Emily did not seem to mind Janet discarding her. There followed a period of weeks when she was every bit as self — absorbed as when she had been eating, dreaming, indolent, but now she was full of energy and self-denial, at least for food, and I watched. I watched endlessly, for I had never seen anything like this for concentration.
For if she, Emily, had gone inwards, as much now in this new activity as she had when lazy and dreaming, at least now what she felt herself to be was all visible, presented to me in the shape of her fantastic costumes.
Her first self-portrait… she had found an old dress, white with sprigs of pink flowers. Parts were stained and worn. These she cut away. Bits of lace and tulle, beads, scarves, were added and removed to a kaleidoscope garment that changed with her needs. Most often it was a bride's dress. Then it was a young girl's dress — that ambiguous declaration of naivete more usually made by a maturer vision than that of the wearer, an eye that sees the fragility of certain types of young girls' clothes as the expression of the evanescence of that flesh. It was nightdress when she wore its transparency over her naked body. It was evening dress, and sometimes when she did not intend this, for a hardness in her, the watchfulness of her defences, took away innocence from anything she wore, so that she might have flowers in her hands and in her hair, in an attempt at her version of Primavera, yet she had about her the look of a woman who has calculated the exact amount of flesh she will show at a dinner party. This dress was for me an emotional experience. I was frightened by it. Again, this was a question of my helplessness with her. I believed her capable of going out on the pavement wearing it. Now I judge myself to have been stupid: the elderly tend not to see — they have forgotten! — that hidden person in the young creature, the strongest and most powerful member among the cast of characters inhabiting an adolescent body, the self which instructs, chooses experience — and protects.
And then, to see this creation now, at such a time of savagery and anarchy, this archetype of a girl's dress — or rather, this composite of archetypes; the way this child, this little girl, had found the materials for her dreams in the rubbish heaps of our old civilisation, had found them, worked on them, and in spite of everything had made her images of herself come to life… but such old images, so indestructible, and so irrelevant — all this was too much for me, and I retired from the scene, determined to say nothing, show nothing, betray nothing. And it was lucky I did. She wore the thing about the flat, a naked girl only just veiled; she wore it flauntingly, bashfully, daringly, fearfully; she was 'trying on' not a dress, but self-portraits, and I might as well not have been there, she took no notice of me. Well, of course, the pressures on everyone's privacy had taught us how to absent ourselves into inner solitudes, we were all adept at being with others and not being with them.
But I really did not know whether to laugh or to cry; I did a little of both, of course when she could not see me. For she was so ludicrous, as well as so brave and resourceful, with her straight, honest, hazel eyes — her English good — comrade's eyes, unsubtle, judging, wary; with her attempts at make-up on a fresh little face, languishing away there behind harem veils, her body stiff in 'seductive' poses. This dress possessed her for weeks. Then one day she took scissors and cut off the bottom in a gesture of derisive impatience: something had not worked, or had worked for her and it was all over, not needed. She threw the jaded bundle into a drawer and began on a new invention of herself.
There was a late, and prolonged, cold spell. There was even a little snow. In my flat warmth was a much-coaxed visitor, and like everyone else we were wearing almost as many clothes indoors as we did out. Emily took the sheepskins and made a long dramatic tunic. This she belted with some scarlet chiffon, and she wore it over an old shirt she had taken from my cupboard. Without asking. I cannot say how delighted I was when she did this. It showed she felt she had some rights with me, at last. The child's right to be naughty, for one; but it was more than that: an elderly or a mature person finds some young one simply taking something, a personal thing, particularly if it is a strong expression or statement of a phase of life (as a pink — sprigged white dress is for a young girl) and what a release it is, a shock, cold water on shrinking flesh if you like, but a liberation. This is more mine than yours — says the act of the theft; more mine because I need it more, it fits my stage of life better than it does yours, you have outgrown it… and perhaps the exhilaration it releases is even a hint of an event still in the future, that moment when the person sees in the eyes of people the statement — still unconscious, perhaps: You can hand over your life now, you don't need it any longer, we will live it for you, please go.
The shirt had been among my clothes for thirty years, had once been a sophisticated thing, was of fine green silk. Now it went under Emily's sheepskin swagger, and just as I was wrestling with the need to say: 'For heaven's sake, you can't wear that brigand's outfit out of doors, it is an invitation to assault! — she allowed the contraption to fall apart, for it was only tacked and pinned together, no more permanent than a daydream.
And so we went on. She did not go out of the flat, not in any of her fantasies; and I observed that these were becoming more utilitarian.
Chrysalis after chrysalis was outgrown, and then, because of her shame at having wasted so much, she asked abruptly and gracelessly but in her over-polite and awful way for some more money, and went off by herself to the markets. She came back with some secondhand clothes that in one giant's step took her from being a child with fantastic visions of herself into a girl — a woman, rather. She was thirteen then, not yet fourteen; but she might as well have been seventeen or eighteen, and it had happened in an explosion of days. Now I thought that probably the heroes of the pavement would be beneath her; that she, a young woman, would demand what nature would in fact have chosen for her, a young man of seventeen, eighteen, even more.
But the crowd, the pack, the gang — not yet a tribe, but on its way to being one, had suffered forced growth, as she had. A few weeks had done it. While snow had bleached the pavements and heightened the black of tree branches frilled and dangling with new green — had shrunk away and returned again, while Emily had mated herself in imagination with romantic heroes and chief executives and harem tyrants, a dozen or so young men had emerged from their disguises as louts and yokels, and at evening stood around under the trees swaggering in colourful clothes, and the girls of the neighbourhood had come out to join them. Now sometimes as many as thirty or more young people were being watched in the lengthening afternoons of early spring from hundreds of windows. By now it had dawned on the neighbourhood that a phenomenon we had believed could belong only to the regions 'out there' was being born before our eyes, in our own streets, where until now it had seemed that at worst nothing could happen but the passage of some alien migrations.