IN the mountains, nights were long and dark and piercingly cold; days were rent and maddened by bitter westerly winds. In the early morning taps were frozen, the ground stood up on tiny stilts of ice, and pavements rang like iron underfoot. Down in the gullies where the sun came late or never, plants and undergrowth were no longer green, but powdery white—brittle and unearthly like frost flowers. Under the towering tree-ferns, among the mossy rocks and decaying logs, the lyrebird, embodiment of a perpetual green twilight, stressed the silence with his midwinter song of mating. The smell was of loamy soil, rich with the rotting leaves of centuries.
Up on the tableland above those wide gullies and narrow gorges the sun shone through an air so icily pure that every breath of it was to the lungs like the shock of cold water to the body; there was a shiver in the thinnest tracery of shade. Shopkeepers strayed to their doorways to loiter for a moment in the sunshine, rubbing their numbed fingers. Postmen and tradesmen were more leisurely on their rounds, housewives dallied when they came out to shake their mats, and holiday makers, stretched in deck-chairs on boarding-house verandahs, basked rapturously, newspapers and knitting forgotten on their knees. Afternoons died quickly under lengthening shadows, and sudden sunsets, as gorgeous as mountain parrots, flamed out across the purple valleys. When they faded only a cold, bluish haze was left, and smoke began to rise from every chimney to meet and mix with it. People retreated indoors to huddle over fires, leaving the streets deserted, the town beleaguered by darkness.
Gilbert, in the town but not of it, found himself observing with the mild interest of the casual onlooker its reactions to its environment. Phyllis, by now firmly entrenched as a permanent resident, provided him with the keynote. As a whole, he discovered, the town took small notice of the valleys. They were its livelihood, its reason for existence, but they dwarfed it, and some half-conscious resentment, perhaps, at being dwarfed, tempted the town-folk to assert themselves by creating an atmosphere of complacent suburbanism. They made indeed a grudging gesture of acknowledgement to scenic immensities by constructing sedate and easily accessible vantage points from which visitors could gape, and turn away. Smooth paths skirted the cliffs for the tourist, broad roads invited his car, signposts directed him, refreshment rooms beguiled him, rubbish bins invited, but did not always receive the litter of his picnics. And yet the valleys were omnipresent; no one ever quite forgot them. Looking innocent enough from above, their tree-tops endless and unbroken, like moss, softened by the blue haze, dipping and darkening to some hidden creek, rising again in a sunlit talus to the foot of some perpendicular cliff, they offered a perpetual challenge. Looking-glass country; country in which the surest way of not reaching a given spot was to walk straight towards it. Country that tempted you forward with a vista of gentle undulations, and then stopped you dead with an unexpected cliff. Country that camouflaged its contours with dense undergrowth, enveloped you suddenly in an impenetrable veil of white mist, left you floundering, disorientated; country which quietly swallowed the inexperienced hiker and held him prisoner. . . .
During the week-ends, Gilbert escaped to it. He found a certain stimulation in the austerities of the weather, and the pleasure of novelty in winter loveliness. It was a beauty, he felt, to awe rather than to gladden the heart; there was nothing in it of the sensuous enjoyment of summer beauty—of grass, and flowers, and hot, strong-scented earth. But it fitted his mood. He could walk himself to physical exhaustion, he could pit himself against the stubborn wildness of the country, he could explore, and climb, and trudge, finding comfort and reassurance from the threat of middle-age in the hardy response of his body.
His escape was not from his thoughts, harassing as they were during those winter and spring months of 1941; he took his thoughts with him to a place where he could examine them free from the intrusions of his personal life. The end of August brought a political crisis in his own country, and he watched its development with a kind of uneasy hope, measuring the extent of his earlier anxiety by the breath of relief he drew when the first Federal Labour Government for nine years was precariously established early in October. Life nowadays, he thought, found its peaks in pathetically fervent gratitude for small mercies. People had forgotten how to expect good things; they could only offer wondering thanks when they were not as bad as they might have been.
He knew that his absences on such expeditions were at once the cause and the result of his wife’s increasing bitterness. He went to escape from her complaints, and she complained because he went. And yet he knew also that during the week she was well content without him, fussing with the house and the garden, giving and attending tea-parties, making a life for herself which was serene because she could build it to her own pattern, without his intrusion. She did not really want him, but she wanted the conventions of married life to be observed. She was, he found, essentially a small-town dweller, and he realised now how the more impersonal life of a city must have chilled and bewildered her. She liked small communities, small problems, small issues, small scandals and small talk. In the little mountain town she found herself transplanted to a soil in which she could thrive. Here she discovered a compact and cosy circle of respectable matrons with whom she could endlessly exchange calls, recipes, knitting patterns and gossip; here her penchant for organising found an unfailing outlet in church bazaars, local charities, functions in aid of war funds, and sewing bees. As the wife of a novelist, she assumed, too, the responsibility for nourishing culture in her home town, and founded a “literary circle” at whose meetings literature played second fiddle to afternoon tea. She was so busy and so happy for the first few months that she ceased to worry about Gilbert, assuming that the carrying out of her Machiavellian plan was the same thing as its success.
And indeed, except for his selfish, solitary excursions into the bush on Sundays, it seemed to be working out quite well. Ignoring his unenthusiastic response to her offers to accompany him, she insisted, once, on going. She packed an elaborate lunch, and chattered with determined cheerfulness as they walked. And walked. Cheerfulness faded as they toiled up the fourth long, stony hill. She protested querulously:
“How much further are you going? There was a perfect picnic spot back there.”
He looked at his watch.
“We haven’t been walking two hours yet. Do you want to stop here?”
She looked round discontentedly.
“There’s no water.”
“There may be some in the next creek. But it wasn’t much more than a trickle last time I passed it.”
“How far is it?”
“About two miles.”
“Two miles! I can’t possibly walk that far, Gilbert!”
“Well, we’ll stop here if you like.”
“But what about tea?”
He said irritably:
“I can’t conjure water out of the thin air. If we stop here we can’t have tea—that’s all.”
She contemplated a tealess lunch with horror.
“I suppose we’ll have to go on.”
There was no water in the creek. She sat down and took her shoes off, almost in tears.
“I can’t imagine why you want to come all this way! There’s always water down by the falls, and a good path, and seats and tables, and fireplaces for the billy and everything . . .”
It didn’t seem worth while, in this unattractive spot, to spread the little cloth she had brought. There was grass on the banks of the creek, but it was tall and wiry and parched by the drought. There were no trees—only thickets of low-growing callistemon, and when she sat near them to get some shade she was disturbed by movements and rustlings that made her think of snakes.
Gilbert wandered away down the dry creek-bed. It was a pity, he thought, that Phyllis could not have seen it as he remembered it before, when the creek was running—though her main interest in water seemed to be as a means of making tea. He shrugged, looking down at the dry sand under his feet, and the hard-caked mud of the banks, picturing it transformed by the flash and gurgle of the little creek tumbling merrily from one limpid pool to the next until it reached the lip of the falls, and leapt over in a flutter of diamond drops and a gauzy veil of wind-blown spray. He moved cautiously nearer to the edge of the cliff until he could lean over and look at the soft, sage-green tree-tops far below. He craned, trying to see what became of the creek down there, but his view was partially interrupted by a ledge jutting out from the cliff-face not ten feet below him. He saw a clump of unfamiliar blue wildflowers growing on it, and was studying the rock, toying with the idea of climbing down to look more closely, when Phyllis called him.
“Gilbert! Gil-bert! Aren’t we ever going to have any lunch?”
He turned away from the cliff. Getting down might have been easy enough, but getting back would be difficult. He made his way up the creek-bed again to find Phyllis nearly in tears.
“This place is swarming with ants, Gilbert! I had to put everything away again in your pack, and even then they keep crawling in. And the flies are nearly driving me mad! Of all the silly places to come to!”
She sat on a bare flat rock with her back to the view, and sulked. Gilbert ate a couple of sandwiches standing. Most of the picnic had to be carried home again. She arrived limping painfully on a blistered heel, and went straight to bed. After that Gilbert went walking alone.
It was not until the winter was over, the maples in the garden in young green leaf, the lilac in bloom, and one old apple tree reminding her, as it always did, of the blossomy scene of their betrothal, that Phyllis began to fret again because the inspiration she had so carefully provided for her husband’s muse still failed to inspire. She could not quite clarify her own wishes on the subject. For a time after Thunder Brewing, she had hoped that he would write no more, that he would rest upon the laurels he had already won, and give their friends no further cause for doubtful glances. But she had discovered—with some indignation—that the world was curiously forgetful. She had realised that a writer whose name was not continually blazoned on the bookstalls is soon for-gotten, and it irked her to discover that more and more of her new acquaintances had never even heard of Gilbert Massey. As President of the Literary Circle, she wanted to be able to say again: “My husband’s new book,” and she felt that in making this impossible he was letting her down badly. She began to question, to hint, to exhort.
“How is the new book going, Gilbert?”
“I haven’t started yet.”
“But, Gil, you were writing yesterday—and last week-end.”
“Nothing of importance—just notes.”
She was puzzled. He never made notes. She knew that, at least, from hearing him talk to other writers. Nevertheless, “notes” sounded professional. Perhaps, she thought, he was working out a new technique. That was a good phrase, and she used it with effect at the next meeting of the Circle. But when she enquired again he still said he had not really started on anything new. She became importunate.
“But, Gilbert, why don’t you? I’ll see that Pete doesn’t turn the wireless on while you’re working. After all, you’ve had a good rest from it—four years! There’s really nothing to disturb you here!”
He stared at her, looking into her mind with amazement and despair. Nothing to disturb you! Turn off the wireless, and the voice of humanity is silenced, shut the door and the world is outside! Then, in a dreamy void, in a vacuum, in an exquisite nothingness—you can write! With what? Why, with a pencil, on a sheet of paper! Looking up when your words fail to a blue view, and drawing from that some nebulous inspiration for creating a safe world, a gentle world, a rosy-golden-tinted world unrelated to the savage one so happily excluded! That was how she saw it. Could he tell her that he carried the world in his mind, that no matter how profound the silence she provided for him it was still clamorous, that those clamours, that “disturbance” were the ingredients of his craft, that he could not shut them out, and would not if he could?
He said wearily:
“I’ll get going on something soon.”
But when her enquiries began to grow querulous, he took refuge in a stony, forbidding silence which daunted her until she persuaded herself that it was her duty to remain undaunted, and began again. He countered that by beginning to stay in town overnight one and sometimes two nights a week, until she understood at last that she had not removed him from the influences which she dreaded, but had merely removed herself so that she could no longer efficiently police his actions. Watching her, he had seen her growing more and more into the life of the township, building herself a place in it, becoming, as he grimly phrased it, the big frog in the little puddle; and when he saw the realisation of her mistake dawning on her he threw down a challenge.
“If you don’t like my being away at night occasionally, perhaps we had better sell this place and go back to town.”
She cried hastily:
“No, no-no, there’s no need for that! But . . .”
“All right. If you want to stay here we will. But when I have business in town at night, or a meeting, or the weather’s bad, I’m not going to do that drive twice a day just for the sake of sleeping here. I can always stay at Nick’s flat.”
Beaten, puzzled, she said resentfully:
“Oh, very well.” An idea came into her head which had never entered it before; but because she was angry she welcomed it. She added with a sour little laugh: “So long as that’s where you do stay!”
After his first astonished anger he tried to brush the remark aside, but found it returning to goad him into an uneasy self-examination. He realised that he was forty-five, and that he had been soberly faithful for more than twenty years to a woman he had never loved, and now heartily disliked. He discovered, moreover, that he had lately become a more active member of the Writers-Guild than ever before, and bullied himself into admitting that the reason for this sudden enthusiasm was that Elsa Kay was usually to be found at its meetings.
He was profoundly startled by these discoveries. He would have said, if questioned, that he did not greatly like the girl, and it would have been the truth. Why, then, in Heaven’s name, was he seeking her out? Standing with her that night at the top of Marty’s steps, he had been moved to an intense compassion for her—and that, surely, was natural. There was enough in what she had told him, wasn’t there, to account for compassion? And yet, was there not also another more personal impulse behind it? Feeling some obscure psychological confusion and distress in her, was he not identifying her with the confusions and distresses of his own youth—being sorry not so much for her as, vicariously, for himself? The threads which stretched between them were too cobweb-frail to be called bonds. They were threads of association, perhaps—her association (so nebulous as to fade before thought, and reassert itself only in moments of unguarded emotion) with what he called the Scott Laughlin period of his own life; her association with himself in the pangs of “creative paralysis”; and in their common knowledge of loneliness. “I like a little human company, now and then,” she had said. Something in his own nature, solitary not from choice, but from the never-to-be-escaped inhibitions of his childhood, had responded to that.
And she was often stimulating. As one of a younger genera tion with which he had had few personal contacts, she stirred his interest. He compared her dry scepticism with the groping amorphous idealism of himself at the same age, and probed, not without anxiety, for some depth of conviction in her which he had not yet discovered. Was he regarding her, instinctively, as material as a point of view and a set of reactions hitherto unfamiliar to him, but which, as a novelist, he must understand? Of were all these conjectures merely defences which he was setting up against the incredible possibility that he was falling in love with her? At his age? Nevertheless, he was forced to recognise what (but for Phyllis-barbed remark) might have remained obscure to him for many months yet—that she was often in his thoughts, that his eyes looked for her at any gathering, that something in him quickened if she were there, and died if she were not.
He told himself dispassionately that he was at that dangerous period of life, and in those dangerous matrimonial circumstances which tempt middle-aged men to make fools of themselves with girls young enough to be their daughters. Elsa, of course, was not quite young enough for that, but still . . .
All through November he kept away from the Writers1 Guild. He accepted an invitation from Gerald, and made a last-moment excuse when he found that Elsa was to be one of the party. Through those uneasy months of Spring and early Summer, while one part of his mind watched the shaping of events—the political crisis in his own country, the beginning of the siege of Leningrad, the attempted assassination of Pierre Laval, the assault on Moscow—another part worried at this personal conundrum which threatened, unless he were very circumspect, to complicate further an already complicated life. This young woman, he told himself brutally, could mean nothing to him; to her, he realised, remembering his own youthful impressions, he must seem old. He struggled to detach his mind from her by fastening it on something else, and set himself doggedly to the reorganisation of his business, and the renovation of his terraces.
Yet he found no real refuge in these activities. They were jobs performed almost automatically, guided by the surface of a mind which was incessantly restive, impatient to be about its own work. So, one Sunday afternoon, early in December, he went off in a mood bordering on desperation to the glassed-in corner of the verandah which was his study, and shut the door.
He had always thought that there were just two good moments in the writing of a book—the moment before beginning, when an idea demands expression, and a stack of virgin paper beckons, and the moment of ending when, with the last word written, there comes an intoxicating sensation of release. Like most writers he had an affection for his tools of trade—an affection which, as manager of a wholesale stationers, he was peculiarly able to indulge. Three reams of paper, their wrappings still unbroken, lay in the right-hand drawer of his desk. He could afford to be extravagant with typewriter-ribbons and carbons. He had an abundance of pens, pencils, india-rubbers, paper clips. He had pots of gum, elastic bands, patent box-files and folders with spring clips. He had red, green, and the best blue-black ink, envelopes of every conceivable shape and size, and a gadget for punching holes in stacks of paper. All these, neatly arranged on his bare and spacious desk, or stowed away in those drawers which were not stuffed with his scraps and failures, awakened that anticipatory eagerness of the craftsman to handle his tools, with which he was pleasantly familiar. Nevertheless, he knew from experience that in the throes of production this barren tidiness would give place to chaos, and it was the chaos he wanted really—the scattered papers, the mess of cigarette-ash and india-rubber fragments, the overflowing wastepaper basket, the screw of discarded carbon, the pages mad with interpolations and erasures, and the productive impulse throbbing at full power like a noiseless dynamo.
So he sat down and waited for the dynamo to switch itself on. He lit a cigarette and stared out through the panes of glass at the glimpse of blue valley framed in trees, not drawing inspiration from it, but reflecting idly that, though he had become a mountain-dweller for ulterior motives, he was beginning to enjoy it; had it not been for the pile of paper before him, a white and silent challenge, he could have relapsed into a mood of beatific receptive-ness, observing how dramatically the cobalt of the distant valleys contrasted with the fresh green of the maples in the garden.
Forcing his eyes from them, he stared down at his paper and began to doodle. He drew a black square very carefully, and surrounded it with an intricate pattern of right-angled lines spreading out and out across the top of the sheet. It formed a maze through which his pencil tip absently wove its way, and all the time he was thinking: “How do you begin? Damn it, the others began themselves!”
His cigarette was finished. He lit another and stared out the window again, He thought angrily:
“This isn’t getting any work done.”
If you can’t write, he thought, how about writing about not being able to write? He scored a black line under his doodling and began with obstinate laboriousness:
There may be certain educational: alue in being unemployed—for a time. To imagine the frustration, the lowered “morale,” the general sense of personal deterioration which inevitably goes with unemployment is not the same thing as experiencing it. The writer who cannot write—who cannot, despite long hours at his desk, achieve anything in which he can feel that independent life which is his signal that what he is doing will (in the mountain-climber’s phrase) “go,” is unemployed; and the moral blight of unemployment descends on him. Perhaps there is nothing left for him then but to get words down on paper somehow—any old sequence of words—or perish as a writer. Perhaps he must forget whatever writing aims he may have had in better times, forgot that he wanted to write in a certain way about certain things, and go back to the elementary function of his job—recording. Perhaps into a mass of such recording some fragment of interpretation will find its Way at last, and set him off on his own track again. So it becomes a matter of recording fast and continuously—and to hell with literary effect. It is a matter of driving through that invisible, intangible obstruction in oneself, of putting one’s head down like a labouring ox, and going ahead. And if one’s brain, dulled and blunted and half-anaesthetised by its necessary, self-preserving de-fence against too frequent and too brutal assaults, has ceased to be a fine precision tool for the marshalling of Words into beguiling patterns, and the building of shapely phrases, perhaps it can remain a more humble but no less prideful implement—something which, like a hammer or a spade, needs no trained skill for use, but can claim the sober value of utility. . . .
Full stop. He thought: “Oh, damn!” and tore the page in small pieces. He got up and went to the window from which he could look down the hill towards the creek; and among the broom, and the grass-trees, and the low-growing black wattle, and the mountain-devil bushes, he saw Virginia being kissed by a young man.
He returned hastily to his chair. Astonished by his own discomposure he asked himself if he were going to be like his grandfather, and disapprove of his daughter for an innocent kiss. All girls got kissed, and girls as pretty as Virginia no doubt got kissed with particular enthusiasm. Was it not altogether more right and natural that she, at twenty-two, should be kissed than that he, her father, at forty-five, should imagine himself kissing Elsa? All the same, he told himself stubbornly, there were kisses and kisses. This one which he had inadvertently seen had been a very intense, passionate, experienced kiss; and he found himself remembering a morning earlier in the year when Virginia had unexpectedly come home at four o’clock . . .
So had poor Aunt Bee, some fifty years ago . . .
He had asked Phyllis about that morning.
“Why didn’t Virginia stay with the Johnsons after all?”
“They had to go down to Sydney at the last moment, so she and Betty Bradley drove down with them half-way and came back by train. They had to wait over two hours on the station. I told her it was a silly thing to do—but you know what girls are nowadays.” She had seemed quite unconcerned.
He stood up again and began to pace restlessly about the room, keeping away from the window. He was suddenly afraid—horribly afraid—that the shock which he had felt when he saw that kiss had its origin not in paternal anxiety, but in paternal resentment because his daughter was young and ripe for kisses, while he himself was—or should be—long past them. This demonstration of sex-passion in Virginia underlined for him unmercifully the knowledge that his own time for it was passing him by without fulfilment. Was he angry with Virginia, furious with her young man merely because they goaded him with a glimpse of something he had never known? Was he in danger of that sour, middle-aged puritanism which resents in the young its own missed and now never to be experienced ardours?
No. He was really worried—for Virginia. Standing still, glaring into himself with almost inimical ruthlessness, he was able to say honestly that if it had been Prue in the young man’s arms he would have felt differently. He wouldn’t ever feel afraid for Prue—even if she did, as the old-fashioned saying went, throw her cap over the mill. She would be armoured in her own personal integrity against the results of any escapade; she would bring something with her out of any experience to enrich her life. But Virginia? There was something irresponsible and undiscip-lined about Virginia. She would follow her sensations and her appetites into any kind of mess, taking all the time, giving nothing, and so building nothing from her mistakes . . .
He felt suddenly helpless and humiliated. Remembering his own violated solitudes in childhood, he had tried so hard not to intrude into his children’s lives that now there was no common ground on which he could meet them. This, surely, was a job for a mother? Almost as if she were there in the room with him he could see Marty cocking a quizzical eye at him and asking: “Why?” Children, she always maintained, were a joint responsibility of both parents. Together, male and female, they could represent for a child a complete, sane embodiment of adult humanity; singly they split his world in half. That was her theory. Well, if it were a true one, Heaven help his children, for he and Phyllis had never been “together” in that sense. What could Phyllis, with her irritating, scolding manner, her shrinking pruderies, and her alternating fits of hectoring and sentimental appeal, do for this hungry, unstable, and far too beautiful daughter? What could he do, reserved, awkward in emotional contacts, and now inhibited by a long habit of detachment? Well—could he not at least have a look at this young man?
He went out quickly along the verandah, down the steps, round the gravel path, across the lawn. He found himself coughing loudly as he went because it was unbearable to him that he should seem to be spying on Virginia. She, seated gracefully on a rock, smiled sweetly at him as he approached, but he was unconscious of her in the shock of discovering that her young man was not young at all. He was, Gilbert judged, not more than three or four years younger than himself—a well-dressed, middle-aged man with a red face and rather protruberant brown eyes. Virginia said kindly:
“Hullo, Dad. This is George English. My father, George.”
“How do you do?” said George.
“How do you do?” said Gilbert.
They shook hands.
“Charming place you have here,” George remarked. He studied Virginia’s father curiously, having read two of his books, heard rumours of his pink politics, and decided that, being a writer, he must be slightly mad.
“We like it.” Gilbert heard himself sounding as abrupt as he felt, and left it at that because he was no good at dissimulation, Virginia said composedly:
“I’ve been showing George the creek. But he prefers fairways.”
“Oh?” said Gilbert.
George cleared his throat.
“Are you a golfer, Mr. Massey?”
“No,” said Gilbert.
Virginia, he observed with fury, was looking amused. She said lightly:
“George is teaching me. He says I’m doing pretty well.” She added demurely: “Except on the eighth hole—somehow I never seem to get a good score there.” Gilbert saw a glance flash between them, and a slight deepening of the colour in the man’s already florid cheeks.
He said shortly:
“I’m going down to the creek.”
As he picked his way down the stony path he heard them exchange some remarks in an undertone, and then Virginia laughed. Standing on the rocks, looking down at the trickle of water sliding over the stones, he thought: “It’ll be quite dry soon, if we don’t have rain . . .”
In the morning, driving down to town with Prue beside him, he asked:
“Do you know this friend of Virginia’s—George English?”
She answered briefly: “Yes—just.”
He drove for a mile or so before he spoke again.
“I’m worried about Virginia. It doesn’t seem fair—and it’s not what I would want to do—to push those worries to you, but—well . . .“—he hesitated again—”. . . there are things I don’t feel I can profitably discuss with your mother.”
She replied awkwardly:
“I know, Dad, but I don’t think it’s any use worrying about Virginia. If she’s man-mad that’s the way she is.”
“But hang it all,” he burst out, “I must worry about her, mustn’t I? I’m her father.”
“Just what are you worrying about?”
“I don’t like the look of this chap English.”
He tried to add that the chap was nearly twenty years older than his daughter, and found that he could not say it. Prue said it for him.
“Of course he’s much too old for her.”
To his annoyed astonishment he heard himself objecting quite hotly:
“That in itself needn’t matter. Look at your Aunt Marty; she and Richard have made a perfectly successful marriage . . .”
“Marriage?” He saw from the corner of his eye that she turned and looked at him for a moment. “There isn’t any question of marriage between George and Virginia, Dad. He’s married already. He has two children round about Pete’s age.”
He managed not to show the shock he felt. There had been something almost pitying in her voice. Poor old innocent Dad, said her tone. She tried to reassure him.
“I don’t think it means anything more than—all the others, you know. Virginia has always had men trailing after her ever since she left school. She’s really absurdly young, Dad—I mean undeveloped, and irresponsible, like a kid. She only cares about having a good time, and George is well off, and he has a car, and he takes her to expensive places where she can show off her clothes and be admired. That’s all it means to her.”
“Is it?” he asked, remembering that kiss.
She did not answer, and they drove for a few miles in silence. He wanted to say: “What about his wife and children?” and found that he could not say that either. Again she seemed to read his thought.
“I gather he doesn’t get on with his wife. Hasn’t for years. She’s—sort of fat and middle-aged, and perfectly happy so long as she can play bridge all day. I suppose you can’t blame him for being mad about Virginia.”
He asked slowly:
“You wouldn’t blame a married man with children for having a love affair with a girl twenty years younger than himself?”
She said impatiently:
“Oh, Dad, we don’t know that it is a love-affair. Why shouldn’t it be just a flirtation like half a dozen others she’s had?”
He made no reply to that, admitting to himself that he was out of touch with the modern techniques of flirtation. Prue said almost apologetically:
“Anyhow, what can you do about it? I mean Virginia’s of age, and you haven’t any hold over her except money, and you wouldn’t cut her off with a shilling—at least I can’t see you doing it—and if you did she’d only get herself into a worse mess than ever.”
He said heavily:
“No hold over her, eh? We must have been shockingly bad parents, Prue.”
She replied with detachment:
“Mother’s not a good parent because she’s not a good human being. I mean her intentions are good, but she’s all muddled and sentimental. I’m quite fond of mother, but I feel as if she’s the child and I’m the adult. And if she really knew the extent and variety of Virginia’s flirtations she’d only scold and exclaim, and make a fuss, and say that modern girls are no good, and Virginia would go straight ahead her own way without taking the slightest notice.”
He asked with an effort:
“How about yourself? Have I no hold over you, either, except money?”
“Would you want to have a hold over me?”
He said with violence:
“No!” And then added: “Not a hold, Prue, but at least a say if I saw you getting yourself into a mess.”
She said lightly:
“Do you think I’m likely to get myself in a mess?”
“No—no, I don’t really. But if you did?”
She laughed and patted his knee.
“I’d give you a fair hearing, Dad.”
He felt reassured, and smiled at her.
“You’re an impertinent brat. See if you can’t talk some sense into Virginia, Prue.”
She said with a sigh:
“Sense doesn’t seem to take with Virginia. But I’ll try. And get called a prude and a sourpuss for my pains. Oh, Lord, Dad, just look at those burnt-up paddocks!”
They were going down the long, curving slope of the foothills, and below them the plains spread out, parched and brown except for the green ribbon of trees which marked the winding river.
“When the drought breaks,” she said, “let’s stay at the hotel up there and sit on the verandah and watch them turn green.”
He glanced up at the cloudless sky and grunted discouragement.
That day Nick burst into his office
“Well, it’s happened at last, Gil. The Japanese are running amok. They’ve bombed Pearl Harbour . . .”
While he listened Gilbert noticed with a novelist’s detached curiosity that the effect of this news was to send a flood of energy through his body—as if it wanted to leap out of the chair and start doing things straight away; as if the sudden awareness of crisis with its merciless challenge were stimulating (as, indeed, it probably was) automatic physiological reactions. That passed, and there remained nothing but the intolerable burden of intellectual realisation. He laid his pen down, took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, reached mechanically for a cigarette. He told himself, putting it carefully into words: “The Pacific isn’t pacific any more.”