The Long Prospect (13 page)

Out of the room, Emily went to the kitchen at a run, dragging on her dressing-gown, breathing deep draughts of the morning air that swept through the house, her eyes unsticking themselves. She beamed in the door at Dotty.

‘'Lo, Em. Give Max a shout in a minute, will you?'

‘I'm going to, Dot.'

In the bathroom she brushed her hair, cleaned her teeth and so lavishly soaped herself that her skin went smooth and shiny as scented marble. The mild flowery smell preceded her into Max's room, beginning another day in which he would be.

She stood motionless while her eyes went over the familiar room; it was sunny and smelt of damp grass for the window was wide and the curtains drawn. No amount of light disturbed Max. He slept profoundly, and was guarded by an expression so austere that the smile faded from Emily's face. As she drew nearer to him she felt her heart beat with awe and terror, yet she could not do other than move closer to the side of his bed.

‘Max,' she whispered. ‘Max. It's time to wake up.'

He came unwillingly to life, pushed his straight hair till it stood on end and automatically threw an arm over the edge of the bed to grope in mid-air for cigarettes and matches. Then he woke up, saw Emily, and grinned at her in such a way that she was instantly reassured. It was him. He had not changed.

She smiled down at him. ‘Hullo.'

‘Hullo, morning glory. Time to get up, is it?'

‘I'll get you a cigarette, then will you race me to breakfast? I'm washed.'

‘That far ahead? Then no cigarette. I'm handicapped enough.'

In the kitchen, which last night had seemed to concur with the idea that it was a study, the lately self-effacing gas-stove wheezed with activity: on it bacon sizzled, under its griller the toast was allowed to burn and sent up acrid fumes and blue smoke. But everyone liked burnt toast.

The percolator, once part of a still-life, bubbled vociferously on the stainless-steel draining board and sent delicious coffee steam into the room. Milk boiled on the stove. Every inanimate device rejoiced in its reinstatement and all joined, in a noisy and appetizing way, in proclaiming this the beginning of a good new day.

Here, last night, and for many nights back, when text-books were closed, Emily and Max had taken up a dialogue that had no end, leaning across the table like antagonists—Max speaking slowly, listening, watching her, smiling and sending up clouds of smoke, Emily, serious, blotting up facts, ideas, and more than anything, a manner of thinking.

Leaning back in his chair when Emily had carried one of the ideas he had thrown forward to a triumphant conclusion, he would say, ‘Perhaps. But look at it from this angle, Em...'

And she would be, at the same time, dashed and fascinated to see the many, many angles to the problem, the ifs and buts and qualifications without which no answer was possible.

As they walked on soft black evenings round the familiar streets, with Emily carefully lengthening her step to Max's long one, they talked poetry, history, astronomy, art, psychology, politics, sense and nonsense.

Concerning life and people the girl was uplifted by something like fear to find that not only were her inclinations not invariably fantastic, but sometimes well thought of, and that on the same side of the fence were Max and people whose names he honoured. It was marvellously cheering. And to know that she, Emily Lawrence, whose name alone—Emily Lawrence—could sound like a phrase meaning stupid and lazy, was thought to be worthy of Max's thought, made her eye herself in the mirror with an altogether new respect. And because she was no longer expected to strive and care for herself alone—to be healthy, to work, to succeed, to be clean and much more for her own sake alone—from matters of simplest hygiene to the most complex matters of thought within her youthful capacity she made great efforts and progress.

Through the open door of the kitchen, and through the window, sunshine came, lighting conflagrations on the yellow china, on Emily's hair, piercing the honey, falling also on the clock, which all were constrained to watch.

‘Last night I saw Max's laboratory,' Emily told Dot. ‘I did an experiment.'

‘What happened?'

‘Nothing much,' she said airily, but Max said, ‘Don't believe her, Dot. A great deal happened without a single explosion.'

Spreading honey on her toast, Emily smiled, and chanted a Latin conjugation. She played it silently over on the fingers of one hand. ‘I know it.'

‘You're a genius. Eat your toast and come out here for a minute,' Max said.

‘What's it mean, anyway?' asked Dotty, but they had both gone, were now standing outside examining the prints of some photographs they had developed.

Looking at them through the open door, Dotty shook her head and concluded, without knowing why, that it was a nice day, that she was in a good mood. Even washing the dishes seemed mildly pleasant, and as long as Dotty could remember she had been washing other people's dishes.

Emily was all right, she thought, and as for Max—he was a bit more. He must be deep. But no airs and graces. No. But if he just sat quiet, looking round—whatever he was doing—you knew he was there. Those big horn-rimmed glasses when he was reading—it was hard to know whether he was ugly or nice-looking. But she liked him. Yes, though he took Em all over the place with him and taught her all kinds of high-falutin' rubbish, he was deep; he could do all that without looking silly, or soft.

Dot felt something for him that she had no name for, that she had never felt before. She resisted it, and was often short-tempered with him, treating him as she treated Rosen and Lilian and everyone else: the difference was that she respected him.

‘Only ten minutes!' she yelled, coming out of her trance. ‘You don't want to miss your bus.'

‘I just have to see these.'

‘It's always something.'

Her morning attempts to be part of the circle of two, her changed way of speaking to Emily were accepted by the girl as part of her increase in value since Max had chosen to find her valuable.

‘If it isn't one thing, it's another,' Dotty confided to the dishes as she swished them through the suds.

Some mornings the excuse would be that Gussie—the blunt-nosed, gallant-eyed mongrel who had adopted the house and its inhabitants—needed company. At other times they would have to examine the fruit trees at the end of the long untidy garden to see what particular miracle—if any—had happened overnight.

Now the photographs were left for Dotty's delectation while the executants walked round to the front of the house, to the letter-box at the gate, Emily leading the way to what was the only puzzle in her mornings—the indifference with which Max regarded his few, mostly official, letters.
Her
letters from Paula and, now and then, short ones from her father were, irrespective of content, irradiated by the distance they had covered. That her attitude was at fault she did not doubt: Max's she could not understand.

She was too young to know the sad sensation of late youth and middle-age, when what is yearned for is not news of a kind relation or friend, but a word from the past to say that old, lost opportunities are yet to be had; that the old loves, canonized by nostalgia, still remembered, are waiting with all the bitter, heavy glamour still intact to take up again, and lead to a happier conclusion, relationships unhappily gone awry.

She was aware only that he was distant from her and, somehow, from himself. Faintly chilled she waited, until he should return, with what seemed a laborious resurgence of breath, consciousness, and energy, to her un-understanding smilingly apprehensive gaze.

Today, though, when she said, ‘It's empty!' he seemed not to care. They continued to walk along the paths around the house, ate two loquats from the tree, talked and were silent; in the end it was she who remembered to think of the time.

Jolting to school in the top of the red double-decker bus she was stimulated to the point of laughter by the memory of the frantic rush—Max quieting Dotty's not very forceful tirade, saying to relax, the world would not end if she was late for once, at the same time doing his best to ensure that she was not.

The memory slipped away. She was in the bus going to school—lurching, swaying.

It gradually dawned on her that a furtive conversation about love and marriage was going on among her uniformed acquaintances. She listened, at first, with a sort of ironic pity, not untinged with complacence. Voices were lowered. Hearts and initials were carved in breath on thick glass windows, and forefingers grew grubby.

‘I know how to find out who we're going to marry,' someone shouted, and immediately cases smelling of sandwiches opened, notebooks and propelling pencils came out. Then, with mysterious schemes of initials and numbers it was ascertained again that everyone would certainly marry someone.

Gazing through the window at the prospect of steelworks Emily expelled Max from her mind. It was unbearable that she should so much as think of him in the presence of her companions. She burned with vicarious shame. As a whispered conversation behind her progressed she grew angry, then anguished, and was not comforted to remember that last year she too, had done her share of whispering and speculating.

She slumped. More whispering. Now they were giggling. She wanted to scream at them, to stand up and denounce them and tell them to grow up or keep quiet. Especially to keep quiet. Hideous inhuman pigs. They had ruined everything. And she was one of them. Unworthy, contaminated. She could go no lower, but she stayed at a great depth for some time.

Then slowly, indignation, anger, common sense, began to burn and blow in another direction. She sat up. Her back straightened. How could she have been so witless as to think that they, or anyone, could damage
that.
It was safe from everyone.

Her exacerbated sensibilities recovered just in time to subside completely—for there was the red school building.

Books opened and shut: three-quarter-hour periods succeeded one another in the silent class-room. A series of women, variously shaped and dressed, came and talked, or were silent while the class wrote and noted through eyes in the top of its hydra-head a way of sitting or of speaking that might be branded different from the norm. The imitation of any such discovery—together with sausage-rolls, spotty apples, cheap assorted sweets and the unveiling of family skeletons—occupied its lunch hour.

During the afternoon, facts and energy drained from the teachers and accumulated in the pupils. Their faces took on added colour and shine, and hands grew dirtier than in the morning. Their collars began to wilt. It was as if, in the midst of learning, they made unconscious preparation for the return to private life, though the necessity for competition—never so urgent as here—kept them a whole.

Only on the homeward journey were the morning's voices reasserted, but more noisily, as a protest against class-room circumspection. Round brown and freckled cheeks bulged with bull's-eyes, and fashionably battered school hats spiralled in the air. Between crunchings and suckings, perfunctory, restless attention was granted the favourite girls of the day, but often shrill voices interrupted them.

After the first of their company had split off there was an air of the rehearsal room about the bus, while attitudes were adopted suitable for presentation to—it was to be
hoped
after all they had been through—impressed, devoted parents. After a little nourishment, a little bracing encouragement, an expression of fear for their nerves and strength had been extended, and graciously received, they might perhaps be ready to deflate and go in search of one of themselves to play with.

Emily no longer envied them these once jealously witnessed joys. She never stood with that disintegrating solitude of the past, listening to the chiding, cherishing reminiscences of another mother and child. She felt nothing for her school friends now but pity—for they were young and ignorant.

Encountering her for the first time that day, Lilian said, ‘Good God! More work? You'll have to clear these things off the table by five o'clock. What are they trying to do, giving you all this? Now listen, I want you to run over to the shop and get some things for Dotty. A pound of butter, half...'

She ran willingly, exulting in her speed, the sky, the evening air.

A few minutes later on the corner, Patty said, ‘Well, it's true you won't go to Heaven.'

(Meeting, they never wasted time on small talk.)

Emily considered this. In spite of tentative requests
her
ear had never been whispered in. It was impossible to pretend that any voices or whispers in her head were any but her own. She knew no one who went to church—except a few Catholics. She said, ‘I don't believe in Heaven.'

‘You'll go somewhere else, then.'

‘You said I would anyway, so...Do you really think only Catholics do?'

Patty nodded. ‘But don't you really?'

‘No. Just don't.' Emily raised airy eyebrows and added with more nonchalance than she felt, ‘You
see
! I'm here.'

‘Oh, well,' Patty struggled to say, aware that her side might seem to have been let down by this obvious truth, ‘you'll find out.'

Being dead. Not one person Emily knew had ever died. She had
heard
about people it had happened to, of course. But it was an interesting fact that no one...

‘Pat!...Do you know anyone who's died?'

The girls juggled their parcels from arm to arm and scraped the soles of their shoes on the footpath.

‘Auntie Mavis and Grandfather Flanagan.'

‘Oh.'

In a moment Patty asked, as if she were offering an alternative to Heaven, ‘Well, can you come to the pictures tonight?'

Max was giving a lecture at the Technical College in town, so Emily said yes.

‘There's something good on tomorrow, too,' Patty said. ‘You're missing everything these days. Can you come tomorrow?'