Return to Coolami by Eleanor Dark Page B

practical situation to be faced, and two long lives to be lived in whatever degree of happiness could be achieved—
    But his anger against Susan was gone. That was something. And he smiled at her as she came up with the hamper, glanced at the still virgin glory of the Madison’s bonnet and said with pretended apprehension, “We’re going to get splashed!” to which she replied in an awed whisper, “Not God Himself would
dare—”
    After that, absurdly enough, he felt more cheerful. There began to creep over him one of those irresponsible moods which, because of his more usual soberness, swept him sometimes into incredible depths of foolery. It was at such times that he and Susan, clowning together, had always hit it off best. They had escaped into buffoonery as into the unreal sawdust world of a circus-ring, and there, forgetting everything, they’d capered and somersaulted and jumped through hoops in a kind of wild holiday abandon.
    But Susan, somehow,didn’t seem to catch his mood this time. She sat in her corner of the back seat, and though she smiled and chaffed her father’s careful manœuvres through the scrub, she seemed, really, rather sober and withdrawn.
    Drew came out on to the main road and turned westward again with obvious relief. He called back to Bret:
    â€œWe put in a solid hour there. Never mind, plenty of time. How far to Mudgee?”
    â€œAbout a hundred. Take you over three hours, not knowing the road. Three and a half if it rains.”
    But Millicent protested:
    â€œWe’ve all day before us, Tom. And there’s heaps of food still. We could have lunch by the road. It’s only going to be a shower.”
3
    Susan was thinking that a year ago when she’d walked blindly out into the street from the block of flats, with Bret silent and inimical at her side, the sky had looked just as it did now. He’d put her into a taxi, said shortly, “I’ll come to-night,” and then she’d been alone with new refinements of suffering to face—
    And nothing much to face them with. The half-hour she’d just been through with Bret had left her mind feeling as her body might have felt after being flung ashore from a heavy surf, aching, limp, helpless with exhaustion.
    She’dgone down the passage to the door of their flat thinking, curiously enough, of Bret. Not thinking anything in particular about him, but just holding a mental image of him up before her mind as one will try in the midst of illness or pain to remember happier things. So that when the door had opened swiftly from inside, and she’d seen not Jim, but Bret himself confronting her, her little involuntary cry of his name had been only a continuation, really, of her thoughts. She must have looked, she supposed, rather ghastly, because he said at once:
    â€œYou know?”
    But she’d only stared at him. He seemed malevolent, implacable, and the pallor of his face was like something smeared unevenly over its surface. She’d said with sudden tearing anxiety:
    â€œAre – are you ill? What’s the matter?”
    He shook his head, and she with a flare of resentment that this hard thing should be made, by his presence, so unbearably harder, demanded sharply:
    â€œWhere’s Jim?”
    He’d crossed the room, flung a window up, turned and hurled the words at her as if he’d hoped they’d kill her:
    â€œHe’s dead.”
    â€œDead!”
    Her repetition was the merest whisper, but it hovered and echoed about them interminably. Susan could remember putting her hands up vaguely, stupidly, as though there were something she could brush away—
    Bret had turned back to the window; she wanted to speak to him but couldn’t think of the words she needed. She could only wonder dully how she had come to be sitting on the end of the couch, and feel a rambling surprise that she had not fainted or screamed or fallen down—
    But