The Long Prospect (28 page)

‘Oh!' She banged some cushions about and shook herself into a new position. ‘Well, I don't know. The whole thing just had to be put a stop to and now it is, that's all I know.'

Thea walked slowly across the room, away from her, towards Emily. She put a white-gloved hand on the girl's shoulder and said her name.

‘I don't think there's anything I can do. I'm sorry. But don't cry. Don't cry.'

Emily said, ‘I know where he is. The Promenade Hotel, in town.' She felt a moment's alteration in the slight pressure on her shoulder.

‘Thank you for telling me.'

Having regretfully acknowledged that her part in the scene was over, Lilian had been sitting slumped, staring at Thea's back. With an effort she pressed her hands to her knees and stood up.

‘Well, what's she telling you now?...Oh!' She studied their faces. ‘She knows where he is. Oh, well, good luck to you if that's how you feel. You won't have any trouble getting him back, believe me.'

Then as if the silent Emily had screamed, she said, ‘Listen to her! She won't like this. I said you'd put a spoke in her wheel.'

Thea put a hand up to the door. Lilian ducked back. Thea said, ‘I ask you, for God's sake, for your own sake, not to say any more.'

They reached the front door.

Lilian said, ‘There's the car! Oh, forget all this, why don't you? Stay and have some tea and a talk to Paula. There's no need to rush away because of this. He'll be there for weeks yet.'

Thea turned to Emily, who was clinging to the veranda post. She looked at her speechlessly. Quickly she said, ‘Goodbye, my dear.'

She was gone. The gate squeaked shut.

Emily and Lilian exchanged a look. Paula ran breathlessly up the passage to the veranda. ‘Was that
Thea
? Did you ask her here, Mum?'

Lilian's eyebrows rose. ‘And why shouldn't I? Whose house is it? She's off to see him. Everything's all right. I don't know what you're getting so excited about.'

But her daughter had run back inside to collapse on the bed.

‘Place is like a madhouse,' Lilian muttered. Catching sight of Rosen she flapped her arms at him. ‘Put on the wireless.'

She gazed out, like a ship's captain from his eminence, at the empty street. Paula was right. Greenhills
was
depressing. Discontented, she gave a sigh. She had meant to make a few conciliatory remarks about Max just to be on the safe side, but somehow things had happened too fast at the last moment, and now Thea had gone.

Biting her lips she went heavily back to the sitting-room, and was cheered as she approached it by the sound of an advertisement. That meant the three-thirty had not yet been run.

Emily stopped at the corner, her knees locking to counteract a sudden desire to give in, to sit down. She could see Thea at the top of the hill. At this longed-for, unexpected, reprieve she hung back, unable to remember what it was she had intended to do or say when she left the house.

Obviously the time for everything was past; only some stubborn necessity provoked her against reason to seek the anti-climax of another meeting.

Thea had walked very slowly, she thought, beginning to run again. She would catch her and tell her—what it was her fevered mind for the moment kept her from knowing. All she knew was that her final desertion, their reunion, their forgetfulness of her, their happiness, her immolation, must be postponed.

And running, she felt the bracelet drop from her fingers, felt again the fall, the loss, remembered the flash of gold in the river. Was this the punishment? She could not deny its justice.
That
had to be told whatever else was said.

Abruptly, at the thought, she slowed to a walk, came almost to a standstill, light-headed, incapable of bringing up the wordless thoughts that surged below the surface, unable to localize the intense disquiet of her being.

But Thea had disappeared, crossed the road, and was out of sight. In a panic Emily heard a bus in the distance and threw herself forward again.

Now she was at the top of the hill. A little to the left a red double-decker bus had halted. She was too late.

As it started up and, slowly, approaching the cross-roads, drew level, she walked to the edge of the road and narrowed her stinging eyes at its many windows. She lifted an arm to shade her eyes. She was nothing. She felt nothing.

‘
Thea
.'

In the empty bus, at an open window, Thea heard and turned her head. She lifted a hand, and then the bus disappeared through the tunnel in the yellow cliffs.

Emily's arm, bare and meaningless as a vacant flagpole, fell to her side.

CHAPTER TEN

IT WAS late afternoon. Outside, a low sky of clay-coloured clouds hung full of threat. There was a sound of distant thunder and occasionally from the clouds, or above or behind them, came a flash of sheet lightning.

Quick-changing variations of darkness had made it necessary to switch on the lights and the effect was to give to the bedroom the artificiality of a stage-set across which the two girls moved with a certain consciousness.

Interested in the clear yellow of her skin, Patty sat at the dressing-table and examined her face minutely in the triple-sided mirror. Emily, wearing a new woollen jumper suit of hard red, stood over the suitcase and gazed at the harmless pile of clothes that was packed in it.

‘That's the lot now,' Dotty said, coming silently in on her felt slippers. She handed Emily a bundle of white silk school blouses, still warm from the iron. ‘How's it going?' Pausing to find a shoulder-strap, she winked at Patty, looked uncritically at the suitcase, and sniffed and sighed vaguely.

‘All right...But look, Dotty. What can I do with all my books?'

‘Oh, are you still going on about that?'

‘Well, I've got a few little ones on the bottom, but Grandma wouldn't let me put them all in and now it's full, and she says I can't carry them loose...' Lilian's opposition to her every plan for their transport had been off-hand, as if she knew that she need no longer exert herself to rule.

Dotty said, ‘Well, what do you think I can do about it?'

The three of them looked in silence at the books on the floor—Dotty, Patty, stolid and bored. ‘Oh, what do you want all them for anyway?' Dotty said at last. ‘They're not even stories, are they? Some of them?'

She privately agreed with Lilian, who had cursed Max for leaving a pile of old books that no one wanted as a further source of trouble.

Catching the girl's enigmatic blue eyes on her, she wiped her hands down the front of her apron and said indifferently, ‘I don't know. Get them the next time you come up, why don't you?...O-oh! Here it comes, and I've still got things on the line...' And off she fled down the passage and out into the back yard, for, with a tremendous, preliminary battery of thunder the rain had started, came down solid and pounding.

Unnoticed, the spray from it blew in the window and dampened the thin curtains.

Emily put the blouses in the case.

‘Don't you ever do your own ironing?' Patty asked, knowing.

‘No.'

‘Don't you know how?'

‘No.'

‘You're spoilt, aren't you?'

New red jumper suit, new this, new that.

With an effort, Emily threw up a tinny unconvincing smile. The unexpectedness of this small attack momentarily knocked her off balance, deprived her of another unit of energy, almost, it might fancifully have been felt, lessened her chances of survival.

She took a breath and knelt beside the books. With palms flattened she pressed heavily on the clothes in the suitcase. Nothing gave. It was really full.

Patty said in an absorbed voice, ‘My skin's as soft as soft.' She caressed her pretty round cheeks with her fingertips and smiled. Swinging round on the stool she looked at Emily with flattering attention. ‘And I like your nice dark shiny hair, Em.'

Shiny dark hair. It sounded like poetry. Emily had to go to the mirror.

‘And the way you look sometimes, you know, the way your eyes look—I like that. I think we're both rather unusual and interesting, don't you?'

Solemnly, side by side, they gazed.

Forehead, nose, mouth, teeth, ears, neck, shoulders, red jumper suit, shiny dark hair: it was all there, and all right, but eyes...Emily went away. Eyes knew too much.

Lilian came in surrounded by scent and spirits, bound, squeezed, tied, pinched into her clothes—the general darkness and tightness of her ensemble indicating beyond doubt that she was dressed in her best and dressed to go out.

She said cheerfully, ‘Are you nearly ready?'

She had about her tonight something of the swashbuckling air of a principal boy, and when she accidentally knocked over some books she started back, pointing to one in exaggerated amazement as if she were indeed playing a part. ‘Good God! What's that? Chinese?'

The girls giggled. ‘Greek.'

‘Well,' Lilian said, ‘that was a queer thing to give you. Fat lot of good. You'd better get these into the other room. You can get them when you're up another time.'

Patty tittered. She could smell whisky. She hoped Emily's grandmother was drunk.

While Emily gathered up the books and left the room, Lilian shivered at the sight and sound of the rain. She gave a small exclamation of annoyance when she saw the open windows and went to close them. ‘Don't you girls ever think?'

Patty watched.

It was three months since Max had gone. Since then, Rosen had been despatched back to his wife and son, and the friendship of the jolly Mr Watts had been secured. Harry and Paula had had three weeks alone in their new Sydney flat; tonight Emily was to join them. Tomorrow Mr Watts was moving in as a boarder, and Dotty, whose mother had recently died, was bringing her luggage round, full of relief at the solution Lilian had offered to her homelessness.

‘Changes, changes!' Lilian said, scrabbling in her handbag for her wallet. She took from it a five-pound note to give to her granddaughter. ‘How's your mother?' She eyed Patty. The two women had an old unsettled quarrel and communicated now, when necessary, through the two girls.

‘She's fine,' said Patty soberly.

‘And she said you can go to stay with Emily in your school holidays?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good. Now you'd better put on your coat and tell Emily to get ready. We'll be going in five minutes.' And Lilian dabbed on more scent and went back to the sitting-room to finish her drink with Mr Watts.

Emily put the books on the empty shelves and closed the door of the room. It was all now so tidy, so bare, so devoid—apart from herself—of all that was Max. Had he ever existed?

‘Max?' Self-consciously, her lips parted; without breath she framed his name, but somewhere she was betrayed for the end of the word came out with a little hiss that sounded absurd in the empty room.

During these months she had been poised, weightless with expectation of a word, a sign, a catastrophe—the sun and moon colliding with the earth: anything seemed possible, and anything catastrophic, desirable. Like an exile from her homeland she waited for a message from home—a place which must exist somewhere outside the prescribed perimeter of her journey to school, outside the fence around the house, beyond the shopping centre in Greenhills, on the other side of the river where she had never been.

At school she had worked with fanatical thoroughness as though she sought to wrest from the facts some meaning other than the logical, the architectural. In the house she was unobtrusive as a shadow. ‘You wouldn't know she was here,' Lilian assured Paula on the telephone. ‘She's as good as gold now that—now.'

But under the listless surface was a hot, gushing, weak but uncontrollable animal that lifted its arms and exhausted her with meaningless tears—when she broke an old saucer, for instance; at any sudden noise, or small accident. These periodic spasms of weeping she accepted as freak storms, and ignored.

Her chief preoccupation since Lilian had given the date of her departure for Sydney had been to secure that she should take with her what Max had left and, with less compulsion, the few old toys, the odd dishes she had owned since early childhood. They were the only reliable proof she had of having existed in the past—for no one but she recalled her presence then—and as such they were of value to her. Her desire for them had been instinctive, but now that she was not to have her way, she relinquished them without protest. For of course Lilian had said, referring to the toys and books, ‘There'll be no room for any of that junk. I'll give them away, you never look at them.'

The two chipped china mugs, the three small plates with painted figures, Emily had not liked to mention, unwilling to give herself away for so fruitless a cause. And anyway, when it came to it, what did they matter? Now, to her, less than the Pyramids.

Tonight she was going. Not for months or years, perhaps never again would she be in the room where Max had lived, where he and she had talked and said goodbye. She stood at the side of the bed and looked at the rough weave of the yellow cover.

Where
was
he? With Thea? Would they always be together? Were they happy? Did she want them to be happy without
her
? No. No, she did not.

She felt the thing within her rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall.

‘Crumbs!' Patty said. ‘What're you doing—just standing in the dark? Come on. We've got to get ready. We're going.' Patty was off.

Lilian threw on her fur coat and jolly Mr Watts stood behind her helping to adjust it, his pleasantly plump and unwrinkled face looking very clean, very shaved, and rather mischievous.

‘Well, here she is,' Lilian half sighed, half sang, seeing Emily. ‘Off to the big city she goes. Ah, we've had some good times.' She laughed up at Mr Watts. ‘I'll miss her, you know, though she's a little devil sometimes. Always singing, always singing...'