A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley Page A

are oranges and magazines and the exchange of platitudes, but in so far as you are concerned with me. Quite suddenly, Helen, I seemed to have lost the wish to control my impulses towards you.’
    He touched her arm with his large gentle hand and rubbed the sleeve of his other arm across his forehead where moisture lay in the furrows like dew. Helen looked down and seized mentally on the three objects within her grasp – the bread, the knife, the butter. She learnt them by heart and shut her eyes and memorised them and opened her eyes and found them still present like a talisman. Having reached this stage of the journey together and having desired it sub-consciously so long, yet still she was doubtful of how to reply. The disturbance in the blood made speech impossible for the moment, but finally she looked at Moller’s sad face and was shocked into the beginning of a smile.
    He essayed one, pitifully, and said, ‘Helen, please. I wish to court you to the ultimate old-fashioned scandalous end. My intentions are dishonourable. Please accept this as the warmest compliment I can pay you.’
    She laughed and the tenderness between them merged more comfortably with the bolder stream of their old comradeship.
    â€˜That is the way I accept it, Robert?’
    â€˜Do you, then?’
    â€˜I think perhaps I do.’
    â€˜Helen,’ he said, ‘Helen, let’s hurt no one else in doing this. Especially Lilian. We must be sure that this snivelling bloody-minded town is unaware of us. How it would salivate over this conversation!’
    He let her arm fall to her side and turned to the coffee that was bubbling. He took a strainer from a drawer, poured coffee into cups, and snapped the switch down on the stove. Helen buttered toast and set it out on plates, finding in the simple domestic actions a kindling delight. And as they sat over their supper they investigated the possibilities of silence together and on its quiet plains they mustered the flocks of their gentleness. They sat a long while, hardly saying a thing but utterly content. Moller watched her fair head, her intelligent eyes and the curve of her mouth with a dreadful hunger, but still did not touch her. She was, he reflected, all the day and all the night he could wish to know, the goal of his heart and thought. He tried, in this room that was so full of Lilian, not to think of his wife, and the struggle between pleasure and pain must have shown on his face.
    Helen asked, ‘What are you thinking?’
    â€˜Of you – and Lilian.’
    She was surprised to see tears spring to his eyes and he turned his head quickly away from her.
    â€˜It was Ulysses’ private woe – the endless pattern and perplexity of never-ending oceans.’
    He laid his head on his arms in a defeated way, and Helen moved so quickly round the table to him it was as if she had not moved at all, but had always been there with his head cradled against her. Their bodies moved as naturally to each other as flowers to light and they comforted each other so until their time for parting came under the clock’s warning.
    The daphne was still clouding the garden with scent under the china-white moon. Shadow made their faces featureless, but not their voices when they parted by the gate, and Mr. Lunbeck, smoking quietly beneath his guava tree, was overjoyed to find he was not alone in his pursuit of Eros.
    The pattern on her pyjamas was washed into an anonymity of design, yet Vinny still found upon the yellowed surface of the flannelette the ghosts of scrubbed daisies and leaves. She stood skinny in her singlet before the wardrobe mirror, and thrust her arms absentmindedly into the coat sleeves. The elastic at the top of the trousers was loose now from boilings. Every so often she had dragged it out through a little opening and made knots to tighten it, so that it was beaded like a girdle of discipline, but incapable of combining further elasticity with the