A Descant for Gossips Read Free Page A

room, but most of them sat giggling with their neighbours. They watched him go, solid under his cheap tweed jacket, fingers already fumbling for the makings of a quick puff between classes, groping in the pocket where the tobacco crumbs fell from the loose pouch.
    Vinny looked after him with something near to love as she handed in her essay to Howard, recalling what he had said about pain and sensitive people and writing about it. How did it go? ‘Only people able to something their suffering could write about it sensitively.’ One day she’d show them, Warburton and fat old Klee and the rest. Fame and fame and fame …
    â€˜Open it up, Lalor,’ Howard snapped. At sixteen he already hated plain girls.
    â€˜I don’t know how the population increases,’ Helen Striebel said gloomily as she watched the barbaric young killing time mercilessly, slaughtering the lunch-hour. ‘That is, I understand the fundamental principle, but I cannot understand its repetition.’ She turned away from the window, teacup in hand, to her lunch spread out between the exercise stacks on her desk.
    The men roared with laughter.
    â€˜What’s this? What’s this?’ Moller said, coming in rubbing his hands. ‘Sex rearing its lovely head?’
    He went to the battered teapot near the wash-basin and filled a cup.
    â€˜Weak brew. Who’s guilty? Helen, what was that remark I surprised you in?’
    She laughed with the others. ‘These children. I explain a perfectly simple trigonometrical problem, I set a similar one, and not a soul gets it right. Peters said he thought it was a quadratic equation. Still, I was pleased he even knew the term. His idiocy is rather endearing.’
    â€˜No shop first day back,’ Sweeney roared heartily. His coarse good-looking face stuck out arrogantly above a footballer’s frame. He tapped another memo for Findlay, using his typewriter in somewhat the way emotional pianists use their instruments, crouching low and leaning back and making rather unnecessary arm movements. ‘How’s your wife, captain?’ he asked Moller, when he had come to the end of the memo. Moller, watching him, felt like bursting into loud applause. (‘Brilliant, my dear fellow! Positively brilliant!’) Hesitation patterned his plum face and he lit a cigarette before he answered. He could sense the others waiting for his reply also.
    â€˜Much the same. Worse if anything, I suppose. Her right hip is affected now.’
    â€˜Sorry, old boy.’ Sweeney gulped back lukewarm tea and felt safe; safe in his job, safe in his health, and safe in the campaign he was conducting towards achieving a profitable marriage. He eyed Rose Jarman sideways where she sat, not quite plain, and not quite good-looking in her expensive one of many linen suits. Her father owned a large dairy farm in the Mary Valley, a seaside cottage at Inskip Point, and a big, fast black car. Sweeney coveted all these things, and his covetousness was understandable, for Rose was an only child whom her father loved in a completely foolish way, lavishing on her practically anything she wanted. At times Sweeney felt too young for marriage at twenty-four, but, realizing an opportunity such as this might not come his way again, he was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of the male. Although he was not interested in easy seduction, it was on no moral ground. Rose was not sufficiently attractive for him to labour through the preliminary details of an affaire, and he was, if nothing else, a man who demanded value in kind for his money.
    Mrs. Striebel marked another book, unnecessarily conscientious on this first day back. Elderly Miss Rowan, disappointed in love, in life in the broader sense, and in occupation, grizzled into the room from the infants’ department.
    â€˜Sixty-three! Would you believe it! Sixty-three in that tiny room. I’m resigning at the end of the year, I tell