The Long Prospect (8 page)

Her throat and chest scorched with breathlessness, Emily scrambled up the stone steps to the veranda and skidded into the hall.

‘Grandma! Grandma!' she gasped, trying to read the walls for indications of Lilian's whereabouts. She thundered towards the kitchen. ‘He's coming! Daddy—Dad—my father's coming! He'll be here in a minute! Grandma, he said my neck was dirty!'

At the door of the kitchen where they collided, Lilian absorbed—what she had before merely seen—Emily's startling appearance.

‘My God!' She drew a deep exasperated breath. ‘Isn't that just like the thing.' She glanced at the open front door. ‘And he said your neck was dirty?'

‘Yes, and it isn't!' cried Emily, triumphant. She had told on him.

Lilian led her to the daylight at the back door and scrutinized.

‘It isn't, is it?'

After the slightest pause Lilian said, ‘What a thing to greet his daughter with after all this time! It must be more than a year since he was near you. I'll have a thing or two to say to Harry Lawrence before I'm through.'

Emily fished the roses from her hair and looked at Lilian with beaming admiration. She had a champion. She was defended. A moment later, remembering the need for stealth and speed, she got her grandmother back into the kitchen: from the front door her father would have seen their two figures outlined against the strawy grass of the back lawn. What fatal gesture she expected from him, she hardly knew, but her hopes were infinite.

‘Listen!' she hissed to Lilian, and, bending forward, open-mouthed, they received Harry's shout, ‘Anyone home?...Lilian?'

Guiltily the woman and child backed away. ‘Harry!' Lilian bellowed. ‘Wait just a minute! I'll be there in a minute.'

She straightened the skirt of her thin shantung suit and briefly examined her face in the unflattering surface of an egg-lifter. At the same time she delivered orders to Emily to wash and dress and have a glass of milk and—here Mr Rosen wandered in from the garden where he had been unenthusiastically pushing the mower—sing a little song for Mr Rosen. Full of piety and obedience, Emily disappeared into the bathroom, and with much the same expression Mr Rosen went away to put on a tie and take off his hat.

‘Well, and how's the world treating you, Harry? Come in, come in, come in and sit down!'

‘Oh, same as usual, you know. How are you getting on these days?'

‘Oh, you know me, always the same. Nothing changes here.'

They both laughed.

Harry said, ‘I saw Paula when I was in Sydney. We've—er—we're going to stick it out together, we think. So maybe next year we'll be able to take Emily out of your way.'

Lilian lifted her arms in a dramatic gesture of approval. ‘Well, I'm glad for your sakes. I'm very glad to hear it. Sit down—anywhere.' She waved a hand at the dark empty chairs of velvet and leather.

They looked cool to Harry, like caves. The sun was at the other side of the house and in here, through the open window, he could smell the fresh-cut grass. A small illusion of cool air beat with tantalizing gentleness about his flushed face.

‘Whew!' He found a handkerchief and blotted his face and head. ‘Gets you down, doesn't it? I'm sweating like a horse.'

‘It's not the heat, it's the humidity.' Lilian explained his discomfort to him as though the platitude had just been thought of, and Harry, who was prepared to take seriously any words that had a remote connexion with his well-being, looked interested and even impressed to hear it.

When Lilian reappeared, after a moment's absence, with a glass of cold beer, he felt a rush of affection for her that quite outdid anything he had felt at the sight of Paula or Emily. She was a good sort, all right. One of the best.

‘Paula knew you were coming up?' she smiled. ‘She didn't tell us.'

‘No?' Harry looked dense.

‘You might have stayed or something.' Lilian smiled again with sheer annoyance. ‘Oh, well!...You've seen Emily. She's grown, hasn't she?'

‘Yes. Too right.' Harry made other affirmative noises until Lilian allowed him to shut up and drink his beer by starting off on a monologue, a tapestry of
non sequiturs.
Harry drank, listened, and nodded, grateful to be talked at.

He was a lazy man. He was lazy with the physical laziness common among Europeans who live in hot climates; unthinking, with the masochistic laziness of an adult whose mind has gone inadequately trained; but the lack of moral and emotional force might have been said to be an inherent limitation, rather than a wilful or accidental withholding of effort. For these reasons he looked forward to promotion and transfer in the future with more stoicism than pleasure. He was constrained to dangle before his own nose the prospect of material gain and prestige, when he thought of the future, to assuage the fear in which his lethargy went. For these reasons he sat comfortably uninvolved while Lilian talked and wondered whether Paula had told Harry that Rosen was living with her, and what he would say when they met.

Harry
was
one of the family, in a way, and he was a man. When he was present his opinion had to be thought of, especially now when Rosen was beginning to irritate her.

The unlikelihood of Harry's forming an opinion, and the even less likely extraction of unfavourable criticism from him at this time, when he was beholden to her, she easily overlooked.

In the kitchen, Emily glowed with soap and satisfaction. For once she was confident that she had the interest of the adult world; better still, she was attacked and defended. And Lilian would win. There was no obligation to feel more than contempt for her father, but since he had been the one to provoke this situation of interest round her—though she could not forgive—she withheld further censure.

A little weak, a little pampered, she sat at the table and held between her hands, untouched, a glass of milk. The glass was full and perfect. With a vague idea that it would be a kind of cannibalism to ruin its perfection she pushed the glass away, for the moment, at least, renouncing it. And gazing at this symbol of her own completeness she added up her value yet again.

On the opposite side of the table Mr Rosen sat smoking. He said, ‘Your grandmother promised me a song, Emily. How about it? And don't spoil it this time by giggling in that way. Playing up. Sing properly and don't laugh.'

As long as the songs were Irish or Welsh (he himself claimed to be one or the other) he had no objection to hearing several.

Emily grimaced. She could not leave the house and perhaps miss something important; on the other hand the pathos of Mr Rosen's glances was nauseating. From past experience she knew he would cover his pale-blue eyes with his fingers as soon as she began to sing, and all at once it seemed worth the effort to cancel them from view.

Lilian, who had been listening for a song as the signal to break up a conversation which even she had begun to find opinionated, led her son-in-law to the door of the kitchen.

It was an old-fashioned, high-ceilinged room painted in dark brown and cream: a single white-shaded light swung in its centre over the chenille-covered deal table. Four blackish wooden chairs were pushed in at the table, two more stood against the wall. The curtains, of some thin white stuff, billowed in the hot draught that ran between the open door and the window. From the blue mottled gas-stove, faint smells of the Saturday roast were beginning to drift. Some flies buzzed near the ceiling. Level with the top of the big green refrigerator a bare, high-powered light globe was stuck in a socket in the wall. Sunshine fell diagonally across one-half of the room.

With a curiosity to know whether or not she could make Mr Rosen cry, Emily had chosen to sing the most plaintive ballad she knew. But gazing through the door at the zinnias and the ivy-covered wall of the garage, at the width of pale sky, she forgot to notice him. She was soothed by the high mournful notes, by the colours, and the pleasant lack of thought and conjecture. Only when, accidentally, her eye came to the empty milk glass, did she unknowingly use her voice to such effect that Mr Rosen's eyes filled. And she knew there had been a loss. An old, sad loss.

‘Ah!' sighed Lilian. ‘That was lovely. Hasn't she got a nice voice, Harry?—Now up you get. Your father's taking you to the pictures.'

Lilian introduced the two men while Emily absorbed this news. She wound her arms and legs round her chair, stunned by the outcome of the battle.

She stared at the big, familiar-looking stranger and heard herself say boldly, ‘What are we going to see?'

‘And how have you been getting on at school?' Harry asked when they sat in the bus. ‘Are you set for high school after the holidays?'

‘If I pass. The results'll be in the paper any day.'

‘And will you?'

‘Mrs Salter says so.'

‘She your teacher? It used to be a
Miss
Someone, I thought.'

Emily looked blank. She thought back. ‘Oh, Miss Bates! That was years ago. Two years ago.'

Harry persevered automatically: the day was so quiet and hot and meaningless that he wanted nothing but to sleep. It was a fine kind of torture to see empty seats across which he might horizontally have stretched, and yet to remain vertical. He forced himself to ask, ‘And what was this one like?'

Smoothing her fingers over the nickel frame of the seat in front, Emily said disingenuously, ‘All right.'

But the truth about Mrs Salter and the part she had played in her life for the past two years could not have been conceived by her father whatever the tone or answer had been.

Separated from Miss Bates, Emily had floundered in an alarming void until, sinking under the weight of her unused affections and undirected aspirations, she attached herself to the one new adult in her world—Mrs Salter, a woman in her early thirties, shrewd, dimpled, with devastating smiles, sarcasm, and a dislike of children who were anything but normal.

Now, to Emily, it was merely an interest from which she had very simply recovered—by separation. For these were the long summer holidays, dividing childhood from adolescence, dividing primary from high school, three weeks, dividing her from Mrs Salter. Now she could think calmly, kindly, even with patronage, of Mrs Salter with whom she had for two years sought and failed to ingratiate herself.

An air of diffidence, almost automatically assumed, marked Emily from the first day as a target. She seemed to Mrs Salter a born target. The fact that—pushed by fascination and fear—she worked well and gave no opening there for criticism made the pleasure of pinning her down on points of attitude, expression, and personality, the more subtle. With Emily Lawrence, and a couple of others who were dunderheads, Mrs Salter quite exploited herself as a satirist. The rest of the class laughed hysterically. She had no need of a cane to keep order.

Aware, even at the apex of her malaise, of its absurdity, of the peculiar self-betrayal she daily exacted of herself, Emily nevertheless persisted in thinking of herself as entranced. With fanatical persistence she fed the idea of devotion to Mrs Salter: she
would
be attached to someone.

During visits from Paula, and days at the beach with Patty; through laughter and screaming quarrels with Lilian she was inwardly never deflected from concentration on the image to whom she sacrificed, by whom it was a pleasure to be rent and mortified.

For in everything she did, Mrs Salter was reliable: and what could not be proved she did not say. She surveyed her pupils with bright watching eyes—eyes alive with conscious intelligence, eyes that drew conclusions, behind which there was thought. The unknowable ramifications of grown-up thought in Mrs Salter's head attracted Emily hypnotically. She was planet-struck by the extensions of life she sensed in her.

But today, miraculously, when her father, reluctant to leave a subject he could share with her, repeated, ‘So she was all right?' Emily looked at him with mild astonishment, was compelled for a moment of something like boredom to reconsider her verdict, and felt a small surprised memory of warmth. Poor Mrs Salter!

Emily saw her standing at the gate that Thursday afternoon, after the examinations and the party: she had said goodbye to them all for the last time. She, it had seemed, was doomed to stand there for ever, while they, suddenly freed and optimistic, went on and on, growing up but never old, gaining strength and power.

With a happy, sentimental, spiteful sensation in her chest Emily said goodbye. It was over and she was resigned. As for the declarations that Mrs Salter would never hear, she could but feel that they were her loss. She had never felt herself so invincible as at this moment of extraordinary change, at this incredible going forward.

Sitting beside her father, she remembered enough to remember that it was a pity. Something to do with Mrs Salter was a pity. She had smiled at them as if she was sorry to see them go—even her—just three weeks ago.

‘Yes,' she said vaguely.

They both swayed slackly as the bus started up again. Someone climbed the stairs. The vast scattered buildings of the steelworks, black and grey, ranged alongside them—barbed-wire fences, scrap-iron, disused carriages, smoke. An American car turned in at the entrance gates, passed a garden, stopped at the office block.

Harry looked away. ‘What else's been happening to you all this time?'

Emily sucked at her bottom lip and scanned the interior of the bus. Against the ever-present background of obsession little stood out in the immediate past. She could think of nothing except the new facts she had learned at school, and that she and Patty had broken into an old deserted convent a week before and had been frightened stiff ever since.
That
she would keep to herself.

‘Patty and I went for a hike on Sunday,' she finally offered.

‘Oh? Where to?'

‘Oh...' She waved an arm in the direction of the trunk road. ‘We went along the road as far as the crematorium. That's three miles there and three back. There's a radio station, too. You're allowed to go in and look at it, so we did. But you can't,' she warned him, ‘go into the crematorium. But we wouldn't, anyway.'