Free A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley

hear her mother ordering and then pleading with her to come out, but she would neither move nor answer, and after a while the visitors left, all sounds died away, and the tears came at last to comfort her spasmodically until long after darkness drifted into the room.
    Lying in the darkness now, Vinny saw the whole afternoon telescoped into a brief minute of shameful memory. Her mother had questioned her later about her behaviour, but she had not explained why she had become so angry and she did not talk about what she had so nearly heard in the acalyphas. But ever afterwards she felt cut off from Royce almost entirely, and certainly from her mother. She blamed her for the failure of the entire affair. With the sweeping generalizing of the adolescent she turned all her affection upon Mrs. Striebel, and cultivated what might have been a mere ‘crush’ into a disproportionately deep attachment. As the end of the year drew near, she made in the back of her work pad a calendar of schooldays with the periods to be taken by Mrs. Striebel numbered off. She dreaded their ending, for nothing awaited her after the public examinations were over but a job in a Gympie office – if she were lucky – shifting figures from one column and one ledger to another, sifting the relationship of money and goods.
    Down the hall came the distant crash of the back door and her mother’s voice raised in protest as Royce clumped noisily to his tiny den off the side veranda. Vinny frowned and twisted under the worn sheets. She shut her eyes and Mrs. Striebel, dark and adorable, loomed up between the bloodwoods and filled the sky with sleep.

Three
    Robert Moller yawned stalely into the spring. He started up the decrepit Buick and then backed it down the drive and out on the roadway. Ruth Lunbeck waved over armfuls of flowers and gardening shears, poised with just that right amount of poetry above nature. Her hard, pale face foolished a smile under expensive leg-horn and brand new linen and tweed. He smiled back perfunctorily and then groaned softly to himself and twisted the side of his mouth away from her downwards into an expression of contempt. With a roar the car vibrated into life and wrapped watcher and watched in an orange screen of dust – a fact that he endured with pleasure as he thought of the new clothes and the agitation behind him.
    When he pulled in by the hotel Helen and Vinny were there waiting, Helen with a large overnight bag and Vinny with a hat box. Behind them, through the half doors of the pub, the noise of the drinkers – the morning shift from the factory – rolled out in a blurred wordy wordlessness. Behind the press of workmen Moller could glimpse Farrelly, trim as a bottle and an impersonal dispenser, playing the cash register like a miniature organ, venturing into passacaglias based on short-measure and short-change and tips. Helen followed the direction of Moller’s sardonic smile.
    â€˜The moment of truth,’ she murmured to Moller, nodding towards the bar.
    â€˜How right. In with you both.’ He jerked open the front door for Helen and then leant back and opened the rear door for the child. ‘You’ll have to put up with my ungentlemanliness,’ he said to them as he took Helen’s bag and slung it on the rear seat. ‘We’re running a bit late. The damned engine played up again.’ He let in the clutch and the car moved forwards. ‘Yes. Friend Farrelly simply thrives in the odour of sanctity.’
    Vinny sat forward close to the window, grinning nervously with excitement. Her hair had been combed back hard with water and shone pleasantly above her best jacket and skirt. On her lap she held a bottle-green coat that, Helen knew, long before it proved the fact, would be several sizes too large. Helen laid her hand for a minute on Moller’s plump knee bulging beneath his shiny sports trousers and he patted it in a businesslike way.
    For each of the