The Long Prospect (10 page)

Particles of dust hovering in shafts of sunlight were atoms which, with her new vision, she was not surprised to see. Ants and birds, tadpoles in the shallows of the river, she gazed at with a kind of still intensity as if quite suddenly her concentration might help to bring about a second miracle to supplement the first and make the universe completely comprehensible.

At length she hit on what seemed the only answer to the enigma of differences between people and, especially, differences between herself and everyone else. There must be a series of lives to be lived, and age, real age, depended on the number of lives, not the number of years in the past.

When the pride of discovery had diminished, the conclusion that she was a few lives ahead of everyone else she knew made her feel not so much superior as marooned. Where were
her
people? Where were the others like her, to keep her company? And where was she to look for help or information? She might, she felt, have been told something before being dropped off in Ballowra.

She longed to be in a climate of effort where people strove, where mathematical precision would eventually arrive at the answer to all questions, and where warmth and kindness and love were everywhere, but mainly over her.

What she chiefly suffered from—like a champion swimmer without a coach, or a pool to practise in—was the lack of a teacher and situations in which her capacities might be tested to the limit. She felt the need of spiritual exercise and testing, and she wanted it to be scientific. She wanted, not to do good for others, nor for herself, but simply to exercise for their own sakes the qualities that lay like wasting talents, the qualities that
were
her talents.

To these unformulated feelings was added a corrosive desire for fine behaviour, from those around her, in everyday encounters. She sent prayers into nowhere that Mr Rosen should keep his mouth closed when he ate, that teeth and ears should not be examined at mealtimes, that Dotty should not belch, that Lilian should not utter words in anger that made even adults look peculiarly depressed. She wanted for them straight shoulders, clean skin, alert, seeing eyes. She wanted dignity, discrimination, and the cessation of war against the gentle virtues she admired. She provided constant amusement for her grandmother and friends.

It was only necessary, she had discovered, for a person, place, or thing to be admired by her, to become the object of hilarity and scorn. They'd even laugh at Shakespeare, Emily thought, and when Mrs Salter and the head talked the way they did there was clearly something to him. But if she so much as mentioned Mrs Salter and Mr Wills in support of an argument they minced her up with smiling sarcasm, and laughed at the teachers, and laughed till she and the teachers shrank to dwarf-size. She burned with anger hot and gusty as a bushfire—an appalled, helpless kind of anger. For no one wanted to be just, and that still seemed—in spite of her theory of life and age—so unaccountable and alarming that her strength evaporated. They'd even laugh at God, she thought.

She had no feeling for Shakespeare or God: if they had, she could have listened like a stone. But not to what they
did
say.

Baited, she retired to patch up and comfort her treasures. She learned to be silent under provocation—for no one was twice allowed to desecrate what she valued. Suppressing herself to explosion point, she continued to agitate the air with pleas for at least an external change in the direction of nobility. A noble Lilian, a noble Rosen, everyone to be perfect!

Lilian sat at the kitchen table and began her letter to Paula. She loathed writing but she knew by the unusual silence from Sydney that Paula was annoyed with her, so here she sat.

‘I've done what I said,' she wrote, ‘and got someone into the spare room. Mr Watts at the chemical works heard I was looking for someone so he came to
inspect
us all and then took the place for this man who was coming up from Melbourne. Max his name is. He's quite a big-wig at the works so we'll have to watch our step. We'll be having all the heads around the place coming to see us. (Ha-ha!)

‘He used to work at this place here before, then he went home to Melbourne, and now he's back again for about a year. But that's just by the way. The funny thing about it is that he's the Max Thea used to know. (I knew that before he came. Mr Watts and I had quite a little chat.) But he didn't know that this was where she used to be until I told him, and of course he didn't know that I knew what I did. But we had a talk about her, he keeping his distance and me mine, if you know what I mean. The thing was, if they wasted any time talking about us, she would have called me Lilian. It was the name Hulm he didn't know. He remembered Emily, though. Thea's Emily he called her if you please, and then looked as if he could have bitten off his tongue. I said what a good memory he had considering how long it was since Thea went—'

Lilian paused, wondering if she had been too frank, if she had given anything away. These were some of the facts, if her arrangement did somehow counterfeit the tone of the meeting. She was reluctant that Paula should see she had been impressed; on the other hand she was unwilling to prejudice her against him. He was here to propitiate her as much as for any other reason.

Lilian drowsed idly over the blotting-paper and dotted it with tiny spots as she remembered Rosen's discomfiture on being introduced. The whole thing had been news to him. He was horribly put out. She smiled indulgently. It was doing him good already. He was jealous! As if...She opened her eyes and looked at the wall rather bleakly. It was not for that reason she had got another man into the house. If it had been, she would have chosen differently.

She drew herself up and, sitting straight in her chair, scrawled several boxes on the blotting-paper with the decisive air of one signing a cheque. Only the stiffness of her corset and her disdain for the blank paper in front of her kept her from slumping over the table again as she sat thinking of the new boarder. His eyes, like her own, were grey. They had held her flickering eyes and caused in them a baffled stillness of which she was unaware.

Aggrieved at that first meeting to feel that she had not made her impression, she was impelled to staccato bursts of laughter, to a puzzled, defensive attempt to get through to him. But her wit was over his head, she concluded. He was not one of her men. But he had been, she recalled on an upsurge, and thought she would repeat the thought to Paula, a thorough gentleman. If Rosen would only behave like that, she began to think, and then she could have giggled. If she had been looking for a thorough gentleman, she would never have landed herself with Rosen.

Perhaps it was because Max was a Catholic that he seemed so different. Lilian paused over the thought. Was he? Incredibly, she seemed to hear now, over the years, an equivocal note in Thea's admission. Perhaps it was not true. She sat breathing away, thinking about it gloomily, abstractedly; then she thought: well, as long as he doesn't hang any bleeding hearts on the walls, I don't care one way or the other. Those holy pictures gave her the creeps. Gladys had her house practically papered with them, and the things that went on there...Lilian honestly wondered how she could. She was sure she would feel put off.

With a shiver she picked up her pen and wrote at great speed:

‘Just after that, Emily came in from the pictures and I had to go out and I've hardly seen him since. You'd think, though, that she had known him all her life. Still, it's dull here for him after the big city and she keeps him busy.

Have you forgotten the road home? Why don't you come on Friday night? Ring and let me know or send a telegram. Rosen can meet you at the station.

Your loving Mother.'

‘Thank God!' she said aloud.

For the third night in succession Emily had been to the Rialto where, on Wednesday, she had seen the archetype of her aspirations—someone apparently famous, of whom she had never heard. In what kind of a fog had she been living, she wondered, that she had never known the extraordinary range of subtlety people had it in their power to command. This was how people should be—witty, wise, compassionate, and clever.

On Thursday she had difficulty in keeping her delighted smile concealed. She neglected Patty, spent several shillings on film magazines, and locked herself in the bedroom to examine each one from comma to comma for a word of information about the actress on whose behaviour hers would henceforth be modelled.

She found a small biography and read with veneration till she had it by heart. Not American, twice married, no children. No children. She smiled with hard satisfaction. Dramatically she sighed and leaned against the wall. No children.

The magazine learned, she sat gazing at the carpet, facing facts. By distance, fame, and
her
silence, this one could be kept safe from sneers. But oh, what a distance to admire from! Advantages and disadvantages went hand in hand, it seemed. After Friday
she
would be gone from Ballowra, and though she was making another picture, according to the magazine, it would be months and months before it came...

On Thursday night she committed large tracts of the dialogue to memory, and tore a poster, advertising the film, off a wall. It was a bit ragged round the edges and had a hole in the middle where the glue was thickest.

On Friday she practised the dialogue, fitting it into her conversations wherever it would be least remarkable. For all her care, a few people were startled by its irrelevance.

Tonight, Friday night, she had been there for the last time. Now she flew home through the dark streets, plunged in a fantasy in which life-size portraits on the walls of the room gave way to visions of a private cinema and trips to Hollywood. She stowed away...

Unbalanced, she had caught at what she took to be a lifeline; something that took her a step further away from a life she had no use for. She went home, stretched with a nervous, not happy, exaltation which fell, inevitably, on reaching the gate of her own house. Both she and her exaltation were diminished in the steps that carried her inside.

She heard voices in the sitting-room—Lilian's and a stranger's—and with automatic curiosity started to walk past the door, looking in.

‘Oh, there she is!' her grandmother cried. ‘Just the girl we've been talking about. Come in and say hullo to Mr—' She turned to the man beside her. ‘I can't think of you as anything but Max, I'll just have to call you that.'

With her eyes fixed first, unnaturally, on her grandmother's, and then with equal unease on the stranger's, Emily got herself over to Lilian's side, sea-sick with the swaying conflict between tongue-tied shyness, and a frightening sensation that an impertinent remark might come out, accidentally, and shock them all.

The man spoke to her and she mumbled something back. Then she knew she was being fondly extolled, ‘My only grandchild...' Hearing, but not listening, she looked at the man from under her brows with oblique, fluttering glances. Lilian's human bulk and warmth and peculiar musky smell at her side.

Under the light, the man stood, nodding occasionally, listening to Lilian, looking now and then at
her.
He was tallish, not solid, rather thin. His hands were brown and sinewy.

Her eyes darted again at his face, half in shadow, took in the high forehead, the thin bony structure; with impersonal interest she looked at a mouth that told her nothing. His hair, she saw, had begun to recede a little on either side of his forehead.

The voices still went on. She looked again at the man, idly, with more ease, at his eyes, and saw with a shock of profound surprise that his grey eyes were turned on her, and more than looking at—
seeing
her, saluting her with a kind of serious friendliness as if he knew her. She throbbed with surprise and alarm, looked away, to Lilian, to Lilian's diamond watch, to the armchair. No one ever looked as if they
saw
her.

Cautiously she charted an upward course again for her eyes. He was talking to Lilian. He looked nice. She liked him.

‘Wake up!' said Lilian, with a laugh. ‘I said, where have you been?'

‘The Rialto, Grandma.'

‘That's the third time this week, isn't it? What do you think of that, Max? Three times to see the same picture.' Preparing to go, she said, ‘All these young ones need their heads read, I think. Pictures, pictures. It's all they think about. And a pile of magazines in there...'

Emily waited for an attack on
her
, quite mistaking, in an upsurge of guilt and loyalty, the perfunctory nature of Lilian's remarks and interest. She was amazed when the voice trailed off as if her grandmother scarcely remembered what she had been saying.

Beneath this surface reaction, she felt, but would not remember, a submerged shamefacedness at the mention of pictures and magazines, as a toddler might who had been reminded in company that it still used a dummy. She was unadmittedly ashamed of what, an hour before, had been a kind of claim to fame.

Outside, from some point among the furnaces and foundries, a whistle signalled the change of shifts.

‘It's time I wasn't here,' Lilian said. ‘You'll be all right, won't you? When you've unpacked Emily'll make you a cup of coffee. It's one of the few things she
can
do, and she'll give you a hand in with your things.'

‘No, indeed! I'll have them in in five minutes. But as for the coffee, Emily, if you don't mind, later on...'

‘No, no, no!—Emily! Did you see those cases by the door?'

‘No.'

‘Oh! She can be awful stupid when it suits her. Well, they're there! Now just start bringing a few things into the spare room—into Max's room.'

‘Is he...?'

‘He's staying.'

‘Don't let me keep you late, Mrs Hulm. I've held you up already.'

Pleasant though he was, it struck Lilian that he meant to have his own way. A kind of inward surprise, a fraction later, registered itself on her face. Recovering, she waved her hands with a show of indifference or incomprehension, and started for the door, laughing, only to stop and say, one finger aloft, ‘Lilian! Not so much of the Mrs.'