by Thea Astley
‘It’s good to see you again, Helen. The holidays were no holiday for me.’
‘It’s good to see you, too.’ She paused. Her eyes looked away into her own shyness. ‘Robert, I heard you tell Greg Sweeney that Lilian was worse. I’m so sorry. Won’t she get any better? Not any better?’
‘Not a scrap.’ Moller remembered the tossed bed, the crumpled pile of women’s magazine, the sweet smell of ether and the oranges, unwanted, piled beside the flowers. Remembered, and felt a frightening weariness at the thought of it again next week and the next and the next with the tossed bed, the magazines, the sweet smells of ether and the oranges and the flowers.
‘Not only will she not get any better,’ he said, ‘but she is slowly, very slowly, becoming worse. And indefinitely, it seems. Only one thing is definite, Helen, and that is she has completely lost the use of both legs.’ He tapped the ash off his cigarette. It fell into the light layer of chalk dust below the table. ‘She’s too miserable to be interested in much. Each week-end I see her she plucks nervously at the covers most of the time and hardly has a thing to say.’ He stood up agitatedly and walked over to the window. But his agitation was not really with Lilian.
Helen sensed that he wished to say no more about it so she said abruptly, ‘My holidays weren’t the best, either. Margaret was down with ’flu. The city was jammed with Show visitors and I lost a tenner first day there. I’m glad we don’t have to write a holiday task about them.’
‘Talking of holiday tasks,’ Moller said, swinging round from the window, from the pain in his mind, and hurrying back to the pile of books on his table. ‘I’ve got something here that might interest you, Helen. A child with an idea at last.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Vinny Lalor. Yes, Vinny.’ Moller laughed as he saw the disbelief on the other’s face. ‘Not brilliant, but original. It gives quite an interesting sidelight on that unhappy kid’s existence.’
He sorted through the books until he found the grease-spotted cover that badged most of her exercises, and opening up the book he read, ‘ “A Family Day”.’ He stopped ‘Get that, Helen. Even the title has escaped.’ He glanced down at the book again and flicked the page over. ‘Would you mind if I read it?’
‘No,’ Helen said. ‘Go ahead. The staff is as one when it’s a question of discovering a little intelligence.’
Moller hooked a chair out with one foot and having sprawled easily in it he continued to read in his soft voice:
‘ “All yesterday I wondered if families were like ours. At first I thought there could be no answer to this and then quite strangely I found that there was. Very early I began to walk from our home which is at the top of Duncan Hill and passed most of the houses on this side of the town well before ten. At one place after another the same scene repeated itself, a crying child, a woman shaking a mop over the stair rail and a man lounging back in his chair and shouting an order.” I like that bit,’ Moller said. ‘ “This part was different because my father shouted his last order three years ago and then left. I think this is a pity for though it is bad to be shouted at, it is worse to have no one to shout at you. I feel if he were here with us, shouting or not, we would be more like other families.
‘ “In the evening I went past the same houses and from each the lights shone boldly in the darkness. In one house there was a piano with someone making a mistake over and over and in another I could see people laughing over their tea. It was like looking into another world. But from nearly every home in the street blared the radio tuned to a talent show. The announcer was so kindly he was false and the performers were so sincere they were sad. And when I crept home, there was mum listening quietly to some classical music because she has always wanted us to be more refined. So when she became busy with the ironing, I went softly to the radio and tuned in to the talent show too. Listening to the bad singing and the hill-billy guitars I felt happier than I’d ever felt before. Our house was the same now as all the other houses in the street, and I was part of the sameness.” ’
Moller looked up at Helen’s disturbed face.
‘Not exactly the usual style of holiday task, is it? Poor little beggar!’
They both thought of the child and her isolation. Helen saw the playing-fields curving back to the peppertrees and the tennis courts, and the senior pupils in groups forming permutations of gossips over their lunch hour activities; and apart from them, outside all the groups every day, the hair-bright, plain-faced child trying desperately to look as if she were walking purposefully, as if there were a goal somewhere – and not succeeding. Sometimes when Helen was on playground supervision she would come up to her and ask a trivial question about the afternoon’s mathematics class. Her requests were such thin ruses to give her approach some point that Helen, filled with pity for the child’s friendlessness, would walk across the grounds with her, talking about school work and the girl’s interests as long as the lunch duty lasted. This was bad in a way, for it not only set Vinny Lalor apart but it made her the butt of unpleasantness, charges of currying favour. Yet neither the child nor her teacher felt capable of acting otherwise. Moller spoke to her, too, in the yard, but less frequently; and then after a while, when it was discovered how she loved reading, both of them lent her books of a better quality than the meagre contents of the school library could provide. Despite this particular attention, however, her essays had never before revealed, apart from an occasional felicity, any mark of the sensitivity behind her observations.
‘It’s quite incredible,’ Helen said. ‘By the way, how do you think Vinny would know what was bad singing and what wasn’t?’
‘I suppose she heard her mother criticise the talent shows.’
‘That’s so. Incidentally, I had no idea the father had left home. I was under the impression he was dead.’
‘It happened just before I came here,’ Moller said, ‘but it’s such an old story no one ever discusses it. Mrs. Lalor seems to manage somehow. Better off, probably. Two of the kids still home are working, and they help out. You’ve noticed Vinny’s clothes are never quite up to scratch. That seems to be the one thing some of the nasty little beasts in her class can’t forgive.’
‘God, they’re cruel,’ Helen said. ‘And there seems to be nothing one can do about it.’ She paused. ‘I feel,’ she said deliberately, and thereby setting up the first piece in a dangerous montage, ‘that I would like to do something special for that child. Give her a treat that she’d remember with pleasure for a very long time. How about running her down to Brisbane with us next month and taking her to a ballet or a play or something like that?’
Moller jerked his head back in surprise. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked.
‘Perfectly. I’ve always had a weak spot for that girl.’
‘But think of the complications. There’s the mother to ask. Findlay probably will think it odd and the rest of the kids will give her hell.’
‘There’s no need for Findlay to be told and Vinny won’t mention it to the others. I’ll see to that. As for Mrs. Lalor, I’m sure she would be pleased. I know her.’
And did know her: the seedy dresses, the hair worried through its curling pins, tortured by steel waving grips, the grammar struggling desperately to surface the swamp of local carelessness, the seedier finance behind the upbringing of six children, Vinny last and least lovely; knew her in her gaping timber house behind casuarina and lantana hot-prickled-red-yellow-freckled maze of overgrown hedge, up garden path between the asters and chrysanthemums tangled in fertility to the wistaria’d veranda; as a pale face through leaves and worries.
‘She would be pleased,’ Helen repeated. ‘Vinny could stay at Margaret’s with me and be perfectly safe. Robert, I’ll enjoy the variation in my routine, so be a little more enthusiastic.’
‘When will you ask?’
‘I think I’ll stroll up to Lalor’s this evening while the impulse is still fresh.�
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‘If you’re determined … it might be a good thing at that,’ Moller said. The tiredness was sweeping over him again in the rising afternoon temperatures. He stretched his knotty hands painfully-pleasurably, above his head and grunted. The period bell would ring in five more minutes. Placing a hand on Helen’s arm, he patted her lightly. A fly drummed backwards and forwards across the ceiling, and Corcoran’s voice raised in sudden anger throbbed along the veranda. All the newness of term opening was gone in the establishment of routine. Everything was as usual. Findlay came into the room through webs of heat, ovoid and perspiring and genial, but relentless in his pursuit of minutiae, to post another notice on the staff-room board.
Two
The repetition of the cottage pie drove Helen from the green cave of a dining-room earlier than usual. Where calendulas spiked multiple suns above the five dining tables and cloths gravy- or porridge-spotted from earlier meals, the six permanent boarders had sat tense in their dislikes of each other’s eating habits, seeking conversational refuge with the commercial travellers or the dairy inspectors or the forestry officers on their way to the Brooloo station. The sucking action of one mouth dreaded and fought back the clicking dentures of another. One pair of hands chopped all the food into prissy segments, another forked in clumsy gobbets, angry plugs. Conversation was sterile from two meals a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, curving its full cycle through weather and politics and local scandals back through weather and scandals and local politics. Mouths minced or pursed or dogmatised or vanished altogether in refined outrage and jaws became prognathous over unimportant points of view.
Sharing the salads and the roasts with Helen Striebel were Alec and Jess Talbot. The husband, young, graduate in science with the views of a respectable lady church-worker – and the face – was bacteriologist for the butter factory for a year. His wife, all amazon thighed, huge-busted, and gone to seed at thirty from over-zealous hockey and basket-ball playing, plunged with desperate seriousness and ellipsoidal vowels into every new piece of gossip as if it were a pool, and surfaced refreshed and whale-like with a struggling little fish – the privacy of some local wrongdoer. Under the guise of interest in their fellows and the pretence of purely disinterested analysis, they tossed the wretched thing back and forth between their careful grammar, their nominative pronouns after the verb ‘to be’. What wallows of refined moralizing! She had failed to graduate but constantly referred to the fact, so that, first having driven home the point that she was university trained, she made the listener wonder how such a leaping, pouncing mind could possibly have flunked the course. Helen always longed to shout ‘Goal!’ as another reputation bounced its full career and succumbed to a final, hearty schoolgirlish blow.
Alec Talbot loved music. In their bedroom he kept a tiny radio that he played softly at night, a gentle background to the raucous vulgarity of the quiz and give-away shows that pounded from the other rooms. As he went about the hotel on mundane errands, he would whistle with infinite detail and piercing clarity whole subjects from symphonies, sometimes whole movements of the more esoteric chamber music. However, as Helen was the only person in the hotel who recognised the works, no one else knew how cultured he was. So all this effort with Brahms and Mozart was rather a waste, for Helen had ceased to discuss music with the Talbots when she discovered that they used it merely as a dividing line between themselves and the hicks.
‘And what is it like being back, Mrs. Striebel?’ Jess Talbot had asked.
Helen only smiled – she had become expert at facial answers – and continued eating.
‘I suppose,’ Jess Talbot pursued, smacking the ball straight between the goal-posts, ‘that you saw Mr. Moller when you were in Brisbane. He told me he was going down for the fortnight.’
Helen looked up coldly.
‘Brisbane has a population of nearly a million. There must have been several thousands of Show visitors as well. Would you be surprised if I said we didn’t meet?’
The other woman laughed carefully. ‘My dear, how silly of me. Of course. I just thought you were such friends, you know. Always deep in conversation when I see you coming home. Alec, pass Mrs. Striebel the bread. No. I don’t think I missed seeing the Show this year. After all, Alec’s work means so much to him, and the factory was very busy, if only because of the Show. Isn’t that so, Alec?’
His face, sallow with idealism, gazed seriously across the table.
‘To cap it all’ – he looked away and his chin shook earnestly – ‘the cooling system collapsed on the Wednesday and we were working non-stop for eighteen hours putting it right.’
Helen fidgeted with her soup spoon. Along the wall sombre horses glared moronically at her from the sporting prints. Opposite, the Talbots stared critically. She regretted not bringing a book to the table; she would have enjoyed the Talbots’ reactions to her breach of manners. Between the green hands of a monstera deliciosa she could glimpse the Farrellys sipping fastidiously, bowed down by their profits, starved by their economies, and respectable, respectable, respectable. The tweed that formed around him a loose circular lovableness repeated itself on her in spinsterish outlines of propriety. They inclined genteelly towards her as she watched them, and Jess Talbot, diverted from a particularly savage anecdote, wreathed her face in godliness and dabbed essence of Christianity behind each honest-to-God, straight-forward, head-girl smile.
‘They’re pets, aren’t they?’ she said, turning to nod. ‘So open to deal with. And regular church-goers, too. Though of course I don’t hold with popery, but it does seem to go hand in hand with hotel-keeping. However, one thing I will commend them for, won’t you, Alec? I will commend them for their kindness to young Allie when she had that trouble.’
‘What trouble?’ Helen asked bluntly, knowing, and resenting discussion of it.
‘My dear, you know. You did know, didn’t you? You must. It’s the most fascinating tale. It appears that last February one of the bank clerks who –’
‘Jess, please,’ Alec interrupted. He took the last portion of the butter in his abstraction. His chin shook. Helen consulted the menu and ignored Jess Talbot’s confiding eye that promised ‘later’. Behind her at the next table she could hear the railway clerk in heated argument with the bank teller, each riding a horse to win and backing it with anger.
All blossomed in pink, early for the pictures (a love story and a Western), and ready to race away after the last plate was cleared, the second maid took their orders with indifference, dreaming of the brilliantined, tight-panted hero who would later compromise her in return for three shillings’ worth of tears and giggles. She could hardly wait. She returned with the pie all pranked in weedy greens and ice-cream mounds of potato, so uninviting in appearance that Helen felt she could not eat it. She cut neat bays and inlets into its outer edge while the Talbots whacked into their heated-up roast. Ron Coombes, chief boiler hand at the factory, coarse and good-natured, bachelor and pleased to be, bounced in late to join the teller and the railway officer. The Talbots nodded coolly. They were very conscious of the social gap between Coombes and themselves, and they were always fearful of some dreadful familiarity following upon a lowering of the barrier.
‘It makes them uncomfortable when we’re friendly,’ Jess would say, wrapping her self-justification round her like a chenille gown. Helen sighed relievedly, seeing him approach, and gave him a wide and grateful smile. She decided suddenly against finishing her meal.
‘Hullo, Ron,’ she said, and rose. ‘Excuse me’ – briefly to the Talbots. ‘Ron, I must see you later about some lighting I wanted, rigged up for the school dance next month. Mr. Findlay said you were the one who did it last year and wondered if you’d be kind enough to help out again.’
‘Glad to, Helen,’ he said.
The Talbots shuddered at the exchange of first names and Jess was later to say to her husband that she thought perhaps Mrs. Striebel was just a wee b
it common … well, not … you know … and the Beethoven Seventh thundered on behind her, for she always talked through the very best music.
Helen went upstairs to her room that was really nothing more than a cavity veranda’d and corridored at each opening, with a monstrous wardrobe against one wall, a leprously stained mirror, and a bed. To these basic forms she had tried to introduce the intelligence of personality with prints tacked on the wall, a mantel radio, a clock, books and magazines. But when at night the clean-cut angles of light sharpened themselves against the furniture edges and behind the milky looking-glass she saw her thirty-two years staring back at her with placidity and resignation, she knew what mockery four walls made of the prints and the books, the mantel radio and the clock.
She took a jacket from the wardrobe and then sat on the edge of the bed to change her shoes. The sagging wire moaned and shuddered, the fluff from the mattress sifted imperceptibly. Oh, the infinities of daily boredoms, she thought, the sun driving her each morning to the grind of work that was mainly thankless, and in the evening driving her back again to the hotel with its patterns of boarders and meals. Tonight the longing for escape was intolerable. There seemed to be no fellowship in the new books she had brought back with her from the city. With both anger and pleasure in her mind she shut her door firmly and locked it. Below in the street the evening lay in grey points and streaks tattered by late dog-barkings and flapping newspaper sheets. Smiling, she entered its anonymity.
Once out on the road with the gums crowding in rapidly upon her, the bracken-scented wind curling round her, she felt immediately better. Two people passed her in the darkness and called out good-night. She was pleased to answer them and walked contentedly up the long hill that led to Lalor’s. A peculiar feeling that the evening divergence from habit – the seven o’clock bathing, the eight o’clock reading, and the ten o’clock sleeping after the Gympie mail had passed through pratically under the hotel verandas – was in some way a focalizing of the whole of the day’s trivia into one important central point filled her with elation. She walked even faster.