Down in the City Read Free

pictures, before they go dancing and skating.
    The girls behind the counter move with smouldering, sullen speed, their make-up melting with the heat. Stella has four tin beakers in a row. She glares into four pairs of eyes.
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Chocolate malted. Chocolate malted. Plain strawberry. Caramel malted.’ They are meek.
    Her face pretends that she has not heard, but her hands work at lightning speed. Half a pint of milk to each beaker, a ladle of flavouring, over to the malt dispenser, a scoop of ice-cream to each, and the first two are under the whirring mixers. She jiggles them impatiently, then, jerking them from the machines, the beaker in one hand thrown high above her head, she tosses a long line of frothing milk into a glass like a cardsharper spreading the pack, and stabs the foam with two straws.
    This humidity would get anyone down. Stella has had three jobs already this summer and she won’t be in this one much longer. The trouble is they all expect a girl to give up her private life to her work. But not Stella. If Jacko has a day off and says, ‘Come on!’ she goes. There are other jobs, and she’s young this year.
    Night comes swiftly. The sun falls with perceptible speed and blackness follows immediately. Away from the city and the glimmer of neon lights the vast black heavens overawe the earth with incandescent stars.

CHAPTER ONE
    What was never known for certain was why David Prescott acted as he did. Certainly, although it seemed to his sons and his acquaintances a deplorably reactionary, un-Australian attitude to have adopted, it would not have been possible for them to criticise him. And by the time he married again, by the time he persuaded Marion Hervey to marry him, it was too late. As far as Esther was concerned the damage was done, irreparable.
    Unwilling, at first, to realise this, Marion, with an urgency that was not entirely disinterested, questioned him on the subject. She was not gagged by the blighting tolerance, by the cold ideal that froze spontaneity, which he had passed on to his family. And she wanted affection from David’s daughter. She had no thought of playing mother to a girl who had never known a mother, but she hoped at least for warmth and affection.
    The boys—David, Hector and Clem—had, with thoughtful responsibility, decided on university, chosen their professions and absolved their watchful father from the necessity of what could only be for him distasteful interference.
    They had memories of their mother: they could, and occasionally did, talk with one another, but Esther was alone from the first. She was hovered over, she was observed, but she was not approached. In pursuance of an extraordinary plan which it is only to be supposed was carried out with the intention of securing for her an unusually high degree of self-reliance, she was shackled from childhood with completest freedom. All guidance was determinedly withheld.
    It was only when the child reached school age that her father revoked his rule of conduct to make one decision for her. Having succeeded so far with his plan, it was apparently unbearable that by contact with, and inevitably contamination from, the outside world, she should be spoilt. He hired a governess—a Miss Barker, a colourless Englishwoman who spoke well and sewed beautifully.
    As far as could be seen by onlookers, this act was the most remarkable of a series which had with reason been called eccentric. If only now the term appeared inadequate it was because this was a positive action, the consequences of which might be conjectured: what was past was tenuous, the effect impossible to gauge.
    Later, when it was too late, when Marion came, she said what had till then been merely thought by Esther’s brothers and her father’s friends—that such isolation was unhealthy, even cruel, that she thought, with the best intentions, he had been wrong.
    Unperturbed—for when he looked at Esther he