Return to Coolami (2 page)

Drew snorted.

“Made 'em do it for me. Can't bear this crawling round at twenty-five. No, I can let her out to-day. How far did you say it is to Colin's place – from here?”

Bret reflected.

“Round about a hundred and fifty. A very easy day's run.”

“And about the same from there on to Coolami?”

“Yes, roughly.”

Drew nodded and looked towards the house again.

Well, here was Millicent, anyhow. The faint scowl, that had settled round his eyes since he thought of his daughter's marriage, cleared away while he watched his wife coming up the path. Cool, she looked in that greyish-green dress; but she'd want her thick coat crossing the mountains—

He called:

“Where's your fur coat?”

She protested.

“Tom, I won't want that. I've a tweed one here – it's quite thick.”

She stood at the gate which Bret was holding open for her, and looked at her husband and her husband's
car. For she did not really think of the car as being in any way her own. Her fur coat even, she thought, with a smile flickering, was really Drew's fur coat. And he would be so disappointed, poor darling, if she didn't wear his fur coat to-day when she was going for her first drive in his wonderful new car. He said off-handedly:

“Oh, all right, all right, please yourself. But it'll be cold when we get up there near Katoomba—”

She agreed quickly.

“I expect it will, dear. Perhaps I had better have it. Bret, you wouldn't mind running back for it? Take this – just throw it on the bed. The fur one is hanging in my cupboard. Susan will know—”

Quite solemnly her eyes met the solemn eyes of her daughter's husband. But the laughter that passed between them warmed her heart as he turned away. Dear Bret! Lucky Susan! If only—

Coolami. Coolami. A word, thought Susan, and a mass of pictures. A word and an ache of memories, a chill of many fears. She stood at the window pulling her bright blue felt hat down over her hair, hoping that the breeze would fan from her hot cheeks, before she joined the others, traces of that brief and fiercely subdued burst of crying which had overwhelmed her just after Bret went out.

Coolami. About sunset they'd come to it – up to the crest of a long hill with the sun in their eyes so that until the car began to swoop downward they couldn't see anything. And then like magic it would all be
there, the great valley glowing with opalescent light, the wheatfields quivering and flowing to the current of a vagrant breeze, the river like a mirror beneath a green deluge of weeping willows. Coolami; she rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, as though she might clear in that way the obscure confusion of thought that the name roused in her. What did it stand for, that name of her husband's home, beyond the lovely picture that it flashed instantly to her mind – beyond her memories of Jim – beyond the unbelievably carefree months of her romance, the freezing horror of its ending, the dreary and humiliating mess which had somehow grown out of what had seemed so lovely and so gay—

It was no joke, she thought, living too intensely when you were very young. Crowding emotions and experiences into too short a space of time. Being pitchforked out of what was practically childhood into a maturity which had not yet found its feet. Loving and being loved, seeing death and giving birth and seeing death again – all in so short a time. Not two years yet since she had first met Jim. Then she had been nineteen and a child, but now she was twenty-one she hardly knew what to call herself. She'd been in love and she'd had a baby – surely if those things didn't make a woman of you nothing would. And yet for four months nearly, she'd been hiding here like a panicky child behind her mother's skirts! All the same, she defended herself with unhappy honesty, it wasn't so much fear as just confusion – a muddled, miserable feeling of having found herself in a situation that was too complicated, too tangled, too—

But if Bret meant what he had said—

She couldn't blame him, after all if he did. She'd
thought of demanding the divorce often enough herself, and really it did seem under the circumstances the only decent way out. But when it came to the point – when you felt it really near you, this cutting adrift from Bret, from Coolami—

It would be like hacking a piece out of yourself— Too much of your life, not in time but in essence, had been bound up in Coolami—

“Ready, Susan?”

She swung round from the window, hoping that with her back to the light the tear stains wouldn't show. Not that she could tell from his quite expressionless glance whether they did or not. He had his hat in his left hand and her mother's fur coat over the same arm, and he stood in the doorway with his right hand on the knob barring her way. She picked up a bag, glanced in the mirror and said, “Quite. Come on.” But he didn't move.

She flushed angrily. He didn't know perhaps (or perhaps he did, but she wasn't going to give it away anyhow!) that the unfair advantage of his physical size and strength was a perpetual irritation to her. She would have given anything, at that moment, with the full flare of her red-headed temper burning her up, to have been able to push him aside, to send him spinning against the opposite wall while she walked victoriously down the stairs! The knowledge that she could brace her feet against the doorway and shove till she was tired without moving him an inch made her so angry that she could hardly see, so she turned her back again and strolled over to the window, and from there spoke airily:

“When you are.”

“I was bluffing about the divorce,” he said.

Relief ran like a cool tiny trickle of water amongst the flames of her temper and was consumed.

“What a pity,” she said politely. “I was just feeling glad you'd saved me the bother of having to ask for it myself.”

His hand was no longer on the doorknob. She walked past him, pulling on her gloves. He followed silently.

F
ROM
where he sat in the front seat of his car, with his arm across the wheel, Drew could see the railway station at the foot of the hill. And dimming, as it always did, the pleasure he felt in his home, his neighbourhood, he could see, too, the last four letters of its name – tall and white on a black ground, pricking him to a faint exasperation.

“—
LOOL
.”

He glanced sideways at his own house. To him it had always been perfection, and his wife's attitude towards it, of faintly amused detachment, had puzzled and disturbed him. To-day, he thought, wishing vaguely that Millicent instead of himself should have been the one to notice and comment on it, it looked particularly well; the sun glowed on the red roof and cream-coloured chimneys, and the dark brick walls were still in flickering shadow. The cypress hedge that he'd planted was growing well, and the pergola was fairly smothered in yellow roses. The lawn, he noticed with a slight frown, needed clipping round the edges, and he made a mental note that Stock the gardener must be brought to book not only for this but for the patch of dandelions which, even from here was visible, marring the immaculate smoothness of the turf. A good house, he thought, refusing with some inward defiance to harbour memories of his wife's rapture in their first home – that little place with the straight stone path
and the neglected orchard, foaming with pink peach blossom – the little place he'd got cheaply because it was next door to a cemetery!

Here, he thought, looking along his own high brick wall towards the high brick walls of his neighbours, there was dignity, security. Roads were smooth for the passing of costly cars; footpaths were well-kept; gardens – gardens were properly looked after, they were assets, they were frames for the houses, riot, as Millicent seemed to think they should be, rather in the nature of joyous accidents—

Yet there on the station was that name – that somehow unsuitable and undignified name – Ballool.

He said over his shoulder to Millicent:

“What's it mean, that name? Ballool.”

She shook her head.

“I don't know, Tom. Why?”

He grumbled. “Must mean something, I suppose. Where the devil are those two? We won't get away before lunch at this rate.” He blew the horn violently.

Millicent, passing her daughter's room, had heard her crying. Not for the first time in these last four miserable months. She said gently:

“Don't hurry them, Tom,” and he, with a sudden outburst of impatience and long-concealed anxiety, demanded:

“What's the matter with the girl, anyhow? He— treats her all right, doesn't he?”

She said warmly:

“Bret's a dear. But – it's been a bit of a mess, Tom— Give them time. Sometimes I've wondered if we were right to allow it.”

He grunted. “Too late for that now.” And turned his head towards the sound of their approaching footsteps.
More than ever when they came in sight they bewildered and annoyed him. Side by side, just finishing as they came round the corner some apparently amiable and trivial conversation, Susan smiling, Bret quite unperturbed – What the devil did they
mean
by not being as carefree as they looked?

Susan said, patting his hand as she passed:

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Dad. I'm going to sit behind with Mother.”

But at that Drew's vaguely pricking disquietudes became transformed into a rich and satisfying anger. Damned young fools with their silly squabbling! “Going to sit behind with Mother,” was she? Well, he'd show her what a marriage was, the spoilt little devil! And he said with determination:

“Nothing of the sort. Your mother's sitting in front with me!”

There! He simmered in the gently subsiding glow of his indignation, and held the rug for Millicent, who climbed meekly in beside him with lowered eyelids and a funny expression round the corners of her mouth. From the back of the car, silence. Serve them right! Let them stew in their own juice for a while! He wasn't going to have his day spoilt for them – his first long run into the country without Millicent at his side—

And Susan's voice bubbled out behind him:

“Bret, darling, just move that suitcase over the other side, will you?”

Now that they were actually moving Bret's faintly nagging impatience became suddenly a blaze. Something,
he wasn't quite sure what, lent the journey a rather exciting tang of adventure. It might be simply the thought of Coolami, lying like a promised land three hundred miles away; it might be the deserted, still-sleeping appearance of the streets which made one feel one was perhaps rather picturesquely enterprising to be abroad at all; it might be even – yes, it was possible – because Susan was beside him and bound too, however unwillingly, for Coolami. Or, as a last guess, perhaps it was that surprising little gadget of Drew's on the radiator – that simple and primitive figure straining forward incongruously from the sophisticated bonnet of a new Madison!

Whatever it was it made him feel better. It pushed into the background of his mind the depressing psychological tangle that his life had become, and brought forward the refreshing physical simplicities of his work and his home. He began to enjoy in anticipation a hundred small things he would do and see within the next week – his crops springing up rich and green after last week's heaven-sent rains – his favourite horse, Ranger – the cattle-stop he had told them to put in while he was away in place of the old gate by the creek – Desdemona's new foal—

But there his thoughts tripped and crashed painfully into a memory of Jim sitting on the fence and laughing and claiming the next offspring of Desdemona as his own. Not much more than a year ago. And by some freakish twist of unprepared emotion it now seemed the most poignant and unbearable of all the results of Jim's death, that he should not be able to have the foal now that it was born.

Gaps. Gaps. Everywhere you came up against them. Weak places in the structure of your life. Like walking
a carpeted hall, not realising the rotten boards till your feet went into them! Jobs that Jim had always done – suddenly you had to find some one else to do them; a realisation one night of a piano always silent; a letter from a tailor who wanted another fitting – how subtly horrible that was! – from a Jim who would never again swank about in clothes to which he lent an intriguing air of mixed Beau Brummel and Tom Mix!

Well, it was over –
over
, he told himself violently, angered again by the dark slow-welling tide of resentment against his wife, Susan, which he could not control with any amount of carefully fostered mental justice. He told himself wearily what his mind, from constant repetition, found no sense in any longer, that it was no use thinking about it, no use wondering or regretting, or resenting. The thing had happened and it was over. Some one else did Jim's work, the piano was silent, and there were no more tailor's bills for Jim. Even the baby had died. And he thought for the first time that, in a way, it was not till that scrap of humanity drew its last breath that Jim had made his real, his final exit.

Leaving Susan—

Drew called over his shoulder:

“Where do we strike the Great Western Road?”

Bret answered, leaning forward:

“Parramatta.”

Drew thought irritably:

“There's another of them!” Parramatta. It had a silly sound, a jabbering sound, the kind of sound that a child might make experimenting with vocal noises!
And over there to his left still another – Kirribilli! Well, they sounded just exactly what they were – the language of savages!

And he thumped his hand heavily on the horn. The note of it, deeply and mellowly austere, the chastened alacrity with which a lesser car slid to the left while he roared past it consoled him slightly. He called back to Bret:

“Well, tell me where to turn off. I don't know this road at all.”