Free A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley Page A

three the journey held the magic of giving or receiving or of helping to give or to receive. Caught in a present temporal elation, bounced into unison on worn leather and ageing springs, they received impressions of slope and hill distance in melting spaces between the telegraph poles and the blurred oneness of the fence-posts. The road twisted south and east from the township, and then south again, once the hill cupping the town had been crested, and moved ahead of them in the mild September afternoon amongst flat grey shadows.
    A mile or so out of Gungee, near the beach turn-off, Rose Jarman’s car passed them with her future husband (though she did not know it) lovingly fondling the wheel. A stuttering shriek of the horn and the big black car skimmed them so closely they could still read the obscenity some school wit had fingered on the dusty duco of the boot. Moller grunted with annoyance as he pulled the car in closer to the road edge.
    â€˜There goes one of the seven wise virgins,’ he said. ‘And I don’t mean Rose.’
    Helen laughed. ‘Shush!’ she said softly. ‘We have a passenger, remember?’
    Moller grinned and nodded good naturedly. ‘I’m suffering from a severe attack of week-end. I’ll be careful, I promise.’
    Now that he had arrived at his decision, had achieved a certain exposition of his feelings, he was conscious of an astounding relief. Whether or not his decision would prove wise for himself or for Helen or even Lilian, who still made claims on his conscience, he did not know, though he was, naturally enough, much given in his frequent analyses of the situation to a specious form of rationalizing that applauded his purpose. He sought the self’s bright centre, urged by tempest in his own blood, and now was happy that he might in future let slip aside each day’s disguise and loosen the sophisticate masks that plied chalks and words of reprimand and menial actions into an impression of surface acceptability.
    They raced over Eumundi’s green hills in the limelight of five o’clock, down through deepening tones in paddocks and trees under a threatening spread of nimbus moving in from the sea-line.
    â€˜God! Not this week-end,’ Moller pleaded, glancing up at the sky. And then, ‘Wie bist du meine K ö nigin,’ he sang in a sudden exhilaration, on key and fulsomely exaggerating. He da-dahed the piano accompaniment that followed and Vinny blushed frantically at the sight of her lords relaxing. ‘Happy, Helen? Happy, Vinny?’
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ she replied shyly, and turned to look at the racing scrub under the racing sky.
    â€˜Well, baby, I’m happy. Happy to be out of school and out of town. You’ll have to excuse us, Vinny, and be very tactful if you see Mrs. Striebel and myself acting like escaped prisoners. We are. So relax, my child. We are normal under the job exterior.’
    Vinny pulled her coat over her thin knees and pressed them hard against each other. She swelled with happiness and looked at the backs of the two adult heads in front of her with uncritical pleasure, denying their physical faults and seeing in them a near-Olympian beauty.
    â€˜Back to your Brahms,’ Helen suggested softly as they passed over the shallow reaches of the Maroochy River with its mud flat stampings of greyish white below the bridge. So he resumed singing and passed through the matching inflections of Daumer’s words and Brahms’ music until he reached the end of the first stanza:
    â€˜Wie bist du meine K ö nigin,
    durch sanfte G ü te wonnevoll:
    Du l ä chle nur,
    Lenzd ü fte weh’n durch mein
    Gem ü the wonnevoll, wonnevoll.’
    Both Helen and Moller were aware of the emotion behind this half-clowned performance of one of the loveliest songs either knew; and Vinny, sitting quietly and embarrassedly in the back seat, became apprehensive of an adult emotion in the air that she