Return to Coolami (23 page)

He began to walk up the hill on the other side of the creek. A little farther on he thought he'd strike the crazy track which connected, after a fashion, the road with the mountain, and he'd be able to tell, then, if a car had used it that day. And in the meantime, walking steadily, there persisted in him an unrest, a bitterness, a grief roused up anew by his moment of immobility down there by the creek. No matter how long he lived, he supposed, he'd never really get used to the thought of Jim's death. It would always return to his memory with the jar of an idea not properly assimilated, a fact never wholly believed—

Perhaps because there had always been at the back of his mind a devout thanksgiving that Jim had been too young for service in the war. “
He's
safe, anyhow.” War made you think like that when you'd got used to seeing youth butchered; made you feel that nothing else could conceivably touch it. If somehow it escaped
that
it was safe. But it wasn't. Not safe from a wet street, a skidding car, a—

Susan. That was
Susan
. He had to tell himself so clearly and insistently before his mind would recognise that the ugly words which had been in it applied to the
girl who was now his wife. And upon coming to it again, that tangle, that unmanageable knot of complicated emotions to which, inexorably, his every thread of thought must lead him, he uttered half aloud an exclamation of helplessness, despair.

He wished suddenly, angrily, that he'd been, after all, as obtuse as she'd expected him to be. That he'd felt only their satiny warmth in that tightening of her arms round his neck; in her recklessly offered beauty nothing of that obscure and inexplicable peril.

As it was—

Things became worse and worse. More and more impossible. Ludicrous—

As he walked his anger mounted. He saw furiously two alternatives ahead of him, each menacing, poisoning, what he had always valued most, the orderly contentment of his life at Coolami. Making of it, whichever road he took, a life of dingy frustration, of furtive compromises, of endless situations in which one's self-respect must shrivel and fade like young corn in drought—

He saw, sharp and clear and miniature, hanging brightly in the dark confusion of his thoughts, like a tiny illuminated symbol, the door between their rooms at Coolami. Saw it shut, hiding loneliness and bitterness, all the unwholesome maladies of normality tortured and denied. Saw it open revealing subtler but no less poignant misery; things he couldn't analyse, but from which instinctively he recoiled; efforts at decency failing and failing and failing again, till at last they renewed themselves no longer; friendship, admiration, fading into hatred and contempt; children, perhaps, conceived in secret, unadmitted loathing—

All that – at Coolami! There, really, was the root
of his resentment. Born there, brought up there, the perfection of his parent's happiness reflected all round him, he had felt sometimes before, as he felt more strongly now, that this marriage of his to Susan was little short of sacrilege. And he remembered again what he'd told old Drew this morning – “
Coolami, birthplace of heroes!
”

Well, what was the heroic line now? Take her, leave her alone, let her go? Not very—

He stumbled in a rabbit burrow and came down heavily on his knees. The jar of it, breaking into the midst of his mental turbulence, a hardly realised physical fatigue, and a certain nameless foreboding of which, till that moment, he hadn't been fully aware, shook out of him a brief blistering spasm of profanity. Still on his knees he looked up, and a cold nausea hit him suddenly like a blow in the pit of the stomach.

Good God, what a thing it looked in the moonlight! Its base still hidden from him, its soaring spire framed in a gap between the trees, it had, a million times magnified, that same breath-taking, nerve-shocking touch of drama which he had already felt twice that night. The moon was on its right now. That side of it gleamed, falling abruptly here and there into the darkness of shadowed chasms; the other side, impenetrably black, was menacing and magnificent in the fierceness of its triumphantly ascending outline.

He didn't know how long he knelt there staring at it, wondering vaguely how something whose very essence was its immense, its overpowering immobility, could convey so clearly an impression of energy, force, a sinister and latent power. And, rather paradoxically, could capture, too, in the formidable masses of its
naked rock so elusive a suggestion of the delicate, the insubstantial fabric of a dream.

He was suddenly deadly tired. He put his finger-tips on the ground and pushed himself wearily to his feet. Life, he thought, soberly enough and without any of the turmoil of his recent reflections, was really a silly business. It took such a moment as that one he'd spent on his knees gaping like a fool at the mountain to make you abruptly rather sick of yourself and your frenzied worm-like wrigglings on the barbed hook of your existence. Rather disgusted with what was shown to you as your own incredible transience, your altogether galling unimportance—

“
Worth more than Colin's!
”

How
was it worth more than Colin's, this futile life of his? Well, he was a better farmer, a better judge of sheep, and he happened to dislike whisky. Apart from that—

He was aware, painfully, of solitude. Not only, he realised gropingly, of the physical and mental solitude of his immediate environment, but another more alarming aloneness in the whole of space and time, so that he felt, ridiculously, an overwhelming desire such as a child might feel in the dark, for the comfort of some human companionship. His, he thought, was the one solitude against which all nature cries aloud—a biological solitude that made one outcast, contemptible, of less importance, finally, than the smallest ant dragging its egg to the friendly shelter of a stone.

He stopped. At night, in this transforming silver light, it would have been easy enough, he thought, to miss this track altogether – a track which had never been made, but worn after a fashion by the cars of
infrequent sightseers and picnic parties. Just here the earth was too hard, too thickly sprinkled with fallen gum leaves and twigs for him to find wheelmarks. He began to follow it, staring at the ground. It doubled and twisted, skirting vast outcrops of granite, squeezing between tall trees, climbing in zigzag fashion, obstinately, laboriously; finishing, as he remembered, in one steep pinch, just wide enough for a car, which swept it up in triumph to the very foot of the first great wall of rock.

There, Bret thought, shifting his rope to an easier position, even if not before, there would be wheelmarks, or, better still, the car itself. He didn't like, very much, the thought of Colin, desperate and drink-bemused, climbing that last little bit of the track. Might very well be risky after last week's rains – washed out, narrowed—

He began to walk faster, feeling in his pockets for a cigarette, lighting it as he went, trying by such small and everyday actions to repel the sudden savage assaults which his imagination was making upon his habitual imperturbability. He'd seen, years ago, too many mangled human bodies not to feel now a prickling of the skin at the thought of Colin lying at the foot of that steeply ascending bank in the wreckage of his car—

And now at his feet, in a patch of softer ground, were unmistakable wheelmarks—

That steep incline, when at last he came to it, rather breathless, and rubbing his hot forehead with his handkerchief, was undoubtedly in worse repair than when he'd seen it last. It was corrugated with deep gutters whose water had swept away down the hill large sections of the earth bank which was the only
made part of the track; but he saw with relief that the wheelmarks went up it steadily enough, keeping well in to the side of the mountain—

And he reasoned, slackening a little with a mixture of heat, weariness and relief, that if Colin was sober enough to drive his car up there without mishap he was probably sober enough to climb—

He came to the top of the incline and stopped dead. There on that open and rather steeply sloping place where the car should have been, the moonlight came flooding down brilliantly on to a few stunted shrubs, a little grove of wattle, ash-gold in the moonlight, breathing out the scent of honey; and wavering wheeltracks that went out of sight over the opposite cliff.

W
HEN
Bret stood
back at last from the shattered car and drew his shirt sleeve slowly across his forehead, he could feel his whole body prickling with sweat, limp with abrupt release from nervous strain. For Colin wasn't there. Quite methodically and thoroughly he'd searched, forcing up the crumpled hood, peering and feeling into the car where it was shadowed by the vast tree-trunk into which it had crashed, poking about in thick undergrowth, streaked and dappled with moonlight, for a still body flung there by a terrific impact.

But he hadn't found it, and now with a sudden violent reaction he was aware of exuberance. An energy that was half defiance sent him scrambling up the steep slope to the plateau, and held him there for a moment or two, his head craned backward, staring up at the menacing black bulk above him. Step by step his eyes picked out the different stages of the climb, and he surprised in himself a faint half unwilling exhilaration at the thought of tackling it again. Rather a sheer bit at first – about fifteen feet of it very nearly perpendicular but with quite fair foot and handholds. The sort of thing you did gaily enough with good earth so close below you, but which, a few hundred feet higher, made your stomach feel queer and your knees wavery—

Then twenty or thirty feet of scrambling up a sloping face of rock to a chimney. Bret, peering, thought he
could place it, but it was hard to tell from here just how much of it there was. He remembered it as strenuous but not particularly difficult, and moved farther back to try to refresh his memory of the next pitch. With his final backward step it leapt into view and with it memories he didn't know he had preserved, of his first encounter with it. That vile ledge! He could see it as a dark line edged with silver, disappearing round a corner into the great cleft in which nearly half the ascent was made. Well, it was broad enough – nearly two feet six in some places and never less than one, and it wasn't more than sixty feet from the ground. If it hadn't had that gap in it. Not, Bret acknowledged, admitting all the excellent qualities which Colin, like any collector exhibiting his favourite specimen, had claimed for it, that it was a wide gap. Not that it hadn't two splendid handholds, one on each side. Not that the ledge itself didn't obligingly almost double its width at that particular spot—

All the same you did have to step across it. There did come a moment when, with one handhold released and the other not yet achieved, with one foot on the point of leaving its solid rock and the other already in mid-air, you realised acutely with every cell in your body that you were far enough from the ground to get quite nastily messed up if you fell—

After that, he remembered, once you got into that cleft there was nothing to it but exertion for a least a couple of hundred feet. A steep slope full of stunted growth and great wedged boulders—

He looked up sharply at the moon. Now, and for perhaps an hour longer, it would be shining straight into that cleft. It would be lighting every foot of the way and you'd take it almost as confidently as if it
were a staircase. But later when the moon was higher, that great buttress on the northern face would shadow it. It would be black night in there, and if you stumbled— Well, you'd roll and bounce and bump till you brought up against a rock or became jammed behind some clump of bushes, and you mightn't be actually dead, but you'd be lucky if you hadn't broken a bone or two somewhere—

He looked at his watch, and realised with no more than a feeling of fatalistic resignation that if he went back as he had intended to signal for help, and then waited till his helpers arrived, they'd be lucky if they got into that cleft before the moonlight left it; and luckier still, he thought grimly, if they got out of it intact.

He threw his head back suddenly, cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted. He didn't know quite why he was so dumbfounded when there came, faintly, but clearly from far above him, an answer. He must, he supposed, have considered it possible that Colin would hear him or he wouldn't have coo-eed, but nevertheless he stood for a moment or two with his hands still at his mouth, petrified with astonishment and relief.

The whole thing became, suddenly, a lark. The anxiety and depression of his mood vanished so abruptly that he almost imagined he felt them flowing upward from him like a vapour, like ectoplasm— The word chimed in his mind with the name of the mountain, and he found himself thinking with ridiculous amusement, “spirit place”!

He shouted again:

“Hallo there! Colin!”

But although the answering call was repeated he
couldn't distinguish words. He went over to the wall of rock and tried, tentatively, the first few feet. Funny stuff this trachite. Too smooth – didn't give your feet much to grip on. Not like sandstone. He jumped down, pulled off his shoes. He tied them together by the laces, then fastened them behind him to his belt and tried again.

Easy enough. His toes slipped once from a foothold not quite as good as it had looked, and he barked his knee, but so near the ground, he thought, you don't lose your breath over trifles like that! Later on, when you're up a thousand feet or so, your heart turns over if your little finger slips so much as a hairbreadth—

He pulled himself up over the top of that first small pitch and sat for a moment readjusting the rope across his shoulders. Then he went on up the slope, clambering, touching the ground before him with his fingers, to the black cleft of the chimney.

It looked, he thought, squeezing himself into it and peering up, a deuce of a long way, and there was no moonlight here. He took out his torch and flashed it above him, trying to memorise roughly the footholds and handholds available. But anyhow, he thought, vaguely surprised at his own cheerful unconcern, in so narrow a chimney you could do a lot by just bracing your feet against one wall and your back against the other—