The Long Prospect (18 page)

Wanting to cry, Rosen said nothing.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I KNEW! I knew!' Billie's head came round the door and she gave a little scream of laughter. ‘Lilian said, “They'll be away for a walk or something,” but I guessed you'd be here. This is Fred. See, they're playing ping-pong, Fred.'

Fred came in after her and grinned sheepishly at Emily, half raising a hand in salute. To Max he gave a wary nod. ‘Yeah,' he said slowly, staring at the table, net, bats, and ball with apparent absorption.

‘Here we are,' Max agreed, not sounding amused. ‘Were you looking for us?'

He waited with an air of tolerant curiosity to hear why they were sought out, while Emily, after an indecisive moment spent watching the spangled apparition leaning against the solid Fred, commenced to bounce the ball up and down, obviously waiting for them to go.

Billie turned from Max delightedly, seeming not to hear, and looked up at Fred as if to say, ‘What did I tell you?'

But she said, ‘There's a party on tonight. I said to Lilian if we had her birthday party at home you couldn't get out of coming, so you're caught.'

‘Lilian's birthday? I didn't know that. In that case I—'

He was not allowed to finish. Running up to him, Billie grabbed his arm with drunken determination. ‘No! You're coming whether you like it or not.' Laughing and gasping she clung to his arm. She smelled disagreeably of wine and cheap cosmetics.

Fred and Emily exchanged a look and he advanced a step or two. ‘Aw, let him alone, Billie, if he doesn't want to come.'

‘He's got to,' she panted. ‘Come and give me a hand with him or I'll yell for the others to come out and help.'

Max detached himself from her, but like a child who will not allow the game to end, Billie put her arms around his waist and, bending double, tried to tug him from the garage by force.

In the hard shadows cast by the single unshaded light over the table, the tussle looked grotesque: the neutral colours of the men, the rough blackish walls against which leaned two bicycles, the dark vacancy at the far end, normally filled by the car, the waxy wood of the long table, Billie's lilac silk back, dark head, and spangled stole.

Max removed her to arm's length where she elected to stay, submissive and arch.

‘If you give us ten minutes to finish the game, I'll come in to see how the party's getting on,' he said, and Fred, rightly taking this as directed at him, led Billie backwards by the elbow to the door. ‘Oke!' he said.

Convinced of her success, Billie tilted her white face at a provocative angle. ‘I'll be watching for you, Max.' She was unaware of the cruelly unflattering light: the three who listened were made despondent by her confidence.

Max signalled his agreement and Fred apologetically turned her round and led her down the three cement steps to the path, and back to the house.

‘Oh!' Emily groaned, leaned over the table and dealt it several sharp nervous raps with her bat. Her head still down, she turned to look at Max.

‘What was the score?' he said, smiling faintly.

Ten seconds later, searching behind a bicycle for the ball, he said, ‘I didn't know it was Lilian's birthday?'

‘It isn't,' Emily said. ‘
She
made it up.'

In the sitting-room were assembled about twenty-six people. Most of the furniture had been removed; what was left—chairs and sofas and a small table or two—was pushed against the walls. The gramophone played; everyone was moving, talking, waving glasses, reflected three times over in the mirrors so that the room seemed grossly overcrowded.

Lilian's voice rang out above the others, over the music, cheerfully inciting her guests to all manner of reasonable excess. That there was more to a successful party than a large number of bottles was an idea conceived by very few of those present—certainly not by Lilian—and she responded with a blank whoop of laughter when Gladys said, ‘You're in great form tonight, Lilian!'

Fortyish, a hairdresser who had lived in the city, Gladys was known as a hard case. Self-conscious in a way that was unusual for a member of Lilian's circle, Gladys was able, when she chose, to manipulate the impulses of her friends into patterns as intricate as those her fingers created on the violet, copper red, and white blonde heads that Emily now gazed at from the door.

Seeing Max come in, Rosen nudged Lilian. ‘What's
he
want?'

‘A drink!' she said, with a soft flash of menace. ‘Go and get him one!'

But before he could make his way across the room, Billie and Fred had hailed Max and taken him off to their corner. Emily stood by the gramophone and watched it all unblinking.

The din was now so great that—as if it were caused by some external natural force—everyone had to shout to be heard above it. Della Griffiths sat sobbing noisily in an armchair by the windows. On the sofa, Gladys and her friend Jack were in a tight, and, as it were, explanatory embrace from which they disengaged themselves to make a point to the couple who stood over them, and then resumed. Rosen had dropped a plate of potato crisps on the floor and was in disgrace.

After fifteen minutes, Max started to work his way across to the door; and as he reached it, caught a story, coming from a group of men, which it was impossible that Emily should not have heard.

She followed him down the hall to the kitchen.

‘I always went to these parties before you came,' she said, before he could reprove her.

‘So I believe. Tonight, though, I asked you not to come.' He sat down at the table and abstractedly fingered some of the papers he had brought home.

Emily pulled roughly at the bobbles on the table-cloth and gulped back her tears, cast down as much as anything by the knowledge that it was her youth that occupied him.

She wanted to explain to him how accustomed she was to most of the things he minded; how drunkenness, occasional violence, smutty jokes, biliousness and hard-breathing demonstrations of what was alleged to be love had been part of the common scene all her life; how she watched it with scorn and boredom if she watched it at all.

‘I'm sorry,' she mumbled, then looking up, leaning her cheek on her fist she added, ‘But it was just an old party. I don't take any notice. They're all mad.'

Clearly this had not been the right thing to say, but a speechless look that asked forgiveness for whatever it was that was wrong made Max say dryly, ‘All right, all right. Now what about some work?'

After lighting his pipe he took out his pen and wrote steadily, covering long sheets of paper, while Emily went over history dates for a term examination due to start in two days' time.

The door from the hall was closed but even so, subdued explosions of sound penetrated from the other room and occasionally someone new to the house would blunder in in search of the bathroom, the end of a laugh still hanging to his face. A stagger of surprise at the unexpected studiousness of the scene, a prolonged explanation of how he had come to open the wrong door, an apology, and then he would lurch out and turn in farther up the hall.

At eleven o'clock Rosen put his head round the door and called Emily out.

‘What do you want?'

‘Listen!' He leaned over her and breathed spirits in her face. ‘We're all going out soon, and you're to go to bed, but not in the front room. You're to sleep in the dining-room.'

‘Who says? Does
she
say so?' It was some time since she had been turned out for the night and Emily fixed him with a suspicious stare.

‘Yes, yes, Lilian says so,' he said hurriedly, glancing over his shoulder. The noise of the party seemed to make him nervous. He started to go away. ‘Now don't forget. The dining-room.'

‘I'll ask her myself,' Emily tested him.

He came slowly back. ‘You'll do what I say, you little—'

‘What's the matter?' Max appeared at the door.

No one answered.

‘You should've been off to bed before this, Em. It's late.' She went at once. ‘No, don't go away, Rosen. I want to talk to you for a minute. Come in here.'

With the patient, exasperated air of one humouring a lunatic, Rosen followed him. He folded his arms. ‘Well?'

‘I heard what you told her.'

‘Well, what about it? What the hell's it got to do with you?'

‘Nothing. What's between you and Lilian is entirely your own affair. My complaint is that you involve Emily. Damn it all, Rosen, she's only a kid. You ought to be able to arrange things without that.'

The older man's face turned a purplish-red. He sputtered, took a step forward. His loose, undefined lips opened and shut. ‘What's it to do with her?' he blustered. ‘What's it matter to her if she's all that innocent?'

Max stared at him in silence. Eventually he said, ‘Did Lilian ask you to tell her?'

He was answered by a change of colour and clenched fists.

‘I thought not.'

‘Do you think she hasn't?' Rosen sneered, smiling, raising his eyebrows. ‘You're making a mistake if you think that, you bloody Boy Scout. She's been moved a few times without your permission, I can tell you that.'

Max regarded him through narrowed inscrutable eyes. ‘It seems an extraordinary arrangement from everyone's point of view. It can hardly be satisfactory.'

‘Huh!' Rosen muttered gloomily. ‘You don't know Lilian!' After this confession of weakness he moved closer to Max, and with the drunken necessity to emphasize speech by physical contact, poked at his shoulder with a plump forefinger. Max stood impassive. ‘Have it your own way. Go on, go on! Don't think it'll make any difference to me. Tell your little friend to stay in her own bloody little bed. That's fine. That's all right. But just take a bit of advice, Mr Max. Find yourself somewhere else to live. I've got a feeling you won't be here much longer. I can do
some
things with Lilian, you know.'

When, with many backward glances and muttered threats, he had taken himself from the room, Max went outside to get some air. The noise of the party spilled out through the windows. He was angry.

There was an unhealthy pervasive quality—almost viciousness—in Lilian's relations with Rosen; in the inconsistency of her attitude, and in the feeble, constant pressure of his. They made the climate of the house too close, too strained, too charged.

If Emily's presence was considered at all in respect to the situation between them it was by Lilian, as useful, adding to the tension, by Rosen as obstructing.

Truly she was the responsibility, primarily, of her parents, but, having agreed to accept the charge, Lilian rendered herself liable to criticism if she neglected to provide a minimum of attention.

Liable to criticism from whom? Max asked himself. Not, apparently, Paula or Harry Lawrence. Not Rosen or Dotty or Billie. According to their standards Lilian did very well indeed. Emily was housed, fed, and clothed; she was not expected to do housework; she was allowed to go three times a week to the pictures and had done so, before he came. She was irregularly given by Lilian some pound notes or a pile of silver. Witnesses at these ceremonies, without moving their too-bright eyes from the pile of money in the girl's hand, exclaimed on Lilian's generosity, Emily's luck. Very soon, ‘She's lucky' was ‘She's spoilt'.

What did it all prove except that their standards were not his? If they had looked after her in
any
respect, he thought, he might have found their reasoning easier to follow. But it was...it was as if, being young, her connexion with the human race was very simply discounted.

No external excuse, no lack of this or that fine feeling could be counted as justification. Nothing could undo the harm these casual people had done. Yet, Max argued, they were themselves and lived as they could, and had not been wisely treated either, very likely.

It made no difference. Tonight he could not convince himself that they mattered so much—not so much as Emily. It was not possible that they had ever been what Emily was, or that she would grow to be what they now were. The principle of equal rights was denied before birth when the limits of capacity and human quality were set differently for each separate being. If, following that line of reasoning, no one was to be blamed for his behaviour, and impartial justice to be administered according to the capacity and quality of the individual, why was there the implacable sense of outrage, of deep dismay and reprobation when pain was inflicted unthinkingly? It was too easy to exempt from responsibility those who felt no responsibility for their actions. Too easy, reductive, wrong.

Remembering the scene in the kitchen his anger stirred again. He was aware that Emily saw the loveless tension between the two; that she accepted it calmly in no way exonerated them in his eyes. He knew that she had little time and few thoughts to spare for Lilian and Rosen now, whatever it had been like in the past. What troubled him was the knowledge that the present was the interlude, and the past and future the bulk of her life.

Slowly he climbed the steps up to the veranda, and passed across it, disturbing an amorous couple.

Knocking at Emily's door, he said good night and told her to stay where she was.

A week later, on the way back from the hotel, Rosen had stopped the car, the better to answer Lilian. Now, in spite of her repeated requests that he should take her home, he sat stubbornly clutching the powerless wheel, monotonously asking, ‘But why? Why? What have I done? What's wrong?'

Through the grey stormy evening light Lilian looked at him with detestation, tightly crossed her arms, clenched her teeth and after a sharp breath of exasperation said, ‘Because you're a great loafing bastard, that's why! You've had all the gold watches and signet rings and suits you're going to get. You've just been a bit too damned smart once too often. Making up to her in
my
house! Talking big to
my
friends! Feeling so grand in all the things I've given you! Trying to tell me what I should do!' She shook her head and snorted with irritation. ‘Well, you've made a mistake.'