The Long Prospect Read Free

he’s married. I made out that much. Will he get a divorce?’
    â€˜There’s no question of it.’
    â€˜Ah!’ Lilian dug her heels into the carpet and bounced farther back on the sofa. She said shrewdly, after thoroughly studying Thea’s figure and pose, ‘What’s the trouble, is he a Catholic or something?’
    Seeing in Lilian’s unsuccessful speculation a means of halting the catechism Thea almost warmed to her. ‘Yes.’ She sat down in an armchair and added, forestalling further questions, ‘Tonight, as you probably heard, he’s flying to Melbourne.’ She said it with the air, casual yet candid, of one telling all.
    Lilian was nonplussed. Her other questions, banished by the previous moment’s intense receptivity, could not be recalled. She cleared her throat. ‘It’s a good night for a plane,’ she remarked.
    â€˜The forecast says fair weather.’
    They did not speak again of Max.
    When Lilian was leaving, Thea came after her to say, ‘Tell Emily—tell her I’ll come to see her soon.’
    Thea had known Lilian Hulm and lived in her house for eleven years, ever since the year of her graduation when the opportunity offered by A.C.I.L. for research had brought her from Sydney. In those days there were no flats; a moat of steelworks and factories surrounded hills and plains of drab bungalows and shops. Cinemas, hotels, reared up from the encircled plain like small cathedrals. At night the sky glowed dusky red with industry.
    For a newcomer, a single woman, accommodation meant a room in a stranger’s house in whichever suburb was nearest to her place of work. That Thea had at the beginning chosen to stay with Lilian indicated no more than the convenience of the house, and the lack of an alternative; that she continued to stay was the measure of her detachment.
    Lilian Hulm, handsome, twice-widowed, forty-seven, had had boarders in her house—sometimes one, once as many as three—ever since her first marriage at eighteen.
    For two years before the death of her first husband, Paula’s father, she had been the mistress and landlady of Jack Hulm—a personable man twenty years her senior. Now his widow, free of ties and financial worries—he had left her a row of houses and three taxis—she was searching in an intuitive but none the less methodical manner for his successor.
    It was of bygone and potential candidates for this rôle that she talked tonight.
    Thea had to hear again the old story of Olly’s defection. She was told, incidentally, about the woman across the street who had bunions, and Jill having trouble now that she had reached that certain age. She was told that Billie Duncan no longer slept with her husband; that Moira Digby along the street owed ten pounds to the grocer, that at forty-two Janet Olafson expected her first baby and no one could guess who the father was. Olafson was at sea. Thea was taken, in detail, through Dotty’s mother’s operation for gall-stones. And an ancient interesting haemorrhage of Lilian’s own was recalled in passing.
    In return, Thea did not mention Max. She did not give her opinion of the United Nations’ resolution on the European crisis, or ask for Lilian’s. She did not say that she had last night, with great pleasure, rediscovered Housman. Neither did she attempt to summarize what she knew of the work of Jung, nor try to convince Lilian of its great value. That she and Max had dragged themselves from bed at dawn to walk on the empty beach, and smiled now to remember their subsequent exhaustion, she did not say. And about Emily, whom she suspected of not being properly fed, she did not ask. The hostile irrelevance of Lilian’s reaction was all too predictable.
    It was several months since Thea had been to Greenhills. Her visits now were always arranged to coincide with Max’s periodic trips to Sydney or Melbourne for meetings.