A Descant for Gossips

by Thea Astley

  ‘How was that?’ Moller murmured when it was all over. ‘That your pals the Talbots could see us now wrapped in compromise and culture! It would support their conversational sorties through a month of badminton. Is there anything else you’d like to hear, Helen, or will we get busy on some coffee?’

  ‘The coffee, I think. And after a while some soothing trio or quartet if you have it. I heard Alec Talbot whistling something last term I meant to ask you about. I think it was Schubert, but I wouldn’t be sure.’

  ‘When you’re strengthened by coffee,’ Moller said, ‘you can sing it for me.’

  ‘I’ll have to be really strengthened, Robert. I think I’d just as soon look through your record pile and work it out by trial and error.’

  ‘So be it. Come and help me brew this stuff, Helen. I’m still trying to achieve the perfect elixir.’

  Helen rummaged in the cupboards, found bread and sliced it, and began making toast. Moller put the coffee on to simmer in a saucepan and leant back against the sink watching her as she worked. He found it unbelievably pleasant to have her there with him and was smiling happily when she looked up and saw him.

  ‘After a year,’ he said.

  ‘What? What after a year?’

  ‘This. Just this. You working away in the kitchen, coffee on the hob, a record digested. Here, you’ll need some cheese for that toast.’

  Bending down to forage in the cupboard behind him, he kept his broad back turned to her so she could not sense his emotion. Among the dim edges and corners, the uneven planes of grocery packets, lonely as a late night city, he became suddenly still as he peered down the lanes between the prisms and cubes of food. The vision of his aloneness and the aimlessness of his progress blew like a gale-blast along the thoroughfares of this toytown, and he touched the sharpest of points that indicated barren evenings and days, became lost in his mental projections among the alley-ways between the biscuits boxes and the flour, and shuddered at the solitude of this new landscape. With an effort that was painful he straightened and turned heavily and smiled and then not-smiled into Helen’s face. During the cessation of speech the very climate of the room had changed, though there were still the red cotton curtains and the cheap imitation tile work above the sink and the bread bin solid as a Bible behind the door.

  ‘There’s one thing I must make clear, Helen,’ he said, and did not touch her in spite of his wishes, but she felt as if she had been touched all the same, ‘that after tonight I’m afraid I can’t reject the situation between us any longer. I have decided that I shall have to reject Lilian – not in so far as there are oranges and magazines and the exchange of platitudes, but in so far as you are concerned with me. Quite suddenly, Helen, I seemed to have lost the wish to control my impulses towards you.’

  He touched her arm with his large gentle hand and rubbed the sleeve of his other arm across his forehead where moisture lay in the furrows like dew. Helen looked down and seized mentally on the three objects within her grasp – the bread, the knife, the butter. She learnt them by heart and shut her eyes and memorised them and opened her eyes and found them still present like a talisman. Having reached this stage of the journey together and having desired it sub-consciously so long, yet still she was doubtful of how to reply. The disturbance in the blood made speech impossible for the moment, but finally she looked at Moller’s sad face and was shocked into the beginning of a smile.

  He essayed one, pitifully, and said, ‘Helen, please. I wish to court you to the ultimate old-fashioned scandalous end. My intentions are dishonourable. Please accept this as the warmest compliment I can pay you.’

  She laughed and the tenderness between them merged more comfortably with the bolder stream of their old comradeship.

  ‘That is the way I accept it, Robert?’

  ‘Do you, then?’

  ‘I think perhaps I do.’

  ‘Helen,’ he said, ‘Helen, let’s hurt no one else in doing this. Especially Lilian. We must be sure that this snivelling bloody-minded town is unaware of us. How it would salivate over this conversation!’

  He let her arm fall to her side and turned to the coffee that was bubbling. He took a strainer from a drawer, poured coffee into cups, and snapped the switch down on the stove. Helen buttered toast and set it out on plates, finding in the simple domestic actions a kindling delight. And as they sat over their supper they investigated the possibilities of silence together and on its quiet plains they mustered the flocks of their gentleness. They sat a long while, hardly saying a thing but utterly content. Moller watched her fair head, her intelligent eyes and the curve of her mouth with a dreadful hunger, but still did not touch her. She was, he reflected, all the day and all the night he could wish to know, the goal of his heart and thought. He tried, in this room that was so full of Lilian, not to think of his wife, and the struggle between pleasure and pain must have shown on his face.

  Helen asked, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Of you – and Lilian.’

  She was surprised to see tears spring to his eyes and he turned his head quickly away from her.

  ‘It was Ulysses’ private woe – the endless pattern and perplexity of never-ending oceans.’

  He laid his head on his arms in a defeated way, and Helen moved so quickly round the table to him it was as if she had not moved at all, but had always been there with his head cradled against her. Their bodies moved as naturally to each other as flowers to light and they comforted each other so until their time for parting came under the clock’s warning.

  The daphne was still clouding the garden with scent under the china-white moon. Shadow made their faces featureless, but not their voices when they parted by the gate, and Mr. Lunbeck, smoking quietly beneath his guava tree, was overjoyed to find he was not alone in his pursuit of Eros.

  The pattern on her pyjamas was washed into an anonymity of design, yet Vinny still found upon the yellowed surface of the flannelette the ghosts of scrubbed daisies and leaves. She stood skinny in her singlet before the wardrobe mirror, and thrust her arms absentmindedly into the coat sleeves. The elastic at the top of the trousers was loose now from boilings. Every so often she had dragged it out through a little opening and made knots to tighten it, so that it was beaded like a girdle of discipline, but incapable of combining further elasticity with the shortening process. She held her pants up with one hand and switched off the light while she shouted good night down the hall to the family. In the darkness she heard their mingled replies, and then she edged between the layers of chill that soon would become layers of warmth, curling in a ball with her head turned to the sash window opened a few inches at the bottom. The sky was filled with pastings of cloud. She watched them and said little phrases to herself and whispered, ‘O desolate eves along the way’, and could get no further, her memory tricking her. Over and over the words emerged, passing like smoke between the old washstand and basin and the wardrobe, curling mistily in the darkness-becoming-lighter of the room with less and less meaning in the words as scenes from the evening repeated themselves in profiles of invitation from Mrs. Striebel’s clever face, or her hand touching Vinny’s shoulder, or her words ‘my dear’.

  ‘My dear.’ Vinny said them aloud and turned to hug the pillow in a paroxysm of ardour. She smiled foolishly and ached with love and joy and a desire for martyrdom for her idol’s sake, and then went into a raptuous fantasy of herself and Mrs. Striebel in dangerous climates, with herself heroic at dying moments, nobly trying to stanch the flow of her friend’s tears.

  A wind rising all seagrass-scented and smoky from paddock burnings threw violence across the screen of her window with the clumped foliage of the bloodwoods flung like crazed mops across the star-white sky. Through their turbulence she sensed the outlines of her classmates’ hostility, their indifference; and although she tried to fight the image and recapture the tenderness of a few minutes before, she found herself whimperi
ng with part-pain, part-annoyance in the darkness and burrowing her face into the pillow to cut out the vision of the sharpest shame of all. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no’, and ground her knuckles so hard into her eyes that the night exploded in flashes of colour that washed and waved together and changed shape like watermarks on paper and then became a steady golden oval with a diminishing black centre. It was ringed in orange light that was metamorphosed from diamond shape to cruciform and then it sputtered out into the soft blackness of her relaxed eyelids. The pattern was always the same.

  It had happened last summer term, her birthday term.

  Her mother had suggested asking them, but Vinny protested because she knew it wouldn’t be any good, anyway; yet in the end her mother won. So she had invited, with almost Christ-like humility of purpose, the very girls who disliked her most, hoping at the back of her mind that some miraculous volte face might occur, that after this birthday treat she would be accepted.

  The five of them came. They all lived on her side of the town. They came in their best frocks – which were not so expensive, perhaps, but made Vinny’s shrunken voile a sad matter. And they bore token gifts of the cheapest kind – a small bottle of perfume, a pocket diary, a plastic brush-and-comb set.

  ‘It’s your first teen year,’ her mother had sentimentalised. ‘You must have a party, love. Oh, I can still remember mine! What a time! Dad, stingy though he was, God rest the old basket, asked every kid in the street. And they just loaded me with things. Hankies and books and stockings and undies.’

  Remembered Vinny bitterly, as the tiny packets lay insultingly on the blue quilt of her bed. The guests had jostled one another, giggling and gazing curiously at the poor room. They primped before the wardrobe mirror and plumped out fat fringes above their freckled or browned country faces. She saw Elizabeth Turton notice the hole in the mat beside the bed and with loathing watched her nudge Pearl Warburton into a shoulder-shaken spasm of suppressed giggles. Betty Klee’s great moon face swung round the room like an arc light. Her fat calves bulged over the tops of bobbystocks, and her feet bunched out the shiny leather court shoes she was wearing.

  ‘Well,’ Vinny said awkwardly. ‘C’mon outside under the trees.’

  She led them down the dusky hall to the sitting-room with its cheap home-made cupboards and its drab easy chairs exposed in the afternoon sunlight that slanted through the windows. I hate it, she thought sulkily, but I won’t let them see it.

  All her visitors looked about them in an appraising fashion.

  Making adult conversation, Pearl Warburton said, ‘We just bought a new lounge suite in Gympie. Genoa velvet in autumn tonings. Very fashionable, I think.’

  ‘Ooh, it’s lovely!’ her satellites chorused Greek fashion. ‘Ooh, so soft when you sit down you nearly vanish and your legs just come right up off the floor you go back that far.’

  ‘That must be fun,’ Vinny said sourly, with the obscene image of Betty Klee’s monstrous baby rolls of white fat in lavish display.

  Her mother was busy in the kitchen, red and perspiring over the fuel stove, making sausage rolls for the afternoon tea. She whispered to Vinny as she stood near the door, ‘Go on, lovey. Take the girls out to play in the yard. It’s too hot in here.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you have made them this morning like I said?’ Vinny whispered back resentfully. ‘I wanted to help.’

  ‘Now that’s enough. You know I had to finish Rene’s dress so she could wear it this arv.’

  Vinny grumbled an unintelligible reply. Rhonda and Janet Welch heard and sniggered uneasily. Their broad stupid faces did not register the year between them.

  ‘Cost sixty pounds,’ Pearl continued, unwilling to release this social weapon. ‘Cash. More if we got it on terms. Mother says terms are just helping the Jews. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Lalor?’

  Mrs. Lalor looked up startled by the phenomenon of adolescence new since her day. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said. She felt a strange discomfort in the presence of this over-developed girl with the cold eyes and the full, wet-mouthed smile. ‘Still, we got all our stuff on terms and glad to, things being so dear and us not being able to rake up the money. Wouldn’t have had a chair to sit on otherwise.’

  Mother, mother! pleaded Vinny’s mind. She saw the others smirking and staring critically at the cane settee and the cut-out calendar pictures spotted with fly dirt and the hideous carved clock that never went.

  She managed to lead them outside down the five back steps, counting them silently to herself and clinging to their numerical fact as a thing of strength amidst all this half-suppressed criticism and mirth. The mango trees were green cumulus of shade and coolness along the back fence with the pattern of their foliage overlaying the trunks with black. For a few dreadful moments they all stood in complete silence. Vinny was uncertain how to entertain these girls with whom she shared no common denominator save that of age, for she was an immature thirteen and under-developed physically alongside their boy- and bust-conscious selves. They were playing the part of young ladies visiting – below their social inclinations and in adult guise. So that when after many false starts and awkwardnesses the group degenerated into hoydenish hide-and-seek and tag, the spectacle of large, ungainly girls throwing themselves among the privacies of tree and shrub, shrieking at contact or an avoided one, was entirely grotesque. Vinny felt peculiarly apart from the boisterous group. She would have enjoyed the games far more than any of the others had they been played with any genuineness; but she was conscious all the time of a condescension and an innate burlesque of what was happening. So after a while she excused herself and went to the lavatory at the end of the yard.

  The four narrow walls enclosed her in a prism of stifling heat. She sat looking at the sawdust and the neatly cut squares of newspaper hung on string and the sunlight coming in yellow planks past the door jamb and the cracks between the timbers. There were spiderwebs thickly in the corners and along the roof beams and between the floorboards rows of paspalum spears. She felt safe sitting there and listening to the squeals of her visitors with a sullen but contemptuous distaste. Three minutes passed. The sunlight slid quietly across the floor. Outside the squeals suddenly gave way to silence, followed by sly giggles and a murmur of voices. The visitors must have come closer to the acalyphas crowding the lavatory walls and sheltering it from the lawn, for she could hear but not distinguish Pearl Warburton’s glib tongue licking a piece of gossip into shape to start it rolling from one to another of her listeners in a variety of exclamatory noises.

  Vinny rose softly, prickling with curiosity, and opened the door on sun and dark-red acalyphas chinked with the white and blue dress of the guests. She stood very still and caught her breath and then moved in closer to the shrubbery.

  ‘Silly old bag,’ Betty Klee was saying. ‘Bet she burns those rolls. And there won’t be enough, anyway.’

  ‘Not if you’re around.’

  They did not spare each other. ‘You trying to build yourself up?’

  ‘No wonder Vinny’s queer,’ Rhonda whispered. ‘It’s that poky old house and that awful looking furniture. It’d be better if she burnt the house, not the rolls.’

  There were shrieks of laughter at this and then Pearl Warburton’s voice unctuous with insincerity.

  ‘Ooh, you are awful, Rhonda, saying that. Why –’ She hesitated with artificial coquetry. ‘Why, Royce is rather nice, don’t you think?’

  The silence following held its expectancy flower-tilted to the girl behind the shrubbery and the germinating lasciviousness of the girls hidden from her.

  ‘I sat next to him at the pictures the other night. Mmm … mmm!’

  Vinny trembled with rage. She could visualise Pearl’s eye-rolling salacity in the telling, the implication of omission. Royce, whom she loved best of all the family, could not thus be kind to her enemy. She bent white and sick against the branches.

  ‘And
then after the pictures were over we …’ Here the insinuating voice became so soft Vinny could not hear anything but the flow of its murmuring and the listeners’ giggles which punctured it like reefs.

  She heard Betty Klee exclaim admiringly, ‘But what did you tell your mother when you got in so late?’

  ‘I told her the pictures were slow getting out, and anyway I put the clock back half an hour before I left.’

  ‘Ooh, Pearl!’ Choruses of acclaim and admiration. ‘Ooh, you are awful!’

  Royce, thought Vinny. He likes this girl who hates me and who has made me unhappy for years. Tears scalded her pale lids and hung upon her colourless lashes. She backed away softly from the shrubbery and came up to them from the orchard end of the yard, trying to appear casual and indifferent to the tight-knotted tortoise of their gossiping heads. The brown, the black, the blonde jerked apart, the white and the blue emerged individually from the pastiche in five variants of nastiness and arrogance. When she hailed them they turned to her with foolish and knowing smiles and queries as to where she had vanished. The sun was shining splendidly on the green and the red making rich splashes of shadow. The grass washed backwards and forwards in a breeze. The figures had that sudden clear arrested appearance of a photographic ‘still’ and when their lips moved the sound came as if from a dubbing. At the back door her mother appeared and called to them; yet even though they all heard there was some intangible relation binding the six of them in cool enmity on the lawn. They stared at each other, and the Welch girls squeaked with nervous laughter, until the moment when Mrs. Lalor’s voice sliced again into the silence. Wordless, they walked to the house and the back sitting-room where the long homework table bore the best table cloth and the best crockery.