by Thea Astley
‘You can only be important in the area where you move, I suppose,’ Helen suggested. ‘Other people’s reactions to unconventional behaviour seem to vary in inverse ratio to the size of the environs.’
‘My little mathematician!’ Moller laughed. ‘You’re so right. And it’s so wrong that it should be like this. I suppose it’s because there is much less distraction, especially of an immoral kind, in places as small. The merest peccadillo –’ He spread his hands hopelessly. ‘I have visions, Helen, of the porridge-pale faces of outraged parents bent reverently over Bibles open at Leviticus and the Song of Songs.’ He pressed his hands together in the attitude of prayer. Then he said, ‘Can you see me this evening? We might go for a drive. If necessary I’ll carry the car a mile out of town so Lunbecks won’t hear me start her up.’
Helen hesitated. ‘Do you think it’s wise at this particular time? Did Finlay make any criticism?’
‘He did ask for a little more discretion. He’s worried about the effect this might have on discipline.’
‘That’s a point certainly.’
‘Agreed. But I feel he was overstepping the mark when he hinted at a transfer for one of us.’
The smile breaking at the corner of Helen’s lips and eyes was arrested and twisted into a temporary pain that vanished.
‘He wouldn’t be so absurd! Punish us like pupils!’
‘My dear, it’s not absurd really, from his point of view. What is he? Forty-four. Still pretty young in this game. He has a son at an expensive boarding school. He wants to get on. He can’t afford to have scandal’s hot breath blistering his well laid plans. I know it’s absurd looking at it from our side of the situation, but when I look at it from his, I could almost predict to the moment and place just when and where he will act.’
‘And –’
‘First, he’ll mull the whole situation over. Has done by now. And then tonight, under a text above their bed reading ‘God is love’ and another on the dressing-table reading ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’, he’ll talk it over with his wife in their cretonne-cosy bedroom. She’ll be the first vote against us. Then he’ll take it along – not officially, mark you, but he’ll take it along all the same – to the school committee on Thursday night and he’ll mull it over with a couple of the boys; and they’ll have been worked on by their wives and that will be a whole lot of votes against us. So you see, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if perhaps he does do something about that threat, and one of us gets a take-off ticket.’
Porter McKeith swayed to his feet and rolled away to the signal-room with the half-smoked cigarette saliva-stuck to his lower lip. The afternoon rail-motor north to Gympie was just rounding the southern bend, bucketing along the channel through the scrub.
‘It would hardly be you,’ Helen said. ‘You have a house here.’
‘Only rented. There’s no bargaining point behind that when you’re dealing with clerks in the public service.’
‘Perhaps both of us will go. A catharsis for Gungee.’
‘Perhaps. It will hardly matter, will it, once we’re parted anyway?’
Helen half turned to leave him and walk down the road beside the lines. She swung round again upon a sudden thought.
‘That poor Lalor child! I wonder what made her do it. It’s very moving – for want of a better word. I suppose it was gratitude for the week-end, among other things.’
Moller grunted. ‘I gave you the reason once before and you didn’t like it. We all have to have a cause – something to worship or work for. And on that trite note I’ll leave you until this evening. Please come. About seven. Earlier if you can make it. Come round on the back road and you might dodge the Lunbecks. Or better still, Helen, I’ll run the car down towards the pub and you can get in at the corner past the paper shop.’
He caught her hand and pressed it very tightly in his own. ‘You know I’d like very much to kiss you now. Compromise you con expressione, con moto.’
Her back was to the sun, her face in shadow, but Moller’s burned in the late extravagance of light coming from the western sky. She squeezed his hand in return and briefly placed her other hand over his. ‘McKeith is watching us fascinated through the signal-room window,’ she said, and turned finally from him.
She was late coming to the dining-room that night, having spent more time than usual exploring the possibilities of dress, examining her face with a new consciousness that comes to the lover and the loved. Her dress was dark and soft and clasped her body in shadow that strengthened the effect of light upon her hair. It was a study in chiaroscuro. The Talbots glanced swiftly at her as she sat down at the table and she was well aware of their curiosity, their aroused criticism of her appearance. She smiled Gioconda-fashion between the sauce cruets, older for the moment than both the Talbots seated there in the anticipatory stew of indignation – she felt certain they knew about her week-end at the Bay – their juices longing to flow in outrage.
‘Something special tonight?’ Jess asked. It was an impossibility for her to pay the direct compliment to another’s looks. Always the praise was tempered by just that little piece of unkindness calculated to destroy the effect of any pleasure the receiver might have obtained. (‘She has a beautiful body,’ she would say of Ruth Lunbeck. ‘Really beautiful. What a pity her feet are so ugly!’ Or, ‘Freda Rankin really can look pretty sometimes.’)
It was a special skill, Helen told herself. You either had it or you hadn’t. She was sure that as a team the Talbots practised their verbal viciousness together. Prick. Prick. Alec Talbot had told her once that Jess and he often corrected each other’s speech; it was a game they played, like quoits or darts or skittles, seeing who could detect the greater number of solecisms. How close they must be to each other! Helen shuddered at the thought of this marriage of true minds that admitted no speech impediments.
‘No. Not really. Just a morale booster.’
Talbot sniffed into his roast beef, quivered above the tissues of cold meat covered with lukewarm gravy, over the unhappy vegetable farrago. Furtively, while he munched, he watched Helen’s bosom, or her lips or her hands, but watched without real lasciviousness, merely the curiosity of the welfare worker for the underprivileged, with an almost evangelical interest. Helen perceived his shifting glances and permitted herself an inward smile, thinking how he would, if he could, present her with a tract. His wife viewed both of them coldly, displeased by Alec’s behaviour and with jealousy rumbling at the back of her mind in a faint thunder of inference. She always stated, to those of her friends unluckily close enough to be recipients of the intimacy, that she could not bear to think her husband had been anything but virgin when she married him. However, remembering Ruth Lunbeck’s amused assertion that Harold had stepped practically from his prefect’s study into their hymeneal flatette, and watching Alec now, she was not so sure. She ate her woody potatoes very deliberately, cut them into slabs and small blocks, and pushed them into her prissily chewing mouth.
Since the previous week-end, when the Welches had discovered for them the scandalous relationship between Mr. Moller and Mrs. Striebel, the Talbots found conversation at meal-times more awkward and more restraining than they could have foreseen. Jess was longing to elicit succulent details that would place her conversational value at a premium, but she hardly liked to make direct investigation. At first she had used Mr. Farrelly’s agitation over the trunk calls as an excuse for broaching the inexcusable, but all her inquiries, polite or not, met with nothing but a brief explanation that her sister had been involved in a car accident, and was not seriously hurt beyond a fracture of the left arm. All other probings, veiled with the thinnest good manners to prevent her rudeness being charged with indecent exposure, could gain nothing more than, ‘Yes, a very pleasant two days away.’ If it had been one of her old school hockey team deliberately bouncing her questions, Jess would have punished her with demotion or detention from sport.
Her bust swelled with annoyance as she drew an impatient breath – she would like to suck the two of them in with it, bathed in a faint halitosis that seemed a normal adjunct to such self-consciously militant Christianity.
‘Black is always effective,’ she said, staring hard at Helen’s all-black dress, ‘especially with a touch of white. I think I must wear something similar to our special “do” next week.’
‘Please, Jess, not “do”. Function. Function.’ Alec Talbot spoke in a kind of anguish.
‘Yes,’ Jess Talbot continued, ignoring him for once because she was punishing him in their own special way. ‘Yes, Mrs. Striebel, Sam Welch is giving the factory’s annual staff dinner on Friday week. This year he has invited the entire staff, engineers, senior office workers and their wives, typists and their husbands, as well as the boiler hands and packers and drivers. We can’t help feeling a wee bit worried as to how it will go. A most uncomfortable affair, I should imagine.’
‘It might be good for laughs,’ Helen said, with the first touch of real viciousness she had ever displayed towards them.
‘Ohhh.’ Jess paused. ‘You think we’re snobbish?’ she asked coldly.
‘I do indeed.’
‘Not at all. I merely think the evening will be a failure with people of such dissimilar education forced upon each other for hours at a time.’
‘Nonsense,’ Helen said briskly. She poured herself another glass of water and drank it with at-ease heartiness. ‘It will do you good. Why keep your tight little university minds in a tight, sacred little university circle? And it isn’t as if the senior business staff were university men,’ she continued recklessly. ‘You’re just making position and money your arbitrating factor there. Personally, I’d rather talk to boiler-hand Perce Westerman and his wife than to Marian Welch any day. Both of them have far more sensible things to say, and if the way they say it isn’t contorted with elocutionary garble, who cares?’
Jess was quite white. Her narrow face, furrowed in annoyance, bent forward across the stained cloth and the untidy dinner plates, zealot-keen.
‘We care,’ she said. ‘Alec and I care for a few of the refinements of life. And careful speech is one of them. You’re being terribly unkind about Marian Welch.’
‘You care for it,’ Helen said slowly and carefully, ‘the way chorus girls care about furs. It’s a new form of pretentiousness that can hide all sorts of mental bankruptcy. The bray. And as for being unkind about Marian, I would love to know, but cannot conceive, how that is possible. Tell me. How?’
Alec Talbot looked up anxiously into the puffed-powdered-strawberry-sweet face of Allie.
‘Two baked custards,’ he said, he begged. ‘We’ve had this out on speech before, haven’t we?’ he urged them to agree. Placatory gestures were not normally his method, he felt apologies were a weakness of character, but he was afraid that at any moment the conversation might swing into a dangerous wood, storm over and under the flying boughs of personal abuse. He only liked being rude in whispers or a softly modulated voice. Helen Striebel might shout dangerously and openly.
Helen finished her first course and set the plate to one side. Guided divinely, she rested both elbows on the table and propped her chin on her laced hands. Head supported thus, she gazed down upon them, the very insolence of her calculatedly ill-mannered posture making her relaxed; upon the scaled peak of their enmity looking down into their unhappy faces.
Jess Talbot found only one thing to say.
‘You have reason to be unkind, haven’t you?’
Helen heard the spoons and plates beaten like tympani by the unsatisfied diners. At the table behind her a quartet of male voices whinnied through last Saturday’s losses from start to finish, and the owners gobbled as if they were chaff-bags the uneyed meals in front of them. Heard it all; and saw, in the snipping flash of clear vision that showed her just what the other woman was implying.
‘No reason,’ she replied. ‘No reason at all. What would make you imagine that I should have?’
‘Well, she is rather a gossip, isn’t she?’
‘Is she?’
‘Why, of course. You of all people should know.’
‘I’m afraid that I don’t.’ (Why wouldn’t she state her accusation boldly, come uncleanly clean?) ‘And I’m sorry for your sake. You seem so terribly anxious that I should be feeling uncomfortable or guilty or anxious. I feel none of those things. Ah! The pudding.’
Helen smiled into Allie’s face coated like the pudding itself with a seductive cosmetic meringue, iced into the accepted mask of red and pink and black and white. Jess Talbot frowned down at her empty tea cup and then looked across to her husband’s rabbit-like face. There was a strange expression on his features, a compound of fear and enjoyment. He really should have been a woman.
Helen felt as if she were poised, leaning forward into unfrightening darknesses, poised about to fly with no bravado at all into clearness; and the utter escape feeling made her see beyond the Talbots to the road and the car and the humped male figure cigarette-illumined in spurts. The Talbots finished their meal with lip dabbings and napkin foldings of technical precision, and left the table. But she did not hear or see. Rather she sensed them gone, and soon so would she be, the cup banging in the saucer, the scraping of the chair, the nod of thanks to Allie half seen in the kitchen, and then up the oilily lighted hall and down first to room to bathroom, back and down and out into the darkness, real, really and truly as they said when they were children and not for ever but capture the moment while you can, crunching on the dry road towards the car.
It crouched in the shadow-jungle of the corner house’s crowded mango-trees. Helen’s heart beat stupidly fast as she neared it, opened the door, and fell in against body, thigh and mouth. It was endless and ended and he put her gently back, starting the car without trouble for once and smiling, pleased, as the lights raced along the road.
‘Where to?’ she asked.
‘Right out,’ he replied. ‘Right out of this town where no vultures rest. How about going down to the coast?’
She nodded and lit herself a cigarette.
‘It seems no time since last week-end, does it?’
‘No. But, my God, a lot seems to have happened since then.’
‘The pressure’s on,’ she said. ‘Jess Talbot hinted at dinner tonight that the scandal has reached her sensitive ears.’
‘It would be surprising if it hadn’t, wouldn’t it?’
Off the main southern road the landscape was deep as a well. The car dived into its black bowl and sliced darkness open with yellow light. Along the eastern sky a kind of reflected pallor from the west lay close above the tops of the trees, washing upwards and out into the stippling grey-blue-indigo-black of the sky basin. Road glimmer before and behind took them as unerringly as migratory birds towards the salt-smelling under-moon washing sea. It was only ten miles away due east and Moller drove fast, ripping the black night air carelessly, letting it stream back against the sides of the car like rag.
When they came down to the river and the first lights, the narrowness of the road was a symbolic narrowness they both felt, with situations falling away to one side and sheering up upon the other. It was good that the fever of indecision was over, and it was good that they were committed to each other this night in car and under moon rising suddenly and late and full. But behind this surface confidence was a repressed fear of consequences of the act, of the ultimate feelings each would take away from the relationship if it ended.
The lights sugar-sprinkled the darkness to their left which was north, where the guest-houses and flats to let, untenanted, unlet, squatted along the river-front in out-of-season mourning, longing for the brown girls and the life of the party and the tonsures tomato-toasted and the immodest satin swimming trunks and the honeymooning couples connubially joined for a fortnight by mutual suffering – the sandfly-bitten, red-ba
ked-crackling skin. Under the moonlight the boats showed upon the wide reaches of silver-paper water like pencil strokes, fringing the mournful lines of the jetties where the fishermen sat, blobs of optimism against heaven.
‘Shall we go on to the bay?’ Moller asked.
‘If you like. It’s not far, is it?’
‘Only another five miles.’
He swung the car over the bridge that spanned the narrow stretch of water between lake and river, and they went on again, following the water made magical by bonily outlined tree and casual cottage and the mangrove fingers, sly-sinister with moonshine and shadow, trailing the water. Weyba Creek stabbed the country whitely, and after that was passed the car ran quickly down the last mile to the bay.
Moller parked the car as close to the sand margin as he dared. The last house before the river-mouth curved the beach into a lip stood a hundred yards away. It was so still they could hear the fish rising in the gutters along the river bank. All around, scrub box crowded the moon. He kept remembering the seats under trees facing Moreton Bay and the fish dinners and the love-making of more than twenty years before, and to himself he seemed not the same person at all. Between dances at the great hall, that wasn’t really great but the moderns lecture-room, he had stepped into so many arms and eyes and soft meaningless loves that held all the glamour of being young and walking the partner round the kidney-shaped grass plot and between the science schools and the common-rooms. And now, here he was, hundreds of grey hairs later, yearning like a boy on the shores of a nondescript coastal town and turning to the woman beside him as if he would find there the end of the world.