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jealousy.

CHAPTER FIVE
1
    S USAN pulled her hat off and sat on it. The wind and the sun leapt into her hair, blew it out behind her and burnished it so that it looked like the flame of a grass-fire, flickering, crackling. She was nervous. There was a kind of constriction in her throat, a swollen feeling behind her eyes and she was uncomfortably conscious of her breathing. It was the road that was doing it, this road which had always seemed to her to fall naturally and topographically into three sharp divisions. There was what she always thought of as the city-side and then, like a vast wall, the mountains. And on the other side of them, the country. Bret’s country. Jim’s country – Coolami.
    While they were here, on the city-side with the mountains still ahead, but so much nearer every moment, she could cling to the queer detached life of the last four months – feel herself not quite Susan Drew and not quite (how queer it still sounded!) Susan Maclean, but a Susan who had drifted numbly in a present which couldn’t last, but which, while it did, was peaceful so long as she could keep herself from thinking—
    But soon now the car would rush upward. Incredibly soon after the road began to climb they’d be able to look backward at the plain they were now on and see it far below as a soft pattern of greens and browns, remote and tranquil beneath a grey-blue film of morningmist, the long curves of the Nepean lying so still that the trees fringing its banks were no more perfect in detail than the trees mirrored in its dark water—
    And that, thought Susan, her hands clasping rather tighter on her lap, would be the end of the city-side. They’d be climbing the wall. And on the other side she’d have to begin to realise things again, to face certain questions, to make certain decisions; to be, finally and irrevocably, Susan Maclean of Coolami.
    It would be hard, very hard, to feel that. Perhaps men didn’t realise that among the many difficult adjustments a woman must make on marriage the changing of her name is not negligible. It wouldn’t be so bad, perhaps, she thought, if you were really – if you were able to feel altogether a sense of belonging to each other.
    But there was something confusing, something that made you feel you had lost your psychological bearings, in finding yourself no longer the Susan Drew you had known from babyhood, but an unfamiliar Susan Maclean, standing like a shy and forgotten child at a party, in the midst of a strange life. It wasn’t even as if you had been properly invited. You were a sort of unwilling gate-crasher—
    Not that Bret, she acknowledged quickly, had done anything to make her feel like that. Nor Kathleen. Ken – yes, a little, perhaps, but more teasingly than unpleasantly. There hadn’t even, in that perfect and perfectly-run home, been any particular work for her to do. You couldn’t when you were twenty, and lucky if you boiled an egg properly, tell anything to Mrs. Dobbs who had taught Bret to use a spoon. You couldn’t dictate to Matty who had learned her housework under the eye of Bret’s mother herself. No oneattempted to, not even Kathleen. Domestically, for many years the house had functioned under the rule of these two with a beautiful noiseless and invisible efficiency. So that, feeling rather awkward, and very nervous, and acutely unhappy, there had been nothing for it but to live there for seven endless months, in the family but not of it – not a wife exactly, or a friend exactly, or a guest exactly—
    Feeling at first while Matty swept and dusted in her room and then passed on with expressionless eyes to Bret’s, a seething under that naked and bony forehead of conjectures, of austere and bitter condemnation. Seeing, a few months later, with new-born super-sensitiveness Mrs. Dobbs’ speculative eye on her figure. Forcing herself, through the growing lassitude of her body, the