A Descant for Gossips Read online

  ‘Perhaps not all the time,’ he said. ‘Though it was very clever of you to sense that some people do enjoy their agonies. I think that only people capable of assessing their suffering are capable of writing about it with sensitivity. They stand back from themselves, as it were, and watch their own joy or unhappiness with an interested observer’s eye. In a way it is good to be clinical about your personality, for self-analysis should be honest if it is to have any meaning when it is written down.’

  He did not know whether the girl understood all he said. He felt sure she would understand part of it. Vinny watched him with bright eyes, happy at being the sole receiver of his opinion.

  Moller eased his chair back from the table and walked over to the window. Sid Ewer’s truck with stinking exhaust crashed across the rectangle and vanished into the receding perspective of the trees. As he watched the red dust settle he told them something of Brennan’s life and his unhappy career. There was not much he could tell them, he reflected, for too many of them knew adultery and drunkenness in such a day-to-day fashion in their own homes, its relevance in the life of one of the country’s finest poets would be missed.

  ‘Before we finish,’ he said, glancing thankfully at his watch, ‘are there any questions?’

  He looked round the room without much hope that his invitation would be accepted. Betty Klee was nodding vigorously and giggling at Pearl Warburton. Pearl rose, smiling but with poise, and said, ‘Please, sir, there’s one thing I didn’t understand. What does “niggard bosom” mean?’

  A convulsion of mirth shook the room, but Moller preserved his calm. He looked at her sadly and smiled back.

  ‘Howard,’ he said, ‘the essays. There’s half a minute to go. Is there anyone who has not completed it?’

  Three arms waved shyly. He glanced at the owners and noted their names in a pocket diary. ‘No excuses accepted,’ he said. ‘Remain after school.’

  The class shuffled as the period bell rang. Some of them stood in an attitude of respect when he left the room, but most of them sat giggling with their neighbours. They watched him go, solid under his cheap tweed jacket, fingers already fumbling for the makings of a quick puff between classes, groping in the pocket where the tobacco crumbs fell from the loose pouch.

  Vinny looked after him with something near to love as she handed in her essay to Howard, recalling what he had said about pain and sensitive people and writing about it. How did it go? ‘Only people able to something their suffering could write about it sensitively.’ One day she’d show them, Warburton and fat old Klee and the rest. Fame and fame and fame …

  ‘Open it up, Lalor,’ Howard snapped. At sixteen he already hated plain girls.

  ‘I don’t know how the population increases,’ Helen Striebel said gloomily as she watched the barbaric young killing time mercilessly, slaughtering the lunch-hour. ‘That is, I understand the fundamental principle, but I cannot understand its repetition.’ She turned away from the window, teacup in hand, to her lunch spread out between the exercise stacks on her desk.

  The men roared with laughter.

  ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ Moller said, coming in rubbing his hands. ‘Sex rearing its lovely head?’

  He went to the battered teapot near the wash-basin and filled a cup.

  ‘Weak brew. Who’s guilty? Helen, what was that remark I surprised you in?’

  She laughed with the others. ‘These children. I explain a perfectly simple trigonometrical problem, I set a similar one, and not a soul gets it right. Peters said he thought it was a quadratic equation. Still, I was pleased he even knew the term. His idiocy is rather endearing.’

  ‘No shop first day back,’ Sweeney roared heartily. His coarse good-looking face stuck out arrogantly above a footballer’s frame. He tapped another memo for Findlay, using his typewriter in somewhat the way emotional pianists use their instruments, crouching low and leaning back and making rather unnecessary arm movements. ‘How’s your wife, captain?’ he asked Moller, when he had come to the end of the memo. Moller, watching him, felt like bursting into loud applause. (‘Brilliant, my dear fellow! Positively brilliant!’) Hesitation patterned his plum face and he lit a cigarette before he answered. He could sense the others waiting for his reply also.

  ‘Much the same. Worse if anything, I suppose. Her right hip is affected now.’

  ‘Sorry, old boy.’ Sweeney gulped back lukewarm tea and felt safe; safe in his job, safe in his health, and safe in the campaign he was conducting towards achieving a profitable marriage. He eyed Rose Jarman sideways where she sat, not quite plain, and not quite good-looking in her expensive one of many linen suits. Her father owned a large dairy farm in the Mary Valley, a seaside cottage at Inskip Point, and a big, fast black car. Sweeney coveted all these things, and his covetousness was understandable, for Rose was an only child whom her father loved in a completely foolish way, lavishing on her practically anything she wanted. At times Sweeney felt too young for marriage at twenty-four, but, realizing an opportunity such as this might not come his way again, he was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of the male. Although he was not interested in easy seduction, it was on no moral ground. Rose was not sufficiently attractive for him to labour through the preliminary details of an affaire, and he was, if nothing else, a man who demanded value in kind for his money.

  Mrs. Striebel marked another book, unnecessarily conscientious on this first day back. Elderly Miss Rowan, disappointed in love, in life in the broader sense, and in occupation, grizzled into the room from the infants’ department.

  ‘Sixty-three! Would you believe it! Sixty-three in that tiny room. I’m resigning at the end of the year, I tell you.’

  ‘Go on with you!’ Moller said. ‘You’ve been saying that for years, Rowie. I bet you’ll be teaching their grandsons. Have a cup of this appalling tea. I don’t think the dregs were emptied last term!’

  Miss Rowan shifted her glasses higher and flopped into a chair.

  ‘Dear, it’s awful,’ she said. ‘Why do we do it? Why on earth do we do it?’

  ‘Because we love little children. We see their essential innocence, their kindness to each other, their respect for old age. It’s all so rewarding.’ Moller sipped tea and sucked at his cigarette alternately. Sweeney shoved a paper of sandwiches across the table and Moller took one absent-mindedly. Chalk dust still in corners, rolls stacked on corner press, programme registers along tables, tea-cup rings – all the impedimenta of teaching. The eight members of the staff squatted uncomfortably with them, acting no longer with each other, now that familiarity’s offspring banished politeness and allowed the idiosyncrasies- shortness of temper, oddly enough, and the uncalculating kindnesses – full play. This laying bare of the personality made in a general way for more harmonious living together. There was no necessity for pretence. Although the end of each school year found nerves frayed from irritations that were part of the job, the staff returned each February, prepared to live out again a union more intimate in some respects than marriage.

  For the past three years there had been no transfer of staff, and daily interchange of ideas and school gossip had given these eight people a relationship intangibly binding one upon the other. That this was a dangerous thing did not make itself immediately apparent; yet month after month of limited companionship, limited conversational gambits, threw the staff in upon themselves in a desperate circle of self-concentration. The school and its problems became over-important; the behaviour of one member of staff to another, the fortune or otherwise of any of them, was balloon-swollen and treated as if it were the concern of all. Partisanship reared up in sudden ugly growth about trivia, and though it withered away in the calmer moods of the men and women, memory had still many limbs to spread tendrils of discomfort and dislike.

  I will remember this room, Moller thought, though the years deny all cognizance of time and place and mood. I will remember it by the pos
itioning of chairs, the ink stain on the corridor wall, the windows looking out on the school field and the courts and the mountain sky threatening behind the township. Glancing round, he reflected with amusement that the seating habits of the staff had remained unchanged since he had been there – and that was three years. Helen, calm, straightbacked near the end window; Sweeney sprawled huge and boorish over typewriter at the centre table, and Rose Jarman beside him with Miss Rowan, slicing the townspeople into tiny pieces and serving them up with their sandwiches and cake; Millington, blond and good humoured, near the door beside Corcoran, late-comer to lunch, over-bellied, tonsured at forty, bullying the seventh grade into examination passes at the end of each year. Only one person was missing – Mrs. Ballard, efficient as an egg-whisk in the home science section, all gleaming like a hard baked stove, ate, often as not, in her separate teaching wing the left-over fricassee and pastry prepared at her classes. Eight of them, nine with Findlay, all marooned on this educational islet, aching from each other and from the town, ingrown like nails, throbbing with self and other self.

  Below the end windows a surging and unexpected clamour of singing broke on them.

  ‘Ooooooooh – the tunnel of LOVE, the tunnel of LOVE!’ It was chorused with the heartiness of bush-hikers and a salacity of emphasis remarkable considering the age of the performers.

  ‘Vulgar little bastards,’ Moller said. He leant out the window and glared down on four boys from the senior school. They were squatting with arms linked, and swaying to their singing.

  ‘First day of term is hardly one for rejoicing,’ he said. ‘Get out of there. Right out, you fellows. You know this section is forbidden. Get down near the technical block.’

  Four pleased faces, upturned to his, smirked their satisfaction, happy with the result they had achieved.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ Howard said, all melting politeness sauced over a crustacean shell of insolence. ‘We forgot. We didn’t mean to be happy.’

  ‘Go on!’ Moller roared. ‘Out!’

  They sauntered off, slowly, provokingly, while Moller watched them until the corner of the building cut them from view.

  ‘There you are,’ he said to Miss Rowan. ‘There’s your answer. We do it for absolutely nothing. We do it so that any manners or good taste we attempt to give them may be thrown back in our teeth. We correct so that parents may criticise our harshness, and we neglect through sheer weariness and hopelessness so that parents may criticise our indifference. But all the time, all the time, mark you, we must be cautious of ourselves; we must live righteously within the law and the sub-sections of the Education Act. Circumspection is our ruling word.’

  Sweeney clapped ironically. ‘Well said, captain. Have another ham and pickle. They’re doing you good.’

  Helen Striebel rolled the last of her crumbs into a brown paper bag that she screwed up and hurled into the wastepaper basket.

  ‘Everything you say is right,’ she agreed. ‘And add to it the necessity for near-perfect technique in our subjects. I remember when I was teaching in Sydney, before Tom died, the headmistress of the school I was at being displeased with the writing of the English staff. So one afternoon – and though this is incredible, it’s perfectly true – she took the five of them, all graduates mind you, and some of them middle-aged, and gave them a writing lesson in cursive alphabet formation for forty minutes. She made them practise each letter as if they were children.’

  ‘My dear, I can still help you,’ Miss Rowan said bitterly. ‘Crushing a sixty-fourth into the prep room will be a matter of no importance.’

  Corcoran knocked his pipe out against the table edge and brushed the ash carelessly from his grey flannel trousers. His entire life was governed by routine and examination cramming; it was not a pose and it was not that he wanted particularly to get on in the department – he just preferred it that way.

  ‘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.