A Descant for Gossips (3 page)

‘Playground duty,' he said. ‘Who's for it with me?' He knew – he always checked with the roster – but a pretended joviality over tasks was his one concession to flippancy about the job.

‘Mercy on this first day,' Sweeney pleaded. But he got up, nevertheless, nudging Rose on the thigh as he went past.

When they had gone silence fell heavily and accustomedly. Miss Rowan rose after a while and stamped off to her room to prepare the afternoon's blackboard of objects so carefully drawn they appeared unnatural – apples, oranges, books, dogs and cats whose outlines were executed in vigorous lines and scarlets and purples to gain the interest of her class. Rose Jarman washed the cups in a small enamel dish, dried them quickly, and then called a child to empty the slops. Moller sighed and opened the first of the essays piled on his table and began reading unenthusiastically. Most of them were two pages in length, eked out with wide margins, large writing, and generous paragraphing. This is where I cry for my dividends, he thought, where I long for some seed of original thought to display even the minutest germination. He knew that in attempting a lesson on Brennan he had been ambitious, but after all the poem was in their set text and he always subscribed to the argument that if only one child responded to the challenge of something both beautiful and difficult, then the waste upon the others was worth it.

So now, ploughing through this weed-rank jungle of holiday tasks that all seemed to be a dull resume of unreal picnics, fishing trips, and bush rambles, or else adventure stories so garishly coloured they were childish, it was with a feeling of wonder that he paused finally before placing his red-pencilled approval at the end of Vinny Lalor's precise writing. He looked up. The room had emptied while he was working save for Helen, who shared the next period off after lunch with him, a period of relief while Findlay, godlike above the test tubes and the bunsen burners, took the combined school for chemistry.

Moller looked across at Helen through the thin planes of silence in the room. Outside the bell shrilled suddenly and the inner silence was united with the outer that spread like mist all over the grounds and found the very last whisperings and the very last scuffle melt away. He could hear the lines forming as Corcoran gave the orders, and then the tapping of Rose Jarman's expensive tittuping heels when she went along the veranda to the music room to wrest cold technical sense from the untuned keys. The boredom that he had endured all morning dissipated as he saw his teaching partner calmly turning pages of books and impressing her ideas on them in a thick blue comment. She sensed his eyes upon her and smiled without looking up.

‘Just a moment, Robert. I'm on my last one, and then I'll join you in a cigarette.'

Moller watched her smooth face and drank in the quietude of her lowered eyelids and sad mouth. She had joined the staff a year after him, widowed and withdrawn for at least six months, until he, about to lose his wife in a permanent illness, found his being's purpose running parallel with hers so that it would have been a wild and incredible thing had not each found the other a solace, at least in the daytime hours. Her practicality, which he lacked, and her humour, which kind he possessed but enriched male-fashion, drew him, the impractical and the dreamer, into a companionship that tempered their teaching relation. Affection existed between them. They were both aware of it. But they were circumspect, careful of staff and town that lay idle under the hot sun waiting to devour reputations. Sometimes, but never often, they would stroll down from the school together in the late afternoon, watching Bundarra fling its hammer shadow across the little streets and shops and houses, and when they reached the hotel where she boarded he would turn away after the briefest of leave-takings along the road beside the railway line to his empty house.

He kept it going. There was not much point in selling it until he knew exactly what to do about Lilian, whose paraplegia was now so advanced. They were separated physically by her illness and absence and spiritually by the despondency that had enveloped her to such an extent that even his weekly calvaries of pity to visit her meant nothing really to them, who were childless of the body and no longer shared offspring of the mind. He kept the house going largely as a place for his books, somewhere to play a record and cook a quiet meal; or just to lie around in the months of June and November, unhappy in the debris of unmarked examination questions.

At those times when the summer evenings drifted in from the sea in a green translucence that lay over the hills and paddocks like clear water and the after-tea hours lay ahead as empty as the sky limits, he would have liked Helen with him to share the silence or the idly dropped word. But his neighbours watched with unkindly interest the most trivial actions of a man who did not belong to any of the local clubs, refrained from attending any church, and found horses and bridge boring beyond endurance. Occasionally he played an uninterested game of badminton at the doctor's home, but that was not sufficient to excuse his lack of interest in sport. His love of books and music made him immediately suspect, and his preference for drinking at the hotel bars with the working class, instead of the private polite parties, marked him down as rather common. He did not know, and he certainly would not have cared if he had.

In much the same fashion Helen Striebel was criticised by the women of the town, who resented the way she was able to keep to herself, disliking her because of a self-sufficiency that precluded the need to swap knitting patterns and sponge recipes and allowed her to retire blamelessly to her room at seven. This sort of behaviour was accepted as a personal affront by the active women's organisations, who regarded it angrily as voiceless criticism of their behaviour. In a way perhaps it was, though it was unintentional.

‘In a place like this,' Moller used to say to her, ‘you may detract and calumniate with impunity, but sneering at
mores
and traditions is unforgivable.'

By now Helen had put down her pencil and pushed the bundle of closed books to one side. She fumbled in the bag that she kept slung over the shoulder of her chair and drew out her cigarette case. Through the thinly fanning smoke they looked amusedly at each other, he finding her devotion to the tedium of correcting exercises as much a part of her personality drive as she found his amusement at its part of his. Their ability to predict each other's reactions pleased them both. Finally Moller spoke.

‘It's good to see you again, Helen. The holidays were no holiday for me.'

‘It's good to see you, too.' She paused. Her eyes looked away into her own shyness. ‘Robert, I heard you tell Greg Sweeney that Lilian was worse. I'm so sorry. Won't she get any better? Not any better?'

‘Not a scrap.' Moller remembered the tossed bed, the crumpled pile of women's magazine, the sweet smell of ether and the oranges, unwanted, piled beside the flowers. Remembered, and felt a frightening weariness at the thought of it again next week and the next and the next with the tossed bed, the magazines, the sweet smells of ether and the oranges and the flowers.

‘Not only will she not get any better,' he said, ‘but she is slowly, very slowly, becoming worse. And indefinitely, it seems. Only one thing is definite, Helen, and that is she has completely lost the use of both legs.' He tapped the ash off his cigarette. It fell into the light layer of chalk dust below the table. ‘She's too miserable to be interested in much. Each week-end I see her she plucks nervously at the covers most of the time and hardly has a thing to say.' He stood up agitatedly and walked over to the window. But his agitation was not really with Lilian.

Helen sensed that he wished to say no more about it so she said abruptly, ‘My holidays weren't the best, either. Margaret was down with 'flu. The city was jammed with Show visitors and I lost a tenner first day there. I'm glad we don't have to write a holiday task about them.'

‘Talking of holiday tasks,' Moller said, swinging round from the window, from the pain in his mind, and hurrying back to the pile of books on his table. ‘I've got something here that might interest you, Helen. A child with an idea at last.'

‘Who is it?'

‘Vinny Lalor. Yes, Vinny.' Moller laughed as he saw the disbelief on the other's face. ‘Not brilliant, but original. It gives quite an interesting sidelight on that unhappy kid's existence.'

He sorted through the books until he found the grease-spotted cover that badged most of her exercises, and opening up the book he read, ‘ “A Family Day”.' He stopped ‘Get that, Helen. Even the title has escaped.' He glanced down at the book again and flicked the page over. ‘Would you mind if I read it?'

‘No,' Helen said. ‘Go ahead. The staff is as one when it's a question of discovering a little intelligence.'

Moller hooked a chair out with one foot and having sprawled easily in it he continued to read in his soft voice:

‘ “All yesterday I wondered if families were like ours. At first I thought there could be no answer to this and then quite strangely I found that there was. Very early I began to walk from our home which is at the top of Duncan Hill and passed most of the houses on this side of the town well before ten. At one place after another the same scene repeated itself, a crying child, a woman shaking a mop over the stair rail and a man lounging back in his chair and shouting an order.” I like that bit,' Moller said. ‘ “This part was different because my father shouted his last order three years ago and then left. I think this is a pity for though it is bad to be shouted at, it is worse to have no one to shout at you. I feel if he were here with us, shouting or not, we would be more like other families.

‘ “In the evening I went past the same houses and from each the lights shone boldly in the darkness. In one house there was a piano with someone making a mistake over and over and in another I could see people laughing over their tea. It was like looking into another world. But from nearly every home in the street blared the radio tuned to a talent show. The announcer was so kindly he was false and the performers were so sincere they were sad. And when I crept home, there was mum listening quietly to some classical music because she has always wanted us to be more refined. So when she became busy with the ironing, I went softly to the radio and tuned in to the talent show too. Listening to the bad singing and the hill-billy guitars I felt happier than I'd ever felt before. Our house was the same now as all the other houses in the street, and I was part of the sameness.” '

Moller looked up at Helen's disturbed face.

‘Not exactly the usual style of holiday task, is it? Poor little beggar!'

They both thought of the child and her isolation. Helen saw the playing-fields curving back to the peppertrees and the tennis courts, and the senior pupils in groups forming permutations of gossips over their lunch hour activities; and apart from them, outside all the groups every day, the hair-bright, plain-faced child trying desperately to look as if she were walking purposefully, as if there were a goal somewhere – and not succeeding. Sometimes when Helen was on playground supervision she would come up to her and ask a trivial question about the afternoon's mathematics class. Her requests were such thin ruses to give her approach some point that Helen, filled with pity for the child's friendlessness, would walk across the grounds with her, talking about school work and the girl's interests as long as the lunch duty lasted. This was bad in a way, for it not only set Vinny Lalor apart but it made her the butt of unpleasantness, charges of currying favour. Yet neither the child nor her teacher felt capable of acting otherwise. Moller spoke to her, too, in the yard, but less frequently; and then after a while, when it was discovered how she loved reading, both of them lent her books of a better quality than the meagre contents of the school library could provide. Despite this particular attention, however, her essays had never before revealed, apart from an occasional felicity, any mark of the sensitivity behind her observations.

‘It's quite incredible,' Helen said. ‘By the way, how do you think Vinny would know what was bad singing and what wasn't?'

‘I suppose she heard her mother criticise the talent shows.'

‘That's so. Incidentally, I had no idea the father had left home. I was under the impression he was dead.'

‘It happened just before I came here,' Moller said, ‘but it's such an old story no one ever discusses it. Mrs. Lalor seems to manage somehow. Better off, probably. Two of the kids still home are working, and they help out. You've noticed Vinny's clothes are never quite up to scratch. That seems to be the one thing some of the nasty little beasts in her class can't forgive.'

‘God, they're cruel,' Helen said. ‘And there seems to be nothing one can do about it.' She paused. ‘I feel,' she said deliberately, and thereby setting up the first piece in a dangerous montage, ‘that I would like to do something special for that child. Give her a treat that she'd remember with pleasure for a very long time. How about running her down to Brisbane with us next month and taking her to a ballet or a play or something like that?'

Moller jerked his head back in surprise. ‘Are you serious?' he asked.

‘Perfectly. I've always had a weak spot for that girl.'

‘But think of the complications. There's the mother to ask. Findlay probably will think it odd and the rest of the kids will give her hell.'

‘There's no need for Findlay to be told and Vinny won't mention it to the others. I'll see to that. As for Mrs. Lalor, I'm sure she would be pleased. I know her.'

And did know her: the seedy dresses, the hair worried through its curling pins, tortured by steel waving grips, the grammar struggling desperately to surface the swamp of local carelessness, the seedier finance behind the upbringing of six children, Vinny last and least lovely; knew her in her gaping timber house behind casuarina and lantana hot-prickled-red-yellow-freckled maze of overgrown hedge, up garden path between the asters and chrysanthemums tangled in fertility to the wistaria'd veranda; as a pale face through leaves and worries.