A Descant for Gossips (4 page)

‘She would be pleased,' Helen repeated. ‘Vinny could stay at Margaret's with me and be perfectly safe. Robert, I'll enjoy the variation in my routine, so be a little more enthusiastic.'

‘When will you ask?'

‘I think I'll stroll up to Lalor's this evening while the impulse is still fresh.'

‘If you're determined … it might be a good thing at that,' Moller said. The tiredness was sweeping over him again in the rising afternoon temperatures. He stretched his knotty hands painfully-pleasurably, above his head and grunted. The period bell would ring in five more minutes. Placing a hand on Helen's arm, he patted her lightly. A fly drummed backwards and forwards across the ceiling, and Corcoran's voice raised in sudden anger throbbed along the veranda. All the newness of term opening was gone in the establishment of routine. Everything was as usual. Findlay came into the room through webs of heat, ovoid and perspiring and genial, but relentless in his pursuit of minutiae, to post another notice on the staff-room board.

Two

The repetition of the cottage pie drove Helen from the green cave of a dining-room earlier than usual. Where calendulas spiked multiple suns above the five dining tables and cloths gravy- or porridge-spotted from earlier meals, the six permanent boarders had sat tense in their dislikes of each other's eating habits, seeking conversational refuge with the commercial travellers or the dairy inspectors or the forestry officers on their way to the Brooloo station. The sucking action of one mouth dreaded and fought back the clicking dentures of another. One pair of hands chopped all the food into prissy segments, another forked in clumsy gobbets, angry plugs. Conversation was sterile from two meals a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, curving its full cycle through weather and politics and local scandals back through weather and scandals and local politics. Mouths minced or pursed or dogmatised or vanished altogether in refined outrage and jaws became prognathous over unimportant points of view.

Sharing the salads and the roasts with Helen Striebel were Alec and Jess Talbot. The husband, young, graduate in science with the views of a respectable lady church-worker – and the face – was bacteriologist for the butter factory for a year. His wife, all amazon thighed, huge-busted, and gone to seed at thirty from over-zealous hockey and basket-ball playing, plunged with desperate seriousness and ellipsoidal vowels into every new piece of gossip as if it were a pool, and surfaced refreshed and whale-like with a struggling little fish – the privacy of some local wrongdoer. Under the guise of interest in their fellows and the pretence of purely disinterested analysis, they tossed the wretched thing back and forth between their careful grammar, their nominative pronouns after the verb ‘to be'. What wallows of refined moralizing! She had failed to graduate but constantly referred to the fact, so that, first having driven home the point that she was university trained, she made the listener wonder how such a leaping, pouncing mind could possibly have flunked the course. Helen always longed to shout ‘Goal!' as another reputation bounced its full career and succumbed to a final, hearty schoolgirlish blow.

Alec Talbot loved music. In their bedroom he kept a tiny radio that he played softly at night, a gentle background to the raucous vulgarity of the quiz and give-away shows that pounded from the other rooms. As he went about the hotel on mundane errands, he would whistle with infinite detail and piercing clarity whole subjects from symphonies, sometimes whole movements of the more esoteric chamber music. However, as Helen was the only person in the hotel who recognised the works, no one else knew how cultured he was. So all this effort with Brahms and Mozart was rather a waste, for Helen had ceased to discuss music with the Talbots when she discovered that they used it merely as a dividing line between themselves and the hicks.

‘And what is it like being back, Mrs. Striebel?' Jess Talbot had asked.

Helen only smiled – she had become expert at facial answers – and continued eating.

‘I suppose,' Jess Talbot pursued, smacking the ball straight between the goal-posts, ‘that you saw Mr. Moller when you were in Brisbane. He told me he was going down for the fortnight.'

Helen looked up coldly.

‘Brisbane has a population of nearly a million. There must have been several thousands of Show visitors as well. Would you be surprised if I said we didn't meet?'

The other woman laughed carefully. ‘My dear, how silly of me. Of course. I just thought you were such friends, you know. Always deep in conversation when I see you coming home. Alec, pass Mrs. Striebel the bread. No. I don't think I missed seeing the Show this year. After all, Alec's work means so much to him, and the factory was very busy, if only because of the Show. Isn't that so, Alec?'

His face, sallow with idealism, gazed seriously across the table.

‘To cap it all' – he looked away and his chin shook earnestly – ‘the cooling system collapsed on the Wednesday and we were working non-stop for eighteen hours putting it right.'

Helen fidgeted with her soup spoon. Along the wall sombre horses glared moronically at her from the sporting prints. Opposite, the Talbots stared critically. She regretted not bringing a book to the table; she would have enjoyed the Talbots' reactions to her breach of manners. Between the green hands of a monstera deliciosa she could glimpse the Farrellys sipping fastidiously, bowed down by their profits, starved by their economies, and respectable, respectable, respectable. The tweed that formed around him a loose circular lovableness repeated itself on her in spinsterish outlines of propriety. They inclined genteelly towards her as she watched them, and Jess Talbot, diverted from a particularly savage anecdote, wreathed her face in godliness and dabbed essence of Christianity behind each honest-to-God, straight-forward, head-girl smile.

‘They're pets, aren't they?' she said, turning to nod. ‘So open to deal with. And regular church-goers, too. Though of course I don't hold with popery, but it does seem to go hand in hand with hotel-keeping. However, one thing I will commend them for, won't you, Alec? I will commend them for their kindness to young Allie when she had that trouble.'

‘What trouble?' Helen asked bluntly, knowing, and resenting discussion of it.

‘My dear, you know. You did know, didn't you? You must. It's the most fascinating tale. It appears that last February one of the bank clerks who –'

‘Jess, please,' Alec interrupted. He took the last portion of the butter in his abstraction. His chin shook. Helen consulted the menu and ignored Jess Talbot's confiding eye that promised ‘later'. Behind her at the next table she could hear the railway clerk in heated argument with the bank teller, each riding a horse to win and backing it with anger.

All blossomed in pink, early for the pictures (a love story and a Western), and ready to race away after the last plate was cleared, the second maid took their orders with indifference, dreaming of the brilliantined, tight-panted hero who would later compromise her in return for three shillings' worth of tears and giggles. She could hardly wait. She returned with the pie all pranked in weedy greens and ice-cream mounds of potato, so uninviting in appearance that Helen felt she could not eat it. She cut neat bays and inlets into its outer edge while the Talbots whacked into their heated-up roast. Ron Coombes, chief boiler hand at the factory, coarse and good-natured, bachelor and pleased to be, bounced in late to join the teller and the railway officer. The Talbots nodded coolly. They were very conscious of the social gap between Coombes and themselves, and they were always fearful of some dreadful familiarity following upon a lowering of the barrier.

‘It makes them uncomfortable when we're friendly,' Jess would say, wrapping her self-justification round her like a chenille gown. Helen sighed relievedly, seeing him approach, and gave him a wide and grateful smile. She decided suddenly against finishing her meal.

‘Hullo, Ron,' she said, and rose. ‘Excuse me' – briefly to the Talbots. ‘Ron, I must see you later about some lighting I wanted, rigged up for the school dance next month. Mr. Findlay said you were the one who did it last year and wondered if you'd be kind enough to help out again.'

‘Glad to, Helen,' he said.

The Talbots shuddered at the exchange of first names and Jess was later to say to her husband that she thought perhaps Mrs. Striebel was just a wee bit common … well, not … you know … and the Beethoven Seventh thundered on behind her, for she always talked through the very best music.

Helen went upstairs to her room that was really nothing more than a cavity veranda'd and corridored at each opening, with a monstrous wardrobe against one wall, a leprously stained mirror, and a bed. To these basic forms she had tried to introduce the intelligence of personality with prints tacked on the wall, a mantel radio, a clock, books and magazines. But when at night the clean-cut angles of light sharpened themselves against the furniture edges and behind the milky looking-glass she saw her thirty-two years staring back at her with placidity and resignation, she knew what mockery four walls made of the prints and the books, the mantel radio and the clock.

She took a jacket from the wardrobe and then sat on the edge of the bed to change her shoes. The sagging wire moaned and shuddered, the fluff from the mattress sifted imperceptibly. Oh, the infinities of daily boredoms, she thought, the sun driving her each morning to the grind of work that was mainly thankless, and in the evening driving her back again to the hotel with its patterns of boarders and meals. Tonight the longing for escape was intolerable. There seemed to be no fellowship in the new books she had brought back with her from the city. With both anger and pleasure in her mind she shut her door firmly and locked it. Below in the street the evening lay in grey points and streaks tattered by late dog-barkings and flapping newspaper sheets. Smiling, she entered its anonymity.

Once out on the road with the gums crowding in rapidly upon her, the bracken-scented wind curling round her, she felt immediately better. Two people passed her in the darkness and called out good-night. She was pleased to answer them and walked contentedly up the long hill that led to Lalor's. A peculiar feeling that the evening divergence from habit – the seven o'clock bathing, the eight o'clock reading, and the ten o'clock sleeping after the Gympie mail had passed through pratically under the hotel verandas – was in some way a focalizing of the whole of the day's trivia into one important central point filled her with elation. She walked even faster.

By the time Lalor's fence came into view it was nearly seven-thirty. The front of the house was in darkness, but a square of light shone from a back window. Helen pushed open the gate and the shadows of the miniature jungle swallowed her, the splintered veranda steps offered her silence, and in the constantly moving night of the veranda itself with the thin moonlight probing the wistaria, she hesitated just a few seconds before ringing the bell.

It excursioned into the bungalow recesses with an alarum like beaten gongs. The drone of voices that had reached her ears faintly ceased at the signal, and a light switched on in the hall shone through the stained-glass panels of the door with a religious significance. Bathed in a liturgical glow, she blinked and smiled as the door open widely on Mrs. Lalor searching short-sightedly for her own surprise as the worry on her face changed to the anxiety of recognition.

‘Mrs. Striebel!' She rubbed her hands nervously down the front of her apron. ‘What a surprise! Come on in.'

She stood aside and Helen went in and down the long hall. It had a nightmare quality in its narrowness and length, but the shock of light in the sitting-room ahead was the essence of comfort. Two of the other children were sitting there and they grinned at Helen as she came into the room. Helen recognised Vinny's brother Royce and the eldest girl, Rene, who was twenty and working in the local dentist's rooms.

‘Done real well for herself,' Mrs. Lalor would boast proudly to her neighbours. ‘I always knew I could make something out of Rene. Types and does shorthand and all that sort of thing as well as helping in the surgery. Mr. Lunbeck says he doesn't know what he'd do without her.' (Nor would he, some of her neighbours thought viciously, knowing Mr. Lunbeck's little fancies and Rene's high self-evaluation.)

The two women sat down in the cane basket chairs where cushions and arm-rests had been reduced by the violence of the children to a secure drabness from which nothing could redeem them. Now and again Mrs. Lalor, teased by magazines into an effectual activity, had licked them over with a glossy enamel in a fashionable shade or prodded the cushions to brief life and packed them into new linen covers. It was hopeless. Royce spilt ink or put his muddied shoes on them, and Vinny read and munched fruit in them, and it all came to the same thing in the end.

‘Well,' Mrs. Lalor said, ‘I hope you haven't come about Vinny. Getting into trouble or anything like that, I mean.'

Helen picked at a loose end of cane but stopped when she noticed Mrs. Lalor's anxious eyes on her.

‘It is about Vinny that I've come,' she said, ‘but I assure you she's in no trouble. Certainly not with me, anyway.'

‘Is she working hard, Mrs. Striebel?'

‘She tries very hard indeed, Mrs. Lalor. You've no worry at all on that score.'

‘That's a relief. Always worried about that one. She never says much.' Mrs. Lalor breathed deeply and settled back in her chair.

Helen paused. The two women gazed awkwardly at each other. The business was harder than she had thought it would be. ‘Look,' she said, ‘I'll come straight to the point. Today Mr. Moller, her English teacher, showed me the essay she had done for her holiday task. Where is she, by the way?'

‘Her turn,' interrupted Royce who was now crouching by the radio. ‘She gotta wash
and
dry up tonight.'

‘You shut up, Royce,' his mother said, ‘and lower that serial. Rubbishing stuff. Vinny's in the kitchen. They all get their turn, Mrs. Striebel.'

‘Good idea,' Helen agreed. ‘I like the closed door, too. Keeps them working without distraction and stops their unhappiness spoiling what you're doing.'

Royce grinned. He had just left school and was working as a grease boy at the factory. He had lost a front tooth.

‘You were real tough on us, Mrs. Striebal,' he said. ‘But it was good.'

‘Thank you, Royce,' Helen said gravely. ‘You always responded well to my treatment.'

Royce's big face, freckled and pimpled, grew red with pleasure. Embarrassedly he rubbed his large nose.

‘Now go on, Royce,' his mother pleaded. ‘Listen to your old serial please, and leave me to talk with Mrs. Striebel a minute.'

‘Well,' Helen said, and stopped, perplexed. ‘Look, I really don't know how to put this without sounding as if I'm exaggerating and that's the last thing I want you to feel I'm doing. But after I read Vinny's essay today, I must confess, Mrs. Lalor, that I think your little girl has quite a deal of talent.'