A Descant for Gossips (10 page)

Helen laughed. ‘I'm very tired.'

‘Too tired for coffee or supper? Nothing social, nothing dressy. Just plain natter and coffee.'

‘If Margaret is back in time to baby-sit. She was due half an hour ago. As a matter of fact, I think I can hear the car now. Yes. There she is booming up the veranda. All right, Robert. Let's say eight, shall we? And where?'

‘I'll pick you up if it won't cause scandal.'

‘My dear!'

He replaced the receiver, humming
‘Wie bist du meine K
ö
nigin'
with syncopated pauses and little batches of mordents and semi-quaver variations that gave the song a nightclub significance. He washed his face, but it still looked greasy and certainly flabby, and then he brushed his nicotine coated teeth uselessly; and after that he put on a tie. The whole effect – the sports coat, the rounded trousers – was not one of being
en f
ê
te,
so with a hideous groan he stripped them off and struggled into navy serge, buttoned rather too snugly across his chest, creased a little too sharply on each leg. Still, this was more – more … He went still singing to the car.

They confronted each other in the angle seat of an upstairs lounge with the wary eyes of rivals. Outside the window behind them a vertical neon sign switched from red to green and back again, subtly altering the values of the light about their table. The lounge was filled with drinkers whose talk made barriers of privacy round the two by the window. The pedestrian platitudes bubbled up like froth on beer and settled between the groups in tarnishing rings. A waiter on wheels skated in and out, twirling his drink tray, clinking his gins and brandies, his whiskies and cr
ê
mes, like castanets among the fleshy and the fleshless, the hard and the flaccid. The rubber bound bodies of the women bent in their prisons towards the legs-apart-sprawled men using their chairs like saddles. Mouth signalled to mouth over rim, or the eyes were wildly bright and insincere or watery and maudlin above the big and the little noses, the red pores, the powder. In rhythm with attenuated tea-room music pressed from piano and violin by two blas
é
boys, the washroom doors swung open and shut monotonously, and at each opening Helen glimpsed the stained tiles, a figure re-masking before a wall mirror, the chromium of the taps. And all the time, out here in the large smoke-hung room, the bawdy utterance burst among the red faces pressed together and flung them apart with the bomb of the obscenity into explosions of laughter. Quiet and systematic character-felling went on at tables for two, which stood among the jig-sawed pieces of personality like fortresses of virtue, stone-hurling turrets.

Helen felt the artificial excitement of the setting, the tawdriness, and, feeling it, did not know whether to be pleased that they had made the decision to solve their friendship erotically. The adverb crossed her mind with a temporary embarrassment and involuntarily she lowered her eyes to her gin. Moller was watching her. His heavy eyes said nothing at all, and it was some time before he spoke.

‘Tell me, Helen, are you sorry?'

‘No.'

‘Sure?'

‘Quite.'

He nodded. ‘Now another question. Did young Vinny hear your end of the conversation tonight, or know you were meeting me? I think perhaps it's unwise that the adolescent population of Gungee should feed on our indiscretions.'

Helen lit herself a cigarette. The sign outside the window fell across her in green bands.

‘I don't think she could have heard. The phone is in the hall as you know, and Vinny was in the sitting-room with the door closed between us. No, I don't think she could possibly have heard, and I certainly didn't tell her I was meeting you. All she knew was that I was going out for a short time. I hope to heaven Margaret has the good sense to repress her Bohemian descriptions. In any case, Robert, Vinny would hardly discuss it with the rest of her class. She wouldn't get a chance, poor kid.'

‘Who knows?' Moller said. ‘This is a God sent opportunity for establishing herself as an oracle. She might use it to make a bid for favour.'

‘How would that sort of behaviour tie in with the crush on me that you say she has? And I don't know that I like the idea of that too well, either.'

‘A point. Still, she could be jealous of me. Don't look so incredulous, my dear. Remember the scandalous fate of my predecessor at the school after his idyllic episode with young Crewe. Now, hold hard! I'm not suggesting Vinny nourishes a passion of that extent for you, but you must admit she does worship a little. Who can blame her? You're the only one who is kind to her – unalterably kind.'

‘Why,' Helen asked, ‘why is adolescence such a difficult time? Why has it got to be so distorted and painful?'

‘Mine wasn't,' Moller said complacently. ‘I did all the things boys do at all the normal times. I went into boils in second year, long 'uns in third year, and spent most of fourth studying nature magazines and swotting up unnecessary biological facts in medical texts. I was a charming, natural, unspoilt boy.'

Helen laughed loudly and spontaneously. A man at the next table winked. She winked back.

‘It's the gin.' She explained away her action to Moller who was looking at her amusedly.

‘Good for you,' he said. ‘I like to see you unbending. But while we're still sober, a word of warning. We must be oh so circumspect at school. Deny each other more than thrice, my dear.'

He said, suddenly sentimental across the tiny wobbling table, ‘My very dear', and knocked his glass, spilling some brandy on the floor. ‘They are so full of conscience and God, our village playmates, they would feel it a duty to inform Lilian to make her sickness more unbearable and our happiness less tolerable.'

He sighed and finished his drink. The neon sign changed from green to red. The man at the next table swayed across space towards him and called him ‘sport' and borrowed a match and swayed back. The big clock on the wall above the door leapt five minutes and took the room to nine-fifteen and a higher straining of the voices towards enjoyment, towards packing popularity into fatuities and shallow yap, while the door of the women's washroom swung open and shut upon the blonde and the brunette, all sisters under the liquor, who got pally over the wash basin or shared their waiting discomfort outside the lavatory door with comradely patter from the external sexual warfare. They belched and apologised as one.

‘What can we do?' Moller apostrophised the air, ignoring the appetent leer from the man at his elbow. He spoke more softly and leant across the table. ‘What can we do, my girl, but sleep together? A dull denouement for the warmest of friendships. Hark at my cynicism! But I can think of nothing else.' He complained into his third brandy. ‘I have seen nothing of you this week-end, except tonight, and soon you will have to go, I suppose. I planned this week-end hoping – well, no, of course I didn't hope really – I knew the child was to have the pleasure.' He made a face at Helen and took her hand between his sweaty ones. ‘Go on smoking,' he said. ‘Do it single handed. So,
post hoc,
I have decided that I want an entire weekend of you. Schoolless, Lilianless, conscienceless.' A muscle moved with a sudden desperate flicker along the line of his jaw. His kindly, unromantic face looked at Helen's. ‘I shall take you away,' he said, ‘and we shall don our sanbenitos afterwards.'

There should have been a certain fragility about this moment, a suspension of all ambient crudeness, but behind him, sudden as his statement, the washroom door opened like a rip in the wall, and a young and incredibly thin woman in scarlet lurched over the threshold to fall heavily amongst the tables and the chairs. Torn as it were from their context, Helen and Moller watched as her friends lifted her up and carried her from the room, and their real horror was that no one displayed any more surprise than a temporary turning of the head, a pause in the litany of sips. The man at the next table chose this moment to lean his red face across, his watery eyes glistening with apology.

‘'Scuse me,' he said to Helen.

Moller glared. ‘Beat it!' he said. ‘Go on!' He swung his bulky shoulder between the drunk and their table, shifting his chair further along. ‘Christ!' he snarled softly. ‘Christ! I said coffee! Why in God's name did I choose this joint to impress you with? To ease what could be a sordid situation right over the edge. It could be sordid, you know.'

‘I know,' Helen replied, gravely intent on not seeing him. ‘Very easily.'

‘The quick extra-marital excitement, the ultimate scuffle, the revulsion. That isn't what I want. At least, that is what it might be, what it probably is essentially, but we must change it with the right props. We must be a little insincere, or artificial, so that we don't disgust one another.'

He stubbed out his cigarette and rose.

‘Don't even finish your drink, Helen. Quickly. Let's get away from this place. It's like a merciless conscience.'

She pressed her bag and her gloves together and looked up at him furtively. Sweat oiled his forehead and his neck. He is neurotic, she thought, and yet who would find him so, punting the ball round the practice yard amongst the boys or fence vaulting or music-listening wrapped in an inner and an outer stillness? It is he who remains most urbane during examination pressure or inspection rounds; he who puts brash Sweeney down with more kindness than he deserves and bothers to talk trivia with Findlay. She followed his large body through the uncaring crowds; she kept close beside him as they passed the piano which was skimming in fulsome glissandos across the barest outline of a tune cartooning the original; she put out a hand and touched lightly with her finger-tips the warm serge of his coat as they went down the staircase laid with hotel-smelling carpet where the darkly varnished walls pressed them together before squeezing them out into a bud of a reception foyer with the closed registration desk, the stale gladioli, the loungers. Queen Street and the trams blazed in at them, yellow and black in prisms of clanking light under the exploding overhead wires, the green and purple dust-ticklings at the tongues of the jolly-poles. The streets were half empty, and in the theatres the crowds sat jammed together in their unreal worlds, cuddling the dark and the fantasy of each other, and sucking toffees and shushing. Oh rapture, thought Moller, hearing the united burst of laughter muffled but still audible from behind the closed doors and the epauletted commissionaire. The shops illuminated their death-faced models draped in silk, the hats displayed on basket frames, the underwear shameless under fluorescent light. Helen took Moller's left hand and tucked it warmly beneath her arm.

He looked down at her in affectionate surprise, and said, ‘We won't count this evening at all. I hate remembering my failures. I'll plan something a little more tasteful, I promise you. For the moment I'll have to content myself with seeing you home.'

Helen found the parcel on her bedside table next morning. There was a piece of notepaper tucked under it, and the edges of the paper were jagged from being trimmed with scissors. The note said:

Dear Mrs. Striebel, thank you for a wonderful week-end, from Vinny.

Helen opened the little brown-paper parcel, frightened of the contents even before she saw them, knowing they would be an embarrassment. She took the ornament out carefully and placed it on the table where it wobbled rachitically under its stuffed burden of roses and violets. The morning sun laid a colder gilt along the falsity of the edges. It stood there, vulgar and tawdry and filled with affection. She braced herself for the insincerity of gratitude, but really there was no necessity for her to pretend emotion, because she was so strongly aware of the effort behind the act, the privation for even such a cheap article, the difficulty of choice.

She took it out to Margaret who was in the kitchen preparing pancakes.

‘O God!' she said. ‘How sweet! And how really awful!'

‘Hush! For heaven's sake,' Helen pleaded. ‘It would break her heart if she thought I didn't find it perfect. This must have been the thing she carried round all day yesterday. I remember she hung on to it very carefully, and once when she dropped it in the theatre foyer she went white as death. I know it's hideous, but how lovely of her to do it.'

‘Changing the subject for a moment,' Margaret said, ‘How's Robert?'

Helen looked at her sister amusedly. ‘Now what?' she said. ‘What are you wanting me to say?'

‘I think,' Margaret said carefully, ‘I think you might be – pardon the expression – in love.'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Isn't it rather brave of you in a town the size of Gungee?'

‘What is the reason for this concern?' Helen asked mildly. ‘Surely I was in at a respectable hour last night.'

Margaret paused in her mixing and looked straight into Helen's eyes.

‘You look tired – not physically but emotionally.' Her face became impish once more. ‘How will you have your aspirin, honey? Scrambled or poached?'

They both laughed and hushed each other and glanced at the wall behind which Vinny was sleeping.

But she was awake by now, woken when the sun had first splintered the venetian blinds, snug in her cretonne womb, in the grottoed warmth of sheets and blankets, imagining with delicious apprehension Mrs. Striebel's opening of the packet. She had slipped into her room during the night, long after she had heard her come down the hall and rustle out of clothing and into bed, and had stood at her bedside for a trembling moment seeing her, Olympian, lying vulnerable upon her pillow, pale and dream-wasted and not at peace, with her head turning angrily against the lip of the sheet. She had not dared linger and, having put the gift where Mrs. Striebel could not fail to see it in the morning, had gone tiptoeing back to her room. It was a long time before her excitement subsided sufficiently to allow her to sleep. For an hour she lay listening to the stertorous wind outside the house heaving and grunting through the oleanders and shifting the last ribbons of storm cloud farther west. She kept wondering, too, where Mrs. Striebel had been. Perhaps with Mr. Moller. She felt jealous. Anyway, he had no business being with Mrs. Striebel. His wife was sick. She'd heard Pearl Warburton say some pretty mean things about Mr. Moller and Mrs. Striebel. Nasty, sneering little things she wouldn't listen to. Though she had felt last night they might be right.