The Long Prospect (30 page)

Her hand relaxed and tightened on the stake when the voice sounded. She was called. Her mother was calling from the, from here, invisible back door of their first-floor flat.

Holding on to the end of the exaltation she looked round, released her grip, and leapt across the width of the rose-garden to the lawn. Over the grass, along the cement path, up the cement stairs, hand on the piping rail she went, the surely, surely, surely, going with her, being beaten by her into a self conditioned to resist hope. For she had been on the verge of knowing something tonight...

She and her father looked at each other: Paula looked at both and started to chatter. What she said, neither knew. Emily pulled in her chair and sat down.

Harry said, ‘Wash your hands.'

Paula said, ‘Have you had your tonic?' (The doctor said she had outgrown her strength and prescribed iron.) Emily took the tonic and went to the bathroom to wash her hands.

In the kitchen Harry said, eating, breathing heavily through his nose, ‘If I see that look on her face again I'll give her something she won't forget in a hurry.'

And about the look—a provoking compound of scepticism and understanding, impatience and calm—Paula could say nothing. It was not a good look for a young face: it aggravated Harry, but it seemed so habitual that she did not know how to ask her daughter to change it. She supposed it was impertinent of Emily to look like that. She automatically checked a sigh. Regretfully she watched her husband eat his meal, his whole face working.

She looked at her own plate. ‘Three hundred pounds,' she said, but Harry was silent. ‘Mrs Downstairs came up this morning and she was in raptures over the dining-room suite. She kept saying, “Mrs Lawrence, it must have cost a fortune!”'

Harry gave a short laugh and tilted back in his chair. He prodded his teeth. ‘What'd you say?'

Paula felt the legs of his chair digging into her polished floor. Forcing herself to remember the morning's conversation and to derive, as well as to provide consolation from it, she said, ‘Oh, I just laughed, but she was so busy admiring the whole place I thought she'd never go.'

Harry nodded as if he could understand this. He sucked thoughtfully at his teeth, scratched his neck with a forefinger, and said on a deep sigh, ‘She'll have something else to look at next week.'

Extravagantly mystified, his wife slowly straightened her back and laid down her knife and fork. Her smile traversed his face. ‘Tell me, Harry.'

‘Tell you what?'

‘What she'll see.'

‘Oh, that...Well, I saved three hundred, didn't I?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well then. Gotta get rid of it somehow.'

‘What do you mean, Harry? Tell me.'

Nervously she giggled. Her interest was, as usual, uncomfortably tinged with alarm, and would be, until she heard what he intended. Though her dinner was getting cold, she knew that if she started to eat again, now, before he finished the game of question and answer, Harry would be bitterly offended. She was conscious, too, that Emily had not come back from the bathroom. ‘Harry, what are you going to do?'

‘Guess!'

The game began in earnest.

Emily dried her hands and looked at her face in the mirror. ‘Hullo,' she said. ‘How are you?'

For some seconds she and her reflection commiserated kindly with each other. To it she confided her marks in today's test. Did it think, she asked it, that she would ever find a friend at school? Now, she sat alone. The rest were all as good as married. Exactly even. Twos and twos.

Still! her reflection said, as if it mattered.

And it ceased to matter.

Then Emily told her friend, with eyes and thoughts, about the sunset, the sky, the pink clouds, and the birds.

Max,
it snapped at her.
Max
, it said. Have you forgotten him? Didn't you think of him tonight? Have you forgotten him already? You said you never would. How does your heart feel when you think of him? Is there any love? What did he look like? What did he say?

The towel between her hands, she turned away. Hanging it on the chromium rail she felt the sparking, sparking in her chest. The thing in her chest was brought to life. With a mixture of panic and relief she felt the old familiar swelling and dying, rising and falling, quicker and quicker, rising and falling in her chest.

Then she made it stop. Then she remembered what she had done. As if she had seen someone fall from a height, her body throbbed with vicarious fright. She had torn up his letter. She had nothing of him. It was her own doing.

Appalled by a deeper isolation here among unfamiliar people and places than she had ever known before, she had written a letter to him—the kind that could not go unanswered. Here she lived under closer surveillance, was brought up against jealousy and active dislike. Drift, drift, up and down the stairs; drag, drag, round the paths, surrounded by silence, the utter purposelessness of her existence, the inconvenience of it daily more apparent, she wrote Max a letter imploring something of him. Anything. At least, a letter.

He had answered quickly, submitted to the necessity of sending the letter to Patty first, to be forwarded by her, covered by her big careful writing on the envelope. With what sensations he had done this, when the letter came, Emily did not concern herself.

Sick with excitement she had locked herself in the bathroom, and, unfolding the long sheets of paper, trembled violently, for they proved he was still to be reached, had existed, had surely felt
some
affection for her. By the window, terrified of discovery, she read.

And what had he said in all that space? She could hardly remember. With a slow, incredulous chilling of her blood, she had read, and seen only what he did not say. No promises. No declarations.

In the intensity of her disappointment she loathed him, was utterly humiliated to remember the past. She felt physically sick with loathing and disappointment. What could she destroy?

Someone had banged on the door. She stared at the pages in bitter hurt. Quickly she tore them to pieces, dropped them in the bowl of the lavatory and pushed the handle.

Remembering, she leaned against the towel rail and pressed her mouth to her towel.

For weeks she had hated him, and to feel hate for him was to feel something worse for herself, to be empty of all past happiness and future possibilities of good.

Then one day she knew, and suddenly said aloud, ‘What else could he have done?'

It was as if she had learned the most difficult code of all. She begged forgiveness of his memory. (In spite of the letter she had come to think of him as dead. Such utter inaccessibility could only belong to death.) For she would not write to him again. There was no need. Now she could begin to understand the many inexplicable things he had said to her. Now she was responsible for herself, and knew it. She was responsible for her actions. What had been amorphous and unreliable in her seemed, now, to be solid.

She pressed a cheek against the towel and took a deep breath—a sigh that was not a sigh, something that was more than air. With a breath, she had lately come to accept much that was not easy.

All this being brave, doing what he said, growing up, was all very well, she thought, eyeing the dark shadow of herself on the tiled wall. In the daytime, or the evening, looking at a bright pink sunset it was not so bad, but at night...Any time. It was easy for him.
She
had to live without the kindness and communication, without a movement of the heart—and from tonight, without dramatics.

A sudden shattering awareness of the existence of Max and Thea, a memory of her feeling for them, caused such a questioning of life in her that she stood for seconds without breathing, felt the question expand, the small tiled room contract. For she no longer cared. There were memories, and gratitude, but she
resented
knowing that love ended.

There came a kind of furtive battering at the door. ‘Emily! Emily! What's the matter? What are you doing in there? Are you crying again? What on earth are you crying for? Come out here at once and eat your dinner like a sensible girl of thirteen. Lots of little girls would be happy to be in your place, you know. Of all the discontented girls I know...I'm really losing patience with you. Come out this minute, do you hear me? Wait till I tell you what Daddy's going to do.'

Casting a last look at the shining tiles Emily said, I have to go.

Sapped, hollow, belatedly obedient, she opened the door. Paula eyed her sharply.

‘Now come out here and have your dinner and behave,' she whispered. ‘I don't know what I'm going to do with you.'

At the kitchen door she paused, laughing, with her hand on Emily's shoulder, and looked at Harry. ‘This is a wicked father you've got, Emily. Do you know what he's just told me?'

Still she and Harry held each other's eyes as in a trance. ‘He's going to get us a lovely new car. Going to sell the old one next week and get a lovely brand-new one. Isn't that wonderful?'

Harry stuck out his lower lip. ‘You two'll have to clean it, though.'

Paula giggled and raised her brows, sending a woman's glances to the young girl beside her in the hope that she would respond and join her in the fascinating, necessary game of teasing Harry.

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