The Long Prospect (17 page)

After a long silence Max said, ‘She didn't like her sister.'

They looked at each other, and a shock of profound physical dismay bleached Thea's face. The final admission of love cannot be without shock, and melancholy for the past. She said automatically, ‘Why not?'

‘Irene tried to break up her marriage.' He paused, and they were speechless, seeming almost wearied by precognition of all that must be said, once silence was broken, before they could again simply look, simply know; wondering perhaps if so much as that would again be possible. They stared at each other.

It was thus, after two months, that their first day as lovers began.

Towards the end of two years, when they were making plans to return to Melbourne, Max had a letter from the doctor who had been treating Irene. He knew the past history of their marriage, he said, but believed that his patient repented her behaviour, and was sure that, if she was given the opportunity to prove this, and to take up a normal life with her husband again, her chances of being restored to full mental and physical health would be incalculably greater than they at present were. She had expressed her willingness, even anxiety, to be allowed to join him.

The letter had a bare dry look about it, as if it had been sent out as a circular many times. There was the feeling that, turned over, it might reveal its purpose in a single line: Use Our Matt White Paper, followed by a list of sizes and prices. A machine, not a man, had dictated that bald, bland ultimatum.

Dead-white, Thea said, ‘No one has the right to ask that. It's brutally unfair.'

‘Considering the facts, it's grotesque. I'll refuse, of course; I don't know what he can have been thinking about to suggest it.'

They moved slowly together. They looked at each other a long time in silence, destitute, dry.

For days it kept them strained and silent. Then one night Max said, ‘I can't believe that it's the only way she could be helped. To him, it's no more than an experiment. If it failed he would have to think of something else. It was purely accidental, I suppose, that he thought of this.'

Tonelessly, Thea said, ‘If we parted...even if we parted we would bear it somehow. In some curious way it's that that makes me most despair. I don't want to be tried. I want what we had.'

‘Why do you say “if”, Thea? There's no question of it.' Urgently Max stared into her face. He touched her cheek and she closed her eyes. Presently she said, ‘We both know so well, don't we, my darling? What did he say? A mind. A life. Whose doesn't matter, does it? That we don't care doesn't matter either. The strength of my not caring amounts to a passion. I don't believe in self-sacrifice...And yet...'

In the end Thea left two days before Max was due to go to Melbourne, and it was over. With heavy, numbed incredulity they parted, scarcely aware, at the very last, of the rending of heart and spirit. Helpless as lead figures in the sun they watched the separation of the indivisible and felt nothing.

The doctor's experiment failed, but not conclusively for eighteen months. During that time Max, his wife, and her nurse lived in an atmosphere of hospitalized isolation. Life became a mechanical routine; a circular pantomime through which the characters, ground very small, drifted painlessly.

When a series of relapses took Irene to a mental hospital Max did not write to Thea to tell her, and risk smashing, perhaps to no purpose, whatever calm she had found for herself. In watching the weak, ineffectual struggle for sanity, he had not been unmoved, but he was drained, hardened by the effect on his own life, and Thea's. As he was, he would not approach her.

A further eighteen months of rigid adherence to a programme of work that left time for nothing else ended in his return to Ballowra. He had expected never to be there again, but he accepted the necessity, and later bowed to the irony of Watt's choice of a dwelling-place. It seemed that whether he would or no the dark tunnel of the past three years had ended.

Some of these facts he now related to Emily.

Her over-taxed spirit plunged to exaggerated depths of pride and humility at this proof of his confidence. She could have wept with gratitude. Inside her head, slowly, with the threat of added momentum, a merry-go-round of sensation began to lurch and turn. His words seemed to make the ears that heard them ache with pity. She had never loved him so much. For Max's Thea she
would
feel a kind of exalted admiration and compassion; for her own—there was still a deadness, a breathlessness at the centre, as if she had not yet recovered from shock; the body falling from the cliff, the irretrievable loss, the error, the sin impossible to undo.

When Max had finished speaking they walked on in occupied silence. Once he looked at her in a reverie, seeing her not as herself but as someone who had known Thea. When, caught by his concentration, she glanced round inquiringly, he realized his fatuousness and was disgusted.

He remembered how, earlier in the evening, his concern had been for the danger to which he might unintentionally have exposed Emily, and could have smiled, for it had become apparent since then, in his reaction to Lilian's gossip, what effect his efforts to bring her into touch with life had had on his own life. Emotions moved, however lightly, attitudes rethought, stirred memories, and that almost comfortable resignation that had been his chief support was suddenly seen to be in jeopardy.

Comfortable resignation. He looked at the idea of it. It had not always been that, but the change had been slow and subtle, worked in him secretly. Now the metamorphosis was complete, surprising, disagreeable.

Emily's blue eyes scanned his abstracted face. The silence had been long, long, long. If she spoke now, said something striking to catch his attention back from—back to herself, it would surely not be indelicate?

Her censor left the question unanswered, and when she spoke it was with an artificial force that made her sound everything she wanted not to be—insincere, childish, coy, lacking in understanding.

‘Oh, I
hate
them!' she cried emphatically, leaping under the fence, looking back to see what Max made of this declaration. ‘When they said something awful at the end I said, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” and kicked the door.'

She smiled at him but a twinge of fright made her shiver at the sound of her own voice. What had been spontaneous, became with re-telling shoddy and self-conscious.

Max fought down a sense of alienation and said, ‘None of it's your fault. I know. You did it for me. Don't worry.'

The house was empty and in darkness. Max switched on the light and Emily looked in the oven to see what was for dinner.

‘A casserole,' she announced, and began to set the table.

Feeling that something ought to be said about her fervent declaration of hatred for Lilian, Max contrived during dinner to establish a list of positive and negative virtues which Lilian could be said to possess. Emily listened to him obediently and seemed literally to take over his views: in any case, with each nod of her head his own conviction of Lilian's worth diminished.

Pointing out one of the many instances of Lilian's quite genuine generosity—a handsome gift of money to Dotty's mother when she was recently ill—as final and conclusive evidence for the defence, he wound up. It had been a tasteless, even farcical conversation, but he felt constrained to convince the girl that there was reason to respect the woman with whom she might yet have to spend years of her life.

Emily turned with some relief from the burned saucepan whose interior she had been studying and said with serious, almost technical interest, ‘But is that so important? Money?'

‘Very, when you haven't got it. Mrs Brown could tell you just how important, I don't doubt,' Max said, feeling atrocious. ‘But right now all
I'm
trying to tell you is not to go round saying or thinking that you hate people. You don't at all, and it's not a particularly good habit of mind to get into.'

Emily was meek. Perceiving that Max was not angry with her, simply trying to improve her, she was happy. They went to the sitting-room and sat listening to music.

Doubting if his lecture had had any effect, doubting its veracity, Max wandered off into a maze of speculation. What place should any action, unaccompanied by a degree of feeling, have in an absolute scale of values? he wondered, thinking of the charity of an organization, of necessity acceptable, of necessity impersonal and nourishing as a rock. And then Lilian's generosity had to be seen beside her ‘easy come, easy go' attitude to money, beside her total incapacity to understand, and complete indifference to, the mental suffering she induced in others.

For Dotty's mother, Mrs Brown, he realized that such questions would have no meaning. Her urgent appeal for a loan had been met by a gift and that was that. No other solution would have been so immediately beneficial, no amount of feeling have been adequate substitute, or seemed in the moment of need so admirable.

The difference between their points of view might be merely, he thought, that she had been the object of Lilian's generosity, and he, tonight, of its opposite.

How unsurprising, how very much to be expected it was, he thought, that he should adopt the standpoint of the ideal and use it as a platform from which to illustrate, albeit to himself, Lilian's shortcomings, and that Mrs Brown, the beneficiary, should praise and admire. Or did she entirely? The antipathy felt by receivers for givers was as old as history.

But he knew the whole premise was false. It was no subjective reaction to a single event in which he himself was directly implicated that had shaped his opinion of Lilian, or his definition of good.

Feeling and motive, he believed, could not be over-estimated. Tonight, though, for valid feeling and motive, he had had, by implication, to depreciate both to Emily.

Yet, he was aware that she had taken his lecture lightly enough. He could not pretend he had done any damage by, for once, saying less and more than he thought true. His concern seemed disproportionate. He knew it was. He knew that he was pedantically occupying, and would continue to occupy, himself with every implication of the evening's scene—moral, metaphysical, sociological, psychological—that he would consider the effect on Emily, on Lilians relations with her, on his own with Lilian; that, in short, he would do anything to postpone that inevitable flooding of his consciousness by the futile, insistent desire that the catastrophic emptiness of the past years should not be allowed to continue into the future.

From the bedrock of resignation—and there seemed no other vantage point from which to view the universe—it was possible, he believed, to live a life of dignity; even, for individuals to establish a sphere of order, and to extract great happiness from it, open-eyed, in the face of all. But not alone. Solitary resignation, circles and chimes of utter loneliness: to be alone...

The thing was—and it came on him savagely—where was
she
? What was
she
thinking? What changes had taken place in
her
life?

It was inconceivable that he did not know.

‘What do you want to play next, Max?'

The music had stopped. Emily, her head on the dark table beside the gramophone, looked up. Another record was substituted and the music began again.

What a horrible, and kind of wonderful day it had been, she thought. And how strange it was, what she had learned. Oh, Max, you're awfully quiet, she silently said, gazing at the table between her arms. Don't be different! Don't think about what I said! Don't think about her! Don't love her more than me! Don't wish I wasn't here!

The music swelled, washed through the big dull room, over its pale walls and dark furniture out through the open windows into the black oblongs of night.

That day of upsets was followed by calm. The episode was not mentioned by Lilian to Emily or Max, nor did they discuss it with one another.

And while Emily's days were occupied by Max, mathematics, syntax, Shakespeare, French and picnics at the beach, Lilian passed her time with a small amount of housework, many cups of tea with Dotty, much gossip, sufficient alcohol, and more than enough Rosen. She tried in a thousand ways to use that surplus energy which was at the same time her greatest attraction and her greatest defect.

She had not abandoned her plan to get Thea to the house, but it lay in abeyance: she was dimly conscious that it was there to be brought out on a boring day to provide entertainment. She thought of it as someone else might have thought of a sketching block in a cupboard.

At night she and Rosen were never apart. Whether they stayed home and read or played cards, or went driving through flat familiar streets in search of novel sights and a change of temperature, whether they joined up with Billie and the rest of their friends for a party, Rosen was always beside her. He was her tame bear and she treated him with condescension.

With everyone else Rosen was pompous and haughty. He hated Max, whom he could not reasonably regard as a rival or usurper, but whose presence in the house he believed acted as a hindrance to his aims.

His presence acted, in fact, in precisely the way that Lilian had hoped. It gave an air of respectability to the arrangement of her household; it annoyed Rosen; it relieved her of all thought of Emily and bore possibilities of future amusement. No, it was really
more
than she had hoped.

Her relations with Rosen were at this time equivocal. Would he or would he not ask his wife for a divorce? His wife wanted him back, but Lilian knew what
he
wanted. Wouldn't she say the word? He didn't want to go to all the trouble and expense if she'd made up her mind against it.

Lilian taunted him happily, saying that she could understand that he wanted to tie himself to her. She was a moderately wealthy woman; she would be quite a catch for him, wouldn't she? If he could catch her. But he was no particular asset. What did he think he had that made it worth her while to be stuck with him for life? Say one thing. One thing.