The Long Prospect (5 page)

‘Well, what's the news from Harry?' Lilian asked now, briskly.

‘Harry?' A faint grimace dug a dimple in Paula's cheek. She stared at the fire. ‘The same. No sign of a transfer.'

‘So!' Lilian exclaimed, less than intelligently. She tried to round up her thoughts. ‘And you certainly won't go out there to him,' she said approvingly, though she had, in fact, no idea why this was so.

‘No.' Paula sounded, at the same time, vague and evasive. She knew no more about her decision than her mother: she had taken it ages ago, just like that, and she was not going to change her mind now. If there had ever been conscious reasons, they were forgotten, but conveniently supposed to have been impassable, had grown through time to be sacred. Nevertheless, in place of these sacred, forgotten reasons she was disinclined to tell her mother that she could not endure the thought of a small hot country town, far from the sea, with Harry and Emily; that housekeeping, and responsibility, and bridge—any change—would kill her in a month. She instinctively knew, but would not acknowledge, that there would be too much
wanting
for her to cope with.

When Lilian said, snorting a little, ‘You should just get a divorce and find yourself someone else to give you a nice home,' the reprieve from questioning enforced animation and a degree of honest bitterness in her reply.

‘I wouldn't want anyone else if I did divorce him. I hate them all.'

Lilian knew she meant men. She had heard this before, but with an easy, admirable assumption of interest she leaned back in her chair, fixed her eyes on Paula's face and prepared to hear again an oration that had become a fixed piece for her daughter during the last two or three years.

Tolerantly, feeling that Paula would be brighter company for the delivery, Lilian listened. But as usual, she had in memory and anticipation watered down Paula's intensity. Reintroduced to it, behind the placid silence she maintained, Lilian came up against an uneasy blankness in herself. She knew that she did not agree. As far as men were concerned, no one would more willingly admit that they were faulty—aggressive, rough, thoughtless. And Paula had, beginning with her father and ending with Harry Lawrence, come up against some weird specimens...Still! What did it matter?

To Lilian, who had competed with and excelled them in most of their faults, and who knew how to baffle and reduce them in a peculiarly feminine way as well, it all added to the zest. No, she could certainly not agree. Pursing her mouth as she listened, she wished that Paula could see the immense possibilities for amusement in the situation. It was all right to
hate
men—any woman in her right mind did—but if you had any spirit at all you had to battle with them, and belittle them, and learn to enjoy it.

Having wound up, vehement, confused, and confusing, Paula sat, for the moment, deprived of sight and hearing, but presently the stimulant worked, and she said quite brightly, as if it followed, ‘So we'll let things stand as they are for a while.'

And, as sincerely as she had advocated divorce, Lilian said, ‘I think you're right. Emily can keep on at school here, and you can get on with your little shop.'

They exchanged a serious, devoted look.

‘Harry still sends the money?'

‘Oh, yes, yes.'

Feeling lazy, but more than usually vital and aware of well-being, Paula rose, intending to inspect Emily's teeth, but a vivid change of expression on her mother's face, a sort of coming back to herself, made Paula turn to the window where Lilian had just seen Mr Rosen walking along the path by the side of the house.

A big pale man, he could not bear, even indoors, to be separated from his hat, for his sandy hair was thinning fast and he was vain. His perpetually hatted presence had the effect, it seemed to Paula, of turning any room into the waiting-room of a railway station.

To see the diffident smirk that the great creature turned on the window behind which he knew Lilian to be, made Paula draw in a silently exclamatory breath and turn away for the door. A kind of dreary frustrated discouragement took possession of her.

The apparition at the window was stayed, electrified by a gesture from Lilian who, holding him, as it were, by one finger, called to Paula—by this time in the hall.

‘I'll tell Mr Rosen to get the car out and collect a few people for a little party for you tonight.'

It was not yet a statement.

Paula drew her eyebrows together in mutinous negation at the thought of the people Lilian was certain to assemble. She wanted peace.

‘Don't do it for me, Mum,' she called back. Then on an impulse she returned to the room with a sudden false subsidence which it was hoped would surprise Lilian to accidental surrender. ‘Yes, get them if you like. I don't mind. It's nice to be quiet when I come so that we can talk, but if you'd like to have them in, yourself...I don't mind...'

There was an occupied pause. ‘Oh, some company'll do you good. You're too quiet! I'll just send him.'

The self-conscious grin that Rosen had been regretfully wasting on a pane of glass was restored, as Lilian turned, to its original extreme of doting subservience. Enjoying themselves, the two conducted a farcical scene through the closed windows, Lilian all hands and eyes, he seeming to melt downwards into the ground, from the pinnacle of his hat, seeming to melt with admiration for Lilian.

Abruptly Paula went away, her face stony. In the bathroom she found that Emily had not, after all, been able to bring herself to violate her nightly routine by cleaning her teeth, so with considerable force Paula undertook to do it for her. It was a relief just then to encounter Emily's sullen glares: they loosed her authority, turned her from a daughter to a mother. As a dutiful mother she had a right to wield a toothbrush firmly round the mouth of her disobedient child. They stood clamped in a tight untender embrace until the operation was over, Emily squawking with rage.

Later, when Emily lay in bed, face to the wall, Paula dressed to meet the visitors whose raucous whoops were even then resounding through the house. Fastening the last of the small black buttons on her dress she remembered to say, ‘You can turn round now.' She went over to the dressing-table to look at herself and dab scent on her throat and hair.

Tomorrow, Monday, she would have to go away again. Already the customary sense of helplessness and smouldering desperation was swamping over her. She would have to say goodbye again, as she did every two months, to her mother and Emily. As the taxi drove away she would want to cry, would feel she ought to cry, but would not, would know that they would not. Turning the corner she would tremble with something she took to be fatigue for they would not cry and she was guilty of relief at going.

Paula sighed and rubbed her arms. The question of responsibility for Emily's life, or even for her own, she had never tried to solve. People simply existed and things happened to them for no reason. The miraculous thing was that she did not consciously want to die.

‘You're happy here with Grandma, aren't you, Em?' she asked, going to the bed.

‘Yes,' Emily said, non-committal, giving an inward squirm of apprehension. After a second she added, ‘Some of the time.'

This was, and was not, what Paula wanted to hear. Awkwardly she teased, ‘You won't want to leave to come to Sydney one of these days?'

That awful, marvellous scent was as dizzying as anaesthetic: Emily could remember it from long ago. ‘Oh, yes,' she answered weakly, strained and mortified to feel her reliable calmness driven off. ‘When?' She bit at the top of the sheet and eyed her mother.

‘One day,' said Paula comfortably, satisfied that she was at least interested, and she started to move away, but Emily clutched at her and cried with an excitement that was only half-feigned, ‘And will Dad be there? And will it be like it was before?' She wailed, ‘I want a mother and father like everyone else.'

This was a familiar line. Years ago she had said it and meant it; now she only put herself off, made herself sick, made herself wail again, miserably conscious that though she might be acting, there was a coldness somewhere about things that was reason enough for misery.

With the cool and slightly exasperated air that her helplessness engendered Paula said, ‘Do you miss your father?'

‘No.' She gave a sycophantic giggle into the bedclothes. ‘He needs his head examined, Grandma says. She says he was a pig to us. She says all the Lawrences—' Her mother's non-response was apprehended by her and she stopped, wondering if she was required to abuse Lilian. She was most willing.

She thoughtfully puffed out her cheeks and looked at the round yellow light that dangled from the ceiling.

Silent for a moment, Paula straightened the cover over her. ‘You were happy then, weren't you? When there were just the three of us?'

Emily plaited her toes in embarrassment. She wanted to giggle hysterically. This was sloppy. What had she said? Happy? It was a word that left her nowhere to go. She was nonplussed by it, did not properly know what it meant. But behind her, from where she had come there were intimations of something—she didn't know what—a row of trees, a sandy beach, a face, a voice, a thin gold bracelet, the minute examination of stones and earth and bits of leaves. It was no good. No catalogue, however full, included what it was she longed for.

She could not speak. Paula endured the clutching arms for a moment, then with an impatience that was only just apparent, released herself and went to open the windows before switching out the lights.

When the taxi turned the corner Lilian said, ‘Well!' and went inside. The vacuum cleaner, propelled by Dotty, roared up the hall to the open front door. Emily's arm dropped: her eyes clung to the corner. She felt nothing. She was shrivelled, indifferent.

Alice stared at her, smiling.

‘Chasings! Let's play chasings!' she cried to Alice, and at once they began to pound down the quiet cement footpath.

High overhead smoke was blown from the thundering steelworks by a sea wind: it blew towards the plains of the west.

Approaching, levelling, passing the two puffing figures, came the baker's van; its tyres added yet another elaborate pattern to the surface of the damp clayey road.

Reaching the old wire fence that proclaimed the unbuilt spaces beyond, the country, Emily and Alice stood panting and giggling. But Alice never blinked, or looked away from Emily's face. She had a hard, old-fashioned air, a deathless curiosity.

She said, ‘Don't you mind about your mother going away and leaving you?'

Emily flashed her a glance. She pointed, ‘There's a mushroom!'

They climbed through the sagging strands of smooth wire and plucked the small creamy hummock. Their four hands and eyes examined it.

‘It's only an old toadstool.'

Scornful, they tore it to pieces; they jumped on the poison-pink fragments that fell to the sparsely grassed earth. Emily spat into the palm of one hand, washed them both and wiped them on her skirt. Alice did the same.

They sat then on the lowest loop of the fence and wove themselves up through the wires. Suspended thus, Alice worked the heels of her shoes into the clay. Emily copied her. Three magpies flew low across the paddock in front of them.

‘Yes, but don't you mind about your mother?' Alice said, turning her thin freckled face on Emily. ‘If
my
mummy—'

‘No!' Emily joggled her heels on the ground. ‘I'm lucky. I don't have to do anything I don't like the way everyone else does. I'm lucky. I don't care.'

Dotty went out to the side garden to pick some mint for the sauce. Monday was always busy for her but today, what with Paula to get rid of in the morning, and Emily on holiday, tearing in and out over the polished floors with her damp shoes, and Mrs H. not giving her any help because she had to go and have her hair done for tonight, it had been—what?

Winter sunshine soothed her as she bent over the pungent green bed. She pulled another sprig of mint and shook her head. There was no word to describe what today had been.

Tonight, with her thin black hair washed and screwed in silver curlers, a bag of caramels by her side and her monthly treat—a magazine of true love stories—on her knees she would feel each shiny polished table knob inside her head, round and hard; with the whole clean house inside her head, she would read the choicest story with detachment. And some of them, Dotty admitted, disapproving,
were
choice. But then in America, of course, anything could happen...

Dotty and Ma Brown lived in a little cubby-hole of a house two streets away on the money and food and clothes paid her by Mrs Hulm. A girlhood spent, during the depression, in a camp for the unemployed among the hills behind the steelworks made Dot think of herself now as lucky. Then they had lived on bread and dripping, and her brothers had gone rabbit-hunting all day long: there were no magazines and caramels then, no pictures twice a week. As soon as there was work the boys went away from Ballowra and never came back. All very well for them but Ma never seemed to get over it: she was always sick.

Straightening up, Dotty pushed back her hair and, turning to survey the garden, saw Emily lying flat on the grass, peering through the thick black roots of the hedge to the footpath. Sniffing the mint she went back into the house.

Emily put the fourth stick of chewing-gum in her mouth and worked on it. She felt the dry, powdery peppermint stick moisten and expertly added it to the—by now tasteless—wad of the three previous sticks. With her neck stretched and her chin on the ground, swallowing was, if not dangerous, difficult, but vigorous chewing somehow added to her courage and she needed it. She was waiting for Miss Bates.

Through the gnarled black roots she watched the feet go by. Presently, having swallowed the last thin peppermint-flavoured drop of moisture, she resigned herself to the steady monotony of chewing plain gum.