by Thea Astley
He rose himself, agitated, now that the moment was on him and shut the door.
‘This all seems very importantly mysterious,’ Moller said. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Thanks.’
Findlay sat down heavily and watched while the other man rolled and lit a cigarette. His full lips held it as gently as a kiss.
‘I’ll come straight to the point, Mr. Moller,’ he said, swerving from the image. Moller looked at him quickly. He felt he knew what was coming. Anger leapt up, became self, demanding protest, but he forced himself to smile and to keep his nervous fingers still.
‘This morning I found an extremely distasteful notice scrawled across the roadway just in front of the school. It concerned you and Mrs. Striebel.’
Moller’s heart jumped galvanically. He blew out a puff of smoke and tried to watch Findlay calmly.
‘As a matter of fact I found one of the pupils busy trying to clean it out.’
‘Ah! And who was that?’
‘The Lalor girl. She must like either you or Mrs. Striebel very much. Or both of you. I asked her if there had been any other similar signs, and apparently she has been busy rubbing them out for about a week.’
‘Oh God!’ Moller said. ‘Poor little devil!’
‘The point is this, Mr. Moller,’ Findlay said, and paused embarrassedly – but it was a slightly synthetic embarrassment. ‘The actual words of the message are unimportant, but the implication was that your friendship with Mrs. Striebel is of a – shall we say, non-platonic nature.’ He paused again.
Moller felt no impulse to reply. Wait now, he thought, for the complication of platitude to follow to entangle his argument.
‘Now I am not attempting arbitrary judgments on your personal behaviour. Please understand that. I’m only speaking to you about the matter because I feel such an incident will give us bad tone. Yes. Bad tone.’ He repeated the words with a near-unction, happy to have lighted on them. ‘Allowing a thing like that to pass unnoticed would be appalling for discipline, not only yours or Mrs. Striebel’s, but that of the whole staff generally, I feel, if the children are allowed to do that sort of thing and get away with it. Not that for one moment I believe there is any truth in the statement.’ He added this cunningly and took a sly half-glance under the grey eyebrows.
Moller knocked half an inch of ash from his cigarette carefully into the bakelite tray on the office desk.
‘It is quite true,’ he said.
Findlay was not surprised by the truth of the words but by their having been uttered at all. The respectable side of him would have preferred outraged denials. Confronted with an honest reply he hardly knew what to say. At most, he felt, he could bow his head in acquiescence before such open profligacy.
‘It is entirely your own affair, Mr. Moller,’ he said, ‘but you must agree that it is your duty to see that it remains so. After all, apart from any repercussions your behaviour may have upon you at the school, there is also – forgive my mentioning it – your wife to consider. It is possible that some ill-advised gossip in the town might inform her. Have you thought of that?’
‘I have. I’ve thought of it almost constantly. You know my wife’s condition, I think, Mr. Findlay, and I would like to say right here and now that I will not be cajoled either into defining or apologising for my position. The situation exists. Further than that I will make no statement of any kind whatever.’ Moller could feel his anger taking control of him like a gale through a tree.
‘Of course, of course. I am, I hope, a man of the world’ – the flashed understanding smile and Moller wanted to scream with ironic laughter – ‘but you mustn’t mind if I ask you to be a little more discreet. Surely you don’t resent that?’
The pleading, Moller thought. He intends me to think I have him in the inferior position, when he knows and I know that as quickly as winking he could have me moved to the end of God’s earth. Someone tapped diffidently on the office door, and Moller wondered if, after the person had gone unacknowledged, there would be a small sacrificial offering of corn and oil.
‘Later!’ Findlay called out. There was the sound of footsteps moving away along the veranda.
Their eyes met across the neat table, and the anger on Moller’s face was duplicated on Findlay’s, though the latter was trying to appear as unmoved as he could.
‘What I cannot understand,’ he pursued, ‘is how the children got wind of the business, anyway.’
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ Moller said. By telling Findlay he would put him out of his agony in somewhat the same way as one might shoot an injured horse. ‘Perfectly simple. Helen and I spent last weekend at Tin Can Bay and unfortunately the Welches also spent the weekend there. I suppose their girls heard the talk at home and couldn’t resist the temptation to buy themselves a little temporary prestige at school.’
Findlay twitched. Moller sounded flippant, and the whole thing, this simple contravention of accepted moral code, was so important, especially in this tiny town. He saw, and tried not to see, illicit week-ends shaping themselves round luxury hotels and flats and houses to rent, all coming in the end to that same well wanted, unbearable, mental verisimilitude of an unendurable act of love. He shook his head in an effort to rid himself of the image, and Moller watching him, smiled with sympathy for the first time, sensing the struggle in the man opposite, the battle between his respectable and his carnal impulses.
The edge of silence was serrated by sound as the first ten minutes of the lunch-hour ended and the quietness impelled by the need to eat gave way to the first shriekings and yellings from the primary school. It was hotter than ever, and in the narrow office both men edged uncomfortably on their chairs. Moller took a crumpled handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mopped it backwards and forwards across his forehead and round his neck under the curve of his chin. Findlay couldn’t help noticing with fastidiousness that the linen rectangle came away soiled – only slightly, but there it was. On a sudden he resented Moller, resented and envied him his sexual success, although he did not envy him Mrs. Striebel in particular; only in some aching general way that this hot day was making aware he envied him, and resented with a jealousy that took him gaspingly by surprise the physical fallibility of the man, the stoutish body, the thinning hair, the sweating skin with its expanded pores. But again and again his mind alluded to the humour and the intelligence and the sensuality of the face. The confrontation made him shudder in his angry desire.
‘Well, we shall just have to be on our guard,’ he said. ‘Yes. On our guard.’ There they come, thick as plums in a pudding, Moller thought. ‘And if you encounter anything more of the sort, Mr. Moller, I want you to inform me immediately. I shall make a few discreet inquiries among the senior boys, and if I discover who was responsible I shall punish him very severely.’
Moller protested mildly enough, ‘I think that is wrong policy, Mr. Findlay. I think the best thing would be to ignore it. That way the whole business will probably die a natural death in a few days.’
Findlay was scandalised to find himself wondering if that were what he really wanted, if his method of dealing with the situation were only a contrivance to prolong it. He hated being opposed and he shut his ears to the obvious sense of Moller’s suggestion.
‘There is only one sure way the whole thing could die a natural death, Mr. Moller,’ he said, and his words traced out a cold anger. ‘By transferring one of you. Let me deal with this my own way, and the other alternative need not be necessary.’
‘Very well.’ Moller unaccountably felt bored. He was being pigeon-holed as a problem, his moral competence was on probation.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said, ‘I’m on duty second half, and I haven’t had any lunch.’ He stood up and stubbed the butt of his cigarette so viciously the paper burst and the tobacco splayed out. Findlay, noticing the tension implicit in the actio
n, felt himself moving towards an inevitable decision. There was a school committee meeting in three days’ time. He would mention the matter – cautiously, you know – to one or two of the more responsible members, get an opinion. He followed Moller out of the door and, going down the school’s front steps, crossed the yard to his home. Annoyance and heat shimmered everywhere and, refracted on the lenses of his glasses, made him stumble blindly.
It was like cornering a rabbit.
Surrounding her, pressing her in against the far corner fence made her seem smaller and whiter and more unpleasant than ever. Howard and his pal, Tangle Davis, drew Pearl Warburton and Betty Klee forward until the four of them held her trapped in a tiny sector of bush-screened shade. So far she had not answered them, but the first terror which had made her speechless was dwindling away now to nothing, to absolutely nothing, and obstinacy hardened her mouth and her pale eyes.
‘Come on,’ Howard repeated, ‘come on, Lalor. We know you did it. Bert Springer saw you when he was coming in on the run. His kid Joey told me it was you who did it.’
The girls watching her stirred in anger. They almost begrudged her this sudden attention. Pearl Warburton leant against Tangle’s skinny side. He looked at her and giggled with nervous pleasure and, concealed from the others, she caught his arm and squeezed it with the tips of her fingers. Vinny’s glance flickering across the shaken shadow-doubles of the leaves caught the movement of amorous finger-play. Suddenly, vividly she saw again the pool and the bathers and the figure on the diving rock. She had never really been free of the image, for it had come to her whenever she saw Pearl Warburton or Royce. But it always seemed too horrible to be true, smudged in outline even by the passage of a week; yet now the exploring, interpreting fingers proved the image once more and she shuddered involuntarily.
Howard was becoming tired of her stubborn silence. He snapped his fingers hard under her nose and flicked her with them.
‘Come on. Tell us!’ he said.
Vinny’s hand flashed up before she could prevent it and smacked Howard’s arm so sharply it hurt her. He drew back, his face crimson with rage.
‘Why, you bitch!’ he said. ‘You ugly little bitch!’
‘Yes!’ Vinny shouted. ‘Yes, I did it. And it wasn’t the only one I washed off either. I cleaned off all of them. All last week. And every time you write more up, I’ll clean them off, too.’
She felt crazed with her own defiance. The four faces watching her melted and shifted their outlines. The air was aqueous with light in which leaves swam like seaweed. She hoped she wasn’t going to faint.
‘She’s mad!’ Betty Klee said, and giggled. ‘I always thought she was. Her mother’s crazy as a galah.’
Vinny did not even hear her. The heat was making her giddy and the tension that had built up inside her until it snapped in uncaring passion had been too great for her to endure.
‘And what’s more,’ she added, ‘what’s more, Howard, the next time I see one of your lousy little notices I’ll go straight to Mr. Findlay. Do you hear? I’ll tell him it’s you. I’ll tell him it’s the four of you.’
Pearl’s fingers dropped from Tangle Davis’s unmuscular arm.
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she said. ‘We’d make it too awful for you. You wouldn’t dare.’
‘Yes, I would. And there’s a few other things I could tell him, too.’
‘What are they?’
Vinny smiled ferociously. She gripped her belt with her hands and glared across the yard at the distant school. She could see Mr. Moller ambling behind the primary block getting children to gather papers and lunch bags and fruit skins to put in the big green bins. She felt her loyalty to him flare up into the ardour of a crusader. She watched his kindly, lazy body and knew the insanity of personal sacrifice sweeping through her, aggravated by the sudden appearance of Mrs. Striebel and Miss Jarman along the senior veranda. She smiled maddeningly.
‘What other things?’ Pearl persisted.
‘Ah, leave her.’ Betty Klee dragged at Pearl’s left arm. ‘She doesn’t know anything. She’s kidding.’
Pearl shook off the acolyte hand angrily. There was something in Vinny’s face that made her aware of more than bluff, that warned her, usually so insensitive to atmosphere, that there was something far more dangerous than chalked-up libels.
‘I’m not kidding.’ Vinny marvelled at her own effrontery. She looked from one to the other of the four faces, from the oval to the square to the round to the pointed, through meanness and sensuality and flaccid ugliness and good looks, and felt that she had come a long way to find her revenge in this moment.
She looked away then past them and saw the bell prefect hurrying along the veranda to ring the first warning of the end of the lunch hour. She watched him, watched his hand hurl into the air an iron chatter, a monotone clanking of liberation. All over the playground the noisy groups were stilled, ropes and balls caught as it were in mid-flight, the voices struck dumb. Mr. Findlay, magnificently the autocrat, walked along to the stair-head where he conducted assembly with the solemnity of a priest.
‘I’ll tell him about the swimming hole,’ Vinny said. Her voice sounded over-loud in this shell of silence. She glimpsed sideways Pearl’s plump face, Howard’s startled eyes. The sky over the town was filling up with tassels of quick-growing cloud, sud-white and wind-plumped.
‘What’ll you tell?’ Pearl had to hurry with her questioning. The second bell would ring in a matter of seconds.
‘The boys,’ Vinny whispered, ‘the boys.’
‘You’ll have to think of your brother’s feelings,’ Pearl replied viciously. Knowing it was useless to pretend unawareness, she tossed caution aside like a rag. Vinny glared into the round face with its full wet mouth and glimpsed her again with curving breast and thigh above the pool.
‘You’re filthy,’ she said. ‘Filthy. And I don’t care about anyone’s feelings. Not any more.’
The second bell rang, a dispassionate arbiter, and quite automatically the five of them started down towards the assembly lines.
‘Mind yourself, Lalor,’ Howard said, and ‘See you after school, Pearl.’ With Davis he loped off towards the boys’ end of the senior ranks. Pearl permitted Betty Klee to link her plump arm with hers. She was puzzled. The butt of the class, the butt for so long she could remember no other time or attitude, had suddenly spun a trump before her unbelieving eyes, revealing a situation which she was unsure how to handle. Her excursions to the pool were important to her, not for their sensual reward so much as for the confirmation of her power, the proof that her body could focus and control the desires of men. For a girl of fifteen she was astonishingly old in erotics; and yet she managed to keep her behaviour secret from her parents, who doted on their only child as a consummation not merely of the flesh but of the spirit also. Although she had outgrown the habit of loving them, she was careful not to let them know, because life was so comfortable with their lavished material affection. And for the same reason, the fear that her comfort might be disrupted, she would hate them to learn about her summer outings.
She tugged at Betty Klee and drew her back as Vinny Lalor ran past them down the slope. The bright hair burning, it seemed, with missionary fire, the pallid limbs uncurved even this spring, were lost in the jerking, foot-edging, arm-extending horde of pupils.
‘Don’t worry, Pearlie.’ The diminutive was the emotional additive for reassurance. ‘Don’t worry. She doesn’t know a thing. Royce must have let something slip, but you know perfectly well he wouldn’t tell her. You know he thinks she’s a dope. He’s always saying so.’
Pearl smiled. Sometimes she wished she didn’t feel so old. She wanted to shake her fat apostle into an adult apostasy.
‘I’ll fix her,’ she said as she slipped into her place in the squad. ‘I’ll think of something.’
Seven
‘We have been thrown to the Chri
stians,’ Moller said to Helen.
He took her elbow as they left the school, and pressed it as he helped her down the earth shelf to the road. ‘I didn’t want to talk about it at lunch-time with Rowan and Jarman practically on our laps, but Findlay called me into the office this morning and told me an odd story.’
Helen waved to Szamos as they passed the milk-bar. ‘The Welches,’ she said. ‘Oh, Robert, have they told Findlay? We must be costing them a fortune in sherry and biscuits!’
‘I don’t think so yet, but it certainly will come from that source when they next meet. No. This is allied, but concerning the kids. This morning the old boy spotted Vinny Lalor washing off a big chalk notice on the road in front of the school. He didn’t go into detail, my dear, but apparently it was flattering both to my virility and your attractiveness. Poor old boy! He had his departmental face on. All respectable and promotion conscious and keen.’
‘How can you – no, you’re right to be flippant, really. It’s too absurd. Bless Marian and Sam. They must have discussed us in front of their two revolting girls. Oh, Robert, what do we do? Now everyone knows or will within the week.’
‘Nothing. Nothing but carry on as usual.’ He laughed. ‘No vulgarity intended. The only thing I hope,’ he added seriously, ‘is that Lilian doesn’t get to hear. Oh God, I wouldn’t want to hurt her. Mind you, Helen, she’s well aware that she’ll never be out of that hospital cured, and I feel her reason would excuse us.’
‘And if it doesn’t?’
He shrugged. ‘Wait. The rest of the town will be waiting. We can wait with them.’
They walked in silence to the railway yard. Porter McKeith, lounging spread-legged upon an outside bench, fag-rolling in the syrupy afternoon light, nodded at them and grinned, and tongued the edge of the cigarette paper delicately. Two dogs raised their legs upon the far side of a luggage trolley; the milk-cans squatted in silver back towards the entrance gates.
‘Here,’ Moller said – he indicated with hyperbolic gesture the whole circle of the town, the stillness, the scattered shoppers, the pubs with their out-spillings of early evening drunks, the dogs, the lean grasses – ‘here is the hub of our worry, our punctured self-pride. Why, the nasty, stinking little mullock heap wouldn’t even be marked in a Commonwealth atlas, and yet here we are worried sick because we have affronted the guardians of the town. It is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.’