Free When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald Page A

decorated in purple ink. A few days when Bernadette had been content to knock around with him for the simple fun of it, when they’d played checkers and cribbage until they reached the time of day apportioned to a woman’s unerring power. When curtains fluttered in the evening breeze and Rusty leaned with her perfect elbows on the sill, showing her flushed cheeks of excitement.
    â€˜You never told us about her, how beautiful Mrs Buckler was,’ said Bernadette. ‘We had the impression from the way you talked she was nothing much. Maybe an invalid or something like that, you big wart, but she’s peachy.’
    Buckler in foolish despair waited a long time before answering, ‘Don’t tell me she’s here.’
    â€˜I won’t if you don’t want me to.’
    The Adelaide streets were a furnace in the late afternoon. Off the tram and into the boulevards of protestant churches and wholesale merchants, they jumped like a large bug and a small bug into a fiery pan. Buckler felt sick at the thought of Veronica thereabouts and mistook every wafty woman of a certain artistic style as her lurking. They navigated stunned pavements towards Hindley Street until they came to a shaded, freshly swabbed pavement overhung by verandahs three-storeys high. Buckler gave the place an admiring glance: bluestone blocks, iron lace white-painted, brass nameplate shining (Licensee, Mrs H. Harris in gold lettering on a wooden plaque above the lintel), an establishment of undoubted good name.
    He climbed solid steps and shouldered open engraved glass doors. Polished floorboards and oriental rugs, hallstands gleaming bright and the scent of fresh-cut roses enticing the traveller into a grottoed shade. He became aware of Rusty rather transformed, the perfect hostess watching through a hatch window.
    â€˜Dunc!’ Her voice always seemed shy to him, provisional, with a smoker’s burr. Its subtleties landing electrically on his tongue in the gleaming darkness with his eyes adjusting from the outside glare.
    â€˜Quite the establishment,’ he said.
    â€˜Not all mine, heavens.’ She laughed low, emerging into the room.
    Hair up in a French roll, wearing a white silk blouse, a severe black skirt, high heels. First of his new impressions: the coolness of a counter-supervisor, white hand on shapely hip, green eyes upon him so resolutely truthful. They kissed, and there was a givingness in her manner, as if she were able, even now, to yield what she had without mucking about.
    Not a good sign, though, because ill-suited to the circumstances. And yet roughly carpentered to his hopes.
    Bernadette sat on a nearby chair and watched them. Rusty handed her a set of keys.
    â€˜Can you cope, sweetheart?’
    Bernadette left the room.
    â€˜I wonder how he knew?’ said Buckler, while Rusty examined his walloped scalp. ‘In a situation, they say, a bloke’s the last to know.’
    â€˜I’m so ashamed, Dunc, for getting you into trouble.’
    â€˜Then why start something?’ he stoically maintained.
    â€˜I like the circus of a man going away, coming back,’ she shrugged. ‘I can be myself when he isn’t there.’
    So was Buckler the bloke still, who would do his lurking wherever?
    â€˜Your wife came with a lawyer, she held his arm while he looked around. I hated you for allowing it, for our not finishing when I said.’
    Buckler couldn’t remember Rusty asking anything so stark. She had merely cooled by mail. But he liked her implying he’d made it hard for her, as it gave him more reason to like himself.
    As for Veronica, she was a storm beyond the windows, except that Rusty kept using the name, letting her in.
    â€˜The worst was meeting her – it can’t go on now it’s happened, Dunc dear, and we’ve met eye to eye.’
    â€˜That’s only an excuse in a game one,’ said Buckler, not exactly generously.
    â€˜You see, I liked