Return to Coolami (5 page)

Then it was gone, like a fitful gleam of sun on a drizzling day. Other things began to drip, drip through
your mind obscuring a radiance too fleeting and uncertain—

The Coolami verandah and his own voice speaking from the dark to Jim reading in a patch of butter-yellow light.

“Jim, what are you at with Susan Drew?”

“What the devil has it to do with you?”

That, he remembered thinking, while he watched a moth crawl up the page of the book Jim was pretending to read, was the sort of tone he had to expect. So he shrugged and went on deliberately:

“Just that if her father found out about your little affair there'd be a row – and I don't want a row.”

Jim flicked the moth away and said angrily:

“What do you mean by ‘affair'? And if there was a row it would be my row, not yours.”

Bret said wearily:

“Oh, don't be an ass.” And then lost his temper.

“And you know what I mean. Do you think I don't know about your idiotic flat in Sydney? And if I know there'll be plenty of other people who know too—”

Jim said hopelessly.

“She won't marry me.”

Bret laughed outright and then sobered. The boy was too obviously unhappy to be really amusing. He said shortly:

“Why should she? She only wants a few sensations.”

And there it was. That was a conversation you had had. Nothing could alter it. You'd said those things, you'd thought them, believed them, about Susan. Now—

Even though you didn't believe them any more, even though you'd come slowly to a very different conception of her, those things which had happened and
which, therefore, were irrevocably a part of your knowledge of her, remained.

So many of them. That night when he'd found Jim, tight, in the car. Another time a few days later beside the sun drenched tennis-court at Coolami, when Susan had turned to him suddenly, cool, polite, dangerous:

“You don't often play tennis, do you?”

“Not often. But I wanted to be here to-day.”

“I see. Police supervision?”

“Possibly.”

“Will you tell me how you knew about our flat?”

“I found out accidentally. But I'd have known sooner or later. You don't keep those things dark for long.”

“Apparently not.”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“Will you give it up now?”

“The flat?”

“Yes – and Jim too. The whole business.”

“Why?”

“Because it's a rotten waste of time – and other things that shouldn't be wasted.”

“That's a matter of opinion.”

He looked at her curiously.

“Do you know Jim's in love with you?”

“He's often told me so.”

“You don't care two hoots for him.”

“I like him very much.”

“Don't you feel you're being unfair to him?”

“No. I don't feel that.”

It was then he'd realised for the first time that she wasn't, anyhow, doing this in the heedless butterfly fashion he'd imagined. He looked at her with new
interest and increased dislike. He saw that she'd thought it all out; that she was playing the game rigidly in accordance with some rules which, rightly or wrongly, she believed to be fair. He was startled; he was even for a moment, through a veritable blaze of resentment, amused by his own reaction. For he felt, suddenly, the whole male sex rear its head in his person and bellow angrily. She was usurping its privileges, endangering its supremacy – actually attempting, heaven smite her, to kiss and ride away!

And then he'd voiced a threat and she'd answered it – two brief sentences which he'd often found himself remembering since:

“You'll burn your fingers.”

“You won't hear me yell if I do.”

A cheeky face it had been in those days. A pair of brown eyes with a gleam in them defying him from beneath her copper coloured hair. He'd gone away into the house rather hurriedly. He'd always suspected that if he had stayed a moment longer she'd have put her tongue out at him—

He looked at the two heads in front of him. Drew must have been a fine-looking fellow when he was young; even now though the contours of his face had thickened, you could see a good line of cheek and jaw, a glimpse of handsome, if rather arrogant nose. And Millicent, of course, must have been quite bewitching. It wasn't any wonder when you thought about it, that Susan was – Susan. The vitality of her, springing like grass after rain, the flame of adventurousness flickering fascinatedly towards danger was pure Millicent. The Millicent who had snapped her fingers at Wondabyne and married a bank clerk she'd known for a week—! And yet, in Susan there ran too the streak of obstinacy,
the conviction of her own rightness, the arrogance that he'd seen just now, in her father's nose!

Life had hammered that out of her, poor kid! He glanced at her, troubled, knowing how much and how unwillingly he'd helped with that hammering. And yet she wasn't quite flattened out, even now! Judge her as you would, you couldn't deny her courage. Nor that queer, absurd, heroic honesty she'd taken for her only standard—

She asked him suddenly:

“Will Kathleen and Ken be at Coolami? When we get there?”

He said, “Not that I know of.” And added presently:

“Did you see her show?”

“Yes – we all went.”

“Like it?”

“Yes. Dad bought the one of Wondabyne Pool for Mother, but she doesn't know yet. For her birthday.”

And that, thought Bret, was just about as unfortunate a choice as he could have made. Not that he knew, of course, how much of his daughter's love-affair was bound up in that spot – the spot where two generations of young people from Wondabyne and Coolami had swum, and picnicked and flirted—

He suddenly found that he didn't want very much to think of it himself, and he wondered, looking at the long range of mountains now visible, remote, intangible as a bank of cloud across the plain, whether what he felt was jealousy.

S
USAN
pulled her hat off and sat on it. The wind and the sun leapt into her hair, blew it out behind her and burnished it so that it looked like the flame of a grass-fire, flickering, crackling. She was nervous. There was a kind of constriction in her throat, a swollen feeling behind her eyes and she was uncomfortably conscious of her breathing. It was the road that was doing it, this road which had always seemed to her to fall naturally and topographically into three sharp divisions. There was what she always thought of as the city-side and then, like a vast wall, the mountains. And on the other side of them, the country. Bret's country. Jim's country – Coolami.

While they were here, on the city-side with the mountains still ahead, but so much nearer every moment, she could cling to the queer detached life of the last four months – feel herself not quite Susan Drew and not quite (how queer it still sounded!) Susan Maclean, but a Susan who had drifted numbly in a present which couldn't last, but which, while it did, was peaceful so long as she could keep herself from thinking—

But soon now the car would rush upward. Incredibly soon after the road began to climb they'd be able to look backward at the plain they were now on and see it far below as a soft pattern of greens and browns, remote and tranquil beneath a grey-blue film of morning
mist, the long curves of the Nepean lying so still that the trees fringing its banks were no more perfect in detail than the trees mirrored in its dark water—

And that, thought Susan, her hands clasping rather tighter on her lap, would be the end of the city-side. They'd be climbing the wall. And on the other side she'd have to begin to realise things again, to face certain questions, to make certain decisions; to be, finally and irrevocably, Susan Maclean of Coolami.

It would be hard, very hard, to feel that. Perhaps men didn't realise that among the many difficult adjustments a woman must make on marriage the changing of her name is not negligible. It wouldn't be so bad, perhaps, she thought, if you were really – if you were able to feel altogether a sense of belonging to each other.

But there was something confusing, something that made you feel you had lost your psychological bearings, in finding yourself no longer the Susan Drew you had known from babyhood, but an unfamiliar Susan Maclean, standing like a shy and forgotten child at a party, in the midst of a strange life. It wasn't even as if you had been properly invited. You were a sort of unwilling gate-crasher—

Not that Bret, she acknowledged quickly, had done anything to make her feel like that. Nor Kathleen. Ken – yes, a little, perhaps, but more teasingly than unpleasantly. There hadn't even, in that perfect and perfectly-run home, been any particular work for her to do. You couldn't when you were twenty, and lucky if you boiled an egg properly, tell anything to Mrs. Dobbs who had taught Bret to use a spoon. You couldn't dictate to Matty who had learned her housework under the eye of Bret's mother herself. No one
attempted to, not even Kathleen. Domestically, for many years the house had functioned under the rule of these two with a beautiful noiseless and invisible efficiency. So that, feeling rather awkward, and very nervous, and acutely unhappy, there had been nothing for it but to live there for seven endless months, in the family but not of it – not a wife exactly, or a friend exactly, or a guest exactly—

Feeling at first while Matty swept and dusted in her room and then passed on with expressionless eyes to Bret's, a seething under that naked and bony forehead of conjectures, of austere and bitter condemnation. Seeing, a few months later, with new-born super-sensitiveness Mrs. Dobbs' speculative eye on her figure. Forcing herself, through the growing lassitude of her body, the nervy grating of her mind, to remember that she'd played a game and lost and was now paying her forfeit—

She had, indeed, made for herself a little Litany of a scrap of conversation she had had with Bret. It began after a while to have, by sheer force of repetition and reaction a steadying influence:

“You'll burn your fingers.”

“You won't hear me yell if I do.”

No yelling, therefore. Not even when it became most awful. Not even when they were both discovering that the mind, soul, psyche or what you will of a human being is a fathomless wood where he may lose himself indefinitely – where he may find green glades with sun in them and banks of violets, or bogs of viscous slime smelling heavily, sickly-sweet of menace and corruption—

Not so simple to be clean in a wood like that. To be rational, honest, controlled, just – everything which,
they had tacitly agreed, would save this dreary marriage of theirs from total failure. You were in a bog before you knew it was there, floundering, struggling, crawling out to lie breathless and befouled, wondering just where and how you had lost your footing. Rational – no, not always possible to achieve that, either, when you were lost, quite lost, quite confused, your nerves screaming with the panic of your utter solitude. Not honest either when your every action came from motives so obscure, so primitive and tangled that you could not always recognise them yourself—

But no yelling—

Not even when sometimes it had seemed that the ultimate destruction was coming. Sometimes Bret started it – a look – a touch— Sometimes she started it herself, goaded on by an obscene devil of perversity to endanger the only treasure she had left – to risk the defilement of her last remaining shrine—

The shadowy range loomed over them. Drew called to Bret:

“What's the grade like?”

And Bret said:

“Good.”

The Madison roared and leapt at it. The hill dropped away behind them.

Bret was thinking about the thousand sheep he had to get, somehow, by the end of next week, from Coolami to Manton's place out of Gunnedah. He was wondering, with a faint corrugation of worry between his brows,
who he'd send with them now that Giles was needed for the shearing and Jim – and there wasn't Jim any longer.

A pity in a way that Ken – and yet, no, it wouldn't have been any use his sticking to the land when he wanted the law. He was cut out for law, too – his sharp inquiring mind, his precision of thought, his fluent, caustic tongue. All the same, Bret realised uneasily, he himself had been finding something a bit blank, a bit solitary about life and work, since Jim's death. He'd been restlessly aware during the past year that he no longer had any one to talk to about Coolami. Ken and Kathleen, of course, had their share in it. They were fond of it, too, as a home, as a background. But they didn't run it, plunge themselves into it, know it and understand it to the last of its seventy thousand acres as he did – as Jim had done.

An odd thing really, that of the four of them he, the eldest, should have had more in common with Jim, the youngest, ten years his junior, than with either of the other two. It had begun, probably, after their father's death when he was 24, and Jim, home for holidays, had mustered sheep with him and fenced paddocks and slept near him at night in a rolled blanket by a camp fire. It must have been then, too, that he began to rely on the boy, half-unconsciously, for companionship. There hadn't really been any one else. Their mother was like a pale flame flickering just before it goes out. She'd been ill, then, for years, and her husband's death had finished her – only ten months after him she'd died—

And Ken had been at the university, very absorbed, appearing rarely, disappearing suddenly – not really minding very much what happened to the goose that
was Coolami, provided his golden egg reached him promptly each quarter—

And Kathleen – twenty, in the thick of her first love affair – very stormy, very hectic, very brief. Love had got her that way at the beginning and had gone on getting her that way, till now, at 31, she'd learnt to take it a bit more casually; he grinned, thinking of her standing in front of her easel in a blue overall, brushes bristling from her fingers, the floor littered with bits of this and that, paint in her dark hair where she'd pushed it fiercely back from her lovely face, which was lovelier now, he thought, by a good deal, than it had been when she was twenty. Kath, certainly, was one of those women who improve with age. The clamours and impetuousness of youth had subsided now, and her eyes had a laugh in them instead of a blaze. She'd learnt a certain very valuable detachment; her discarded amours strewed the path of her life in very much the same cheerfully haphazard way that her rubbish littered the studio floor. And her pictures grew better and better—