The Long Prospect (9 page)

Harry nodded, and, when he saw that she was about to start again, said hastily, ‘Who's this Patty? You used to have a friend called Alice, didn't you?'

Emily gave him a pitying look. He didn't know
anything
. She gave him an edited version of the change-over.

It happened that on leaving Miss Bates's class, Alice had been relegated to the B grade as a result of a falling-off in her work. The two girls, who had become friends circumstantially on their first day at school, were separated for the first time.

Humiliated, Alice had reacted against Emily and threatened to find a new friend. Rebuked by her father, told by her mother that Emily, with fewer advantages—no mother, no father, no proper home-life—had yet been able to succeed where she had failed, Alice resolved that the loss of her friendship was insufficient punishment for this paragon—though even that, she knew, would be a blow.
She
was all right: there was a new girl in her inferior class this term, a pretty new girl who wanted a friend. Emily would be the odd one out. Everyone was paired off.

For a few weeks the old partnership held together—Alice cool, Emily hectic with perturbation. It was not Alice she wanted; it was the symbol of social success and security; it was Alice, the stable landmark she had known for years; the protection against a charge of unpopularity—simply, that is, the useful bulwark that most youthful friendships are.

To this end, she daily drained herself of her sense of what was right, what was fitting; there was even a sense of what was dignified that had to be sacrificed—as it turned out, in vain. Emily's temporary successes only hardened Alice's determination to break away.

The climax and the end came one day when they sat eating lunch in the shed at school. Another parental lecture the night before had finally decided Alice.

In a clear thin voice she said, ‘My mother says your mother and father'll get a divorce. You'll be an orphan. It'll be in all the papers. My mother says I ought to have friends who have nice homes like me.'

Emily was conscious suddenly of tears waiting under her lower lids. She had not armed for this attack. They were in the midst of a contest, yes, but this was out of the blue, irrelevant, and surely, not true.

‘They will not.'

‘My mother says they will.'

There fell the cold rain on the pitted asphalt; there stood the red-brick school with its high grey windows; beyond it, a fence, a road, a line of houses. On her arms there was cold damp air; round her there were girls who smelled of the food they had eaten—bananas and onion and garlic sausages. Through the wall of skirts and legs she could see the wooden floor of the shed, and at the entrance, the garbage tin, stuffed with crumpled papers, crusts, and fruit skins.

The girls stood watching and listening with mindless curiosity. Emily and Alice, knowing this now to be their last encounter, smiled tightly at each other like small-mouthed animals.

‘
June
's going to be my best friend now and my mother's glad. She says your grandmother's a disgrace and that Mr Rosen living there isn't respectable. She says—'

The bell rang for assembly and they stampeded from the shed, clasping lunch-boxes, throwing up knees and feet, tearing across the wet playground.

‘June! June!' screamed Alice. ‘Wait for me!' She threw a backward glance over her shoulder at Emily and sped to join her new friend.

The dull wet afternoon was spent on art. On rough grey paper the children drew with coloured chalks which infiltrated fingernails and fingertips. Untalented, unconcentrated, into her circular red apple and her bright banana, Emily drew it all—the stab of fear, the beating heart, the tears that stayed, the smile, that awful smile she had worn, it now seemed, all her life.

Automatically thrilled by the silent tigerish passing of Mrs Salter up and down the aisles between the desks, Emily squeaked away with her chalks, and remembered
knowing
Alice as an individual. There had been an unemotional knowing, a recognition in some part of her mind or nerves so calm as to be objective, that Alice was a small girl with sharp teeth and an animal lack of feeling. She had rejoiced in the audience, wanted to create a sensation, would gladly have spilled blood for effect.

Drawing the apple and banana, Emily made no effort to put her feeling into words, but the memory of it came to her and she felt it again. She looked at the fruit on the table, the stick of chalk in her fingers: her eyes went momentarily to the grey windows, then passed to the grey page in front of her.

Divorce? An orphan? To be as different as that from everyone else? And Lilian and Mrs Rosen? Remember the day Mrs Rosen came crying and Lilian chased her away? Remember George looking the other way if he saw her coming?

She hurled herself and her bag through the kitchen door that afternoon and pelted Lilian with questions. If she was tactless, Lilian was too outraged by the impudence of her accusers to notice.

She vehemently denied the likelihood both of divorce and of Emily's becoming an orphan. And what was it, she wanted to know, that Alice had said about Mr Rosen?

A quiet afternoon by the electric fire with a book had brought Lilian to a readiness to be roused that Emily and her story touched off at once.

Stomping to and fro across the room, glaring belligerently at everything in sight, Lilian abused Alice, her mother, her father, and all their relatives for many generations into the past and future.

They could be had up, going round saying things like that about people. And coming from
them
, anyway, it was pretty good.

‘When I first knew that family—that was when your mother was just about your age—do you know what they were?'

Having heard before, Emily knew, but she shook her head.

‘They were flat broke. The grandfather was round here every day asking if he could cut the lawn for us. I used to give him a basket of food to take home to them all. If you gave him money he drank it though his wife didn't have a loaf of bread in the house or a decent pair of shoes to her feet.

‘She was round begging me not to give him even a sixpenny piece. Ah, yes! Of course, they don't remember any of that now. All set up in their nice big jobs, they don't remember.'

‘But, Grandma—but Lilian'—Emily always found this perplexing—‘
why
were they hungry?'

‘It wasn't just them,' Lilian corrected her with a threatening nod, ‘everyone was.'

‘Us?' She narrowed her eyes. A different answer from the one she was invariably given would not have surprised her.

‘No, we were lucky.'

‘Well, why were they...hungry?'

Faintly harassed, Lilian at length said, ‘Well, you see, there was no work for the men.'

‘Why?'

‘Why?' Lilian frowned. ‘Because there wasn't, that's why.' Then, for her own benefit, for it puzzled her, too, she added, ‘You see there was the Great War and then the Depression came and then...'

Emily squashed her face between her fists and was silent.

After a tentative pause, during which Lilian gathered with relief that she was to be questioned no more today, she said, rallying, ‘So don't you worry your head about those ones and all their talk. My goodness, you should feel sorry for them for being so stupid. They can't help it, the...'

This sudden reversion to personalities found Emily unprepared. She could not so quickly rise to Lilian's magnanimity. But when she had thought it over for a minute or two it struck her as indeed most gratifying that pity was the reasonable return for Alice's spite. It was what she had suspected at the time.

‘Come on!' Lilian cried. ‘We'll make ourselves some afternoon tea and have a party. And there's no school for you tomorrow. We'll have a day off and go to the pictures. What do you say?'

After a feast of iced fairy cakes and tea, Lilian sang—as she sometimes did when she wanted to be particularly amusing—a series of music-hall ballads remembered from her childhood.

And Emily pressed her to tell again how, if she had not had her tonsils removed at the age of eighteen, she might have been another Melba. If that had happened, she never failed to point out, Emily would never have existed. ‘You owe your life to my tonsils,' she said, and then she sang some more.

She was very funny, and Emily, who loved to be entertained, laughed and cheered her on until they were hoarse and weak with giggles.

Wiping their eyes they looked at each other with the harmonious affection of shared, unmalicious amusement and laughed again. Mr Rosen, coming in from work, was baffled by their happy hysteria.

He made a few bewildered attempts to join in, but finding the tide of Lilian's interest against him he went away to his room.

But he had reminded the others of time. After she had done a few imitations of him, Lilian wanted to be alone to get dinner and to fall into the state she called thinking.

She faced the idea that she might eventually have to return Mr Rosen to his wife and let her reputation rest: for the present it was a thought to be kept available for use on those occasions on which it suited her to frighten him.

For Emily the problem of finding a new friend was easily solved by the presence three houses away of Patty, whom she knew by sight, a Roman Catholic in a Protestant neighbourhood and consequently isolated. Unutterably relieved to have found each other they talked one afternoon and vowed, the following week, to be friends till they died.

The repercussions of the distant break-up with Alice were still at work in Lilian. More and more frequently it occurred to her to remember that she and Rosen were locally criticized. For some time past her chief interest in Rosen had centred round her ability to humiliate him. He, for his part, was able to irritate her without trying, by acting in company like the master of the house, and unwisely trying to exhibit his non-existent power over her.

Recently the possibility of bringing, not competition, but a levelling agent, in the shape of another boarder, into the house, had been appealing to Lilian. It would be a perpetual reminder to him that whatever the situation was between them, he was there as a paying guest and his privileges, if peculiar, were not unlimited.

Lilian was resentful that she should be labelled, because of someone for whom she now felt only a spasmodic interest, as less than respectable. And, too, she had all along been aware of Paula's frozen disapproval. The performances of mother and daughter had been intolerably strained by her unorthodox behaviour, were so far from expressing what each truly felt that their meetings teetered on the edge of farce.

Last week, after a quarrel, knowing only that she was irritated with Rosen, and plagued by a compulsion to ingratiate herself again with Paula, Lilian wrote to say that she was looking for news of someone suitable to take in as a second boarder.

With deceptive casualness Paula had passed on this information to Harry.
His
mind turned on his own affairs. He imagined that people were always coming and going in Lilian's house; he guessed, also, that Rosen was Lilian's friend—a euphemism for something which, in Ballowra, had no other name—and he was less than interested.

But to break the silence back into which he and Emily had fallen he said, ‘Old—er—what's-his-name—how do you get on with him?'

She got on with him as well as she got on with the dining-room table, or the grandfather clock, so she said, ‘All right.'

‘Look out!' her father said. ‘That's the Royal, isn't it? This is where we get off.'

She saw his tweed shoulders preceding her down the stairs of the bus and said to herself, that's your father.

CHAPTER FOUR

DURING THE holidays Emily turned twelve and some time, but at no identifiable time, after that she woke to a world that made what she had known before seem one-dimensional. She was collected in one place, made subjective and aware of it: made capable of objectivity. Overnight she had become all-seeing and all-wise. She had become the sounding-board for thin waves of intuition by which she incredibly, sometimes shockingly, and often to the dismay of her heart, knew what was true and what was not.

Battered by ceaseless messages from an autonomous translation centre she looked away from shuttered adult eyes, overcome by a conviction that they lied not only to her but—what was infinitely more alarming—to themselves.

Had she accidentally become a hypnotist, that she knew so much? Had her eyes developed X-ray vision? she wondered. No, it was more miraculous than that, something more sober and terrifying than that, that had happened to her. A palpitating new world of extraordinary richness and complexity had sprung round her. She and the world had been reborn.

Through the hot summer days she lay on the grass and watched the clouds, and wandered along the river trying to probe the mystery of the fabulous being she had become.

If a universal miracle had taken place, someone, she thought, would have to mention it sooner or later, so she waited and watched.

She studied Lilian and Mr Rosen, dropped hints to Dotty while she dried the dishes. She gave Patty opportunities which, had she known the language, she could not have failed to understand. Reluctantly she concluded that whatever had happened, she was in it on her own. No one else had changed. They still lived from day to day, and meal to meal, and talked about the price of peas and tomatoes. They talked about Gladys's Tom getting drunk and breaking one of her teeth (‘His inside must be pickled in alcohol,' Lilian said); and about Mrs Hodges who was so stuck-up suddenly having hysterics in the butcher's shop and being taken off in an ambulance (‘Swearing like a trooper,' Lilian said). And they talked about the floods last winter, the people whose houses were flooded out for the third time in the season (‘Waves crashing over their chimneys, poor souls,' Lilian said). And they made love, and made themselves sick on cheap wine.

The application of her belief that the truth of a situation, pointed out, would be self-evident, taught Emily that nothing was easier to resist than reason, and sent her to the river to think again. It sent her out at night to lean against the wall and watch the sky until she saw stars jerk a hundredth of an inch or a million years across the blackness. By day she lost her eyes in the spaces where she knew the stars to be.