Outside on the lawn the party was beginning to break up. Many of the guests were already gone. Those who remained were scattered in groups, the men all fired up with the last of the day’s arguments, sport, politics, business; some of the women now with their high heels kicked off, easing their stockinged feet in the grass. The band still played, but the floor was occupied now entirely by children, little boys in long pants and long-sleeved shirts and ties, some of them bow ties, and girls in party frocks with ribbons. They were pushing one another about on the waxed boards like perfect little adults while one or two real adults looked on. One of them, Digger saw, was Ellie’s father, Mr Warrender. He looked rather tipsy, and Digger saw him, over Ellie’s shoulder, step on to the dance floor in a top-heavy, deliberate way, as if he feared he might not make it, and begin to weave about among the couples, who looked sideways at him, embarrassed by his dancing alone like that, and steered away from him towards the corners of the floor.
Ellie, seeing Digger’s intent look, turned her head, wondering what it was that had caught his eye; but what she saw was not her father making slow circles with his arms raised among the dancing children, but Vic. He was standing just off to the side in a group of older men, all with their heads together. He had turned away from whatever it was they were discussing. With his hands in his pockets, he was watching Digger and her.
He glanced down when her eye caught him and pretended to laugh at something that was being said. But a moment later, when she looked that way again, he was again watching. This time Digger saw it too. And immediately Vic detached himself from the group, one or two of whom turned and looked after him, and came over the lawn towards them.
Ellie looked at Digger, made a face, and smiled.
‘Well,’ her look said, ‘that’s that. This is the only moment we’ll have. But that’s all right, isn’t it?’
Digger found that he too was grinning.
‘He’s scared. You know — that we might get on too well together. I mean, of what we might find out — you know, about him, not about one another — if he leaves us alone too long. He’s like that.’
‘I know,’ Digger agreed.
‘He can’t help it.’
‘He’s a difficult cuss.’
‘Oh, you don’t have to tell me’.
These were the thoughts that flew between them.
He wondered what it was exactly that Vic had told her; not about him but about the rest of it. Not a lot, he thought. There would be things she would never know. She would wake nights and find him sitting on the edge of the bed (Digger knew these occasions himself) with the sweat pouring off him; stuck in the real heat of a place he had been dreaming about, except that it was never just a dream and there was no way back from it.
‘You’ve found Digger,’ he said brightly, coming up and taking her arm. ‘That’s good.’
He stood looking from one to the other of them, aware of the warmth between them. They were quite easy, gave no sign that anything they had been saying had had to be cut off short by his arrival. But the smiles they wore were conspiratorial, and Digger reddened and looked down. Vic knew him too well to miss it. But Ellie was not intimidated.
‘I was just asking Digger to come and see me sometime,’ she said, contradicting what Digger thought had been agreed between them. ‘You will, won’t you, Digger?’
He glanced at Vic. He too was smiling, quite amiably you might have thought, but he said nothing, and he did not want it; Digger saw that quite plainly. Why had she suggested it?
‘I should find Iris,’ he said quickly. ‘She’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.’
3
A BLUSTERY DAY, late August. High up, flat-bottomed clouds were in flight, sailing fast around the world, but the air was clear and up here on the hill above the Crossing she could see in all directions at last, north, south, eastwards towards the river’s mouth and the ocean. The whole landscape was laid out for her.
Downriver, in a dozen little bays and inlets, boats were stuck like bits of paper, white on blue, unmoving at this distance. Upstream the bridge, its traffic silenced by the sound the wind was making, the wrenching of branches, fistfuls of leaves rattling at the ends of twigs and the gulls’ crying.
To one side below was the store in its elbow of low land, high and dry and isolated: the ridge of its tin roof, the four posts of her washing-lines, old barrels and kero tins with her bits of shrubs in them, Digger’s workbench under the pepper tree. Jenny was there, mooning about in a cotton frock chasing birds.
‘She doesn’t know yet,’ she thought. ‘She hasn’t realised I’m out of the house.’ The panic there would be when she went into their room and found the empty bed! The moaning and flapping! She was sorry about that.
On the high bank opposite, on one of the roofs of the weekenders that dotted the hillside over there and flashed among the trees, Digger would be working, a hammer in his belt, a stub of pencil behind his ear.
She knew it all; where everything was. Only up here was new to her.
And why had she left it thirty-three years to come up here and see it?
Because she didn’t want to see things too clearly, that’s why.
And why had she done it now?
Because she did.
She had left it till the very last, not to disappoint herself. She could face it now. She was past disappointment.
Far off, forty miles it would be as the crow flies, in a soft haze in which houses, whole streets of them, and trees and harbour water were smudged to the same pastel blue, as if it was a lake not a city, and just the highest towers were visible above the surface of it, was Sydney.
That wasn’t what she had come to see. She hadn’t even known it would be visible. In her mind it was further off than that. Halfway to England, practically. Thirty-three years off. She had knuckled under and hung on here — somebody had to; kept things together, turned her back on the rest of the world, taken on its name, Keen, and would now be buried under it.
But suddenly, just this afternoon, she couldn’t bear to be in the house any longer, in the stuffy little back bedroom, on a day when the wind was up. Everything, every stick of furniture, every inch of the curtains she had ordered and sewn and hung in their three rooms, every teaspoon, and the wedding picture of her husband’s parents on the sideboard, and the bags of sugar, rice, salt, and the scales in the back room on which for thirty-three years she had weighed them out in pound and half-pound packets — all that, and her kitchen chairs and saucepans, and the bucket and mop behind the door, and Jenny flopping on the counter, and all the ghosts of the others, squeezed into a corner by the stove and sucking a rusk or pushing ashes into their mouths, Leslie and James and May and Billy — all that and more, weighed on her heart and crushed her. She could have set a match to the lot of it in this high wind and watched it blaze up in a roar of smuts.
So what sort of woman, at last, did that make her?
The very kind she had set out not to be.
Tearing off her bedclothes she had rushed out barefoot to the kitchen, snatched up a box of matches and struck one and threw it down, then another, and looking wildly about her said, ‘This is the sort of woman I am.’
But the box fell from her hand, the matches spilled. Without looking back she had broken out of the house and, plunging off into the scrub with no thought in her head, only the wind and the high clouds flying, begun to climb.