A Descant for Gossips (17 page)

‘No.'

‘Well now.' He stopped, flummoxed, as his mind sifted the implications of the words before him. The milk truck rattled back late from its delivery on the west side of the town, circling wide around them. The driver waved carelessly, but Findlay did not look up. He did not know just where to proceed from here. To show concern would demonstrate plainly to the child the serious quality of the suspicions that were forming in his own mind. True, he had heard fragments of gossip lately, but he had discounted them as being the grievance-formed malice of children. There was a school committee meeting later in the week. Perhaps then a tactful reference or two would elicit any adult knowledge of the matter. Now he felt the main thing was to get the notice removed before morning school. He sighed. His last hope of a quiet cup of tea was gone.

‘It was very thoughtful of you to try to get rid of this,' he said. ‘Such things are scandalous and absurd. Absurd,' he repeated, hoping his point was being taken. ‘I wonder if you could clean it out properly if I got you a cloth or a mop. Yes. A mop. You wouldn't mind, would you?'

‘No, sir,' she replied. ‘It is absurd, isn't it?'

He glanced at her sideways, curiously, but her face was quite expressionless, her voice toneless.

‘Just wait here.' He knew she had a peculiar reputation amongst the other pupils. ‘I won't be a moment.'

He took his confusion with him back to the house, mumbling at the idea that had been presented so baldly, pondering the possible and the impossible results of its truth. He couldn't tolerate it, really he couldn't. Quite apart from his own moral point of view, the situation, if it existed, would be a dangerous one in a town like this. He had his own reputation and authority to uphold, even if he did not consider the repercussions on the pupils of such a clandestine relationship between two of his staff, for he could not allow himself to appear as tolerant or in connivance. You are taking it too seriously, he told himself, as he searched in the back lobby for the bucket and mop, pushing aside the ranks of rake, adze, and spade handles. Far too seriously. He could hear his wife, susceptible to the faintest adumbration of gossip, coming out through the kitchen. He intercepted her question with a brisk, ‘In a moment,' and turned the back-door tap on full into the bucket, cutting off speech in the roar. His wife's round unoriginal face watched in a silence that could afford to wait. Ultimately, like a river to a sea, all town doings flowed to her to be filtered as it were by a mind long accustomed to picking over the driftwood of local misdemeanour. He rolled away from her into the hot morning to where Vinny waited by the roadside, receiving the stigmata of the sun in a burning flush upon the back of her neck and on her fair arms.

He panted as he set the bucket down and the water splashed and rocked dizzily against the iron sides. Their eyes met in a levelling of age and idea. Both of them felt it, but only the one tried to conceal it.

‘It will only take a moment with the mop,' he said. ‘Hurry.'

She dipped it in the bucket and splashed it out again on the tar-bubbling road. He was right. Plenty of water and some hard rubbing at more obstinate marks and it was all gone in under five minutes. Even as they watched the water was drying fast, leaving only the blank, bland surface of the road, innocent as now neither of them could be.

‘Thank you,' he said. ‘That was a very kind action. But perhaps it would have been better if you had told me first.' They both knew why she hadn't.

‘Yes, sir,' she said.

‘Have there been any others?'

‘Yes.'

‘What happened to them?'

‘I rubbed them out.'

‘All of them?'

‘Yes.'

Findlay was lost for platitudes. He looked away. ‘One more thing,' he said. Along the road he could see the first early comers to school dawdling in the heat. ‘Don't talk about this. If I find the child who did it he will be severely punished. Most severely.'

‘No, sir.'

He emptied the last inch of water from the bucket and put the mop handle under his arm. It became part of him, fasciated with the portly limb that pressed it like a rifle. He felt he looked absurd, and that was something his position could not endure. Chauvinism, lack of humour, bigotry, lack of erudition, anything – but never absurdity.

‘Run along now,' he said.

The morning ate them up, made them a holocaust.

By the time the twelve-thirty bell jangled along the verandas Mr. Findlay, who had wrestled with moral surgings and curiosity all the morning, could contain his impulse to decision no longer. When he saw Mr. Sweeney striding past he asked him to tell Mr. Moller he would be grateful if he could come to the office for a moment. He sat back in his chair and swivelled it with that indescribable release of a decision achieved. He surveyed his room with an inner confidence, the stacked class rolls on the corner of his desk next to the dozens of memoranda chits spiked for reference, the score of well kept, hardly used encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and gazetteers along the wall, the jug of callistemon beside the phone. He was simple and fairly easy to please. He read digests and digests of digests and listened to the lighter programmes of the two national stations whenever static permitted. He worshipped within the Thirty-nine Articles (though for the life of him he couldn't have told you what they said), permitted himself an occasional sherry or beer, condemned gambling with a sonority that brought him notoriety if not respect, and played an insipid game of golf. Altogether he considered himself a pretty all-round sort of fellow.

He sucked at his pipe and doodled on his blotting pad with the red-ink pen. Circles interlocking with more circles were his favourite medium of expression, perhaps his only one, symbolising as they did the round of each day's predictability, or each year's for that matter, circling about the annual inspection and the possibility of a higher promotion mark.

Moller's large head looked round the door. His face seemed unperturbed, and Findlay stared with a teased up interest at the heavy dark eyes, the full lips, the greasy skin. No conventionally good-looking lover, he told himself, not here. And his gaze travelled over the thickening body, the careless posture under the worn clothes. But the face, he conceded all in this flashing minute as his eyes reverted to Moller's, the face was intelligent and kind and sensual – and he stopped on the word abruptly and with the puritan's envy and said, ‘Sit down, Mr. Moller.'

He rose himself, agitated, now that the moment was on him and shut the door.

‘This all seems very importantly mysterious,' Moller said. ‘Mind if I smoke?'

‘Go ahead.'

‘Thanks.'

Findlay sat down heavily and watched while the other man rolled and lit a cigarette. His full lips held it as gently as a kiss.

‘I'll come straight to the point, Mr. Moller,' he said, swerving from the image. Moller looked at him quickly. He felt he knew what was coming. Anger leapt up, became self, demanding protest, but he forced himself to smile and to keep his nervous fingers still.

‘This morning I found an extremely distasteful notice scrawled across the roadway just in front of the school. It concerned you and Mrs. Striebel.'

Moller's heart jumped galvanically. He blew out a puff of smoke and tried to watch Findlay calmly.

‘As a matter of fact I found one of the pupils busy trying to clean it out.'

‘Ah! And who was that?'

‘The Lalor girl. She must like either you or Mrs. Striebel very much. Or both of you. I asked her if there had been any other similar signs, and apparently she has been busy rubbing them out for about a week.'

‘Oh God!' Moller said. ‘Poor little devil!'

‘The point is this, Mr. Moller,' Findlay said, and paused embarrassedly – but it was a slightly synthetic embarrassment. ‘The actual words of the message are unimportant, but the implication was that your friendship with Mrs. Striebel is of a – shall we say, non-platonic nature.' He paused again.

Moller felt no impulse to reply. Wait now, he thought, for the complication of platitude to follow to entangle his argument.

‘Now I am not attempting arbitrary judgments on your personal behaviour. Please understand that. I'm only speaking to you about the matter because I feel such an incident will give us bad tone. Yes. Bad tone.' He repeated the words with a near-unction, happy to have lighted on them. ‘Allowing a thing like that to pass unnoticed would be appalling for discipline, not only yours or Mrs. Striebel's, but that of the whole staff generally, I feel, if the children are allowed to do that sort of thing and get away with it. Not that for one moment I believe there is any truth in the statement.' He added this cunningly and took a sly half-glance under the grey eyebrows.

Moller knocked half an inch of ash from his cigarette carefully into the bakelite tray on the office desk.

‘It is quite true,' he said.

Findlay was not surprised by the truth of the words but by their having been uttered at all. The respectable side of him would have preferred outraged denials. Confronted with an honest reply he hardly knew what to say. At most, he felt, he could bow his head in acquiescence before such open profligacy.

‘It is entirely your own affair, Mr. Moller,' he said, ‘but you must agree that it is your duty to see that it remains so. After all, apart from any repercussions your behaviour may have upon you at the school, there is also – forgive my mentioning it – your wife to consider. It is possible that some ill-advised gossip in the town might inform her. Have you thought of that?'

‘I have. I've thought of it almost constantly. You know my wife's condition, I think, Mr. Findlay, and I would like to say right here and now that I will not be cajoled either into defining or apologising for my position. The situation exists. Further than that I will make no statement of any kind whatever.' Moller could feel his anger taking control of him like a gale through a tree.

‘Of course, of course. I am, I hope, a man of the world' – the flashed understanding smile and Moller wanted to scream with ironic laughter – ‘but you mustn't mind if I ask you to be a little more discreet. Surely you don't resent that?'

The pleading, Moller thought. He intends me to think I have him in the inferior position, when he knows and I know that as quickly as winking he could have me moved to the end of God's earth. Someone tapped diffidently on the office door, and Moller wondered if, after the person had gone unacknowledged, there would be a small sacrificial offering of corn and oil.

‘Later!' Findlay called out. There was the sound of footsteps moving away along the veranda.

Their eyes met across the neat table, and the anger on Moller's face was duplicated on Findlay's, though the latter was trying to appear as unmoved as he could.

‘What I cannot understand,' he pursued, ‘is how the children got wind of the business, anyway.'

‘It's perfectly simple,' Moller said. By telling Findlay he would put him out of his agony in somewhat the same way as one might shoot an injured horse. ‘Perfectly simple. Helen and I spent last weekend at Tin Can Bay and unfortunately the Welches also spent the weekend there. I suppose their girls heard the talk at home and couldn't resist the temptation to buy themselves a little temporary prestige at school.'

Findlay twitched. Moller sounded flippant, and the whole thing, this simple contravention of accepted moral code, was so important, especially in this tiny town. He saw, and tried not to see, illicit week-ends shaping themselves round luxury hotels and flats and houses to rent, all coming in the end to that same well wanted, unbearable, mental verisimilitude of an unendurable act of love. He shook his head in an effort to rid himself of the image, and Moller watching him, smiled with sympathy for the first time, sensing the struggle in the man opposite, the battle between his respectable and his carnal impulses.

The edge of silence was serrated by sound as the first ten minutes of the lunch-hour ended and the quietness impelled by the need to eat gave way to the first shriekings and yellings from the primary school. It was hotter than ever, and in the narrow office both men edged uncomfortably on their chairs. Moller took a crumpled handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mopped it backwards and forwards across his forehead and round his neck under the curve of his chin. Findlay couldn't help noticing with fastidiousness that the linen rectangle came away soiled – only slightly, but there it was. On a sudden he resented Moller, resented and envied him his sexual success, although he did not envy him Mrs. Striebel in particular; only in some aching general way that this hot day was making aware he envied him, and resented with a jealousy that took him gaspingly by surprise the physical fallibility of the man, the stoutish body, the thinning hair, the sweating skin with its expanded pores. But again and again his mind alluded to the humour and the intelligence and the sensuality of the face. The confrontation made him shudder in his angry desire.

‘Well, we shall just have to be on our guard,' he said. ‘Yes. On our guard.' There they come, thick as plums in a pudding, Moller thought. ‘And if you encounter anything more of the sort, Mr. Moller, I want you to inform me immediately. I shall make a few discreet inquiries among the senior boys, and if I discover who was responsible I shall punish him very severely.'

Moller protested mildly enough, ‘I think that is wrong policy, Mr. Findlay. I think the best thing would be to ignore it. That way the whole business will probably die a natural death in a few days.'

Findlay was scandalised to find himself wondering if that were what he really wanted, if his method of dealing with the situation were only a contrivance to prolong it. He hated being opposed and he shut his ears to the obvious sense of Moller's suggestion.

‘There is only one sure way the whole thing could die a natural death, Mr. Moller,' he said, and his words traced out a cold anger. ‘By transferring one of you. Let me deal with this my own way, and the other alternative need not be necessary.'