A Descant for Gossips Read Free Page B

you.’
    â€˜Go on with you!’ Moller said. ‘You’ve been saying that for years, Rowie. I bet you’ll be teaching their grandsons. Have a cup of this appalling tea. I don’t think the dregs were emptied last term!’
    Miss Rowan shifted her glasses higher and flopped into a chair.
    â€˜Dear, it’s awful,’ she said. ‘Why do we do it? Why on earth do we do it?’
    â€˜Because we love little children. We see their essential innocence, their kindness to each other, their respect for old age. It’s all so rewarding.’ Moller sipped tea and sucked at his cigarette alternately. Sweeney shoved a paper of sandwiches across the table and Moller took one absent-mindedly. Chalk dust still in corners, rolls stacked on corner press, programme registers along tables, tea-cup rings – all the impedimenta of teaching. The eight members of the staff squatted uncomfortably with them, acting no longer with each other, now that familiarity’s offspring banished politeness and allowed the idiosyncrasies- shortness of temper, oddly enough, and the uncalculating kindnesses – full play. This laying bare of the personality made in a general way for more harmonious living together. There was no necessity for pretence. Although the end of each school year found nerves frayed from irritations that were part of the job, the staff returned each February, prepared to live out again a union more intimate in some respects than marriage.
    For the past three years there had been no transfer of staff, and daily interchange of ideas and school gossip had given these eight people a relationship intangibly binding one upon the other. That this was a dangerous thing did not make itself immediately apparent; yet month after month of limited companionship, limited conversational gambits, threw the staff in upon themselves in a desperate circle of self-concentration. The school and its problems became over-important; the behaviour of one member of staff to another, the fortune or otherwise of any of them, was balloon-swollen and treated as if it were the concern of all. Partisanship reared up in sudden ugly growth about trivia, and though it withered away in the calmer moods of the men and women, memory had still many limbs to spread tendrils of discomfort and dislike.
    I will remember this room, Moller thought, though the years deny all cognizance of time and place and mood. I will remember it by the positioning of chairs, the ink stain on the corridor wall, the windows looking out on the school field and the courts and the mountain sky threatening behind the township. Glancing round, he reflected with amusement that the seating habits of the staff had remained unchanged since he had been there – and that was three years. Helen, calm, straightbacked near the end window; Sweeney sprawled huge and boorish over typewriter at the centre table, and Rose Jarman beside him with Miss Rowan, slicing the townspeople into tiny pieces and serving them up with their sandwiches and cake; Millington, blond and good humoured, near the door beside Corcoran, late-comer to lunch, over-bellied, tonsured at forty, bullying the seventh grade into examination passes at the end of each year. Only one person was missing – Mrs. Ballard, efficient as an egg-whisk in the home science section, all gleaming like a hard baked stove, ate, often as not, in her separate teaching wing the left-over fricassee and pastry prepared at her classes. Eight of them, nine with Findlay, all marooned on this educational islet, aching from each other and from the town, ingrown like nails, throbbing with self and other self.
    Below the end windows a surging and unexpected clamour of singing broke on them.
    â€˜ Ooooooooh – the tunnel of LOVE, the tunnel of LOVE!’ It was chorused with the heartiness of bush-hikers and a salacity of emphasis remarkable considering the age of the performers.
    â€˜Vulgar little bastards,’