The Long Prospect (14 page)

‘Max's taking me to the dentist and then I don't know where. He's made about six appointments for me.'

‘What for?'

‘Dunno. Suppose because I had toothache last week. I wish I hadn't told him.'

A penetrating call from Patty's mother, seen irate on the veranda, waving an arm at them, broke up their session, made them run home with their parcels.

Craning over to look at her watch, Emily stumbled and almost fell when she saw that it was five o'clock—time to meet Max.

Not six but nine appointments spread over three months saw a few teeth extracted and more filled. On the corner of the street, nursing a pound of beans and a loaf of bread, Emily opened her mouth to Patty. At once, her tonsils, or some other ancient organ, blocked her breathing.

‘Hurry up!' she complained, unintelligibly. ‘Can't you see
anything?
'

Patty concentrated. After a minute, ‘Yes! Two big ones at the back. I bet they hurt. Your tongue's red.'

‘Cherries. Have some. Didn't hurt much. He gave me injections. Oh! I have to go, Pat. I'll be late for Max.'

‘Why are you always going to meet him? You like him, don't you?'

‘Yes.' Emily was insulted.

Patty chewed, swallowed, spat four stones into the gutter. ‘But, why, Em?' she asked, with a kind of inattentive persistence. ‘He's old. We're only young.' Four cherry stones in the dust. Tinker, tailor, soldier,
sailor...

‘Young! Young's got nothing to do with it. What's the difference? I'm
me.
What's young got to do with it!' Emily ranted with an adult irritability that brought Patty back from ships and the sea.

‘Oh, all right.'

They walked slowly backwards away from each other, talking.

‘But I still can't see why you've got a crush on someone so old.'

‘If you say that again I won't speak to you.'

‘Oh, phooey!'

Turning, heads in the air, they skipped and ran away from each other, looked back, once each, at different times. Emily took her parcels inside.

A crush, Patty said—a funny unworthy word to describe a funny unworthy state of mind. But not hers, Emily thought, almost grimly.

Away from Patty, preparing to meet Max, there was a shifting of key in Emily, a translation to a deeper level of reality, a translation to herself.

By Patty's words she
had
been insulted; she no longer was. It was as if, before, she had responded childishly according to age, according to Patty's expectations: together the two girls were younger than they were apart. Now a kind of mature confidence in her own judgement made it unnecessary to defend herself or her feeling to Patty.

Even those times in the past, the feelings for those other people, she could not dishonour with that word. From most of them, as far as she could remember, there had been little to be learned. She had had to hold them in spite of themselves, had had to admire in spite of her own instinct, had deliberately courted and willed obsession. She had no word for it; she simply knew what it was not. It was not what girls of her age felt for boys or girls of her age, or for their teachers.

At first, to Max, her reaction had been uncomplicated devotion and delight. She was entranced by the diversity of her entertainment. But she had known all along that it was not like anything else that had happened to her.

And one night, for no reason, she knew something more. Her simple belief in simple happiness dissolved as she apprehended almost with alarm the expanding complexities of her life, the perverse emotions, the dangerous strength of her untrained will, full of potential power and threat as an unconnected live wire. She came to a newer understanding of her feeling for Max.

Her feet were nowhere; she was aghast at the immensity she glimpsed. She experienced a sensation of joy, beside which, in inverse proportion to which, she discovered a bright fear for the future. For what was Max to her? What could he ever be?

Max lived, she had inarticulately grown to know, not with happiness, as she had easily supposed, but resignation. That this was all that by
her
side could be achieved, dismayed her. What then could he feel for her?

A tormented desire to know
exactly
what he felt for her became increasingly insistent. Her eyes asked it. In a moment which might before have been the victim of boredom, this question dwelt. She and it revolved together tightly.

Only the most intense perversity—prompted by a relentless desire to
know,
to make someone
say
—could have made her pretend to doubt, against reason and belief, the interest and generosity with which she was treated, or the affection from which it sprang.

She would swerve from a rigorous pretence of hurt and misery to a voluptuous, certain belief that she was seen and felt. What did the reason matter? Whether it was because he indiscriminately liked children, or because he pitied her for being stupid, or neglected, or hideous or awful—anything—as long as she knew. She
would
have affection on any terms.

In bed, in the nights after days of utter contentment, her thought would flicker over conversations, in which she found much that was satisfying, sustaining, if not perfect. But she wanted perfection, impossible declarations. She knew she coveted eternal assurances of love; she knew the impossibility; she knew her age. But that adult balance and proportion that she so revered, she longed to overthrow. It was a serious, honourable thing.

No, what she had was not perfect, but so nearly so that when she made the words and pictures of the day play over, there was still to be found in the midst that extraordinary pang—of love, was it, or gratitude? She often intended, and as often feared, to exercise it further.

Hastily, one night she turned from the memory that induced that heart-felt pang of pain and delight. Tossing round in bed the sensation faded. She held the dammed-up knowledge back a moment longer, and then began to feed again to her slow-thumping heart, the memories of the day, realized anew. She was valued! She was valued! The thumping and the tenseness dissolved in slow, self-conscious, thrilling tears. They fell briefly.

Repelled by a moment of cold insight, she stopped dead, and after a breath, cut contemptuously through the profusion of curiosity, flagellation, and false sentiment in which she had entangled herself. In the darkness her expression became bleak, almost austere.

There were no protestations and recriminations: there had already been too many, too misused. What she wordlessly knew was that feeling should not be tinkered with and too much handled; that warmth began where protestations ended, that hearts and wills and feelings, even adults', were not toys to be manipulated. Protestations were for those others, for Lilian and Paula, and all their world, but not henceforth, for her.

It was Tuesday night. It was midsummer. Emily left the house by the side entrance and walked to the top of the hill. Behind her, below her, lay the last trickle of streets of Ballowra's most isolated suburb. Beyond them was flat marshy country, rich, vulnerable to floods, through which the main road stretched to join the cities and towns of the coast. At the point where Emily had stopped, another road ran at right angles along the crest of the hill. She had walked up from the valley of corrugated iron rooftops and on it now turned her back: on the other side the hill sloped, all pale greeny shiny grass, dry and polished, down, down a long way to the river where the factory stood. Though more than twenty years old it was considered new for a place like Ballowra, had had to penetrate further along the river than was desirable for lack of space in more accessible areas. It was at a distance of three-quarters of a mile, or perhaps a mile, from the top of the hill.

To the right and left the same green slope continued its long downward roll to a river which, under the bluest sky, remained opaque, strangely colourless, its width so flawed by small tree-covered islands that its far bank was invisible, merging at some undetected point with the plain of dark treetops that extended to the hills on the horizon.

Apart from the four brick buildings of the factory there was one other to be seen—or part of one: the old monastery. Its roof, rising from among the trees on the other side of the river, was singled out each afternoon by the sun, and the mellow red flared among the unlit dark blue-green. When sometimes in the evening a wind or a stillness carried the sound of bells across the water people paused at their tasks, or their pleasures, listened as if trying to translate from some half-forgotten language. Women sighed, without knowing why, perhaps at an idea of pale, smooth-faced, black-robed men, dedicated, eyes uplifted.

Among the local men, as tales do, tales did go round, each addition to grow inevitably so lush that credulity was sacrificed and a new story begun.

To Emily the monastery's isolation was poetic, therefore admirable, and, too, it gave a kind of romantic focus to the valley which, in smoke-ringed Ballowra, was to be valued fiercely. Bearing the responsibility for all that was harsh and ugly she nevertheless most relievedly had this to offer Max as a symbol of something fine, as, inexplicably, a concrete symbol of her aspirations in regard to him, to the future, and to virtue in general.

Now she turned benevolent eyes from it and, ignoring the motor-road to the factory, climbed through the wire fence and glided down the hill.

Leaving his laboratory, Max waved and started to walk up to meet her. In a matter of seconds her flight neared its end.

‘I'm going so fast I can't stop,' she shrieked, approaching with outstretched arms.

‘Look out!' Deftly catching her, Max swung her sideways so that she collapsed laughing on the grass.

‘We'd better sit down till you get your breath back.'

The vast sky of a vast unmisted land shone bright and hard in the light of the afternoon sun. The earth was warm. In the far, far distance, touching the sky, were some faint unknown hills or mountains.

Emily coughed, yawned and gasped for air while Max banged absent-mindedly at his pockets in a search for his cigarettes. He took off his coat, forgot what he had wanted, and stretched his arms lazily. He smiled at her. ‘Well...?'

Frank, yet guarded, she halted in her pantomime to return his look. She looked at him stilly with a frank expression covering her face. ‘Hullo.'

There was a pause. Max said, his voice touched with amusement or perplexity, ‘What goes on in your head?'

Released, she smiled slowly, innocently, and said nothing.

‘What's been happening today?' Max said. ‘What did they have to say about your essay? And
what
are you looking so pleased about?'

She was enveloped in smiles. ‘Just pleased,' she said and went on to tell him the events of the day.

They both breathed and yawned and looked at the sky. After a moment Max said, ‘Oh, I heard from those college people again today.'

Emily felt a throb of jealousy. ‘What did they want?' She looked from her shoes to his eyes, and turned to unsheath a pale round stem of grass with idle fingers. Looking back at him she bit the tender dark green segment of new grass. It tasted sweet.

‘They liked that lecture I gave a few weeks ago. They asked me to do a series, but it would mean going along there most nights in the week so...'

Penetrated by the acuteness of Emily's listening silence he gradually slowed down and finally stopped altogether: she was desperately afraid.

Max was appalled by what he could feel of her strain. He went on, ‘So, of course, I'm going to refuse. I have plenty to do.'

A single tear of relief eased all her fear. It made a dark stain on the lemon and white check of her dress. ‘That's good,' she said, in a constricted voice.

‘I suppose it is,' Max said heavily.

Dark swarms of men emerged all at once from doors at various points round the factory buildings less than half a mile below the spot where they sat: automatically they got to their feet and began to walk on.

‘I would have hated it,' Emily admitted cheerfully, feeling nothing now that the danger was over, stripped of all the cramping reticence imposed by the emotion of the previous moment.

Max deliberately changed the subject and they kept up a facetious debate which petered out as they reached the fence and climbed through. Waiting for a bus to pass before they crossed the road, they stared at each other in silence.

‘What's going to happen to you, Emmy?' Max asked at last, as if by hearing the words he might more easily arrive at an answer.

Thrown back on herself she looked at him in wonder, wondering what he meant. ‘Me? When? Nothing. I don't know.'

They went quickly downhill. Approaching the house they saw, to Emily's displeasure and apprehension, that Patty stood at the corner waiting, her hand lifted in a tentative wave. With a terrifying smile Emily flapped back at her to signal that they were not on any account to be waylaid. Thankfully she saw that the message had been received and accepted; after a stationary moment of working-up, Patty skipped off in the other direction, her fair hair bobbing on her shoulders.

‘Max? What's the matter? What did you mean up there when you said...?'

This evening had seemed the same as any other: she could examine every word of their conversation without finding one to account for this strangeness in him, this withdrawn, almost angry air about him.

She could not know that the reason lay in her own eyes, in the look she had turned on him, in the emanation of panic that sprang from her and sat between them like a ghost.

That petrified stillness and silence, that look in the unmoving eyes that said, ‘I can't bear it if you go,' had been borne with a restraint completely adult; yet the abrupt change to youthfully naïve confession had been equally natural. Now that it was over she seemed protected from a knowledge of the duality of her response.

Max was assailed by weariness and doubt. Until tonight he had not seriously believed that any harm could come to her through him. While not underestimating her attachment because of her youth, he had imagined that what he gave in return was stuff of a kind likely to endure and benefit her after his going, that in the balance he did more good than harm. Yet the fact remained, he thought, that she had looked on his temporary absence from the house as if it were a prospect she could not endure. With others, he knew, she was often dramatic, but not with him, and what had happened this evening had been the opposite of the theatrical.