Free Return to Coolami by Eleanor Dark

somehow in the months she had spent with him at Coolami she had grown into the pattern of his life more closely than he’d realised. Miserable months they had been, strained, nerve-racking months, and yet, he acknowledged now, he’d felt at the time some undefined promise beyond them—
    Something, too, in the thought of the child had stirred him. He’d begun to think past his own life and to realise that Coolami would remain. So that with Jim’s child other children of his own should grow up.
    Yes, there, he thought, cutting a neat rod and trimming it, he’d put a finger on part at least of his problem. He did want children, and it seemed, surely, rather roundabout and unnecessary, having a wife already, to divorce her, and hunt laboriously for another whom he probably wouldn’t like half so well—
    For he did like Susan. She was game and she was honest and, he thought, glancing at her building her sticks deftly into his fireplace, confoundedly pretty. And that was another thing. You couldn’t, if you were human, live in the same house with a pretty young woman for seven months, nothing but an unlocked door between you, without wanting – yes, wanting like hell, a closer intimacy—
    That, because of Jim’s baby, had been, for him, quiteunthinkable. But now – when they’d somehow adjusted their lives, when they’d got the purely physical aspect of their marriage straightened out into normality – wouldn’t it all right itself—?
    This love business. What was it? Surely if he hadn’t it already he had the ingredients! Liking, respect, admiration, physical desire. Was there anything else?
    He supposed there must be. Susan had had all that for Jim and yet she’d never ceased to deny him the love she’d given so incomprehensibly to his elder brother. No, quite obviously, he admitted, hanging the billy in a notch of his stick and propping it over the back of the fireplace with a stone to weight its end, his mixture wasn’t right!
    â€œHave you matches, Bret?”
    He gave them to her, watched her crouch before the fireplace with the sun on her bent head and the nape of her neck, and the tips of her dark eyelashes. Smoke began to wreathe up through the twigs, there came a faint crackling, and the air was suddenly full of the lovely aromatic fragrance of gum-leaves burning. She looked up at him, and now the sun was on her brow and the end of her nose and her teeth and her white throat, and she was smiling. A disturbing smile with effort behind it, and determination and a strange uncertainty.
    â€œIt caught beautifully, didn’t it?”
    He said, “Yes,” abruptly, and walked away with his hands in his pockets, wondering how the devil you contended, in marriage, with a smile like that.
4
    He found a tiny path, rough and steep and rocky, leading down the hill to the cliff-edges. He followedit watching his feet, lost now in confused and troubled memories.
    Hot it had been this time last year – unusually hot for the spring, even in Sydney. The air in the auction-room, crowded with buyers and sellers, had seemed thick, heavy with heat and excitement. He’d been excited himself that day, because the bidding for the last of the Coolami clip had mounted well beyond what he had expected; and from the look of the stolid German, Hesslein, and the small, swift Jap with the falsetto voice, it seemed as though it would go higher still—
    He could remember, too, thinking that this auctioneer – one he’d never seen before – was a genius in his way. There was something like wizardry in the deftness with which he plucked out of pandemonium the voice of the first bidder; he had a perpetual faint smile and a trick of looking over his glasses; it made him appear indulgent, slightly disdainful, incredibly aloof—
    It was peculiar, now he thought of it, how ridiculously detailed was his memory of that particular sale. Was