Return to Coolami (31 page)

Back there on Jungaburra, he reflected, an ancient people had seen spirits God only knew how many centuries ago. In the mountains the records of a thousand years were written across the cliff faces; and in the gullies, through a dim green light and on soft earth that gave out a damp, rich smell, you might walk under tree-ferns whose ancestors had been tree-ferns before you grew legs and came to live on dry land!

He surprised in himself an urgent and compelling emotion – half attraction, half antagonism. He wanted to come to grips with this new world which he hadn't ever understood or even clearly imagined before. He wanted to grapple with it, as men and other male animals cuff each other and snarl or use rough words as signs of affection. For here was, he realised with mounting excitement, a glorious, an inexhaustible source of combat! In that other life he'd left so far behind that it now seemed incredible, there was nothing left to fight.

But fifty-eight …!

Millicent said:

“Tired, Tom?”

He became aware that he had sighed. He shook his head, his eyes straying to the surrounding countryside. Strange paddocks he thought, eyeing them; pitted and scarred and dotted all over with heaps of stones and rubble and barren-looking soil. Evil and forsaken. On one side of the road some kind of crop had been sown, but it had a half-hearted appearance, yellowish, dwarfed, uneven. Here and there, where it encountered one of those heaps, it seemed driven back, repelled, the
wave of green thinning, scattering as it approached till it died altogether still yards away.

Bret said:

“We're just out of Gulgong. Take the road to your right.”

Drew's eyes sharpened suddenly with interest. Gold! Of course! The grim heaps of stones, the tortured and mutilated earth became glamorous. He turned back to Bret.

“Pretty rich fields here once, weren't they?”

But Bret's unenthusiastic glance was the glance of the farmer who sees good land ruined for crops. He said:

“Legend has it that the children still go out after heavy rain and find gold specks in the streets.”

Susan asked drowsily:

“Have I died and gone to heaven? Gold streets?”

“Not heaven, darling,” Millicent explained. “Gulgong. Have you been asleep?”

She looked round at her daughter. Susan sat up and smoothed her hair and said, “Nearly, I think. It's so hot now,” but she looked, her mother thought, more wide-awake, more alert and eager than she had looked for months. Well, young people were erratic and impulsive. What had happened to transform the stormy Susan of yesterday afternoon into the happy Susan of the present moment she supposed she would never know. Nor what had lit behind Bret's still imperturbable expression a kind of glow which even he could not quite subdue. Perhaps nothing at all. It was, undoubtedly, one of the prerogatives of young people to be wildly and deliriously happy for no cause whatever, and, she thought, one could not grudge it to them. For they could be with equal lack of reason, most
gloriously and lusciously miserable. Not that you didn't rather envy them there, too! For that, really, is the measure of youth – the vigour and intensity of its emotions. Living hard, loving and hating hard, letting the stars hear its laughter, and turning its tears into temporarily immortal poetry. …

And there with that little gibe, she thought sadly, she was admitting her own lost youth. Easy enough to mock at an intensity and passion, the memory of which still has power to hurt you a little because you know it lost to you for ever! She heard Susan say:

“Quick, Bret – throw them!”

As she turned her head she saw a succession of orange streaks curving through the air. Shrill voices followed – yells, exclamations, a swelling pæan of joy. She hung over the door, looking back. The narrow street seemed literally paved with chocolate in orange wrappers, and children were springing from every fence and doorway. She wondered watching till a turn in the road hid them, if they had ever picked up gold in the streets which was more to their liking, and if there would come again, in the life of even one of them, anything so nearly approaching a miracle.

And yet, really, were miracles so scarce? Weren't they, as long as human beings lived and thought, and felt, and blundered along their precocious and audacious way, daily or even hourly commonplaces? What was it, for instance, but a miracle, which had kept Tom silent, back there in Mudgee, when he saw his quite sane and responsible son-in-law gravely emptying several pounds of sweets in assorted bags, and twelve cakes of chocolate in orange wrappers into the back of the car? Only yesterday he would have said a good deal, beginning probably with, “What the
hell—?” And not only in him had miracles been at work. It didn't matter, she realised, that one's body sat quietly in a well-upholstered corner, and that one's tongue uttered, politely, trivial fragments of conversation. What counted was that in one's brain the strange alchemies of thought, the mysterious vagaries of memory and hope were going on all the time. So that you were not necessarily now the person you had been yesterday – or even half an hour ago!

She glanced almost timidly at her new husband. She thought that she might like him even better than her old one when she had had time to know him.

When they came at about two o'clock to a bridge over a creek, Drew stopped the car on the grass by the roadside and pulled his driving gloves from his hot cramped fingers. He asked idly:

“Any one hungry?”

Bret, getting out and stamping a foot which was nearly asleep, didn't answer. He was trying an experiment with himself, seeing, as he walked to the bridge and leaned his arms on it, Jim and Susan laughing and squabbling on the sandy bank of the creek below. He'd had that glimpse of them one day as he drove past on his way home from Mudgee. He'd spent a bother-some and profitless morning, he remembered, arguing with an obstinate ass of a chap about a tractor, and he'd been feeling rather disgruntled even before he swung round the curve on to the bridge and saw Jim's single-seater parked by the roadside, its bonnet faced towards Sydney.

He'd
pulled up savagely, his tyres scraping and skidding on the road as he wrenched with unhabitual violence at his brake. For he'd needed Jim that weekend, and there had been no talk of a journey to Sydney when he had left the day before. He'd stood for a moment on the bridge looking down at them. Susan was trying to get some water in a billy and Jim was trying to stop her. Their laughter and carefree foolery, he remembered, had made him feel so furious that he'd stopped to light a cigarette and calm himself a little before he went down the bank to speak to them.

And it had all been very futile, anyhow. Jim, cheerful and unconcerned, had greeted him casually. Susan, quite silent, had stood motionless, her eyes, he remembered now, fixed rather intently on his own face. He'd said:

“Where are you off to?”

Jim, wiping his hands on a handkerchief, answered:

“Sydney. Where's the lid, Susan?”

She gave it to him. Bret asked:

“For how long? We're short-handed, you know.”

There must have been some hint of his exasperation in his voice, because surprise had flickered in the glance Jim gave him, and there was a shade of conciliation in his reply.

“I'll be back on Monday. Did you get the tractor?”

“No.”

And then he'd looked straight at Susan and asked bluntly:

“Is this trip quite necessary?”

It was then he had noticed how intently she was looking at him. But it was Jim who answered:

“Oh, absolutely! We're going to boil a billy. Won't you stay and have some tea?”

He'd
snapped:

“No, thanks,” and then he hadn't quite been able to repress a smile at the transparent relief on Jim's face. He'd said, “I'll see you on Monday, then,” and distributed a casual “Good-bye” between them as he went back to his car.

But as he'd driven off again he had been in a black mood of rage against the girl who, standing motionless and saying nothing, could still take Jim so easily from him and from Coolami. …

He took his arms from the railing and turned back to the car. Millicent was spreading a cloth in the shade, and Drew was collecting driftwood under the bridge to make a fire. Susan with the billy in her hand was standing on the other side of the road, and as Bret turned, her eyes, which must he thought have been glued to the back of his head, moved swiftly away, and she flushed, beginning to walk down the bank to the water.

He followed and took the billy out of her hand.

“I'll get it. What were you staring at me like that for?”

She asked slowly, without looking up:

“Were you remembering …?”

He said:

“Of course I was. One couldn't very well help it, could one?”

“I suppose not.”

He looked about.

“It's too shallow here. I'll step on to that rock. Hold the lid, will you?”

She said, taking it:

“There's a way you've looked at me sometimes that I've always – connected with this place. Because that
day was the first time I saw it. Contempt – and hatred.”

He straightened up with the billy brimming and stepped back on to the bank. She held the lid out to him mechanically, but he didn't take it, so that presently she looked up at his face.

He thought, staring down at her, that it was only to be expected that so mysterious and irrational an emotion as love should assail one in a completely sudden and illogical manner. And yet possibly not so sudden after all. Perhaps no more sudden than the overnight blossoming of a flower whose seed has worked underground, whose stem has striven upward, whose leaves have opened and toiled for just this consummation. He didn't know, or care really, how long there had been accumulating in him the feelings towards her which only to-day had been fused into the one grateful and beneficent gladness which now pervaded him. He didn't know why or how it was that he should find he could remember Jim without anger or resentment, and with no hurt beyond the hurt with which one loses any friend to death. And he wondered, watching Susan's dark, shadowed eyes wakening, coming to life, what this queer power was writing on his own face where once, in this same spot she had seen hatred written, and contempt.

He said:

“They aren't there now, are they?”

She shook her head. He thought with sharp anxiety that she looked exhausted, as though some flame which illuminated was at the same time consuming her. A realisation of the full misery, the full suffering, both mental and physical, of the year she had spent came to him with a shock of pity and remorse. He said gently:

“They
never should have been. They never will be again.”

Drew stirring his tea with a twig, caught sight of his wrist-watch and thought, “Nearly three o'clock. We should be there comfortably by sundown. Better put some water in the radiator perhaps.” His mind filled with these idle thoughts, it seemed to be from some others, quite unauthorised, that there came the impulse which made him say suddenly:

“Where did Colin get all his information about Mortimer, anyhow?”

He drank, waited, and then with his cup half-way to his lips again, looked round at his son-in-law. Bret was lying on his back on the grass, his half-shut eyes on the lovely curves and spirals of his ascending cigarette smoke; his thoughts, quite evidently, had shut the world out. Drew repeated:

“Bret!”

But even then, it was not till Susan prodded his ankle that Bret came back to the present with a jerk and rolled over on one elbow.

“I was half asleep. Sorry; what did you say?”

“Who told Colin about this chap Mortimer? How did he know Wondabyne was for sale again?”

Bret sat up and stubbed his cigarette out carefully on the grass behind him.

“His stockman, Miller, got the news by phone from his aunt this morning. She's been housekeeping for Mortimer since his wife died. It's to be sold for the children, of course – little kids they are. About seven and five.”

Drew
grunted.

“What'll they ask for it?”

“Ask or get?”

“Both.”

“Well, they'll probably ask a hundred and fifty thousand and get somewhere round a hundred and twenty thousand.”

Drew said, “H'm!” and passed his cup to Susan. “Any more in the billy?”

She dipped it out with a pannikin, wondering in passing, half-absently, why Dad had seemed so glum all day, and whether he was really very pipped with her for having taken his sumptuous Madison out last night and scratched its paint and dented its mudguard. But she wasn't very concerned about it. There didn't seem to be room in her at present for anything else but an almost incredulous gladness, and already her parents had faded a little, blurred a little, diminished a little, as if they were figures she was leaving slowly behind her on a misty road.

She began to think eagerly, impatiently, of Coolami. There a mist seemed to be clearing away, as though all the unhappiness of the time she had spent there had obscured her vision of it; she felt that now when she came to it she would be able to love it as she had always wanted to – as she had never felt quite free to do before.

She began to think about it in detail – its solidity, its comfort, its rather exciting and queerly appropriate note of austerity. Bret's mother, she thought, must have loved the country very much to have grown such a house in it. For, as her own mother had said, it didn't look as if it had been built. It looked, really, with its lines and angles masked by trees, as if it might be only
another and larger one of the great granite boulders whose outcrops dotted the paddocks here and there. She remembered that the first time she had seen it she had stood beside the car for a moment while Jim hunted for tennis-racquets, and she'd found herself thinking, “For ever and ever, amen!”

Her thoughts of it drifted down about her, shadowy and intangible like mist or smoke. They were less pictures than patterns of words which evolved themselves slowly and deliciously in her mind as though, childlike, she were telling herself stories of it. She told herself about the library where there was always a comfortable litter of things— A chair with dented cushions and a newspaper on the floor beside it; a magazine open on the table; sometimes Kathleen's big dilapidated sketch-book with a couple of pencils and a cigarette-holder snapped under the elastic band; Bret's hat on the chair just inside the door.