The Long Prospect (11 page)

By the time she left the house, the stranger had his coat off, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, and, Emily watching at a distance, had transferred the suitcases to his room.

Now he unfastened the padlock of a chest and, lifting the heavy lid, scooped up two armfuls of books. Emily goggled, came forward. ‘I'll take some.'

They made several trips from the dark veranda down the lighted hall to his room and, when the chest was emptied, carried it in.

Satisfying herself that the man, withdrawn, methodical, was occupied with his unpacking, Emily gazed over the room—at the assortment of luggage, the heaps of books. Loving sensation, she abandoned herself to the alternate gusts of exhilaration and compassion that swept over her.

His bare brown arms worked over his luggage; she saw the white shirt, the tie hanging down as he leaned over something on the floor.

But her job was over; it was her business to get out of the room and leave him in peace. Reluctantly, hands behind her back, she began to inch her way out—but not altogether silently; she wanted him to notice.

‘Going? You don't have to. Stay and look at the books if you like.' He was abstracted, but he still
saw
when he looked, and meant what he said. She was convinced of that.

‘All right.' Willingly she dropped to her knees and began to lift the books, reading the titles, opening some, handling all with respect. He was stuffing things into drawers, and hanging things up. She sat on the floor and started to work systematically. Absorbed, she was silent for a long time, but suddenly she said, ‘What's this?'

‘What've you got?' He came over. ‘Oh, that. Latin. You haven't seen it before?'

‘No. I might soon be doing it, though, Mrs Salter says.'

‘Who is that?' he asked, and Emily told him more, in a few words—with a curious mixture of willingness and fear—than she had ever told anyone. She finished up, showing him the book again, ‘Can you read this, though?'

‘I know that one fairly well. But most of the others—no, unfortunately. I've forgotten it all. There isn't'—he zipped up a bag and put it against the wall—‘there isn't enough time.'

Mentally, Emily shrugged and raised her eyebrows. He was nice, this man, but what did he mean? Time. That was one thing there was too much of. He was, after all, a bit nuts like all grown-ups.

With cagey, critical eyes she watched him roll down his sleeves and stack one empty bag inside another. He noticed her again, and said, ‘Don't wait to ask if you want to take any of those any time.' He paused, and looked at her for what seemed a long time, in a serious, searching way—yet as if he knew her. It was a bit confusing and embarrassing, especially in view of what she had just thought about him, and especially when he didn't look exactly happy about it. She wriggled and fiddled with some books, then, spotting a dark red box from which the man at that moment lifted a raincoat, said, ‘Oh, is that a gramophone?'

With an effort he responded to her expression of repressed delight. He said, ‘Do you know how to work it? Would you like to play something? I wonder what?'

She couldn't think. ‘Yes, but you say. I don't know. ...Are you going to stay here?'

Plugging in the machine, he told her where he had come from and what he would be doing in Ballowra. Because he was more than tired he gave a heavy sigh, half groan, half sigh, as he knelt beside the girl on the floor to explain how to use the machine.

And Emily, kneeling there, listening to his voice, watching his hand point to a piece of mechanism, turn a knob, suddenly felt at a great distance, was conscious of his unconsciousness of her, of his mechanical concentration on the task he was performing for her, and she felt a wave of compassion for him. She felt a small physical reaction on her spine to the suddenly strange, living humanity of the man beside her.

‘Yes, yes, I see,' she nodded dreamily. ‘I understand.'

The music started. The chairs were littered, so Max sat down on the bed, then leaning forward, lifted a packet of cigarettes and his lighter from the dressing-table.

If there was one thing he had not expected this morning, on the plane, he thought, it was that at half past nine he would be in the room where Thea had lived, in the house with people she had spoken of, the child she was fond of.

Whatever record it was he had chosen, he never knew.

A spiral wall was woven by the music—a tower from which Emily leaned at leisure, to gaze out over strange lands and fancies. She listened to Wagner's trumpeting with a quite incongruous sensation of peacefulness. There was a man in the house, with a man's different voice and look. The vitiating femininity of life in the house was balanced; authority rightly centred.

His head wreathed for an instant in smoke, the man listened with eyelids reflectively lowered. He was not young. There were lines on his forehead. He had at the same time a look of sorrow, and a look of humour. Now and then he raised an arm as if it were stiff, or troubled him.

Into an extraordinary quiet, Emily finally said, ‘I think it's finished.'

And not smiling at being caught, but not angry either, she thought, he stood up and ground out the butt of his cigarette in a green glass ashtray. He forgot to mention the music, but frowning, said to himself, ‘I'd like to leave the rest of this for tonight.'

Emily scrambled to her feet. Reminded of her, he said at once, with an inexplicable change to cheerfulness, ‘What do you think, Emily? Do people call you Emily or Emmy? Either? Both? Anyway, what do you think, yes or no?'

She was hypnotized by his confidence and his interest. She shook her head more in wonder than answer.

He gave her a quizzical look. ‘No, we don't do it?'

‘I'll make the coffee,' she said breathlessly.

In the kitchen she went from cupboard to sink to stove. The man found cups and saucers, competently cut the raisin bread and stood by the griller while it was toasted. He was not far away now, but talking as if she were grown-up, about her, about himself, giving himself away to her. She was his. She knew that she would always have to be what he expected her to be. She knew it with a feeling almost of sadness. It was a journey's end.

At the same time, she was lifted off the ground with a high childish glee at being taken under the wing of the enemy—the adults—into the enemy's camp. She yearned to tell one of her tribe—Patty, anyone.

Sitting at the table, drinking coffee, Max said of the kitchen, looking round, ‘I wonder if I might borrow this room some nights when I have work to do. The light's good. Table, too.'

Emily looked from it to the big globe, mildly. ‘Yes, I do my homework here.' She pushed her hair away from her face, swallowed some toast and blurted, unintentionally, into the silence, ‘I'm glad you're staying here.' Her eyes filled and she giggled. She picked up her cup and drank a frantic mouthful or two.

Max shook a cigarette from the packet into his hand. He leaned on the table easily and smiled at her. ‘Thanks, Emmy. It's nice of you to say so.' There was something reassuringly level about his look, or the set of his eyes. Illuminated for an instant, by the flame of his lighter, they were bright grey.

‘By the way, did you carry in a telescope?'

‘Was that it like a bicycle pump? Well, I did. Was it a telescope?' All the rest and a telescope,
too
, her tone implied.

But there was relief in her voice. This first meeting, this being with Max was rushing past her. She could remember nothing, here and now, of what had made her grateful for his interjection, she only knew that she had now to think about a telescope. Realizing this, she marvelled. How she had longed to see the heavens close! Should she ask?

All at once it seemed incredibly foolish to risk alienating this man by presuming too far on his offered friendship. Had she not been warned often enough of the dangers of going too far with adults and tiring them? And that when she had not gone a quarter of the distance she had gone tonight! For what hadn't she told him!

‘One night next week—the moon isn't up, yet, tonight—if you're interested, we could have a session with it.'

‘I've read about the moon—all about it—in a newspaper,' she said, pale with confession. ‘I might like to be an astronomer one day.' With each secret piece of information, she handed over part of herself, was lighter for the delivery, lightheaded.

‘Well, there's no reason why you should not be.'

‘What do you have to know to be one?'

‘For one thing—mathematics.'

‘Oh, then I won't.'

He laughed. ‘Don't be in such a hurry! I might be able to help you—but not tonight,' he added, seeing her change of expression.

They smiled, then gradually, again, Emily was overtaken by the idea that she must be cautious. Apologetically she got herself from the table and began to collect the dishes.

In an effort to tone down the man's memory of what Lilian would surely have branded cheekiness, and forwardness, she moved about the room almost stealthily, and spoke, when driven to it, in monosyllables. And trying to immunize herself against a possible future rebuff, she pretended to believe that he had used her as a stop-gap and would drop her when an adult came.

Contrary to her fears, no one disputed her claim to Max, and after that first night there were no further preliminaries to their friendship. The others simply recognized that he was not for them. His physical presence among them was a phenomenon, to which they accustomed themselves with the ease of savages, as if he were some extinguished comet dropped out of the sky: to keep off the fear of the unknown, training themselves to think of him as part of the natural formation of the land.

As far as Emily was concerned, his coming and her growing-up, relegated her early idols, from Thea to the model actress, to barbaric—albeit revered—pre-history.

It might have been expected that nothing less than all of his attention could satisfy her craving, for, finding herself valued, she could keep no feeling from him to bestow on those whom she was bound by convention to honour. But his manner was the opposite of intense. There was no place for her fierce possessiveness in a relationship which, by its ease and lack of patronage, denied her nothing. And somehow recognizing that her childishness might mean a diminution in him, her unrestraint was yoked by a kind of scrupulous chivalry.

The test was not so severe as it might have been. Max had few, and no visible, ties. The vital times of his life were in his past. But this was her great time and she rose to meet it.

The picnic was over and now they all dispersed—not that it mattered: it was the relieved dispersal of incompatible parts, there was no fragile unity to be shattered by the homecoming.

It had not been a real picnic. It was the first time these six had been out together—a command performance—and they had all sat for hours, jammed tight, bathed in petrol fumes and the smell of warm leather. That was discouraging, not to say nauseating, to begin with. Apart from that, what had the day contained?

There was the sea below, a cliff—some incalculable feet above which hovered the miraculous end of a rainbow—where Emily had contrived to isolate herself for some seconds before they all came up. And how full of meaning might that not be? A rainbow arching the sea. But
they
had taken it calmly enough, of course, walking stodgily up to it, scoffing at it as if to say ‘mirage' or ‘go away'. But that could have been jealousy; they were obviously unwilling to believe what they could so clearly see. It outstayed them on the cliff, though, and that seemed to prove something.

Apart from those few minutes, and the eating, which went well, the day ground animation and ease to death.

Rosen, having taken in too much of the tripe in the Sunday papers, Lilian said, but more affected, Paula thought, by the amount of beer he had taken in, was argumentative, contentious, busily occupied with foreign affairs, bent on baiting Max and provoking him to the defence of something—in Rosen's view—indefensible.

It was sultry. Rosen drove the car; next to him sat Dotty, and next to her, Lilian. In the back, Emily sat between her mother and Max. It was one of those days, Lilian said, when everything on wheels was on the road. The cars crawled bumper to bumper to the five beaches of the district. And Rosen talked until a series of well-placed questions from Max brought about his self-immolation. There was a short silence for which everyone was grateful.

Lilian cried, ‘Well, now, cheer up, everyone! This is a picnic, not a funeral—though God knows I've seen livelier corpses than some of you. Emily, pass round the chocolates. Put on the wireless, Dot, and don't get us a sermon, either—we've had enough of them for one afternoon.'

There was a bustle in the car, but, her task performed, Emily sat amazed at Max's questions. He had listened to all of them, her mother and Lilian, as well as Rosen, and asked them questions as if he wanted to know what they thought. It was impossible to accuse him of insincerity, yet how could he question them as if he thought they were sensible?

Paula had not approved. Even though she disliked Rosen she was shocked to hear his opinions questioned. A kind of numbed look came over her face, and when Max had taken up her remark, forcibly expressed, about the White Australia policy, she had quite hated him. The idea of discussion was anathema to her. Surely it was not done to disagree, however mildly? Good manners surely prevented you, if you could not agree, from contradicting someone in cold blood?

Hearing the arbitrary, dogmatic statements come, as if from voices in the air, Emily wondered if it was fair to be interested for any reason.

No, she decided, it was not really fair, and then there was the oddness to be thought of, and the blind, voiceless signals between the other heads. Emily felt the chill of their messages on her skin, their hostility, their drawing together. United against the stranger, the party found its second wind and there was much merriment and politeness. They finished the whole box of chocolates.