The Long Prospect (23 page)

‘I'd like a big pot of paint,' Emily said moodily to her friend.

They stood inside the fence eyeing the three provision shops on the opposite corner.

‘What for?' Patty asked, idly chewing a leaf.

‘I'd slosh it all over that,' she said, pointing to the blue and silver advertisement that covered the outside wall of Sim's shop. ‘And that, and that.' Pointing a finger, she ruthlessly obliterated red-painted declarations of ownership, yellow and green caricatures designed to encourage the consumption of porridge.

‘What for?'

They were untidy: they caught the eye. Huge printed letters under a sky of blue crystal, smoke-streaked; printed letters with real air blowing on them. She could not convey how peculiar it seemed. ‘Oh, I don't know. I just would.'

Out of the corner of her eye she saw that her father had moved, was going back into the house. Why?

‘Well, what colour would you use?' Patty persisted, abstractedly picking bits of leaf from her tongue.

Emily gave an exclamation of mingled irritation and misgiving. Her hands met nervously behind her neck, twisted her stream of hair into a rope and let it go again.

‘Huh? What colour, Em?'

‘Oh! I think I hear the car. I'll have to get tidied. See you later.'

She was off up the steps before Patty had time to listen, look, and contradict.

Simultaneously entering the house at either end of the long passage, Emily and her father stood for a moment transfixed, eye to eye, till with the bound of a startled rabbit she made for the bedroom and, holding her breath, closed and locked the door.

She tore off her school uniform and fought her way into a dress, occupied by an artificially stimulated fear that he might come banging at the door, demanding entry and audience; complacent in the knowledge that he would not.

Just the same it was immensely embarrassing to have a stranger as an intimate relation. She did not feel, and would not act, like a daughter, and Harry's half-hearted attempts to play the father shocked and mortified her. He was so obviously an amateur. And anyway, it was gruesome, she felt, to see grown-ups pretend anything.

If it did nothing else, concentration on this old grievance dispelled the vague feeling of dread that had come on her again in the garden. She now tied the belt of her dress, fixed the buttons, and brushed her hair with complete forgetfulness of the intangible strain, the mysterious unease that she had earlier in the day apprehended. Brushing mechanically, she even forgot the awkwardness of having her parents come together under one roof, of their making claims on her.

With a smile she pressed her cheek to the cold silver mirror. ‘Hullo, Max,' she whispered. ‘I love you, Max.' The blue eyes were unwavering. The room was dim, blinds and curtains drawn against the sun. Her smile faded as she regarded herself.

And I feel so old, she thought heavily. I'm not young. I'm not young.

At dinner she sat between Paula and Harry; Lilian and Rosen sat opposite. They were in the dining-room—an ominous fact in itself—surrounded by pieces of tall furniture which stood round the high dark walls. There was a sense of being overshadowed, hung over, watched. All that was horizontal in the room, apart from floor and ceiling, was the sofa where Emily sometimes slept, and the table at which they sat—two who knew, and three who were mystified. Lilian would wait till they had eaten to speak.

‘When are you going to move to Sydney, Harry?' she now asked, jolting them all to life, more than hinting at what she expected to be the outcome of their meeting.

Harry said soon, and suddenly meant it, and Paula, quickly taking a spoonful of hot apple dumpling, scalded her mouth.

She wondered if her mother was going to marry Rosen, but the next instant she dismissed the idea. What would have been the purpose of summoning Harry to hear that news? Not simply to arrange for Emily's removal, surely? Perhaps. Her mother might, on occasion, do anything.

Paula prepared to accept the latest arrangements that fate (she had never been able to separate her mother from fate) had fixed for her.

Harry was, with added maturity, a changed man. She herself was not what she had been. They found it surprisingly easy to talk together. There was no other word for it—before dinner tonight they had actually flirted. She had difficulty in remembering why they had parted, and stayed apart so long.

And both thinking that Lilian's intention was simply to force them together for their own good, she and her husband mentally assumed that her arguments would be, indeed, had been, won. Occasional glances exchanged behind the head of an immobile Emily helped to bring about the conviction that the assumption was mutual.

‘You won't ever be as good-looking as these two blondes,' Rosen said suddenly to Emily, beaming, pleased to have complimented both women at once.

And Harry, feeling an unfamiliar rise of pride in his possession, looked across at Paula—she
was
nice-looking—who had turned a curiously gratified smile on her daughter.

But Lilian would have nothing to do with smiles and compliments. Though Paula and Harry strained to convince her by every means except actual
words,
that they were in happy accord with her intention to reunite them, she was grim, her manner portentous. She seemed not to notice; she would not respond. They thought—even Paula thought—that she was dense.

The heavy central light shone on the white table-cloth. Emily moved her head slightly from time to time to catch a new glimpse of the woven pattern. Shiny bits, dull bits. It was infinitely boring, frighteningly boring...Oh yes, she was frightened.

The conversation—the talk about Sydney, about the future—she disregarded in a way that ought to have been impossible. It concerned her deeply. But she knew. She knew that this was not it. She had heard Lilian say, ‘Later,' meaning later, when
she
was not there. And without that she would still have known with clear cold certainty, and her knowledge would still have made her heart beat with foreboding as it did now, slowly.

At the end of the meal, abruptly Lilian said to her, ‘Go out and talk to your friends for half an hour while we do the dishes and then come in and stay in your room with a book.'

No one ever told her what to do. Everyone looked at her. She extricated herself from the tight wedge of chairs, from their solemn-eyed presence. She had no will. She went like an automaton.

Patty was at the gate. ‘Hullo. That's your best dress.'

‘Yes. I have to go in in half an hour because they're here.'

What did they bring you?'

‘She brought sandals. He gave me a box of chocolates.'

‘You get a lot of things.'

Emily breathed.

They walked up and down the short stretch of footpath between their respective homes. They walked hand-in-hand, looking now at their shoes, now earnestly into each other's eyes, as they talked.

The sun jerked below the horizon and it was night. Streetlights came on, and the lights at the windows of the bungalows. Curtains and blinds remained undrawn on the summer night. A scattering of stars appeared.

Patty said, ‘I know why people get married. You don't, do you?'

Emily had not known she did not know. ‘Why?'

They scuffed along, voices low and constricted. Patty told.

Complete silence, then, ‘What?' Emily screeched. ‘Oh, I don't believe it!'

‘Well, it's true! Someone told me who knows. But I don't
get
it, do you?'

They had stopped walking, now they moved on again in silence.

That men and women went to bed together was old history. Some notion of the purpose had been conveyed to Emily at seven, when she had shared a bedroom with Audrey, a girl who worked for Lilian before Dotty came. Audrey's boyfriend got into bed with her the nights that Lilian went out. They used to wake Emily up. At first she had been obscurely terrified, but after a while she took no notice. It was simply something else that grown-ups did. Events had never conspired to convince her that there was any connexion between this habit and marriage, still less, love. Even the baby business, as she thought of it, was a mechanical matter of cause and effect. Weird. Loveless. And now this.

At length she said gloomily, ‘Good heavens!' Then again, overcome by the preposterousness of Patty's claim she said, ‘Well, I knew about
that,
but I didn't think that was why...Oh, there must be more to it than that—liking one another and being friends and being interested in things and talking...Don't you think so?'

‘That doesn't matter at all,' Patty said firmly. ‘It's just the other.' Borrowing the tone of her informant, she was convincing.

‘You would have thought—' Emily began, and shook her head. She had meant to say, ‘You would have thought they would have loved each other,' but in view of the truth it sounded too naïve. ‘Heavens, Pat!'

‘That's what
I
said. I wouldn't believe her for ages. I don't care though, do you?'

‘No.'

Shaken, they spent the following fifteen minutes cheering one another with avowals of indifference. But each felt the world to be colder, flatter, less explicable, for the loss of passionate, but chaste, romantic love.

It was time to go.

‘Incredible!' called Emily from the veranda, and Patty lifted a hand at the gate, ‘But true!'

How wise, how disillusioned, how philosophical they felt! And somehow, how marvellous they were! So that was life!

In the split-second of turning in at the front door, reality, the present moment, forced itself back on Emily. What did she care about all that? This was tonight, this funny night. She had eaten less than half an hour ago and been afraid. There was only this moment, this suspicion. She listened to the sounds of the house. The washing-up was finishing in the kitchen; the men were in the sitting-room.

The thin belated squeak of the gate and sudden footsteps jerked her round in time to see Billie and Fred advancing up the path. Billie looked up at her with the kind of serious glitter suitable for royal occasions, seemed to stare at her as if it meant something.

Doubtful, Emily looked down at the skirt of her dress. It was her best one, and worth a look, she supposed.

She smiled at them and Fred mumbled hullo, then as Billie swept past her into the hall, her mother and Lilian left the kitchen—Paula to join the men, Lilian to come forward to meet her friends.

Mutely, she greeted them, her eyes making signals so obvious as to be almost audible. Billie clasped her hands and watched while she gave Emily a little push on the shoulder.

‘I was just coming to call you. Into the bedroom this instant, and stay there, do you hear me?'

Furious, Emily stalked away from them. ‘Yes, and you don't have to push me! I was going anyway!'

It had only been a token push, but still! What for? And in front of Billie who didn't like her!

Unhappily Fred fingered his jaw-bone and looked at the wallpaper.

She heard Lilian say, ‘They're all waiting.'

I want a glass of milk.

She rehearsed the unmeaning words of justification several times before going to the door. There was no sound.

I want a glass of milk.

Very lightly, very slowly, she crept out into the open space of the hall. Had they all gone?

But then, at once, she knew the house was occupied. The silence on which she had opened the door was a prolonged pause—nothing more—in a turbulent conversation. It began again with a kind of restrained vehemence, ran swiftly, skirting hysteria. The voices combined in a sound that made Emily shiver with fear.

This was what she had heard an hour ago, more faintly though, for then she had not moved from her room. Now she went close to the place that had quite suddenly become the source of panic. Her back pressed against the wall, she stood staring at the door, impaled by a sense of impending calamity, incapable of distinguishing words or voices, simply apprehending in tones and echoes, a fear and intention that left her cold to the heart.

All at once Lilian's voice rose above the others.

‘Why should
I
have the responsibility? You'll just have to make a home for her. And you've to see him in the morning, Harry, and tell him to get out by lunch-time. These people—these people will tell you what's been going on...'

A chorus of mixed voices interrupted her here, but in a moment she went on, ‘...not her fault, but I can't be always watching...always round her...got a bad reputation...Thea and him years ago...get the police on to him...Anyway,
I'm
not, I'm too...Well, they'll tell you, and it's time you...'

‘...get a doctor...' came Rosen's voice.

‘Shut your mouth, you...'

Someone gave a cry and again the voices rose, clashing with alarm and hysteria; the voices split, and Rosen and Billie could be heard shouting each other down. Her mother and father in lower, less steady tones explained and apologized into the unlistening air. Over all came Lilian's voice, strident, dogmatic, hot with accusation.

Confirmation had touched off the climax of horror and grief, an explosion of horror and disbelief. Now Emily's lungs were full of lead. She went back to the bedroom pursued by a raucous cry. The next instant, a profound silence, the suspension of which she did not hear, settled over the house.

She sat on the sofa and played the hem of her dress through her fingers, not thinking, looking pensive, taking a spasmodic shallow breath. She sighed.

And then the inadequacy of any outward gesture to relieve or express what she was as yet too numb to feel made her shrug, as if at some other, frivolous self who had come along saying, ‘You're upset! Make a noise! Bang your head against the wall! React so that you can be sure you're unhappy.'

She sat thinly alone. Tonight for the first time she was united with herself in desolation, and the solitude of that unity made her turn her head slowly and look round the walls in helpless wonder. Tonight the customary split between actor and commentator was bridged, there was nowhere to retreat, no demonstrative companion to say, ‘Yes, this is sad, but bearable. Yes, you're right to moan, but it doesn't matter very much, does it? Calm down and stop kidding. You don't really care about anything.'