A Descant for Gossips (19 page)

Jess Talbot found only one thing to say.

‘You have reason to be unkind, haven't you?'

Helen heard the spoons and plates beaten like tympani by the unsatisfied diners. At the table behind her a quartet of male voices whinnied through last Saturday's losses from start to finish, and the owners gobbled as if they were chaff-bags the uneyed meals in front of them. Heard it all; and saw, in the snipping flash of clear vision that showed her just what the other woman was implying.

‘No reason,' she replied. ‘No reason at all. What would make you imagine that I should have?'

‘Well, she is rather a gossip, isn't she?'

‘Is she?'

‘Why, of course. You of all people should know.'

‘I'm afraid that I don't.' (Why wouldn't she state her accusation boldly, come uncleanly clean?) ‘And I'm sorry for your sake. You seem so terribly anxious that I should be feeling uncomfortable or guilty or anxious. I feel none of those things. Ah! The pudding.'

Helen smiled into Allie's face coated like the pudding itself with a seductive cosmetic meringue, iced into the accepted mask of red and pink and black and white. Jess Talbot frowned down at her empty tea cup and then looked across to her husband's rabbit-like face. There was a strange expression on his features, a compound of fear and enjoyment. He really should have been a woman.

Helen felt as if she were poised, leaning forward into unfrightening darknesses, poised about to fly with no bravado at all into clearness; and the utter escape feeling made her see beyond the Talbots to the road and the car and the humped male figure cigarette-illumined in spurts. The Talbots finished their meal with lip dabbings and napkin foldings of technical precision, and left the table. But she did not hear or see. Rather she sensed them gone, and soon so would she be, the cup banging in the saucer, the scraping of the chair, the nod of thanks to Allie half seen in the kitchen, and then up the oilily lighted hall and down first to room to bathroom, back and down and out into the darkness, real, really and truly as they said when they were children and not for ever but capture the moment while you can, crunching on the dry road towards the car.

It crouched in the shadow-jungle of the corner house's crowded mango-trees. Helen's heart beat stupidly fast as she neared it, opened the door, and fell in against body, thigh and mouth. It was endless and ended and he put her gently back, starting the car without trouble for once and smiling, pleased, as the lights raced along the road.

‘Where to?' she asked.

‘Right out,' he replied. ‘Right out of this town where no vultures rest. How about going down to the coast?'

She nodded and lit herself a cigarette.

‘It seems no time since last week-end, does it?'

‘No. But, my God, a lot seems to have happened since then.'

‘The pressure's on,' she said. ‘Jess Talbot hinted at dinner tonight that the scandal has reached her sensitive ears.'

‘It would be surprising if it hadn't, wouldn't it?'

Off the main southern road the landscape was deep as a well. The car dived into its black bowl and sliced darkness open with yellow light. Along the eastern sky a kind of reflected pallor from the west lay close above the tops of the trees, washing upwards and out into the stippling grey-blue-indigo-black of the sky basin. Road glimmer before and behind took them as unerringly as migratory birds towards the salt-smelling under-moon washing sea. It was only ten miles away due east and Moller drove fast, ripping the black night air carelessly, letting it stream back against the sides of the car like rag.

When they came down to the river and the first lights, the narrowness of the road was a symbolic narrowness they both felt, with situations falling away to one side and sheering up upon the other. It was good that the fever of indecision was over, and it was good that they were committed to each other this night in car and under moon rising suddenly and late and full. But behind this surface confidence was a repressed fear of consequences of the act, of the ultimate feelings each would take away from the relationship if it ended.

The lights sugar-sprinkled the darkness to their left which was north, where the guest-houses and flats to let, untenanted, unlet, squatted along the river-front in out-of-season mourning, longing for the brown girls and the life of the party and the tonsures tomato-toasted and the immodest satin swimming trunks and the honeymooning couples connubially joined for a fortnight by mutual suffering – the sandfly-bitten, red-baked-crackling skin. Under the moonlight the boats showed upon the wide reaches of silver-paper water like pencil strokes, fringing the mournful lines of the jetties where the fishermen sat, blobs of optimism against heaven.

‘Shall we go on to the bay?' Moller asked.

‘If you like. It's not far, is it?'

‘Only another five miles.'

He swung the car over the bridge that spanned the narrow stretch of water between lake and river, and they went on again, following the water made magical by bonily outlined tree and casual cottage and the mangrove fingers, sly-sinister with moonshine and shadow, trailing the water. Weyba Creek stabbed the country whitely, and after that was passed the car ran quickly down the last mile to the bay.

Moller parked the car as close to the sand margin as he dared. The last house before the river-mouth curved the beach into a lip stood a hundred yards away. It was so still they could hear the fish rising in the gutters along the river bank. All around, scrub box crowded the moon. He kept remembering the seats under trees facing Moreton Bay and the fish dinners and the love-making of more than twenty years before, and to himself he seemed not the same person at all. Between dances at the great hall, that wasn't really great but the moderns lecture-room, he had stepped into so many arms and eyes and soft meaningless loves that held all the glamour of being young and walking the partner round the kidney-shaped grass plot and between the science schools and the common-rooms. And now, here he was, hundreds of grey hairs later, yearning like a boy on the shores of a nondescript coastal town and turning to the woman beside him as if he would find there the end of the world.

The moon was wrecked on a cloud-bank when they took the car back up the hill and Helen said quite suddenly, ‘I have a feeling that something is building up for us – we're not safe any more.' She was surprised that she did not feel like crying.

‘What do you mean? You're frightened of Findlay?'

‘Yes, Robert. Yes, I am. I feel he'll break this apart without a care. How could I ever hope to keep anything made of happiness when all my adult life I've failed?'

‘You're merely being feminine and nervous. And even if the worst did happen – and please, Helen, please don't imagine I don't care when I speak so casually, I'm merely being as realistic as I know you are at heart – would it ultimately be more than either of us could bear? I always remember back in my student days – it was my final year, and I had a bad case of infatuation for a girl a year behind me. I had a small sports car in those days that made my morals suspect through the whole faculty, and sometimes we used to skip lectures and drive out along the river somewhere, I suppose, where the new university is today. The roads were practically not, and we walked a good deal once we had settled the car safely, and we always seemed to end up in the same little hollow by the water. We went up at week-ends, too, on Sundays in the milder parts of summer, and after a while this particular spot became quite littered with our luncheon wrappers and sheets of the newspapers we took with us. I imagine it was fairly slummy, but we were in love and didn't notice – too busy necking. Anyway, the whole thing fell through. Student romances nearly always do. I went out of town on appointment and she stayed to finish her course.'

‘How's all this relevant?'

‘Wait a moment. We met about six months later. I was back in town during the August vac, and I ran into her quite by accident. Just for old times' sake, and because I'd got over the worst pain of being wiped off, we went out again to the same spot. I insisted. I think, perhaps, I had ideas of trying to patch things up. But here's the rub, Helen. We got there and all the old magic was gone. Completely. The newspapers we'd left on our last visit half a year before were still there, weathered and dirty from rain. And all I felt, looking down at a place I thought I'd never want to see again because of the pain it held for me, was nothing but a mild aversion. It looked bedraggled, unromantic, and just the smallest bit cheap.'

‘Did you stay?'

‘Only a few minutes – half an hour maybe. And, funnily enough, it was she who wanted to be kissed, to be wanted. But it was utterly impossible. We talked for a while and then left. I never saw her again.'

Helen wondered if this were a forecasting for their own affection. She looked at his blunt profile, perplexed, afraid to speak.

‘I know what you're thinking,' he said, as they entered the township and rattled along the dark streets. ‘Wait, Helen, and I'll answer you. Wait until I find a place for coffee in this seething town.'

He drove slowly along the main shopping block, and on a corner shelved in with dead shadow they found a milk-bar still open, where the ranked eating booths promised a hot meal of some kind. They slipped into one of the green painted pews and faced each other solemnly across the stained table. Moller held the deep-pink menu like a hymn card and read the items for the evening service with a lugubrious expression. They settled for fried eggs with the sullen, the grudging permission of an eighteen-year-old youth. He slouched to the hot range in the window of the shop, slapped grease on it with a spatula, and waited for it to heat up. Then he chopped lettuce laconically and scattered it on two plates with wafer thin circles of tomato. He did not look at his customers again and, while the eggs sizzled in the fat, stared sulkily across a street house-high in girls.

‘You're thinking,' Moller pursued as they huddled in the privacy of their corners, ‘you're thinking that already I'm tiring.'

‘No.' Helen smiled. ‘No. But I think you're trying to prepare me for such an event.'

Moller smiled in return with a sweetness quite unbelievable and pressed the fingers of each hand round her wrists. ‘You fool,' he whispered. ‘You are the only thing I want. But let's not be so immature we enter upon a thing like this, swearing, repeat swearing, blindly, for ever and ever. It is presumptuous even to hope for that, I feel. Helen, we're both adult enough to know that nothing ever stays exactly the same. Something of what we start out with must be lost. But that doesn't mean for a moment that we want it to happen. We just know it probably will sooner or later.'

‘Sooner, I feel,' Helen said pessimistically. This is the second thing, she thought, that he has proved mortal or fallible. Firstly he convinced me of the necessary animality of the affair and now of its transitoriness. Is he disproving the worth of it all for me consciously? She found his next remark discordant with her mood.

‘Not till after the school dance,' he said with a grin. ‘Findlay couldn't bear to lose any of his sweated labour until that's over.'

‘I shan't mention it again. A promise.'

Helen watched their plates of eggs being carried from the counter. They were set down in a rough design with cups and saucers and not even an interested glance from the youth who rolled back again behind the till and picked up his sex-magazine and was lost in a limb-wallow. They ate hungrily and drank the stewed black coffee. Helen frowned now and then and pulled her bread to pieces, crumbling it over the plate.

‘Still worrying?' Moller asked.

‘Not about us. It's young Vinny Lalor. It's absurd, I suppose, but I keep hoping the other kids don't find out she was cleaning off the notices. They'll give her a shocking time.'

‘She's used to it.'

‘That's no justification. I imagine they'll think up something really juicy for this. Why does she have to involve herself in our troubles?'

‘It's a shame,' Moller said, ‘but it just happened that way. If you hadn't given her that week-end in Brisbane, perhaps her frightening acolyte spirit wouldn't have received the final fillip that made her do what she did.'

‘Do you think so?' Helen asked. ‘Oh God! I hope not. I'd feel really guilty in that case.'

‘This is all nonsense, Helen. You're exaggerating the whole thing. You did the child a kindness. Whether or not you happened to stimulate the crush she already had on you is beside the point, for you had no direct intention of doing so. You can't possibly blame yourself if the kids give her a bit of curry for a few days. It will all blow over in a week as far as she's concerned. So for Heaven's sake cut out this crazy self-accusation.
We're
the ones in the jam – a far greater mess than she'll ever be in, and it doesn't look as if our threatened punishment will have blown over in a week. So please.
Lenta ira deorum.
But it will come, don't worry.'

Newspapers rattled past the caf
é
doorway in the salted wind off the river. Distantly a dog yelped its nervousness to the floating moon. The kid at the counter coughed phlegmily and turned the pages of his dreams and scratched one cheek absent-mindedly.

We look back, Helen thought, and there we are feeding the swans in the park; or travelling between this town and that, all night, standing in the corridor outside the lavatories because all the seats are taken, and talking, joking most of the way; or at our first dance with the pimply young Jew picking over the sandwiches to avoid the ham; or rolling on the lawn and the pants showing pink, over and over and over. Each moment framed like a picture and distant as a gallery. This particular moment would be added, she knew, and wondered why those times of intense emotional involvement were more shadowy than those of less. I stood off, she thought. I watched myself enjoying the externals, I had not given myself completely.