a little matter concerning the monthly return I must fix up.’

  Eleven

  ‘I have never dreaded a day ending so much, nor longed for it to end so fiercely at the same time,’ Helen said.

  ‘This isn’t the end.’

  ‘But I go tomorrow. I have to go in the morning. I made a mistake about the train.’

  ‘That’s ten hours yet.’

  ‘But, Robert, I can’t see you in the dark.’

  ‘We’ll write.’

  ‘And then we’ll stop writing.’

  ‘I say you’re wrong.’

  ‘As you like.’

  ‘Whatever you like,’ Ruth Lunbeck said to the long unhappy body at her side. ‘But I say they deserved it.’

  ‘You judge like God,’ her husband grunted into his pillow. ‘Judge me,’ he reproved in a moment of compassion for the victims, ‘if you dare.’

  ‘December and June dey come along da bays, fat as figs and t’ousands of t’em. Absolutely t’ousands!’ Szamos stirred salt into the supper coffee. ‘And vill I be glad, momma, to get avay from dis dirty little shop and town. Ven dey ask for a milk-shake today, I fill like saying all da time, ‘Vot flavour is it, lady? Moller or Striebel?’

  ‘Silly coots,’ Sweeney said, cuddling Rose Jarman in the front of her father’s car. ‘They were bound to get caught. It’s crazy to fool around when you’re married. That’s one thing I’d never do, honey. You can be sure of that.’

  ‘Oh, Greg!’

  ‘Marry me, Rose.’ It was more an order than a question.

  ‘Yes, I do dare judge you. Playing around for years and I’ve taken it. What do I get out of this rotten marriage?’

  ‘Clothes, cold creams, permanents. The lot,’ Harold said.

  ‘Poppa, I can hardly vait, me also, to get that little house at the sea. Maybe next summer, eh?’

  ‘Helen, you know I love you more than anything on God’s earth. Don’t be so hopeless about it all.’

  ‘I’m going to be a realist, Robert. If it goes on – well, it goes on. But no matter what happens we’ve had our – forgive me – fun.’

  ‘You sound rather like me.’

  ‘You’ve been a good teacher.’

  ‘My dear, you’ve been the most apt of pupils.’

  ‘You’ve talked all through the Bach. Now what?’

  ‘I said she was rather an over-confident person, anyway. The jolt will do her ego good. I really cannot bear people who are so cocksure with so little basis.’

  ‘Really, Jess, be fair. She wasn’t an unintelligent person, you know.’

  ‘I grant a certain text-book cleverness. But she had no sensibility. Alec, lower that just a little. And in addition, think of the benefit to the school.’

  ‘There is that, of course.’

  ‘Of course I was right to tell Findlay, Sam. You have no thought for our girls.’

  ‘You’re a bloody interfering bitch,’ Welch said. ‘And right now I lump the kids with you, see?’

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Not as drunk as I’m going to be, Mary Ann. Not nearly as drunk. When I’ve pushed this bottle over I got a couple more lined up. Stick around and see me really tick.’

  ‘Allie can do her room out tomorrow afternoon after she’s gone. I think I’ll change the furniture round in there.’

  ‘Kind of superstition, is it?’ Farrelly lay contented in sheets like bank-notes. ‘We’ll keep it for C.T.s. if you like, instead of permanents. Make a bit more on it.’

  ‘Put that phone down, Cecily.
It’s time for the news.’

  ‘Just a minute, Freda. What was that, Garth?’

  ‘I said put the damn’ phone down.’

  ‘Garth’s getting mad, darling. I’ll see you tomorrow. ’Bye.’

  ‘Happy?’ he asked. ‘Busy spreading it round?’

  ‘Last patient, thank God.’ Rankin closed the door between the surgery and the hall. He could see his wife in the living-room still reading one of the glossy magazines she seemed to need monthly. Like a shot, he reflected.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Perce Westerman. Had a flint in his eye.’

  ‘Hear the news?’

  ‘You mean Helen Striebel’s leaving?’

  ‘M’m.’

  ‘Vaguely. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Cecily Cantwell rang me a while back. She ran into Ma Findlay. It’s all fearfully confidential till she goes.’

  ‘That means everybody knows, then.’

  ‘Did you say good-bye to anyone, Helen?’

  ‘I had to see Farrelly, of course. And just before I left school this afternoon I said good-bye to the few who were still around. Rowie and Rose and Millington, They were surprised, but you could see the zest for the situation all over their poor dear faces.’

  ‘Kiss me.’

  ‘I’m not staying!’ Marian shouted. ‘Not with you. If necessary I’ll ring Cecily and ask can I spend the night with her. See how you like that.’

  Welch smacked the table hard with his palm. ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ he roared. ‘Do you hear? No such bloody thing! There’s been enough mischief done with all the yackety-yacketing in this joint. From now on you’ll lay bloody well off.’