The Long Prospect (16 page)

There was a pause, then Billie said, ‘You'd never think it to look at him, would you? You know that kind of distinguished...'

‘She was secretive about it,' mused Lilian.

‘I thought you said...'

‘I don't like secretive people, do you?'

‘Oh, no!'

A ruminative pause followed, during which they seemed to think it over, and try to decide at what point to pick it up again.

‘Of course, I never liked her,' Billie confessed.

‘No,' said Lilian, without expression.

‘Of course, there was something about her! Though, I don't remember her very well...'

‘Good eyes. Very good eyes...'

‘Do you think he cared? Just now, I mean. When you said that.'

‘He cared, all right.'

Lilian's manner became increasingly dry as the conversation progressed. It stimulated Billie and had the effect of preparing her for the climax towards which Lilian unconsciously worked.

Billie gave an agitated titter. ‘Romantic, isn't it? Do you really think he still...?' Apparently in answer to a look from Lilian, she protested, ‘But it was years ago. She must be married now. She must be getting on, too.'

‘He's thirty-four. She must be about three or four years older.' Then very casually, ‘And I can tell you another thing. Not married.'

Worked up to exactly the state of receptivity that Lilian demanded, Billie shrieked with anticipation. ‘How do you know? You've got something up your sleeve, I can tell. Come on!'

It was clear that they were enjoying themselves.

‘Wait till you hear! At first I thought I wouldn't, but today I just thought, what the hell!'

Here Lilian went off into a laugh which, as it prolonged itself, found competition in Billie's high giggle. Together they laughed till they were breathless. When Lilian could speak again it was, with renewed spasms of laughter, to compare Thea and Max to two characters in a dirty story.

The laughter rose again, and as it did, there slowly rose in Emily's heart an overwhelming wave of anger. She was submerged in bitter anger.

She got stiffly to her feet. Tears streamed unnoticed from her eyes. She stood looking at the door, bewildered by the intensity of her anger and disgust.

A last shout of laughter from the other room pierced the mass of undirected feeling that burdened her, and she kicked the door violently to make them stop.

‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!' she screeched.

There was utter silence.

Sightless, weeping helplessly, she made for the front door, ran down the path, round the corner and up the hill. She climbed through the fence, in the hot light of the setting sun, and half fell, half ran, down the slippery deserted hillside she had lately climbed with Max.

‘I didn't follow you! I didn't know you were here!' she gasped, affronted and defensive to come on Max at the river's edge.

An uneven line of trees and bushes had prevented her seeing him until it was too late to retreat. Now, hands tensely raised, she paused, the alertness of her pose suggesting that she might at any moment decide to turn and run back the way she had come. Yet she knew, through all the confusion of surprise and resentment, that she would not go: a marble pillar might more easily have uprooted itself and moved of its own volition than she.

She said, ‘I didn't follow you!'

Max looked at her bright defiant eyes. ‘All right. I believe you.' He took a few slow steps along the narrow path of trodden earth that ran parallel with, and two feet distant from, the edge of the river, towards the spot where Emily stood transfixed on the downward curve.

‘Come down. What's wrong? Have you been in trouble?'

She felt herself shut off from him: she felt he scarcely saw her, but at his voice she dropped her hands, shook her head. ‘No,' she said.

‘Come down...' When she was silent in front of him, Max said, ‘What's the matter, then?' But she twisted away and flung to the ground at the very edge of the river. She plucked restlessly at the long withered spikes of grass.

‘Oh, Max, I hate them!' she cried, suddenly still. ‘And you'll hate me now, too.'

He sat down beside her. He was neither pleased nor displeased by her accidental intrusion. Simply, there was an empty abstracted detachment in his manner that he could not shake off.

‘Why should I hate you?' He heard his voice, hollow, rhetorical. ‘Why should I? You'd better tell me what's happened.'

‘I
listened
!' she sobbed. ‘I listened at the door to hear what they were saying about you and Thea and everything.'

He was made weighty, concentrated, feeling, subject again to natural laws—an instantaneous transformation brought about by a word.

‘Did you?' he said flatly. ‘Well, I don't want to know what you heard. And, as it could have been nothing but—to say the least of it—ill-informed, I'd be glad if you'd try to forget it.'

But now that he was no longer looking at her, Emily got to her knees and hysterically addressed the side of his face.

‘Be quiet! I don't want to hear. I don't
care
what they said.'

Voice and tears checked by his hostility, she stared at him for a moment, and then she burst out, ‘
I
do! They said horrible things. They laughed and laughed.'

Max gave a sigh and roughly rubbed a hand over his face. With the other he felt for Emily's head.

‘Stop crying,' he said at last. ‘You'll make yourself sick. Here—wait a minute—I think I've got a clean handkerchief somewhere.'

He gave it to her, and let his eyes rest on the sluggish dark-grey water in front of him. ‘So they laughed...Well, why not?'

Emerging from the handkerchief, Emily, still on her knees, sat back on her legs and looked at him with blood-shot eyes. Her lashes stuck together in frail, damp clumps. It came to her in a sweeping wave of regret as she looked, and caught the echo of his words, that in order to relieve herself she had inadvertently done what Lilian could not do.

She put a hand on his shoulder and shook her head drearily as the tears started again. ‘Oh, no, they didn't, Max. They didn't laugh. Truly, they didn't. Please, Max. They didn't.'

There was a pause. Beside her Max was thin, hunched up, drawn—in pain, because of what she had said. He seemed young, and dreadfully human, as easily hurt as she. Emily gave a little moan.

Trying to respond to the girl's abrupt attempt to undo the damage, and protect him, Max said in a brisk, automatic voice, ‘No? Didn't they? Well, it doesn't matter.' Then he looked at her. ‘Hey, what's this?' he said gently, catching her by the shoulders to prevent her lying face down on the grass in an abandonment of remorse. ‘Stop it, Em, or I'll have to treat you like a little girl and give you a chocolate to make you behave.' He felt in his pockets and added, ‘In fact, I would if I had one.'

Finding something, under his fingers he exclaimed, ‘We're in luck. If you're good I'll give you something.'

‘Oh, really!' Emily deprecated through her tears, smiling, embarrassed that he should carry out his threat. ‘What is it?'

‘A walnut, of all unlikely things.' Max held it between two fingers and gazed at it with vague pride.

‘Oh, a walnut! Oh, really!' They both laughed.

‘Where did you get it?' Emily asked, blowing her nose, laughing weakly.

‘From whom, rather? The why still escapes me.' Max polished the shell on the sleeve of his coat. ‘From that queen of the kitchen, Miss Dorothy Brown. Remember the cake?'

‘The one that had the hole?'

‘
This
should have been in it.'

He wandered away to crack it on a stone, and Emily, watching him, heaved a tremendous sigh in the direction of calm. She leaned over the low bank of the river and trailed a corn-coloured weed through the water.

But Thea, she thought darkly, feeling her heart pound. He loved Thea. More than me, more than me. She was grown-up. They lived alone together.

Calmly and deliberately she undid with her right hand the thin gold bracelet on her left wrist. Had it ever been undone before? No matter, the catch worked smoothly. She held it in her right hand, swiftly glanced over her shoulder, turned again to the river and dropped it in with a little smile of triumph.

Triumph? It dropped from her fingers so willingly, unprotesting; its shining length now made a hummock of gold on the river bed, sank into the river mud.

She felt it was her heart she had thrown away. She felt she had vomited her heart out through her mouth into the river.

‘What's the matter?' came Max's voice.

‘Oh!' She lay back on her elbows, sat up and touched her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing. I felt a bit dizzy...I leaned over too long.' Silently, to the river, or
something,
she apologized: I'm
sorry...
I didn't mean to...I didn't know...

‘Sit still for a moment. You'll soon feel better. Look! Eat this up and you'll be as good as new.' He smiled at her averted face, rallying her.

Limply she took the shell. Her hands felt powerless to lift the kernel out, to so much as support its weight. She had no breath. She was conscious of having sinned, of irreparable loss.

‘I'm eating mine,' Max said, trying to make her smile by keeping up the pretence that she was a child.

Her hand went obediently to her mouth and she nibbled at the nut like an exhausted mouse: she held it to her lips to satisfy and silence the voice that talked to her.

She endured the curious, hollow sensation in head and chest, and thought: I did it myself. She had damaged the root of her earliest memories of good. She had forsworn an old idol: one from whom she had received benefits, to whom she had given affection. And she herself had become lighter, of less value, the victim of a small self-murder.

With a new direction of vision opened up by pain and experience she understood for the first time that it was she who had by far the greatest power to damage herself.

She sighed profoundly and looked at Max: he said, ‘I think we ought to go. It's getting dark.'

He put an arm round her to help her up the hill and she leaned against him, silent and tired. But when he began to speak she moved carefully away and trudged beside but at a small distance from him.

‘When Lilian and her friend talked this afternoon they probably meant no harm. What they said can have no effect on anyone they mentioned, but the thing is...Do you remember Thea?'

‘Yes.'

He hesitated, then said, ‘It may be wrong to involve you further but I think, as you know so much, that you ought to know the truth.'

Briefly, dryly, he told her the facts.

When he first came to Ballowra he had been legally married for four years—though, in fact, less than four months. His wife, Irene, disappeared as she had—he then learned for the first time—after an earlier marriage which had been annulled.

He saw her before she left for a trip abroad to discuss arrangements for a separation, but for various reasons, he said, among them his own reluctance—at that time—to have the subject debated at length, nothing was done. His wife was indifferent.

She came back from her prolonged stay in England shortly before Max left for Ballowra the first time, and they met again. She looked ill. He thought she had been taking drugs. This time it was she who spoke of divorce. She wanted to remarry, but her prospective husband was too prominent, she said—in what sphere Max never learned—to marry a divorced woman. She, she insisted, must be the innocent party. She would start the proceedings at once. Max agreed, and left for Ballowra.

The following day he met Thea. Adult, intelligent, feeling, the opposite of frivolous and yet not earnest, she was the opposite of the popular ideal of her place and time. Then and there, in the cities, great wealth masked a naïvety one would hesitate to call childlike. A contradictory striving after perpetual adolescence, sophistication and an accumulation of wealth were the motives of action. The chief conviction was one of superiority; this was brought about by the Pacific isolation of the continent, and, contrariwise, by trips to a Europe where all the famous treasures were old and frequently dirty, where there were peasants, and the city-dwellers were peculiarly poor. What the fuss was about Europe few Australians could imagine. Not all of them believed in its existence.

To be one of the self-critical minority was to be not so much politically unsound—for there was very little, it seemed, to be political
about
—as thoroughly, disagreeably, un-Australian.

Two members of the small minority, meeting, could not easily part without a promise of further meetings, letters, communication. The opportunity was rare.

For
these
two, only together, it seemed, were they able, for the first time in their lives, to be completely themselves. To share a common attitude, for them uncommon, was to be led to a love from which, once acknowledged, no retraction was possible. Aware of this, they hesitated, and until the letter came from Irene's sister, Christine, eight weeks after Max's arrival in Ballowra, nothing was said.

That day Max showed the letter to Thea at lunch-time, sitting by the river, not far from the place where he and Emily had talked.

The day was cloudy and windless. The river was grey, the grass straggling on to the path cold round their ankles. Seeming to create and stand in their own shade the tattered gumtrees were dark and still.

Thea read. The letter was short. Irene's friend, it said, had learned something about her past, discovered that she was taking drugs and broken off the relationship. She had attempted suicide, and was at present in hospital under treatment. Bartlett, Irene's lawyer, had suspended work on the case. There was no possibility of anything further being done while Irene was in her present state. ‘For your sake,' the letter ended, ‘I'm sorry about all this.'