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He said abruptly to Millicent:

“Would you like to come back?”

“Back …?” She looked at him uncertainly.

“Back here.” He took one hand from the wheel and waved it in a vague, explanatory gesture. “To the country. To Wondabyne.”

She wondered for a moment if perhaps through the noise of the car she had not heard him properly. She repeated stupidly:

“To Wondabyne? How?”

“I was thinking I might buy it.”

For the first time in her life she looked at him with
actual dislike and repugnance. For her instant wild impression was that he could not conceive this beauty about him save as another something to be bought with his all-powerful money. That he had seen in this coincidence of Mortimer's death his own picturesque chance for the ultimate conquest of his rival. And she had imagined him changed! “
I might buy it”
Well, it was his moment of victory, perhaps – but would it satisfy him? So paltry a triumph? She stared in front of her, a tide of anger drumming behind her eyes.

And yet, on its ebb, there came another tide of juster thoughts, steadily and quietly flooding her heart with gladness and remorse. For she saw now that what she had imagined was a change in him, was only the long-delayed awakening of something always dormant, something her instinct had felt but never found before. She recognised with relief and gratitude that he was still Tom; that there remained essentially untouched by the strange experiences of this most eventful journey the sober and practical and hard-working man who would never fail her – or himself. Or Wondabyne …?

She found that her hands were clutching each other tightly in her lap. She thought with nervous amusement that surely no more alarming and disconcerting a thing could happen than to have one's heart's desire suddenly handed to one. For she recognised it now that it was before her as a dream so lost in the background of her mind that she had never been aware of it before. So preposterous that the practical Millicent of these thirty-odd years would never for one moment have considered it. Tom at Wondabyne! Its absurdity was grotesque. A man did not, at fifty-seven, forsake the City, abandon his clubs, his golf, his bridge, his first nights at the theatre, his summer surfing holiday, his
vast circle of congenial friends and acquaintances – to buy a sheep station! But perhaps he hadn't intended …

She said doubtfully:

“Do you mean – to live there? To – to run it?”

He answered shortly:

“Why not?”

She remained for half a mile or so staring dumbly at his arrogant profile. Then she felt laughter beginning to waken in her, deeply and silently, so that her face suffused and there came a slight aching round her ribs. It was really less amusement, she reflected, than a wild and triumphant exhilaration because she saw now how unerringly the wilful and impetuous Millicent of thirty-seven years ago had recognised her mate. Hadn't she felt only yesterday that he wasn't really a runner round in circles? Wasn't this the juggling with points which she had imagined, and wasn't he off now, with a reckless adventurousness at which even she drew a breath of anxiety! “Why not?” indeed!

She said rather breathlessly:

“Darling, you're game!”

He took the car carefully round a bend before he looked at her with a faint grin and then back at the road.

“I suppose I'm not too old to learn, am I? And anyhow Colin could do most of the work.”

She said doubtfully as if testing the idea:

“Colin?”

And again he answered briefly:

“Why not?”

She thought more soberly this time. All very well to be reckless with one's own life, but one's children's were more precious. She thought slowly and carefully, placing her conclusions neatly in a row for final
analysis. She could feel in each argument as she dealt with it that Tom had been there before her, and she glanced at him gratefully, contentedly, feeling security in the knowledge of his shrewdness, gladness that not even she herself could plan more selflessly for their children's good. But was it safe to plan at all? Was it any good to set up in array a dozen – or a hundred – undoubted advantages if they were to be, as they very well might, overborne by the one ruthless and definite “No” of youth?

She heard the sadness in her own voice and was shocked by it.

“He mightn't want to, Tom.”

His left hand came down on to hers, and then went up again to shield his eyes from the setting sun.

“Then he won't have to. I don't doubt we can run it ourselves, with a good manager perhaps, and Bret at our elbow. But I think he will.”

He added presently:

“That girl Margery has lots of sense. And she wouldn't be sorry after last night to get him away from that damned mountain. …”

Susan called from behind them:

“Daddy, we're nearly there. You'll be able to see it from the top of this hill.”

As they came roaring up to its crest Susan's thoughts flew backwards, wondering, awed, to re-discover other thoughts which had absorbed her such a little time ago. Only yesterday morning? It didn't seem possible;
and yet in a way it was comforting to know that things so definitely true, things so austerely provable by calendars and clocks could seem impossible. For then it was easier to believe in other miracles – in the miracle, for instance, which showed those imaginings of yesterday at once so accurately fulfilled, and at the same time to grotesquely denied.

For there was Coolami. “
About sunset they'd come to it – up to the crest of a long hill with the sun in their eyes, so that until the car began to swoop downward they couldn't see anything. And then like magic it would all be there, the great valley glowing with opalescent light, the wheat-fields quivering and flowing to the current of a vagrant breeze, the river like a mirror beneath a green deluge of weeping willows.”

Could you have imagined it so clearly? Wasn't it, in this new awareness of mysterious forces, almost easier to believe that your longing, your hunger, your love for it must have run ahead of your body, which, even in a Madison, had come so slowly – so very slowly – home?

Yes, up to here (if they were imaginings) they had been accurately fulfilled. But it was hard now to imagine a darkness quite so heavy and impenetrable as that through which her further thoughts had stumbled yesterday. For she had said the name over and over to herself, “Coolami, Coolami,” rubbing the back of her hand across her forehead as though she might clear in that way the obscure confusion of thought that the name roused in her.
What did it stand for, that name of her husband's home, beyond the lovely picture that it flashed instantly to her mind – beyond her memones of Jim – beyond the unbelievably carefree months of her romance, the freezing horror of its ending, the dreary and humiliating
mess which had somehow grown out of what had seemed so lovely and so gay. …

Inconceivable now, that one should ever have been so dreadfully in outer darkness! That one shouldn't have felt oneself struggling from futility towards usefulness – that one should have been as blind as a man lost in some underground tunnel, groping instinctively towards a light he cannot see.

For it was so easy to know, to understand now that there was no crime like the crime of stagnation – unproductiveness. With a creative trinity, mind, body and spirit, one must yield something back to the generous earth. And that was Coolami. The generous earth.

The car swung round towards the house, hardly recognisable as a house except for the blue smoke thinly and steadily ascending from its chimneys. A happiness which was almost vertigo so overwhelmed her that the joyous barking of dogs seemed to come from far away, and she saw only mistily the warm light from an open doorway. She felt in the detached manner of a dream the slowing and stopping of the Madison's great bulk, realised dimly the fading into silence of its rhythmic sounds, so that it seemed, in the general confusion of her senses, like some vast and friendly monster ceasing to breathe, bewitched now that its task was ended, back into gross and inanimate metal. …

She looked round and found Bret smiling at her. So that when he had opened the doors she got out and faced the house, thinking that now she could return to it gladly and confidently – a potential bringer and receiver of gifts.

Drew,
looking across the room at his wife, demanded:

“Any hurry for getting back – to Ballool?”

But Millicent, unpacking his pyjamas and laying them on the bed, refused to be startled. Here at last was the game which she had once vaguely imagined that matrimony might be. You were both sudden and unexpected; you dashed off delightfully upon wild and unexplored byways; you talked nonsense and you did erratic things. And of course whichever one of you disconcerted the other most frequently was the winner.

So she only smoothed his pyjamas and answered warily:

“No dear – not so far as I'm concerned.”

“Like to go on a bit?”

“On? Where?”

He made a vague magnificent gesture.

“Oh, just – on.”

She glanced at him admiringly. How well he played! She nodded.

“I'd love it, Tom. Broken Hill, do you think?”

He eyed her sharply.

“Well – possibly. I had Alice Springs in mind.”

She began to laugh.

“You win, darling. I refuse to die of thirst with a new-chum in the middle of a desert.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at him.

“Have you talked to Bret? About Wondabyne?”

Drew grinned, brushing his thick grey hair at the mirror.

“I've listened to him talk to me. He thought I was mad.”

“So
you are, darling.”

“Possibly. Probably. Oh, of course, I am. Who cares?”

She said, “Not I!” watching him contentedly in the mirror. But the day in the open air had made her sleepy so that with the heaviness of her eyes it blurred and became alive with formless and fluidly-moving shapes. Fluidly-moving, melting and merging into a kind of coherence, so that at last they became a mud-bespattered car facing west with yet another rising sun behind it.

Bret came out from the library where he had been arguing with his father-in-law, on to the flagged path of the inside garden and looked up through the dusk to Susan's room. There was a light there, but almost as he saw it he saw her too, a dark blur at the end of the balcony, leaning her arms on the railing, looking down across the paddocks towards the river.

He wanted very much to run up the steps and tell her all about Wondabyne. He wanted to enjoy with her the rather gorgeous and intrepid lunacy of her parents, who after more than thirty years of matrimony were determined and eager – to start all over again. He wanted to share with her his delighted amusement in them – as though, he thought, they were the children and he and Susan indulgent but disillusioned adults. How long had they been hatching this? One day! One day to upset the carefully built structure of thirty-seven years! What had happened to the old chap to make him run amok like this?

He
sobered, thinking, his eyes still on the fading outline of Susan's head and shoulders against the darkening sky. A funny journey it had been. After all, in a sense, he'd run amok himself. And yet nothing had happened. They had all been calm and civil and matter-of-fact and very nearly monosyllabic as one usually is. …

Danger, perhaps? Physical peril? Yes, there might be something in that. For twice during that journey he had felt his own life and Susan's as brittle fragments of some exquisite and complicated piece of craftsmanship entrusted to the care of people not able to appreciate their value.

Something in him then had cried out for another chance, protested in a blind panic which was less fear of death than fear of waste, against the destruction of beauty before its blossoming.

And now he could hardly see her at all. He called:

“Susan!”

The darkness moved a little where he was watching it. She came along the balcony and stood at the top of the steps peering down at him. Suddenly he knew that he didn't want to tell her about Wondabyne now; he didn't want to discuss anything or to explain anything. Words were heavy things, tearing, destroying things like stones flung through a cobweb. He saw her hand lying near the top on the wooden bannister of the steps, and he looked down curiously at his own resting against the post at the bottom. It occurred to him that there had never yet been so much as a meeting of their hands in perfect kindliness, and he looked up at her again, troubled and now irrationally ashamed of those things in himself which had made their life together so barren and so hard.

She came down one step, but still he did not move, delaying purposely, postponing for the sake of the strange half painful joy it gave him, a moment for which he now felt he had been waiting all his life. She said his name suddenly on a note of desperate appeal, and he realised with sharp contrition that her faith in him had been tried very high that day.

Until he saw his hand come down on hers, he hardly knew that he had moved.