The Long Prospect (20 page)

Driven desperate by this and the persistent buzzing of imprisoned flies, Lilian had demanded suddenly to be taken to the Horizon Hotel where there were high ceilings, a view of the ocean, and air-conditioning. ‘Air-conditioning!' Though hers was not a voice accustomed to yearning and pathos, she now included so much of both in her plea that Rosen jumped to it.

Not a man, or a dog, or a bicycle intruded on the grey cement paths, the roads of sticky tar, and clay. Under the sun's curfew, all Ballowra remained indoors.

Preceded by a pant of transparent blue smoke, the car crawled on to the road: the noise it made, its bulk, was an affront to the boring vacancy of the scene.

As Lilian climbed in, Emily came through the gate and said listlessly, ‘Hullo. Here's a letter for you. I just found it.'

She retired into the shade of the garage and watched while Lilian tore open the envelope. ‘From Sydney,' she added, and she sighed as she leaned against the blistering dark red paint of the door. She wore a white seersucker dress without sleeves, and white sandals. Her feet were powdered with the dust of her short walk down the path. ‘Where are you going?' she asked Mr Rosen uncuriously.

‘Town,' he said, wiping his face while Lilian read, and they both waited, for nothing in particular, completely passive, until Lilian cried, ‘I said so!' and looked sharply from one to the other as if to exact acclamation.

Emily gazed back with a mild lack of interest but at that moment, suddenly, her head was turned by a distant sound. Her arms rose like wings, she cast the swiftest smile over her shoulder at the car as if to say, ‘Rejoice!' before she cut noiselessly away, running to meet Max who had appeared at the top of the hill.

‘What is it? What's the matter? Where's she off to?' Lilian asked, assuming a testy air of mystification.

‘Him,' he said, without turning his head to look. ‘I wish I had her energy.' And as if to illustrate his weakness he let the car coast downhill.

Lilian held before her eyes for a moment that expression of Emily's. She tapped the letter in her lap with moist fingers. Gusts of dusty air beat against her flushed face and added to the chaos begun by the melting of her make-up. ‘Energy?' she repeated vaguely.

With a groan she peeled herself from the leather of the seat and resettling at a different, though hardly more comfortable angle, said, ‘Anyway, this is from Thea.'

‘What does it say?'

‘She's supposed to be coming here for a conference soon and if she does, she's coming to see me. She will. I know she will!'

And momentarily forgetful of their discomfort, Lilian and Rosen beamed through the shimmering air at the blue-black surface of the road and the burning silver of the bare tramlines.

In the pale shade of the plum trees Max and Emily stretched on the grass and drank lemon and iced water from glasses on whose surfaces moisture had condensed in a cold mist. The air weighed oppressively on them.

Emily swept her long brown hair away from her neck and glanced at Max. He was studying the dissolving cubes in his glass. Scarcely able to contain her enchantment she looked at her ice, too; then, so that she might not exclaim aloud, she put a hand behind her back and smoothed the surface of the tree-trunk against which she leaned. It was real. Her isolation here alone with Max was real.

Oh, but I'm only twelve, she thought, with a fall of exaltation, and I'll be young for years. All at once she was imprisoned by her youth.

With a flutter of panic she looked at the garden to reassure herself that it was no mirage. We're here
now,
she thought, and she leaned slightly forward, taking her weight from the tree, almost imagining that pressure anywhere was pressure on time, pressure on the sun, hastening its descent.

‘What time is it?' Max asked, and she looked at her watch, ‘Quarter past three.'

‘As late as that? Fine time to get home on Saturday. I ought to resign.' He finished his drink and put the glass down on the turf where it became, for an hour or so, the wonder of the ant world. ‘It was a meeting. I was reporting progress.'

Reporting progress to Macmillan, being told that they wanted him back in Melbourne as soon as possible, before the year was up—this instead of the extension he had half expected.

Emily had forced an unspoken agreement never to mention his going. Now he wondered how he might best approach the subject. The silence between them, while not in itself unusual, seemed to demand that he speak and speak to the point; instead he said, ‘You didn't want to go to the beach?'

Emily shook her head. ‘Too hot.'

‘So it is. Happy here, then?' he asked, looking at her quizzically, searching, almost appealing, for some sign of boredom, of that childish desire to be for ever moving, running, going somewhere.

‘Yes,' and she smiled at his ignorance of her.

She had to restrain no other, youthful impulses in order to fulfil a more insistent one to be with him. There was no choosing, no indecision, however slight: there was no subjugation. With him her need was filled: she was content.

Presently Max said, ‘You haven't told me how you're getting on with Darwin.'

She was amazed to hear it. She sat up and proceeded earnestly to tell him what she thought about the origin of
homo sapiens.
Now she was in Asia, now in Africa, now she was a monkey. And why weren't monkeys daily turning into men? Where—no—
what
was the missing link? No, not what—
how?

Max groaned, summarized a few theories which left her dissatisfied with, and critical of, the world's scientists. He concluded, ‘And if you ask me
why
—
today...
'

She laughed. She had meant to.

Smiling, he said, ‘Tell me what you think.'

‘But I don't know.' She was suddenly very young, uncertain of everything—including him.

That crushing uncertainty had been, when he first came, the most noticeable thing about her. She had had a quite extraordinary lack of confidence. That had not surprised Max for long. Even now, occasionally, he saw her crucified by Lilian's sarcasm, when, provoked to stammering rage by some piece of hypocrisy and ruthlessness, she sallied out, wordless, flashing-eyed, her whole nature pressed rigid against what she could sense of Lilian's underlying motive. It was a motive recognizable to Max, for Lilian was not subtle and hid nothing of herself. It could often be placed no higher than sadism. In microcosm Lilian was the world. She was the majority, and had its qualities for good and evil. Living with her was practice in bloodless warfare...

What in Emily
had
surprised him, was the discovery that under the ingratiating smile and the puzzlement, was a basic, unshakable belief in the rightness of a life that did not sin against intelligence and kindness, and she saw these qualities he knew, as high, august, and including all virtue. She desired for herself and for others that they should live to principle when it hurt.

Max shifted his position restlessly. He lit a cigarette, smoked it without enjoyment, and tried to concentrate his thoughts on the meeting with Macmillan.

At that moment he would not think of her reaction to his going, of its effect on her, or of his own regret.

It was as well for his peace of mind that he could not know of the way in which her time was spent when he was out of sight—of the entranced inspection of his room, the mathematical straightening of bedcover, curtains, shoes; of the strict order of precedence with which the table was set, the dishes dried, with his identified and treated, as were all of his possessions, with a reverence usually reserved for the bones of saints.

And he was not sufficiently vain to imagine the enormous power her memory attained through the strength of her desire to lose nothing of him; the conviction with which his standards were adopted; the impetus he lent to that yearning to be good, just, and true.

But if the situation between them was one that could have deteriorated into something ugly, no one was more aware of it than he—though from the first he had felt it would not do so. Emily responded to his attention with a nervous sensibility that was, in its lack of childishness, as well as a signal of her character, a pointer to the extremity of her deprivation and, to Max, a cause of anger.

They had fallen silent. Now they were returned to themselves by an increase in the intensity of the heat. It seemed too hot to breathe. The air withheld itself, suspended motion, was suddenly felt to have withdrawn into the upper regions so irrevocably that the two under the lattice of gnarled branches and leaves were roused to turn their heads and finally look up to see where it could be.

There appeared at that moment in the glaring deserts of the sky a single cloud—a small untidy mass inconceivably composed of moisture and coolness, inconceivably designed to shade and dampen. Watching it, they were forced to sigh.

Emily moved her upturned hand to and fro, played with the luminous patterns printed by the sun, curled her fingers in an idle attempt to capture a piece of living light, then, tiring of a game that had unconsciously imposed itself as an aid to concentration on she knew not what, dropped her hand to the grass. There it plucked and plucked at the short dry blades until, her eye coming to Max's hand which lay as if sleeping, it was directed to touch it, identifying, claiming it with drowsy satisfaction.

‘At least,' he said, turning on one side and leaning on his elbow, ‘at least we must try to see that you get to university. You're nearly thirteen. That means, four, five years here before you could go...But if you had that as an objective—I'm sure you could get a scholarship. What do you think? It would be worth some hard work, Em. You'd never regret it.'

The intent, unseeing gaze with which his grey eyes had imprisoned Emily's blue ones changed, swept the suspicious face in front of his with entirely conscious attention. He smiled.

‘Don't you think you might like it? Remember how interested you've been in all the things we've talked about. And they are only the beginnings of what you would learn...'

Her heart seemed to open with pain. She could not believe he had so misunderstood. Made vocal by shock she cried, ‘Oh, Max! It wasn't
what,
not the
things...
I mean—Max—I liked the things, but it was the
way, you...
'

He frowned at her. ‘Of course it matters that we like to talk together, but you're not being honest to suggest that—to you—the subject is unimportant. And in fact I know that isn't true. You couldn't argue me down if you didn't care. You, the defender of the Spartans!'

‘It's just that the historians aren't fair to them, Max. It makes you have to defend them. They go from one extreme to the other on Athens and Sparta. You know they do.'

‘So do you,' he said, smiling at her, ‘on all kinds of things.'

‘But they,' she explained patiently, ‘are prejudiced.'

‘And you're not?'

‘No.'

‘All right, then. As I was saying: if it's possible to get you to university, we must try. Don't expect it to be the answer to everything. It can do the wrong people positive harm by misleading them about themselves. They count up the facts they know, and if they amount to a great many, they decide that they are rather wise.'

Emily could not help a smile of fellow-feeling.

‘Often then,' Max said pointedly, ‘they proceed to say and do a number of dangerous things that they'd have lacked confidence to do but for the mystic wisdom they feel they have had conferred on them.'

‘How?' She stubbornly followed him.

‘By three or four years spent in the same square mile as a lot of books and a few old men, who are perhaps quite wise, but do not think so.'

Trying to make this out, Emily looked at him, solemn. ‘I better not go,' she said, at last.

‘You only listen when you want to.'

‘No. All the time, Max.'

He believed her and he sighed. Then he grinned and ruffled her hair. ‘For you, I don't say there's that much danger! I think you might just avoid it. You would learn. You would have a chance to meet other young people who— Now what?'

He saw that she suspected him of trying to pass her on to a chilly crowd of strangers. Sitting up, he clasped his arms loosely over his legs. ‘I'll start again. We'll forget about the people.'

‘I only want you,' she said in a low voice.

‘The point is,' he went on, ‘that you have it in you to be a good scholar, and I can see you don't believe me now, but you'd
like
it.'

She looked at him doubtfully. ‘Did you?'

‘You know all about that.'

They both smiled and Emily said cautiously, ‘It might be nice.'

‘It would be.'

Emily looked at him steadily, listening, not caring. Inside herself at this, as at every demonstration of his concern, her heart beat with a heavy melancholy joy; she wept, moaned soundlessly, could have died peacefully in the sheltered happiness of the moment. Wrapped in a cocoon of warmth, the reason for his solicitude mattered not. He cared. Someone cared. Max cared.

Sensing her distance, Max said, ‘This is important, Em. If I speak about it to your mother, will you back me up?'

He had hesitated to put his idea to Paula, foreseen objections from her husband and Lilian. He was aware that his suggestion would amaze them. They had no time for education. It was not one of the things that they, or anyone they knew, had ever gone in for. It was eccentric to dwell on it. They would not allow that it was for those in a world above theirs, but it was for those with a great deal of money. It was something that happened to city socialites. University was a place where they went to meet husbands and wives. Quite what a degree was, no one Lilian knew in Ballowra knew.

Max remembered the few references to Emily's future: ‘She's got long fingers, she'll probably be a famous pianist' (this from Paula in a cheerful mood, in the face of the fact that there was no piano and had never been lessons); and Lilian's equally airy, ‘She's tall, she might be a famous mannequin.' Almost impatiently he said, ‘You will, won't you?'