The Long Prospect (22 page)

‘I hope you won't be too lonely if I leave you to get on with your poems and love stories,' she said shrilly, stretching her mouth in imitation of a smile, ‘but there's a
man
waiting for me out here. Maybe your little playmate'll soon be back to keep you company, though. Ta-ta.'

Breathless with agitation she opened the door and slid out into the passage.

Max rubbed the back of his neck. With a suppressed exclamation he went to the door and locked it. Striding across the room he threw the window open wide and stood there, looking out, seeing nothing, for some minutes. Finally he pulled on a coat and left the house.

Billie rearranged her expression on the way to the sitting-room, and released a final sharp breath of chagrin before she presented herself, looking quite unnaturally mild, to the inspection of three pairs of eyes.

Fred, idleness and boredom personified, uttered an inane, ‘Wha' d'ya know?'

On the table in front of him was an erection of playing-cards—a pagoda, perhaps, but of a style belonging to no known country.

Billie gave a brittle laugh. With a flip of her fingers she finished his game and turned away without seeing the blight that came over his face. He poked a dejected finger among the ruins.

Lilian and Rosen sat on either side of the cold fire. Next to Lilian on a small carved chest was an electric fan whose blades were still.

‘Well?' the two women said simultaneously, looking at each other with vague inward attention.

Dyed blonde hair and grey eyes—colourless, Billie thought. And Lilian shook her head slightly with pity at the sight of her friend's dyed black hair and great cow eyes. So ageing, she thought.

‘Can I park here?' Billie dropped to the arm of her chair.

‘Where were you? We thought—'

Suspecting an unsanitary joke, Billie snapped, ‘It's none of your business,' and Lilian laughed behind her hand.

‘We're one up,' Rosen said, giving her a glass of wine.

Not looking at any of them, Billie drank. When she had put the glass down, she said, ‘I think that Max is funny.'
That
Max, she said, as if she were isolating one particular Max from many others. ‘I ran into him in the kitchen just now and he started going on about how lonely he was with Emily round at her girl friend's. I think he's off his rocker.'

As at a signal, she turned to Rosen, and for the length of a breath their eyes held together.

‘I didn't hear you in the kitchen,' Lilian said smoothly, turning in her chair so that she could fix Billie with her formidable eyes. She asked Fred, ‘Do
you
think he's queer?'

Fred looked at Billie, looked away, ‘He's all right.'

Lilian's laugh, scornful and comfortable, mingled with Billie's unconcealedly bitter one.

‘You can laugh. You just don't want to see what's going on under your nose.'

‘That's what I keep telling her,' Rosen put in self-righteously, but the next instant he was floundering for apologies, shaken by a look of contempt from Lilian. ‘Well, all I meant was...'

Brusquely to Billie she said, ‘There's a chair over there. You'll break the arm.'

And to Fred, who was eyeing them all with a lazy benevolence that appeared to cover any number of judgements on the situation, she said, ‘What do you say they've got their reasons, Fred? Eh? Not too hard to guess, are they?'

‘Well, if you're going to get nasty...' Billie said, while Fred reiterated to the cards on the table, ‘He's not a bad cove.'

‘That's all you know. I tell you he's rotten,' she cried hysterically. ‘It's got me worried sick when I think of him near that young girl. It shouldn't be allowed.'

Smiling, Lilian watched the performance until Rosen brought himself to her side and blocked the view. ‘I swear I'm only thinking of you,' he said in a low voice. ‘We're speaking for your own good.'

‘Shut up!' she said with a tight little smile and gave the side of his face a malicious pat with her open hand.

He retired to the windows.

Rising, Lilian pulled down her dress, saw that she was firmly balanced on her high heels, and gazed round as if she were master of ceremonies. She rubbed her hands together and called, ‘Shut up! Shut up, all of you!' Everyone attended. ‘Well, now, what about some bridge?'

‘No, thank you, Lilian,' said Billie primly, staring at the carpet. ‘I've got to go home. Are you ready, Fred?' She had become so distant that her vision seemed to have been affected. She was intensely vague.

At this set-back, Lilian consulted her intuition to gauge the amount of energy necessary to save the night. A moment later she called in the same cheerful tone, ‘Get out the car, then! We're all off to the Horizon for a prawn supper and a dance.'

It was irresistible. Within ten minutes they were ready to leave the house.

Across the shady black veranda they passed down the steps into a blaze of moonlight that gave to houses, fences, and telegraph poles the sharp transparency of a negative held close to the light. The moon floated in a sky made pale by its brilliance.

The two women went down the dark gravel path by the side of the house with caution, clutching each other's arms, pointing out, in the friendliest manner, the hollows and rises to be avoided. While they chatted their lovers plodded after them, sombre, stolid, deaf, and—when the procession to the garage was abruptly halted—bewildered, as if wakened from a deep sleep.

The path beside the house approached at right angles the bone-white path running from the back gate to the back door. Sheltered from sight partly by shadow, partly by a bank of overgrown hydrangea bushes, Lilian and the men were pulled up by a dramatic barricading movement of Billie's arm. Wordlessly she pointed to the gate where Max, returning from his walk, had been seen and hailed by Emily. He stood waiting for her.

Angry, but held to the spot by a kind of fascinated curiosity, Lilian submitted, and the four crowded together against the wall.

Emily ran to Max as if she had been shot from a catapult. Her arms went round him and, before the watchers had time to register emotion, dropped again. They stood talking for a few moments in clear voices which the horror-muffled ears by the house could not understand. Emily said something and Max laughed and put a hand on her head.

This time Billie drew in a deliberate, and deliberately audible, breath.

Slowly the two walked down the path. Yes, they were almost touching, the narrowed eyes made out. Oh, God, there was her hand in his. Yes, they were horribly intimate. In the moonlight their faces were extraordinary: the onlookers were appalled.

By watching, they had themselves provided the necessary atmosphere of stealth: easily transferring it to those on whom they spied, they were convinced of evil. And that Max and Emily supposed themselves alone and were not seemed, inexplicably, to give further proof of guilt.

When they had passed out of sight, Billie hissed, ‘What did I tell you?'

‘Shocking! Shocking!' muttered Rosen.

Confused, Lilian turned from one to the other with an apprehensive uncertainty as to what she was expected to do. As she became aware of their alarm and exultation she knew what must be done. They felt they had been proved right: they were crowing over her. Her task was obviously to smash their victory, to astonish and overawe them by the severity of her pronouncement. Accordingly, she looked at the three dark faces and said, ‘I'll send for her mother and father. He'll leave this house.'

Rosen's voice was stifled. ‘Yes.'

Billie said, swallowing noisily, ‘Oh, isn't it awful! Oh, imagine!'

Only Fred, who screwed up his face and looked round at the eerie beauty of the black and silver night, said nothing.

‘Not a word to anyone,' Lilian cautioned them, from her distant stronghold. ‘Nothing's to happen till Paula and Harry get here.'

Her two disciples had no other thought than to chorus: ‘Oh, quite right! Of course!'

‘Well, come on,' she said roughly. ‘We can't stand here all night. We might as well go and have those prawns.'

Fred followed Rosen into the garage, and the two women waited outside at the gate, X-rayed by light now, as Emily and Max had recently been.

‘They're in the kitchen,' Billie said. ‘Do you think we ought to see what they're doing?'

‘I've seen enough for one night,' said Lilian with grand indifference.

‘I hear music, though. Do you think we ought to leave them by themselves?'

‘Why not? They've been alone for months. Well, he'll soon have his walking papers. It won't be much longer. He's a dirty little rat if ever there was one.'

Fervently Billie agreed. She felt that until tonight she had not properly appreciated Lilian.

CHAPTER EIGHT

WHEN LILIAN left the sitting-room to refill the teapot and put the roast in the oven, Emily flew after her.

‘What's he want? Did you know he was coming?'

Receiving no answer, she followed Lilian about the kitchen asking, ‘But why is Mum coming to see him? Is something going to happen?'

‘Nothing that concerns you,' Lilian said, obviously lying, just not obviously enjoying herself. ‘This is for grown-ups so don't go bothering your mother and father with questions.'

Emily grimaced. As if she would ask them anything. As if she cared what it was. But she shot a calculating glance at Lilian and could not prevent herself from wondering.

For all the normality of the scene—the efficient way in which Lilian handled the meat, the way the kettle steamed, the way Gussie pounded in at the back door and put his muzzle in her hand—Emily felt a current of critical excitement in her grandmother that was anything but normal. It made her peculiarly uneasy. She leaned against the wall and studied Lilian's face with a kind of half-conscious wariness. She saw pale powdered skin, rouged cheeks, busy, glittering grey eyes and a mouth held set. She gave herself up to brooding speculation.

A minute or two later the sheer offensiveness of the lump of raw meat in the baking dish on the table brought her back to herself. Repelled, she dragged her eyes away from it, and volunteered, ‘Oh! Max won't be in for dinner. He asked me to tell you. He's working late. He's going to get something at the canteen.'

Lilian slid the dish into the oven. ‘Is he now?'

Taken aback by the edge of sarcasm in her voice, Emily felt another jolt of dismay. There was no need to pick on him just because there were visitors, she thought. But then she told herself that maybe it was just that she was boring Lilian by saying Max's name, or that she was thinking of something else and was just not interested.

She scratched a bare brown knee, gave a philosophical sigh and stretched her arms up to the top of the door.

‘Well, they'll—Mum and Dad'll still be here tomorrow, though, won't they? Because Max has to see them, and he didn't know they were coming. But if he's late tonight, I'll tell him in the morning.'

Flabbergasted, Lilian slowly turned her head to look at her granddaughter. The utter astonishment of her pose caused Emily to grin, and her eyes to shine with wicked amusement.

‘What do you mean, he has to see them? What for?'

Success! Electrification! Emily was overjoyed.

‘It's for grown-ups, I can't tell you,' she said pertly, but she grinned a shade less joyfully when Lilian started towards her with a threatening hand raised. ‘I can't. It's a secret,' she protested, dodging round the table.

‘You little monkey!' But Lilian halted. There was a guilelessness about the girl that made her feel foolish and repent her panicky speculations. Of course it could be nothing important. She would not have anyone know what she had imagined for the world.

Walled-up by her reaction, she filled the teapot and hastened from the room without a word, unaware that her failure to laugh, to persist, to rebuke, raised Emily's eyebrows and choked off her small victory with apprehension.

When Rosen went at five o'clock to meet Paula at the station Harry had offered to go with him, but Lilian insisted that he stay.

‘Rest!' she had said. ‘You must be tired.'

Naturally he was: he very seldom was not. So he stayed. Besides, it was what he was obviously meant to do.

It was Friday afternoon. Lilian's cryptic telegram had reached him the previous morning; by the early afternoon he had arranged leave, packed, and booked a seat on the only long-distance train out of Coolong for twenty-four hours. Now that he had arrived and been assured by Lilian that no one was dead or dying, he wondered rather pettishly why Paula, who had not half so far to come, had not been there to welcome him.

But in fact, though he criticized, he was pleased to have time to himself to ponder on the alternative crises that could account for the unprecedented summons, and to prepare attitudes to meet them.

He was more relieved than resentful that Lilian had determined to say nothing until Paula arrived. He had no wish to face alone what must presumably be a joint dilemma—if dilemma it was.

Ostensibly waiting for the car to return, he stood at the gate, smoking, looking up and down the road, thinking of neither Paula nor Emily. His hazel eyes gazed blankly at the scene in front of him. Characteristically he had soon abandoned the effort of conscious thought and waited now for events.

From the steelworks to the north came the familiar shuddering of machines; the thunderous roll spreading across the built-up plain was of less note than a clap of natural thunder, or the cry of a bird gone astray in the wilderness of wood and corrugated iron. But Harry had grown unused to it, and turned his head to look at the reverberating sky.

At another point in the garden Emily was talking to Patty. She and her father, intent on avoiding each other, found that by a small restriction of head and eye they could seem to be unaware of each other's presence. Apart from a few minutes in the sitting-room over afternoon tea, when both Rosen and Lilian had been present, they had not been together.