A Descant for Gossips (20 page)

‘It's fun, isn't it?' he said. ‘Isn't it?'

‘Yes.' Helen smiled into his face, his begging face. ‘Yes. The smallest things with someone you love are fun.'

‘You can stand the inexpensive setting?'

‘Please,' she said. ‘That doubting offends me.'

‘I'm catching that disease you had at the Bay. Hoping that the tizzy
d
é
cor
won't catch us out. Not for my sake, you understand. I'm worried for you.'

‘I'm getting better,' she said. ‘Soon I'll be too involved to notice externals.'

They edged out of their seats and Moller put the exact change on the cheque, placing it gently on the counter beside the lounging figure. It merely grunted as they left, ringing in their meal price on the cash register as automatically as a man might make the sign of the cross. Thus blessed they passed into the night-deep street and climbed back into the car.

Moller kissed Helen quickly before he started up the engine.

‘Endings,' he said. ‘We're always coming to endings. I feel a bit of your gloom. Don't deny that you are feeling gloomy.' He stared out across the black and silver river, into the softness that pushed back the efforts of sight, the softness that was as hard as a wall, impenetrable beyond the few yards that didn't matter. And then inexorably let in the clutch.

He drove fast once out of town and easily up the first slopes. They were both utterly unprepared for the sudden lurch as the car banged into a pot-hole, and the dreadful crunching sound under the back wheels. The car seemed to scrabble uselessly on the roadside shingle and, finally out of control, pitched their terror forward in a long skid to the far embankment that butted the machine viciously and half turned it over. Helen, tumbled against the door, felt Moller's body crushing heavily on her own, and just momentarily she cried out in fear and pain as her arm was jammed agonizingly against the handle. Too stunned to move, they lay clumsily together in the boxed-up space, but after a while Moller pulled himself upwards and managed to jerk open the door. He struggled out and then reached back to seize Helen's arm and pull her after him. They stumbled and almost fell as she tipped through the swinging door into his arms.

‘You're all right, aren't you?' he asked quickly. In the moonlight her face was bluish-white. She nodded and rubbed her head against his arm suddenly like a child.

‘Sure?'

‘Yes. I bumped my arm a bit, but it's nothing.'

‘Show me.'

He turned her slim arm over. It was scratched and blood-scribbled.

‘It was the door handle. There's something sharp on the under edge.'

He tied his handkerchief round it carefully. ‘Be brave,' he said, ‘till I see what's up with this ruddy car. I think there's a torch in the far pocket if I can reach it.'

He plunged head first into the car again and she could see him threshing the black air like a swimmer. In a moment he wriggled out and by torchlight looked once more at her frightened face. She smiled with an effort to reassure him and he kissed her gently on the forehead.

‘You and your premonitions,' he said. ‘Thank God you're okay. I'll just have a look at the car and see if there's anything I can do. She might only need righting.'

Before he even squatted, and as he shone the torch on the rear of the car, he saw what was the trouble.

‘Oh jesusgodanddamn!' he groaned. ‘The bloody back wheel's off and the hub's all twisted. God almighty, what a bastard of a thing to happen!'

‘Just as well we're only a mile out of town. It won't take more than twenty minutes to walk back.'

‘Oh God, Helen! It doesn't matter whether we walk back or go on the rest of the fifteen miles to Gungee. No one's going to fix this damn' thing tonight. It's put paid to getting the car back before tomorrow. C'mon. We might as well walk back to the town and see if there's any transport into Cooroy tonight. You never know. There might be a stray C.T. on the move.'

He took Helen's unhurt arm and shining the torch ahead, they trudged downhill towards the river again. The township's lights teased them for twelve minutes before they finally came into the main street.

‘Let's have a word with that kid at the caf
é
', Moller suggested. ‘He didn't look a very likely specimen, but he might know a thing or two about the exits.'

The long room with its green booths was still empty except for the boy, and entering it, seeing again the shelves stacked with cigarettes and sweets, recognising the mirror oblongs stamped above each table, the soft drink advertisements sycophantic on the far wall, Helen felt the despair that overtakes the person trying to escape who finds himself involuntarily returned to the same place.

The youth behind the cash register was still reading, but when he heard them come in he looked up from his book, marking the place with a finger, and yawned straight at them.

‘Our car's broken down,' Moller explained, ‘about a mile up the road. Can you tell me where the nearest garage is or if I could knock the owner up?'

The boy stared at Moller coldly and then picked at a molar with exaggerated interest.

‘You wouldn't get no one on to it at this hour,' he said, tossing the words round his probing finger.

‘No. I realise that. I was just hoping I might be able to get a lift if anyone's going through to Cooroy tonight, or hire a car.'

‘Well, Bert Simmons is the nearest. He's just down the road a coupla blocks on the far side. Lives at the back.'

‘Think he'd have a car for hire?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Failing that,' Moller said, ‘failing that, there wouldn't be a bus, I suppose?'

‘First bus in the morning.'

‘What time?'

The youth yawned again. Even his breath had the stale scent of boredom.

‘'Bout eight-thirty. It catches the nine o'clock train up to Gympie.'

‘Oh God!' Moller said, turning to Helen. ‘We're trapped. That wouldn't reach Gungee till well after half past nine.' He glared back at the humped shoulders, the acne-smudged forehead and chin.

‘You don't know of anyone driving in tonight, do you?'

‘Look, mister, I don't run the bloody town.'

‘Okay, okay.' Moller felt testy, too. ‘Sorry to interrupt your study.'

They went out again, a step ahead in time now. At least we are progressing to nowhere, Helen thought. It's possible to progress and be nowhere in this no-town with the long occasional stripes of light and the shadows splitting the river into chequers, with the day cooling off in the saltiest, fishiest of breezes up through the embankment grasses and houseshop alleyways jammed with parked trucks and litter and breathing with the sleeping stray dogs. Unreality was the essence of the minutes in which they moved, and unreality meant no town and no river, no street, no then and no will be and almost no at this moment – that most of all. Disembodied, perhaps, she thought, we will find this garage – as they did – and knock uselessly – as they did – at the darkened house at the rear.

They stood in the deep bays of the garage with its farouche petrol pillars and anxiousness unmasked upon each face sought its fellow and found it. Moller spoke softly.

‘I'm very sorry. Very sorry indeed. Not that that will mend the situation, but there it is. It looks as if there's nothing for it but to try to get a room at a pub and go up tomorrow. We can't search all night for possible transport.'

‘This is twice,' Helen said. ‘Things are loaded against us. I feel like a child caught out. Imagine Findlay tomorrow when neither of us turns up and then both – both unashamedly entering at the end of the first period.'

‘Don't worry, Helen. lt's an absurd system that can make two mature adults feel like a pair of naughty babies. If that's any comfort. The pub might know of someone going up early tomorrow. In any case we could try to fake up separate entrances, but I hardly think it's worth it. He's not a fool. The Talbots would observe your absence from breakfast, and it would only be a matter of days before he put two and two together – using a copulative verb, my dear.' He laughed. ‘No. We'll just face the thing out. Anything else would irritate him more. In fact, I think the best thing to do would be to put a trunk call through to his house tonight, explain what has happened, and hope for the best.'

Hesitancy of the mind, the heart. Moller's feet paused, braked by conscience and his eyes, startled by the shrillness of his thought, caught at hers for safety in the dark.

‘I suppose,' he said, not looking away from her once, not daring to look away, ‘I suppose
I
could walk back.'

‘I don't really want you to,' Helen said.

‘It would only take five hours or so. I'd be back by about five.'

‘At sunrise probably. And then what would you say about the car, even if no one saw you come in?'

‘That I'd lent it to you.'

‘Too easy,' Helen said. Relief. Relief. The wind blowing from the river dropped and scuppered papers sank into corners, leaves chattered into a final silence. ‘I can't drive. And Findlay knows it. He and his wife took me for a run up the coast not long after I came and my ignorance of matters mechanical thrilled him. He likes to be the boss in all things. No. No, Robert. No go, my dear.'

‘You're glad?'

Here at the same time was his wonder and his delight.

The dark air nuzzled their tiredness and they walked faster, their feet smacking the asphalt road, with doors and shop fronts beating back the quickened emphasis of feet on pavement; there was the hand, hard heavy around companion hand, the sudden impulse to look up, look down; and the volubility of their smiling eyes took them dreamlike to the nearest hotel broad-fronting the township with door open, still lit on the ground floor, waiting.

The archetype of all licensees grubbed round in a rolltop desk, looking them over slyly and disbelievingly.

‘Broken down?' he said. ‘That was bad luck for you and … your wife, you said?'

‘That is correct.'

‘Mmmmm.' He looked at them with joy, salacity achieving, sanctioned. ‘Ah, yes.' Helen noticed irrelevantly that his hair fluffed into a nimbus. ‘Well, I think I can manage a room.'

‘Any chance of a lift in early to Cooroy?'

The man behind the desk smiled happily.

‘No,' he said. ‘Not a chance in the world. Not from anyone here, anyway. The two travellers staying only got in this afternoon and they booked for a couple of days.' He fished in his desk and dragged out a big register. ‘Like to sign the book?' he asked. ‘Both of you if you like.' He leered up at Helen.

Moller scribbled his name at the bottom of a dirty page.

‘Where's your phone?' he asked.

‘In there,' the other said, pointing to the parlour. He tried an insinuating smile on Helen again. ‘Bad luck, wasn't it? There's a chair there while your hubby's phoning.'

Moller closed the parlour door behind him and crossed to the old-fashioned wall-phone and booked his call. I'm not good at this sort of thing, he thought as he waited. An artificial voluptuary. The phone shrilled its agony across the undusted tables and chairs and he picked up the receiver nervously.

On the other side of the closed door only the faintest sound of his voice came through to the woman in the hall and the man listening behind the office grille. He must be speaking very softly, Helen thought. She glanced over at the barrel of a man totting profits, and was sorry to deny him his scandal. But he wouldn't deny himself, she knew. He would have it in spite of them. And she caught his eye and smiled.

There was a click from the next room as Moller replaced the receiver on its hook. The door opened and he came out, his face unemotional as he met her glance.

‘Here's your key, Mr. Moller,' the licensee said. ‘No need to take you up, is there? It's the second on the right at the top of the stairs. Breakfast's at seven and there's no hot water now till the morning.'

He grinned as he emptied this cornucopia of information.

Helen followed Moller up the stairs, and they were all hotel stairs, and along the corridor that was all corridors, and into a room that shut them in with each other and the lumpy, uncomfortable furniture.

With the shedding of their clothes they lost their perplexity as well; and somewhere between the long kisses Moller forgot completely the unkindness Findlay had offered him.

Eight

Feverishly Mrs. Lalor joggled needle and cotton in her arthritic fingers, squinting redly and hopelessly in the light from the weak bulb.

‘Keep still, love,' she pleaded as Vinny wriggled in her being-made-over dress, itching against time, against madeoverness, against excitement in spite of herself. ‘Only another three inches.' The hem submitted to her nervous stitching and resolved itself gracelessly into final folds round Vinny's knobbly legs. Mother and daughter stared dubiously into the mirror.

‘You look real nice, Vin,' her mother said without enthusiasm, but bravely lying, hoping to be proved wrong miraculously.

Vinny could have wept when she saw herself unsuitable in cr
ê
pe, her unformed breasts made mockery of by the suggestively gathered bodice and the two dreadful flounces parenthesising her bony shoulders. Inwardly she declined despair and proved it like a theorem, until, observing her mother's unhappy anxiety, she forced a tight smile.

‘The colour's not bad, is it, mum? This paley sort of green goes with my hair.' She shook the overlong skirt out as she had seen Rene do, in order to admire the expensive finish on the black suede shoes she had borrowed from her eldest sister. But it was chilly comfort. Her mother reached over to the dressing-table against the bed wall and produced, as if from a feretory, a tarnished lipstick tube that contained still a creamless, cracked resistance to time.

‘Just a touch,' she urged, ‘so as to give you a bit of colour. You look real pale, Vinny, and so you ought, eating no tea and hiking all the way out to Pratten's farm just to get those posies for Mrs. Striebel. Just see if she uses them, anyway. I don't know why you want to run around after her the way you do, even if she did take you to Brisbane.'

‘Oh, mum!' protested Vinny.

The old jousting, the tourney, the same verbal thrustings, a litany of pale recriminations and tired responses. To divert her mother she took the lipstick and with unpractised finger smeared a little colour across her mouth, noting with astonishment her youth more manifest by the uneven red lines. And so, chrysalis emerged, her mouth barbaric for the first time in her life, she bent forward and smudged a kiss on her mother's cheek.

‘Got your hanky and your purse?' Mrs. Lalor asked.

‘Thanks, mum.'

‘And your ticket?'

‘Yes. In my purse.' She wished she could thank her mother for fixing the dress, but something kept stopping her. She wasn't really grateful because she knew it didn't look much. ‘I've got to hurry, mum,' she said awkwardly. ‘I've got to get those posies round to the supper room for Mrs. Striebel.'

‘Oh, those posies!' gibed her mother with a momentary spasm of annoyance, jealousy perhaps, and the constant irritation of the throbbing in her joints.

Merciless for the instant, she watched her daughter run gawkily down the hall, down the steps into the heavily scented garden soft with moths and dew. Then partly because of griefs older than this, and partly because of the impossibility of alleviating the present one, she found, in spite of the violent upsurge of tears within her mind, that she could not weep at all, and set to resignedly to gather thread from the floor, the bedspread, the sewing-table.

Vinny paused beside the door of the sagging toolshed to gather up the tray of flowers that she had left there to retain their freshness in the damp night air, and then went back over the uncut lawn to the front gate and the melting grey night in Duncan Street. Just below in the valley the lights of the station ticket-office and waiting-rooms splashed across the metals and the humped lines of timber trailers delayed in the siding until the Gympie mail passed through. In the house across the road the Gilham boy practised uncertainly the same piece he had been practising for weeks and weeks, and with unerring certainty made the same mistake in the same place. Vinny, listening for it in the darkness, smiled to herself, hugging the tray more closely in her thin arms, smiled because for weeks the irritation of that one trifle had driven her nearly crazy every night. She tottered in the unaccustomed height of Jocelyn's shoes, wincing as pebble after pebble caused her to go over first on one ankle and then the other. The brumous green of fig-trees wearing the evening lateness blurred the road for a hundred yards at this point where the hill's declivity met creek, bridge spanning it, and the main road that lead up over the tracks to the shops and school. Standing in shadow, Vinny removed the shoes and, holding them clumsily beneath the tray, padded along in the powdery dust, her stockinged feet stretching in relief. Ahead of her two figures came in from the branch road and the moth mad street-light at the bridge's eastern end shone like grease on bulbously profiled lips gossip-gabbling of Pearl Warburton's mother and Pearl.

Vinny's empty stomach contracted unpleasantly as she sensed, seconds before she heard, the frou-frou of starched white frock suitably girlish, expertly made, and then glanced down at the skimpy flatness of cr
ê
pe still looking made-over in the twilight. Pressing herself back into the bays of the trees, she stood perfectly still, praying that they would not turn and, finding her, clap her in the cage of their mockery. Their voices became fainter. Vinny shuddered in the darkness and, putting on her shoes again, wobbled after them up the next hill towards the town.

When she came near the hall the lights were quite dazzling on the black and the wine and the sea-coloured metal of the cars parked at right angles to the paspalum-rank gutter. There was a noise and an excitement, a scuffing of feet among the paper bags and emptied cardboard drink cartons that flooded her with a rising wonder as she looked nervously in the wide open doors at the dance floor now reverberating to the shouts and skiddings of uncomfortably dressed boys from the senior classes. Around the walls mothers sat in corseted groups eyeing off their giggling daughters, maddening them by plucking at a hem or twitching rebellious belts and sashes. The girls twisted and preened, conscious all the time of the furtive glances of the boys who skylarked in the corners near the stage, smacking back the brilliantine on their hair, fingering the new eruptions on their skin. Streamers, balloons, paper lanterns quilted the ceiling with gaudy colour.

There were no members of the staff visible except Mr. Moller, looking completely different in a dinner jacket. He was on the stage helping the three-piece band shift the piano from the wings. Vinny ducked back past Perce Westerman, loud with an alcoholic goodwill, who was collecting tickets at the door, and went round the side of the sprawling timber hall, down the slope to the basement supper room. Three parallel rows of trestle tables stretched over with cream paper and loaded with cutlery, crockery, and jars of sugar, ran the full length of the room. At the far end a rough work section had been hastily set up near the tea-urn, and round the counter thus formed dodged senior prefects carrying top heavy platters of sandwiches, tomato, cheese, baked bean, from the labouring, near-disembodied hands of staff and school committee. Lost in this crush of effort against time, Vinny felt more confident that her appearance would not even be noticed. She edged crabwise with the flower tray, jostled but strangely happy, especially when she saw Mrs. Striebel calm and golden and untouched by Howard's libels working stolidly over the butter bowl as she pounded milk and fat into an economic elasticity. Breathless, eye brilliant under electric light, animated by noise, dust, and the intermittent bursts of jazz from upstairs. Vinny offered the tray with the sprigs of wattle, the cabbage roses tied with blue silk, the daisies bedded back in maiden hair, offered and was received by a startled Helen as the tray thrust forward impatiently before her.

‘Why, Vinny, my dear, how lovely they are, and how kind of you to go all the way to Pratten's! I hope you managed to get home for tea.'

Vinny squirmed with love and embarrassment. She dropped her lashes over the shallow curve of freckled cheek.

‘Have a sandwich now, anyway,' Helen continued briskly, and reached behind her for a plate piled up with triangles of bread.

‘Thank you, Mrs. Striebel,' Vinny murmured, worshipping. Furtively she looked at Mrs. Striebel's dress, loving and envying. ‘Who's getting the posies?'

‘Not me. I'm not nearly important enough. They're for Mrs. Findlay, the women on the judging committee in the cake competition, and the wives of all the important local men. Sprinkle some water on the flowers, Vinny, from that glass there, and then put the tray up on the shelf out of the way.'

How Vinny adored her when she said things like, ‘I'm not nearly important enough.' It was a descending to take Vinny into her confidence, making them equals in the levelling of jocularity. Friends. Almost.

Behind her Pearl Warburton's voice shocked the warmth. ‘Hullo, Mrs. Striebel. Hullo, Vinny.' She paused deliberately. ‘Got a new dress?'

Vinny swung round to see Pearl, plump, powdered, staring insolently at both of them. She thrust forward a pink hand to touch, ever so gently, the ruching across Vinny's breast and, as soon as she did so, flourished her own beautiful organdie skirt. Her full lips were moist and smiling unkindly. Her eyes wandered slowly over Vinny's person. She smiled again and turned away.

‘Anything I can do to help, Mrs. Striebel?'

Incontinent rage swept words of accusation to Vinny's trembling mouth. How dare she? She who had scribbled filth all over the lavatory walls. Only hope that Mrs. Striebel had not even heard of the matter kept her from shouting out the truth. She had not told Mr. Findlay the names of the wrongdoers. She was afraid. She felt with a primitive superstition that it was better to keep that ammunition as reserve, that it would be a permanent form of control over the group.

Helen was angry for a different reason. She had looked on helplessly at the calculated offensiveness of the older girl, and now, feeling the blood refluent once more, as if it had paused in its flow, gripped the trestle edge nervously until her anger had withered away and she was able to speak with calm. Her eyes sought Vinny's indefinite grey ones when she replied, sought uselessly, for Vinny, ridicule eroding all the happiness and excitement she had felt earlier, stood with her face turned away, now the first anger had passed for her too, pale with shame for her appearance and oddly afraid.

‘Nothing, thank you, Pearl. Just behaving yourself inside and outside the hall will be sufficient help.'

Pearl flung a suspicious look at the bland face. There was nothing to discover. If she were snubbed, her features quickly resumed their mask of enigmatic indifference, her aplomb appeared not one degree dislodged. She stared brazenly once more at Vinny's flounces, said goodbye to Mrs. Striebel, and wandered off arm-in-arm with Elizabeth Turton, who had been giggling foolishly a few yards away.

Vinny's hands trembled as she lifted the tray to the shelf beside the urn. ‘Leave me alone,' she prayed. ‘Please, God, make them leave me alone the rest of the night.' But she knew in her heart it was no use. God only answered Warburtons and Klees and Turtons.

Neither she who was so disconsolate nor Helen who was so angered found continuance of that earlier pleasure in each other's presence, and so Vinny drifted out of the supper basement into the warm anonymous night. The crowds were fairly streaming in now from Murray and Jerilbee roads, in pairs, in trios, in quartets of varying degrees of anticipation according to the age of the person and the propinquity of the opposite sex. Station-wagons, motor-bikes with side-cars, and decrepit semi-utilities were all blurring and clattering down the dirt roads, honking good-naturedly at each other before spilling their occupants, their pleasure offensive.

At eight-fifteen sharp the band whined into life, progressing through hesitant disharmonies towards the intricate pattern of a fox trot. Hulking youths from the outlying farms, still smelling of the beer they had been drinking straight from the bottle in the deserted grass paddock at the back of the hall, swept into motion with grinning confidence, the nipped-in-waisted, high-busted pouters who slatterned out their living in the milk bar, the hotels, the Gympie stores. The drums exploded under Mack Stevens's massive wrists, the saxophone whimpered up to orgastic heights, and the dance was under way.

Vinny slid shyly past Perce Westerman and sidled along the wall to find an empty space. All around her the heavy sweaty serge was selecting with finical caution the tarty nylon, the voile, the stiffened cotton. A few of the older pupils had filtered into the adult group that seemed to dominate the hall, though the dance was run ostensibly for the school, and with over-red faces shamblingly invited their schoolmates to partner them. Vinny watched the girls on either side of her go off, haughty at the favour they were conferring, coldly, not glancing again at their partner once they had assured themselves that he was worthy. She longed, but hopelessly, for someone to ask her, ruining her very chances by looking up too eagerly whenever a boy approached and smiling or saying, ‘Hullo, Trev', or ‘Hullo, Johnno'. They would look at her for a moment, smile crookedly and mutter backwards, escaping. At nine o'clock she was a thin, isolated figure twisting her hanky round in her moist palm, pretending beneath the bright paper ribbons, the crimson and the tangerine, that she was having a good time.

Moller was standing at the door when he noticed her. Immediately the recollection of what she had done for him stabbed him with its frightening kindness. He searched round the walls of the hall for a likely partner for her, but there was not a boy in sight who was not dancing or busy talking in the middle of a group. He walked from the lights of the hall into the smooth night and felt as if he were entering a pearl. The blackness was richly round and the parallels of mist that had padded out the valleys in the town's centre had merged into a low-lying white sea over which the archipelagoed tops of trees lay holding their branches very still. Muffled giggles and protestations floated to him from the rear of the hall, and he smiled sardonically as he thought how the indentations in the long Kikuyu grass would reveal wordlessly the evening's folly to the garrulous small-town sunrise. The paling fence jettied into the night, and it was here that Moller found Tommy Peters busily chalking short and obscene phrases.