Return to Coolami (8 page)

He was amazed that he hadn't thought of it months before. Realised that it might be, to her, a veritable deliverance. Because he'd never been able to take quite seriously that staggering assertion of hers, made so calmly and deliberately in the garden at Ballool, the day before their marriage—

And he wasn't quite sure, knowing nothing at all of women and their odd reactions, whether, taking her love for him as a fact, it made the position better for her, or worse?

He found two big stones near him, and brought a third to complete his fireplace. He rummaged in the bottom of the car for the billy and filled it from the canvas water-bag swinging muddily on the luggage-carrier. Then he got out his pocket-knife and went off to cut a green sapling.

Well, if she did want it, what then? She must have it, of course. There was nothing against it except the
rather unpleasant details. The baby had died, and with it had gone the whole reason for their marriage, the whole basis of their compact. It was quite obvious to him now that as soon as she was out of the hospital he should have offered to free her legally of an obligation from which she had already been morally released. His failure to do so – his failure even to think of doing so, puzzled him. It must have been that somehow in the months she had spent with him at Coolami she had grown into the pattern of his life more closely than he'd realised. Miserable months they had been, strained, nerve-racking months, and yet, he acknowledged now, he'd felt at the time some undefined promise beyond them—

Something, too, in the thought of the child had stirred him. He'd begun to think past his own life and to realise that Coolami would remain. So that with Jim's child other children of his own should grow up.

Yes, there, he thought, cutting a neat rod and trimming it, he'd put a finger on part at least of his problem. He did want children, and it seemed, surely, rather roundabout and unnecessary, having a wife already, to divorce her, and hunt laboriously for another whom he probably wouldn't like half so well—

For he did like Susan. She was game and she was honest and, he thought, glancing at her building her sticks deftly into his fireplace, confoundedly pretty. And that was another thing. You couldn't, if you were human, live in the same house with a pretty young woman for seven months, nothing but an unlocked door between you, without wanting – yes, wanting like hell, a closer intimacy—

That, because of Jim's baby, had been, for him, quite
unthinkable. But now – when they'd somehow adjusted their lives, when they'd got the purely physical aspect of their marriage straightened out into normality – wouldn't it all right itself—?

This love business. What was it? Surely if he hadn't it already he had the ingredients! Liking, respect, admiration, physical desire. Was there anything else?

He supposed there must be. Susan had had all that for Jim and yet she'd never ceased to deny him the love she'd given so incomprehensibly to his elder brother. No, quite obviously, he admitted, hanging the billy in a notch of his stick and propping it over the back of the fireplace with a stone to weight its end, his mixture wasn't right!

“Have you matches, Bret?”

He gave them to her, watched her crouch before the fireplace with the sun on her bent head and the nape of her neck, and the tips of her dark eyelashes. Smoke began to wreathe up through the twigs, there came a faint crackling, and the air was suddenly full of the lovely aromatic fragrance of gum-leaves burning. She looked up at him, and now the sun was on her brow and the end of her nose and her teeth and her white throat, and she was smiling. A disturbing smile with effort behind it, and determination and a strange uncertainty.

“It caught beautifully, didn't it?”

He said, “Yes,” abruptly, and walked away with his hands in his pockets, wondering how the devil you contended, in marriage, with a smile like that.

He found a tiny path, rough and steep and rocky, leading down the hill to the cliff-edges. He followed
it watching his feet, lost now in confused and troubled memories.

Hot it had been this time last year – unusually hot for the spring, even in Sydney. The air in the auction-room, crowded with buyers and sellers, had seemed thick, heavy with heat and excitement. He'd been excited himself that day, because the bidding for the last of the Coolami clip had mounted well beyond what he had expected; and from the look of the stolid German, Hesslein, and the small, swift Jap with the falsetto voice, it seemed as though it would go higher still—

He could remember, too, thinking that this auctioneer – one he'd never seen before – was a genius in his way. There was something like wizardry in the deftness with which he plucked out of pandemonium the voice of the first bidder; he had a perpetual faint smile and a trick of looking over his glasses; it made him appear indulgent, slightly disdainful, incredibly aloof—

It was peculiar, now he thought of it, how ridiculously detailed was his memory of that particular sale. Was he always so observant? Was it merely that impressions slid into his consciousness and out again because nothing happened to fix them there? It did seem now as if that scene must have been frozen into his mind indelibly by what followed it, because he could remember with photographic accuracy every face in the top tier opposite where at the moment he heard his name called, the little Jap was feverishly capering—

Some one had called him, and then several others had echoed helpfully:

“Mr. Maclean! Mr. Maclean!”

He looked along the row to a man whom he knew slightly and who was making explanatory gestures towards the door.

“Chap outside wants to speak to you,” some one offered. “Says it's urgent.”

He had pushed his way out of the room.

He hadn't ever known who the man was, but no face in the world was more clearly driven in upon his memory. He could see it now, lean and brown, all twisted up with embarrassment and a queer frightening pity—

“It's your brother, Mr. Maclean – car accident – he's in the Sydney Hospital. He said we'd find you here—”

Ken had been in Melbourne at the time, so he'd known at once it was Jim. He didn't think he'd spoken at all. Not in the lift, not in the street. Only once, in the taxi, he seemed to have a vague memory of his own voice saying: “Serious?” and the man's answering something that made his mouth go dry and his head throb with a sudden violent headache—

It hadn't looked much like Jim – the face half-covered with bandages, the other half yellowish white, sunburn without blood beneath it—

He'd said:

“Is that you, Bret? I can't see properly.”

“Yes.”

“Listen – something important. Are you listening?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Susan. Yesterday – she told me – she was going to have a baby—”

He'd stopped, his eyes closed as if gathering strength to speak again. In himself, like a spark in dry timber Bret had felt his dislike of Susan flame into hatred. Illogically enough, as he admitted now, he'd thought
of her as directly responsible for the death that even now was shadowing Jim's face. It tore his heart with pity and resentment that, suffering, dying, his brother could think of her, could spend his last moments in worrying about her, his last breath in speaking of her—

“Of course – I've always wanted – marry her. She wouldn't. Now—”

“Yes,” thought Bret, bitterly, cynically, “‘now—'!”

“She – wanted last night to think it over. Said she'd meet me at the flat. To-day. I – was going there—”

Going there! To her. And if he hadn't been, Bret's thoughts had raved blackly, he wouldn't have been hurt, killed—

“Think it over!” Another night to torment him was what she'd wanted, the—

Staring at the blue valley he put his hand suddenly to his eyes. For his thoughts of her then had been so dark, so ugly with fury and contempt and bitterness that he couldn't even now remember them without shrinking.

Jim's voice had broken in on them, hoarse and dragging with effort:

“I want you – go there – tell her – see her through – look after the kid—”

He was glad now that he'd had enough control to say, “Yes. Yes, Jim, all right, I will.” The boy hadn't been able to speak any more after that, or perhaps to hear either, and there'd been a ghastly interminable hour of sunlight and silence and queer hospital smells while he lay there and struggled with the breath that was so soon to forsake him—

F
AR
down in
the valley between the tree-tops which looked, from here, like so much dark moss spread upon the ground, his eye caught a glint of silver. His eye caught it and his brain seized upon it too, feverishly seeking an escape from thoughts too torturing and profitless—

A creek down there. He tried to follow it but it lost itself among the trees. He looked farther across the valley at tiny scattered farmhouses and wondered vaguely what sort of a living they made. He sat down on a rock and realised with surprise that he hadn't had his cigarette yet, and decided he'd prefer a pipe after all. His thoughts began to dart about upon the immediate surface of
here
and
now
, like wary skaters on thin ice. He looked across towards the Black Ranges and regretted that he'd never, after all, found time to explore them as he'd always meant to when he was a boy. Wild country; they said there was gold there. You'd want to be in condition for it, and to have another good bushman with you. Jim—

And the Wild Dog Ranges out beyond the Cox. Queer names began to drift back to him, touched with the glamour of his boyhood. Tumbledown Mountain and Toppleover Peak. And the Cloudmaker—

High cliffs and tangled gullies dwarfed into deceptive flatness by the great expanses round them. Savage country, all but unknown, drowned in its mysterious and ineffable blue—

What a feat they'd
performed, those chaps, those pioneers! Almost incredible that they should ever have got through at all! Miraculous, when you thought of the place they'd passed farther down where the road and the railway crawled huddled together along a ridge with the world falling away on either side.

A pebble rolled beside him. He looked up and saw Susan standing on the path.

Millicent left the car at last with a little sigh. Drew had climbed out rather stiffly a few moments earlier and was now hovering with the chamois-leather in his hand, rubbing and scowling at a faint scratch from a branch on one of the doors. Near the fire Susan was still crouching with a matchbox in her hand, watching the flames; and Bret's head and shoulders were just visible over there on the scrubby hillside.

She turned back ruefully to the blue view she had demanded and wondered if it had anything to do with the sudden illogical depression which had gripped her. Probably, she decided; almost certainly. Because a sight like that broke down your defences, opened your heart, made you in an instant mysteriously receptive. While you looked at it any small pleasure could become a joy almost unbearably poignant; and any anxieties could be transformed into veritable monsters of menace or despair.

So that now, for the moment, it had become unspeakably dreadful to be married to a cross man with a chamois-leather; to see your daughter with the wings of her youth drooping and bedraggled; to watch your son-in-law going off by himself to think and worry, not knowing how beautifully simple and how simply beautiful his life could be. To wonder about Colin, and whether, as Margery so stoutly maintained, he was
really – had really given up—

And to live in a house at Ballool—

And to be fifty-six with life behind you – spirited away somehow when you weren't looking—

And to be made to feel, in the face of all this beauty and vastness, exactly like an ant, incredibly small, and quite ludicrously unimportant—

Oh, well—!

And anyhow, she concluded, making a swift grimace of defiance at the view before she turned her back on it, it was very possible that the divinest discontent might be unromantically allied with the emptiest stomach. So she went over to the fire and began to unpack the hamper, watching Susan out of the corner of her eye.

Susan hadn't even seen her. Heaven only knew what she was thinking, with her dark eyes fixed so absent-mindedly on the fire.

She was thinking that whatever else might be said for honesty it was, from her own experience, about as bad a policy as one could have. Perhaps her thinking had been wrong, but it had been honest; perhaps the very honesty of her actions had been the most foolish thing about them.

When you were nineteen and very pretty there were always lots of men about. That was all right, and quite enjoyable, but you couldn't help thinking that some day you had to marry one of them. And then what? You found yourself facing, at the end of this gaily lighted path of dalliance, mysteries, silence. It didn't help you very much to read the books which Mum, bless her heart, had always left so cleverly where you'd find them. Facts were better than nothing but they weren't feelings. When you married you wanted to feel
sure
it was going to be all right – you wanted to feel you could have your husband's children with joy that they were his as well as with joy that they were your own. And Love? What was that? You heard people say, “It comes after marriage.” Well, if it did, that was all right, but supposing it didn't? You were in the soup, weren't you?

It did seem,
however you looked at it, as if a girl were expected to buy a pig in a poke, which was to say the least of it a bit unreasonable, seeing that it was upon her fell all the weight of so many matrimonial miseries. And she'd thought of Mrs. Haversham, on crutches for a year, Mrs. Osban, three months in a hospital, having operation after operation— She'd thought of young Mrs. Hunt, laughing with her over the front gate of her new cottage in Ballool, and four days later dead, with a dead baby at her side. And Daddy's sister, Aunt May, in her wheeled chair, drained and brittle and ghostly with her ten dreary children about her—