The Long Prospect (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

THE FRONT door of Thea's flat was ajar so Lilian gave it a push and went in, her eyes on swivels. This was the first time she had been here but Thea's name was printed on a card next to the bell so there could be no mistake about it, any more than about the building which, on its cliff-side road, was hardly more to be expected
there
, and hardly less conspicuous, than a transplanted Sphinx.

To Ballowra, for Ballowra, the building, and the choice of the building as a dwelling place, seemed pretentious. Since its birth Ballowra had been—you might say on principle—low-lying, single-storeyed: in everything, that is, but steelworks and factories.

Ignoring the lift, walking upstairs with one ironic eyebrow cocked ready to greet Thea, one drooping disdainfully, Lilian had reflected on the truth of her late husband's saying. The exact words of it were in the grave with him, but she remembered it as a complaint against the commercial types from Sydney who were even then coming up and building up and making money—spoiling the place, he had incredibly said (for what could spoil Ballowra?) with their great department stores and blocks of flats.

That someone
she
knew, that someone who had boarded in her house for years, should have aspired to and achieved the tenancy of one of these quaint apartments struck Lilian as more than comical—it was ludicrous. It was as if Thea had suddenly claimed for herself some marvellous talent.

‘God in Heaven!' she softly exclaimed as she walked through the small passage into the sitting-room.

What she thought of the room was neither here nor there and had nothing to do with her cry. The thing was, she had registered her disapproval of Thea's unnatural act in coming here: that done, she more tolerantly looked around and crossed to the wide windows. There, below, and straight ahead, was that much-praised view of the sea. A lot of water, yes, but nothing to make a fuss about. She had once said, ‘For all I care the Pacific can jump in the lake.' It had been a success. On the strength of that success she now relaxed her mouth at the Pacific and admitted that it was blue.

Turning, her eye took in with less and less attention flowers, books, ceiling, floor...

Now that her first curiosity was assuaged, she had begun to wonder at Thea's continued absence. There had been doors to the right and left, she remembered, as well as this central door she had chosen to enter.

She took herself again to the hall and listened, frowning. She meant to charge and reprimand Thea for her carelessness in leaving her flat unguarded, and in order that her reproof should have authority, she wanted to keep combined the full surprise of her physical and vocal presence. Therefore she was silent, but she thought, I might be Jack the Ripper for all she knows, and here I am, inside.

A few quick steps carried her heavy, erect figure to the kitchen—little more than a gleaming cupboard of white and dark blue—where the sight of dishes, two sets of dishes on a tray, in a moment overrode the more immediate effect made by the dazzle of fitments and paint.

Thea was solitary:
she
was unexpected. Affronted by the mystery of the dishes, Lilian went back across the hall towards the other door, almost shut, presumably the bedroom.

As she approached it a voice was raised and Lilian stopped dead. Then with a fall to something like disappointment, she realized that Thea was speaking on the telephone. She let out a breath. But then, again, at a note in the voice, at the tone, her face twisted incredulously. She had never heard anything like it. And that was Thea, whom she knew.

Tense, eyes fixed, Lilian listened, her mouth quivering with anger and excitement and a curious kind of pleasure. Absorbing it all, directing content, manner and implications to their appropriate ends, she decided that the really annoying thing about it was that but for this accident she might never have found out.

Another small, galling but unadmitted factor in her reaction was jealousy, for at this time she had not met Rosen, and Olly had had his day.

Now Thea was speaking again, and there was her voice...

When at last the receiver was replaced on the stand Lilian was unprepared for it. She gave a jump. She had banged the front door and turned with a smile to meet Thea before she knew what she was doing. Several long seconds passed in silence and astonished surmise strained the smile to a grimace.

‘Lilian!'

Defended by a poise that Lilian had never shaken, Thea stood in the doorway and was eyed by her uninvited guest with the usual mixture of awe and derision. A woman by temperament thoughtful, generous and feeling, Thea was accustomed to being suspect by the majority that was her opposite.

‘Did you expect someone else?'

‘No. Not even you. I heard a noise. Was that...? How are you?'

‘Anyone might have come in. Luckily it was only me.'

‘What do you mean? Sit down over here.'

‘The door. You should be more careful. I read last week—'

‘Why? It's so hot,' Thea excused herself, turning to light a cigarette. ‘There might have been a breeze.'

‘But there isn't.' Lilian protestingly flapped her gloves in front of her face. ‘Billie and Gladys and I and a few others were round at the Horizon this afternoon, so when we broke up, and I was practically next door—I knew you'd be home from work—I thought I'd come and have a look at your
flat
.'

‘And what do you think of it?' said Thea, standing at the windows. When Lilian continued to watch her with cold, amused grey eyes she knocked some ash from her cigarette and said, ‘But you haven't seen it yet, have you? I'll show it to you.' She added tonelessly, half lifting a hand, ‘This is almost all there is.'

Another silence came over them. At length Thea said, ‘And how is Emily?'

‘Wondering what's hit her now that you're not there to spoil her,' said Lilian ironically of her granddaughter. She said, more slowly, looking round the room, ‘The house is empty now with only the two of us, but I see why you had to have your flat. I see
now
.'

Unable to relax so far as to sit down, Thea nevertheless seemed to grow easier, though there was about her still an unfamiliar, uncharacteristic distractedness. Behind Lilian she touched a cushion on an empty chair. ‘I must see her soon. You do like it, then? A room of this size is rare in a new building.' Seeing by Lilian's smile that she had mistaken her meaning, she said, ‘The position? The view?'

‘Oh, the view!'

In Greenhills, the most western suburb of Ballowra, farthest from the coast, from her house on the side of a hill, Lilian could see three provision shops on the opposite corner, two roads at right angles, hundreds of corrugated iron rooftops, and smoke from acres of steelworks. Nevertheless she said of the cliffs, the long curved beach, and the Pacific, ‘Oh, the view!'

‘Then what? What do you mean?' Thea smiled, disarmed by her scorn, her attention finally canalized, concentrated on Lilian.

Lilian tilted her head. ‘Who's Max?'

There was the slightest pause during which their eyes held together stilly.

‘Why do you ask? Did you overhear our conversation?'

‘I heard what
you
said,' Lilian declared. ‘Luckily it was only me. You shouldn't leave your door open. Who is he, anyway?'

By Lilian only the broadest of gestures and words were comprehended; for that reason, very little that was natural to Thea ever came into play against her. That, in Lilian's company, passivity and non-retaliation were the sole defences of integrity she had long ago learned. She had agreed to pay the enervating toll exacted by the stopping-up of spontaneity.

She therefore stood, and holding at bay the idea of Lilian's witness, said indifferently, ‘You must have heard me mention his name.'

‘He's at the works with you? Is he a chemist, too?'

‘You could call it that.'

‘Something atomic?' Lilian hazarded, looking suspiciously up at her. ‘Trying to ruin our weather, is he?'

‘Happily, no,' Thea said, with the ghost of a smile, and felt free to walk to the mantelpiece to discard her cigarette: having done that her position became devoid of purpose.

Outwardly controlled, she eyed a small vase of petunias with blank resistance, and waited for Lilian's next remark which was, ‘Of course, he's married. I made out that much. Will he get a divorce?'

‘There's no question of it.'

‘Ah!' Lilian dug her heels into the carpet and bounced farther back on the sofa. She said shrewdly, after thoroughly studying Thea's figure and pose, ‘What's the trouble, is he a Catholic or something?'

Seeing in Lilian's unsuccessful speculation a means of halting the catechism Thea almost warmed to her. ‘Yes.' She sat down in an armchair and added, forestalling further questions, ‘Tonight, as you probably heard, he's flying to Melbourne.' She said it with the air, casual yet candid, of one telling all.

Lilian was nonplussed. Her other questions, banished by the previous moment's intense receptivity, could not be recalled. She cleared her throat. ‘It's a good night for a plane,' she remarked.

‘The forecast says fair weather.'

They did not speak again of Max.

When Lilian was leaving, Thea came after her to say, ‘Tell Emily—tell her I'll come to see her soon.'

Thea had known Lilian Hulm and lived in her house for eleven years, ever since the year of her graduation when the opportunity offered by A.C.I.L. for research had brought her from Sydney. In those days there were no flats; a moat of steelworks and factories surrounded hills and plains of drab bungalows and shops. Cinemas, hotels, reared up from the encircled plain like small cathedrals. At night the sky glowed dusky red with industry.

For a newcomer, a single woman, accommodation meant a room in a stranger's house in whichever suburb was nearest to her place of work. That Thea had at the beginning chosen to stay with Lilian indicated no more than the convenience of the house, and the lack of an alternative; that she continued to stay was the measure of her detachment.

Lilian Hulm, handsome, twice-widowed, forty-seven, had had boarders in her house—sometimes one, once as many as three—ever since her first marriage at eighteen.

For two years before the death of her first husband, Paula's father, she had been the mistress and landlady of Jack Hulm—a personable man twenty years her senior. Now
his
widow, free of ties and financial worries—he had left her a row of houses and three taxis—she was searching in an intuitive but none the less methodical manner for his successor.

It was of bygone and potential candidates for this rôle that she talked tonight.

Thea had to hear again the old story of Olly's defection. She was told, incidentally, about the woman across the street who had bunions, and Jill having trouble now that she had reached that certain age. She was told that Billie Duncan no longer slept with her husband; that Moira Digby along the street owed ten pounds to the grocer, that at forty-two Janet Olafson expected her first baby and no one could guess who the father was. Olafson was at sea. Thea was taken, in detail, through Dotty's mother's operation for gall-stones. And an ancient interesting haemorrhage of Lilian's own was recalled in passing.

In return, Thea did not mention Max. She did not give her opinion of the United Nations' resolution on the European crisis, or ask for Lilian's. She did not say that she had last night, with great pleasure, rediscovered Housman. Neither did she attempt to summarize what she knew of the work of Jung, nor try to convince Lilian of its great value. That she and Max had dragged themselves from bed at dawn to walk on the empty beach, and smiled now to remember their subsequent exhaustion, she did not say. And about Emily, whom she suspected of not being properly fed, she did not ask. The hostile irrelevance of Lilian's reaction was all too predictable.

It was several months since Thea had been to Greenhills. Her visits now were always arranged to coincide with Max's periodic trips to Sydney or Melbourne for meetings. But tonight, in spite of his absence, she was depressed by the senselessness of time so spent. Inevitably, she and Lilian had shared a web of associations: they knew the names of each other's friends and relations, recognized each other's clothes, brands of toothpaste, soap, and cigarettes. Each knew what would not amuse the other. The routine of Lilian's daily life was as familiar to Thea as her own. And, too, it had not been possible to live in her house for years, through vicissitudes which had included two deaths, two weddings and the birth of her granddaughter, without having come to respect some part of her immense, uncompromising gusto, and the sheer size of her most wrong-headed qualities. Thea understood Lilian, but discerned the point beyond which her understanding did not go: Lilian, on the other hand, pronounced on
her
with the confidence that comes of ignorance and physical propinquity—but without intentional malice. This was the sum of their relationship. Tonight, to Thea, it seemed insufficient reason for her presence.

In a small agony of restlessness Thea felt it insupportable that they should remain as much as acquaintances. Communication so arid should long have been abandoned. But in the past, living in the house, there had not been this necessity to sit face to face for the purpose of entertaining and being entertained, and if there had been, it was not impossible that she would then have responded without the sensation of disintegrating boredom and reluctance that now assailed her. Then, alone and disengaged, she had had endless tolerance and patience. Now, she could not bear for the length of an evening, the fall to tedium, flatness, and the exchange of personalities. And it was a delusion to think of her presence or absence, her interest or distaste, in terms of selfishness or generosity: anyone over the age of twenty-five with normal hearing would have served Lilian as well.

Her coming tonight was an act of hypocrisy—one that had not gone unpunished, she wryly thought. And she suppressed a sigh, for this brief return to the past made her long for the present, long for Max, long for their life together, as sharply as if all were unattainable.