Return to Coolami (3 page)

He glanced sideways at his wife. He had remembered, even as he spoke the words, that she did know it. Or that she had known it, years ago. Queerly reluctant he'd always been to talk to her or to allow her to talk to him about her girlhood in the country. Jealous, perhaps. Fiercely touchy about a time when she'd had far more than he could give her. Resentful of a home more impressive than the one with the peach blossoms and the cemetery next door! Such things stung and goaded you when you were a youngster with energy and ambition and precious little else; and a good thing, too! They'd stung you into the best house in Ballool, goaded you into the latest model Madison, brought your wife fur coats and your son a country property and your daughter—

Well, confound it, what more could he have done? Was it his fault she'd got these damnable modern ideas from God-knows-where and dashed off—

His memory thrust at him suddenly a picture of four-year-old Susan galloping down the beach in a blue bathing-suit, her arms outstretched to a colossal curling breaker in a gesture that was at once a fearful welcome and a pathetic attempt at defence— He remembered feeling, as he rushed to the rescue, a pride
in her that was vast and painful. So small and so intrepid and so damn silly! Just exactly like that she'd rushed into life – where he couldn't follow and pick her up and comfort her because she'd had the breath knocked out of her and her feet swept off the firm ground—

And he remembered again the one small circumstance at which he had been able to grasp for comfort in those dreadful days after it had happened – he had never wanted her to go to Wondabyne; and if she hadn't gone there she'd never have gone to Coolami either, and if she hadn't gone to Coolami she wouldn't ever have met this – this Jim—

Yes, it had given him some slight easing, rescued him from too overwhelming a feeling of failure as a parent, to be able to say, stamping up and down the room, “I said at the time I didn't want her to go— I was always against it—” But of course he hadn't thought – couldn't have foreseen—

As a matter of fact he hadn't had any real reason for opposing the visit – except that always, ever since his marriage, he'd felt this obscure jealousy of the country. He'd been jealous of its pull on Millicent, jealous of its pull on his two children, jealous of something they felt which he couldn't share, didn't know anything about. And didn't want to. What a game! He'd learnt a good deal about it, indirectly, since his marriage, and whoever wanted it could have it! No stability to it, no certainty, no chance of letting up for ever and ever amen! Good seasons, bad seasons, endless work, endless anxiety. When you weren't praying for rain you were being flooded out! Rust in your wheat, fluke in your sheep, rabbits and droughts and bush fires. Hell!

And in the end, what? Peace for your old age? Security? Not on your life! Just look at Millicent's family and Wondabyne! Rich and prosperous in her parents' time – passed on, still rich and prosperous to her brother. He dies, and what then? Comfort for Agatha his widow and money well invested? No such thing! The money you make on the land goes back into the land – what you don't spend on your periodical sprees to the city. Back it goes, and the land eats it up and demands more. Then wool's down and wheat's down and Depression arrives on the scene and you're beaten – finished. You've got to sell out and live on next to nothing in a little flat, and all you've given your life to is yours no longer. Look at Agatha. Adrift, alone, and this stranger, Mortimer, at Wondabyne driving it back again to a new prosperity. Oh, yes, it was there all right, the money. The richness, the essential value. But how many got it out and stuck to it? Not one in a hundred – not one in a thousand—

And he began to wonder and to worry about Colin.

Round a corner the fresh breeze from the harbour leapt at them suddenly. Susan clutched at her hat. Bret took his off and held it on his knee. Millicent, who didn't mind looking old-fashioned and had tied hers on with a veil, lifted her head up and sniffed blissfully.

She had been feeling, very much as Bret had felt, that a momentous journey, a momentous undertaking of any sort perhaps, should always begin in the very early morning. Hours before you were, on ordinary days, awake at all. You came to it then with the extra
freshness and eagerness of novelty. You felt clean and the day felt clean, and you had a cheering sensation that everything was beginning anew. Rather like the feeling when the desk-clerk at a hotel turns over a page, and you are the first to inscribe your name on it; and you write neatly and clearly because you are leading off a whole pageful of heaven only knows what other people on what other diverse and extraordinary occasions, and it behoves you to set an example of order and seemliness—

Yes, anything begun like this would surely lead to pleasant things. A time when you saw streets empty and shops closed; a time dedicated, it seemed, to milk and magic and morning papers. Susan must be feeling it too. Bret must be. And they were both young. When you were young and felt good the natural outlet for the good feeling was to love some one. Why there – even Tom, bless him, had suddenly put out his hand and patted her knee! And spring, too. Bret, what are you thinking of! Susan, Susan! Forget it all, put it away, be happy!

“In the spring a young man's fancy—” How old was Bret? Thirty-fiveish? Well, that was young. Jim—

The thought ran over her mood like a small cloud-shadow over a sunlit plain. Jim of course was only twenty-five. That was spring, too. Last spring—

Poor children. Youth, difficult and lovely. Susan, Colin, both gallant and impetuous and mad. Never mind, she thought fiercely, I
like
my children mad! God save us from cool and calculating young people!

But not war – that wasn't fair. Susan had come to grips with Life and been worsted – temporarily. That was one thing; one grieved, worried, tore oneself to
bits with pity for her, but one felt all the time that it had been at least a clean fight. War was different. There wasn't anything clean in that; there wasn't anything there that was worthy of having such a wealth of courage, such a flame of selfless youth matched against it. It wasn't a fight any more than the ancient sacrifice of little children into the molten jaws of the god Moloch. It was something obscene that grabbed and devoured, or where it couldn't devour, maimed or warped or mutilated—

And there, like her husband, she could remember that she had cried tormentedly: “He mustn't go! He can't go! Eighteen – Tom, he's a child! You went, you got your leg smashed up – isn't that enough?” But, unlike her husband, she found no comfort in the memory. Nothing but a bitter self-reproach that she had given way in the end. Nothing but contempt for a mother who had been taken in even for a little while with fine phrases spun to cover abominations—

A boy had gone away, very cheerful, very excited, very particular about his buttons and the shine on his belt and boots. There had come back a boy wrapped in a strange, bleak maturity that sat on him like an ill-fitting garment; a boy with restless eyes and hands, sharp tongue, sudden laughter, long silences—

And dreams. Nightmares. Things that crowded on him in the night and tortured him and flung him, shuddering and wet with perspiration, out of frightful sleep where these horrors had been false into still more frightful wakefulness when he knew that they'd been real—

The trouble was that before it all happened, one's ideas of war had been so wrong. One's thoughts were a sort of hotch-potch of second-hand ideas, mostly
poetical and all so very out of date. One thought: “On, on, you noblest English,” and “‘Charge for the guns,' he said,” and “What can I do for thee, England, my England.” Yes, even out of the heart of it had come a cry, the spiritual descendant of those old-fashioned cries, the cry of the warrior who was still a warrior out of war that was no longer anything but butchery: “Now God he thanked who has matched us with this hour—”

They had had that – they had had it in thousands and they matched it with what? Glory and valour of days gone by? A charge, a battle, real anger, real action, triumphant conquest, honourable defeat? No – but mud and vermin and waiting. Boredom. Disease. And then an orgy of organised and nauseated killing. Not in anger, not in any hot outburst of natural hostility, but coldly and mechanically, from afar; death from the air, from under the sea, out of tanks, out of machineguns, out of gas-bombs—

And Colin in the midst of it—

But now there was Margery. And little Richard—

Millicent sighed and began to see again. She came back painfully from this blind excursion into her thoughts, and looked at the harbour like a pearl in its early morning veil of mist. Sandals – something about sandals, wasn't it? Her mind groped among rhymes and metres. “The still morn—” Yes, yes, “and the still morn went out with sandals grey—”

She lifted her head a little, and it went back suddenly and she was staring upward. Oh, lovely, lovely! She was wildly happy again. How much more delightful it was to see beauty where you didn't expect it! You looked at the harbour knowing it would be lovely, and it was lovely and you drank it in and said, “
That's
all right.”

But this sudden miraculous beauty curving and spinning away over your head, this cobweb wizardry of steel, of soaring arches just touched by the first sunrays to a faint golden warmth – this was something you hadn't expected, hadn't looked for – it was an extra, given free with the morning—

Her husband said:

“Better than the punt, old lady?”

She laughed excitedly, far less at his remark than for joy at her recaptured happiness. She said:

“Oh, yes, darling, better than the punt – much,
much
better than the punt!”

B
UT
Susan was only twenty-one, and for her places were not, save from her own association with them. The last year with all its burden of tragedy and joy was still vivid enough to make places connected with it queerly poignant, touched for ever afterwards in her mind with a sharpness, an intimacy that other places could not have. Across that year she looked back as one might look across an angry bar to calm water beyond, at a time which seemed curiously remote; and to a Susan so gaily and energetically sure of herself that the present Susan could only think of her with amazement – and envy – and a faint pitying contempt—

Envy – yes, you couldn't but envy any one so blindly and deliciously certain that she knew all about life and could lead it round like a little dog on the long leash of her theoretical knowledge! A marvellous feeling, while it lasted! Perfectly marvellous until your leash suddenly snapped and you discovered that your poodle was a lion after all – or a gorilla or – what was bigger and fiercer than a gorilla—?

“Bret?”

“Yes?”

“What were those animals – you know – lizardy things only as big as a house – prehistoric beasties—?”

“Ichthyosaurus, do you mean? Or rather I suppose it's Ichthyosauri.”

“Yes, those are the things.”

That was what it was like. But the picture she instantly saw of herself standing aghast before its devouring jaws turned out to be comic instead of tragic, and she giggled suddenly.

“Are they funny?” asked Bret.

“This one was.”

And then she saw it all allegorically again and felt sick with shame, remorse, misery. Funny? Jim's death; those dreadful months before the baby lived and died. Bret and their hopeless sort of marriage – funny? And she remembered the first few moments when she'd known that her theories had failed her, the first glimpse she'd had of a life that wouldn't run to the charming pattern she had shaped for it, the first sickening, panicky feeling of being trapped—

Bret asked conversationally:

“What did it do?”

She looked at him dubiously. You couldn't explain all that to your companion in the back seat of a car, shouting a little because the wind was in your face – even if it weren't so muddled and incoherent and absurd. So you just said, “It ate some one,” and looked away at the road again and felt a fool—

No comfort though in the road. Not because it was, anyhow, depressing road now – jumbled shops and houses, cheapish, resentful-looking even in this early morning freshness – but because she had travelled it so often with Jim in those lovely lunatic months before it all was spoiled—

No wonder, she thought now, Bret had looked at her so much askance. They'd torn up and down, she and Jim, from Sydney to Coolami, from Coolami to Sydney, as though the three hundred odd miles were across the road and back; starting out early in the morning,
roaring along at sixty for a while and then crawling at twenty-five while they argued it out all over again. Jim pleading, raging, expostulating, herself all reasonableness and determination, not knowing that there were things that could make your reasoning like a whisper in a hurricane, your determination of no more importance than the defiance of an ant beneath a steam-roller.

Yes, here – just here one day when they'd been a few seconds too late and the railway gates of the level-crossing had barred Jim's impatient way, he'd slumped back in his seat, all glum and glowering and said:

“Well, if you won't – it's over. We can't go on like this. I won't stand it.”

And she'd just said:

“All right. That's that.”

And meant it, too. Not being in love gave you an awful power, a detached merciless power. She knew that well enough now that Bret had turned the tables on her so neatly. And yet she'd tried to be kind to Jim – not to take advantage of this strength of hers. It wasn't her fault that it had all become so dreadfully serious to him and remained for her the charming and jolly adventure it had been in the beginning. She hadn't ever, not for one moment, pretended, or led him to think or expect she was going to love him some day as he loved her. She had tried, really very hard, though Bret didn't believe it, to stop the whole thing when she saw how Jim was beginning to take it. But it wasn't any good. He'd only followed her to Sydney, tortured her with arguments and beseechings, sworn that he understood, that he knew she couldn't force her love for him—