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“I thought you were asleep.”

“No. What made you jump like that?”

He burst out in a ferocious
undertone:

“That's
when I should have put my foot down! That was the time! Eighteen! Good God, were we all crazy—?”

She said, rubbing one of his fingers:

“He'd have hated us,” and he replied with a scornful snort of unmirthful laughter:

“What odds? He was nearly grown up anyhow. We were almost at the end of our job. We could have finished it decently. Instead, we let him— What's that?”

“I didn't hear anything.”

“Thought I heard voices outside.” And then he added, “Perhaps it's—” And she at the same instant began eagerly, “It might be—”

They lay still, listening. Over and about them like a breath of wind, through them like a strange elixir ran something which was the essence of their long life together. In that moment of anxiety for their firstborn their lives which in the inexorable now were always so unrelentingly two lives, ran backward through time beautifully and mysteriously united. One life so surely that the thoughts, the memories, the emotions which now beset them seemed to come with a blessed alleviation of spiritual solitude, to him through her, and to her through him.

Colin, in that brief interlude of their abandonment to their love for him became less a human being than a medley of remembered joys and sorrows. They lay silently, their present anxieties dimmed as a narcotic will dim physical pain until the mere absence of suffering becomes, by contrast, a drowsy pleasure.

Drew said presently:

“I don't think it was Colin. Sounded
like Bret's voice. Go to sleep, Milly.”

But she said with sudden violence:

“I can't sleep. I – I don't want to sleep.”

He was silent for a few seconds, in sheer astonishment. It was not so much her tone that amazed him, taut though it was with strain; it was the realisation that he had not for many, many years heard it other than cool and controlled, measured, amused, faintly ironic. This, he thought, feeling rather stirred, and turning his head slowly on the pillow to peer at her, was a voice not missed but very clearly remembered, the voice of his young wife.

He patted her hand.

“What's the matter? Worried about Colin?”

“Colin – yes. And Bret. And Susan. And us.”

He repeated, bewildered:

“Us?”

She began to laugh a little; laughter which did not, he thought, trying uneasily to see her face, ring quite true. He was more perturbed than he cared to own by his own failure instantly to demand, “Us? What's wrong with Us?” As he would undoubtedly have done yesterday. Or even this morning.

He had to admit, though it irked him, that during this day's drive, behind and beneath the comfortable commonplaces of the journey, and without any words at all, something had happened to his thirty-seven year old relationship with his wife. No use, he told himself rather irritably, trying to put your finger on the disturbing factor. It might have been anything from the fanciful geegaw on the radiator, to that only just eluded death which had waited hundreds of feet beneath the front wheels of your skidding car. Things
had happened to you. A great deal of new and disturbing beauty. An illuminating if painful moment when you'd seen your house at Ballool through other eyes. You'd caught for the first time a hint of music in outlandish names, felt a stirring of excitement in the mere thought of distance, an urge, vague and ill-defined, for some sense of spaciousness which you had never yet enjoyed—

All of which, he pondered, brought him – where? To this journey which had been, in his heart, a kind of challenge. There in Ballool he'd taken stock of his life and decided that he'd done pretty well. No need, he'd felt complacently, to be afraid of the country any more. Now that he'd finished, now that he could honestly say that there was, almost literally, nothing he couldn't buy for her, it wouldn't do any harm to take Milly for a brief while back into this life she had forsaken to share his climb with him. He even confessed to himself, perturbed by a new perceptiveness which suddenly illuminated motives hitherto comfortably obscured, that it hadn't been altogether accidental, his having so costly and magnificent a car brand new for this momentous occasion!

Where, he wondered ruefully, was the victorious mood which had so elated him this morning? Was it only this morning? Looking at the luminous dial of his watch, he curbed severely with accurate calculations an absurd conviction that this morning was separated from him not only by a hundred and fifty odd miles, but by an immeasurable gulf of time. Nearly eleven o'clock. About fifteen hours ago they'd set out, and all the way, he told himself grimly, he'd been shedding imperceptibly little pieces of complacency! Until now, lying wakeful on a queer old-fashioned iron bedstead
in a big room whose walls were vertical weatherboards, through whose window, wide upon sloping paddocks, came strange scents and drowsy sounds, he felt less secure, more spiritually astray than he had ever felt before.

Now he was ready to begin living. Now he was ready to play. And he had ten years left. Nonsense, he was as strong as an ox! Twenty years! And yet, what was twenty years? Twenty years ago Susan had been born – and it was yesterday! Time – what a strange thing; what a mysterious and disturbing thing! Twenty years of your life were like a short step, and fifteen hours like a journey so long that you had almost forgotten its beginning!

His involuntary sigh merged wearily into a yawn. He turned over towards Millicent and threw one arm across her as he had done for thirty-seven years. He said indistinctly into the pillow:

“We'll be all right. Don't worry. Go to sleep.”

Something wakened him. He was sitting up in bed listening with strained attention to the sound of a car – the
fading
sound of a car—

What, he wondered, peering at the luminous dial of his watch, could that mean? A car arriving might have meant Colin's return, but what car was this, setting out mysteriously after midnight—?

Hang it all, there
was
no car except his own!

Unless—

And on that thought he was out of bed and across the room fumbling with the unfamiliar catch of the door.
If some one had brought Colin home it must mean, surely, an accident? If it were – anything else – they'd bring him, wouldn't they, in his own car?

Millicent asked, sleepy, startled:

“Tom! Where are you? What is it?”

He answered over his shoulder as he went out that it was nothing, that he'd thought he heard something, that he'd be back presently and that she was to lie down and go to sleep again.

So she sighed, got out of bed, threw her fur coat over her shoulders and followed him down the hall to the back veranda.

Something in his attitude, the unbelieving forward thrust of his head, the hands frozen in mid-movement by sheer astonishment, made her realise before she reached him that she was to see something very strange indeed. But her mind was so full of Colin, her expectations unconsciously fixed so firmly upon some news or sight of him, that even when she joined her husband, stood beside him, stared where he was staring, she could not, at first, see anything amiss.

Her touch on his arm released him from his stupefied immobility. He cried, pointing:

“The car – it's gone! Some one's taken the car!” He turned furiously to the house. “Where's Margery? Where's the telephone? I'll have to—”

But Millicent, looking beyond the shed whose open doors revealed moonlit emptiness within, had seen a dark shape turn suddenly at the sound of Drew's voice, and become Margery walking slowly towards them. Walking so wearily, looking so solitary and so strangely tragic that even Drew, plunging round to Millicent's pull on his sleeve, damned back the thundering flood
of his wrath enough to make his question merely a question, shorn of profane embellishments.

“Who was that went off with my car?”

Margery, at the foot of the steps looking up at them, said flatly:

“Susan.”

They stared at her. Susan? Drew, momentarily speechless, struggled with a mind whose utter blankness refused to be filled by any reasonable and coherent thought. But Millicent's, frightened, leapt like a startled animal straight back to that dreadful little sobbing cry of Susan's just before the accident. Plunged on from there, terrified, through dark woods of imaginary horrors. Why should Susan, in the middle of the night, drive away in a car? Escape? Flight? From what? From—?

But there they stopped, quivering, confronted by a darkness, a tangle too impenetrable even for thought. Not that – not that—

Her lips said, unwillingly:

“Where – where's Bret?”

Margery put her hand up in front of her eyes, and sat down suddenly on the bottom step. She said:

“He went to look for Colin. On the mountain. I didn't tell you. Colin just – cleared out – this morning. I didn't know where. But Bret thinks he's up on Jungaburra somewhere. If he did go there he might be – hurt. He – he wasn't in a fit state—”

Millicent felt relief and a new anxiety run together in her mind, a strange mingling, as of a warm with an icy stream. She said:

“Didn't Bret take any one with him?”

“No. He was going to signal if he needed help.”

Drew demanded, breathing heavily:

“And Susan? What's the idea? Going
off alone in the middle of the night—”

Margery said:

“I wanted to send Bill with her, but she wouldn't have him. I wanted her to wake you and get you to go.”

“What I want to know,” Drew said explosively, “is why she had to go at all? Taking my car God knows where – probably smashing it up even if she doesn't kill herself—”

Margery stood up. In the moonlight her face had, now, a ghastly pallor. She came up the steps holding on to the railing, and Millicent, at the top, put an arm round her only just in time. She said:

“There, darling, never mind. They'll all be safely home before long. You're worn out. Help me, Tom.”

She thought, settling Margery down on the couch in the dining-room, that if she had not had, as she turned to come in, that momomentary glimpse of Jungaburra's vast bulk cleaving upward through the silver sky, she might have felt more able to believe herself in her own reassuring words. And, too, if she hadn't happened to remember it so vividly from the last time she'd seen it, forty – no, nearly forty-five years ago! Not that that was more than a blink in its existence, but all the same, reason as you might, it did seem strange and rather awesome to come back after years which had so altered other places to find that spirit place so utterly unchanged, dreaming its immortality away.

And on it, somewhere, Colin, Bret, Susan.

She asked, settling a cushion behind Margery's head:

“What made her go? Is that comfortable?”

“Thank you – yes, quite. She
was anxious about Bret.”

Ill and exhausted as she felt, she could not quite subdue the smile that her own words aroused. That, she supposed, was half of Susan's charm – that her beauty had, like a kitten's, so much of the comical in it; that you couldn't, without wanting to laugh, think of her, tiny and indomitable, setting forth at midnight in a car only smaller than a charabanc, to succour two large and strapping males. …

All the same, Drew's sudden jovial explosion startled her. It had, she conjectured, glancing round, startled him too! He began to explain hurriedly:

“Just the thought of her – little devil! What sort of a road is it? Does she know the way?” He looked at her abruptly, almost menacingly, and came across the room to stare down at her:

“Why wouldn't she wake me – to go with her?”

Here it was. Margery wondered whether she some day would forget that children, when they were no longer children, liked to be left alone. That their whole instinct, when they found themselves in any of the tight places of adult life, was to battle through by themselves or with help, if need be, from their own generation? That there should be, for parents, one vast Commandment – Thou shalt keep out of the way—

She found herself looking unhappily at Millicent, who said:

“They didn't really, don't you see, Tom? – want us to know anything about it. They didn't (a small smile which it hurt Margery to see, touched her eyes for a second) want us to be worried. So don't you think that perhaps the – the most tactful thing we could do would be – to go back to bed?”

Drew looked at her
and then at Margery. He was conscious again of that newly acquired (or perhaps it was only newly realised?) perceptiveness of his. Not that it was much use to him as a faculty; it felt, he thought with wry humour, rather like trying to play golf with a new club which you hadn't quite got the hang of yet! It was like a light just bright enough to show him that there were matters here which he didn't understand, but too dim to enable him to analyse them. So he looked at Millicent who, he now remembered, had often seen her way, and incidentally his, through difficulties before which, like an angry elephant at a closed gate, he had thundered and trumpeted and made ready to destroy.

So that if, in spite of the fear he could see so plainly written on her face, she decided to go back to bed, to say no more, do no more, behave as if it were the most natural thing in the world for one's children to go gallivanting about on a dangerous mountain in the middle of the night – well, no doubt she had a reason, and a good one. And he hadn't missed, on the tired face of his son's wife, a little quiver of very evident relief.

So the old people weren't wanted.

Well, he supposed there wasn't anything to stop him watching the bit of the road that was visible from their bedroom window?

It was, as his weary arms testified, a darned heavy car for so small a person as Susan.