Return to Coolami (30 page)

But you couldn't, you couldn't. You must only hover tactfully on the outskirts of their lives while they, growing up or growing older themselves, pushed you back relentlessly into old age. Unless you escaped.

Escape one's children? Ridiculous! And yet a faint fear assailed her. She realised that, unwittingly, her mind full of her son and her daughter and the shaping of their lives, she had come suddenly upon a crisis in her own and Tom's.

One might say actually that they had no life left. All that had made Tom's, his work, his fight (which had been less a battle for money than for a vindication of himself to himself) was over. All that had been hers – the children – had suddenly been taken from her. Nothing remained, really, but an existence and a host of material possessions.

She saw this journey now very much in the same way that Susan had seen it for different reasons – as a kind of interlude between two lives. To-night they would sleep at Coolami. To-night and to-morrow and thereafter her daughter's life would run a course diverging steadily from her own. A course in which new loves and new preoccupations would gently force out old ones – inevitably, rightly and beautifully as the spring leaves of some trees push off the dead ones of last year.

An existence and a host of material possessions. Could you make a life of those? She considered them dubiously like a cook considering some flour and a handful of raisins, and wondering if, by some miracle
of culinary art, a cake could emerge from them? And she looked sideways at Tom's bent brows, speculating upon what he'd say if she told him she was a cup of sugar, and asked him to pretend to be an egg. …?

Bret, with his pipe in his mouth and his feet propped up on the two suitcases, stared at the greenness that was swinging and swaying past his half-shut eyes. He saw it just now simply as greenness, a colour restful not only to the eyes but to the heart and mind of a countryman. Without any reasoning it added a saving touch of contentment to a mood which had been vaguely ruffled for the last ten minutes by his thoughts.

He had been thinking about Wondabyne and comparing its fortunes with those of Coolami. It worried him rather to think that so magnificent a property was not having its just due. Long years of competent and uninterrupted management by the same man – or at least by the same family – was what it needed. Wondabyne, he reflected, had never really had a fair deal since the death of Millicent's father when he himself was about seven. Her brother had been at first too young and then increasingly too ill to run it properly. When he died and poor Agatha had tried to keep it on with a manager—! He made unconsciously a little noise of impatience and exasperation. It had been enough to make your heart bleed, he thought, to see the state it had fallen into then – the rabbits multiplying in thousands so that even Coolami had been quite seriously threatened; a wool clip that the old man would have been ashamed
to see go out with the name of Wondabyne on the bales.

Into the end of that bad chapter of its history Susan had flashed so suddenly. Bret wondered for a moment if part of his instantaneous dislike for her might have been caused, quite unreasonably, by the fact that at that time everything and every one connected with Wondabyne irritated and annoyed him. The gentle ineffectual Agatha; Bailey the manager leaving ruin in his wake! His feeling then for the property had been the feeling of any humane man seeing a child or an animal badly used. Indeed he had been so concerned that he had actually suggested tentatively once to Jim that they should buy some of it – the paddocks that ran with Coolami–“just,” he remembered saying uneasily, “to put it out of its misery!”

Well, times had been bad then, they had decided that it wasn't possible. But Mortimer had come along and bought it from Agatha soon afterwards, and in his slow and uninspired way he had been heading it back towards order and prosperity.

In time he'd have made a fine property of it again. But he was dead. …

Susan, leaning towards him with her hair blowing, asked:

“How's Desdemona?”

He answered:

“All right – why?”

“I want to do an awful lot of riding.”

He nodded. Behind his unchanging expression as he leaned back in his corner his deflected thoughts began to unfold a new sequence of pictures. He saw Susan on one morning just after their return from that idiotic honeymoon. Still trying desperately to keep the thing
on a practical and friendly basis he'd suggested a morning ride, and she'd come down in her khaki breeches and leather leggings and a white shirt, looking, he'd thought, particularly trim, and particularly fit. And then, without warning when they'd been walking their horses up the hill from the windmill paddock on the way home, she'd gone a greyish-yellowish colour very suddenly and shut her eyes. He'd steadied her for a few moments and she'd recovered quite quickly and said, “It's all right – it's nothing – I feel fine now. …” Not until the middle of the morning when he was up to his eyes in work had it dawned upon him that, in addition to the psychological difficulties which they were to share, she had physical ordeals to face. …

After that he'd been nervous about her riding. He protested, but she only laughed. The pleasant and friendly basis upon which they were building their life together began to show signs of cracking. His protests, from being honest expressions of concern, took on a tone of ugly accusation; her laughter became reckless and bitter, and all that came of the business was that she went riding with Ken instead. While he was there. But when he went away and Bret had been on the point of further protest or even command, she had given up riding of her own accord. She had behaved altogether, he had been forced to admit, sensibly and pluckily. She'd been careful, but she'd refused to mollycoddle herself. And she'd never for one second used her condition as a weapon against him, a defence from him, an excuse for any of her own less creditable words or actions.

And they had both behaved badly enough at times. His spurt of anger over the episode with Ken in the
woolshed had given her a glorious weapon. And hadn't she used it! Not that you could blame her, he thought, when you considered what a cruelty, what an unbearable humiliation his whole attitude to it must have seemed to her. Natural enough for her to hit back at him how and when she could. She had, all the same, her own particular knack of putting a dash of spice and exhilaration into everything – even unhappiness! It was just as well, he thought grimly, that they had both been able to introduce into their squabbling something of the gleam and glamour of sword-play, for the ugliness of the things they had said and done to each other in those dreadful months could never otherwise have been endured.

And Ken, of course, had been vastly amused by it all. …

A sudden shock of something went through him so violently that he found himself sitting upright with his pipe in his hand before he recognised it as anger.

Anger? He told himself irritably that it was rather late in the day to start being angry now! Absurd to see Susan and Ken in miniature, bright and unreal like figures on a stage, dancing up and down the hall at Coolami to the music of a gramophone. Ridiculous to be enraged now by things which, at the time, had roused in him only a detached, impersonal disapproval. To be unable now, months later, to shrug as he had shrugged then, refusing to be goaded. …

Ken had played up to her. That was all there was to it. He hadn't cared at the time, and he was damned if he could see why he should care now. …

Drew called:

“Want to stop in Mudgee?”

Bret answered mechanically:

“No,
thanks,” but turned at a small sound to find Susan shaking her head at him.

She said reproachfully:

“My chocolates!”

The remnants of his anger seemed caught up suddenly in a blaze of some other emotion. He found that he was staring at her with a feverish intentness as one stares at something which is to be, in a moment, whisked out of one's sight for ever, and through a queer drumming in his ears he heard himself say in a voice which sounded almost threatening:

“You won't need those now.”

Drew, cocking an ear backwards, said:

“Hey? What's that?”

Susan, with scarlet cheeks and startled eyes, was gaping at her husband. She looked so amazed, so unbelieving that Bret began to laugh. He said:

“I'm going to get them all the same,” and called cheerfully to his father-in-law:

“Yes, stop just near this corner, will you? Susan and I are going shopping.”

Susan walked beside him down the street. At school when she had had to go on the platform to receive prizes she had had just the same breathless uncomfortable feeling that she had now. A
stuffed
feeling. Words, she knew, if she had to say them, would come in jerks, and sometimes there wouldn't be enough breath left to finish them. It was all, she thought resentfully, very stupid and inappropriate that happiness should be able to rob you of your dignity and calm as misery never
could. She felt that even if Bret really meant what he had seemed to mean, he'd only need one downward glance at her to make him recant, for so abruptly had her poise deserted her that she really saw herself for a few seconds in a thick shapeless navy blue tunic of her schooldays, in cotton stockings and flat-heeled shoes with the toes kicked almost out by hopscotch!

He said, “Come on!” and steered her abruptly into a shop.

She thought miserably:

“I suppose I'm being an ass. Why should he feel any differently to-day? Only yesterday he was still hating me.”

She roamed about the shop and came back slowly to the counter. She glanced at Bret absently and then again sharply with amazement. He seemed to be buying everything in sight. The counter was littered with paper bags and the white-coated man behind the counter was looking dazed. Bret said:

“And I'll have a dozen of those.”

Twelve mammoth slabs of chocolate in orange-coloured wrappings were piled before him.

Susan began to laugh, and the man glanced at them suspiciously.

“‘Avin' a party, sir?”

Bret nodded gravely.

“A birthday party. For our triplets.”

Susan turned her back too quickly for her face to betray her. She heard the man say genially:

“Well, well, that's unusual, ain't it? ‘Ow old are they?”

Bret said:

“They're three.” And added courteously, “The twins, of course, are younger.”

Susan
exploded.

She went outside and waited on the footpath in the sun, shaking. When Bret came out with his arms full of parcels they stood and grinned till their grins died of exhaustion, and they still remained there looking at each other's faces quietly and contentedly as if they had been parted for a long time. Presently Bret said:

“Come along – we must get back to the car. Here, carry some of your blasted chocolates or I'll spill them all over the street. Have one?”

She shook her head.

“I don't need them now.”

He said gently, “Bless you!” And began to rummage in one of his bags. She watched him amusedly, thinking that in many ways he often seemed younger than Jim – younger even than herself—

He said:

“How about this one?”

She took it – a “conversation lolly”–heart-shaped and biliously pink, with “I love you” in crazy red lettering. She said lightly:

“Thanks, I'll have that,” and then began to run ahead of him because her eyes were hot with tears.

D
REW
,
mooching along at thirty, was telling himself that at his age a man should have less sense. He did not, actually express it in that way, but he was aware of a nebulous conviction that to every human being there belongs an inalienable right to behave wildly, ridiculously, at least once in life. And that if one has spent fifty-eight years being sensible one is due, if not overdue for an outbreak of lunacy.

For that, he warned himself, was just what it would be. Sheer, boneheaded madness. This was what came of stepping out of your routine. This was what happened when you yielded – just for a moment – to an impulse, a prompting from some not very often asserted self, and bought a fanciful geegaw for your radiator cap! He looked at it sourly. He knew now that it had been the thin edge of the wedge. Once you'd admitted to yourself, by buying it, the power of a thing like that, you had delivered yourself into its hands. It was only a step from there to seeing flowers where none existed. And only another step to finding music in queer names. And only one more to being bewitched by a map. And good God, what an unholily seductive thing a map could be! Black magic, no more, no less. For after you'd seen it the road you drove was no longer just a road, but a valiant little black line, weaving and threading and picking its way across plains and through vast tracts of bush and over wild
blue mountains. Your car wasn't just a car; you had, instead, an eagle's eye view of it as an infinitesimal speck moving along the black line, heading away from security into unimaginable adventures.

Names which you must have seen last night in small black print were like voices now, calling out of some primeval past; Yarragrin, Cobborah. They were like something you had forgotten a thousand years ago and to which you were returning now, not only in miles along a road but in spirit through a dissolving barrier of time. …

Time! Again he was aware, uneasily, of the difference even, sometimes the antagonism, between what one knows and what one feels. And he found himself suddenly abashed because he realised that until now he had always felt that this land of his had been born out of the womb of Mother England in the year 1770 with Captain James Cook for midwife.

Yes, he thought, feeling his way gingerly through unaccustomed mazes of surmise, the things you knew were perhaps only raw material out of which if you were wise – or lucky – there might some day blossom things you felt. Years ago, for instance, from the boredom of some otherwise profitless lesson you had saved and kept the knowledge that the grass-tree was one of the oldest forms of vegetable life. But not until this very moment had the meaning come to you of a sight you had seen only yesterday morning, and thought then, carelessly, nothing but, “Queer effect, that!” Now at last you had felt it. Now you could understand that gaunt hill-top with the tall spears of its grass-trees like an army against the sky. Now you could feel that its strangeness was the strangeness of Time arrested, Time suspended, so that there for an
acre or two you might walk in a world of tremendous, of majestic antiquity. …