Return to Coolami (19 page)

“Well, be good then. Come on, Susan.”

In the tiny dressing-room they faced each other, Susan and Margery, questions and answers in their eyes.

Margery said:

“Well?”

And Susan, with a little shrug, answered:

“Not so very.”

She pulled her frock over her head and sat
down on the window seat fanning herself with her hat. She asked:

“And what about you?”

It wasn't very hard now, she thought, looking at her sister-in-law, to guess what about Margery! There was a sudden abandonment of effort in every line of her burdened body as she sat down wearily, her hands dropping like lead into her lap. She said:

“Oh, much as usual.”

“Colin?”

“Mostly he's all right.”

“To-day?”

“No, I haven't seen him since this morning. We must try not to let them know, Susan.”

“I don't see why you mind so much about their knowing.”

“He does. And when he knows they think – your mother thinks – he's all right, he – it seems to help—”

Susan stood up restlessly. Something in the sight of Richard, in the knowledge of Margery's pregnancy had stirred a never wholly buried grief for her own shortlived baby. She said shortly:

“Are you all right?”

Margery looked surprised. She was surprised. Beyond the weariness and the nervous stress it had never occurred to her to question her own health in child-bearing.

“Oh, yes – quite!”

“I got Mother to pack my baby-clothes for you. You might find them useful.”

“Rotten luck, Susan.”

“Maybe.”

Margery looked at
her. A few years ago when she'd first met Susan she had said to Colin with a faint superciliousness which, she now admitted, had had its roots in envy, “That young sister of yours gives herself a good time, doesn't she?”

She hadn't ever had that kind of good time herself. She hadn't been rich enough or pretty enough, and she'd always been too serious. Sometimes, now that life had really become such a difficult business, she often found herself smiling at the extreme seriousness of her university days; wondering what in the world she had found to be serious about in that incredibly far away and care-free existence—

She found herself thinking now that apparently Susan's frivolity had been quite as good a school for subsequent endurance as her own more austere youth. Not that Susan's trouble—

Her idle thoughts, the very movement of her hand to brush her hair away from her forehead, stopped abruptly. She realised with Susan sitting there before her that she had, so far, given her young sister-in-law's romance and tragedy only the scantiest and most superficial attention. Certainly last year when she had been playing the fool with Jim – when they'd come dashing in on their way from Coolami to Sydney, or from Sydney to Coolami, demanding lunch, demanding tea, demanding shelter for the night, laughing, teasing each other, filling the house with a very tempest of youth and vitality, she'd warned Susan several times to watch her step. Susan had laughed and hugged her, at first. Later she'd grown more subdued, and Jim had followed her with hungry, resentful eyes. And one day – on their last trip down from Coolami, Margery had stumbled on the reason. She'd gone
to her room where Susan was having a wash and found her standing before the dressing-table with a brush in one hand and a framed enlargement of a snap of Colin and Bret taken on their troopship in the other. Margery had seen, as she entered, an expression on Susan's mirrored face that surprised her. Not one that she could analyse – not one that gave her any clue to the amazing truth which Susan later confessed to her, but just an expression that struck her instantly as being queer, of lying unfamiliarly, like a mask, over the girl's usually merry face.

She'd said, looking over Susan's shoulder:

“Colin's changed a good deal, hasn't he?”

“Yes.”

As the expression on Susan's face, so the tone of her voice gave Margery an instant sensation of strangeness. And then, putting the photograph down and turning away from the mirror she had added:

“Bret hasn't, though.”

Almost as though she realised herself that her face, her voice, were betraying something she wished to hide, she had bent her head down suddenly so that her flame of hair swung downwards round it, and she had brushed and brushed with her face hidden—

And later, after lunch she had vanished. Jim, sitting on the veranda with Colin and herself, was moody and restless. His eyes were always on the door into the house, his conversation scrappy and disconnected. Margery at last, taking pity on him, had gone to look for Susan and found her face downward across the foot of the double bed, quite still, her hands clasped over the back of her head. She'd sat beside her, anxiously:

“Susan, what's the matter?”

Susan rolled over
and looked at her. She hadn't been crying, evidently, but she looked so despairingly miserable that Margery found herself wishing for the sight of a tear or two, as for a sign of alleviation. She asked desperately:

“Look here, Marge, how
do
you stop a man caring for you?”

Margery had asked, puzzled:

“Jim, do you mean?”

“Yes. I've tried – I – he—”

“I thought you – don't you care for him?”

“I like him – I'm really awfully fond of him. But I don't want to marry him.”

“Have you still got that flat?”

“Yes – in a way. I— Oh, that's where all the trouble is, Marge. I won't go there any more and he – sometimes he seems nearly mad with unhappiness – I can't bear to see it. I told him I wouldn't see him at all last time I was down, but he just followed and followed and hung round and wrote letters begging me to marry him so that I
had
to—”

“Well, why on earth did you go back to Wondabyne this time?”

“It was getting simply impossible at home. You know what Dad is – he was beginning to wonder what Jim was at with his precious daughter. And Mother – I was afraid – you know how people talk – lots of people knew about the flat apparently and I was afraid Mother and Dad would hear of it. It seemed safer to get him back to the country and leave him there—

“Leave him there—!”

She had finished with a little shrug and a wave of her hand towards the veranda. Margery had asked slowly:

“Are you sure
you don't care for him enough to marry him? He's a nice boy – I'm fond of Jim.”

Susan had nodded soberly:

“That's just it. He
is
a nice boy. I'm fond of him too.”

Margery had asked at random:

“You're not in love with anybody else?”

And then sat staring at the sudden flood of colour over Susan's cheeks, the painful twist of her face as though from some sudden inward agony. She said awkwardly:

“I'm sorry, darling – I had no idea. But if Jim knew that – if you told him—”

Susan rolled over on her face again. Her voice came from the eiderdown, muffled and despairing:

“I can't tell him – I can't – it's the one thing I can't do—!”

Margery asked, mystified:

“Why not?”

The voice this time was so smothered that Margery could not believe that she had heard it properly.

“What
did you say?”

“It's Bret.”

Well! She'd sat there helplessly looking down at the tumbled red hair on the eiderdown and wondering why the news should be so staggering, so impossible, grotesque. Just because, she supposed, Bret had always seemed so very much a bachelor, so intensely occupied with and satisfied by his work—

She'd asked doubtfully:

“Does he – is he – well—”

Susan sat up, smoothing her hair. She said crisply:

“He can't bear the sight of me. Marge, it's been getting late while I've been having emotion-trouble all over your best eiderdown. We won't get home till
morning at this rate. Don't tell any one, darling. I'll get over it – maybe.”

Maybe.

It was perhaps that echo of the word Susan had just spoken which had taken her thoughts back to a day so long past. And she saw now that since that day she had never really thought much about Susan except for a brief time after she had had the letter from her brother. That had been a nasty shock! Although, of course, it had crossed her mind several times that Susan, even armed as she was with knowledge, was living very dangerously indeed!

“That young sister-in-law of yours has got herself into a mess. She said I could tell you. She came to see me yesterday. I'm writing to you because you may be able to do something – help her in some way – you probably know who the man is? She looked a bit queer when she left—”

For a week or so after that she'd thought hard. She'd written to Susan and waited anxiously for a reply. Before it came there'd been that brief, staggering paragraph in the paper – “Mr. James Maclean of Coolami station—” “injuries to the head and back—” “taken to the hospital where he survived only a few hours.” And almost, it seemed, on the top of that bald announcement had come Susan's amazing letter. She and Bret were going to be married. Almost at once. Because of the baby. Short sentences like that, giving, Margery remembered thinking, in their bare statement of fact, a dreadful impression of despair hidden and beaten down—

But somehow, from the moment of reading that letter she hadn't worried any more about Susan. Bret was taking it on. She'd be all right with Bret. She'd got out of a tight corner very well, and even if Bret didn't really care for her he'd always be decent, and probably Susan was too young anyhow to know anything about love. As for her infatuation for Bret it was probably a good thing. Given that and the dreadful jolt, poor kid, that Jim's death must have been to her, she'd be a good deal more amenable, a good deal less wilful and mercurial and red-headedly impetuous than she'd been in the past—

That was how her
thoughts had run – skimming, as she now saw, the surface of Susan's troubles. It was only the sight of the girl sitting there before her, limp and listless, only the flat sound of her voice saying that one word, “Maybe,” which made Margery see with the swiftness of revelation that her young sister-in-law had come through a year of varied sufferings, and was now facing what was, she could not help thinking, a queer fate, for the fascinating and much-coveted Susan! She remembered talking very glibly to Colin about it just after the marriage had taken place. “Oh, it'll right itself – Susan's a dear kid but she's a bit superficial, isn't she? I mean her reactions would be rather shallow – ephemeral— She'll be miserable for a while and then she'll settle down and forget all about Jim and be as happy as a cricket—”

Something like that. Funny that it hadn't seemed to occur to her that Bret would have “reactions” too! She saw now, shocked and amazed by her former denseness, that Bret's reactions, which would naturally be anything but shallow, were the key to a situation far less simple than she had so carelessly imagined.

Susan was roaming about the little room, still using her hat as a fan. Margery thought, watching her, that
there was a Peter Pan-ish look about her – slender and small and with an intriguing air of having just alighted on the ground. That was something she got from her mother – there was that about Millicent, too, which always made you feel that her presence at any given spot was accidental, temporary, even illusory! That you wouldn't be surprised altogether if the spot were suddenly vacant and you were left half-wondering if it had ever been occupied at all!

And then, as Susan turned from the veranda door, she had to admit that that impression of her belonged almost entirely to her back view. You couldn't, seeing her face, feel that she was anything but a blend, endearing to others, but painful no doubt to herself, of too many very human qualities.

She swooped suddenly to perch on the arm of Margery's chair. She flung a cool bare arm round Margery's neck. She said:

“Cheer up, darling. Colin will be all right. I'll change my dress and then I'm coming out to do a chore or two for you. Have you still got Simple Sarah the Idiot Child?”

Margery laughed, and stood up.

“No, Richard started imitating her – roaming round with his jaw dropped and a vacant expression. I really couldn't stand it. I've got a lass called Annie. She's strong and willing to such an extent that she's broken all my best china, but she's fond of Richard and she's clean, so what's a plate or two—?”

Susan said brightly:

“What, indeed?” And began to sob with her head down on the back of the chair. Margery stroked it silently. She thought:

“Oh, hell! What a houseful of misery!”

But Susan was
sitting up again in a moment smearing the tears out of her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. She said calmly:

“Don't take any notice of me, Marge – I'm liable to burst into heartrending sobs at any moment. All I need is a hanky and a cold bath.”

Margery said, giving her a handkerchief:

“Well, that's easy. You know your way to the bathroom. Don't hurry – there's nothing you can do. Everything's cold and Annie is quite equal to it.”

But she thought, closing the door behind her, that a hanky and a cold bath would not go far towards the easing of Susan's unhappy heart.

B
RET
, following his father-in-law
in from the shed where the Madison had just been lovingly bestowed, paused for a moment to speak to Bill, who was pottering aimlessly about the wood-pile.

“Good rain last week, Bill.” But he was watching Drew out of sight round the corner of the house as he spoke and he only half listened to the man's rambling answer.

“—an' they do say that over by Malibar they never got a drop. Real good fall out your way, Mr. Maclean.”