A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley

you have dared for me, you must stay at least to hear the Fifth out, and have a coffee.’
    He turned away, large and dark, slightly flabby with his gaberdine trousers slipping untidily below his relaxed stomach muscles. His fingers were spatulate and long, gingered from nicotine; his eyes were troubled with irony and kindness, and his mouth had the mobility of self-humour. He went across to his record-player and Helen sat in a chair by the windows. Carefully he replaced the needle on the second band and they sat exposed under the glare of the unshaded light bulb to the second and third movements of the Beethoven. They smoked, and they smiled occasionally at each other through the cantabiles and the diminuendos, cloistered in simplicity until the bassoons and horns eased in on the piano’s muttered chords spelling out the dramatic final theme. The tiny silence held to just that point where it became unendurable. Attacca. They were away on the allegro and its dogmatic statements of melody, and Miller and Helen lay back in their chairs and under cover of gigantic fortissimos, shifted into more comfortable positions and lit new cigarettes.
    â€˜How was that?’ Moller murmured when it was all over. ‘That your pals the Talbots could see us now wrapped in compromise and culture! It would support their conversational sorties through a month of badminton. Is there anything else you’d like to hear, Helen, or will we get busy on some coffee?’
    â€˜The coffee, I think. And after a while some soothing trio or quartet if you have it. I heard Alec Talbot whistling something last term I meant to ask you about. I think it was Schubert, but I wouldn’t be sure.’
    â€˜When you’re strengthened by coffee,’ Moller said, ‘you can sing it for me.’
    â€˜I’ll have to be really strengthened, Robert. I think I’d just as soon look through your record pile and work it out by trial and error.’
    â€˜So be it. Come and help me brew this stuff, Helen. I’m still trying to achieve the perfect elixir.’
    Helen rummaged in the cupboards, found bread and sliced it, and began making toast. Moller put the coffee on to simmer in a saucepan and leant back against the sink watching her as she worked. He found it unbelievably pleasant to have her there with him and was smiling happily when she looked up and saw him.
    â€˜After a year,’ he said.
    â€˜What? What after a year?’
    â€˜This. Just this. You working away in the kitchen, coffee on the hob, a record digested. Here, you’ll need some cheese for that toast.’
    Bending down to forage in the cupboard behind him, he kept his broad back turned to her so she could not sense his emotion. Among the dim edges and corners, the uneven planes of grocery packets, lonely as a late night city, he became suddenly still as he peered down the lanes between the prisms and cubes of food. The vision of his aloneness and the aimlessness of his progress blew like a gale-blast along the thoroughfares of this toytown, and he touched the sharpest of points that indicated barren evenings and days, became lost in his mental projections among the alley-ways between the biscuits boxes and the flour, and shuddered at the solitude of this new landscape. With an effort that was painful he straightened and turned heavily and smiled and then not-smiled into Helen’s face. During the cessation of speech the very climate of the room had changed, though there were still the red cotton curtains and the cheap imitation tile work above the sink and the bread bin solid as a Bible behind the door.
    â€˜There’s one thing I must make clear, Helen,’ he said, and did not touch her in spite of his wishes, but she felt as if she had been touched all the same, ‘that after tonight I’m afraid I can’t reject the situation between us any longer. I have decided that I shall have to reject Lilian – not in so far as there