A Descant for Gossips (18 page)

‘Very well.' Moller unaccountably felt bored. He was being pigeon-holed as a problem, his moral competence was on probation.

‘If you'll excuse me,' he said, ‘I'm on duty second half, and I haven't had any lunch.' He stood up and stubbed the butt of his cigarette so viciously the paper burst and the tobacco splayed out. Findlay, noticing the tension implicit in the action, felt himself moving towards an inevitable decision. There was a school committee meeting in three days' time. He would mention the matter
–
cautiously, you know
–
to one or two of the more responsible members, get an opinion. He followed Moller out of the door and, going down the school's front steps, crossed the yard to his home. Annoyance and heat shimmered everywhere and, refracted on the lenses of his glasses, made him stumble blindly.

It was like cornering a rabbit.

Surrounding her, pressing her in against the far corner fence made her seem smaller and whiter and more unpleasant than ever. Howard and his pal, Tangle Davis, drew Pearl Warburton and Betty Klee forward until the four of them held her trapped in a tiny sector of bush-screened shade. So far she had not answered them, but the first terror which had made her speechless was dwindling away now to nothing, to absolutely nothing, and obstinacy hardened her mouth and her pale eyes.

‘Come on,' Howard repeated, ‘come on, Lalor. We know you did it. Bert Springer saw you when he was coming in on the run. His kid Joey told me it was you who did it.'

The girls watching her stirred in anger. They almost begrudged her this sudden attention. Pearl Warburton leant against Tangle's skinny side. He looked at her and giggled with nervous pleasure and, concealed from the others, she caught his arm and squeezed it with the tips of her fingers. Vinny's glance flickering across the shaken shadow-doubles of the leaves caught the movement of amorous finger-play. Suddenly, vividly she saw again the pool and the bathers and the figure on the diving rock. She had never really been free of the image, for it had come to her whenever she saw Pearl Warburton or Royce. But it always seemed too horrible to be true, smudged in outline even by the passage of a week; yet now the exploring, interpreting fingers proved the image once more and she shuddered involuntarily.

Howard was becoming tired of her stubborn silence. He snapped his fingers hard under her nose and flicked her with them.

‘Come on. Tell us!' he said.

Vinny's hand flashed up before she could prevent it and smacked Howard's arm so sharply it hurt her. He drew back, his face crimson with rage.

‘Why, you bitch!' he said. ‘You ugly little bitch!'

‘Yes!' Vinny shouted. ‘Yes, I did it. And it wasn't the only one I washed off either. I cleaned off all of them. All last week. And every time you write more up, I'll clean them off, too.'

She felt crazed with her own defiance. The four faces watching her melted and shifted their outlines. The air was aqueous with light in which leaves swam like seaweed. She hoped she wasn't going to faint.

‘She's mad!' Betty Klee said, and giggled. ‘I always thought she was. Her mother's crazy as a galah.'

Vinny did not even hear her. The heat was making her giddy and the tension that had built up inside her until it snapped in uncaring passion had been too great for her to endure.

‘And what's more,' she added, ‘what's more, Howard, the next time I see one of your lousy little notices I'll go straight to Mr. Findlay. Do you hear? I'll tell him it's you. I'll tell him it's the four of you.'

Pearl's fingers dropped from Tangle Davis's unmuscular arm.

‘You wouldn't dare,' she said. ‘We'd make it too awful for you. You wouldn't dare.'

‘Yes, I would. And there's a few other things I could tell him, too.'

‘What are they?'

Vinny smiled ferociously. She gripped her belt with her hands and glared across the yard at the distant school. She could see Mr. Moller ambling behind the primary block getting children to gather papers and lunch bags and fruit skins to put in the big green bins. She felt her loyalty to him flare up into the ardour of a crusader. She watched his kindly, lazy body and knew the insanity of personal sacrifice sweeping through her, aggravated by the sudden appearance of Mrs. Striebel and Miss Jarman along the senior veranda. She smiled maddeningly.

‘What other things?' Pearl persisted.

‘Ah, leave her.' Betty Klee dragged at Pearl's left arm. ‘She doesn't know anything. She's kidding.'

Pearl shook off the acolyte hand angrily. There was something in Vinny's face that made her aware of more than bluff, that warned her, usually so insensitive to atmosphere, that there was something far more dangerous than chalked-up libels.

‘I'm not kidding.' Vinny marvelled at her own effrontery. She looked from one to the other of the four faces, from the oval to the square to the round to the pointed, through meanness and sensuality and flaccid ugliness and good looks, and felt that she had come a long way to find her revenge in this moment.

She looked away then past them and saw the bell prefect hurrying along the veranda to ring the first warning of the end of the lunch hour. She watched him, watched his hand hurl into the air an iron chatter, a monotone clanking of liberation. All over the playground the noisy groups were stilled, ropes and balls caught as it were in mid-flight, the voices struck dumb. Mr. Findlay, magnificently the autocrat, walked along to the stair-head where he conducted assembly with the solemnity of a priest.

‘I'll tell him about the swimming hole,' Vinny said. Her voice sounded over-loud in this shell of silence. She glimpsed sideways Pearl's plump face, Howard's startled eyes. The sky over the town was filling up with tassels of quick-growing cloud, sud-white and wind-plumped.

‘What'll you tell?' Pearl had to hurry with her questioning. The second bell would ring in a matter of seconds.

‘The boys,' Vinny whispered, ‘the boys.'

‘You'll have to think of your brother's feelings,' Pearl replied viciously. Knowing it was useless to pretend unawareness, she tossed caution aside like a rag. Vinny glared into the round face with its full wet mouth and glimpsed her again with curving breast and thigh above the pool.

‘You're filthy,' she said. ‘Filthy. And I don't care about anyone's feelings. Not any more.'

The second bell rang, a dispassionate arbiter, and quite automatically the five of them started down towards the assembly lines.

‘Mind yourself, Lalor,' Howard said, and ‘See you after school, Pearl.' With Davis he loped off towards the boys' end of the senior ranks. Pearl permitted Betty Klee to link her plump arm with hers. She was puzzled. The butt of the class, the butt for so long she could remember no other time or attitude, had suddenly spun a trump before her unbelieving eyes, revealing a situation which she was unsure how to handle. Her excursions to the pool were important to her, not for their sensual reward so much as for the confirmation of her power, the proof that her body could focus and control the desires of men. For a girl of fifteen she was astonishingly old in erotics; and yet she managed to keep her behaviour secret from her parents, who doted on their only child as a consummation not merely of the flesh but of the spirit also. Although she had outgrown the habit of loving them, she was careful not to let them know, because life was so comfortable with their lavished material affection. And for the same reason, the fear that her comfort might be disrupted, she would hate them to learn about her summer outings.

She tugged at Betty Klee and drew her back as Vinny Lalor ran past them down the slope. The bright hair burning, it seemed, with missionary fire, the pallid limbs uncurved even this spring, were lost in the jerking, foot-edging, arm-extending horde of pupils.

‘Don't worry, Pearlie.' The diminutive was the emotional additive for reassurance. ‘Don't worry. She doesn't know a thing. Royce must have let something slip, but you know perfectly well he wouldn't tell her. You know he thinks she's a dope. He's always saying so.'

Pearl smiled. Sometimes she wished she didn't feel so old. She wanted to shake her fat apostle into an adult apostasy.

‘I'll fix her,' she said as she slipped into her place in the squad. ‘I'll think of something.'

Seven

‘We have been thrown to the Christians,' Moller said to Helen.

He took her elbow as they left the school, and pressed it as he helped her down the earth shelf to the road. ‘I didn't want to talk about it at lunch-time with Rowan and Jarman practically on our laps, but Findlay called me into the office this morning and told me an odd story.'

Helen waved to Szamos as they passed the milk-bar. ‘The Welches,' she said. ‘Oh, Robert, have they told Findlay? We must be costing them a fortune in sherry and biscuits!'

‘I don't think so yet, but it certainly will come from that source when they next meet. No. This is allied, but concerning the kids. This morning the old boy spotted Vinny Lalor washing off a big chalk notice on the road in front of the school. He didn't go into detail, my dear, but apparently it was flattering both to my virility and your attractiveness. Poor old boy! He had his departmental face on. All respectable and promotion conscious and keen.'

‘How can you – no, you're right to be flippant, really. It's too absurd. Bless Marian and Sam. They must have discussed us in front of their two revolting girls. Oh, Robert, what do we do? Now everyone knows or will within the week.'

‘Nothing. Nothing but carry on as usual.' He laughed. ‘No vulgarity intended. The only thing I hope,' he added seriously, ‘is that Lilian doesn't get to hear. Oh God, I wouldn't want to hurt her. Mind you, Helen, she's well aware that she'll never be out of that hospital cured, and I feel her reason would excuse us.'

‘And if it doesn't?'

He shrugged. ‘Wait. The rest of the town will be waiting. We can wait with them.'

They walked in silence to the railway yard. Porter McKeith, lounging spread-legged upon an outside bench, fag-rolling in the syrupy afternoon light, nodded at them and grinned, and tongued the edge of the cigarette paper delicately. Two dogs raised their legs upon the far side of a luggage trolley; the milk-cans squatted in silver back towards the entrance gates.

‘Here,' Moller said – he indicated with hyperbolic gesture the whole circle of the town, the stillness, the scattered shoppers, the pubs with their out-spillings of early evening drunks, the dogs, the lean grasses – ‘here is the hub of our worry, our punctured self-pride. Why, the nasty, stinking little mullock heap wouldn't even be marked in a Commonwealth atlas, and yet here we are worried sick because we have affronted the guardians of the town. It is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.'

‘You can only be important in the area where you move, I suppose,' Helen suggested. ‘Other people's reactions to unconventional behaviour seem to vary in inverse ratio to the size of the environs.'

‘My little mathematician!' Moller laughed. ‘You're so right. And it's so wrong that it should be like this. I suppose it's because there is much less distraction, especially of an immoral kind, in places as small. The merest peccadillo –' He spread his hands hopelessly. ‘I have visions, Helen, of the porridge-pale faces of outraged parents bent reverently over Bibles open at Leviticus and the Song of Songs.' He pressed his hands together in the attitude of prayer. Then he said, ‘Can you see me this evening? We might go for a drive. If necessary I'll carry the car a mile out of town so Lunbecks won't hear me start her up.'

Helen hesitated. ‘Do you think it's wise at this particular time? Did Finlay make any criticism?'

‘He did ask for a little more discretion. He's worried about the effect this might have on discipline.'

‘That's a point certainly.'

‘Agreed. But I feel he was overstepping the mark when he hinted at a transfer for one of us.'

The smile breaking at the corner of Helen's lips and eyes was arrested and twisted into a temporary pain that vanished.

‘He wouldn't be so absurd! Punish us like pupils!'

‘My dear, it's not absurd really, from his point of view. What is he? Forty-four. Still pretty young in this game. He has a son at an expensive boarding school. He wants to get on. He can't afford to have scandal's hot breath blistering his well laid plans. I know it's absurd looking at it from our side of the situation, but when I look at it from his, I could almost predict to the moment and place just when and where he will act.'

‘And –'

‘First, he'll mull the whole situation over. Has done by now. And then tonight, under a text above their bed reading ‘God is love' and another on the dressing-table reading ‘Blessed are the pure in heart', he'll talk it over with his wife in their cretonne-cosy bedroom. She'll be the first vote against us. Then he'll take it along – not officially, mark you, but he'll take it along all the same – to the school committee on Thursday night and he'll mull it over with a couple of the boys; and they'll have been worked on by
their
wives and that will be a whole lot of votes against us. So you see, I wouldn't be at all surprised if perhaps he does do something about that threat, and one of us gets a take-off ticket.'

Porter McKeith swayed to his feet and rolled away to the signal-room with the half-smoked cigarette saliva-stuck to his lower lip. The afternoon rail-motor north to Gympie was just rounding the southern bend, bucketing along the channel through the scrub.

‘It would hardly be you,' Helen said. ‘You have a house here.'

‘Only rented. There's no bargaining point behind that when you're dealing with clerks in the public service.'

‘Perhaps both of us will go. A catharsis for Gungee.'

‘Perhaps. It will hardly matter, will it, once we're parted anyway?'

Helen half turned to leave him and walk down the road beside the lines. She swung round again upon a sudden thought.

‘That poor Lalor child! I wonder what made her do it. It's very moving – for want of a better word. I suppose it was gratitude for the week-end, among other things.'

Moller grunted. ‘I gave you the reason once before and you didn't like it. We all have to have a cause – something to worship or work for. And on that trite note I'll leave you until this evening. Please come. About seven. Earlier if you can make it. Come round on the back road and you might dodge the Lunbecks. Or better still, Helen, I'll run the car down towards the pub and you can get in at the corner past the paper shop.'

He caught her hand and pressed it very tightly in his own. ‘You know I'd like very much to kiss you now. Compromise you
con expressione, con moto
.'

Her back was to the sun, her face in shadow, but Moller's burned in the late extravagance of light coming from the western sky. She squeezed his hand in return and briefly placed her other hand over his. ‘McKeith is watching us fascinated through the signal-room window,' she said, and turned finally from him.

She was late coming to the dining-room that night, having spent more time than usual exploring the possibilities of dress, examining her face with a new consciousness that comes to the lover and the loved. Her dress was dark and soft and clasped her body in shadow that strengthened the effect of light upon her hair. It was a study in chiaroscuro. The Talbots glanced swiftly at her as she sat down at the table and she was well aware of their curiosity, their aroused criticism of her appearance. She smiled Gioconda-fashion between the sauce cruets, older for the moment than both the Talbots seated there in the anticipatory stew of indignation – she felt certain they knew about her week-end at the Bay – their juices longing to flow in outrage.

‘Something special tonight?' Jess asked. It was an impossibility for her to pay the direct compliment to another's looks. Always the praise was tempered by just that little piece of unkindness calculated to destroy the effect of any pleasure the receiver might have obtained. (‘She has a beautiful body,' she would say of Ruth Lunbeck. ‘Really beautiful. What a pity her feet are so ugly!' Or, ‘Freda Rankin really can look pretty sometimes.')

It was a special skill, Helen told herself. You either had it or you hadn't. She was sure that as a team the Talbots practised their verbal viciousness together. Prick. Prick. Alec Talbot had told her once that Jess and he often corrected each other's speech; it was a game they played, like quoits or darts or skittles, seeing who could detect the greater number of solecisms. How close they must be to each other! Helen shuddered at the thought of this marriage of true minds that admitted no speech impediments.

‘No. Not really. Just a morale booster.'

Talbot sniffed into his roast beef, quivered above the tissues of cold meat covered with lukewarm gravy, over the unhappy vegetable farrago. Furtively, while he munched, he watched Helen's bosom, or her lips or her hands, but watched without real lasciviousness, merely the curiosity of the welfare worker for the underprivileged, with an almost evangelical interest. Helen perceived his shifting glances and permitted herself an inward smile, thinking how he would, if he could, present her with a tract. His wife viewed both of them coldly, displeased by Alec's behaviour and with jealousy rumbling at the back of her mind in a faint thunder of inference. She always stated, to those of her friends unluckily close enough to be recipients of the intimacy, that she could not bear to think her husband had been anything but virgin when she married him. However, remembering Ruth Lunbeck's amused assertion that Harold had stepped practically from his prefect's study into their hymeneal flatette, and watching Alec now, she was not so sure. She ate her woody potatoes very deliberately, cut them into slabs and small blocks, and pushed them into her prissily chewing mouth.

Since the previous week-end, when the Welches had discovered for them the scandalous relationship between Mr. Moller and Mrs. Striebel, the Talbots found conversation at meal-times more awkward and more restraining than they could have foreseen. Jess was longing to elicit succulent details that would place her conversational value at a premium, but she hardly liked to make direct investigation. At first she had used Mr. Farrelly's agitation over the trunk calls as an excuse for broaching the inexcusable, but all her inquiries, polite or not, met with nothing but a brief explanation that her sister had been involved in a car accident, and was not seriously hurt beyond a fracture of the left arm. All other probings, veiled with the thinnest good manners to prevent her rudeness being charged with indecent exposure, could gain nothing more than, ‘Yes, a very pleasant two days away.' If it had been one of her old school hockey team deliberately bouncing her questions, Jess would have punished her with demotion or detention from sport. Her bust swelled with annoyance as she drew an impatient breath – she would like to suck the two of them in with it, bathed in a faint halitosis that seemed a normal adjunct to such self-consciously militant Christianity.

‘Black is always effective,' she said, staring hard at Helen's all-black dress, ‘especially with a touch of white. I think I must wear something similar to our special “do” next week.'

‘Please, Jess, not “do”. Function. Function.' Alec Talbot spoke in a kind of anguish.

‘Yes,' Jess Talbot continued, ignoring him for once because she was punishing him in their own special way. ‘Yes, Mrs. Striebel, Sam Welch is giving the factory's annual staff dinner on Friday week. This year he has invited the entire staff, engineers, senior office workers and their wives, typists and their husbands, as well as the boiler hands and packers and drivers. We can't help feeling a wee bit worried as to how it will go. A most uncomfortable affair, I should imagine.'

‘It might be good for laughs,' Helen said, with the first touch of real viciousness she had ever displayed towards them.

‘Ohhh.' Jess paused. ‘You think we're snobbish?' she asked coldly.

‘I do indeed.'

‘Not at all. I merely think the evening will be a failure with people of such dissimilar education forced upon each other for hours at a time.'

‘Nonsense,' Helen said briskly. She poured herself another glass of water and drank it with at-ease heartiness. ‘It will do you good. Why keep your tight little university minds in a tight, sacred little university circle? And it isn't as if the senior business staff were university men,' she continued recklessly. ‘You're just making position and money your arbitrating factor there. Personally, I'd rather talk to boiler-hand Perce Westerman and his wife than to Marian Welch any day. Both of them have far more sensible things to say, and if the way they say it isn't contorted with elocutionary garble, who cares?'

Jess was quite white. Her narrow face, furrowed in annoyance, bent forward across the stained cloth and the untidy dinner plates, zealot-keen.

‘We care,' she said. ‘Alec and I care for a few of the refinements of life. And careful speech is one of them. You're being terribly unkind about Marian Welch.'

‘You care for it,' Helen said slowly and carefully, ‘the way chorus girls care about furs. It's a new form of pretentiousness that can hide all sorts of mental bankruptcy. The bray. And as for being unkind about Marian, I would love to know, but cannot conceive, how that is possible. Tell me. How?'

Alec Talbot looked up anxiously into the puffed-powdered-strawberry-sweet face of Allie.

‘Two baked custards,' he said, he begged. ‘We've had this out on speech before, haven't we?' he urged them to agree. Placatory gestures were not normally his method, he felt apologies were a weakness of character, but he was afraid that at any moment the conversation might swing into a dangerous wood, storm over and under the flying boughs of personal abuse. He only liked being rude in whispers or a softly modulated voice. Helen Striebel might shout dangerously and openly.

Helen finished her first course and set the plate to one side. Guided divinely, she rested both elbows on the table and propped her chin on her laced hands. Head supported thus, she gazed down upon them, the very insolence of her calculatedly ill-mannered posture making her relaxed; upon the scaled peak of their enmity looking down into their unhappy faces.