A Descant for Gossips (8 page)

Moller stopped the car outside the large bungalow where Helen's sister Margaret lived. The house sprawled white and untidy across most of a large block of land, gardened haphazardly into a jungle of scent and exotic tropical mussaendas, hibiscus, and today-and-tomorrow bushes. He switched off the ignition, glanced at his watch and scowled.

‘Fifteen minutes late.'

Helen, combing her hair, looked solemnly at the polished street. The street-light in front of the house burnished the camphor-laurels on the footpath with an electric green.

‘The main thing,' she said, ‘the most important thing is that we're here. An epochal week-end. Thanks, Robert, for bringing us down.'

‘Shall I see you at all?' Throwing caution to the darkness and the rain. The canvas roof pattered no replies. Helen felt excitement edge quickly in the back of her mind. She leant forward and struggled into her coat, her fair head touching the dash-board. Vinny prickled with unexpected jealousy and then repressed it in the knowledge that she was no longer on the fringe of things. She was becoming part of a private circle of knowledge that would support her in the friendless weather at the school. Amongst gossiping speculators she would be privy to truth. She pretended to be busy with her coat.

‘Well?'

‘Perhaps – perhaps tomorrow night. Tomorrow afternoon is Vinny's, you understand, and Sunday as well. Margaret has booked our seats for a matinee tomorrow, and Sunday – well, I thought a quick visit to the Art Gallery or Museum if there's time, and getting Margaret to run us out to the tram terminus to pick you up.'

‘All very educational, Helen. A little profanity, you know … Still, never mind. I'll ring you round six or seven tomorrow evening to see if you feel up to a late coffee. A late anything,' he added, half to himself.

Helen seized his left hand and pressed it with a swift tenderness that made speech unnecessary; then quickly she opened the door and jumped out over the running gutter. Perched on the kerb, she grasped the handle of the rear door, and for a moment she and the child struggled against each other; then the door jerked open unexpectedly and Vinny tumbled forward off-balance on to the roadway. By a miracle she kept her feet and Helen's firm hand intercepted her elbow and supported her during this moment of ludicrous spasticity. Together they yelled goodbye to Moller from under the front gate's dripping arbour, and when he had turned the car and they saw the red tail-light vanish the way they had come, they raced up the cement path to the lighted veranda where Helen's sister was waiting.

For a moment it was all confusion and greetings and well-wishings with the hands and the arms forming the proven theorems of personal relationships; and then it became bright rooms and shadowy, good furniture and old, a bathroom tiled and chromium plated and reflecting from a dozen surfaces the awed, the excited face; and then it was chairs to sink, to vanish in; and kindly questions pursued the comfort, and ease of mind followed with cocoa in splendid red cups and intricate open sandwiches like problems in stained glass. It must have been quite some time before either of the women noticed the tears running unchecked down Vinny's smiling face. Their anxiety was afraid to question but did nevertheless, and she assured them both that her tears were of pleasure.

‘I can't help it,' she said. ‘It's just I never had such a nice time before.'

And they were sensitive and sensible enough not to pursue the matter, though the wet-streaked cheeks were provocative and the ill-kempt hair and clothes.

Helen saw Vinny tumble into bed in the spare room, cheerful with suburban cretonne and hooked rugs – a deliberate affectation on her sister's part, running counter to her natural taste. But it was unglamorously cosy within its four cream walls. The window shut out wind and rain and a cloud-burst of climbing roses trellised down the side of the house; and it shut in warmth and puffed up cushion and pillow and the tired body upon the hollowed bed.

Margaret Reisbeck was a thin, nervous woman who had crossed the menopausal Rubicon with barely a variation in her jittery personality – if anything, she was now a little more serene, though her tireless pursuit of culture amongst the arid deserts of little theatre and new art groups would lead one to wonder just how volatile had been her nature in the warmer years of her twenties and thirties. Still, her enthusiasms were infectious for a while until they became tiresome; and the long, cultured horse-face with its incredibly odd barking voice was sympathetic. Moller always suggested irreverently to Helen that she had a black roof to her mouth. Hair wisped and framed, and eyes, hollow fatigued above her brightly painted mouth, explained away the twitchings of bony hands and the restless tapping of feet.

She reached across the breakfast table and absentmindedly peppered the eggs of the other two before helping herself.

‘That's an incredible mine host of yours up at Gungee, Helen,' she said. ‘Is he a civil fellow?'

‘He runs a hotel,' Helen replied, cutting her toast into three neat strips. ‘He tries to be all things to all men.'

‘Oh, my dear! Not really!' Margaret simpered. ‘I tried to ring you on Friday afternoon before you left, and he went away from the phone for exactly half a minute and came back and said he couldn't find you and that he didn't intend looking. It was gratuitous rudeness, for I hadn't stressed that I want to speak to you. I
had
said a message would do. Anyway, when he came back to the phone I asked him to give you a message.' Margaret teased her fried egg into several futuristic shapes and gobbled one of them. ‘I even made him repeat it after me. “Please tell Mrs. Striebel” – and he said, “Please tell Mrs. Striebel” – “I wish” – “I wish” – “she would move” – “she would move” – “to a more polite” – “to a more polite” – “and courteous hotel” – “and courteous hotel”. My dear, he actually said the words after me before he could stop himself, and when he'd finished and realised what he'd said, he let out a shrill scream. Absolutely wonderful! I felt it was worth the one and ninepence.'

‘You tiger,' Helen said. ‘I'll probably find my possessions hurled out on to the street when I get back. Vinny, Margaret is a dreadful woman, and on no account must you be influenced by her.'

Vinny giggled into her breakfast plate. Sleep-sated and happiness-masked, her face flushed with pleasure at the inclusion in the adult talk, at being circumscribed by friendliness.

‘Mum says Mr. Farrelly puts clerical collars on his beers,' she said.

‘What an intelligent child!' Margaret barked. ‘I suppose, my dear, he is a very religious man. Now tell me, Helen, what are your plans for today? I know this afternoon is fixed up, but what about this morning? The rain's eased off. It might be an idea if I run the two of you into town so Vinny can have a look at the shops. Homes of graft and racket, my child, but necessary.'

‘It's putting you out, isn't it?'

‘Not at all. I have to go in to see about the hanging of the spring exhibition for Carya Studios. They've got a basement room in Elizabeth Street, poor things. Shockingly old and depressing. Still … a coat or two of flamingo and turquoise ought to pick it up no end. More tea, Helen? Vinny?'

‘Well, that sounds pleasant. How about it, Vinny? There's nothing like a spot of window-shopping to make you happy for the wealth of others. There. I'm sounding exactly like Margaret. Two days of you, Margaret, and I've imbibed enough cynicism to antagonise the whole of Gungee.'

‘Darling, smug little town,' Margaret cooed. ‘I'm burning to see it. One week-end I'll drive up with some of the young things from Carya. They'd adore a sketching jaunt in a primitive backwater like that.'

‘Oh God! Please, Maggie. That's a prayer. Don't do it to me. Wait until I've left the place.'

‘But that might be years.'

‘I don't think I'd want to be there for years. Another one or two, maybe. No more.'

‘Sure?' Margaret asked archly, who always multiplied a given situation by twice the known number of factors in it.

Helen did not answer, and Margaret smiled, all frayed wickedness over slipping dentures, and looked whimsical and non-committal herself. She helped herself to immense quantities of bread and peach jam, as she did daily without any beneficial effect upon her sparse body. ‘Well, today is definite,' she stated firmly, irradiating breakfast-room and occupants with her compelling smile.

Vinny saw the morning unfolding its colours and tendernesses like a rose. In what gardened acres of mind she wandered, when, having assisted with the breakfast dishes and neatened her room, she went off to explore the rear garden tanging with wet earth smells and sodden shrubberies. As a very small child she had loved sitting under the natural caverns of the leaves, feeling enwombed in their ragged tents of colour, watching greedily the bustling life of the ants and flying insects around her. Even now she found herself eyeing the hollows beneath the mussaendas, with a professional eye. She wandered to the front of the house.

The day had cleared under a toughening wind that scudded along behind cloud races from the south-east. Scattered over the wet blue sky were cirrus shreds torn and ripped into an untidy morning; the river, from where Vinny stood by the front garden fence, was deeply, freshly green, wrinkled into cheeky waves that slapped the launches moored offshore. Each leaf, each blade dagger-held its individual pearl of water. A tram rattled by. Gulls whiter than ever against the deepened colours of the river swooped and plummeted and skimmed above the smaller craft.

Vinny's hand closed round the leather purse in her skirt pocket. Inside it was a ten-shilling note.

‘That's all I can spare,' her mother had apologised, tucking it in with a horribly over scented handkerchief. ‘Buy Mrs. Striebel some little thing, Vinny. Not that you'll get much. But it's the thought that counts.' Vinny pressed her chin against the paintless wrought iron gate and ran her fingers thoughtfully over the daggers of design that spiked the morning air. She wondered what Mrs. Striebel would like. Her unsophisticated mind sorted over perfume and stockings and stopped dead for lack of experience. It became even more difficult when there was no question of appeasing the goddess, when it was purely a votive offering – the choice was then so unbounded by what would be necessary; it became a gesture that must embody her own necessity as well as the flattery to Mrs. Striebel. She did not reason exactly like this, but the ideas, unformulated as they were, lingered in her mind and moved restlessly, over its surface like gulls on the river. She squeezed the purse into a thin oblong, and then flattened it out and opened it just to make sure the note was still there, stinking and warm inside the imitation leather.

She was perplexed again when, having parked Margaret's smart sedan near the old university gates, they walked back up George Street and then into the city's centre. The back streets had been patterned with wet leaves and freshly cut shadows on the sunny pavements, stamped out replicas of trees. But here, with the Saturday morning crowds, the jangling trams, the cars and the traffic lights, Vinny was too confused to think clearly. Interiors of coffee lounges, murky walls, dreg colour and people-packed seduced the eyes, the wantings – into milk bars youth-stool-cluttered or into frock shops garrulous with feminine facade, all the mendacities of fabric and colour and line. She was still wearing the same skirt, the same rather small jumper from which her overlong arms projected rawly. The violence of her hair against the pale face was very startling; and the pale eyes were nipping with twin-pincered brightness the movement and noise. She marvelled at the numbers and the variety of the faces, the discs of pink or white or red or brown that jiggled past in the mid-morning streets, with looks of purpose or point, lives crusted with assurance. Trams were freckled, too, with faces, but they had more passivity as they swung by, a blankly accepting blindness of the eyes. Helen watched Vinny as Vinny watched the crowds. Margaret had left them a few blocks away in a smother of scarves and parcels and what seemed to be a dozen string bags.

‘Well?' Helen asked. She broke the surface of the child's abstraction as delicately as a leaf might wrinkle the surface of a pool.

Vinny said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Striebel, the crowds. It's the crowds. I can't imagine all these people having different lives. It must be wonderful living in town with so many. All the time. So many. You'd never be lonely, would you?'

‘Yes. Terribly,' Helen said. She did not bother to explain, she knew Vinny could work out the paradox herself. ‘Come on, my girl. I have to go in here and buy stockings and all sorts of nonsense.'

The counters of the department store imprisoned shop-girls in black. To Vinny they all appeared exquisite painted things, elegant and adult. The prisons themselves clasped like precious jewels, ends of lace and fancy-work, artificial flowers that would make any garden a colourless affair, buttons – speckles of colour, ribbons like paper streamers. The price tags were not obvious. But each sales girl knew the worth of each customer not only from the obvious externals – the declarations of expensive clothing – but as well from the hesitancy which mostly they despised or the arrogance which, peculiarly enough, they seemed to prefer, learning the gestures of it and putting them aside well conned for future use.

Mrs. Striebel was taking so long in her selection at the button counter that Vinny wandered off to a china and crockery display at the far side of the shop. The hideously ornate and the simple battled their themes through ramekins and flower bowls, ovenware, figurines, jardini
è
res. To Vinny the simple looked uninspired. She was only thirteen. Her eyes lit up in near greed at the sight of china roses, flashily glazed horses, shepherdess clocks. She stared covetously. Here was what she wanted. An ornament for Mrs. Striebel. A gay floral tribute, permanent in porcelain, colourful, cheerful, indestructibly complex in design.