Return to Coolami (6 page)

So that she hadn't had much time either to think of Coolami. Only Jim, in scrawled impatient letters from school, demanded whether there'd been rain yet, and how many of the sheep had been shorn and if Bret was putting in corn or lucerne down on the river flats? And what the hell was the use of his staying on for the Leaving when he wasn't going to the 'varsity? When he was just coming straight home to Coolami? Why shouldn't he leave when he was sixteen? “You know very well I'm a blob at exams, anyhow.”

And so on. Yes. Bret acknowledged now, they'd both talked the same language, he and Jim; loved the same—

Now that was funny. He hadn't been thinking of Susan at all, and suddenly in a queer back lane of words which could suggest what they hadn't really meant, his thoughts bumped her suddenly. There she was in the middle of them, barring his way. They tried angrily to pass, dodged, doubled, protested.

“The same
things
! The same
land –
the same work—!”

And the same woman?

What
was
this love, anyhow? He could say quite honestly that he didn't know – and get strangely little satisfaction from the statement. There'd been Myrtle, bless her, just before the war, when he was eighteen; Myrtle, four years his senior, big and rosy and kind. Myrtle, whose father had been a share farmer on Coolami until he died and whose husband, a good chap called Roberts, had taken his place; Myrtle, who now, nearly forty, broad in the beam, but still rosy and hearty, would look at him over the heads of her five small Robertses with a grin which told him she remembered as kindly as he did a long summer evening by the creek on Coolami—

That was all right – pleasant, wholesome, something you could look back on without a sour taste in your mouth. Not like the war episodes – not like Lilian, either, for whom he'd lived six feverish months before he discovered she was engaged to some one else all the time—

It must have been that, he supposed – the jar of feeling himself very badly and callously let down,
which had kept him unmarried so long. Not that he'd cared, a year later, what happened to Lilian. He'd never known till it was all over how very shallow a feeling it had really been—

And after that nothing – except Coolami. And that, undoubtedly, the most satisfying, the most lasting. He'd been content with that. Nothing complicated about it, nothing dark and difficult, no tearing of yourself by many warring impulses, no plungings into sudden unsuspected emotions, no reactions of weariness and disgust—

Just work – a deep absorption, a passionate interest. Triumphant hours, anxious hours, even despairing hours. They didn't matter, the ups and downs of your mood. Through them you knew the land was there, and the feeling that knowledge gave you was not to be put in any words. It was something indefinable, fed by the memories of all your senses; it was something you smelt, grass and earth, bales of wool – something you saw – a hillside moving as a thousand sheep poured over its horizon, white, their backs golden with sunlight, swaying upward to a blue sky. It was the early morning sound of magpies, the hot midday sound of the reaper and binder in the five-hundred-acre-paddock. Not a sharp emotion, not gusty and ephemeral, but something that lived with you, and made a background of contentment to all your days—

And if, he thought cynically, the love of or for any woman could equal that he'd admit there might be some excuse for all the talk about it! The trouble seemed to be that it had to be both of
and
for. And that, heaven knew, was a fluke! One-sided it became dangerous, explosive, something that muttered beneath the surface of your life like a volcano. Yet it must be,
nearly always, like that. The French faced it in their practical way, commented on it with their usual airy cynicism – “il y a toujours un qui baise, et l'autre qui tend la joue!” And which had the worst of it he was damned, now, if he knew! A year ago when Jim was kissing, feverishly, the cool turned cheek of Susan, he'd been afire with indignant sympathy for his brother. But now, he was learning painfully, as no doubt Susan had learned, that it is as difficult to be the loved as the lover.

More difficult perhaps. For there are many other tributes you can give besides love, but they are all rejected. Many good things which he could feel quite honestly of Susan, pity, admiration, yes, and respect – but to her they were only so many blows in the face—

And he remembered knocking at the connecting door of their rooms one night, hearing her call, “Come in,” and entering. She'd swung round to the sound of the door with a look of startled fear that checked his words and movements. She'd snatched her wrapper from the back of her chair and clutched it round her. In the mirror opposite he could see the line of her cheek, her bent head. She said with an effort:

“I thought it was Kathleen at the other door. Did – did you want to speak to me?”

But he was feeling literally sick with pity. A compassion engulfed him which had nothing in it but tenderness. It had been one of those illuminating moments when one feels for the first time something one has always known; the sight of her slender body, its swiftness and litheness and the graceful vigour of its youth being slowly and relentlessly obscured by her coming maternity, had given him an instant's poignant recognition of ordeal. He'd had a moment of un-cannily clear perception. Pretty awful it must be, in a way, for a woman, this sharing of her own body with another life. Mustn't they feel sometimes that they wanted to escape? Mustn't they thirst for a solitude, physical, mental,
spiritual, which they couldn't ever have while the small parasite within them drew its life from theirs—

He was beside her, his arm round her shoulders. She began to shake violently. He said incoherently:

“You poor kid! Never mind—”

She twisted away from him. She flamed at him, cheeks, eyes, hair. Her voice was hoarse, stammering with anger and some indefinable pain:

“Go away! How dare you pity me! Go away—!”

He began to wonder where they were, and to look at the country again. Already the air was colder.

T
HE
road just now, to Drew, was bare road and no more. It was twenty-five feet of good metalled surface, greyish, prickled with faintly glittering points of light, bounded on either side by a tearing streak of reddish earth. For the hill, that long, well-graded pull which formed the first step up from plains to mountains, was far behind them now, and ahead there was a good straight bit—

The speedometer climbed. The car, beneath Drew's hands, felt like a powerful animal. He watched the road ahead and took his foot regretfully from the accelerator. Pity that curve was coming – she'd had heaps in reserve – heaps—

Forty-five seemed like a crawl, but there were plenty of curves now. He said quickly:

“Look, Milly – what's that shrub – flowering?”

It seemed to float towards them out of the soft sage-green of its surrounding bush, a smother of cloudy pink, bloomy, greyish like the young feathers of a galah. The sun tipped it with pale furry gold—

It was behind them. Drew said, puzzled, slightly aggrieved:

“They weren't flowers at all!”

He began to look about him. A strange thing, he thought in surprise, that the sun could create flowers like that where none existed! A confoundedly peculiar thing that now, when he came to look really carefully,
it was doing it everywhere – yes, he'd be hanged if it wasn't—! Everywhere he looked! The speedometer dropped to thirty. To twenty-five. Drew studied the bush.

There were flowers too. You could see them here and there – a glimmer of wattle, a flicker of amethyst over a fallen log, something white and starry near the ground. But it wasn't the flowers that were lighting it all to what was (when you looked with eyes suddenly opened by the miracle of a flowerless flowering shrub) a veritable blaze of colour. It was the sun doing things to the leaves. Turning a young gum sapling into something that dripped rubies. Flaming suddenly behind a dead leaf so that it became a topaz. Plunging into a bush with dark glossy leaves and finding purple there – bursting out again leaving streaks of silver in its wake. Silver was everywhere; the landscape glittered with it. Every gum leaf, hanging motionless with its edge to the sun, looked burnished—

And here was the railway line again and a funny little station – new-looking with another of those names—

Warrimoo—

Oh, well—!

And he said rather reprovingly to Millicent:

“There's no real need to hurry, you know. We've made a good time to here.”

Millicent said absently:

“Yes, we've been very quick,” and went on wondering.

Whether it had been rather rash even at fifty-seven to believe oneself
quite
resigned? Whether it wouldn't have been as discreet as it would certainly have been valorous, to stay at home? At Ballool? To say, “Oh, no, darling, let them go home by train, and Margaret and Colin can come down and stay with us soon”? To repudiate utterly that strange ache so suddenly resurrected, for the country – for Wondabyne—

It had been, on the whole, pretty comfortably smothered for so many years. Smothered – yes, that was a good word, suggesting peat fires, banked up smouldering – but very far from dead. There'd been a flicker when Colin went to Kalangadoo, a hungry little flame of envy and excitement. And then Susan – to Wondabyne itself. Susan coming home from time to time looking as though she were lit from within by some fierce million-candle-power vitality. Susan, nineteen, sitting on the end of her mother's bed and saying things – long, long things which for Millicent were meaningless sounds with disconnected words shining jewel-like here and there:

“Those old round stones in the creek—” “Wondabyne— three steps up to the verandah—” “Jim came over from Coolami—” “the funny clackety noise the windmills make—” “Wondabyne—” “only six shearers—” “Wondabyne—”

Well, she supposed she'd been a very bad mother—

No, she hadn't. Your children had to live their own lives. That was a cliche, a truism, but not many parents managed to put it into practice. And now here she was preening herself because she was one of the few. Whereas it had not really been because she had schooled herself not to interfere, but because interference just naturally revolted her. They were so much
more interesting, the children, going their own way. And life itself became exciting – an adventure—

Behind her veil Millicent blushed.

She always blushed a little when she remembered that day. She'd behaved – oh, atrociously. Just for a minute. And then, not being used to speaking insincerities, she hadn't quite known how to go on behaving, and had sat stupidly, guiltily, staring at her daughter, until Susan, bless her, suddenly began to laugh—!

Really—

“Mother, I'm going to have a baby.”

“But,
darling!
How excit—!”

And there you sat, the bitten-off word thundering in the air, the appalling truth confronting you that in this imperfect world it was not going to be exciting at all, but merely disturbing and rather unpleasant—

So that there had been nothing to do but put out a hand and feel it grabbed, and watch a frozen young face crumble into laughter and incoherent words—

Words – but they weren't only words then. They were pictures and sensations you'd thought dead, buried these thirty years. Suddenly in the rush of Susan's explanation they'd come to life. You had felt a new enthralling kinship with your daughter. Not mother and daughter now – not even fellow women by virtue of a common maternity – but two people who had drunk the country like a strong wine; who had felt it rising in them, warm, swimming, an intoxication. The beautiful country—

Oh, what matter, some part of her had cried, if Susan had found the wine too heady? It was all a question of paying fairly for what you got. There were moments in life for which you could go on paying in
misery till you died, and still end up indebted! Not nature forced these payments on you – only the clumsy adjustments of a fumbling civilisation. Still, she acknowledged with a rather satirical twist of her lips, if you were going to enjoy such luxuries as electric light and wireless and the talkies and, presently, television, you must be prepared to sacrifice something – and if the sacrifice demanded happened to be your moral integrity, well, as those same talkies would have it, that was just too bad—

Never mind though – there were some left, how many one could not know, who beneath the lip-service they gave to an established order, kept their own inner selves fiercely alive and waiting. Susan was one of those. She'd left the track, and the gods of the established order had snatched her back and boxed her ears and sent her off, staggering, along their appointed road again. Prickles and thorns, prickles and thorns, dust and a deadly monotony; that was her path, but she was walking it fed by an inexhaustible conviction that all this nastiness was smeared over something fundamentally lovely— And for Susan in particular, Millicent thought, the nastiness was really only such a thin veneer. With Bret's help she'd propitiated the gods, and now so little lay between her and the loveliness below. A few teasing cobwebby, psychological shreds, a few clinging wisps of pride, resentment, a queer tangle of vague masculine prejudices and inhibitions – things insubstantial but dangerously strong—

She found herself inconsequently remembering Bret's mother when George Maclean had brought her home to Coolami, a slender little thing with fierce straight brows and a smile which flashed abruptly and
was gone before you could respond, so that you were left grinning feebly into her serious dark eyes. And the very first thing she'd done had been to pull down the house. Just as well, Millicent reflected, that there had been good years; that George had been able to satisfy her very considerable demands!