Return to Coolami (29 page)

“Good God, I've been constipated!”

There again, following the irrational and flippant wanderings of his thoughts he found a truth which dumbfounded and wickedly delighted him. He dashed into the bedroom and grabbed Susan by the shoulders. He said:

“My child, I've discovered what love is. It's an aperient. Don't stare like that, idiot. Kiss me every morning and – who knows—? It's the little daily dose—”

She began to laugh helplessly. They found themselves waltzing round the room.

Drew, Millicent and Richard ate their breakfast at the veranda table in the sunlight. Rich smells drifted out through the open kitchen door, smells of bacon, and coffee and of steak cooking over an open flame; they mixed, Drew thought, very pleasantly with the damp country smells of the paddocks. The paddocks
indeed, kept his eyes from his porridge plate. Every blade of grass had its drop of dew, and every drop of dew was like a diamond. The whole scene, the very day itself had a diamond-like quality – cold and keen and polished. …

He said to Margery as she came out with a rack of toast and sat down opposite him:

“This is a fine scheme of yours – breakfast in the sun. There's a nip in the air.”

She smiled absently, moving Richard's plate a little nearer to him. Her eyes were heavy, Millicent thought, glancing at her, and she was pale from want of sleep, but she looked – more alive, as if a few years of lost youth had been handed back to her in the night. Colin, too, in their brief glimpse of him early this morning, had looked happy and vigorous.

He'd stuck his head round their bedroom door and called:

“Hallo, family! Sorry I wasn't here to welcome you last night. Sleep well?”

Millicent took her cue.

“Splendidly, dear. What time is breakfast?”

“Any time you're ready. I've got to ride over to see Miller about some sheep before I have mine, but I won't be long. See you later!”

He'd disappeared. She had looked down at Tom, and begun to laugh helplessly. The children were always doing that to him. Taking a situation out of his hands with a few swift nondescript, even idiotic sentences, so that before he had had time to consider far less to speak weightily, the matter was dealt with, the subject closed! And he always looked, poor dear, so bewildered! She had bent with loving compunction and kissed his creased forehead.

“It's
no good, darling. That's
that!”

He'd shrugged ruefully, running his hand through his greyish hair, and said:

“I suppose it is.”

And it was. They had dressed and come out to find, in the clear morning light, a household very different from that whose strange atmosphere of tension had so worried them last night. Margery, brisk and efficient, set the table on the veranda, told them brightly of Richard's latest escapades, answered Millicent's questions on small domestic matters, put her one maid on the right track with the cooking of the breakfast.

So, Millicent thought, lifting Richard on to his chair and tying his feeder round his neck, if they wanted, she and Tom, to indulge in any more guiding, helping, directing, guarding of young lives, they'd have to wait for grandchildren! Well, one was easily consoled! She was amused to realise that even this trivial service to small Richard gave her a pleasure she had not felt for many years. Colin, bless him, was going to paddle his own canoe; Susan, bless her too, was going to deal somehow with her own strange problem. But there was still, thank heaven, Richard's feeder to be tied!

And she said sadly to Drew:

“Parents are very selfish creatures, Tom.”

He protested indignantly:

“Selfish? Nonsense! Give up their whole lives to a pack of ungrateful brats! Get nothing in return! Selfish be damned!”

She shook her head.

“There's nothing we ever do for them that gives them half the joy they give us – just by existing.”

Margery
came out with steaming plates.

“Do you mind eating this while it's hot? I'll come out presently, but I just want to see that Annie doesn't burn Bret's steak to a cinder.”

Drew asked:

“Where is he? And Susan? Aren't they up?”

Margery said, her head bent over Richard:

“I thought we'd let them sleep. You – you aren't really in a dreadful hurry to leave. …?”

Millicent answered swiftly:

“No – oh, no, not at all. What a pretty plate that is of Richard's. …”

Drew, on the edge of a protest, on the edge of some remark about the weariness of Bret and its cause, found again that he was too late. He surprised in himself a faint amusement and admiration at the deft way in which a very chasm of strange and sinister happenings had been covered by a few airy words, an attitude of matter-of-factness, as an elephant pit is covered by thin boughs and leaves. All very well, he thought, for Millicent, for Colin, for Susan, who were practised in treading lightly! For himself, as he admitted grimly, he was, conversationally, a born elephant. Well, even an elephant could keep away from the trap if he knew where it was.

So he said:

“Sit down and have your breakfast, Milly. Well, young Richard, how about taking us for a walk when we've all finished this enormous meal?”

But Richard's answer was lost to him because he could see, far away across a couple of paddocks, Colin cantering home.

Colin
was thinking, with unregenerate enjoyment, that something nearly always turned up to help the undeserving. This early-morning ride of his had been Margery's idea – and a good one too. The sharp air and the exercise had cleared his aching head, and he guessed from the tingling of his cheeks that some of the yellowish pallor which he had seen that morning in the mirror had probably disappeared. And of course if it hadn't been for this entirely heaven-sent bit of news he could have stayed away longer – arrived back at Kalangadoo with time for not much more than farewells.

It wasn't, he protested to himself, dismounting and leading his horse through the second last gate which was sagging on its hinges, that he didn't want to see his parents. Only that as things were at present he didn't particularly want them to see him. Parents, from lifelong habit, perhaps, were too darned proprietary. If they thought you were doing something you shouldn't they considered themselves privileged to rebuke you, as though you weren't yourself an adult, as though you couldn't see for yourself where folly was and where tragedy and ruin lay in wait. …

As though they couldn't realise that from the moment you took a wife and begot a child, you ceased to be part of their microcosmic existence and became a new being with a new set of human relationships.

And as though, he thought with a sudden scowl which made him look for a moment very like his father, he couldn't manage his own life himself! For he could and he would and he
was
managing it! Yes,
in spite of yesterday, in spite of the blind drunken fury and despair which had sent him up the mountain, and which instead of ending in tragedy as it probably should have ended, had fizzled out so quaintly with the small Susan and the large car as rescue party!

What they didn't understand – none of them except Margery, and even she had failed yesterday – was that if his drunkenness meant failure his soberness meant triumph. A batsman wasn't judged by his one duck but by his many centuries; an airman not by his few forced landings, but by his long successful flights. And he, with his always increasing intervals of sobriety, had felt himself – no, hang it all,
did
feel himself – as one slowly gaining ground in some long and fiercely waged battle. And he wasn't going to be frowned on, or advised, or rebuked or sighed over. No one knew, no one even began to realise how precious a weapon his own self-respect was to him. Nothing sustained him sometimes but his own convictions that he would win; it was like a small candle-flame in some black labyrinth – his only comfort, his only hope of finding, at last, his way back into the daylight. So that it had to be guarded and cherished and shielded; so that, on the bad days after each temporary defeat it flickered and guttered, and disapproval, he thought, like a draught of wind, might well come near to extinguishing it altogether. …

No – what he wanted now was breakfast, a kiss from Margery, the swift hug of Richard's arms as he lifted him to say good-bye; and then a day's work. A hard day's work. So that he'd sleep to-night like the dead and wake to-morrow with that day and night of righteous toil and rest standing like a buffer between him and his day of failure. That was how he managed.
From there his start was clean; he could go ahead with confidence and add another week – another month – even several months to his previous record. In that way, he reflected, you could invest it all with something of the character of sport – you could take, even, a kind of gambler's interest in yourself as the days went by, laying odds on your chances, waking to each day with a speculative interest, a wonder which was partly fearful, partly cynical, partly amused!

Not, perhaps, in the best heroic tradition. Not even, possibly, in the best taste! But God preserve us, his strained nerves cried out, from solemnity! God save us from vows and repentances, from self-abasements and despairs!

Nothing–
nothing
he thought, riding his horse up to the last gate and leaning forward to open it, was ever the better done for being done heavily. You could make a resolve flippantly, airily, as though it were a wager, or you could make it with awesome oaths and prayerful vigils; it wasn't how you made it but how you kept it, that mattered.

And when you didn't keep it, repentances were a waste of time. You had yourself for your only weapon – you weren't going to abandon that weapon to humiliation, to brooding, to sickened self-contempt. Things that would be to it like rust to a sword—

So he snatched his hat from his head and brandished it, dug his heels into his horse and came thundering up to the veranda shouting, “Whoopee!” in his best cowboy voice, and preparing his news gleefully to fling at them, like a small boy holding a throwdown behind his back.

Bret
said:

“Hallo, you're early on the job.” And Susan with her mouth more full than it should have been, scoffed:

“Early! This is supposed to be breakfast but as a matter of fact it's nearly lunch. Yes, I know I'm exaggerating.”

Margery asked:

“Was it all right about the sheep? Because we put a call through to Miller just after you left.”

Colin looked at her quickly. Had that confounded girl, Annie, listened in? And if so had she told—?

But Margery added:

“I thought perhaps your buyer had changed his mind.”

Colin said nonchalantly:

“No, it wasn't that. It was his aunt ringing from Coonabarrabran. Wondabyne's for sale again. Old Mortimer's dead.”

I
T
was nearly half-past eleven when Drew, looking thoughtful and driving silently, swung the car on to the main road again. He hadn't said a word about the new dent on one of the front mudguards, nor about the great horizontal scar along the once immaculate paintwork of the bonnet. And when he'd found a coil of rope lying on the floor at the back he'd just taken it out and handed it to Bret without a word. Any one else but Bret, Millicent thought, might have looked a little sheepish. But when it came to sheer immovable woodenness of expression, Bret stood quite alone.

She admitted to herself as she settled back more comfortably into her corner that she was glad to have left Kalangadoo behind. And even, going suddenly further in her thoughts than she had intended to go, that she would be glad when they had left Coolami behind too, and were headed back, she and Tom, to Ballool. For somehow that news of Colin's which didn't really concern her at all had shocked her more than she cared to own. She felt danger then and wondered again, in a kind of panic, at her own fool-hardiness in venturing so far away from the safe, stagnant resignation of her life at Ballool. What did it matter to her, she thought angrily, that Mortimer was dead? It had, for her, no significance at all, and yet, like some submarine eruption it had flung to the surface of her mind a long-drowned picture of her
home. She realised now that she had been looking at it all this time through depths; years, distance, an always accumulating mass of happenings. The remembered sounds of it had been muffled, its remembered outlines blurred and wavering. She had been safe in thinking of it when it lay so deeply submerged—so unattainable!

Now, quite suddenly, she was close to it again. The scents and sounds of it were all about her. Only a few hours driving would bring them, actually, to its first paddocks, and it was alarming, it was terrifying and exhausting to find in what minute detail her memory had treasured it.

Somehow if this man Mortimer hadn't died it would have been less poignant. He, an unknown owner, would have seemed like a buffer between Wondabyne and her irrationally persisting sense of possession. But now that he was dead there would be a kind of emptiness over all those sunlit acres. A waiting. An invitation. …

She shook herself and blinked her eyes rapidly to focus them again upon the road. She felt so tired, so disheartened and depressed that she knew she must really be getting old. Last night had piled a veritable mountain of age upon her heart. She wanted, now, nothing but to creep back to Ballool with her tail between her legs!

For, she thought, one was not made old by one's own many years but by the few years of the young folks about one. She herself, alone with Tom, was still simply Millicent, but surrounded by these unrestful young people and their problems she felt herself wading into old age on other names which took her deeper at each step; mother – mother-in-law – grandmother. If you could achieve anything, she protested silently, with
these relationships it would not matter that they aged you; if you could, for instance, help your son and comfort your daughter-in-law and do something more for your grandchild than tie his feeder!