A Descant for Gossips (14 page)

There was a knot of people on the station, in best prints and going-to-town silks and absurd serge tight under the armpits and in the crotch, stained across backs and bellies and buttocks. And the heads twisted stiffly to nod as Helen came round the end of the little building on to the platform. She felt her guilt rising like a mountain between her nod and the nods of the others; she was relieved they did not know of the act intended, as bad, she told herself, as the act committed. She bought a return ticket to Gympie and, having crammed the piece of cardboard into her purse, drew her very aloneness about her for protection, and walked out and stood by herself at the far end of the platform. It was a pity she had to be so noticed on this particular morning, but she stood bravely in her one good linen suit and carrying an overnight bag.

Around the southern bend of the line the rail-motor rattled its rust-red length. She stepped forward instinctively and when the end carriage stopped in front of her and she saw it was practically empty, she went, as she always did, to sit by the very last window. The Cantwells got in and waved and she waved perfunctorily herself, shrinking against the hard leather seat, dreading sociability, wanting only to see the houses melt into the trees into the hills, without having to barter worn-out phrases. They sat down a few seats away and she lowered the morning paper that she had raised in self-defence. A short hoot blurted from the front car. Gungee slid back into dust and eucalypt patterns, and then the open paddocks came and the lovely risings of the hills. Town after tiny town stamped its station with skinny farmers and dumpy housewives and urinating dogs across the dirty rain-dust-streaked glass. Now and again when they went through a deep cutting she caught a ghostly glimpse of her own face mirrored on the window, staring steadily into her own eyes; saw the white, wide cheek bones and the full, slightly down-curved mouth and the neat hair in its golden bun beneath the wide straw hat. She asked herself if it were the face of a woman about to betray another, and the eyes swung quickly to the cutting's red walls and the clambering mesembryanthemum and refused to acknowledge the accusation in the eyes. But despite self-recriminations nibbling like tiny fish at the edges of her mind, she was happy at heart beyond belief, so that she hummed quietly to herself below the racketings of the motor.

It was only when the first slag-heaps appeared like dirty scabs upon the Gympie outskirts that she suddenly feared Moller's meeting her on the platform with Cecily Cantwell's mock-innocent eyes down-tracking and cornering them and transfixing them against the waiting room walls. Cecily, she felt, would love to see them scuffing like bugs behind the ripped hoardings, concealing their twoness under dentifrice and canned-food advertisements, reducing the arrogance of their loving to the flat sordidity of torn posters and scribbled-on walls. The last curve came in with the branch line west, and then the station, and they pulled in slowly under the iron roof to a world of tea-urns and trolleys and the dripping taps outside the washrooms. Helen felt the Cantwells watching her as she stood up to drag her bag from the overhead rack. She gave them shallow smile for shallow smile and, disciplined towards exposure, pulled open the carriage door and stepped down to the platform in the dried-out sunlight.

While the front carriages emptied quickly she searched among the groups along the platform for Moller's bulky form. He was not there, and after the first second of disappointment she could almost have wept at his perception, his anticipation of the predicament of a public meeting in this place. She went into the refreshment room and ordered tea and sandwiches.

The long, stale room was all of a pattern with all the railway waiting-rooms all over the State – the thin and the blowsy girls, hair re-permed over perm, the tired frizz bobbing above the thick china and week-old teacake, the scalding, stewed tea and the slop rings on the counter. She stared, repelled, at yellow buns and silverpapered chocolate slabs, safe and sanitary, and the flies lethargic from too much food crawling over the sandwich piles. Yet with an idiotic determination to extract glamour from detail she felt that even these things would fix the day.

The man on the stool next to hers leant over dangerously and jolted her elbow.

‘Sorry,' he said, not meaning it, and leered purple and liquor-scented across the steamy air. ‘Going far? Awful stuff, this tea, i'n't it?'

Helen drew back from the network of veins hovering as if to trap her.

‘Yes, dreadful.'

‘Going far?'

‘No. I'm waiting for a friend.'

He looked her over. There were old stains down the front of his suit, and it was crumpled as if it had been slept in. He smiled confidentially and the effect upon the tiny eyes was quite horrible.

‘Someone's lucky, eh? Us poor travellers don't know what home comforts are. Rocky next stop-off and heaven knows when nex' the missus and me'll meet. Gets a man down.'

He blew on his tea and it washed over into the saucer. A piece of bun floated in it, but he rescued it and popped it into his mouth. His lower jaw worked over it busily.

‘When's your friend coming?' he asked. He smiled again, with his mouth unpleasantly filled with bun, and winked meaningly.

Helen pretended blindness, deafness. The man placed a hand testingly upon her arm.

‘I said when's your friend coming?'

Helen's arm shuddered in withdrawal. Sipping her tea, she said without turning, ‘Soon. Soon, I hope.'

Silence. Then –

‘Gent?'

His look sidled all round her, stroked her cosily, interpreted her silence rightly.

‘Gent it is. He's lucky, eh? Late, isn't he? Catch
me
!'

Helen gulped the last of her tea and sacrified her sandwiches, shoving the cup and plate back across the counter.

‘Hey! What's the hurry?' he asked. ‘We were just getting matey.'

Helen turned and saw him crumpled, stained, unlovely. The tiny eyes stared boldly into her own.

‘Boy-friend here already?' He shook his head in sorrow at her deception. His thinning skull waggled foolish reproof.

‘Yes,' she said. And left.

It was unfortunate, but she seemed to be pursued by incidents that spilt a sordidity over the whole affair. More and more, she felt, the week-end was being turned into a hole-and-corner scramble, furtively undignified. She looked up and down the platform once again, but there was still no sign of Moller and, uncertain what to do next, she turned and glanced through the refreshment room door. The traveller was watching her. He jerked his head with an unmistakable meaning. Helen turned away confused and walked along the platform to the women's waiting-room and entered into the clasp of the brown walls, the unswept floor. One window looked blearily out upon the stacked handles of a trolley pile. She could see a goods train shunting on the far track. All around her in an intense mural effort childish pornographies invited her to gross behaviour through injunction or sketch; name was linked with name in erotic bravado above pencilled anatomies that achieved only yawns. She felt that perhaps it would be better if the government railways arranged for semi-abstract murals by well-known artists to be prepared containing all the monosyllables and drawings so beloved by the bored traveller. If they were added in pleasant burnt orange or sienna or delicate blues and greens as an automatic part of the station
d
é
cor
she felt the public would be far more cheered than by these drab reminders of their primary duties. She found herself laughing as she washed her hands at the tap over the filthy porcelain basin. Careful not to touch its sides, she shook the water from her fingers and wiped them on a handkerchief.

It was ten-thirty. Robert had allowed this fifteen-minute interval very wisely. Feeling that he would probably be coming, she went outside again, handed in her ticket, and waited at the head of the concrete stair flight; and then, although she had expected him, his actuality shocked her into trembling as he ran up the stairs to meet her. The sudden touching of his lips to her cheek was almost the first conscious jolt that reminded both of them of the purpose of their meeting. His eyes explored hers. She felt almost ill at the hunger in them.

‘Thank you for waiting. I thought – I knew it would be safer. The Cantwells passed me, although they didn't see me, half a block back, and several of the mums and dads as well. The devil, my dear …'

He touched her arm and took her bag.

‘Don't say that,' Helen said. ‘I fought a deathly struggle with my conscience last evening. Please. Please, Robert. Let's think of nothing but being happy for a Saturday and a Sunday.'

‘That's entirely my view. Narrow, exclusive, and cannot be built out.'

He said ‘Helen' and ‘darling' and squeezed her arm very gently and pulled her against him so that she stumbled slightly, and then they walked in silence down the hill to his car.

He had parked it a short distance up a side lane, and after they had got in he drove slowly down the steep road past the dull houses to the main street with its close-set shops and its tin awnings. Something of the frontier town atmosphere lingered on in this ghost relic of the gold rush days, Helen thought, something so unsophisticated one felt an obligation to stride in buckskin shooting from the hips. She said as much to Moller, who laughed into the dry blue air.

‘They were dozens of brawls in the old town's heyday, some of them pretty serious. I don't think a mining town ever lives down its reputation, you know. And of course, although the output is finished now, there's always the stray dreamer who hopes he'll happen on a vein one day.'

He pulled in at the top of the town beside the post office.

‘Sending off some rude holiday cards to the Talbots.' He grinned hideously. ‘ “Plenty of sights around Gympie!” “It's breezy up here in Gympie!” “I've struck rock-bottom in Gympie!” '

Helen wrinkled her nose at him. ‘If you don't hurry you'll miss the midday sorting. Different, isn't it, from the days when Andrew Petrie ran his dray down to Brisbane?'

She found herself measuring his retreating and returning figure with a lover's eye that discounted shabbiness and the ageing disproportion of the body. She was thirty-two and felt older and at once younger than she would have thought possible, on this burning morning in September. And he was forty-seven, the hair still thick but greying, the face kindly but pouched a little and lined. Yet she felt nothing but tenderness for him; his physical defects gave him a vulnerability in the unkind light that brought her close to tears, so that when he sat once more beside her and started the engine running he was surprised at finding her hand resting across his own. Loving should not be so sad, she told herself, nor seek in the inevitably cruel way it does a sort of nostalgia in fine weather, in days of irresistible blueness and greenness, as if the rain that was not visible in the physical world were gently falling within the mind. Nothing, not even the most pellucid of moments, was ever recalled without a certain misting in the effect, a regret for loss, for the impossibility of repetition. She remembered a winter in the south when she was only a child, and the limned July outlines in plane-tree and elm, in maple, in poplars piercing the cold winds from the west; days when, moving about the house, you stepped with near-sighted care over the ragged papers of sunlight on the floor. Fires ate up the mallee logs at night as you sat with the plate of toast hugged between crossed legs. The changing shapes within the heart of the fire drugged the eyes into sleep. She tried in later years to recapture just the glassy quality of cold of that one particular winter of that bony deciduous season – but it was never the same.

The car swung out along the Tin Can Bay road and Goomboorian fell away to the west as they entered the Toolara pine forests, plunged into breakers of resined air swept up in tides, in waves, on a beach wind.

‘
Pinus caribaea
,'
Moller said. ‘Impressed? I am a fund of technical information.'

‘God! That heavenly smell! How long does this go on?'

‘Practically the whole thirty odd miles. Close your eyes, Helen, and forget school and Gungee and Talbots and Farrellys and just bask. Sheerly bask.'

I can look, I can try to imprint these miles and miles of forest ocean on receptive traces of the brain, she thought, but the end of the journey will be here, and the whole week-end will be vanished tomorrow afternoon, and not a thing will be left of it. She gazed pitifully across at the man.

‘Nothing lasts,' she said mournfully.

‘For God's sake!' Moller exploded. He half turned from the wheel. ‘Helen, get out of those disgusting deeps of triteness. Good God! I'm surprised at you!' He slowed up for a moment and flung her a brief glance of curiosity. He saw the hurt on her face and relented.

‘My dear, I'm sorry. But don't say things like that. This week-end has only begun. There will be others. I'm afraid you're incurably female the way you must take mental dips in the past. Try to be a bit male. Live ahead. You'll feel a lot better.'

He banged his horn at a curve. A truck coming west swung in savagely close, and was gone before he even had time to yell an oath.

‘You see? Not a regret!'

The road closed before and behind, a green cocoon of silence that fell not between but around them. Helen pressed her cheek to the frame of the window and parted her lips to the kissing of the rushing air. After a while road and trees became a kind of rhythm, and they spoke little, and the minutes slipped away as quickly as the miles. Nearing the coast they turned east to little Teewah Creek and then curved back north again, and the wide flat waters of the bay surprised them on their right and the first shallow inlets of Snapper Creek on their left. The air was bright, so bright that it seemed composed of millions of separate points – gold-pointillism, dust-stippled and dreadfully alive. Moller slowed the car as they came along the peninsula past the week-end shacks, the stores and the caravan park. Under the late morning sun in sharp angle, sun on blue water, the broad illumination of the sky, curved brightness, fire and sea reflection met in fathoms of air and beat the yellow beaches like brass. Gulls curved in over the strait following the hulls of fish-hungry craft speckling the sea. There was utter stillness.