Free The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower Page B

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Patty and I went for a hike on Sunday,’ she finally offered.
    â€˜Oh? Where to?’
    â€˜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.’
    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