A Descant for Gossips (16 page)

Sam Welch filled up his sherry glass and leant back in the moquette depths of his chair. Tonight, in some indefinable way, the enjoyment of the scandal eluded him, leaving him with the feeling that the seediness of immorality lay within this assemblage. He glanced round at the three faces, uncomplicated except from the effort of detraction, busy with a liberal transcription of the actions of others. In a moment of astonishing and impersonal clarity he saw, for perhaps the second time only in his marriage, the uninhibited sexual jealousy upon his wife's face, slanting the eyes and the mouth into narrows of unkindness. He saw the oval faces of the Talbots filled up with false godliness, sharpened and lengthened by the shadows of the lamp. Being deliberately boorish, he gulped at his sherry and ran the back of his hand across his mouth. The three of them sickened him, and he felt suddenly that he didn't want to be in all this, that he was sorry for having mentioned the business. Still, he told himself, nothing would have stopped Marian. Nothing on God's earth would stop her when she made up her mind to do something.

‘More sherry?' He gestured with the decanter towards Talbot's glass.

‘Thank you,' the other said, pushing it forward primly.

‘No. He didn't seem upset, I must say. Not like I'd be.' Welch threw his wife a sly look. ‘Like being caught with his pants down, wasn't it? Most men would be upset.'

He was rewarded by seeing the Talbots wince at his crudeness. It made him happy again.

‘What do you think one should do?' Jess asked. ‘Marian, you have two girls at the school. It must affect you very closely. They're at that terribly impressionable age.'

She has nothing to say, thought Welch, and she says it. God, how she says it over and over and over. The sherry was having an unusual effect on him. At the beginning of the evening when the Talbots had dropped in unexpectedly he had been ready to be right in it with them. But now this eternal carping had been going on for nearly two hours and he felt, not sympathy for the victims, but a remoteness from them and their verbal persecutors. The drive back, too, had tired him and he wished above all to go to bed swagged about with liquor fumes, and to vanish into the fogs of sleep. He heaved his stout body round in the chair and glared at her from his creased face.

‘Well,' Marian pondered, and the intrinsic malice of her design smiled out with a radiance marvellous to see, ‘well, I really feel that being on the parents' committee, you know, that perhaps I should just drop a tiny hint in Findlay's ear.' She pecked a segment from a dry biscuit and made little crackling sounds.

‘That's a bit bloody thick, isn't it?' Welch growled. His half-closed eyes blinked rapidly several times as they all turned to look at him.

‘I don't think so, Sam.' Jess Talbot dealt suavely with opposition. ‘I don't think so at all. Perhaps Mr. Findlay might be able to suggest discreetly to them that they are being a bit
outr
é
.'
(French, too, Welch thought angrily.) ‘After all, Alec' – she appealed to him, requiring no assent really; it was merely a public marital gesture – ‘the children come before the adults, don't they? Every time. The greatest good for the greatest number.' She was using her aphorisms like tear-gas to make her audience weep. The meretricious arguments would pile up and swamp charity in a gigantic wave, a tide of adulterated good works. And after all, who could charge the moral worker with being a busybody without also appearing to be in connivance with the wrongdoer?

Alec Talbot's chin quivered. He leant forward, his eyes intent upon his wife. Their communion was complete at moments like this.

‘What was that business you told me of concerning the school a few years back?' he asked. ‘That – forgive me, Marian – homosexual incident with the young maths master? Now there was a case in point.'

‘Oh, of course! You told me about it, Marian. Remember?'

Jess Talbot was launched. Without hesitancy she plunged down the slipway into a sticky sea of calumny. Her listeners struggled in the wash of words, unable to surface for air under the choking weight of defamation. Welch refused to be drowned. He had had enough.

‘You're looking tired,' he said unkindly to Jess in the middle of a sentence.

‘Am I?' She gave the small smile reserved for fools. ‘My mind feels as sharp as a razor. I feel quite brilliant tonight. As Alec says, there definitely was a case in point. Fortunately that unhappy man corrupted only one of the boys, but he could very easily have gone undetected and done goodness knows how much damage.'

‘Corrupted! Terry Crewe! Oh God!' Welch laughed noisily. ‘What bull! What utter bull! That kid used to hang around the factory at nights when the eleven o'clock shift came off and practically ask for it. He just met a soul mate. I always did feel sorry for Russell. A victim of circumstances if ever there was one.'

‘You're begging the question,' Alec Talbot intervened.

‘And you, Talbot, are nothing but a bloody pedantic theorist!'

‘Nonsense! Jess is completely right. Poor behaviour on the part of adults, especially those in positions of authority, can set up all sorts of chain reactions in impressionable adolescents. If I were in any doubt before that something should be done, I'm completely convinced now that the best thing that could happen would be for Findlay to be informed. It's indifference of the type you display, Welch, that lets these things snowball until they get out of hand.'

‘Yes, yes! Frightened Moller will unseat Lunbeck as the town rake? He's not quite classy enough to get away with it, is he?' Welch belched angrily and without apologizing. ‘He's not bloody classy enough!'

His wife's eyes flickered uneasily between the two men. The evening was taking a wrong turn, and it had all started out so happily, a set of symphonic variations on the one delicious theme. The sunburn, which she felt suited her, shone redly like a lamp through fog under the thinning make-up sweated away by sherry and the warm night, and did not suit her at all really, with her pouched eyes and crisped hair and her forty-three years. She felt she could not bear it if Sam made a gaffe that cut them off from the town's
é
lite.
Looking round the room, she noted with pride the different objects that implied income, that put their home in a certain class – the expensive radiogram that only ever played aborted versions of musical shows, the china cabinet threatening the guests with its gilt and biscuit-thin cups and saucers, the cocktail cabinet with all the right glasses for all the right drinks. She was home like the sailor, home from the sea of early married stringency, to a harbour of best grade wall-to-wall, of inoffensive landscapes, and a deep-freeze unit just packed with goodies.

‘It's the driving,' she hastened to explain to the Talbots. ‘It always affects Sam's nerves. There was the most fearful glare coming back from the Bay this afternoon. We had the sun on the windscreen for miles.'

‘Don't apologise for me!' Welch was very close to shouting. ‘For God's sake don't apologise! I feel I'm talking normally for once. For two hours now, two solid bloody hours, you've been on to them. Give the poor bastards a break. Yes, I know! I know I was in it with you,' he minced at Jess, interrupting her triumphant and accusing eye, ‘but can't you just mention the thing and leave it? You never give friend Harold such thorough treatment. But then he's one of the big four! Solid at lodge and lousy with dough! So he escapes!'

‘Mind your language, Welch,' Talbot reprimanded primly.

‘What? What was that? Oh God!' Welch roared with sudden artificial laughter. ‘She talks of perversion,' he said, nodding towards Jess Talbot and turning to his wife. ‘Her! Perversion! And she's married to such an old woman.' He struggled out of his chair and lurched to the veranda door. ‘I'm going to be sick,' he said. ‘But don't go home on my account.'

The Talbots took the sins of their fellows prissily away into the humped night. Roads merged flatly with grass paddocks and the houses were all in darkness. Strung out along the roads were the weak street-lights desolate as the newspapers blown around their bases. However, when they entered the downstairs hall of the hotel there was a light on in Farrelly's thimble-size office behind the bar. They tiptoed past the half-open door, their normal extrovert arrogance subdued by Welch's outburst, but they had not reached the foot of the stairs when Farrelly slipped through the door and called them. The downward stream of electric light exposed the fatigue, the anger, and the puzzlement on his face without mercy. The Talbots raised their well-bred eyebrows interrogatively and Farrelly hated them momentarily for seeing him in braces.

‘Have you seen Mrs. Striebel?' he asked. There was very nearly a whimper in his voice. ‘I've had trunk-line from Brisbane worrying me all week-end – yesterday and now today. They've been ringing every hour tonight since six o'clock. You don't happen to know where she is, do you?'

In the half-light of the hall, slanted across with the shadow of the wide stairs, their eyes searched for and found each other's. In these lacunae of communication they confessed their purpose wordlessly, gave absolution and blessed the intended action.

‘Well –' Jess Talbot paused. Her voice sounded very lovely when she spoke softly, and now it had the tenderness of the executioner as well. ‘This is strictly confidential, Mr. Farrelly, but seeing the phone call is probably urgent I feel I had better tell you. We did hear, Alec and I, that she has been at Tin Can Bay this week-end with Mr. Moller. Perhaps if you rang his house …'

She stopped in a nicely assumed confusion, and Alec congratulated himself, as he often did, on his perspicacity in choosing a wife at once so refined and so unbelievably tactful.

Six

Vinny found the first notice chalked on the inside wall of the girls' lavatory block. It said simply,

MR. MOLLER LOVES MRS. STRIEBEL.

She would never have noticed it except for the fact that loneliness had driven her lately to loitering there, just where the pepper trees branched over the galvanised roofing and made a pocket of shade in the alleyway. The rough white lettering was modest in size, but its categorical finality shocked Vinny with the greater shock that only the dreaded and expected can give. She stared at it a long while, refusing, thrusting back the truth she knew was there; then she took out her handkerchief and tried to rub the words out. Even after she had blurred and smudged away most of the surface chalk the ghost of the message still lingered on the wall. So she wetted the piece of rag beneath the tap and washed away the five threatening words. She knew that according to school rule she should have reported the matter to the headmaster, but some uncanny caution made her first reaction a pausing to sense the intrinsic danger of the statement. She knew it was true.

It worried her all the rest of the day, and when next morning she found the same five words sprawling along the side fence it was with a feeling almost of relief. There was a group of giggling senior school pupils standing alongside it, fooling about before the morning bell. This section of the yard was well away from the main school block and out of bounds to all except the secondary classes. She approached the group diffidently, but their absorption was complete. She could see Howard's smooth and over-handsome face in the centre of the group and hear him singing in a crooner's exaggerated whine, ‘I can't give – you anything but –
love – babee
.'

She could see the Welch girls, too, usually hangers-on, flutterers at the edge of things, now being the pivot of the questions and the sniggerings and the soft replies. Her anger surprised her and she backed away again. No one noticed her go. And by the end of the week the notices had reappeared along the lavatory walls and this time their message was couched in more direct terms, in monosyllables that Vinny had seen before and, although she was unaware of their exact meaning, felt to be unclean.

She did not know what to do. She clasped her confusion tightly within for the first few days and hoped and dreaded simultaneously that the notices would be reported to Mr. Findlay. But the staff continued serenely through the inflexible time-table of each day, the blocked-out forty minute divisions for subjects, unruffled by any undercurrents among the pupils. In class she watched the nudgings and the note passings, the insolent stares that broke out in epidemic proportions whenever Mr. Moller paused on his way out of the room to speak to Mrs. Striebel on her way in, and marvelled at the unawareness that kept their faces smiling and urbane and innocent as they turned to the class during lessons. Innocent? She flogged the little whip of a word about her and was dubious concerning the quality of guilt. She felt she had some sort of personal interest in their relationship after seeing them relaxed and at one on the trip to Brisbane. If anyone must defend them, she decided, she wanted to be the one to do it. And so began a planned directive towards erasing the more public of the notices.

At first the rest of the class was unaware of what she was doing. They spoke with her so little there was really no opportunity for them to gauge her attitude, though if anyone had thought of it they would have been very interested, for everyone knew she had a terrible crush on Mrs. Striebel.

However, the implications of the scandal, the juiciest the school had had since ‘Sweetie' Russell had lost his job three years before, and since one of the girls accidentally burnt out half a room in the cooking block the year before that, added to the fact that the annual school dance was only two weeks away, completely obliterated Vinny from their minds. Bits of gossip percolated through to the primary school, were not understood, but nevertheless were taken home garbled for reference and handed on to both delighted and horrified mothers who checked and cross-checked the facts with friends until a network of half-truth and half-lies spread over the entire township, a net in which the two fish victims were still swimming unaware.

It was on the Monday exactly one week before the dance that the whole affair, so far lacking any noticeable public unpleasantness, blew up to giant size. The impulse came from an argument between Moller and Howard. At first it was merely the usual exchange of attack and defence over a neglected home exercise; but something in the boy's manner, the smile he gave as he stated definitely he could not be kept in, caused Moller to glance at him more sharply.

‘What was that last remark, Howard?'

‘I said, sir, you probably know what it is to be busy after school.'

‘And just how is that relevant to your own detention?'

Howard smiled with ironic patience. He kicked gently at the boy beside him.

‘Just like you, sir. Personal matters. I have urgent personal business.'

The class gasped with the deliciousness of the outrage, and leant forward, anxious to miss no nuance of this exchange. Moller sat with his body hard against the table edge and with unaware fingers drummed his fountain-pen in the first beats of an intuitive apprehension.

‘And just what do you mean by that?'

He knew as soon as he framed the question that he had made a mistake. To liberate the kinds of answer of which Howard was capable was folly in the extreme. He pouted his thick lower lip in annoyance and then bit it.

‘Girls,' Howard said.
‘
You
know, sir.'

Someone giggled hysterically at the back of the room, but other than that there was silence as absolute as twenty breaths painfully withheld in fear could make it. The telephone ringing in Findlay's office sounded clearly across the intervening silence, and everyone in that waiting room could hear the squeak of his chair as he stretched forward to answer it. His voice floated to them in preliminary politenesses and was cut off by the abrupt closing of the office door.

With his foot, Moller thought irrelevantly. He kicks it shut with his foot. Everything made easy.

He met Howard's impudent eyes with rage, at the back of which lurked uncertainty, a longing to be released from the insolent accusation on the handsome face in the centre of the room. His mind raced over a waterfall lip of tumbled ideas and suspicions. The emphasis in Howard's remark could mean only one thing. The Welches had worked fast – by now half the town must know. He saw the nineteen other faces, and did not see them; they blurred together and separated and they all spelt the same thing; and he knew that he must keep his sense of proportion and a coolness.

‘I do
not
know, Howard,' he said, ‘and, what is more, I feel you are being extremely insolent.' He paused. In spite of his efforts at self-control, he could hardly govern the shaking that crept into his voice whenever he was really angry. He took his hands from the table, for they too trembled, and thrust them down into his trouser pockets. The quality of the moment in pause showed him as never before wall maps, glass fronted cupboards bulging with out-dated texts, insects in bottles, two suitable landscapes. We have come to a cessation of amity, this place and I, he told himself. This is the point where we start inevitably to turn away from each other. It must be a quick turning.

‘Not only will you do your detention, but you will report to Mr. Findlay at the end of this period and inform him of my intention and your disinclination.'

Howard's face did not alter. If anything, it appeared more satisfied, as if his whole being sang towards this moment. He had had his public moment of bravura, and later, but not very much later, he would achieve his finishing stroke. He was not sure why he disliked Moller, only that he always had. Perhaps it was a sensing of adult patronage in his manner that worried Howard, who prided himself so on his poise. He had received public humiliation often enough over poor work, too, and the prick of deflated class esteem made him seize this moment for reprisal with a savage acuteness that would have been more understandable in an adult.

The final expression of Howard's malice spelt itself out in chalk letters at least two feet high across the bitumen road strip immediately in front of the school gate. This time the notice left no doubt at all as to the relationship between Moller and Helen Striebel. It was terse, crudely to the point.

It was there at sun-up, and Sid Ewers, driving past in his truck, braked and backed, the better to read it in the thin morning light. He laughed and stuck another fag in his mouth and forgot about it as he drove on. All round the sky limits the stratus clouds lay washed of colour, waiting for the trades to bank them up from the sea. The air was quivering like a water drop about to fall, its totals of suspense piled up into an unbearable charge of humidity and heat that threatened the town swimming in the late September weather.

Vinny, coming early along the road to the school to complete an algebra exercise from the text she had forgotten to take home, sensed it also, even at eight o'clock. The top of the mountain seemed to lean right over the town, its heavy flat blue summit humped dangerously above the forests that washed the town perimeter. Houses held a dream-stillness, dogs stretched vulnerable and panting under shop awnings and in doorway recesses. Along the railway siding a long line of box cars as neglected as tenements squatted unmoving where they had been since the previous night. The footpaths smacked back the shape of her steps into pads of sound that chased away from her down the shopping block past the still unwashed doorways and ramps; past the cough-mixture packets displayed pyramidal in the chemist's window, receiving on their orange and black wrappers the first benedictions of the flies. They were paling along their edges in the bleaching light that already had faded the draper's summer silks and cottons into uneven stripes.

The school buildings piled back up the slope. Vinny felt for them in this early approach, not a tenderness, but a rough sort of affection that was really only a mutation of her dislike. The sun banged like a gong on the tarred road as she started to walk across, and then, in spite of the heat, she drew up short.

Across the road where every child coming to school must see it stretched another sign. The sun motes suspended a dancing net of dust and light all round her, and she felt so hot and sick all at once she nearly fell. To get rid of the terrible words seemed an insuperable problem, for she had only the one tiny handkerchief. In any case it was so public a place that the attention her behaviour would attract would cause further comment. For a moment she hated Mrs. Striebel and Mr. Moller, both, for placing her in this torturing indecision. She still had her homework to complete. It was five past eight. She look away quickly from the words at her feet and ran up the embankment, across the footpath, and into the school grounds.

The whole place was cushioned in silence, padded by the flock of the stifling air. Even the school house lay mutely in the shelter of giant acalyphas and bougainvillea trellised along its northern side. Vinny stood nervously below the primary school stairs and fought her anger and her fear down to a resolution of purpose that made her seize a watering can from near the infant school gardening stand, fill it at one of the rear taps, and stagger off with it down to the road, unwilling, but unable to act otherwise. At first she rubbed hard with a wet handkerchief and after five minutes had managed to erase only three letters satisfactorily. Sweat sprang out like buds all over her white face and she felt giddy from bending in the one position in the hot sun. She straightened and took off her hat. The whole thing seemed so hopeless and she wanted to cry so badly that the prickling was already starting round her nostrils and eyes and the quivering about her mouth. On impulse she bent suddenly and emptied the can along as much of the notice as she could. But it was useless. She had nothing to rub it with and the water rapidly dried off, leaving the words fainter but still legible.

She forgot how conspicuous she must be, how odd her behaviour would appear to a passer-by, and turned in her vicious circle of resentment and unhappiness back towards the school. Her hat hung from one hand, the emptied can from the other, and her eyes, picking sullenly over the complexities of the rocky ground, did not see Mr. Findlay approach.

He found his early morning bonhomie oozing away in the heat, leaving a pebble of annoyance as an irritant in his mid-breakfasting-disturbed mind. His wife had made him look out of the window, had pestered him until he had left his tea cooling in the cup beneath a saucer placed on it to retain the steam, to see in the middle of the road one of his – Good God! Surely not – yes, that damned Lalor child working away with a bucket? He adjusted his glasses. Slipping into his dark vest, he hurried out to the veranda. Vinny had stopped rubbing at the roadway – what in Heaven's name was the girl doing? – and was slopping water up and down from the can. He shut his front gate carefully and went along the footpath towards her.

‘Girl!' he said. ‘Vinny!'

She looked up. Her face was puffed from heat and the pale eyes under the orange hair glared out from the sweat-glow on her face. When she saw who was addressing her the truculence she felt crumpled like a paper fan, became fear, became herself in essence, the shape of unpopularity, the nothingness against the sheer huge importance of authority.

‘Yes, sir,' she said. There was not even humility left. The annihilation of her personality was complete.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Nothing.'

‘The usual answer – nothing. What is that watering-can for?' He felt very cross. His tea would be undrinkable. ‘Tell me,' he ordered impatiently. ‘What were you doing with the can?'

Vinny did not answer, and the man stared over her shoulder at the blackness of the dampened area in the centre of the road. He strode past her quickly and read the notice. Still Vinny did not raise her head. The few seconds in which he read the crude libel chalked on the hot asphalt seemed to her to stretch over a slow world, to girdle lives and epochs and come back inevitably to this wretched fragment of time with herself wanting but unable to plunge into the springs of tears and with Findlay's voice, cautious and sobered, saying, ‘It wasn't you who wrote this, was it, and then thought better of the action?'