by Thea Astley
Behind them on the quiet lawn the insect hum came with the first threatening moistness of the air. Two large planes of white were stamped across the grass as the Rankin’s housekeeper turned on the living-room lights. They all turned and went back to the court beside the trees, fumbling in the darkness for the bats and pellets dropped carelessly along the lawn. Cecily Cantwell shivered exaggeratedly and drew away from her husband’s flabby encircling arm. The moment was over. Like a signal the radio shouted from the house an unintelligible burst of jazz.
Cecily sidled up to Lunbeck in the dusk. Freda Rankin moved about hostessing pauselessly, guiding to cars, talking through lowered car windows, retesting the slammed doors in an excess of final friendliness. ‘Marvellous. Yes, of course … hardly wait next week … certainly will … no … don’t wait … it’s getting colder … yes … goodbye … ‘bye darling … ‘bye Garth … what about Alec and Jess? … Oh, with you, are they, Garth? … It’s quite a walk … no … yes … no … yes …’ on and on and on with the chiaroscuro of the car lights and the garden darknesses becoming more and more evident as the sky purpled over.
Someone remembered Moller.
No one had forgotten him really, all being hardly able to await that exquisite moment when, his soul laid out upon the table, the moral vivisection would begin. It was just that he had slipped apart from them as a member of the group; finally he had disestablished himself by his behaviour, for although this might seem unreasonable when a comparison was drawn with Lunbeck, it followed fairly naturally because he had not the importance of position that forgave these transgressions – with Lunbeck they passed for foibles pardoned, at least in public, amongst members of his own class. Lunbeck was completely unaware that he was a never failing theme of bar-room conversation, that the farmers’ wives cautioned their budding daughters and that the young louts set him up as a hero.
But Moller’s offence was unpardonable. Ruth Lunbeck would often complain what a disgrace it was when people supposed to instruct the young wouldn’t set them a good example. It was one of her favourite topics, aimed, no doubt, at diverting attention from the behaviour of her husband. The group could never forgive, either, his frequent sly gibes at their snobbery, his amusement at their monetary competitiveness, his preference for music and books to racing and football. During the three years he had worked in Gungee he had slowly built up a case for them against himself, innocently for the most part, and inevitably. His relationship with them had only needed one public, one completely unacceptable misdemeanour, and his final severance would be made.
They all knew it now.
There was something of sadness in the farewells they gave him, the unenthusiastic suggestion that he squeeze into Cantwell’s car along with the Talbots (the Lunbecks were sorry, old man, but they were driving down to some friends at Cooroy for dinner).
‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I prefer to walk.’ And he thought bitterly, you would much rather discuss me before the excitement has worn off; you want to achieve the utmost vicarious stimulation.
Lunbeck leant out of his car. His face worked with an odd mixture of affection and dyspeptic pain. He squeezed the last juices from the evening’s grape.
‘Be seeing you, boy,’ he said. ‘Give my regards to Helen.’
When the last car had roared extrovertedly down the east-turning road he said a brief good night to the Rankins and walked out of their double gates and under the hedges of tecoma, still in his sandshoes, swinging his walking shoes angrily against his left thigh. The stars were prickling out. It was quite cool. Trees, houses, shadows, rough road, arpeggios of a chord played too often, rattled away behind him in familiar landmarks, branch road, corner house, light-pole askew near bridge, bridge finally across creek, and the thrumming monotony of the factory on his right as he strode along the road towards the hotel. As if the tonality of the whole town were taken from this afternoon and this afternoon’s incidents, so now he did what never before would have occurred to him. He turned in the narrow entrance door and crossed the hard polished linoleum, passing the plant icons; he threaded the stairs to the first floor of the hotel.
Around him, concealed, the animals rustled in their burrows. It was nearly tea-time. The half-light in the corridor showed him Sweeney’s bulky frame vanishing down its length to what he presumed was the bathroom. Even as he paused, wondering on which door to knock to find Helen, the shantanlinging of a dinner xylophone beaten into anger percolated the entire building with its rage. Irresolute, he drew into the recess at the stair-head that, harbouring table and chair, served as a writing annexe for guests. Immediately a door beside it flashed open and Jess Talbot, changed by now into skirt and blouse, bounced out and turned left along the corridor. From behind the half-open door came the sounds of her husband fussing through the ritual of dressing, whistling all the time a loud and arrogant version of a Bach fugue. Across the music, within the minute, there came the roar of a lavatory being healthily flushed, and there she was bounding back upon him. Moller pressed against the wall, trapped between Mrs. Talbot and Mr. Farrelly, who was approaching from the other end. Jess’s face lit up when she saw him fidgeting under the stair light.
‘Ohhhh!’ She used the expletive with a special emphasis, always, and a drawing out that gave it all the meaning another might be able to infuse into an oath. It was a little trick of hers. ‘What are you doing here! Not booking in, are you?’
The laugh accompanying the words was very light and unpleasant. Quite foolishly, he knew, his heart beat dangerously fast and he felt the skin of his cheeks prickle.
He stared back equally insolently at her untidy breasts and thighs, and said pointedly, ‘No, Jess. No. I’m afraid not. Not even to be closer to you.’ He turned away. ‘Mr. Farrelly? Excuse me one moment.’
Jess Talbot turned sharply, her mouth tightening with irritation. She went quickly into her room and shut the door loudly. The fortissimo whistling became morendo, accompanying the floating moon shaped pallor of a face that hung lanternwise above the publican’s tweeds, his country rags, elderly and respectable to atone for his service to Mammon. Farrelly’s watery eyes bulged perpetually, but now they appeared slightly outraged that a non-resident should be found upstairs.
‘Yes, Mr. Moller?’ he asked. Their eyes fastened on each other’s, screwed up with the effort of piercing the curtains of hard yellow the hall light swung between them.
‘Would you mind telling me which room is Mrs. Striebel’s?’
Farrelly could not conceal his surprise or curiosity. His priggishness jolted him. His head actually jerked and the pear-shaped body rocked on its skinny legs.
‘Well, really, Mr. Moller, we don’t usually … is it urgent?’
‘I’ll only be a moment. There will be no time for fornication, I assure you.’
‘For what?’
‘Nothing. No time for exactly nothing. And now, please. Would you mind?’
Mr. Farrelly was piqued.
‘There,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Two down from the landing.’ He could stomach, in a way, the furtive visits the maids granted to the travellers, the town policeman, the factory boys, because, although he was aware of their happening, by tacit agreement their fact was never brought home to him in this brash fashion. Like all respectable people he could not tolerate the frankness of a self-confessed peccadillo. It made him shudder. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t … respectable, somehow. He felt he might be wronging Moller by thinking there was a base motive behind the visit, but taken all round, he assured himself, school business could be done at school and man-woman business meant only one thing.
He swung round and huffed away downstairs to the thin nervous looking wife who was in actuality as unmalleable as rock, was the rock on which the hotel was founded. Biblical. Biblical. And the rubbing of profiteering hands that every day performed the miracle of the Cana transformation with watered spirits consigned Moller and Striebel to their p
ersonal wallows of iniquity.
Before Moller could knock upon Helen’s door, it had opened inwards upon the furniture duplicated in rooms to left and to right and opposite, inwards like a shutter letting in a wedge of weakly diffused hall light. She swam in it towards him and it etched the surprise of her eyes and her mouth, the hands raised startled, with a curious effect of sheen and shadow.
‘May I come in?’ he asked.
She switched on her room light again and he followed her inside drawing the door shut.
‘There’s a very final action,’ he said.
‘A very foolish one,’ she replied, ‘and perhaps affecting me more than you.’
‘Do you care?’
‘Not really.’
He took both her hands and drew her slowly to the humped-up, narrow, uncomfortable bed. They sat side by side and Moller stroked the side of her cheek and her neck.
‘There is no point in being discreet, very discreet, that is, much longer. From now on, meine Königin, it is going to be a series of final actions. Final, foolish, and perhaps indiscreet.’
She drew away. The oblong mirror of the wardrobe grouped them as four, doubled the surprise, the disconsolate countenances, made their aloneness seem safe among numbers. The room became as crowded as a party.
‘You mustn’t stay more than a minute. I shall miss out on the shepherd’s pie.’ She grimaced. ‘Why have you suddenly broken the basic rule?’
Moller smiled with the conscious irony of one about to deliver bad news.
‘Lunbeck saw us in town on Saturday night.’
Helen caught her breath and said, ‘But that means nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘No? My dear, don’t think it means nothing to those who want it to mean something. He asked me to compliment you on your appearance, or words to that effect. What a whore-monger! But what is worse, he informed the whole salaciously hungry group. They were all gathered around the afternoon beer, busy with incomes and neighbours, and he lowered this piece of gossip like a baited line. Helen, I’m very much afraid that as far as Gungee is concerned our reputation is irredeemable. I merely want to warn you, prepare you, perhaps, for any snide remarks that might come our way.’
‘You came here to tell me this?’
‘Yes. On a moment’s anger. It could have waited, I suppose, but the Talbots mightn’t have. Anyway, I seem to have made things worse. Jess Talbot saw me in the corridor. I had to ask Farrelly for your room. They will add all the trivia up, square the sum total and confirm – oh, joy? – their very worst suspicions. By tomorrow surely it will be well on the way to the pupils. Parents miss no opportunity to humble the teaching staff in the eyes of their delinquent offspring.’
The pattern, hardly visible, of roses and leaves stared back at Helen from faded, thread-wasted carpet scrap. The water jug, china lilied, rosed and ivied, chipped at handle and lip, squatted whitely in basin. Books lay carelessly along the dressing-table. To the outside commotion of doors opening and of feet between bathroom and stairs, they charted the coastline of this new calamity.
‘Perhaps,’ Helen suggested, ‘it isn’t so bad. After all, it’s almost impossible to live in a place this size without causing unfavourable comment. Should I go out with a man we are immediately joined by local tongues into an unhealthy relationship. If I stay religiously in my room, gossip brings men to visit me here. You can’t win any way at all.’
Moller pulled a cigarette packet from his coat pocket.
‘True. Soon we’ll be able to draft a complicated set of rules for the etiquette of living in the small country town.’ He held the opened carton towards her. ‘There’s only one. Want it?’
‘No. Keep it. You’ve had the shock!’
‘Good. Thanks, Helen. I really need this.’ He lit it and drew on it deeply. The lines of worry on his forehead smoothed out a little. ‘Shall we capitalise on the situation?’
‘How do you mean?’
He watched her questioning face in the mirror for a moment. Then he looked away at the books lying on the dressing-table. Elementary Principles of Trigonometry caught his eye. He held it for security.
‘How about next week-end?’
He could not bear to look at her directly in case she said no. Furtively he glanced back to the mirror. Her eyes, which had been crucifying themselves upon the trellised wanderings of the carpet’s flower vines, met his in the blurred glass. This indirect examination of the eyes was not as difficult as turning directly to each other. They felt as if they were watching two other people pushing through one of those rope jungles found at fun fairs.
‘Helen, please,’ he said. ‘Will it be a beach town? What about Brisbane itself? Or north? Anywhere?’
‘You know what will happen if it gets around. We’ll be talked about the way the Talbots did about young Allie, poor kid, who’s pregnant again. Never mind. She’ll be closer to God’s right hand than they’ll ever be.’
Moller looked sceptical. ‘Yeah! They’ll be on it. They’re great exponents of the art of getting on.’
Helen laughed and shattered the almost artificial atmosphere.
‘Next week-end,’ she said unexpectedly, ‘next weekend will be very fine. Very fine indeed. I’ll think of where tonight.’
Moller could not help feeling surprised by her capitulation. The feeling was the very finest of questionings of his sincerity, and that upset him. He later worried at the problem, wondering if he were really the sort of person who hated ever crossing his mountains.
‘That was a very quick decision. I imagined there would be all sorts of persuasion necessary.’
Helen looked at him with a peculiar expression of disappointment.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Does the easiness of it all make it seem less worth while?’
He pushed his self-doubtings away to an unreality. ‘How can you ask so conventional a thing?’ he said. ‘Of course not. It makes me far happier. Far happier.’
He bent forward and searched the contours of her face with his lips. The electric light burned unkindly on the rented wardrobe and chair, the satin and cotton eiderdown heaped up across the bed. Helen found tears brimming up in her eyes and rolling down her cheeks. Moller touched them gently with his tongue.
‘You’re very salty,’ he said.
‘I’m not going to think that this is wrong,’ Helen said. ‘Please don’t let me think it is wrong or I shall drop the whole thing and I couldn’t bear to do that. I’ve- I’ve had no kindness for years. Nothing but hotel rooms and commercial travellers and drunks and publicans and baking roads into steaming schools with undisciplined classes jamming the rooms to the windows. I feel defiant. I don’t care. I won’t. I simply won’t. Not even about Lunbeck or the Talbots or any of them.’
‘There, my dear. What of the Lunbecks? Two frumps in ten squares of timber. The Talbots cannot possibly touch us. Don’t cry, dearest, best.’
The corridor outside was silent. From the dining-room the clash of eating utensils and the isolated flags of laughter floated up the stair well. Moller kissed Helen again and rose, pulling her gently with him to the door. He jabbed out the butt of his cigarette in the tray on the table near the door.
‘Leave it,’ he said, with a tinny bravado. ‘Leave it for the maid to tell Farrelly to be outraged and disseminate my latest lechery. I must go though I don’t want to.’
Their eyes and their bodies met in that intolerable clasp of parting, and then almost brutally he took his arms away from her and went out of the room.
Stairs, potted plants, varnish, hall, bar and dining-room noises. The night air was blue as a plum, and although he was setting out for his home, he felt very much as if he were leaving it.
Five
Played bumble-puppy with a weathered tennis ball springing away on a length of packing case rope; or chipped gum-oozings from the bloodwoods and chewed them unt
il they were so flattened and eucalypt-bitter one couldn’t spit them out fast enough; or sprawled on stomach beneath shrubberies driving the ants into frenzies with grass stalk barriers; or merely stood, moving only occasionally, under the cassias, picking the isolated flat yellow leaves away from the green ones, picking the green, opening the pea-shaped flowers and turning them over between the clumsy, marvelling fingers.
Up till that last week-end, Vinny supposed, there wasn’t much wrong with that way of spending the Saturdays and the Sundays. Often in the hot September weather it was all you could do, no matter what you wanted. Even in the very hottest weeks in January, Royce would never take her to the swimming hole a mile out of town, because he said none of the other girls went. It was strictly for boys. But she knew, although she never said so, that Pearl Warburton and Betty Klee, shrouded in giggles, wielding their young developed bodies like unsecret weapons, often shoved and pushed and tumbled from the flat, splashed diving rock above the pool – into waves of boys, of encircling arms brown-slippery, to be clutched at, to be clasped feigning resistance, acquiescing. When she thought of it a fierce envy she could not understand filled not only her mind but her body. She wanted to be part of some group; it was the natural urging of her years; she wanted to lose her identity – and there lay the most terrible part of her unpopularity, perhaps: the fact that all the time, contrary to impulse, she was forced to preserve her individuality, to be conscious, day after day, of raw self. To achieve that – to be down at the rock even in the presence of her enemies, leaping off into pools of companionship under the curved brightness of the sky, giggling and slapping with the others, would be a point of contentment.