by Thea Astley
At first the rest of the class was unaware of what she was doing. They spoke with her so little there was really no opportunity for them to gauge her attitude, though if anyone had thought of it they would have been very interested, for everyone knew she had a terrible crush on Mrs. Striebel.
However, the implications of the scandal, the juiciest the school had had since ‘Sweetie’ Russell had lost his job three years before, and since one of the girls accidentally burnt out half a room in the cooking block the year before that, added to the fact that the annual school dance was only two weeks away, completely obliterated Vinny from their minds. Bits of gossip percolated through to the primary school, were not understood, but nevertheless were taken home garbled for reference and handed on to both delighted and horrified mothers who checked and cross-checked the facts with friends until a network of half-truth and half-lies spread over the entire township, a net in which the two fish victims were still swimming unaware.
It was on the Monday exactly one week before the dance that the whole affair, so far lacking any noticeable public unpleasantness, blew up to giant size. The impulse came from an argument between Moller and Howard. At first it was merely the usual exchange of attack and defence over a neglected home exercise; but something in the boy’s manner, the smile he gave as he stated definitely he could not be kept in, caused Moller to glance at him more sharply.
‘What was that last remark, Howard?’
‘I said, sir, you probably know what it is to be busy after school.’
‘And just how is that relevant to your own detention?’
Howard smiled with ironic patience. He kicked gently at the boy beside him.
‘Just like you, sir. Personal matters. I have urgent personal business.’
The class gasped with the deliciousness of the outrage, and leant forward, anxious to miss no nuance of this exchange. Moller sat with his body hard against the table edge and with unaware fingers drummed his fountain-pen in the first beats of an intuitive apprehension.
‘And just what do you mean by that?’
He knew as soon as he framed the question that he had made a mistake. To liberate the kinds of answer of which Howard was capable was folly in the extreme. He pouted his thick lower lip in annoyance and then bit it.
‘Girls,’ Howard said. ‘You know, sir.’
Someone giggled hysterically at the back of the room, but other than that there was silence as absolute as twenty breaths painfully withheld in fear could make it. The telephone ringing in Findlay’s office sounded clearly across the intervening silence, and everyone in that waiting room could hear the squeak of his chair as he stretched forward to answer it. His voice floated to them in preliminary politenesses and was cut off by the abrupt closing of the office door.
With his foot, Moller thought irrelevantly. He kicks it shut with his foot. Everything made easy.
He met Howard’s impudent eyes with rage, at the back of which lurked uncertainty, a longing to be released from the insolent accusation on the handsome face in the centre of the room. His mind raced over a waterfall lip of tumbled ideas and suspicions. The emphasis in Howard’s remark could mean only one thing. The Welches had worked fast – by now half the town must know. He saw the nineteen other faces, and did not see them; they blurred together and separated and they all spelt the same thing; and he knew that he must keep his sense of proportion and a coolness.
‘I do not know, Howard,’ he said, ‘and, what is more, I feel you are being extremely insolent.’ He paused. In spite of his efforts at self-control, he could hardly govern the shaking that crept into his voice whenever he was really angry. He took his hands from the table, for they too trembled, and thrust them down into his trouser pockets. The quality of the moment in pause showed him as never before wall maps, glass fronted cupboards bulging with out-dated texts, insects in bottles, two suitable landscapes. We have come to a cessation of amity, this place and I, he told himself. This is the point where we start inevitably to turn away from each other. It must be a quick turning.
‘Not only will you do your detention, but you will report to Mr. Findlay at the end of this period and inform him of my intention and your disinclination.’
Howard’s face did not alter. If anything, it appeared more satisfied, as if his whole being sang towards this moment. He had had his public moment of bravura, and later, but not very much later, he would achieve his finishing stroke. He was not sure why he disliked Moller, only that he always had. Perhaps it was a sensing of adult patronage in his manner that worried Howard, who prided himself so on his poise. He had received public humiliation often enough over poor work, too, and the prick of deflated class esteem made him seize this moment for reprisal with a savage acuteness that would have been more understandable in an adult.
The final expression of Howard’s malice spelt itself out in chalk letters at least two feet high across the bitumen road strip immediately in front of the school gate. This time the notice left no doubt at all as to the relationship between Moller and Helen Striebel. It was terse, crudely to the point.
It was there at sun-up, and Sid Ewers, driving past in his truck, braked and backed, the better to read it in the thin morning light. He laughed and stuck another fag in his mouth and forgot about it as he drove on. All round the sky limits the stratus clouds lay washed of colour, waiting for the trades to bank them up from the sea. The air was quivering like a water drop about to fall, its totals of suspense piled up into an unbearable charge of humidity and heat that threatened the town swimming in the late September weather.
Vinny, coming early along the road to the school to complete an algebra exercise from the text she had forgotten to take home, sensed it also, even at eight o’clock. The top of the mountain seemed to lean right over the town, its heavy flat blue summit humped dangerously above the forests that washed the town perimeter. Houses held a dream-stillness, dogs stretched vulnerable and panting under shop awnings and in doorway recesses. Along the railway siding a long line of box cars as neglected as tenements squatted unmoving where they had been since the previous night. The footpaths smacked back the shape of her steps into pads of sound that chased away from her down the shopping block past the still unwashed doorways and ramps; past the cough-mixture packets displayed pyramidal in the chemist’s window, receiving on their orange and black wrappers the first benedictions of the flies. They were paling along their edges in the bleaching light that already had faded the draper’s summer silks and cottons into uneven stripes.
The school buildings piled back up the slope. Vinny felt for them in this early approach, not a tenderness, but a rough sort of affection that was really only a mutation of her dislike. The sun banged like a gong on the tarred road as she started to walk across, and then, in spite of the heat, she drew up short.
Across the road where every child coming to school must see it stretched another sign. The sun motes suspended a dancing net of dust and light all round her, and she felt so hot and sick all at once she nearly fell. To get rid of the terrible words seemed an insuperable problem, for she had only the one tiny handkerchief. In any case it was so public a place that the attention her behaviour would attract would cause further comment. For a moment she hated Mrs. Striebel and Mr. Moller, both, for placing her in this torturing indecision. She still had her homework to complete. It was five past eight. She look away quickly from the words at her feet and ran up the embankment, across the footpath, and into the school grounds.
The whole place was cushioned in silence, padded by the flock of the stifling air. Even the school house lay mutely in the shelter of giant acalyphas and bougainvillea trellised along its northern side. Vinny stood nervously below the primary school stairs and fought her anger and her fear down to a resolution of purpose that made her seize a watering can from near the infant school gardening stand, fill it at one of the rear taps, and stagger off with it down to the road, unwilling, but un
able to act otherwise. At first she rubbed hard with a wet handkerchief and after five minutes had managed to erase only three letters satisfactorily. Sweat sprang out like buds all over her white face and she felt giddy from bending in the one position in the hot sun. She straightened and took off her hat. The whole thing seemed so hopeless and she wanted to cry so badly that the prickling was already starting round her nostrils and eyes and the quivering about her mouth. On impulse she bent suddenly and emptied the can along as much of the notice as she could. But it was useless. She had nothing to rub it with and the water rapidly dried off, leaving the words fainter but still legible.
She forgot how conspicuous she must be, how odd her behaviour would appear to a passer-by, and turned in her vicious circle of resentment and unhappiness back towards the school. Her hat hung from one hand, the emptied can from the other, and her eyes, picking sullenly over the complexities of the rocky ground, did not see Mr. Findlay approach.
He found his early morning bonhomie oozing away in the heat, leaving a pebble of annoyance as an irritant in his mid-breakfasting-disturbed mind. His wife had made him look out of the window, had pestered him until he had left his tea cooling in the cup beneath a saucer placed on it to retain the steam, to see in the middle of the road one of his – Good God! Surely not – yes, that damned Lalor child working away with a bucket? He adjusted his glasses. Slipping into his dark vest, he hurried out to the veranda. Vinny had stopped rubbing at the roadway – what in Heaven’s name was the girl doing? – and was slopping water up and down from the can. He shut his front gate carefully and went along the footpath towards her.
‘Girl!’ he said. ‘Vinny!’
She looked up. Her face was puffed from heat and the pale eyes under the orange hair glared out from the sweat-glow on her face. When she saw who was addressing her the truculence she felt crumpled like a paper fan, became fear, became herself in essence, the shape of unpopularity, the nothingness against the sheer huge importance of authority.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. There was not even humility left. The annihilation of her personality was complete.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘The usual answer – nothing. What is that watering-can for?’ He felt very cross. His tea would be undrinkable. ‘Tell me,’ he ordered impatiently. ‘What were you doing with the can?’
Vinny did not answer, and the man stared over her shoulder at the blackness of the dampened area in the centre of the road. He strode past her quickly and read the notice. Still Vinny did not raise her head. The few seconds in which he read the crude libel chalked on the hot asphalt seemed to her to stretch over a slow world, to girdle lives and epochs and come back inevitably to this wretched fragment of time with herself wanting but unable to plunge into the springs of tears and with Findlay’s voice, cautious and sobered, saying, ‘It wasn’t you who wrote this, was it, and then thought better of the action?’
‘No.’
‘Well now.’ He stopped, flummoxed, as his mind sifted the implications of the words before him. The milk truck rattled back late from its delivery on the west side of the town, circling wide around them. The driver waved carelessly, but Findlay did not look up. He did not know just where to proceed from here. To show concern would demonstrate plainly to the child the serious quality of the suspicions that were forming in his own mind. True, he had heard fragments of gossip lately, but he had discounted them as being the grievance-formed malice of children. There was a school committee meeting later in the week. Perhaps then a tactful reference or two would elicit any adult knowledge of the matter. Now he felt the main thing was to get the notice removed before morning school. He sighed. His last hope of a quiet cup of tea was gone.
‘It was very thoughtful of you to try to get rid of this,’ he said. ‘Such things are scandalous and absurd. Absurd,’ he repeated, hoping his point was being taken. ‘I wonder if you could clean it out properly if I got you a cloth or a mop. Yes. A mop. You wouldn’t mind, would you?’
‘No, sir,’ she replied. ‘It is absurd, isn’t it?’
He glanced at her sideways, curiously, but her face was quite expressionless, her voice toneless.
‘Just wait here.’ He knew she had a peculiar reputation amongst the other pupils. ‘I won’t be a moment.’
He took his confusion with him back to the house, mumbling at the idea that had been presented so baldly, pondering the possible and the impossible results of its truth. He couldn’t tolerate it, really he couldn’t. Quite apart from his own moral point of view, the situation, if it existed, would be a dangerous one in a town like this. He had his own reputation and authority to uphold, even if he did not consider the repercussions on the pupils of such a clandestine relationship between two of his staff, for he could not allow himself to appear as tolerant or in connivance. You are taking it too seriously, he told himself, as he searched in the back lobby for the bucket and mop, pushing aside the ranks of rake, adze, and spade handles. Far too seriously. He could hear his wife, susceptible to the faintest adumbration of gossip, coming out through the kitchen. He intercepted her question with a brisk, ‘In a moment,’ and turned the back-door tap on full into the bucket, cutting off speech in the roar. His wife’s round unoriginal face watched in a silence that could afford to wait. Ultimately, like a river to a sea, all town doings flowed to her to be filtered as it were by a mind long accustomed to picking over the driftwood of local misdemeanour. He rolled away from her into the hot morning to where Vinny waited by the roadside, receiving the stigmata of the sun in a burning flush upon the back of her neck and on her fair arms.
He panted as he set the bucket down and the water splashed and rocked dizzily against the iron sides. Their eyes met in a levelling of age and idea. Both of them felt it, but only the one tried to conceal it.
‘It will only take a moment with the mop,’ he said. ‘Hurry.’
She dipped it in the bucket and splashed it out again on the tar-bubbling road. He was right. Plenty of water and some hard rubbing at more obstinate marks and it was all gone in under five minutes. Even as they watched the water was drying fast, leaving only the blank, bland surface of the road, innocent as now neither of them could be.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That was a very kind action. But perhaps it would have been better if you had told me first.’ They both knew why she hadn’t.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
‘Have there been any others?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘I rubbed them out.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes.’
Findlay was lost for platitudes. He looked away. ‘One more thing,’ he said. Along the road he could see the first early comers to school dawdling in the heat. ‘Don’t talk about this. If I find the child who did it he will be severely punished. Most severely.’
‘No, sir.’
He emptied the last inch of water from the bucket and put the mop handle under his arm. It became part of him, fasciated with the portly limb that pressed it like a rifle. He felt he looked absurd, and that was something his position could not endure. Chauvinism, lack of humour, bigotry, lack of erudition, anything – but never absurdity.
‘Run along now,’ he said.
The morning ate them up, made them a holocaust.
By the time the twelve-thirty bell jangled along the verandas Mr. Findlay, who had wrestled with moral surgings and curiosity all the morning, could contain his impulse to decision no longer. When he saw Mr. Sweeney striding past he asked him to tell Mr. Moller he would be grateful if he could come to the office for a moment. He sat back in his chair and swivelled it with that indescribable release of a decision achieved. He surveyed his room with an inner confidence, the stacked class rolls on the corner of his desk next to the dozens of memoranda chits spiked for reference, the score of well kept, hardly us
ed encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and gazetteers along the wall, the jug of callistemon beside the phone. He was simple and fairly easy to please. He read digests and digests of digests and listened to the lighter programmes of the two national stations whenever static permitted. He worshipped within the Thirty-nine Articles (though for the life of him he couldn’t have told you what they said), permitted himself an occasional sherry or beer, condemned gambling with a sonority that brought him notoriety if not respect, and played an insipid game of golf. Altogether he considered himself a pretty all-round sort of fellow.
He sucked at his pipe and doodled on his blotting pad with the red-ink pen. Circles interlocking with more circles were his favourite medium of expression, perhaps his only one, symbolising as they did the round of each day’s predictability, or each year’s for that matter, circling about the annual inspection and the possibility of a higher promotion mark.
Moller’s large head looked round the door. His face seemed unperturbed, and Findlay stared with a teased up interest at the heavy dark eyes, the full lips, the greasy skin. No conventionally good-looking lover, he told himself, not here. And his gaze travelled over the thickening body, the careless posture under the worn clothes. But the face, he conceded all in this flashing minute as his eyes reverted to Moller’s, the face was intelligent and kind and sensual – and he stopped on the word abruptly and with the puritan’s envy and said, ‘Sit down, Mr. Moller.’