A Descant for Gossips (11 page)

She burrowed under the sheets and held them up above her to make a tent. It was very dark and warm. She said, ‘Dear Mrs. Striebel', and put a kiss on an imagined cheek. She raised the corner of her tent slightly and saw the sunlight striping the wall opposite the window in bands of lemon and grey. From the room next to hers came the sounds of someone stirring unwillingly through sleep to wakefulness, plunging her feet into the sea of springtime morning air. Vinny sat up in her faded pyjamas to worship as her goddess paused.

This is it, she told herself. She has seen it.

She hugged her knees tightly against her flat chest and pressed her chin into the hollow between them hard enough to hurt. She will love it, she told herself. She will think it beautiful and keep it for ever. With my note. She heard the sounds of dressing recommence and then Mrs. Striebel going out to the kitchen. She could hardly wait to show Miss Reisbeck, she thought. She crept to the door and opened it, but could hear nothing. So, having waited for a while rubbing one foot against the other, she dressed once more in the baggy skirt and the second of her two jumpers. It was navy blue and larger. Above the depth of colour her pale skin took on a transparency and her eyes a more definite hue. Mirror searching, she loved herself for the first time, where once she had found no excuse for so loving, and with an excess of feeling embraced, as it were, but timidly, the whole house, the silent hallway, the kitchen all pancake-scented-hot, with the morning fragrance of the potted pelargoniums along the sill and rain-wet loam beneath the window.

Margaret's baroque face appeared above the gingham smock as foolishly, misplacedly monkish. She beamed. Helen smiled. The gift stood askew upon the centre of the breakfast cloth, among the canisters and the salt and pepper containers, threatening the day with its implications of devotion and gratitude. During the exclamations that followed Vinny's appearance she became translated to a state of euphoria that prohibited clearness of hearing or comprehending, and allowing phrases like ‘a very kind girl', ‘a most thoughtful action', ‘charming', to monument the moment.

She ate her breakfast, hardly aware, drunk on approval.

All day it was the same.

There was sun and not much wind and a great deal of very blue sky along which boats and buildings battled, pricking and wedging and slicing and scooping with spire or tower or city block or dome. Wherever there were holes in the bitumen, the rainwater puddles glared glassily up at the sky. Gulls came over the city like a drift of flowers sky-planted. The smell of salt was enough to make one cry with a hungry nostalgia for the sea.

They wasted and fretted the morning with talk and tea and household tasks, and in the afternoon, when the thin streamers of breeze blew over the reach, tossing wing and wave and the dried-out tram tickets, Helen and Vinny packed their suitcases into the boot of Margaret's car and got in. She drove them slowly to the Valley and along the tram lines towards the art gallery.

‘All set for culture?' Margaret asked. ‘You know you'd do much better to pop into Carya and see some real stuff, good strong meaty work. None of your wishywashy representationalism. Helen, you're too conservative. Next time you're down I'll have to work on you very seriously.'

‘Next time I'll be your victim, I promise, Margaret. But today you must think of Vinny. Let her see what is normally regarded as painting before you shock her with young – what's his name?'

‘Lawrence Reid.'

‘Yes. His great orange nudes with light-bulbs. Terribly exciting for you
avant garde
types, but I have a sensitive plant here from a more than sensitive village. She mustn't take back any of these extremist notions or they'll be drumming us both out of town.'

Vinny smiled, only partly understanding. The dirty blocks of flats angled steps and tiny courtyards to the west and netted the leaves and papers swung in on the wind's tide. Dogs raised legs against telegraph poles, but they were city dogs. Everything had a magic. Dogs, leaves, papers, grubby apartments, the occasional small shop, the Sunday afternoon couples all belonged to a fascinating design.

‘– delicious little
gouache,'
Margaret was saying, narrowly scraping alongside a tram and just missing a cyclist. Her face, inanely apologetic, swerved to the rider and then back to peer along the roadway. She swung the car down a side-street near the museum.

‘Here, dears,' she said. ‘Dust and dullness together. I shall remain quietly on the lawn reading if you attempt to enter this nauseous hole. In fact, I don't think I
can
even face the Fathers of Australian Art. Just look for me under a cotton palm when you're ready to move on. And don't forget you have to be at the terminus by four.'

‘Plenty of time,' Helen said. ‘It's only a little after two now. Robert is sure to be a bit late. He so prides himself on being early, Fate nearly always has some mishap lined up for him.'

So Helen took Vinny's arm, waved to Margaret who was striding off to a secluded bench down the lawn, and guided Vinny through the gloomy foyer and turnstiles into the main hall of the gallery. They walked slowly through hall after hall in the poor light, where heavy oils loomed over the unvarying expressions of the public gazing up at them. A few young children skittered across the floor and giggled at the nude sculptures. But Vinny was thrilled, even by the mediocrity. She had never been in such a place before, and her knowledge of art was limited to the few pictures at the school and the yearly calendar issued by their grocer. In her immature way she felt that the whole week-end had been a cultural feast – which it had been really for one who had had so little – and impressionable, was demolished by the lovely, the trite without distinction. Helen watched with amusement and compassion her eager craning to read the names of painters and, after observing adults doing it, the standing back from the picture to achieve the right light and distance. Even if the older woman were bored, the girl was not, and tireless for an hour went from gallery to gallery inspecting closely every picture that appealed to her. When they emerged at last in the slanting light on the curved areas of grass they felt as if they were coming back to actuality after a period of time held still.

‘How was it?' Margaret asked. She was stretched comfortably along a seat with her back against the arm rest. On her nose rested a gigantic pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. She twinkled when she observed Vinny's startled glance.

‘My dear, the wider the rims, the larger the intellect. Actually they have no lenses. They're merely for show.'

Helen laughed heartily. ‘Journalists, bookmakers, and radio types! God bless you all with your corduroy beards and your psuede shoes – the ‘p' is silent as in ‘pseudo'. Actually we enjoyed ourselves, didn't we, Vinny?' She gave the child's arm a friendly squeeze and Vinny looked up at her devotedly.

‘It was wonderful,' she breathed. ‘I can't believe there can be that many pictures all in the one place. The whole week-end has been marvellous. Especially the play yesterday.'

‘Please, child,' Margaret admonished in a kindly fashion, ‘all this gratitude is bad for Helen. Can't you see her basking in it, getting inflated notions of herself as a cultural fairy godmother?'

Vinny grinned uneasily, whereupon Margaret, seeing the uncertainty on her face, said quickly, ‘Of course we're glad you've had a wonderful time, my pet. But right at this moment I'm afraid my tastes are earthier than Helen's. What I need desperately is tea – tea and cakes, to be precise – large, sickly, unhealthy cakes. What do you say?'

She swept them unprotesting before her to the car and drove quickly to the place where they had arranged to meet Moller. It was a large sprawling suburban centre, deathly still on Sundays, with its propped bikes, ownerless it seemed for ever, and the empty parked cars and the closed shop doorways. There was one shop of every kind – the newsagents with the hoardings leaning askew in their wire cages, buckled from the attentions of passing dogs; the fruit shop with the speckled apples and the juiceless oranges; the cash-and-carry grocer's blazing with pasteboard price reductions; the chemist's.

‘Surely,' Margaret said, ‘surely there must be something. It's practically the end of the world. Don't they have depots for all you Burkes and Willses?'

She cruised the car slowly up one side of the shopping block and down the other until finally they found a narrow fronted bakery still open and with an ‘afternoon teas' sign fly-specked in the window.

So in there they sat, knees touching under the unsteady table, drinking weak tea and eating pink and white iced cakes, red cherry centred, and laughing because it wasn't what they wanted, and yet as they sat there became the very thing for each of them.

Through the doorway Helen could see the tired shadows stretching lazily longer under the awnings and settling comfortably down for the evening along the kerbs. She, too, was somehow tired of the sun. With a wonderful leap of the heart she thought of Moller with a spasm of such longing she felt she could not tolerate the waiting. The day was the beginning and the end of a journey. From this moment on, despite the bathos, she would never again be able to eat a plain iced cake without thinking of him. She looked across at her sister and found the frayed art-weary face an unexpected map of tenderness.

‘You were right this morning,' Helen said. And there was no need to explain. ‘There is no ‘perhaps' about it at all. You were perfectly right.'

Four

The mystique, the impedimenta of ritual lay in long boxes on the lawn under the striped foliage of the crotons, awaiting the weekly
agape
that brought together in a select sporting coterie the highest income brackets in the township. Frank Rankin as chief celebrant unpacked a half-dozen bats, an assortment of shuttlecocks, and the long poles and badminton net. It is wonderful, thought Moller as he sprawled under the mango tree with the others, to see the technical mind on holiday, the town's medical practitioner acting just like any ordinary person, smacking a badminton pellet backwards and forwards to other gods all disporting like himself, being human and lovable and decent fellows, and keeping well within their social class. He nibbled the thick white end of a grass stalk and lay flat on his back with his eyes closed. He wondered why they bothered to ask him to their little afternoons, and he wondered why he bothered accepting invitations that so patently bored him. Perhaps the fact that Lilian had been away five months now drew on him the self-conscious charity of his neighbours. ‘Me betters,' he told himself, and giggled with eyes still shut under the dark green shadows of the leaves; whereupon he found his stomach prodded in provocative and playful fashion by a feminine foot and a hard shallow voice as bright as benzedrine saying girlishly, ‘Penny?'

He recognised Ruth Lunbeck's kittenish tones, the chromatic tonguing of the threadbare thought from a mistress of the suburban phrase. He could not tolerate opening his eyes to that stunted nose, the long jutting jaw, and the eyes stony blue with coyness laying a film over the ruthlessness and the acquisitiveness. She punished her husband's infidelities with regular large purchase accounts at the city stores. Each revelation of a breach of marital trust was followed by a spending spree so outrageous that even Lunbeck wondered if his pleasure were worth what it cost. But in spite of this, in spite of any side effects his treatment of her might have upon her prestige amongst the other women of her group, she clung to the marriage rock like a limpet because it gave her a social standing in the town that she could certainly not have achieved otherwise, being devoid of both intelligence and distinguished appearance. Her body alone was beautifully made, but topped off with that crackling inanity of voice, that striving-after-never-to-be-achieved-but-still-striven-for girlishness, its effect was largely negatived – at least for Moller, who continued to lie very still upon the shaggy lawn.

The toe jabbed him again, finding a tender spot between his ribs.

‘Come on, sleepy,' urged the kid-sister-let's-all-be-buddies-and-pals voice. ‘What's the joke?'

She has a quality of persistence, Moller thought, that is staggering. The simplest brain surely would have deduced by this time that I am antipathetic. He was tempted to see how long she would continue to prod with tongue and foot if he remained silent, but another voice, rolling under the trees, rich with elocutionary zeal, made it impossible for him to feign sleep.

‘Come on there, Robert,' it mouthed. ‘You look utterly squalid spread out like a sumptuous bum. Get a racket, you lazy old basket, and partner me.'

He gave up. He opened his eyes into the face of a very handsome horse which was bending over him. Its dark eyes rolled under heavy brows that met in slight irritation above the long well-bred nose.

‘Must I?' he protested, knowing all the time it would be hopeless to protest. He rose clumsily, slapping the seat of his trousers, and took off his sports coat. Why doesn't she whinny? he asked himself petulantly, but no. No. It's those rounded vowels, those hideous soundings of ‘utterly' and ‘too' and ‘really' and ‘frightful'. Rankin and Talbot, the both, they keep their vowels so open it's a wonder they don't have verbal diarrhoea. He smiled with an effort and held his racket against the sun, blotting it out from himself. He decided he must tell Helen that last little joke, and for a minute was perplexed by her absence. Then he recalled that she had been once and that that once had been enough. When he remembered her embarrassed determination not to accept further invitation, the explanation of his own presence filled him with momentary self-disgust; but this frailty of self-analysis was swept aside in the usual anticipatory pleasure – at five o'clock the doctor, the generous patron, would produce from his steamingly cold ice-box a dozen dewy bottles of beer.

He strolled across the lawn after Freda, still pressing his racket to the side of his head. Garth Cantwell joined them, and a few minutes later Jess Talbot came bounding across, her colossal thighs white as peeled grass husks below her tight blue shorts. Her enormous bust shook with ferocious zeal at all of them, and she gave her racket several practice forehand and backhand drives.

‘Oh God!' Moller murmured to Cantwell. ‘I feel we're going to play a strenuous game. Just look at that enthusiasm!'

Cantwell sucked in the last possible fragrance from his cigarette – he was not mean, but that was the sort of socially acceptable parsimony that had got him where he was – and smiled and shrugged. His well-fed body slouched now from the effort of years of being successful, which, in his case, meant being on top at all costs; but he still covered it reverently with expensive tussore and tweed, regarding it as something sacred, a temple not of the Holy Ghost but of financial enterprise. He could not whip the money lenders within.

Moller embarrassed him. The fellow never seemed quite
en rapport
with the group and he wasn't sure what to say to him. To agree was rather like letting down the team – his team, the body of people with sporting attitudes and civic conscience who ran the town.

He grunted non-committally and said, ‘Partner Freda, will you, boy? I don't think I'm on form today either, and that will even things up.'

‘There's a fine compliment for the women, Freda,' Jess said. ‘We're not only equals, we're their superiors!'

‘Jolly well about time!' mouthed Freda.

‘Oh Christ, for Chrissake, Christ!' Moller groaned gently into the side of his bat, sibilated as if sharing some esoteric knowledge with the wood and the unresponsive cork surface.

They struck for service and then began playing. While Moller leapt automatically, his arm striking with almost a reflex motion at the feathered ball, he managed to detach his concentration from the game and think seriously of the last week-end in the city, when for the first time he had felt a signal inability to share Helen's activities. Connivance and the acid testing of propinquity had both failed to achieve for him a tolerance of situation, a docility of all the factors that seemed to work unendingly towards his and Helen's eternal separation. Although they had not spoken since of the decision he had made the previous Saturday when he had determined to take her away for a few days from the town, the implications of the spoken word lay at the back of their eyes and startled them with occasional recognition when they passed on the way to classes, or shared periods off, or sat listening to Rowan and Sweeney bickering during the luncheon recess.

The whole of the western sky was quilted with mackerel cloud rippling away behind Bundarra into the Mary Valley. From the front of Rankin's home set on the northern hillside of the town the view of the whole valley in which the town lay opened up its pocket of activity, its crucifix of business, and the neat bungalows pimpling the five exit roads. The afternoon carved its frieze of grouped people, of the white swinging arms and legs and the smack, smack of bat against pellet flying birdlike over the greenness, the five figures under the tree set like Fragonard figurines with all the latent sensuality of careless pose. Already the sweat blotches were dark shadows under the sleeves of Cantwell's expensive tussore, revealed each time he swung his arm. Between the cleft of Jess Talbot's breasts the sweat trickled unpleasantly; her face, white instead of flushed, was beaded with a rosary of water droplets about brow and temple. Moller looked pleadingly at his partner and she flashed him an automatic smile of over-white teeth.

‘Serve up,' she said, bright and crisp with command.

It was trial by ordeal. Five o'clock came as slowly to him across the gardens as the creeping shadow below the mango tree. When finally the nine of them fanned out around the beer and the sandwiches, the triangles and rectangles of social requirement with the ham and bread leaf-thin among the watercross trees, the sun had begun to tip over the shelf of the mountain in an untidy splash of gold.

‘It's going to be a marvellous sunset,' someone said.

They all turned to look at the clouds, the hundreds of white islands radiating from behind Bundarra until they flushed a ragged arc half-way across the sky. Lunbeck's thin, anguished face tortured by dyspepsia and sex swung back upon them.

‘Lovely!' He smiled agonisedly. ‘Really lovely. To stay here and see it go down. I feel I must stay. We must, mustn't we, Ruth?'

Ruth shrugged indifferently and then smiled radiantly up at Talbot. She looked down at the splendid length of her brown legs displayed with near immodesty below her denim shorts.

‘What about the mozzies?' she asked with the insane innocent of someone in the mid-thirties being childlike. Talbot almost whimpered at her philological tampering, yet with the perverted joy of the flagellant he asked her to repeat the remark.

‘The mozzies, Alec, the mozzies,' she said, nearly but not quite on the point of nipping him on the arm.

‘Heavens above!' he protested. ‘Say the whole word, Ruth. Not those shockingly inarticulate abbreviations. How I abhor them! “Mozzies!” “Cuppa!” “This arv!” ' He consigned them like a papal bull to a bonfire and proceeded to burn them with his wrath. ‘I work amongst all classes as you know, Ruth, and Welch would bear me out saying this, that never, not even with the boiler hands, do I speak carelessly. I really believe to be careful in speech stamps a man, gives him a definite authority, a standing.'

‘The Chrysostom of the creameries,' Moller murmured.

‘What? What was that?' Talbot was weak on historical reference. He swung round, annoyedly prickling like a spinster whose virtue has been challenged. Moller drained the last of his beer, ignoring him, while the others did not know whose side to take vocally – the intellectual or the snobbish – but inwardly, to a man they voted for Talbot, not by reason of his old-maidish preciseness, but because they could not support a cynicism that they could not understand.

‘Here! Have another beer, Talbot, old man,' Rankin urged, confident within property, amongst the social perquisites. ‘Where are the Welches, anyway?'

Jess Talbot, happy to see one of the other women publicly chided, smiled like a Botticelli angel, the merest whisper of mirth over an infinite sadness.

‘He was needed at the factory,' she said, ‘and Marian went to Gympie for the weekend to play in a golf tournament. Really, I shouldn't say this, I suppose, but I don't know how she can do it, do you, Freda? Those two unfortunate girls of hers are neglected shamefully.'

Freda Rankin demolished a small cake in three sharp snapping movements. The opening gambit had been played, and they would be well away soon with their chosen victim skulking pawn-like upon the field of their gossip.

‘Utterly incredible!' The consonants cracked and bounced like gravel. The big red mouth munched up mill-wife Welch as if she were a cocktail onion. ‘Mind you, I admire Sam Welch. Rather common, but he does know how to control things. A marvellous efficient fellow, and in spite of Marian, too. My dear, she's such a bag of poison I don't know how her children survived nine months at the breast. Still, I have to ask her … her husband's position …'

Her voice vanished into an innuendo of silence. Making every gesture appear brilliant, she handed round the sandwiches. Like communion breads, thought Moller, like tribal tokens of an infinite ill-will towards others outside the group. The crowd blessed themselves and ate the flesh of their victims with such overt smacking of scandalous lips it was really intolerable. Fragments of conversation, the clich
é
s standing out skeletal, the frame on which the verbose platitudes fleshed themselves, reached Moller's ears as he sat on the lawn. Ruth Lunbeck's voice peppered a long denunciatory story concerning a relation in the permanent army with almost every inanity possible; it came in bursts of static through the cooling air – ‘deserve horse whipping … only a mother could understand … supposed to be an officer and a gentleman …' The last filled Moller with an indescribable pleasure; he was later to tell Helen he thought that the phrase had died with the Anglo-Indian novel, but no, here it was vibrant and living in Gungee. He was startled to hear Ruth Lunbeck ask, ‘Would you like to go to bed with a black fellow?' and felt amused admiration for her ability to reduce such problems as
apartheid
and racial discrimination to such singularly simple postulations. It was wonderful, too, to hear the murmurs of well-bred assent, money singing sweetly with money in a chorus of unanalytical decision. Moller pursed his lips and whistled a little Haydn rondo, hoping to annoy Talbot.

Lunbeck, smiling in a sort of agony, crossed over to Moller and squatted angular upon the grass. Elbows and knee joints, the thin nose, the bony head, all projected their pain against the sky,
estampes
of self-pity, of egotism. He jabbed the air with his cigarette and, about to torture Moller, burnt the flank of the blue afternoon. Moller leant back on one elbow and stared at nothing but the legs of the group, naked or trousered, hairless, hairy, varicose and smooth as oil. They performed all sorts of unlovely stripings across the leafy hedge as they slouched or spread or straightened.

‘Have a good week-end?'

Moller switched a wary grey eye upon the ecstasiated profile beside him.

‘Fair,' he said. He suddenly felt quite cold and curiously cautious.