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“Look, there's Margery on the veranda.”

Margery, with Richard beside her, sat on the veranda seat and watched for the car to appear. Only now, the feverish activity of the day behind her, her anger and her feeling of reckless bitterness were beginning to wane. All through the day she'd been telling herself savagely that when they came and asked, “Where's Colin?” She'd just say, “He's been drinking, and he's taken the car and gone.” That would break up the cheery family gathering all right, and if Colin did come back before they left he could pick up the pieces for himself as best he might! She was sick of lying for him, acting for him, hiding his lapses behind a barricade of her own weary and half-nauseated loyalty.

To-day, cooking and sweeping and making up beds for her four guests, trying through the sick desperation which had followed the scene with Colin to answer patiently Richard's incessant questions, she had decided that for the sake of the coming child she must snatch an interval of quietness and peace.

Go away somewhere with Richard. Be quiet and relaxed, and learn to hear footsteps without listening, heart in mouth, for fear they should go unsteadily.

Somewhere noisy and alive with people, where there'd be no time for dwelling with one's thoughts. Where there were no days such as this had been,
crammed with the drudgeries of a household, every movement of a heavy reluctant body going to an accompaniment of despair and shame and goading anxiety—

While the work had lasted, and physical weariness had kept her anger burning fiercely, she'd answered a hundred times the pricking question, “Where is he?” with a defiant, “I don't know and I don't care!” Now in the late afternoon coolness of the veranda she began to feel rested and the turmoil in her mind smoothed out to quieter thoughts.

She knew now, her hand absently caressing Richard's cheek, that she had acted stupidly, cruelly. You can't marry a man possessed of a devil and hold him responsible for the devil's actions. Was that the right attitude, or was it to excuse too easily those things in him which made him so poor a father? She looked down at Richard's smooth dark head wondering how soon he would realise that the “sickness” for which he gave his father the awed sympathy of healthy childhood had another, harder name—

And yet, she thought, pressing the child's head against her, feeling the soft curve of his cheek and chin with loving fingers, he was right, and the harder name, with all the attitude that it implied, was surely and definitely wrong. For it
was
a sickness. You don't rail at a man for having asthma. You don't pour scorn and condemnation upon him because he's tubercular—

You blame with futile fierceness the unknown powers which sent boys of eighteen to war. You blame those horrors which stayed always fiercely photographed on their memories so that a spot of whisky now and then to bring sleep, oblivion, became by
degrees to seem like a friend – an only friend, merciful and saving—

She sighed and stood up. She thought she couldn't really be a very maternal kind of person or the coming of her children wouldn't make her so nervous and irritable. She'd been sometimes vaguely ashamed of the sensations she had felt in the months before Richard's birth and again now – not as if she shared her life, her body, gladly with the newcomer, but as though some deeply resented interloper were annexing something that was sacredly her own—

It wasn't as if she didn't want the children. It was only that she longed to feel sometimes more alone than was possible when she was conscious all the time of new life within herself, insistent and demanding.

So that really, she thought, when Colin's sickness and her own nervousness happened to clash on the day when four visitors were arriving for the night, it wasn't to be wondered at if sparks flew a bit. And perhaps she was rather silly to feel, every time, such black disappointment. By now, surely she should be prepared, resigned even, to its happening every now and then; content if only the intervals between grew – as they had been growing – longer and more blessedly, peacefully happy. Why, after more than five years, did it still strike her every time afresh with such a torturing sense of disillusionment?

Perhaps, she thought rather fearfully, it was only the faith which had so far always renewed itself in her which had made those intervals as long and as happy as they had been. A hint in her of doubt, of scepticism, a suggestion that her thought was “Till next time!” might have broken down his resistance far more often, far more ignominiously. Just as to-day if she'd
managed to hold her tongue, keep him quiet, give him black coffee and make him lie down, she might have got him into some sort of shape before his people arrived.

Whereas—

If he hadn't pushed Richard—

That was the spark which had lit her smouldering resentment to a bonfire, a conflagration of uncontrollable fury. For the child, round-eyed with sympathy, had been trying to help him – trying to guide his clumsy feet up the two steps into the room where his mother was making beds, saying anxiously, reassuringly, “There's one n'other step, Daddy – only one n'other step—”

She'd looked up from her work with the giddy feeling of disaster which always overwhelmed her when she saw her husband like this.

“Colin! Oh –
Colin
!”

He'd asked her thickly, resentfully, what was the matter, and Richard's voice had said over and over again excited, admonishing in the heavy silence, “No, not any more, Daddy – you've come up all the steps, Daddy, now it's just floor – look, Daddy, it's just floor—”

She'd said with an effort, holding out a hand:

“Richard—”

And then Colin, exasperated by the pulling hand, the small insistent voice, had given the child a clumsy push. Not enough to hurt him, not even enough to make him lose his balance. That would have been better, his mother thought, her bitterness stirring up again at the memory, than the sudden revelation she had seen written on his face that his help, so eagerly and lovingly given, was being rejected.

She had
snatched him up and run with him to the back where Bill, the wood and water joey, was stacking kindling by the kitchen door. She'd said, “Watch him for a few minutes, Bill.” And then she'd gone back, storming, to Colin.

Well, it had been ugly and unnecessary – and futile. An hour later, face downward on the half-made bed, she'd heard the roar of the car engine and thought wildly, “I hope he never comes back!” And she'd dragged herself to her feet and gone on with her work because somewhere between her and Sydney there was a car making for Kalangadoo—

Not easy in a small house and with one indifferent country-girl for a servant, to prepare for four additions to one's household. Not easy either in the confusion of one's mind, the slack weariness of one's body, to know whether one dreaded or looked forward to their coming. How fond she could have been, she thought wryly, of her parents-in-law if she hadn't been forced into the position of incessantly acting to them! “But never again!” she'd sworn vigorously, unfolding two stretcher-beds on the veranda. This time they could see and judge for themselves. This time they could know that Colin had chosen the day of their coming for a drinking bout— All through the sultry morning, the din and flash and battering rain of the brief thunderstorm, she'd felt her anger and her bitter disappointment bearing down like a weight between her shoulders. It was only with the house swept and garnished behind her, and the long purple shadows coming down from the hills to the creek, that she could feel them cracking, falling away from a truer emotion, as a hard shell from the sound and wholesome fruit inside.

They were completely gone, and with them she realised had gone most of the nervous strength that had sustained her through the day. She felt anxious and remorseful and unbelievably tired. She wondered for a moment, drearily, if she should go inside and ring people up to try to find out where Colin was. Menzies' store perhaps; or the bakers might have seen him go by and noticed which road he took. Or – the hotels in Mudgee—

But she didn't move. It wouldn't really help. If he was sober he'd come home by himself, and if he wasn't – well, as things were the longer he stayed away the better. They wouldn't let him drive the car if he wasn't fit to. He'd be dumped down somewhere to sleep it off and the men would glance at him and look at each other and shrug and say, “Colin on the bust again?”

She put her hand to her cheek and found it hot, but not with anger. Her pity and love for her husband expanded achingly, so that they seemed like some other living thing within her, and she knew that drunk or sober, her only wish was to have him home—

Richard, rushing up from the corner of the veranda, called excitedly:

“Car, Mummy! Look, Mummy – car!”

Her heart leapt. The shock of disappointment when
she saw the Madison told her how intensely her mind, her whole desire had been centred on another car, small and brown and dilapidated, with Colin at the wheel—

She had actually, for the moment, forgotten her guests. Now she knew, her practical common sense succeeding the warm and irrational emotions of a moment ago, that it was better – far better that he should be absent – remain absent – while she lied for him. She'd have to chance his not returning till late – or even till to-morrow morning. She'd have to keep awake somehow and listen for the car and smuggle him in and coach him, and feed him, and tidy him up for his parent's eyes—

She'd have to take her luck.

There was Bret getting out to open the last gate. She remembered almost for the first time in that troubled and unhappy day, Susan and her matrimonial impasse. Her hand went down again to Richard's thick hair and the warmth of his cheek. Something of contrition was in the instinctive caress, and gratitude; relief mingled with it for the difficult husband who yet remained a lover,
and for the living child and the other who was so soon to live.

N
OT
that Susan didn't seem jolly enough when she jumped out of the car. Not that Bret, waving a hand towards the veranda while he helped with the luggage, didn't look his usual imperturbable self. Margery felt, as she went down the steps to meet them, a sudden genuine gladness that they were here. Loneliness, she thought, was not unlike physical weariness – you hardly realised how bad it was till the respite came. But warily through her pleasure in seeing them a kind of defensiveness waited alertly at the back of her mind. She kissed Millicent, thinking, “Will she ask it?” She said to herself, an arm round Susan and a hand in Bret's, “Now, surely?” She felt Drew's hearty paternal kiss on her cheek and heard it come at last:

“Where's Colin?”

Amazing how glibly one learned to lie! The fluent sentences of excuse slid off her tongue like lines spoken automatically for the hundredth time in some stage success! She marvelled even as she spoke that her fabrication sounded so convincing! It wouldn't be difficult, perhaps,
to believe it herself! They, at all events—

Over Millicent's shoulder she saw Bret looking at her. The expression, whatever it was, which had been in his eyes was so quickly gone that she could not analyse it. She only knew that in a second, from a feeling of half-excited relief, she was plunged into a vague uneasiness.

Drew, having carried a couple of suitcases to the top of the steps, was at the wheel again. Margery said:

“There's plenty of room in the shed for the car. Bret, would you show the way?”

She watched the big car go lurching round the side of the house over the uneven ground. Something about it made her see her home suddenly as a place rather depressingly crude and comfortless, and when she turned back to her two remaining guests she looked at them for a moment absently. Millicent, sitting on the bottom step, had Richard at her knee. She was showing him the zip fastener of her handbag, and he was wrestling to open it with fat, hurried fingers. And Susan, too, was looking after the car. Susan, too, when it had vanished round the corner, remained standing with her hat in her hand,
her thoughts quite obviously not on the shadow streaked hillside where her dark eyes were fixed.

Margery said quickly:

“Come along inside. You must want a wash. Susan, I've had to camp you and Bret on the veranda. There's a dressing-room for you but it's not big enough for beds. Richard, give Gran back her bag, darling. We'll go through this way. I'll have some tea made for you.”

Millicent protested:

“Not tea, Margery – really. We had a picnic only an hour or so ago. Come and watch me unpack my suitcase, Richard.”

Margery opened the door of the room she had prepared for her husband's parents. It was, she always thought, the pleasantest room in the house, large and cool, its creamy coloured walls flickering with the greenish light from a window half masked by the
frondy leaves of a giant pepper-tree. But now, as she said,

“There are two steps up from the door,” she felt its whole atmosphere weighted, oppressed by a memory of Colin lurching across it to that bed now so smooth and unrevealing—

And the steps, too, had wakened some such memory in Richard. She saw him look back at them and from them to his grandmother with the look in his eyes of the child with news to tell.

“Gran – Daddy—”

Margery slipped between them. On her knees in front of him she said swiftly:

“Darling, Gran's tired and she wants to have a rest now. You come along and—”

But Millicent urged:

“I'd love him to stay, Margery. There's a parcel for him in my suitcase—”

Margery looked at her son. She searched his small face intently. There were no memories there now – only excitement, only visions of unspecified glories in brown paper and string—

She sighed.