The Long Prospect (7 page)

From midnight till three o'clock in the morning she stayed there, crying a bit, talking a bit, sucking the gate on the patch reserved for sucking, and falling into day and night dreams. Miss Bates might really be her mother? There were few distractions; occasional cars and no late pedestrians.

When at last Lilian's car started up the hill, Emily ran, as she had for the others, to the corner of the garden from which she could see both roads. Recognizing it, she ran into the house and turned out all the lights.

She was in bed, shivering, in an ordinary room in an ordinary house by the time she heard the garage doors swing open. Stretching in bed, rubbing her cold feet together, she listened to the noises of the return, a small smile of relief on her mouth.

Lilian and Mr Rosen came in the back door and up the hall to the bedrooms, whispering. There was a confused scuffle, a disagreeable noise which Emily identified as someone being sick. There were more whispers, then raised voices.

Complacent, disapproving, she drifted towards sleep. They were home and someone was being sick. It was all normal again, all routine. Tomorrow she would see Miss Bates.

CHAPTER THREE

AS HE left Jack Stevenson's old weatherboard house, Harry Lawrence pondered on yesterday's decision and marvelled at it. So there were to be no courts, no witnesses, no legal documents—in short, no disturbances in his life. Three days of talks in coffee shops, harbour ferries, and the zoo, had resolved this. For the indefinite future he and Paula had exchanged firm promises to try again to live together.

Neither could have told why they leaned to the side of non-action, but to both, after twelve years of marriage, many of them apart, the abstract idea of their partnership was solid and immovable as a mountain. The failure earlier to make the separation legally permanent had carried them past the time when it could ever become so. For while the living, warm and fleshy, even—when encountered face to face—slightly shocking, three-dimensional creature who ate and walked, might have been exorcised by a few words from a judge, that old idea each had of the other gradually took possession of the future and was not to be eradicated.

Dislike, warped passion, non-comprehension—nothing could outweigh the inner, unconscious, fabulously romantic idea of marriage—themselves the hero and heroine: to part would have been to live life deprived.

Due to return to Coolong tomorrow, his leave at an end, he had come last night to Ballowra to pay a duty call on Emily and her grandmother. As was his custom on these infrequent occasions he stayed over-night with the Stevensons, old friends, and for many years next-door neighbours.

Passing the red-brick house where he had been born, he felt nothing. Some family of strangers lived there now. He saw the old bamboo trees by the side fence thrashing in the hot wind. For no reason he could think of they reminded him of his mother and the old days more than anything else about the place.

He continued down the hill, noticing the changes that had taken place since his last visit, gradually worked on by that recurrent, surprised regret that infects those in their thirties and forties when confronted with places, or people, or thoughts from the past—from a past so recently present, and present to those who remembered no past, for who would be younger than twenty?

After years in the country, this subjection to industry, the smoky sky, the matured deterioration immanent at the birth of such towns as Ballowra left him oppressed and indignant. He was unwilling that it should be so bad.

Below him, acres of flat land were covered by low wooden houses in front of which swayed sappy knee-high grass. Paint was lavished only on the giant advertisement hoardings that bestrode the numerous vacant allotments. There were no trees. The steelworks which, at a great distance, surrounded the rise where Harry stood were the only reason, and, he was forced to suppose, justification, for the existence of Ballowra.

Once, for Harry, the depressing plain had been printed with names and emotions: there was the wide white storm-water channel where he and his brothers had played; the picture-show into which, without money for tickets, they had contrived an entrance; there was Russell's hotel, the most substantial building for miles round, on the corner at the bus terminus. Around these landmarks were situated Joe's place, Al's place, Eck's place, Paula's place, and finally, one labelled ‘home.'

Pausing at the edge of the footpath until a horde of grey-clad, black-faced men swept past on bicycles, Harry felt a kind of appalled relief that he had at least escaped that. He was not a doctor: there had never been a chance of that, but he had managed to get into a bank. He was not quite to be discounted, to be put on a level with those anonymous creatures who pushed in a crowd through the heavy morning air, going home from night shift, or afternoon shift, or some other shift he was pleased not to know.

He crossed the road and lifted his left arm in order that he might be reassured of
something
by the sight of his new wristwatch. With an effort of concentration he read the time. Self-consciously he rubbed a tanned well-shaped hand over his moist upper lip, and starting a conversation with himself about the coastal heat—so different from Coolong—he strolled down the main street of Greenhills.

Here on his right was a garage with no visible customers. On either side of it was a patch of land traversed by paths. After that came a few houses, soon to be demolished according to the signs, and farther ahead, the shops, two-storeyed, impressive, on both sides of the street. At Russell's corner they ended, and more houses and West Greenhills began. Among the houses on the farthest edge of the maze was Lilian Hulm's.

Earlier this morning Harry Lawrence had visited the cemetery which, conveniently, was on the crest of the low hill above his old home, and the present one of the Stevensons. He had even done some work on the grave plot of his mother and father. He supposed that none of his three brothers had seen, or ever would come back to see, their graves. They had left home years before to roam about the country from town to town, taking jobs when and where it pleased them. They, too, could be dead for all he knew. The inconsistent piety which had led him to the cemetery did not carry him so far as to make him care if they were.

Just the same, as a man who actively believed in God—‘I am Church of England'—Harry was, in most companies, though not unique, certainly among the few. And, after this morning's sacred task, as he walked down the deadly, littered street, buffeted by a hot wind, he was rather more conscious of this than usual.

The smell of over-ripe fruit, fried fish and new leather composed the dusty air. A double-decker bus lazing at the terminus overslept the time-table: its driver, leaning out of the window, was suddenly recalled to the idea of time and motion by the sight of a cart and horse returning to the dairy. With a jolt of alarm—for he was normally conscientious—he was inside and off so quickly that the conductor had to swim the blue stream of the exhaust for twenty yards before he could jump on.

The audience—it was Saturday and the men who were free from furnaces and boiling steel stood outside Russell's—said, ‘Ha!' and turned away to listen to the few among them who spoke—about work, about horses, and what would win this afternoon. They rummaged abstractedly among their teeth and listened, disappeared into Russell's for some beer, and came out again to stand and stare at the housewives with their shopping baskets, and the girls adangle with earrings and bracelets and curls.

The young unmarried men, conscious of their unaccustomed whiteness and thickly brilliantined hair, grinned knowingly at one another as the girls passed, and made audible comments, but were permitted no further licence. They were all reserved, at seventeen or eighteen, by the girls they would eventually marry. To be seen in intimate, necessarily provocative, conversation with another girl would have been to invite a vendetta.

The older men were dour, with a look of uncharitable hardness about their eyes. Self-enclosed, past the age when living is itself sufficient incentive to go on living, with atrophied capacities for thinking or feeling, they worked grimly towards old age and death. Their wives flirted with the tradesmen, looked for lovers, and their children feared them. Preparing for a picnic or a dance they would be silent suddenly at the entry of their father into the room. Was he drunk? What would he say?

This attitude of humourless endurance, natural to a few, had been imposed on most by parents like themselves, surroundings of monotonous ugliness, participation in wars the young could not remember, and by a brief education delivered with so little relevance to circumstance and ability as to be incomprehensible.

Recalling the healthy, weather-beaten faces of Coolong, the clear, tremendous sky that arched the miles of open country, Harry felt he knew where was the better place to be.

He fancied that he recognized a few old neighbours, school-friends, and he walked stiffly by. He told himself that it was because he was anxious to have the visit to Emily over; in fact, he was embarrassed, sensed the uselessness of talk, knew there would be nothing to exchange but antagonism. To prefer the bush to Ballowra was to be an outcast, a bushwhacker. To come back clean-handed, well-dressed, from the bush was not good.

Passing the terminus, he lengthened his stride.

Farther along the street ahead of him, going in the same direction, Emily and her friend Patty, having spent the money given to them by Lilian, were on the way back to their paddock.

Emily wore a salmon-pink
crepe
dress of Lilian's which drooped unevenly from calf to ankle: on her feet were flat brown sandals and red socks—high heels had been abandoned before the expedition to the shops. Patty's dress was green: it was gathered across her thin chest and held by a bone brooch shaped like a canary. This had come out of a Christmas cracker. On her feet were white sandshoes. Emily's long brown hair and Patty's blonde curls were garlanded with small wild roses of pink and white which every spasmodic canter caused to slip farther from their restraining pins until they tumbled over ears and brows in gay, untidy confusion. The effect was, aesthetically, not what it had been when they set out.

With metronomic regularity Patty waved a newspaper parcel between herself and Emily, and each in turn extracted from the torn end of the packet a long golden chip. The grease made their orange lipstick, contributed by Dotty, run; and while the bright daubs on their cheeks remained intact, the colour went oddly with the dull flush brought on by heat and exercise. Puffing with the exertion of running, eating, and communicating, they sucked in long draughts of humid air and giggled at nothing, for these were the long summer holidays.

As he approached the two figures, a frown superimposed itself on Harry's carefully bland forehead. Quickly passing the girls and turning to stand in front of them he knew that undoubtedly one of them was his daughter Emily. After a moment of stupefaction he sought to counteract the impregnable frown by forcing a laugh. It came out rasping and unmirthful and did nothing to mitigate the haggard displeasure with which Emily regarded him. Nevertheless she held her ground.

‘Well, aren't you going to give your father a kiss?'

She blinked up at him. He leaned down and she stretched up an unwilling neck: mistiming her salute, she made a little smacking noise with her lips when she was an inch away from his cheek and they separated, daunted.

With an unmeaning chuckle, her father said, ‘I'm taking you back to your grandmother's. You'd better tell your little friend to run home,' and Patty was off, shooting up a side-street before Emily was forced to look at her.

Deserted, she had no choice but to walk by her father's side, glazed with awkwardness, wondering why in the world people had to have fathers, and why they had to come out of the footpath on hot Saturday mornings when people were just enjoying their holidays and doing no harm to anyone.

She made several fumbling passes at the roses on her head, and hoped—but pessimistically—that her father would approve of, even admire, them and her.

They both stared at their feet as they walked, glanced severely at the trucks and cars on the road at one side, at the bungalows quietly stewing in the sun on the other.

Finally bringing himself to look at the flower-strewn head beside him, Harry said, ‘This is a fine costume you've got on! Did your grandmother know you were going down the street like that?'

She resentfully looked up, her glamour shattered, herself ridiculous. ‘I don't know...Yes,' she muttered.

Her father's eyes slid from the painted, hostile face.

‘Your neck's dirty!' he exclaimed, catching her by the arm, making her stand still.

Emily was rocketed by indignation to fabulous altitudes. She swayed on the far heights of the globe. Oh, what a thing to say! What a thing for a father to say! She yearned for the moment when she could tell Lilian.

The two stared at each other with fast-breathing, close-lipped resolution. Harry clenched his teeth, grabbed the girl's hand and started off again very fast, and she, with as much eagerness and determination, ran alongside.

The cream-painted gate, the hedge, and behind it on the corner, set in a pond of grass, the red-brick bungalow with its many additional verandas and decorative pieces of fretted woodwork—home—was now in sight.

Judging the distance, Emily pulled her hand free from a clasp uncomfortably damp and familiar. She lifted the trailing skirt to her knees and turning to her father with an excruciating assumption of friendliness, cried, ‘I'll just tell them you're coming,' and fled head-first to the house.

‘Emily!'

An answer streamed after her but she kept running.

This unprecedented defiance made Harry hasten a step or two and open his mouth to call again. But the exertion demanded by anger and command—in this heat—and the problematic success of any such attempt, arrested him. He slowed, closed his mouth and looked at his watch again.