Free The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower Page A

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    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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜If I pass. The results’ll be in the paper any day.’
    â€˜And will you?’
    â€˜Mrs Salter says so.’
    â€˜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,