Return to Coolami (13 page)

So that at last, finding it all quite unsupportable without a definite theory in which, like a pigeon-hole, he could place the whole bothersome affair, he'd fallen back gratefully on that invaluable fable of feminine cantankerousness! Because, when two people didn't agree it was obviously and inevitably the “fault” of one or the other. To Tom, every question had a “right” and a “wrong”; Bret, with his imperturbable face, his irreproachable behaviour in what Tom saw as an excruciatingly delicate situation, could not possibly be wrong. Susan, therefore, passing from a glitter of high spirits to heavy eyes and long silences; Susan goading her husband, sobbing stormily in her room, behaving, in short, with all the capriciousness of the eternal feminine, must be the culprit. It had helped him, Millicent knew, to have the matter so clearly and satisfactorily decided. So that when he said, sometimes, “She's spoilt – that's her trouble. I hope he brings her to her senses,” she only smiled at him, knowing his love for his daughter quite unaffected by his disapproval—

But that little cry of Susan's just now. What were they doing to her – the three of them – what was in her mind to force from her lips such a dreadful little sound? Had she suffered more than any of them knew? Had she damned it all back too successfully for a time, and was it now—?

Bret called from behind:

“I'd take this
hill very slowly, Mr. Drew. It's liable to be greasy after rain.”

Her eyes focused on the road again. It was hewn out of a mountain-side, high walls of rock rising on one side of it, unknown depths falling away on the other.

She saw Tom's foot go down cautiously on the brake, and felt, at the same moment, the back wheels of the car begin to slide. They slid to one side and then to the other in widening sweeps. Never before had she known a car to feel so alive, so malignantly and powerfully destructive, like a jungle beast long caged and free at last. She felt her heart turn over and a queer feeling of tightness in her head, and she had a second's glimpse of Tom's face looking greyish. The car, then, seemed to lose its independent character. It became a toy-car swung on the end of a string by some peevish child. It whirled round. They were facing for a fraction of a second the high rock wall, then the slope down which they had just come, with the crazy wheel marks of their passage standing out like part of a too-long continued nightmare. Then there was nothing in front of them but a distant glimpse of tree-tops and a white-painted railing which didn't look strong enough—

The front wheels, Millicent thought with calmness which amazed herself, must be very near the edge. Poor Tom! She could feel, though she wasn't touching him, the strain of his intense muscular effort. And suddenly, like a skittish horse, the car sidled back crab-like to the middle of the road, beyond the middle, and came to rest gently, conclusively, with its back wheels in a gutter full of soft mud.

D
REW
wiped the sweat from his face, and put one hand down to clutch Millicent's in a grip that nearly crushed her fingers. He asked without turning his head:

“All right behind?”

Two voices reassured him. He sat still looking
straight in front of him over the bonnet of the car. He knew now that he was old. He knew it because his resilience was gone, because his nerves, his brain, his muscles, reacting from the violence of the strain which had been on them, had sagged into a kind of helpless apathy from which he felt at the moment no desire to rouse them. Something, he couldn't remember what, was stirring in his memory. A fleeting second in the middle of it all when he had noticed something quite extraneous—

Never mind – it didn't matter. For the present it was enough to rest his tired body and feel Milly's hand, warm and steady, in his own—

Bret, too, was content to sit still. He was wondering vaguely what happened to your mind in moments of great danger. He supposed that just as your body releases, instinctively, all its stored up energy, giving you for your moment of need a surprising strength and
agility, so your brain might make one last frantic effort to release into the daylight its many unsuspected prisoners—

For while he'd watched the bonnet of the car swing nearer and nearer to that cliff-edge he'd been conscious of only one sensation, the agonising knowledge of something which he could have grasped and hadn't – of some opportunity missed, of some transcendent beauty left untasted, and when it was all over he'd found himself staring dazedly at Susan—

Susan, who was sitting in her corner with her hands in her lap very much as she had been before it happened several hundred years ago! Time, he thought, still rather ramblingly, what the devil was it? Absurd to contend that the minute or less during which they had all been so close to death was the same as any minute during which they travelled uneventfully over an unremarkable half-mile! He said helplessly to Susan:

“Cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

She took one and he held a match for her. Millicent was smiling at them over her shoulder.

“All right, darling?”

“Rather. Are you?”

“Of course.”

“Cigarette, Daddy?”

Drew roused himself with a sigh. He pulled himself round heavily in his seat and accepted one from the case Bret was offering. Bret said, lighting it:

“Best skid I've ever been in. You did well to hold her on the road at all.”

Drew grunted between puffs:

“Precious little you
can
do in a skid. I was just going to yell to you all to jump when she slithered away from
the edge.” He glanced at the wall behind them. “And now we've got to get out of
this
—”

Bret peered through the back window and said, “H'm!” rather doubtfully. There had been a kind of grim finality in the way the back wheels had settled into the mud. He opened a door and climbed out. As he did so he looked up the hill at their meandering tracks, and felt a brief catch in his breathing. They'd been as near as that, had they? He turned back thoughtfully to the car.

He found himself mentally continuing the day as it would have been continued if those wheels had slid a foot farther; and beyond the inevitable momentary glimpse of them all lying in a tangle of twisted metal and broken scrub he saw suddenly, blotting out everything else, Coolami.

He seemed to hear distantly, like a far-away voice speaking over a telephone, some one regretting to be the bearer of bad news to Ken; being really very sorry indeed to have to inform him that his brother had been killed in a car accident— He seemed to hear Ken's two thoughts falling neatly into place like two pennies in a slot, “Good Lord, poor old Bret!” And then, “Now what the deuce are we to do with Coolami?”

Not much doubt, thought Bret grimly, what they'd do with Coolami. And you couldn't blame them. What else could they do with it but sell it – a lawyer and an artist? He was so blackly lost in this realisation that he looked up startled when his father-in-law demanded:

“Well, what do you think of it?”

He was getting out, sliding his big body beneath the wheel stiffly as though he were not sure of it. Bret shook his head.

“I wouldn't bother to move,” he said, “I think it's quite
hopeless – there's nothing for the wheels to grip on at all. We aren't more than two miles from Kerrajellanbong, though. I'll walk down and rout out something to tow us.”

Millicent protested:

“Bret, what a bore for you. Won't,” she suggested happily, “something come along soon? Surely?”

He laughed.

“Well, it might or it mightn't. If it does I can pick it up lower down.” He turned away and then turned back on a sudden impulse:

“Like to come, Susan?”

Then he swore at himself, and settled the muscles of his face into an expressionless calm against the coming of her cool, “No, thanks.”

But she said, after a brief pause:

“Yes, I'll come.”

He felt his mouth twitch as he watched her climb out, pulling her coat off, her cigarette still dangling between her lips. Really she was a funny little cuss! More than half, he thought, of the charm he'd never failed to acknowledge was in her gift for being, for looking, rather endearingly quaint!

And he marvelled as they set off down the road that until she was beside you, with the top of her head somewhere between your shoulder and your elbow, you didn't realise how absurdly small she was—

She said presently:

“If we'd gone over then – what would have happened to Coolami?”

He looked down at her sharply, but he couldn't see anything except her hair and the tip of her nose and a drift of blue smoke. He said shortly:

“Ken and Kathleen would have sold it, I should think.”

She didn't answer that and
they walked silently for a half-mile before he asked suddenly:

“What was it really that made you cry out in the car?”

“It
was
the rain.”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

She gave him one of her swift smiles.

“It wouldn't be the first true thing you've refused to believe.”

“If I've got to believe that,” he said, “I've got to believe you're on the verge of a nervous breakdown –” He glanced at a curve of cheek brilliantly coloured by mountain air and exercise and finished dryly, “Which is absurd.”

Again she didn't answer for a long time. When she did her voice was quick and low.

“I suppose it is. But there must be something wrong with you when you see death coming at you and feel glad—”

He said sharply:

“Glad
? Just now – when the car?”—

She said helplessly:

“That's what I felt.”

He snapped:

“Take that damned thing out of your mouth before it burns you.”

She threw her cigarette butt away with absent-minded obedience. He said more gently:

“I'm sorry, Susan. I'd do anything I could.”

She acknowledged this wearily with a little wave of her hand.

“Oh, yes, I know you would. You do. We both do. It's pathetic how well-intentioned we are! Let's talk about the scenery.”

He said at once, rapidly:

“The Blue
Mountains offer panoramic views of unparalleled magnificence. Nowhere else in the world are to be found scenes of more majestic splendour, while the bracing atmosphere, sparkling water, exquisite flora and intriguing fauna provide endless attractions for the tourist. In addition to these natural advantages many improvements have been effected; unrivalled opportunities exist for golf, tennis, swimming, dancing, petting, necking and suicide. All beauty spots are lavishly provided with seats, railings, fences, arches, rubbish bins and other conveniences –”

She said:

“Oh, Bret, you are a fool. Bless you.”

Arm in arm, basking in a brief patch of contentment as one basks in stray gleams of winter sunlight, they came down the hill into Kerrajellanbong.

It was nearly midday when at last, roaring and protesting, flinging mud from her back wheels and blue smoke from her exhaust, the Madison was hauled out by a lorry into the road. Splashes from passing cars and from her own elephantine plungings had dried into blotches on her once gleaming paint. Her back wheels were caked, hardly recognisable as wheels at all, and one mudguard had been crushed against the wall of rock.

Bret, in his shirtsleeves, very hot, and trying with one overworked handkerchief to scrub the grime from his face, saw Susan studying this ruination with a wicked glee. She looked, he thought, smiling in
voluntarily, pretty grubby herself. She had stood for a moment, unwarily, in the spatter of mud flung up from the helplessly turning wheels, and she'd carried wet branches with him to place beneath them. He watched her get into the car and climbed in beside her feeling irrationally light-hearted.

Drew, following the lorry cautiously down the hill, asked Bret:

“How far did you say to this Kerra – what's-its-name?”

“A couple of miles or less.”

“Level going then?”

“Well, for a while. We climb up pretty high again near Capertee.” And he wondered for a moment if the old chap was feeling a bit shaken by their mishap? Nasty to be at the wheel in a skid like that. He opened his mouth to offer to drive, caught a glimpse of the arrogant nose and closed it again. Millicent suggested:

“We'll buy lemonade or something in Kerrajellanbong and then we needn't boil the billy when we stop for lunch.”

Drew said testily:

“Upon my word these idiotic names get on my nerves. Why the deuce can't they name their towns after – well, after explorers or – or Governors – or – give them descriptive names or something—”

“Well,” Bret pointed out mildly, “Kerrajellanbong means ‘the place in the shadow of the mountain' – you couldn't very well have anything more descriptive than that.”

Drew said, “Humph!” and then demanded:

“And what does Coolami mean – if anything?”

Bret said modestly, with a twinkle in his eye:

“Without
wanting to appear conceited, it means ‘birthplace of heroes.'” And then suddenly, with his grin frozen on his face, he found himself staring hard at Susan.

Funny that he hadn't thought of that before – the appeal – the demand, even, which was in the name of his home. What would he have done about that, he wondered, if all this hadn't happened? Just gone on in comfortable hard-working bachelorhood trusting to Ken and Jim and Kathleen to produce heirs for Coolami? And what, anyhow, was he going to do about it now, with this strange small wife shut away from him by indefinable barriers—? His trouble was, he told himself irritably, that he wasn't quite perceptive enough or quite obtuse enough! Not perceptive enough to be able to feel in more than passing glimmers any comprehension of this mysterious affliction called love – not obtuse enough to be able to consider without a sharp distaste and dissatisfaction an unwilling wife – an unhappy, driven wife submitting because she must—