The Long Prospect (3 page)

Her eyes drifted abstracted over the room she had known to satiation—white walls, dark picture rail, plain beige velvet sofa and chairs, two round mirrors, the big chiming clock, ten o'clock. A pink racing guide poked out from under a cushion. Ten o'clock.

Lilian was saying, ‘The thing about Olly is he's got a bit too big for his boots. They're all the same. Put a few pounds in their pockets and before you know it they're telling you what to do. He's threatening me—
me
, mind you—that he could get off with that Mrs Rufus, you know, her with the mink coat, that he could get off with her any time he likes. Well, you can imagine—'

Standing behind a high black chair which was at an oblique angle to the wall, Emily slowly ran a small forefinger along, up, along and down the narrow aperture between the spars. Slowly, round and round, the finger went while she stood, eyelids drooping with sleep, staring at Thea. At the same time, mechanically, with tongue and teeth and breath she formed a soundless chain of words, worked a hundred soundless Theas into an incantatory chain to link her to the woman in the chair.

Since dinner she had been there. Three times she had resisted the appeal of Thea's outstretched hand lest her grandmother should be reminded of her existence and send her away. But still she was near, seeing, listening to Thea...

Again Thea stretched out her hand and looked at her, and again the child glanced away.

‘So I said to him, “Mr Olly Porteous, I've put better men than you—” What are you doing standing there? How long have you been there?'

‘A while,' Emily said, reluctantly.

‘A while, indeed,' said Thea, smiling, recognizing in the child the reason for her continued association with Lilian. ‘She's been very quiet. I don't wonder that you didn't notice her.'

Her grandmother said, not unproudly, ‘Oh, she knows how to behave when there are grown-ups in the room. Don't you? Don't you, Emily?'

And Thea remembered that Lilian had been brought up to be seen and not heard. The result
there
had been such that, looking at her, though she was dismayed to have the formula applied to Emily, Thea had to laugh.

‘Oh, Lilian!' she protested. ‘I thought I had convinced you long ago—'

She was disregarded.

‘Well!' Lilian said irritably to the child. ‘Can't you answer when I ask you a question?...Don't you think she's a great silly lump of a girl for nearly seven, Thea? What do you think of a girl as big as that who won't open her mouth when she's spoken to? Oh, she's as stupid as all the Lawrences!'

Salt waves of mortification washed over Emily. She met the scorn in her grandmother's eyes and then bent her head to look at the carpet. No one could like a great lump of a girl. No one could not agree with a voice so positive.

Yet, miraculously, the towering mountain that was Thea—suddenly beside her—could be heard to say, ‘She's my most favourite girl of nearly seven. I love her.' Turning to Lilian she said, ‘The most clever, too! Did you see her school books, tonight?' She leaned down. ‘Sleepy? It's late for you to be up...I know it really is too bad to have to go to bed when things are happening out here,
but
, Emmy...and I'm going very soon.'

Rising, Lilian pointed an imperious finger at the door. ‘Take yourself off this minute! You should have gone hours ago without being told.' Scarcely giving herself time to draw breath she said, ‘What do you say?'

‘Yes, Grandma.' Emily clutched at another chair as if to anchor herself to the room. She could not bear to go. But slowly, as she watched the two women, her fingers uncurled.

‘I'll help her,' Thea said, but Lilian cried, ‘No, no, no, no! She can get herself off. We'll have a cup of tea. I'll put the kettle on. Now say good night to Thea or she'll think you've got no manners and she won't come to see you again.'

The confusion of having the slow, full stream of Thea's attention—all of Thea's concentration—on her was great. She looked up and adored. When she said goodnight it would be over and Thea would go. Thea would go, and would she ever come back?

She was all at once enfolded, engulfed in warmth and softness: she could have died in the embrace—anything to stay with Thea. But a moment later, inadequate, wriggling away, she giggled shrilly, called good night in a high false voice and, arms outstretched, twirled in dizzy circles to the bedroom, laughing stupidly.

‘Well!' said Lilian, not displeased. ‘After all you used to do for her. You used to be a great favourite. I noticed tonight she wouldn't go near you.—Oh, the kettle!—Yes, you always spoilt her. But they forget. They change.'

Sitting back in her chair Thea gazed heavy-lidded at her hands without answering. When Lilian still hovered over her, shifting her weight from foot to foot, fiddling with a china ornament at one moment, putting it down the next to squint along the length of a table for smears or dust, Thea felt rather than saw the sharp glances that investigated her face. She said, ‘And how is her mother? How is Paula? Have she and Harry come to any decision?'

‘Oh, them!' Lilian straightened up. ‘Paula's all right. She still likes Sydney better than Ballowra and she sells a few hats now and then. She says she wouldn't come back here for all the tea in China, but nothing would get her out to Harry in Coolong, either. The latest idea is that if and when he gets a transfer to Sydney, they might set up house again and take Emily, but I wouldn't be surprised if they got a divorce before then.'

‘It's come to that?'

‘Well, you know what they were like together.'

With a snort of laughter Lilian went out to the kitchen and Thea was left with the spectral figures she had defensively conjured up. She had known Emily's parents well.

Paula, Lilian's only child, a solemn girl held in thrall by her mother, had, in a moment of revulsion following the discovery of her mother's relations with Jack Hulm, turned outwards to the importunities of Harry Lawrence, a local boy who worked in the local bank. He was attracted by her calm good looks, by her mysterious stolidity, and a belief that she was not like all the other girls he knew.

Their world was Greenhills, their literature and philosophy Hollywood. Young, unthinking, they were nevertheless conscious of having transgressed; until they married, their fear was genuine. By guilt they were estranged before they properly knew each other.

When Emily was born—having come to believe himself trapped—Harry reacted violently. The thought of a son had been his one consolation.

Half drunk, he refused to visit Paula, or to apply for a birth certificate. According to Lilian's version, he would not listen to reason and he would not talk sense. The christening ceremony to which he was forcibly driven by her was a fiasco.

Thea, living in the house, was unwilling observer of it all.

For so impatient a woman, Lilian was tremendously patient with Harry and Paula. It was not until Emily was three that, wearied at last by brooding silences and razor-sharp quarrels, she advised them to find a house of their own. Taken aback, apologetic and mild, they moved to a small bungalow in the next street. This was the period on which the success of the marriage depended.

A year later, Harry's transfer to a town in the outback, Paula's refusal to accompany him, and Emily's semi-permanent removal to her grandmother's house made clear the result.

Lilian bought for Paula a half-share in a hat shop in Sydney. And there, in the city, as far as one could tell, she had been content in her quiet humourless way to sit with the resignation of a decoy duck in a fun-fair allowing things—life, in this instance—to be thrown at her. As at fun-fairs the missile most often missed, and she was left in much her original varnished, undamaged condition.

Recently Thea had heard from Lilian that there was talk of a reconciliation. Harry visited Paula at least once a year, during his annual holidays; they corresponded infrequently but regularly, and it seemed that a kind of friendship had grown up during their separation.

It now appeared, however, that nothing was settled, that probably another year would pass before they reviewed the situation again. In the meantime, for both Emily and her grandmother the position was less than satisfactory: this had been obvious from the beginning. Lilian had her own occupations—chief among them, living her own life—and they took all of her time and interest.

Though on occasion she displayed her granddaughter with an appearance of pride, the impression was that she would not have been dissatisfied if the child had ceased to be between performances. And, to a woman like Lilian, a constant reminder of her age could not basically be anything but unwelcome.

While Thea was there Lilian had been able to avoid her responsibility without so much as knowing that she did so: now it was simply shelved. If more properly the responsibility belonged to Paula and Harry Lawrence, there was the fact that Lilian herself had failed one of them. But who had handled Lilian? And who, that person? How far back must one go to find the root of human imperfection? Thea wondered. And in which direction first?

‘She's a good girl, Paula, but she's funny—you'd sometimes think she hated Harry to hear her talk,' said Lilian, charging in, laden.

She stooped to plug the kettle in at a point next to the electric fire—slightly dusty and defeated by the long non-activity of summer.

‘In fact'—she straightened up, hand to her back—‘she hates all men. So do I, so do you, eh, Thea? Still you've got to have some around.' She gave a boisterous laugh. ‘What do you say, eh?'

‘I've sometimes wondered why you don't go to stay with Paula,' Thea said too quickly, and knew at once that she had been unwise. It was not even true. She could think of nothing that would be more disastrous for either.

Her instinctive purpose had been to distract Lilian from associations that might lead to a conversation which, with Lilian as one partner, could only go too far.

She had, at least for the time, succeeded. Until the tea was made, Lilian angrily set forth her contempt for the city in which Paula lived, and for all that vast crowd to whom she was unknown, over whom she had no power. Illogical and dogmatic, she was carried on by her irritation.

Knowing herself guilty, Thea bore the outburst as well as she could, in silence, and when Lilian challenged her with a jerk of her head, and clattered her cup on the floor, Thea said, ‘Of course you're right. I don't know why I said it.'

Thwarted, Lilian seemed to deflate. Her head slowly restored itself to an upright position. ‘Well of course I'm right. More tea? Oh, yes, you will!'

Burrowing towards some sharp little revenge against the woman opposite her, Lilian poured the tea, brooded over the steaming flow for a few seconds, then she brought out, putting the pot down decisively, ‘What about you? You stay, though there's nothing to keep you any more.'

Thea took the cup. ‘I'm used to it. I don't mean to stay for ever. I like my job. Friends.'

‘Other jobs.'

Thea passed this off with a faint smile; in answer, Lilian's face curved maliciously. She shook her head.

‘And let's see—if I'm forty-seven you must be about thirty-three.'

‘I seem to have missed the connexion.'

With a laugh and a comfortable rearrangement of cushions behind her back, Lilian said, ‘You should go off to the big city and find yourself a rich old man before it's too late.' She met Thea's eyes without a flicker. ‘This—this Max—this chemist man—what's he going to do about it?'

Unbelievably his name had not been mentioned between them since that day months ago when Lilian had heard it for the first time. True, she had had few opportunities: what made it remarkable, however, was that her restraint had been not only unwilling, as it only could be with Lilian, but, too, imposed on her from the outside—by Thea.

Sitting upright in her chair Thea said with ironic calm, ‘About what, Lilian? About what? Please don't worry about my future. I'm sure there must be other problems of more interest to you.'

She cast about for her handbag, glanced at her coat which lay across the sofa.

Lilian took this without expression, transfixed by a kind of blank satisfaction in having brought off her experiment. Now she exploded back to life, ‘Catholic! Catholic! What does that matter? It's just an excuse.'

She longed to know, but even she baulked at asking if she was his...? Did they ever? Did being a Catholic make any difference there? She yearned to know. Looking at Thea told her nothing: she had an adult, experienced look, an aggravating look of enduring stability, fulfilment. She did not look like an old maid although—and here Lilian could have kicked her feet in a flourish of triumph—the fact was, she was.

Thea stood up. ‘It's time I went home.'

Half lying back in her chair, Lilian eased her fingers under the edge of her stiff corset where it cut into her skin and, with a grunt, jerked it down a fraction of an inch. She went on, slightly distrait after the exertion, ‘You're a fool to stay on his account if you think this is such a rotten place. It doesn't sound as if he's ever going to be much good for you.'

Thea realized she was tired. She knew that to Lilian she presented a constant challenge, that the other woman could not desist from efforts to demolish her. Though she felt no anger, Thea was tired by it, and strangely saddened. There was something touching in Lilian's attempts to wound: in them she exposed herself more than she knew, was more human than she knew.

Just the same, the impossibility of defending Max to her, of so much as saying his name in her presence, collided with Thea's resistance to hearing him attacked, by Lilian, for idle amusement, and incapacitated her.

As she felt her way into her coat, Lilian turned her head to observe that she was apparently unmoved. With grey anarchic eyes she looked at her, then she smiled and said, impatiently, ‘Oh, what you need's a man—not a Catholic—a fine woman like you. You shouldn't waste any more of your life mixing cough-drops and bombs and waiting for his wife to die.'