A Descant for Gossips (13 page)

‘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 personal 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 K
ö
nigin,
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 until 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.

Since her trip to Brisbane with Mrs. Striebel, Vinny had fed on the memory of it from the moment on Sunday night when her mother asked, ‘Had a good time, lovey?'

She had dumped the old hat box on the top veranda step and returned her mother's nervous kiss. Electric light from the hall washed right down the steps and halfway along the path to the gate.

‘It was wonderful,' she replied. ‘The most wonderful week-end I've ever had.'

Her mother wanted to be glad, was glad, even though she felt a nagging jealousy. They went down the hall to the sitting-room, uglier than ever now after the expensive furnishings at the Reisbeck house.

‘Where's the others?' she asked.

‘Royce's gone down to the factory. He's starting night shift this week, and Rene has gone over to Merlie Passent's place to help her make a frock for the ball next month.'

Vinny wasn't really interested.

‘You had your tea?' her mother said.

‘No. I'm not hungry, Mum.'

‘You got to have something. You'll get ill travelling all that way with nothing in your stomach. What was Mrs. Striebel thinking of?'

Vinny's loyalty was piqued.

‘We had pies on the way back, and some cakes before we left Brisbane.'

She slumped into a basket chair with her back against one arm and her thin legs dangling over the other. Mrs. Lalor, routine-bound for ever, resumed her darning.

‘I hope you thanked her nicely, Vin. What did you buy?'

Vinny's eyes glistened reminiscently.

‘Something lovely, Mum. A lovely little china basket, all full of flowers, roses and tiny blue ones and gold on the edges.'

‘Gilt, you mean.'

‘Yes. Gilt. It was cheap too. I saved the change. Two and three.' She opened the purse. Inside it she still kept the folded docket for the basket. She lifted it with reverence, and took out the money. Her mother watched the withdrawn eyes and the orange-coloured head, fire-kindled in the artificial light.

‘What did you do? All the week-end, I mean?'

So she told her about the trip down, and the rain over the Glasshouses, and the chip-shop steaming through the storm; but she did not mention the singing – she thought it might make Mr. Moller look silly, and after the week-end she liked him a whole lot better. When she came to describe the operetta she found an ally in the older woman who, once a devotee of musical comedy, became in memory the geisha girl our miss gibbs the maid of the mountains was peggylalorneeokeefeinhatslikeplatesandskirtslikesshrubberies. Most unexpectedly for both of them, they found themselves deep in conversation, the first adult one they had ever had.

But of course it could not last, could not withstand the impact of Rene back early from her outing, supercilious under the thick lipstick that halted time upon her sullen luscious mouth. Vinny became the child again, dismissed in a careless hullo, the reject who went truculently to an earlier bed where all the rapture of the last two days played itself over and over against the screen of her closed eyelids.

As she stood beneath the cassias now, two weeks later, the act of the dream with buds and leaves could not hold her interest. She pecked listlessly shifting the shadow patterns across the grass with jerks and pluckings at the springy branches, until after a while there was no fun in it anyway, and she wandered out of the yard down towards the empty back paddock and the road. When she passed the lean-to laundry hanging upon the side of the house she saw her mother through the door bending loverlike over the ironing board. Vinny swung her head smartly so that she would not catch her mother's eye, and ran down past the acalyphas, climbed through a gap in the paling fence, and was out with an incredible feeling of freedom in the hot Saturday afternoon.

‘
Il fait chaud, il fait beau temps
,'
she said loudly. She broke into a run and yelled ‘
beau temps, beau temps
'
over and over, and leapt up to snatch at overhanging branches or paused to fling stones at Gilham's mangy kelpie. After the yelping and yelling, the stone hurling, the shouting of school-girl French had released some of the resentment she felt, she found herself – involuntarily, surely – walking in the direction of the swimming hole.

Purpose melted the mile into half that distance trodden along the narrow paddock tracks on the town side of the railway line, south through the scrub thickets to the creek. A goods train rumbled north, and long after it had passed her she could still hear it jerking spasmodically and undecidedly at the station. Wondering what made the sound so clear, she looked back from the rise she had climbed to see the township arrow-straight behind her with not a spur or slope to muffle the whistle shrieks. She turned, and to the south the hill swayed down into dense scrub where the track was only kept flattened and clear by the feet of swimmers and picnickers. Two hundred yards away the creek ran west below the tall railway bridge and then moved south again in a series of falls and pools.

Vinny gazed all round her. The track before and behind was empty. The sky was very blue, its fathoms of air craft-crowded with huge masses of cumulus, icy white, rolling in on the trades high up. Now and again the bracken rattled as some invisible creature shuddered away, but otherwise, after the track dipped down and put the hill between herself and the town, the humming silence was absolute. She felt excited, and, better than that, she felt daring. She had never before been to the swimming hole in the summer months except one late afternoon a year ago when she had sneaked off without permission and found it empty. Girls around the town who swam there were considered fast, but Pearl Warburton and Betty Klee had managed to keep quiet the fact that they went there, and if Royce had not let it slip accidentally to her she would never had known.

Her blood throbbed like a drum with distant warning. An unaccountable sensation of impending excitement and a peculiar sort of fear that was so nebulous she could have laughed at it made her turn round once or twice to stare back up the narrow scrub track between the white gums and the ironbarks. Shadows that were dirty rags flapped under the trees and dangled from sunlit flags of leaves softly, softly on the lank grasses. Suddenly everything was freckled with the thinnest of fears, and Vinny broke into a trot which brought her to the thick tea-tree bushes at the top of the first fall. It was not very high, about ten feet at the most and now, because of the dry season, was a lean trickle gabbling into the wide pool below. Drought had shrunken this, too, and recessed it from the shores to leave a narrow sandy beach where the boys lay and baked in the sun. The whole place was sheltered, its privacy locked in like a secret, but shouts and laughter reached Vinny where she stood on the outer fringe of the thicket. Softly she began to move forward, her fear of discovery for the moment completely overriding that other nagging quivering fear that kept tugging at her stomach muscles. There was something about the laughter that made her wary, that made her wriggle on her hands and knees a few inches at a time to a place where the scrub thinned and she could peer down through the trellis of branches upon the pool, the beach and the diving rock.

It was three o'clock.

There were three boys in the water when she looked down, but two of them she knew only as workers from the factory, faces seen guffawing in the front stalls at interval, hands palming the orange drinks in the waxed containers, flicking the straws across seats and plucking proprietorially at their girls. And there was another head, a familiar, untidy head, bobbing some yards away. The brown hands paddled the green surface into waves, and Royce's face, with a grinning anticipation on it which she had never seen before, stared hungrily across the pool to the big ledge of rock that jutted out from the lantana scrub upon the bank, right over to the foot of the fall.

Vinny saw the lips of one of the factory boys move as he whispered to his companion, who shouted in immediate laughter so meaningly coarse that she felt the whole centre of that peculiar fear focused upon the three figures in the pool. She hardly dared breathe. She knew, as if she had been instructed, that she must make no sound at all, no sound, but wait for the inevitable moment that clutched the landscape in anticipatory stillness.

The lantana fringing the rock was hollowed into a natural tunnel of deepening green twilight, purple with lost light at its farthest parts. A rustling some distance back made the four watchers swing instinctively towards the sound, and Vinny heard Royce shout, ‘C'mon there! Hurry up! We can't wait!'

Every outline of every twig under her skinny flanks and belly and every stone beneath her pointed elbows was impressed upon her flesh; the stems knuckled her knees; and even as she eased her body slightly she saw the parting of the last confetti'd sprays of lantana across the tunnel mouth.

Out of the diving rock walked Pearl Warburton, stark naked.

Vinny found the centre of her fear refracted like coloured light on water, broken apart and shaking all around her in kaleidoscopic fashion. She saw only breasts and thighs and the full-smiling mouth and the knees fat-dimpled and the shoulders curving roundly and again the breasts and the thighs and with it all a quiet horror. It was the whiteness and the confidence, the assurance of eroticism attempted and achieved in the amused eyes and the crescent curved mouth of the girl on the rock below.

If there had been the catcalls and the whistles that accompanied the weekly film stimulations, Vinny would have understood, for that was as far as her knowledge of sex behaviour extended – to the rudimentary concealments with their primary reactions – but what puzzled, what frightened her now, was the utter silence, that fell upon the three swimmers, as, oblivious to each other, they guzzled with their eyes the curving body stretched above them.

The moment hung over the trees, the water, the watchers, and the watched, and burst in a fountain of green droplets when Pearl sprang up and sent her heavy smiling body in a dive to the pool. Then followed in the tumbled confusion of the spray the laughter, the snatching, the provocation. Vinny buried her face in the leaves and smelt the eucalypt fragrance even in the dead mould. Shame fired her cheeks. She wanted to look; she longed in a frightening, dreadful fashion to watch the drama played out to a conclusion she sensed though she did not know about it; but the animality of the four people below terrified her. She guessed at a climax beyond her bearing, and found herself wriggling back through the bracken towards the track.

Something made her move silently in spite of her panic, but when she reached the path she flung herself along its security like a mad thing, panting, dry-gasping up the hill and then down towards the town. The rail-motor passed her, heading south. The driver waved to her loneliness upon the hill, and everything, train and houses quiet against the Saturday afternoon, seemed more normal than normal, more real than real. All the way she kept putting the pool and its four scrabbling occupants from her mind, but with the huge horror of nightmare the scene returned again and again, and although she counted it away and conjugated verbs in three different tenses said rapidly with the fury of a fanatic in supplicating prayer, she could not banish it with this simple guile.

Throughout the late afternoon she lay under the cassias behind the side fence and heard her family calling her now and again as the dusk washed up from the valley. And after a while it became quite dark and the stars flowered out quickly in the blue-green sky, and it was impossible to tell whether her face was damp from tears or dew.

At almost nine o'clock on that Saturday morning Helen had walked across the wide dirt road in front of the hotel and had gone up the entrance ramp to the station. There were newspapers curled round the lower cross-bars of the opened gates, sun-yellowed, sun-curled; behind her at the door of the pub the morning's first drinkers, the veterans of high blood-pressure and cirrhosis. The sky bracketed green hills to north and south, enclosed in a loving sweep of blue the township basin. The houses stood without mystery in the high morning sun, boxed-in ochre or brown with white trim, green-blinded verandas all round, or bare as bones and showing the bicycles propped along them and the aged, sagging wire stretchers from the confirmed sleeper out. And they were filled – filled with shopkeepers and their wives, with factory hands or clerks, the women ardent over recipe and preserve, plump and efficient or plump and slatternly or sun-wizened or almost any combination of these things, but present, and for the most part predictable in the behaviour manifestations of the town – in the country women's meetings, at the church socials, the masonic dances, the school concerts; they cut sandwiches and decorated tables and slouched foot-aching behind stalls and sold tickets and cleaned up after their male partners who boozed and betted and carved out a policy entirely independently. They were rewarded with little titbits of gossip garnered at a lodge meeting or an evening's snooker, toned down from its rosy informality at the bar to a cosier family conversation piece. (Lunbeck had excused more late homecomings than he knew.)