A Descant for Gossips by Thea Astley Page A

with knick-knacks and crackling with currency. The over-vacuumed carpeting and the primped, the shaken-out curtains gulped him up.
    He thought of Lilian and then thrust the thought back behind his desire for Helen and the loneliness and emptiness of the house. In fifteen minutes he would ring Margaret Reisbeck’s. Tea should be over, Helen free for the evening from that damnable little girl. God, he loathed her at this moment! Irrationally he blamed her for the desolation of the seven o’clock news, the seven o’clock house, the Helenless quality of the day. Not that other week-ends had been different from this one, but having made his decisions, having fought past the oranges and the books and the flowers to a little pleasure for himself, he resented not being able to grasp it. He thought of the Lunbecks, the male, the rake – but sly – and the wife suffering gladly for income and prestige and the mixing with the wives of the other professional men in the town. Sourly Moller arranged them in descending order of social importance – the doctor (Jaysus, he breathed), the bank manager, the dentist, the mill owner. Piddling small time.
    He lit himself another cigarette and puffed viciously at the family-group photo upon the sideboard, saw Ted and Vera and Lance with dog vanish in a kindly screen of smoke. Findlay must come somewhere near the mill owner, a little above the Anglican parson but well below the bank manager. Tricky, that. He drew a pencil from his vest pocket and scribbled on Vera’s telephone memo pad a whole feudal socio-economic system for Gungee. He used little squares for the men and triangles for the women; then, amused, drew lines and arrows and equation symbols for misalliance, sharp business deals, nepotism, and so on. He threw back his head and roared. Where was Rome? He added an insignificant black square well below the town clerk, who was himself below the parson and the itinerant solicitor and equated it with the representative of the law. He could see the upper layer with their bridge-party faces, drinking hard in the privacy of their homes, and condemning the farm and factory hands who spewed their dislike of the day in public outside one or other of the hotels. He saw Lunbeck pawing the hostesses at the intimate little gatherings in one dull living-room after another, getting them to one side of the kitchen at coffee time, holding a breast in one hand and a canap é in the other, hiding under the clatter of the women’s tongues snapping up and down over clothes and money and cars and clothes and money and was she expecting or wasn’t she and my dear her clothes and she is and so on. And the men, big and important in their tiny spheres, carping over their employees: ‘Sacked him, by God! His eyes were too bloody close together.’ ‘Stepped up the production a bit. Snipped a couple of minutes off their morning tea break, and they never noticed.’
    He saw the town and the rival streams on a Sunday flowing implacably towards their version of Christ revealed one day in seven, leaving six for primitive tribal taboos and ostracisms, for scandalising and detraction, for the too rare act of charitable restraint. Farrelly stood resigned with his canary-faced wife twittering her aves and paternosters alongside Constable Rossiter. Town Clerk Meerson, abstracted from reality by one of the more fearsome nonconformist gospels, kept his pale, vice-hating face a map of righteousness and dyspeptic texts. The chemist was an atheist – he thought he was daring. (‘But are you a practising one?’ Moller used to ask.) But doctor Rankin and missus doctor Rankin and bank manager Cantwell and missus bank manager Cantwell joined with the Lunbecks and the Findlays and the Talbots in cautious established worship. And the whole town, the simple farming families and the factory workers, all followed close behind, passing through Anglicanism, two sorts of Methodism,