by Thea Astley
The toe jabbed him again, finding a tender spot between his ribs.
‘Come on, sleepy,’ urged the kid-sister-let’s-all-be-buddies-and-pals voice. ‘What’s the joke?’
She has a quality of persistence, Moller thought, that is staggering. The simplest brain surely would have deduced by this time that I am antipathetic. He was tempted to see how long she would continue to prod with tongue and foot if he remained silent, but another voice, rolling under the trees, rich with elocutionary zeal, made it impossible for him to feign sleep.
‘Come on there, Robert,’ it mouthed. ‘You look utterly squalid spread out like a sumptuous bum. Get a racket, you lazy old basket, and partner me.’
He gave up. He opened his eyes into the face of a very handsome horse which was bending over him. Its dark eyes rolled under heavy brows that met in slight irritation above the long well-bred nose.
‘Must I?’ he protested, knowing all the time it would be hopeless to protest. He rose clumsily, slapping the seat of his trousers, and took off his sports coat. Why doesn’t she whinny? he asked himself petulantly, but no. No. It’s those rounded vowels, those hideous soundings of ‘utterly’ and ‘too’ and ‘really’ and ‘frightful’. Rankin and Talbot, the both, they keep their vowels so open it’s a wonder they don’t have verbal diarrhoea. He smiled with an effort and held his racket against the sun, blotting it out from himself. He decided he must tell Helen that last little joke, and for a minute was perplexed by her absence. Then he recalled that she had been once and that that once had been enough. When he remembered her embarrassed determination not to accept further invitation, the explanation of his own presence filled him with momentary self-disgust; but this frailty of self-analysis was swept aside in the usual anticipatory pleasure – at five o’clock the doctor, the generous patron, would produce from his steamingly cold ice-box a dozen dewy bottles of beer.
He strolled across the lawn after Freda, still pressing his racket to the side of his head. Garth Cantwell joined them, and a few minutes later Jess Talbot came bounding across, her colossal thighs white as peeled grass husks below her tight blue shorts. Her enormous bust shook with ferocious zeal at all of them, and she gave her racket several practice forehand and backhand drives.
‘Oh God!’ Moller murmured to Cantwell. ‘I feel we’re going to play a strenuous game. Just look at that enthusiasm!’
Cantwell sucked in the last possible fragrance from his cigarette – he was not mean, but that was the sort of socially acceptable parsimony that had got him where he was – and smiled and shrugged. His well-fed body slouched now from the effort of years of being successful, which, in his case, meant being on top at all costs; but he still covered it reverently with expensive tussore and tweed, regarding it as something sacred, a temple not of the Holy Ghost but of financial enterprise. He could not whip the money lenders within.
Moller embarrassed him. The fellow never seemed quite en rapport with the group and he wasn’t sure what to say to him. To agree was rather like letting down the team – his team, the body of people with sporting attitudes and civic conscience who ran the town.
He grunted non-committally and said, ‘Partner Freda, will you, boy? I don’t think I’m on form today either, and that will even things up.’
‘There’s a fine compliment for the women, Freda,’ Jess said. ‘We’re not only equals, we’re their superiors!’
‘Jolly well about time!’ mouthed Freda.
‘Oh Christ, for Chrissake, Christ!’ Moller groaned gently into the side of his bat, sibilated as if sharing some esoteric knowledge with the wood and the unresponsive cork surface.
They struck for service and then began playing. While Moller leapt automatically, his arm striking with almost a reflex motion at the feathered ball, he managed to detach his concentration from the game and think seriously of the last week-end in the city, when for the first time he had felt a signal inability to share Helen’s activities. Connivance and the acid testing of propinquity had both failed to achieve for him a tolerance of situation, a docility of all the factors that seemed to work unendingly towards his and Helen’s eternal separation. Although they had not spoken since of the decision he had made the previous Saturday when he had determined to take her away for a few days from the town, the implications of the spoken word lay at the back of their eyes and startled them with occasional recognition when they passed on the way to classes, or shared periods off, or sat listening to Rowan and Sweeney bickering during the luncheon recess.
The whole of the western sky was quilted with mackerel cloud rippling away behind Bundarra into the Mary Valley. From the front of Rankin’s home set on the northern hillside of the town the view of the whole valley in which the town lay opened up its pocket of activity, its crucifix of business, and the neat bungalows pimpling the five exit roads. The afternoon carved its frieze of grouped people, of the white swinging arms and legs and the smack, smack of bat against pellet flying birdlike over the greenness, the five figures under the tree set like Fragonard figurines with all the latent sensuality of careless pose. Already the sweat blotches were dark shadows under the sleeves of Cantwell’s expensive tussore, revealed each time he swung his arm. Between the cleft of Jess Talbot’s breasts the sweat trickled unpleasantly; her face, white instead of flushed, was beaded with a rosary of water droplets about brow and temple. Moller looked pleadingly at his partner and she flashed him an automatic smile of over-white teeth.
‘Serve up,’ she said, bright and crisp with command.
It was trial by ordeal. Five o’clock came as slowly to him across the gardens as the creeping shadow below the mango tree. When finally the nine of them fanned out around the beer and the sandwiches, the triangles and rectangles of social requirement with the ham and bread leaf-thin among the watercross trees, the sun had begun to tip over the shelf of the mountain in an untidy splash of gold.
‘It’s going to be a marvellous sunset,’ someone said.
They all turned to look at the clouds, the hundreds of white islands radiating from behind Bundarra until they flushed a ragged arc half-way across the sky. Lunbeck’s thin, anguished face tortured by dyspepsia and sex swung back upon them.
‘Lovely!’ He smiled agonisedly. ‘Really lovely. To stay here and see it go down. I feel I must stay. We must, mustn’t we, Ruth?’
Ruth shrugged indifferently and then smiled radiantly up at Talbot. She looked down at the splendid length of her brown legs displayed with near immodesty below her denim shorts.
‘What about the mozzies?’ she asked with the insane innocent of someone in the mid-thirties being childlike. Talbot almost whimpered at her philological tampering, yet with the perverted joy of the flagellant he asked her to repeat the remark.
‘The mozzies, Alec, the mozzies,’ she said, nearly but not quite on the point of nipping him on the arm.
‘Heavens above!’ he protested. ‘Say the whole word, Ruth. Not those shockingly inarticulate abbreviations. How I abhor them! “Mozzies!” “Cuppa!” “This arv!” ’ He consigned them like a papal bull to a bonfire and proceeded to burn them with his wrath. ‘I work amongst all classes as you know, Ruth, and Welch would bear me out saying this, that never, not even with the boiler hands, do I speak carelessly. I really believe to be careful in speech stamps a man, gives him a definite authority, a standing.’
‘The Chrysostom of the creameries,’ Moller murmured.
‘What? What was that?’ Talbot was weak on historical reference. He swung round, annoyedly prickling like a spinster whose virtue has been challenged. Moller drained the last of his beer, ignoring him, while the others did not know whose side to take vocally – the intellectual or the snobbish – but inwardly, to a man they voted for Talbot, not by reason of his old-maidish preciseness, but because they could not support a cynicism that they could not understand.
‘Here! Have another beer, Talbot, old man,’ Rankin urged,
confident within property, amongst the social perquisites. ‘Where are the Welches, anyway?’
Jess Talbot, happy to see one of the other women publicly chided, smiled like a Botticelli angel, the merest whisper of mirth over an infinite sadness.
‘He was needed at the factory,’ she said, ‘and Marian went to Gympie for the weekend to play in a golf tournament. Really, I shouldn’t say this, I suppose, but I don’t know how she can do it, do you, Freda? Those two unfortunate girls of hers are neglected shamefully.’
Freda Rankin demolished a small cake in three sharp snapping movements. The opening gambit had been played, and they would be well away soon with their chosen victim skulking pawn-like upon the field of their gossip.
‘Utterly incredible!’ The consonants cracked and bounced like gravel. The big red mouth munched up mill-wife Welch as if she were a cocktail onion. ‘Mind you, I admire Sam Welch. Rather common, but he does know how to control things. A marvellous efficient fellow, and in spite of Marian, too. My dear, she’s such a bag of poison I don’t know how her children survived nine months at the breast. Still, I have to ask her … her husband’s position …’
Her voice vanished into an innuendo of silence. Making every gesture appear brilliant, she handed round the sandwiches. Like communion breads, thought Moller, like tribal tokens of an infinite ill-will towards others outside the group. The crowd blessed themselves and ate the flesh of their victims with such overt smacking of scandalous lips it was really intolerable. Fragments of conversation, the clichés standing out skeletal, the frame on which the verbose platitudes fleshed themselves, reached Moller’s ears as he sat on the lawn. Ruth Lunbeck’s voice peppered a long denunciatory story concerning a relation in the permanent army with almost every inanity possible; it came in bursts of static through the cooling air – ‘deserve horse whipping … only a mother could understand … supposed to be an officer and a gentleman …’ The last filled Moller with an indescribable pleasure; he was later to tell Helen he thought that the phrase had died with the Anglo-Indian novel, but no, here it was vibrant and living in Gungee. He was startled to hear Ruth Lunbeck ask, ‘Would you like to go to bed with a black fellow?’ and felt amused admiration for her ability to reduce such problems as apartheid and racial discrimination to such singularly simple postulations. It was wonderful, too, to hear the murmurs of well-bred assent, money singing sweetly with money in a chorus of unanalytical decision. Moller pursed his lips and whistled a little Haydn rondo, hoping to annoy Talbot.
Lunbeck, smiling in a sort of agony, crossed over to Moller and squatted angular upon the grass. Elbows and knee joints, the thin nose, the bony head, all projected their pain against the sky, estampes of self-pity, of egotism. He jabbed the air with his cigarette and, about to torture Moller, burnt the flank of the blue afternoon. Moller leant back on one elbow and stared at nothing but the legs of the group, naked or trousered, hairless, hairy, varicose and smooth as oil. They performed all sorts of unlovely stripings across the leafy hedge as they slouched or spread or straightened.
‘Have a good week-end?’
Moller switched a wary grey eye upon the ecstasiated profile beside him.
‘Fair,’ he said. He suddenly felt quite cold and curiously cautious.
‘I very nearly asked you for a lift on Saturday.’ (The caution rewarded.) Lunbeck’s face became that of a mystic. He smiled bonily, twisting the thin, over-kissed, over-kissing skin of his lips into a dangerous crescent. Moller saw that the orange down on his chin and cheeks turned pure gold in the slanting sun. There was a bracket of fine lines near the corner of each jawbone where the skin stretched even more thinly. The eyes vanished, recessed in smiles, dangerous under the projecting orange eyebrows. Moller looked away to the hill whose trees lashed the summit like hairs all raggedly exposed against the scarlet burning clouds.
‘There’s your sunset starting,’ he said.
The sheer torture of the horizon tapered away through the deep reds of heat, through crimson and orange to pink that was nearly white. Each island of cloud – and there were hundreds of them – showed its western edge a glaring gold against the flat bright colour of the rest of it.
‘ “Patens of bright gold”, ’ he said, but knew he was not diverting the other.
‘Really lovely. Yes. Quite lovely. And no mosquitoes yet.’ Lunbeck turned suddenly, his face filled with brotherhood, and pressed his points home with the skill of a picador. ‘Yes. As I was saying, I very nearly asked you for a lift back here last Saturday, but I thought your car might be full up.’ He smiled dreamily. ‘Funnily enough I was in Brisbane myself last week-end. Had to go down unexpectedly on Saturday afternoon. I ran out of local anaesthetic and tri-cresol, and Rankin couldn’t help me out. I knew I could get some from a friend down there who always keeps far more than he needs. He talked me into staying overnight … No, thank you, Cecily, my dear. Cecily, I’m just telling this old reprobate here how I saw him in Brisbane on Saturday night. He got away too fast for me to buy him a drink.’ He glowed with the roguishness of it all.
Cecily Cantwell perched birdlike before them, beaking eagerly towards a suspected titbit. The plate of cakes in her hand sloped dangerously, forgotten. She fluffed her feathers, all quivering expectation and chirruped, ‘Oh Harold! How odd! What a small world!’
‘Not so small, really. Not a bad pub that, is it, Herc? You were just leaving when I came out of the bar. I must say Helen Striebel looked pretty marvellous. Didn’t know she had it in her.’
Cecily Cantwell almost fell off her perch in her excitement.
‘Oh, Robert!’ she reproved. ‘And we all thought you went down to see Lilian. And here you are hitting the nightspots! Naughty man!’
The brain of a tweeting bird, Moller told himself. A silence had fallen upon the others, who now turned on him smiles of various kinds. Talbot’s wife displayed momentarily a mask of sheer cruelty as if at last some kindly fate had played Moller and Helen Striebel into her hands.
He helped himself to another cake from the plate in Cecily Cantwell’s hands, and she glanced down in surprise at his action, at seeing the plate still there. Turning to the others, bright with the moment’s revelation, she sensed a mood of excited reproof flying between them.
‘I did go down to see Lilian.’ Moller became angry that he was even accepting the challenge, but for Helen’s sake he continued. ‘She is extremely ill. She will not get any better.’ Murmur, he told himself, out aloud murmur your concern, your sympathy, but underneath keep saying to yourselves what a bastard the man is, carrying on with his wife so ill.
They murmured their concern; they pressed their sympathy on him. It was all in order. He scratched the lobe of his ear and said, knowing no one would believe him, ‘I happened to run into Mrs. Striebel myself in town. She’d been to some graduate dinner and we had a quick drink together.’ He paused to inspect the finger that had been scratching and then added, ‘Yes, she did look marvellous. Quite surprised me.’
No one believed him. But Cecily Cantwell said well there that just showed what a small world it was after all, Harold, who looked at her as he looked at so many women across his wife’s shoulder with a ‘we-two-understand-each-other’ look. Oh, the confusion beneath the close trimmed skulls and the regular weekly hair settings with their packing of dried frizziness into close matted unlovely curls! What turmoil of new suggestives churned and spumed around the new victims! Lunbeck stared solemnly at the burning western sky. For a few weeks at least, he assured himself, Ruth’s attention would be diverted from his own erotic activities into a between-house-rushing of speculation, of under-blind-peeping, of checking on Moller’s hours, watching his lights, listening to the identifiable, accusing, late hour creak of his front gate. Devoutly he offered postcommunion thanks. A rush of gaseous wind to his throat made him belch. He covered it up with a social cough and lit a cigarette as Frank Rankin’s big blond head, awash with the mental habit
of the bedside manner, loomed up large amongst the embarrassment, about to dispel it with a calculated phrase of camaraderie. It was as if he applied a spiritual stethoscope to the heart of the group, listened to its thumpings, and decided on a course of behaviour. Prognosis achieved, he poured beer all round and drew his guests forward to the terraced edge of the garden to watch the sunset. Gerberas starred the borders, massed in lemons and pinks before the great ranks of calendulas whose splotches of crude colour stretched to left and right along the stone-flanked beds. The mass of colour lay at their feet and then the eye was distracted downwards to more colour over the succulents and trailers of convolvulus that welded the banks of earth and stone together. The sea of prismatic light broke in a final wave of intense flowering against the close growing oleanders along the western fence.
Together with the darkness rushing in from the coast, a silence fell on the nine men and women poised above the town that swam below in an orange shimmer, each house splashed on one side with light, iron roofs sparkling unbearably. The sky-islands of cloud spread back towards them in a blaze until they were doused in the faint blue of the sky zenith. Bird echelons, lost as inland gulls, arrowed wistfully across tree and house top. For a moment, together in the loneliness of the evening and the flamboyancy of the sunset, the group felt at one. Husbands, surprised, drew near to wives, and Moller, apart from this coupling, felt a great surge of unhappy sentiment as he gazed down on the sprawling tin roofs of the Gungee Railway Hotel. There, Helen would be feeling the unbearable compulsion of rented room and furniture, the stale jest of clanking goods trains that even now he could see jerking like toys on to the siding, and above all, the dissonance, like some great atonal work, of the upstairs radios braying through three different commercial stations a fanfare of militant joviality in the advertising splurge. He turned half away. The planets of flowers, the asteroids, the constellations, were all drained of colour and bent milkily away from him in the black stippled air. It stretched the finest of nets over the valley. And then quite suddenly the houses lost their golden sides and the sun lurched drunkenly over the world rim.