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She thought about the drawing-room with its row of long glass doors opening on to the flagged pathway of the inside garden. No one had used it much, except when Jim had rattled out songs and dance music on the piano. Ken sometimes strummed there, and it had been, for herself, a haven during the few long months of her married life. A room where other people didn't come very often, so that sometimes even if your cheeks were wet you didn't have to betray it to any one – not even to yourself. …

She thought of the blurred soft colours of cretonnes and chintzes dimly repeated in the mirror-like dark floor, and of the brass fire-irons at the far end gleaming against a fireplace like a cavern, and she thought of them quietly and gratefully without retrospective bitterness or grief.

When
she left them and came in her thoughts to the small room across the hall which Bret called his office, she found that the words in her mind no longer made a pattern but a kind of inventory. It was that kind of room. Bare and plain and uncompromising, and yet without grimness. Wondering a little at the accuracies of her memory, she saw as clearly as if she had spent many hours sitting at it, the scratches on the once-polished surface of the desk, the burnt place at one edge where some one had left a lighted cigarette once and forgotten it. The revolving chair had a dark green cushion on it, and the curtains which were never drawn across the window were of the same stuff. There were papers and books and magazines. Bills and receipts on files, and a typewriter with a black tin cover over it.

And, very often, Bret himself. The window opened on to the inside garden, and from the balcony outside her bedroom opposite she'd seen him many times at night with his pipe in his mouth, writing or adding up figures, or typing with two fingers astonishingly fast.

And it had been there one night that she'd seen him through the uncurtained window with Ken; the night of that stupid, feverish, crazy hot day when he'd found Ken kissing her in the woolshed. She'd been sitting on the balcony rail in a thin silk wrapper, trying to get cool, when she'd seen the light go up in the downstairs window, and Ken, entering like an actor on a stage, putting a cigarette in his mouth, feeling in his pockets and then rummaging among the papers on the desk for matches. When Bret had come in too she'd known with a kind of dull indifference – an armour with which she had instinctively provided herself against too much
and too acute unhappiness – that the brief sentences she could see, though not hear them flinging at each other, were sharp and hostile. She'd watched them idly, wondering even at the time how, without hearing their words, she could tell with such relentless accuracy the whole tone of their respective mental attitudes to her and to the episode they were so obviously discussing. She'd wondered, too, whether any actors could have achieved on a stage such a wealth of pantomimic expression with such an absence of gesture. And yet impersonal, armoured, carefully detached as she had been in her rôle of involuntary audience, she thought that nothing in all her life had ever hurt her, harmed her more deeply than the knowledge of Bret's reaction to that kiss. …

It had been rather like a poison to her; something she'd hardly felt at the time but which, as weeks and months went by, had spread and raged through her till no part of her felt any peace at all. For rail and jeer at jealousy as you like, she thought, there can be no love entirely free from it. Nothing before, not even his bitterest words and his most callous actions had so driven home to her the completeness of his indifference, and the essential ugliness of the compact they had made with such good intentions.

Memories! Dreadful things, dangerous things! She felt a little spasm of fear and pain contract her brow as though her thoughts had brushed like bat's wings across her face. How much of your life could you ever really leave behind you? Any of it? Any of it at all? What was it to forget? Just to thrust thoughts away like prisoners into dark dungeons under the surface of your mind. To leave them there, starved and dangerous – some day to escape!

No,
no, that wasn't safe! Never forget things! Never lose them. Keep them there, however unprepossessing they may be, always under your eye, and make them work for you. For surely, she thought confusedly, labouring towards some comfort still hidden ahead of her in a fog of yet unformed ideas, that's what all your life is for? All of it, everything that has happened, good and bad, is only the material available to you for the building of your future? Then you can't afford to forget – to imprison – to waste—?

She looked anxiously at Bret. She had a dreadful momentary sense of frustration because she realised that the joy and fullness of bodily union can never be equalled by a union of the mind. Things interfere. Here, with her own mind abrim with inchoate thoughts, it just wasn't possible to talk to him – to find in his brain those complementary processes which might make of hers a whole idea, rounded and complete. And yet it must be, or it surely ought to be so? More vaguely because less calmly than Margery, she wandered among rather similar conjectures. She wondered why, when with their bodies in fusion, man and woman create a child, when with their souls or spirits in fusion they create a mysterious but far from illusory power called love, they could not – or did not – or did not seem to be able to create by a mental fusion anything whatever! Something wrong there, surely?

She drank a mouthful of her tea, but it was cool and she poured the rest out on the grass. She saw that Millicent was putting things back in the car, and that Drew was dipping more water from the creek into the billy. Bret said, scraping mud from the sole of his shoe with a twig:

“You
wouldn't expect us to forget things altogether, would you?”

She jumped.

“Why do you say that?”

“You were doing some remembering too.”

“Yes. And I wouldn't
want
us to forget them.”

He threw his twig away and looked at her thoughtfully.

“You may be right. Anyhow, it doesn't matter.”

She said dubiously:

“Can things happen so suddenly? Can people change – overnight?”

Quite unperturbed he answered, “Apparently,” and went on after a moment:

“Not suddenly. Not overnight. Very gradually, really – so slowly and unobtrusively that you don't know till it's all over that it's been happening at all.”

He added presently:

“Don't be so doggone sceptical.”

She retorted swiftly:

“Can you blame me when the only declaration I've had from you has been in bilious-looking red letters all running together on a darned messy pink bit of fifth-rate confectionery. …?”

He laughed, getting up and stretching.

“What do you want, ass?”

She said quickly, standing beside him:

“Nothing. Nothing on earth.”

Drew, with the brimming billy on the road at his feet, was unscrewing the radiator cap. He flipped the
little silver figure round and round with a kind of vengeful and sardonic humour. It spun wildly, glittering, its head lifted, its outstretched arm awhirl, like a fanatical high-priest at the climax of some triumphal dance.

Drew thought grimly as he stooped for the billy:

“All right, all right! You win!”

T
HEY
drove silently through an afternoon hot and rich with sunshine. Their thoughts lulled by it, and by the faint, powerful purring and the rocking movement of the car, became less thoughts than day-dreams, disconnected and unfinished. To them all in different guises there was coming a strange delicious mood of almost languorous acceptance. A luxurious fatalism. A sense of waiting in some web of fairy-tale enchantment for some long-delayed but quite inevitable moment of fairy-tale release.

Somewhere not so very far ahead now, lay the end, and at the end they would each find, they dimly felt, a new beginning. The car had become less a mechanical means by which they voluntarily travelled, than a mysterious and omnipotent force bearing them, passive, tranced and pleasantly comatose, towards some destiny which they would not if they could avoid. Even Drew, driving with the sureness of many years' experience, was actually very far from the ingenious gadgets which his hands and feet so efficiently controlled; and to him also, in a state of hypnotised beatitude, the grassy hill slopes, the trees, the wheatlands, the endless road, seemed to be flowing towards them out of some inexhaustible legend.

What thoughts they had as the miles slid past were all drawn to it as to some vast magnet. It was as if each car-length of road they left behind faded and dissolved
into nothingness; as if they were all the time just one jump ahead of an illusory past, with a future coming endlessly upon them which was still not quite their future. So that in a dreamlike way their thoughts seemed actually to leave their bodies, to hover before them, even to fly forward until, grotesquely, they took shape – the shape of the glinting urgent figure on the radiator, lifting its head and pointing its urgent finger to the west.

On this halcyon sea of shared and unspoken sensations they seemed indefinitely becalmed. But as there might come from the sea itself releasing winds and tides, there came suddenly, towards sunset, out of a golden haze of dust in front of them a slow-moving mob of sheep. Spreading, undulating from fence to fence, its rearguard melted out of sight, almost as if it were made up of incorporeal shapes born of the sunlight and the dust which rose from its softly thudding hooves. Drew put his brake down and crawled forward. Some part of him, still bemused by their strange mirage-like appearance, half expected them to fade into nothing as he reached them, but as they closed round the car the dust, and the heavy smell, and the faint occasional bleating of a lamb forced momentarily from its mother's side, brought him back with a grateful sense of awakening to a solid and tangible world.

The mob parted clumsily to left and right. Sometimes a sheep, safely out of the track, floundered across it again, driven by some obscure panic, and there came, once or twice, the faint bump of a fleecy body against the mudguards of the scarcely-moving car. On the heels of the mob two dogs moved swiftly – lean and black and indefatigable, with their pink tongues
hanging out. Two more walked beside the drover, who, leading his pack-horse and flicking flies idly from about his face with a switch of gum-leaves, looked, Drew thought, half asleep on his ambling grey mare. But somehow, from beneath his hat-brim, he saw Bret, and his hand lifted in recognition quickly enough.

Drew asked when they were through:

“How many in that lot, Bret?”

Susan said quickly:

“Let me guess. Two thousand?”

Bret looked at her and said, “How—?”

Faintly as the shadow of a veil he saw a sharp remembrance, a momentary apprehension cloud her face. He said quickly in a low voice, “Who taught you that? Jim?”

She nodded, her eyes still on him. He said teasingly:

“Rats! It was a lucky guess!” and leaned forward to answer Drew who was demanding over his shoulder:

“Eh! How many did you say?”

“Susan was right to the last sheep. I happen to know them – they're on their way down to Mudgee from Nariel, Keith Browne's place.”

Drew asked:

“When'll they get there?”

Bret answered him absently, “About a fortnight,” for he was watching the top of the hill at the foot of which the Madison was gathering herself together for a charge. About half-way up there would spring into view over the skyline the top branches of a vast yellow box, and always from childhood he had watched for it. For it was the first glimpse of his Own land, growing there and perversely flourishing on a hilltop while
others of its family sought the river banks; as if it enjoyed growing there; as if it enjoyed holding aloft, like a flag of welcome, the first glimpse of a green nourished in the soil of Coolami.

He said suddenly on an impulse, to Susan:

“Look! There where I'm pointing. You'll see the top of a tree. There! That's the first glimpse you have of Coolami.”

As he said the words he felt their staggering importance. Not even to Jim had he dreamed of mentioning that childish custom of his. Not to any other living soul could he so far have betrayed in words the strength, the violence even, of his feelings for his home. Some last barrier in himself had broken away with that impulsive confession, and he was amazed by the suddenly unimpeded torrent of his emotions. Not looking at her, not touching her, he became almost agonisingly aware of Susan, and as the car soared over the crest of the hill and all the visible world became in the flash of an eye his own, he felt with a shock of joy some mysterious fusion, some new and infinitely precious sense of completion and fulfilment.

Susan and himself and Coolami. Of course! He leaned forward looking out across the three thousand acre paddock wondering if old Job the dog man had been working there to-day, and if so what his total bag of rabbits had been, and all the time, behind the pleasant preoccupations of his thoughts for his land, he was aware of gladness and excitement in a warmly mounting tide.

Millicent
said to her husband:

“This is the beginning of Bret's land, Tom.”

He looked round at it as he drove. He was glad that now he could consider it all soberly and objectively as a hard-headed man of business should. He was relieved that he had been delivered out of a mood in which it would probably have swum before his eyes in a haze of sun-bewitched romance, rousing in him nebulous dreams and unsatisfactory imaginings. And yet out of the strange mental experiences of the last two days, something remained to him. He was like a man who through long hours of delirium has made strange journeys, and who with returning health, remembers them as dreams but can never altogether escape from them. He drove steadily at thirty-five, considering Bret's domain. Queer, he thought, who had never before known any one who owned more than a dozen acres or so, to watch his speedometer telling out mile after mile of Coolami!