The Long Prospect (6 page)

A pair of dirty white sandals passed. Only two out of ten for them, she decided.

The warmth of the sun made her think for an instant of swimming. She was riding in on a breaker, weightless, buoyant...

Suddenly she glowered. A pair of red sandals were coming down the hill and she knew who was in them—Joyce Hoskins whose father was a headmaster. Noiselessly the pretty red sandals went past. Six—well, perhaps six and a half—was all they were worth out of ten.

Smitten by a pang of bitter envy, Emily tormented herself by calling up scenes to illustrate Miss Bates's fondness for Joyce. For while she, who lavished on Miss Bates so many hours of daydreams, was treated only to the general benevolence that the dullest in the class received, Joyce was singled out for all those kind and intimate words, Joyce alone caught all those special friendly smiles.

Emily quite wondered, as she brooded into the coarse grass, that she did not lose patience with Miss Bates. But that obvious impossibility made her smile shyly, self-consciously, and chew a little faster.

Her third year at school had brought her to Miss Bates: a second year together in fourth class had hardened this—for Emily necessary—attachment into a pleasant obsession. It employed her thoughts; it gave her emotions something to do. While there was contact it would not fade. One-sidedness was its only flaw; she had known what it was once to have something back. Someone once—was it Thea?—had liked her and said so.

Miss Bates's especial charm was that she was logical. The marvellous inevitability with which reason appeared in her least pronouncements gave Emily an almost sensuous thrill. And to be subject to firm, if bulk, direction, was mysteriously of deeper satisfaction than all the amorphous freedom allowed her by Lilian. Truly, the days of the week from nine till three-thirty were bliss!

Hearing the clip of high-heeled shoes on the path, she peered through the roots with frightened eyes and saw the small black kid shoes into which Miss Bates tapered like a genie into a bottle. Oh, undoubtedly ten out of ten for them! Were there ever such shoes!

With a moment's abstracted wonder at her own powers of deduction in correctly timing Miss Bates's appearance here, she ran, bent up, casting furtive glances over her shoulder, to the front gate and waited until she was past. Then, chewing and swallowing, chewing and gulping, she eased herself on to the path and began to trail her plump blue-coated teacher. Meticulous, she had provided herself with a prop in the shape of a rubber ball; with this in her hand, if discovered, she hoped to appear natural.

Plop, plop, plop. The ball bounced from the palm of her hand to the footpath and back again. Plop, plop, plop. And there was Miss Bates turning the corner just ahead.

She could hardly have told, if questioned, why she had today decided on this vertiginous piece of detection. To be found out, reprimanded, would be punishment so acute, so painful and undermining that if she had stopped to imagine the possibility she would surely have desisted. But the impulse, the daring, and the blocking of prudence, had come together in one parcel, and she was carried on now by a high wave of scientific disinterestedness.

The teacher was not a local person; she boarded somewhere in the area—this much Emily knew and no more. She had been worn for months by a dreadful—because unsatisfied—curiosity concerning the private life and personality of the jolly, kind, dependable Miss Bates: at school so firm and mild and sweet, at home—what? Where?

Hundreds of idle hours minus company or occupation had given up thousands of versions. Gazing at ants and grass and earth, she had roamed with Miss Bates through stories gay and tragic. The sticky clay road had opened to reveal to her enthralled eyes such harrowing death-bed scenes as
East Lynne
never knew. In her most desperate moments, suspended on the gate, craftily sucking a clean patch of sun-warmed wood, she would see herself a brilliant hypnotist exposing to Miss Bates's shame-faced bewilderment the real, repulsive little Joyce Hoskins, and the real, endearing little Emily.

An advertisement in a Sunday paper advised her to write for a free prospectus of a course in hypnotism, but when it came with a long letter and a request for five guineas she felt the whole enterprise to be low, unfitting. Miss Bates would be so disappointed if she knew. Besides, who had five guineas?

Nevertheless, her daydreams alone, without the miraculous intervention of hypnosis, served to create a middle plane of existence—neither dream nor reality—where, with Miss Bates as constant companion and guide, with Miss Bates's hopes and expectations to be fulfilled, behaviour had a standard and the world reliability.

Bouncing the soft green ball, Emily turned the corner and saw Miss Bates, about fifty yards ahead, open the gate of an old-fashioned bungalow and go along the path. This was the street where Dotty lived. It was well known to Emily. Even so, having saluted it as the happy dwelling-place of Miss Bates, she was at a loss.

The end of the journey was something she had not envisaged. Her one intention had been to discover where Miss Bates
was
—if such a marvellous creature was anywhere—when she was not at school. That had seemed the limit of desirability. Now she could not help but feel that some more positive satisfaction should be wrung from so enterprising a deed.

What—she threw the ball past the house and fled after it, terrified—what if she could think of some way to get in? Knock and ask for something—an aunt, a scooter.

Miss Bates would come to the door, cry, ‘Emily, my dear. I was lonely. You must come in and have tea with me. An aunt? A scooter? I'll help you find them afterwards.'

She might even say, ‘I'll be your aunt, my dear. In fact, I
am
your long-lost aunt. And you may have the scooter I rode when I was your age.'

No. No. Emily cancelled that. She could not bear to be too optimistic. She stooped over the gutter for her ball and started a slightly more probable conversation.

Recklessly she threw the ball back in the other direction and tore past the house again, glancing at it with such alarm that the brief image received by brain and eyes made her heart bang with shock.

In a daze, she began to hit the ball first with one hand then the other. Dazed, she watched it drop and leap, drop and leap.

On either side of her the squat dull houses sat behind their weeds, rough grass and battered flowers. The yellow road chalked a dividing line between. Above, white smoke streaked the cooling blue sky and the lurid setting sun was wintry, frozen.

She was cold, her courage ebbing. This was the real world and she could not knock. Over there, behind that façade of brick, carved wood and tiles, was a Miss Bates—a short plump Miss Bates with tightly waved fair hair shooting back from her tanned, pink-cheeked face, with round bright eyes behind glasses. No longer the friendly guide, she had become in an instant a stranger, an authoritative stranger, about whose life and circumstances nothing could be wanted to be learned.

Chilled by the black and white of reality, Emily looked for the last time on the windows of the house, and ran.

In the safety of the familiar kitchen, sitting at dinner with her grandmother and Mr Rosen, she listened like a convalescent to their attempts to communicate in code. They seemed so nice. She felt so indulgent towards them. Mr Rosen's ponderousness was balm; Lilian's ignorance of her escapade (which made it seem that it had never happened), her lack of expectation that she, Emily, should do or be or say anything, was as soothing as hot milk by the fire.

Rosen solemnly cut a piece of meat and ate it. He said to Lilian, glancing at her over his rimless glasses, ‘She asked me to return. You'll appreciate that it was very'—he paused, and stressed—‘embarrassing for me, Lilian, at the gates of the works, like that. Everyone saw her.'

‘She's stupid!' Lilian said, and Rosen flushed. He looked at Emily but she composed her face to a degree of childish non-comprehension that reassured him.

He said heavily, ‘She's not
you
.'

‘Ha!' said Lilian, helping herself to more sauce. ‘And when do you go?'

There was no sound but the hissing of the boiling kettle on the stove. The three ate stolidly.

Miss Bates! Miss Bates! Sharp needles of memory pricked Emily till she was crouching persecutedly over her plate, wincing as if at a nagging tooth. Remember what you did! the voices sang in her ear. Remember!

She dragged herself away. She
would
listen to Mr Rosen. It must be that Mrs Rosen, that little woman with the grey hair, wanted him to go home instead of staying here with Lilian. She considered the idea without feeling or opinion. Had George been with his mother when she waited at the gates? George was twelve and had red hair. He was Mr Rosen's only son. In the days when the whole family used to visit Lilian, Emily and George had gone to the pictures while the grown-ups had parties. On the way home they ate hamburgers and talked about outer space, and wondered whether there were people on Mars. She liked George.

Reaction wrapped her in a cocoon of weariness and she went to bed with a willingness that might have made even Lilian suspicious, but Gladys and Billie came early, bringing their newest friends, and another party was on the way.

Very shortly, shrieks of laughter preceded the arrival of more guests. The customary noises of community singing, solos, square-dances, and the clinking of bottles and glasses lulled Emily to sleep.

A flashing figure in a straight dress of thick navy satin, Lilian commanded her willing guests to silence and applause, kept them noisy, kept them moving. The crowd around her in the composite was a restless, harmless amoral creature with winy breath and slippery eyes, an over-mobile mouth, and hair that dipped to a forehead which, as the night went on, grew shiny and flushed.

When Billie had for the third time done her celebrated imitation of bagpipes, guitar, and violin, they left the house and drove in a string of cars to the chromium-plated Ballowra Bowery, overlooking the sea. In a private room they mixed drinks, ate oysters and quarrelled, changed partners and returned from an absence on the beach, the women to smear soft lipstick on mouths suddenly pale, the men to blow noses on fishy handkerchiefs, have another drink, and pat their friends on the back with the generosity of self-congratulation.

Quite suddenly Emily was wakened by the weight of silence in the house. Incredulous, she listened, going cold with premonitory awareness of her solitude.

Oh, it had happened again! The house was in darkness and empty of all life but hers. The mechanical ticking of the clock on the table, simulating life, made her bound from the bed and hurl herself across the room to where she knew the light-switch must be. She knocked herself without feeling against the sharp corner of the dressing-table.

Now the room was an island of light. Outside the night was spectacular with the stars of the south, but moonless; here the rest of the house had yet to be stormed and illuminated. A ferocious expression her only defence against intruders, Emily flew from switch to switch through the house, a streak of red and white pyjamas.

She knew what had happened. They had gone somewhere else to finish the party. And here she was, alone in this brightly-lit oasis with windows through which she could be seen, and seen to be alone. She stood, curled fingers touching her lips, tears held cold in her eyes.

Lilian's insatiable interest in real-life murder stories had done its work on Emily. She had for years been treated to a reading of all the more unpleasant crimes from the Sunday papers, and, when
they
failed, to reminiscences of the famous crimes of Lilian's youth.

Old men with beards pursued small girls through blackberry bushes, strangled them, and remained at large. Small girls were put in bags and drowned. There was apparently no limit to the number of atrocities to which they might not fall victim. Even the avoidance of the most likely situations for murder left them very exposed indeed in a world that seemed bent on the destruction of their species.

Lilian had come to take for granted the frequent nightmares from which the child woke rigid and screaming. She was mildly gratified to think that they showed her as being ‘highly strung' and, consequently, ran Lilian's mind, of noble stock. But other manifestations of the nervousness that she herself had bred and nourished were seen as a taint most surely stemming from the unmentionable side of her parentage.

Now the house hovered round Emily with evil intent. She was trapped, encircled by it. As the impression of hidden malevolence grew stronger, she went into the hall; from there she could watch every doorway.

Then slowly, a moment later, with an accumulation of speed let loose, she made for the front door, threw herself against it and struggled with the lock. Sobbing, she ran down the gravel path.

At once all was different. Up on the gate, if it was cool and black and quiet, it was safer, much safer, than that hideous lighted tomb behind her. Now if they all poured out in pursuit she could fly down the quiet hill calling for help, and people would hear her and come.

For a moment she looked at the stars, let the sight of them soak her; for a moment in the place where she had been was simply black air and a vision of stars.

A hiccough brought her back. She began to make the gate swing to and fro and was, for a time, occupied by the sensation of swinging bravely on a gate in the night. But shortly, feeling cold, the sadness of her position made her cry.

Aggrieved, but scarcely more than that, she grizzled into the flaking paint of the gate and mumbled to herself that her mother would not like this. Miss Bates would not like it. They would be angry if they knew that Lilian had left her alone when she was so frightened. Other people didn't leave people at night. It wasn't nice to have girls swinging on gates so late at night. She would not do that to anyone even if she hated them. It was so mean. But no one cared about her, not really...