A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley

and ate a refreshment room lunch together – which meant nothing in sophisticated eating to Helen but was all the enchantment and magic possible to the child who had never eaten anywhere but at home. She sipped her tea, looking through the lattice of the tea-rooms and watched the pigeons nubbling the grass for crusts. Marvellous, Helen thought, that three thin slices of devon sausage, two triangles of beetroot, and a lettuce leaf could translate anyone into such a condition of pleasure. She, too, sipped her sugarless tea and gazed over the potted plants, the monstera now climbing the side walls, to the older ladies knitting in the sun, in their dumpy browns and angular black, at the women without men and the technical college students cutting downhill towards the river and the Edward Street ferry. Canna lilies burned in the shrubberies, great beds of early zinnias candled the pathways flowing in asphalt streams across the lawns.
    There were only a few people in the tea rooms apart from themselves, and now and then a student on the way from morning classes would drop in for a milk shake or a chocolate bar or a pie. The woman at the next table rose and went to the counter. She was shabby and pregnant, each factor seeming to complement the other. Helen noticed Vinny look quickly at the bulging stomach and the shoulders thrown back above the hips to support the weight. Then Vinny turned away to stare out at the lawn dotted with burdenless bodies – girls, young men, and elderly seedless women. They carried no personality but their own, they bore no other body and no other destiny. Pregnancy frightened Vinny. She still remembered three years ago, just before her dad left, her mother talking about the new baby, swelling gently under her apron and her worn out dresses; bulging horribly in the summer months and becoming crosser, and all the rows and then her father leaving and her mother suddenly taken by the ambulance one night, sweating the pain in rivers, in tides, in oceans, and then no baby, but her mother back home again, thinner than ever under the warped timbers of the house, just at the time when the seed pods were splitting open on the cassias. She never saw a tree in seed now without thinking of that time.
    It was one-fifteen.
    The clock hands nudged them out of the tea rooms down through the swooping gardens under the fig tree basilicas towards the river where it slid olive grey and quiet below the cliffs. The bank on their side gave a steep and tiny plunge to the water and the spatulate mud flats, chocolate shining under the sun. It was too early for the lovers, Helen mused, watching the park seats dotted with old men warming crusted joints or reading their papers. But the day augured benisons for them.
    She found the photographer at the entrance where she had always found him, for years it seemed, since she had visited the park, and she made Vinny stand awkward before his tripod and veiled head to partner the mystic rite. Vinny accepted the ticket with a feeling of mixed reluctance and pleasure – reluctance to see herself as she knew herself to be, ginger and skinny and not even waif-life and appealing, just ginger and skinny and dressed in what she called her best and had thought to be all right until she had seen the other girls in the shops and the trams.
    But she was pleased to fix this day, to have a tangible reminder of herself grinning up Edward Street through the passers-by and the iron gates. She shifted her parcel up to the crook of her elbow and hugged it to her, while she fumbled the ticket into her purse with the few pieces of small change and the scent.
    Moller after tea, replete, unhappy, lay among the cigarette stubs and the dead matches, lay drunken, but not on liquor. Self-pity, retrospective gloom washed, belched over him, flung him into a heap of floatsam in the lumpiest of the armchairs. His relations had gone out half an hour before, crimped like the sand of a low-tide beach, sparkling