A Descant for Gossips (15 page)

He pulled up outside one of the sleepy stores and they bought milk and butter and bread.

‘There's a reasonable stove at the house according to the agent,' Moller said, ‘but I don't fancy messing around with fuel, do you? Let's live on tins and the primus.'

They called at the agent's home and collected the key; then, having received directions, drove slowly along the beach front until they came to the house. Moller braked and cut the engine and they sat there with the sea wind blowing straight through the car. Scrubby trees along the waterfront, tangled and torn by salt, rested their heads against the sky. A hundred yards away a lonely fisherman reeled in, rebaited, and swung his line gracefully out again across the water. Off shore a motorboat chugged a diagonal towards the point and the noise of its engine seemed to arch and enclose them.

The house was very squat and ugly and the windows across the front were blinded by fly-screens. A chainwire fence creaked under the weight of westringia bushes and the front gate swung agape upon sand and tussocks.

‘Inside,' Moller said, ‘there will be one bedroom with a frighteningly large double bed, one with two sagging stretchers, and a living-room with a rococo side board and a lino-topped table. I can see it all. The apricot-coloured glass-ware and the two desert scenes above the sofa.'

He took Helen into his arms, kissing her mouth for a very long time, and the wind blowing across their closed eyelids felt unbelievably cool.

On Sunday morning they hired a rowing boat from the boatshed farther along the beach and took it across to Smooger Point. The weather was still holding. Big puffs of cumulus floated in the strait and the keel sliced them and the mirrored gulls correlated sky colour with sea colour and wing with fin. The shore-line behind them was a melange of green, grey, and smoky blues, shadow dribblings across white sand and the wet tongues of tidal inlets.

After they had beached the boat they carried their lunch bag up the grassy dunes until they found a hollow, tree-hedged, sea-sound-muffled. Hardly could they restrain eyes or hands from each other's person, so sharp was their present tenderness, their infatuation, though it was more than that really – yet going through the primary process all the same of divining one's own godhead in the other. Lying among their own lunch wrappings, they explored the preciseness of their affection verbally, under a vertical sun that wrung sticky-sweet scent from the grass, made a spikenard as it were of the yellow flowers twisting across the multiplicity of purple bloom on the land side.

‘We are too old for this sort of thing,' Helen suggested. She picked up a handful of sand from one of the many little lakes of white that scattered about the grove, and let it sift through her fingers.

‘You sound like an early N
ö
el Coward,' Moller said. He lay flat on his back beside her under the ragged shade of a sand cypress. ‘Of course we are. At least, I am. Not you, my dear, with your incredibly young body. But you mustn't say it, and certainly not in those reproving tones. Even if we are – what the hell?' He paused. ‘But it's not a physical oldness that you mean, I know, but mental. You feel we should have grown beyond this sort of thing.'

‘Something like that.'

‘Nonsense. What delicious nonsense! I have wanted these two days for nearly a year now. Nearly a year.'

She looked across the hollow that held them to the top crests of the ocean-side dunes and did not reply.

He stared into the sky spaces. ‘Even now that I've explored your body I'm not content. I want to learn it by heart. But that's not enough. There's the mind to learn, and the emotions, and the lovely unreliable intuitions that are essentially female. A week-end isn't enough. Not for all those things. I don't know, Helen, really I don't know.'

‘What don't you know?'

‘How or when I can get all those things. Time does seem limited.'

‘Yet yesterday you chided me for the same regret.'

‘Not quite the same. I'm not lamenting what I've had. Only what I mightn't achieve.'

Helen looked straight at him as she asked, ‘Are you content so far with your discoveries?'

He took her hand and held it against his mouth so that she could feel his lips moving against her palm as he replied.

‘Content and most uncontent. There's my fullest compliment. Even after these two days, Helen, whenever I shall see you coming towards me along the verandas at recess or in the classroom you turn as I enter, I'll see you as I saw you last night coming towards me for the first time in that tiny bedroom awash with moonlight.'

Helen trembled involuntarily. ‘Not for long,' she said. ‘You won't remember for long.'

‘At present I think for very long indeed,' Moller said. He sighed. ‘But I know you are right – ultimately. We are too old to be taken in by storybook imagery. Yet really, Helen, it will be a long time before I forget the consolation of your – of your body.'

She was silent for a moment and then she said, ‘After today I never want to see that house again.'

He was surprised at the violence in her voice. ‘Why?' he asked. ‘Do you find it shameful? Won't it have some sentimental connotation?'

‘Now you're being female!' Helen smiled.

‘
Touch
é
!' He was relieved to see the tension on her face relax. ‘But tell me why.'

‘I'm frightened,' she said, ‘that both of us might find it tawdry, tawdry enough to spoil it all. Repetition might make more than a joke of the faded orange silk bedspread and the ripped horsehair sofa. You know, I had a bad moment on Gympie station when I was waiting for you.'

Moller rolled over and sat up. The anxiety in his eyes was doubled in hers. ‘Have care with an ageing man,' he joked, not really joking.

She told him about the traveller in the refreshment room, and grimy salacity of the washroom walls.

‘It was the sudden connection of the idea,' she explained, ‘the harshness of its animality. For a few minutes I was on the point of turning back.'

She saw his face. The pain was understandable, but unbearable, too, and she was glad when finally he pulled a face at her and flung his old cynicism forward.

‘I'll defend that situation,' he said. ‘You wouldn't have me discount the physical – animal, if you like – side of any relationship such as this, would you? Do you really want me to lie and pretend and excuse and paint it all on a high spiritual plane – ‘my-dear-this-thing-is-bigger-than-both-of-us' women's magazine stuff? Do you? Do you?' he persisted.

Helen smiled into his near-angry face.

‘No. I suppose it's as you said – we need the right props. But of course I don't discount the physical. You've made an honest woman of me.'

‘Thank God for that. Why lie to suit the gossips or the prudes that live in the shallows of our own conventional selves? Don't let's pretend that this is all such a beautiful magic we have no bodies. I doubt if there'd be any spiritual affinity between us if it weren't for the primary impulse of our sex. I don't know. I may be wrong. What happened at Gympie was unfortunate, badly timed perhaps. If it had happened a week later it might not even have impinged on your fastidiousness. Who knows?' He rolled himself a cigarette and there was a silence; the hot stillness dripped from trees in the sun to pools of shadow. ‘But know this, Helen. My body wants yours. Terribly, I'm afraid. And I cannot excuse it. You have an inner comfort and the unquiet in my own mind craves that, too. It's knowing “flesh in terms of spirit”.
Bist du bei mir.
Good old Bach.' He hummed a phrase or two. ‘Quickly, Helen. I have to kiss you. Bend over me and blot out that light and that sky.'

So little things swing bigger ones into scything motion; moments have the vengeance of hours and days and years, even, waiting upon the misplaced use of seconds. A folly to count back through time to this or that as a factor in disaster, but so often the casual movement means seriousness for the mover. And thus it was that Helen and Moller, rowing back to Snapper Bay later than they had intended, timed their shore arrival with that of a smart launch nosing in towards the breakwater.

Helen was leaning sideways over the stern trailing one hand in the wash when she heard an oath from Moller and felt the boat swing as he backwatered on one oar and swung the bows in to shore at a sharper angle. She turned and saw the concern on his face creased into a frown.

‘Look away, Helen,' he said softly. ‘The trees. The water. Anything. The launch behind us is Sam Welch's. I clean forgot about their bloody shack up here. Oh God! As soon as I've beached this hulk, head straight back to the house. We'll try to dodge them on the beach.'

The boat jammed in on the wet sand, and Helen, holding her sandals, waded through the warm low tide, went up the beach past the scuttling soldier crabs to the shelter of the trees along the roadway. When she turned at last she could see Moller planting the anchor and gathering up the oars to return to the boatshed. The launch dinghy was slipping quietly over the fifty feet of glassy water between it and the shore, and even up there under the listening trees she could hear Sam Welch's shout of, ‘Hey, Herc!'

She watched him turn in the trap to wave, to smile, to wait for him and to make one of three in an exchange of banalities, while all the time Marian Welch's excited face sought her over Moller's shoulder, reached for her like a gluttonous tapir to where she stood. She half turned to go, and then decided to wait. The breeze came in over the strait stiffening the water into corrugations of green and white; the whole of the bay's craft rocked suddenly in the afternoon breeze, and she saw Moller leave them and come towards her. His face said all she needed to discover, but he spoke sourly as he came up and took her arm.

‘No point in your training it back from Gympie now,' he said. ‘That wouldn't disarm anybody. You might as well travel back to Gungee shamelessly with me. As late as we can. They spotted the car yesterday afternoon.'

They walked along the peninsula in the shadow of the trees. Helen felt nothing but unexpected relief after all, and she smiled as she touched the inside of his wrist with her finger-tips.

‘Just what happened?'

‘Apparently they came up by car after lunch yesterday. Up for the week-end. Their shack's farther along the point. Marian told me she saw the old Buick pulled in under the trees, but she said she didn't think it could have been mine. Anyway, they went off early this morning for a spot of fishing up near Fraser Island, and they must have had a good look at my number plate on the way to the beach. I couldn't pretend I hadn't been here last night. I'm sorry, my dear. I really don't know how I kept Marian from you. She was literally itching as she peered up at you.'

‘They know it's me?'

‘Afraid so. They saw you from the launch. Eyes like eagle-hawks.'

Their feet slapped the red earth, the sand hollows, the stringy grass.

‘Do you mind?'

‘Surprisingly enough, no.'

‘What a lamentable novice at seduction you must think me, Helen.'

‘No, Robert, no. Not technically.'

‘Thank you. Thank you indeed.'

They both laughed and the long purpose of their mirth brought them to the westringia bushes on the creaking chain-wire and the tussocks and the door warped by sea air and the bedspread of faded orange silk. And it was only when they remembered Lilian that their eyes suddenly sobered.

The costive celebrations of the foursome, the nigglings, the prurience, all festooned the evening from eight until ten when they decorated the sandwiches like parsley sprigs and became garnishings on savouries. A satisfying evening. An evening of unchristian destructiveness at which they all assisted with gossip snippets directed at their two new victims. Whenever the conversation digressed into behaviourisms less spectacular, it was drawn back to its central theme by Jess Talbot who found the topic magnetic.

‘I'm interested in people,' she explained earnestly. ‘I don't feel that by being interested one is being uncharitable. Do you?' Her voice was loud and assured and frighteningly well educated. It ploughed through the spontaneous assents. ‘I can't help it, you know. I make it my business to know other people's business. I feel it all helps towards an understanding.'

Her beautiful long hair was drawn back into coiled plaits that shone redly beneath the Welches' table lamp. Alec looked at her admiringly. He loved the simple virtues.

‘True,' Welch said. ‘Very, very true.' He was a technical college, not a university, man, and he felt slightly resentful towards Talbot with his union tiepin, and his careful articulations. At heart he hated him, hated him for his union tiepin and his careful diction, but publicly could not bring his irritation, his dislike to the point of being rude or even cool. Now and again he exhibited just the merest shade of truculence that exploded in fountains of venom when he talked alone with Marian and the two of them stripped the synthetic social mask aside.

‘How long has it been going on?' Marian speculated for the dozenth time. She never tired of flinging this query into the listening air. Titillated by the gossip, she thought of Lunbeck and ogled Talbot, who dropped his church-worker's eyes modestly to his glass.

‘Who knows?' Jess Talbot's vowels were at the top of their form. They bowled all verbal opposition aside like gigantic iron spheroids. ‘Too long, I think. Remember, we do have the effect upon the youngsters at the school to consider if the scandal gets around' – making mental note that it would, that it must. ‘It's exposing them to moral danger to allow them to suffer such a relationship between members of the staff. Teachers are supposed to be looked up to, surely.'

‘The horrible thing,' Marian said, loving it, ‘was that he didn't seem a bit ashamed. Not a bit. He actually smiled when Sam asked him if he came up on Saturday. He almost seemed to be enjoying the situation. Didn't he, Sam?'