Free Watching the Climbers on the Mountain by Alex Miller

henceforth there would always be something of Ward Rankin about Ida Sturgiss. And she was too intelligent to deny this, although it might have simplified things for her had she done so. She acknowledged, furthermore, that it was unlikely the same were true for him. For despite his apparent complexity, wasn’t there, she had asked herself, something finally impermeable about his nature? She had the awful sense sometimes that he was set unwillingly on a course from which no external influence or personal decision of his own could deflect him. And her heart went out to him then, as they looked at each other across a distance that did not seem to be of their own making. So the lingering sadness and the pointless regret.
    But today there was something else, besides this larger enduring concern, that was enlivening her thoughts when she would have preferred them dulled by a pleasant wooziness from the wine she had drunk. A small incident had altered the mood of the gathering just before her husband had left the verandah. She was not actively thinking about either this incident or her relations with her husband, but resonances from both were having an unsettling effect on her.
    For more than an hour she did not sleep.
    The heat hung over the house and silenced the world outside. Small stray noises penetrated to her from the kitchen. Gil, at least, had the clean-up well under control out there! She smiled to herself. He was being protective. Making sure his older sister was given due appreciation around the Rankin place. She knew this was how Gil saw it. She loved him for his mixture of old-fashioned Queensland chivalry and completely modern carelessness. Always patiently concerned with people, he had shown since his earliest childhood a profligate disregard for things and their cost.
    Ever since she could remember, Gil had careered from one short-lived enthusiasm to another, discarding along the way an expensive array of giant toys, from drum sets and electric guitars to powerful hunting bows. The most expensive of these, acquired last year just before he had set out for Gympie and the butter factory, had been a made-to-order western roping saddle and a quarter horse stallion. If anyone else had displayed such an interest it would have been contemptuously dismissed by his older brothers as, ‘Big gun pseudo-Yankee bullshit,’ but in Gil they found it enthralling, even discovering in themselves a taste for the hobby. Apparently Gary, the eldest by quite a few years and the one least inclined to experiment, was riding the horse and using the ‘alien’ saddle! Clearly Gil would have no further use for these things now that he had taken up the serious business of trophy shooting and had joined the Gympie Rifle Club.
    The episode was typical and it was why eccentric side-interests abounded among the otherwise conservative members of the Sturgiss family. Being the last child by a long way had presented Gil with opportunities the others had only dreamed about. And they had begrudged him none of it, but had pored over catalogues with him in the evenings, encouraging him to indulge his every whim, and supplying some from their own fancies, pretending they were his. They had all had a lot of fun through Gil. He had brought the unexpected into their lives.
    As she lay there gazing at the familiar reflected view of the distant hills in the mirror, her thoughts drifted to recollections of her own childhood. The view in the mirror was one she knew to be infinitely variable. This afternoon the dazzling white plumes of thunderclouds had begun soaring vertically thousands of metres into the sky and were now beginning to cast their huge shadows over the black basalt-capped spires of Ka Ka Mundi. She wondered if a storm would roll out of the ranges and sweep down the valley between the escarpments tonight. In that event, she thought—her mind turning to more practical considerations—the roads would be impassable and there