Return to Coolami (15 page)

Drew said:

“By jove, Milly, that's lovely!” and she said: “Yes, isn't it?” feeling guilty and strangely sad because in her present mood her hunger was all for a pathway cut through wheat lands where you walked shoulder-high
and the tops looked like acres of green lawn, so smooth and even with the kurrajong trees rising out of them.

That kurrajong in the far paddock at Wondabyne – it was supposed to be the biggest in the district – amazing how clearly she still remembered it. She could shut her eyes now and see the very movement in its leaves and its pale bell-shaped flowers, see a ewe with its lamb as she must have seen them one hot day sheltering beneath it. And not far away the wilga which, as children, they had imagined to be in some way bewitched or accursed because the sheep wouldn't eat it; not till she was very nearly grown up had she seen others in other places which lay beneath the same incomprehensible ban, and she had never quite lost her childish awe of that one outcast, standing shaggily among its brethren whose lower branches were trimmed by the stock to such a perfection of horizontal neatness.

Oh, was it wise to come back to it again like this? Fleetingly, for a day or two as a stranger, a visitor from what a different life! If a memory could do this to you what would the sight of it mean, the very breath and being of it again—

So close to Wondabyne. Why hadn't she ever gone back? While she could have gone; when Agatha was still there, when it might still have seemed with only a little effort of imagination, home. Why hadn't she gone with Susan? How different then, things might have been—!

But she realised with a faint comfort that those differences might not all have been improvements. Susan mightn't, possibly, have singed her wings, but in that case she wouldn't have been going back now
with Bret to Coolami. That, Millicent insisted on believing, was a good thing. And she wouldn't be here herself, nor would Tom; nor would they have had that quiet, drowsily happy hour together this morning while the young people went off down the hill leaving them to confess silently to each other that they were glad they were still alive even if they were getting old. To admit without words that in the rather unfriendly vastness which life became when you had just missed losing it by a hairsbreadth, it was comforting to be together, and still more comforting to be aware of that comfort as something mellow and full of virtue like old wine—

No, it had all been for the best. It wouldn't have done to let Tom see her craving for the country. It would have baulked him in his steady onward rush; it would have made him uncertain of his goal, and uncertain therefore of those qualities in himself which were fighting towards it. That would have been a dreadful thing – a Tom not sure of himself, disgruntled, feeling all the time an indefinable sense of failure! Inconceivable! She glanced at him sideways, alarmed at the vivid mental image she'd had for one dreadful moment of Tom with a stoop to his shoulders and a flickering doubt in his eyes! Tom robbed of his endearing arrogance which was so like the arrogance of a little boy with more marbles than his schoolmates! Tom without his hearty confidence, his dominance, the slight rotundity beneath his waistcoat, the whole satisfying aroma of his success!

A little fear gripped her. Perhaps she hadn't thought hard enough about this trip? Perhaps, in her first surge of almost incredulous joy when he'd suggested it, she'd
dismissed too hastily the mystery of his seeming capitulation?

Was it a challenge? Was he, like a poker-player, flinging down his hand on the table and saying, “There! That's my little lot! Let's see yours! Beat it if you can!” And of course she could. What could she do about it, this devastating Royal Flush that she held? No good putting it down and trying to pretend it was threes! Tom wasn't to be bluffed that way. For the first time she was a little afraid of that swift perception of his, that rarely-flashing quality which made him so much more than the owner of two cars and a house at Ballool and a cottage at the seaside—

And to be bound for Coolami, of all places! Wondabyne, with its weatherboard homestead, its scattered, tin-roofed outhouses, its general air of rather happy-go-lucky comfort, might not have impressed him much. But the Tom who liked things sound and solid, who insisted on efficiency, who craved rather pathetically a beauty he didn't quite know how to create, would only need to look once at Coolami—

And of course when she'd known it it had been new; now from photographs, from Susan's descriptions she could see it hungrily in all the perfection Bret's mother had planned and Bret's father worked for. She could see its stone, weathered to subdued greys, almost windowless so that it seemed like some vast rock flung there in prehistoric ages, all its life turned inward to the cool garden in its centre. She could see the trees round it, Wilga and Currawong and Silver Wattle. Even the little crooked Coolabah which Bret's mother had so stubbornly insisted on planting though every one protested because it suckered so, and which, Susan said, had grown with the years not as big as it should
because it wasn't near enough to the river to be really happy, but more gnarled, more macabre, so that it threw a shadow incredibly wild and distorted across the ground. Bret's mother had seen, Millicent thought, better than any one, the strange loveliness of an ancient land. She more than most of her countrymen had been able to escape a gospel of beauty handed down from generations which had dwelt on a milder and gentler soil. She had abandoned, somehow, an ancestral reverence for landscapes softly painted in lush greens for sappy, fragile flowers and the smooth charm of an unfailing fruitfulness. She'd seen new and more difficult beauty; beauty that rioted opulently in a frothing mass of honey-scented gold, and then a step farther on, in a vast tree, dead, skeleton-white, lifting naked branches to the sky, took on a wild and tragic aloofness.

So she'd planted the trees of the country, the flowers of the country and fought them into living. That was how she had described it herself in one of her letters to Millicent: “I'm still at war with my garden.” For they hadn't easily capitulated, the wild flowers, defensive behind their sharp hard leaves, their prickles; they resented their captivity as a nervous animal might; bitter, mistrustful, they had died to elude her. But by degrees she'd persuaded them; she'd told of boronia with feathery leaves won round at last to life and a profusion of fragrant blossoming; of a geebung, prim, old-maidish, with its stiff leaves and its green, astringent fruit; of tea-tree and pink melaleuca and white star-flowered eriostemon—

And then she'd died. The trees grew and the flowers went on. “Well, we keep it in order more or less,” Bret had said once to Millicent's questioning, “but of
course we can't look after it as she used to – there's always so much else to do.”

Millicent thought with a strange and restful conviction: “Now, of course, Susan can take it over.”

S
USAN
was nodding in her corner. Now that the sun was out again and the hood and side-curtains kept the wind from her face she felt warm and tired and increasingly sleepy. That wasn't really to be wondered at because there hadn't been much sleep for herself or for Bret last night and they'd had to be up again at the crack of dawn—

Why had they argued, talked, torn themselves and each other to shreds with words that got them nowhere—

Poor Bret—!

And there was another
emotion! Compassion! Heavens! why couldn't you be made so that you could only have one feeling at a time? Was it any wonder that people did crazy things when their whole nervous make-up was being lashed this way and that by a dozen conflicting cross-currents of emotion? There she'd stood in front of Bret last night and felt – what? Well, first and last, of course, love for him, a small, steady-burning flame. From that came all the torture – and all the joy. Dread of an embrace without meaning, dread of what it might do to her, of a flame extinguished and a sudden darkness. Pity for him, caught with her in hopeless tangle of good intentions, pity for his desire and the long effort of his self-denial. And a longing of her own that came chokingly from untold depths, pushing up for a second or two through
her love and her dread, clutching at her pity for him as at an ally, sinking again, wavering down out of sight and knowledge.

There had been a moon. Lying in bed with eyes hot and swollen from soundless weeping she'd been able to see his reflection in the swinging mirror of her wardrobe. How long he'd sat there on the edge of his bed, smoking one cigarette after another, thinking probably, as she was thinking, long profitless, weary thoughts! There'd been moments then when, if he had come, some part of her would have welcomed him, bartered everything else feverishly for a mutual bodily assuagement, for an illusion of easing even for so brief a time the loneliness in which they were both engulfed.

Now she was glad. Now she felt, dimly and unreasonably, fighting her sagging eyelids, that some better, some almost bearable way out might present itself. Now that he didn't have to see her all the time as the mother of Jim's baby, he might by degrees begin to think of her as a separate human being. Not Jim's mistress nor his own wife, nor the daughter of her parents, but just Susan. He might begin to like her then. Like her – like – love her—

Oh, wake up! Stupid to fall asleep like a kid or an old lady! And you might snore or leave your mouth open and you don't look your best—

Not that that matters much – now! He's seen you looking worse than that, with your body clumsy and spoiled, the yellow pallor of exhaustion on your face.

There are the locusts beginning now that the sun's out again. A nice noise, whirry, hot, drowsy; a nice movement of the car, rocking gently, a rhythmic vibration—

Bret had hardly seen the road for miles. Following his thoughts idly as one might follow some meandering bushland track, he had come slowly into a dark and bitter anger that roused him at last to consciousness of himself and of the way he'd come. He'd been thinking of Wondabyne, and from there he'd got on to some friends of Adela's who had wanted to be shown his stud sheep. And from that he'd remembered riding down with them towards the home paddock just when the three o'clock whistle was sounding and seeing in the distance Ken and Susan walk up from the windmill paddock by the creek. Just a glimpse, instantly forgotten except for a faint momentary worry that Ken, confound him, with his caustic, unguarded tongue, might upset her again as he had once or twice before—

So he'd seen his visitors off and gone back to the wool-shed to speak to Curtis. It was hot in there, he remembered, humid, familiarly-smelling of hessian and newly-shorn wool; quiet now that the machinery had stopped and the men's voices in scraps of conversation made the only sound. Bars of sunlight alive with floating specks of gold lay across the floor and there was a faint smell of ammonia that mingled now and then with the other smells. He turned towards the press to look for Curtis, threading his way between the tumbled bales of wool that surrounded it, and behind a stack of them he came suddenly on Ken with his arm round Susan, and Susan laughing.

His anger had been almost purely for their colossal indiscretion. The realisation afterwards of his total
lack of any sensation of jealousy or even of personal injury, had, in fact, disturbed him rather. He'd thought, at first, of nothing at all but the undeniable fact that it might just as well have been any casual shearer who had seen them.

Ken's eyebrows had gone up; he'd made a comical gesture of dismay. Nothing, Bret reflected grimly, had ever been known to upset Ken's attitude of airy cynicism! And Susan, her colour higher and her eyes brighter than ever, had gone on laughing. There, of course, nothing could be said, or done. He'd simply turned and left them, and it was that night when he and Susan had talked and explained and gibed and protested themselves into a semi-exhaustion of nervous strain, that her arm had been scratched so badly by his watch-buckle—

And, when it came to the
point he'd found there was nothing, really, that he could say to Ken. Lacking a natural resentment he was left without a case. Unless, indeed, he said, in effect, “If you want to make love to my wife, do it more discreetly.” He couldn't even feel that Ken was particularly to blame. Susan had deliberately vamped him (she'd said as much herself) and he'd always been inflammable. And he'd protested, shrugging:

“I'm sorry it happened. But for the Lord's sake don't do the injured husband – under the circumstances it's a bit absurd.”

And Bret himself had actually said:

“It's not absurd when you do it under the eyes of every shearer on the place—”

And then stopped, facing the implication of his sentence, seeing the sharp amused appreciation of it lurking wickedly in Ken's faunish grin—

And on that memory he'd
wakened to a veritable drum of anger beating in his pulses, the same torturing impotent rage which he felt so often now. Not anger at Ken for making love to his wife, not at Susan for encouraging it, nor at himself for an attitude which could only be put into words that stuck in your throat if you even tried to say them; but at the something behind it all, driving them into unnatural actions, false to each other and themselves.

And what was it but this confounded love business, mischievous, incomprehensible! Jim's love first, tangling and enmeshing them all. Then Susan's, building barriers about her. And he remembered the first time he had felt it, that wall of something invisible and intangible about her, when he'd first suggested marriage and she'd looked at him as she might have looked if he'd stabbed her and she'd been trying to understand before she died why he should harm her so.

And again in the garden at Ballool – the vegetable garden! He remembered that even then, when he was so worried and exasperated, so wretched about Jim's death and so irritable with want of sleep, he'd had a moment or two of pure amusement that they should be talking this thing out with cabbages on one side of them and spinach on the other!