A Descant for Gossips (12 page)

‘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.

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.'