Return to Coolami (26 page)

“Not in a fit state,” eh? Still, that was this morning.

Supposing he
was
in trouble – could Bret—?

Good chap, Bret; he would do all he could.

But then
he
might—?

Susan—

Millicent, from the
doorway, said questioningly:

“Tom?”

He bent down and patted Margery's hand.

“Well, we'll go off again. Sure you'll be all right now? We'll probably hear them when they come in. Not a word to Colin, eh?”

She pulled his head down, suddenly, and kissed his cheek.

H
ALF
strangled by the thought
that a sudden noise might alarm her and cause her to lose her balance, Bret's sharp cry of her name reached his lips only as a smothered and incoherent exclamation. But she heard it and looked up with a startled backward fling of her head.

She said dubiously after a moment:

“I don't think my legs are long enough.”

Colin, still out of sight round the bend, called, “What's up?” And Bret, amazed at an unnatural quality in his own voice, replied:

“Susan's here.”

He added shortly, to her:

“Get off this ledge. Go back to the chimney. What the devil did you want to do this for?”

She turned without a word and walked back. It didn't, he had to admit, seem to bother her; but all the same he let go a breath he didn't know he'd been holding when she faded into semi-obscurity at the end of the ledge. He said over his shoulder to Colin:

“How about this gap? Are you all right?”

“Yes; go ahead.”

Bret stepped. It was easier coming back, he decided, turning; the wall didn't jut out so and there wasn't the shadow to confuse you—

Colin, the moon making a silvery halo round his head, was crouching on the other side with one hand over his eyes. Bret said sharply:

“What's wrong?”

Colin, subsiding on to his knees,
answered without looking up:

“Must have shaken myself up a bit. Never had a head before. Chuck me an end of the rope.”

Bret uncoiled it wondering what chance he'd have on a narrow ledge of holding Colin's weight if he did fall. He threw an end. Colin's groping hands found it and tied it in a bowline under his arms. He didn't lift his head; Bret suspected that his eyes were shut. Colin said:

“Go along the ledge about five yards or so; there's a jutting-out bit of rock about as high as your waist. Get a belay round it and you could hold anything that didn't break the rope. I'll be all right – but hurry up—”

Bret wondered, squatting on one heel, holding the rope round the rock, watching Colin get up, rather waveringly on to his feet, whether “head” might not be catching—? Whether perhaps the sudden faint malaise he himself was feeling might not turn irresistibly at any moment into a sickening giddiness, nausea, vertigo—

Colin standing on the edge of the gap, said, “Take in the slack, Bret.” And he took it in mechanically, his eyes on the dark, silver-edged figure. It stood there, he thought, for so long that it made the whole situation seem to pass from reality into some other realm of immobility, or rather, perhaps, of indefinitely arrested movement. When it came forward at last it seemed like the whole world leaping at him, so vast and black and momentous was it, so fraught with dreadful and unspecified possibilities. One corner of his mind, defying desperately the invading confusion of the rest,
told him it was Colin. Colin, safely across. Colin on his hands and knees only a couple of yards away, breathing heavily like a man exhausted.

Susan's voice from the darkness on his right:

“Can't I help, Bret?”

He answered shortly, “No.” But Colin, always with his face down and his eyes shut, called:

“Head all right, Susan?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

“Come and get one end of the rope, then. Take it back to where you are and hitch it round something. Bret can hold this end over the belay and I'll use it as a handrail. Quite soon I'm going to be sick.”

Bret opened his mouth to speak. He wanted to shout furiously to Susan to stay where she was. Not on any account whatever to move. Not to dare to come out again on to this damnable ledge which, to his fast crumbling nerve, looked every moment narrower, more sinister, more surely a place for shaking hands with death. But he had reached actually a stage in which even speech had become impossible. The very movement of his lips would have seemed an earthquake to jolt from its tight rope his precariously balanced self-control. He could only watch, dumbly, Colin crawl beside him and unfasten one end of the rope from round his waist. He could only see, with a depth, an agony of fear he'd never conceived possible, Susan walking along, taking up the end he threw her, retreating with it into the darkness again. When she'd vanished he was aware that some unbearable oppression had gone from him, but he hadn't time or mental energy to spare for the considering of it. He tightened his end of the rope over the rock, felt Susan pull on hers, watched Colin, looking tiny and distorted as
people look when one is ill and feverish, receding along the ledge between the rope and the wall. Then he was out of sight, and to Bret it was as if, with his vanishing, he had ceased to exist. He sat still feeling dazed and stupid. He found himself wondering why Susan had looked queer – unfamiliar. He discovered too, with some surprise, that he was in the middle of a vast yawn—

Colin called:

“Are you right, Bret?”

He stirred unwillingly. There was still that long silver streak. And there was still a tightness in his head and a strange emptiness in the pit of his stomach. Susan called cheerfully:

“Colin's been most beautifully sick. He's a new man!”

Bret snapped out:

“Don't!”

His forehead was dripping. His ears began to buzz. Purely by instinct he threw himself forward face downward on the rock. His whole inside seemed to tear itself away from him, and the blackness behind his eyes was suddenly lit with stars and sparks.

He felt a hand on the back of his head. Susan said, “Bret! Bret, darling! Oh, Bret, sit up and put the rope round you! Look, it's here. Let me—”

He sat up and swore at her:

“Blast you, Susan, get off this ledge and stay off it. I'm all right now. I'm coming. Here, hold the rope as you go. I'll follow you.”

“I don't need – oh, very well. Will you tie it round you when I'm back?”

“All right –
all right!
Only be quick. Good God, you little fool, don't
run
!”

She said angrily, regaining the shadows:

“I wasn't running! What do you take me for?”

Bret stood up, holding the rope. He
felt surprisingly better. It crossed his mind that perhaps the everyday normality of a squabble with Susan had had a steadying effect. He walked slowly, holding the rope while Colin and Susan took it in. When he stood at last beside them in the dark, she burst suddenly into a dreadful storm of weeping.

Bret offered her, gloomily, his last cigarette. For an hour or so he'd been living, he realised, a restful life of uncompromising simplicity. A life which had been composed, really, of nothing but the necessity for maintaining a physical equilibrium, and the sudden return to an existence bristling with emotional complexities depressed and disturbed him. He was aware too, unwillingly, that these same complexities had, in some mysterious way, altered since he had last examined them. Something had happened – something had changed; but, he told himself resentfully, he was damned if he was going to worry his head about it now. He was too dog tired; and an arm that he'd cut on some sharp grass coming down the cleft had begun to smart and throb. Or perhaps it was only now that he'd had time to notice it; he saw, surprised, that his wrist and hand were dark and sticky with half-dried blood.

Susan said:

“No – I don't want it,” and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She had stopped crying as abruptly as she had begun, and Colin who was coiling the rope said casually:

“That was a good idea of yours to use the spotlight.”

Bret turned. He realised now that he'd been puzzled when he was on the ledge by an impression of bright light somewhere below him. Now he could see, when he walked a few steps across the platform, that the chimney and the underneath of the chock-stone were illuminated. He said sharply to Susan:

“How did you
get here?”

She stared.

“I brought the Madison, of course.”

“You br—”

He began to laugh. It didn't seem possible, he thought, that down there on a crazy, unmade bush track with its head and spotlights trained on a wild, dark mountainside, was the same car which had stood only this morning, resplendent and urbane, on the concrete highway of Ballool. But in the next breath he was conscious again of irritation.

“How did you get up that chimney and over the chock-stone?”

She answered sulkily, like a reprimanded child:

“It wasn't hard. What's the chock-stone? Oh, that rock? I didn't get over, I crawled under it.”

Bret thought:

“Good God, I must be tired! Or ill, or something—”

He had never felt before this crazy wavering between amusement and ill-temper. It seemed now definitely humorous that where he and Colin had to strain and squeeze and pull in the narrow chimney, Susan, light and unhampered, could go up easily; where they had to make a dizzy outside leap at the chock-stone, she like a rabbit could creep beneath it—!

And then, as though his emotions were swinging helplessly on the end of a pendulum, he was angry again. A midget like that to bring so huge a car out at night along a dangerous track – to—

He said harshly:

“You had no business to come. It was
idiotic. You might have made a whole heap more trouble and you couldn't possibly have done any good. I thought you had more sense.”

She turned on him; for one moment he saw her face flaming with anger unexpressed. It was streaked with tears and the moonlight made it look very pale; her eyes glittered like dark water. She stared for a moment and then turned her back on him. So quickly that he hadn't realised what she was doing she disappeared down the cleft behind the chock-stone. He started forward, swearing under his breath, but Colin said:

“Leave her alone; she's all right. The thing's as bright as day and the handholds are like stairs. Besides she knows it.”

“Knows it?”

Colin said casually:

“She came to the top of the cleft with me one day. And she and Jim used to poke about here pretty often. Will you go next or shall I?”

“I'll go.”

“All clear, Susan?”

“Yes.”

“Bret's coming. Stand aside in case of stones.”

“Right.”

Bret found her standing on the sloping rock in the full blaze of the spotlight. Her hair flamed in it. As his feet came down on to what was, to all intents and purposes, firm ground again, some tension in him relaxed and he gave an involuntary shout of laughter. Susan, usually so immaculate, with riding breeches slipped down round her hips, with hands vanished up the sleeves of Margery's jumper, with white sandshoes
that seemed to double the length of her feet! He laughed helplessly, leaning his shoulders against the wall, and she stood, a grotesque small figure, and scowled at him from under her black brows and her wild red hair.

Colin joining him, said:

“What's the joke?” but it was Susan who answered shortly:

“I think it must be me.”

Colin let out a brief brotherly guffaw.

“You do look a sketch. Go on, Bret, you go down first and catch her if she falls. I'll give her a hand from above.”

Bret, clambering down the last wall, felt a kind of contrition sobering his mood. He thought, cursing under his breath as a sharp edge set his arm bleeding again, that perhaps it hadn't been very kind or very tactful to laugh at her like that. Although, God knew, there hadn't been any malice in his laughter. Not even, he decided, jumping the last few feet to the ground, very much real amusement. It had been, most likely, only a form of letting off steam, a—

A white sandshoe just above the level of his eyes waved about exploringly.

Susan said crossly:

“I can't find anywhere for my foot.”

He told her, “About six inches farther down,” and she snapped, “Don't be silly. I'm stretching as far as I can, now.”

He said:

“Oh, all right. Can you give me a hand and jump?”

She released her left hand and turned, holding it down to him. He could only just reach it, and the sudden impact of even her light weight made him stagger a little as he caught her. He put her down, and
she gave him a savage and ceremonious “Thank you” before turning away.

Colin, above, called:

“I've left the rope up at the foot of the chimney. I won't be a moment.”

But Bret was staring at Susan. One side of her face was wet and crimson. He felt his heart turn over with anxiety, compassion, remorse—

Something else? Something more? He said:

“Susan? You're hurt?”

He took her by the shoulders. She said vaguely:

“Hurt? No – I don't think so – where?”

He touched her cheek, leaning forward to peer at it. She put up a hand with a handkerchief in it and rubbed vigorously. The blood vanished leaving a smooth and unscarred cheek. He laughed, and glanced down at his own arm.

“It was my blood! Sorry!”

She cried:

“Oh –
you're
hurt—!”

Something overwhelmed him. The pent-up strain, excitement, anxiety of this strange night made it seem, in a mind working hazily, lethargically, quite fitting that it should culminate in an unfamiliar burst of a hitherto quite unknown emotion. She stayed in his arms perfectly still. There was no response in her body, her lips, and yet no resistance. She seemed almost to be listening. Dimly he remembered that once, somewhere, somehow, he had stood still and seemed to listen too. Colin called: