The Long Prospect (24 page)

At other times since she had known Max, the wry and imperturbable adviser had vanished and she had wandered out alone in happy country where she simply
was,
and questioned nothing. This was the other side—the far side—of that country.

Looking at her, slumped forward on the tight blue sofa, one would not have thought her capable of so immediate a return to life as she displayed when a sound warned that someone was coming.

She leapt behind the sofa, stood gripping the back. Paula came in, silently weeping, her hands to her face. At the sight of her daughter, she stopped, and was stared at with wild accusing eyes.

Following her a moment later, Lilian looked from one to the other impatiently, made tutting noises with her tongue. ‘Well!' she exclaimed.

There were about her still, traces of high excitement; her cheek-bones, her eyes, were brilliant with colour.

‘You'll have to come out and say goodbye.' She touched Paula on the shoulder. ‘They're all waiting. I told them to wait for you.'

Heavily Paula looked at her. ‘Do I...? Oh, all right.' Wiping her pale lips she went to the dressing-table, fluffed some powder over her face without seeing her reflection, combed her hair.

Watching, Lilian could not help the wave of stimulation that swept over her at the sight of Paula's tears, her puffy face. It was not that she hated her; there was merely an obscure judgement somewhere in her mind that made her feel that it served Paula right. She had been too placid, too untroubled.
This
was what happened to fine people from Sydney.

‘I'm ready.'

With another wordless look at Emily they went out. She heard them cross the wooden veranda, walk down the stone steps, crunch along the gravel.

So this was it. It was all over. All over?

Rubbing her hand along the polished wooden frame where it found itself she came out into the room and stood. She stood in the centre of the room. Suddenly she flung herself over to the windows, with trembling hands sent the curtains flying, jerked at the window and sent it shooting up with a crash so that the six people in the dark garden turned in surprise and saw the subject of their conversation outlined against the bright light of the room.

Eyes flashing with tears, she stared out into the darkness. Her chest heaved. When she tried to speak she gave a groan. A curious human groan came to block her voice.

She clutched at the window-sill. ‘What have you done?' she screamed. ‘You're all mad! You don't know anything. I hate you all! I wish you were dead!'

Her voice cracked. Choked with tears, she turned slowly away and leaned against the wall.

The curtains fell across the windows. The people in the garden gasped; someone said, ‘Ignore it. She's delirious. She'll be all right in the morning.'

She was running through the house, calling Max, looking in every room, biting on the back of her hand in an effort to stifle the sobs that threatened to incapacitate her.

Coming up from behind, Lilian caught her by the elbows and, relying on superior weight, started to steer her to the bedroom.

With a quick wrench the girl escaped. Her tears stopped. ‘Don't touch me!' She backed away. ‘Don't you touch me!'

Nonplussed, Lilian hesitated. ‘Well, get yourself off to bed this minute or you'll be touched whether you like it or not. There's places for girls like you, you know. Blubber, blubber, blubber. It's all you're good for.'

‘Oh, Mum!' said Paula, distressed. ‘Don't talk to her like that.'

Harry and Rosen looked on with expressions of mingled satisfaction and dislike.

‘Oh, well,' Lilian excused herself.
‘You
tell her to go to bed. I don't know. I don't know. She's given us enough trouble for one night.'

The adults revolved to watch Emily go, baffled by her, by her extraordinary attachment, by her expressed (though undoubtedly hysterical) dislike of themselves.

At the last moment Lilian could not restrain herself. She shouted, ‘She's a little blighter, though. If she worried more about her own mother and father instead of getting worked up about old married men old enough to be her father, it'd be more like the thing.'

Harry smoothed back his hair and frowned at Paula disagreeably when she tried to rise to a placating smile. He told her plainly that in his eyes she bore sole responsibility for her mother and her daughter and that he, for one, was fed up with the lot of them.

‘Would anyone like a cup of tea?' she said timidly, gazing at him, but Lilian cried, ‘Listen!' and, electrified, they obeyed her silencing hand, heard footsteps on the path outside.

‘It's him! It's him!' she hissed, eyes dilated. ‘It's up to you, Harry. Catch him now. We'll all go to bed out of your way. Come on. Quick. You know what to say, Harry.'

After a confused moment during which the four milled, crashed into each other, and generally panicked, she and Paula fled towards their room. Rosen, standing at the entrance to his, finally saw it and melted round the door, leaving it sufficiently ajar, however, to catch Lilian's
sotto voce
message from the top of the hall to Harry, who stood irresolutely scratching his ear.

‘No fighting, Harry! I won't have any fighting. Keep your head with him.'

He nodded glumly and disappeared into the kitchen where his adversary could be heard moving about.

In the front bedroom Lilian and Paula lay side by side, listening to the silence. A few feet from them on the sofa, Emily lay with her face pressed between the pillow and the hard shiny brocade of the back, her red-rimmed eyes closed tight.

She knew what they meant, and what they meant to say to him: she understood that she was helpless to prevent them. She wanted to die.

At half past six, chinks of bright daylight ran down the sides of the window blinds. With infinite stealth Emily lifted the blankets and slid to the floor, hot with fear, not moving her eyes from the bed where her mother and grandmother slept.

Crawling on hands and knees to the door she anticipated the despair of a final deprivation. If they could prevent her seeing him, they would, and if they did...

Outside, she tugged on her dressing-gown, and paused again only when she reached his room, her fingers on the white china handle. She was all at once sick, shy, guilty, afraid of Max. She was beset by memories, too, of the long succession of other mornings, the entry into Max's life, understanding, understandable life.

She went in. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, dressed, smoking. Around him were scattered open suitcases. When he looked up she ran to him.

Clinging to him there was no necessity to look, no possibility of being seen; but weeping, clutching him desperately, her voice muffled by his shirt, his arms, she had still to smile because she was with him now, could feel the warmth of his skin, the vibrations of his voice.

Yet an instant later, separated from him, she could have blushed. They had been made strangers, self-conscious strangers. There seemed suddenly no reason why they should address to each other a single word. What could they possibly have, or ever have had, to say to each other? Even so much as goodbye would be superfluous.

Indeed, it seemed to the girl that Max had already gone from her, that this calm gentle stranger who had allowed her to sprinkle him with tears, was not Max. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She glanced up, and they exchanged a painful look. She saw that he wanted to be kind but hardly knew how to go about it.

She whispered, ‘Won't I ever see you again?'

With the last exhalation of his cigarette, Max sent up a smokescreen. He leaned across to the ashtray. ‘I had to leave soon, Emily. The firm is sending me back to Melbourne. I meant to tell you before. I should have.'

Then he gazed at her and, when he saw her bewilderment, frowned. She looked up and he went on briskly, ‘I'm sorry I won't be able to write, or hear from you, but I'll be very busy and so will you, and your father thinks it best not. On the whole I quite agree. But wait a minute.' He extricated himself from the barricade she formed against his legs and going to the dressing-table lifted a card. ‘These will be my addresses when I get back, at work and at home. There seems to be no particular reason why you shouldn't have them. Sometime, later on, if your mother and father don't object, you might write if you have some important news. And I could do the same. But for a long time, anyway, you'll be hard at it at school and so on, and as I said, I...'

Emily took the card. Unnoticed, it fell from her slack fingers. She understood he did not believe what he said.

‘Oh, Max, don't hate
me,'
she said in a small voice. The desire that he should be compensated fought with her perception of the affront apology would be and closed her mouth. She smoothed her cheek along the side of the bed as if it were a kind of weight which would hold them both to the room, hold time.

Max, who had been emptying the shelves of books and stacking them into the open trunk, turned at the sound of her almost inaudible appeal. At that moment the big square window filled with sunshine: the room was lightened, warmed. Sunlight fell on the young girl curled up on the floor against the bed, kindled the brilliant dark-blue of her gown and hung over her uncombed hair: her right cheek, her right hand, were touched by it. And he, too, was covered in light, made suddenly round and whole, brought back to recognizable life, made again her kindest friend, breathing, brown-skinned, looking down at her, leaving her, sent away from her...

‘Oh,
Max
,' she cried, as if a door had opened for a moment again on feeling.

He helped her up to sit on the bed and stood in front of her, holding her hands.

‘Well, Emmy...It's hard to know what to say all at once, isn't it? Try to cheer up, Em. This does no good.'

Her eyelids rose. She looked at him and he smiled, not very successfully. She had no thought of smiling. Her eyes stayed on his, confident that something would come that she could hold on to, that she would not be left without hope. They seemed even to implore him to deny what the room around them proclaimed—that he was on the point of leaving. Today.

‘It seems that you'll be going to live with your mother and father in Sydney now, and I think that's a very good thing. I was glad to hear about it.'

She tried to tug her hands away but he held them tight.

‘It would please me to think that you'll really try to be happy with them, and try to get the most out of the new kind of life you'll be living there. I won't be there to see how you're getting on, but I'll depend on you to do your best.'

He had never spoken to her like this before. He was treating her like a baby. She gave him an almost contemptuous look and stared stubbornly at the ground. She felt as if the blood was draining from her body.

‘I hate them. You know I do.'

‘I don't believe that, Emmy. And I wish you wouldn't say it. They...' But he found it difficult to talk about them.

Still holding one of her hands he sat down beside her but she immediately slipped from the bed and knelt in front of him.

He said, ‘For the time being, at least, you'd better forget all I said about university, Em. I was mistaken in mentioning it to you before I'd talked it over with your parents. In any case—' he paused for breath. This morning, breath, speech, thought, were things to be achieved laboriously, actions to be performed with the dull persevering abstractedness of someone half drugged. ‘In any case,' he began again, ‘that's all a long way ahead.'

Hardly taking this in, Emily clasped blindly at his hands, feeling them as if to learn by heart the texture of skin, the firmness of bone, the particular shaping and grouping of atoms that made these hands, that face, unique in all the world, the hands of Max, the face of Max.

He continued to speak, and her mind recorded and discarded his words, for these were not the important words he had to say to her, not the words she would want to remember and be supported by.

‘Oh, I don't care. It doesn't matter about that,' she said, shaking her head from side to side. But when he said dully, ‘I suppose you're right,' she said, ‘Oh, if you think it matters, I do care, Max. I do. But what good does it do if they won't...?'

‘None, none, of course,' he said. But it had been something concrete to discuss, if not what she wanted. She was asking for some blindingly honest statement, a synthesis of what this year had been not only to him, but to herself as well. In ten minutes she would have him put into words a blue-print—which would be a promise, too—for the future. She would have a crystallization of his feeling and his hopes for her. She would have it visible, tangible. She believed it could be done.

He said, ‘Will you remember the things we've talked about these months, I wonder?'

And now, at last her heart began to beat. There was a kind of humming in her ears which she heard through the sound of her own voice. ‘I won't forget anything ever. My Greeks and Romans, I'll never forget. I'll keep on reading till I know as much as you.'

A stray reminiscent flash of enthusiasm surprised her face and was extinguished. But she had seen the flickering response in Max's face so she plodded on, more slowly, looking now at the pattern on his tie, the buttons on his shirt. She swallowed.

‘After the death of Alexander I'll go right on to—wherever else it goes. And all the experiments I did. And how to ride a bike and how to dive. And amoebas...And, oh, what else? A lot of things.' She briefly met his eyes and gave a strained embarrassed laugh. ‘All the poetry. And all you told me about the stars. And all the other things...'

The things, the things. Now
she
talked about the things.

‘Not to be afraid the way I was of the dark, and speaking, and people...'

Max put his hands over her ears and she closed her eyes for a moment to feel them. When he spoke his voice sounded in her head like a memory.