The Long Prospect (4 page)

There was a sudden silence in the room, then from the steelworks some two or three miles away came the giant shuddering of machinery. The air throbbed with noise. Then the room was silent.

It was impossible to know what reaction, if any, Lilian had expected. She was unable to think before she spoke, and therefore unable to plan ahead. But instinctive presumption and lack of feeling led to her displaying a callousness which in itself, distinct from what was said, appalled the heart.

‘Good night, Lilian. I'll ring next week about Emily.'

‘Now you don't have to get touchy just because I mention what's-his-name's name, do you?' She followed Thea at a little trot and confronted her at the door, her eyes brilliant with expectation.

Thea sustained the neutrality of her expression. Inside her gloves, her hands felt dry and curiously weak. ‘Good night.'

Lilian took a deep breath and shook her head. ‘You'll come to grief. The trouble is you don't know men. They're all rotters. If this Max wanted you it wouldn't matter whether he was a Catholic or a Chinaman.' She felt a bubbling insatiable desire to prod and prod and prod.

Thea walked across the veranda, down the steps, along the path, finding her way by habit. The uninhibited Lilian cried, ‘Well, remember!'

If Emily had looked from the bedroom window to the dark deserted road, she would have seen the darker figure of Thea, her wonderful Thea, leaning against the fence: Thea who was the only one in the world she loved.

Between this visit and the last there were some picnics arranged by telephone, Emily despatched in one of the taxis and collected by another—glorious days during which she briefly bloomed with happiness.

The next time Thea came to Greenhills some months and aeons later, Emily was at school. By four o'clock, when she came home, Thea had gone and it was only when she heard her grandmother talking to Dotty in the kitchen that she learned of the visit.

Questioned, Lilian said, ‘Here, grate these carrots for Dotty. —Yes. She came in for five minutes to say goodbye. She left Ballowra this afternoon. She probably won't ever come back. Oh, it's high time she got away. There's nothing for her here.'

Emily gave a whimper and backed away. Dotty looked round in surprise.

‘Well, what's the matter with you?' her grandmother asked. ‘What does it matter if Thea's gone?' she persisted, her interest sharpening as, at her repeated questions, Emily began to cry. ‘My goodness! Blubbering because Thea's gone away. Well, well, well! All this about Thea and she didn't even stay to say goodbye to you. She wasn't worrying herself about you, don't think it!'

Though she thought Mrs Hulm was going a bit far, Dotty couldn't help smiling to herself as she took over the carrots and grater.

On and on went the inexorable voice, amused, sarcastic.

Sobbing fiercely, Emily stamped her feet to make it stop: she waved her clenched fists.

‘That's right! Cry, cry, cry! Your bladder's too near your eyes, that's what's wrong with you, Emily Lawrence. No wonder she wouldn't stay to say goodbye. I don't know who would.'

Sick with inexpressible shock and loss, provoked to frantic hatred of her grandmother, Emily ran out of the house—eyes, nose, mouth streaming, hands clapped over her ears.

Lilian called, ‘You'll go to bed at five o'clock with a dose of castor oil, you little monkey!'

But Emily, out of hearing, lay on a narrow strip of dried grass and weeds by the side of the house, mourning into the ground, not thinking of Thea, but alarmed to the heart by the knowledge of her absence, made by it more vulnerable than she had ever been.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN PAULA came back into the room Mr Rosen had gone and she gazed at his absence.

‘I told him to go for a walk or read the papers in his own room for a while,' Lilian said. ‘We don't want him hanging round every minute you're here. He's a real old woman, anyhow. I can't be bothered with him.'

So there had been a quarrel? No, not so much as that, a few words. Lilian had spasms of conscience during which she was not at ease alone with her daughter and her lover. This was one of those occasions. In a silent exchange taut with gratitude and respect, mother and daughter acknowledged the rightness of her feeling. But at that moment, seeing the figure of the new boarder passing the open doorway, Paula sought to extricate herself from his hurt. ‘Oh, Mum! I think he heard you!' she whispered.

When he was past, Lilian condescended to become aware of the possibility, but added no soft words to her judgement. Loudly she said, ‘Close that door, Emily. There are so many people wandering round this house...'

And Emily, who did not like Mr Rosen, ran willingly, grinning at the joke, to give the door a bang.
She
was on the inside, one of a trio,
related
to her mother and grandmother: no one was pushing her outside.

Returning to her pose on the round leather hassock, she looked conspiratorially at the others, eager to go on with the fun of Rosen-baiting if it suited them. But nothing happened. Lilian cleared her throat, lifted the newspapers that were lying at her feet and rustled through the pages yet again, sifting, searching for a last sensation.

It seemed to Emily that the dismissal and the dramatic bang that she herself had been allowed to contribute should have led to something more than this. She watched, and elation turned to despondency as Lilian threw all except one paper down, and her mother reopened the novel she had been reading on and off all afternoon.

It was agonizingly quiet.

The electric fire, with both bars turned on, burned Emily's face and threw pink-orange light feebly into the darkening room. She gave an exaggerated sigh and clasped her face in her hands.

Paula raised her head and looked at her in silence for a moment as if the effort of breaking into speech was more than she could contemplate. She was gagged by the wintry Sunday dimness and warmth.

‘Haven't you anything to do?' she asked repressively, at last.

‘Nope. Nothing to read or anything.'

‘Don't say “nope”.'

Lilian intoned, her eyes on the paper, ‘Did you see this about the man who strangled—'

‘Yes. I read it,' Paula said quickly, repelled and bored at the prospect of listening to Lilian's portentous delivery. She was beginning to subside into her book again when she remembered Emily, felt the exasperating weight of her eyes and expectations. She said, trying not to lose contact with the printed page in front of her, ‘We'll have to see Santa at Christmas time. Perhaps he'll bring you some books.'

‘Will he? Will he? When'll it be Christmas, Mum?'

Paula sighed, moved a foot away from the heat of the fire and said, ‘Oh...about six months.'

Emily pulled a face at the carpet and Lilian, catching the last words, said, ‘What's six months?'

After another drugged pause, Paula said, ‘Christmas.'

Lilian stretched her arms out and was temporarily hidden as she turned a page. From behind the rustling barricade came, ‘Well, what about it?'

‘
Oh!
' Emily cried, and in tones of long-suffering explained, while her mother read on in passive gratitude. Emily sighed again.

‘Books? Books? What do you want more books for?' her grandmother asked. ‘You've got a cupboard full of them out there.'

‘They're old. I've read them a million times,' said Emily sulkily.

No one answered.

Some minutes passed during which Emily supported herself by examining her thin gold bracelet and twisting it round her wrist. By now, though it had an almost mystic value for her, she seldom remembered to connect it with Thea, from whom she had received it: simply, it was her most valued possession; it was a comfort.

For further minutes she counted and mentally redistributed the scrolls on the white plaster ceiling, and then she dreamed about Miss Bates. After that it was time for the clock to strike. She watched the hands and listened for the whirring of the mechanism that would signal the imminence of an event.

On the hour it gave an elaborate performance—one sufficiently prolonged to disturb both Lilian and Paula. Blinking across the glowing darkness, pressing fingers to their eyes, they told Emily to put on the light.

Paula yawned and smoothed her hands over her fair hair. She was so far distracted as to turn her book face downwards on the arm of the chair. Emily took in the signs of a renaissance with exhausted relief. The day had been endless.

The silent eagerness of her forward-leaning pose debilitated the two who observed it. She had been carefully ignored. Now someone said, ‘You should have your bath.'

She protested half-heartedly, waiting for insistence. When it came she jumped up. ‘Well, will you...? Mum? You said last night you'd see...'

Again her mother appeared unwilling to commit herself and there was an indecisive silence which might have augured anything. It lasted too long.

‘You're mean. Lots of girls in my class's mothers do and they're home all the time.' She despised herself for asking, loathed her petted voice.

Lilian said, ‘A big lump like you! Go and wash yourself and give your mother some peace. I want to talk to her. She's working hard in Sydney for you all the time, so when she comes to see us—'

But Emily had stopped listening. She scuffed over to the door, breathing deeply, emotions stormy and incoherent. Looking back over her shoulder as she turned the shiny white handle she cried, ‘Well, I don't care! I don't care!'

The grown-up faces were impassive. Paula said, ‘Don't forget to clean your teeth. They don't look as if they've been touched since I was here last month.'

For the second time that afternoon Emily banged the door, but now she too, like Mr Rosen, was outside in the free cold spaces of the house.

It was quiet. It smelled of polish. There was a chill lack of desirability about the room she had left, and about those she might enter—a bleak and rigid lack of warmth that penetrated the future as well as the present and past. She swept her arms over the cold papered wall in longing for something, something...Not, she knew, letting her arms fall, for her mother to wash her.

Waking up now that the lights were on, Lilian took off her spectacles and rubbed the deep marks on the bridge of her nose. In the instant between jumping up and flopping down, she thrust the folded papers under the cushion on which she sat.

‘She's all right. She always plays up a bit when you're here. Other times she's as good as gold—ask Dotty. We don't know she's in the house half the time.'

Good as gold. It was a phrase which, applied to Emily, roused Paula's scepticism. ‘As long as she is. I don't want her to wear you out.'

‘Do I look it?' Lilian's expression dared Paula to have found signs of decay.

She shook a tired, submissive head in answer to her mother's rhetoric. She had so trained herself that any treacherous thought was blocked at its subconscious source. For the most part her thoughts about her mother were of a mythical nature—pure and reverent. For after all, she would think,
à propos
of she knew not what, she is my mother, my own mother. And the curious connotations of that ‘after all' were never probed.

A certain physical resemblance between the two was, as it were, fended off by enforced differences of temperament. On the never-to-be-developed soul that was her daughter's Lilian's fierce vitality had grown stronger. Whom she attracted she stultified and distorted without effort or conscious intention. Now, what was in her electric, in Paula was static: evidence of this was subtly caught and exemplified in mouth and eyes and lift of brows.

Paula had early accepted the idea of Lilian's permanent, unlimited prerogative in every department of life. There was little for
her
to be but an adjunct, and in matters of doing, she assumed she would be informed, in due course, of her duty.

At more than one remove from reality she was always to exist with the most intimate changes in her affairs appearing like objective phenomena: facts to be noted.

For the past few years alone in Sydney, alone for the first time, she found if not contentment, at least a most desirable order and simplicity in her existence.

With quiet competence she organized her share of the tiny shop that supported her, and for the rest, she fixed her large grey eyes on a point in space and let the objects and people who chanced on that point into focus—no more than that.

Long ago she had willed herself to forget the ancient reason for that sudden and disastrous call to Harry Lawrence. It was not possible that her mother, who was her mother after all, should have been found to be less than she, Paula, had always supposed her. Dear, dead Jack Hulm who had married her mother had been a good friend, and later a husband, and could be safely enshrined in memory.

The strangest thing was that Lilian should have felt herself obliged, since Paula had grown up and left the house, to play her rôle of mother seriously. Indeed, it seemed not so much a matter of obligation as of choice. And the fact that she sometimes tackled her lines in a tentative fashion might be accepted—in her—as proof that she was no less sincere than Paula, to whom the image and its preservation were all-important.

Alone together they were nervous, as if each feared the dissolution of the inner script and her own exposure, speechless, staring naked eye at naked eye.

With the belated recognition of Paula as a person, Lilian brought to their relationship the nervousness inherent in all but the most brutal or most true. But Emily, watching, saw only the exaggeration of warmth and feeling, and what was not genuine she condemned.

At the same time, surprised and scornful as she was that they were satisfied by mutual deceit, she envied them, for she found satisfaction in neither. They did not act for her—a child and not quite human—they were themselves, and what they were was not sufficient. They spoke to her from unreason and were frightening. Having no way of expressing her intuition in lucid thought, she simply knew that they were amateurs. This perception brought with it a sensation of complication being passed from ignorance to ignorance; of complication handled by indifference; of complication on the verge of being dropped to the ground where it would inevitably shatter.