Highways to a War Read Online Free PDF

dream repeating itself. Well, Mike escaped, in the end. From the lounge bar of the Colonel; from Launceston; from this bloody little island.”
    She’d been picking at the varnish on a nail, her face bitter; now she looked up and attempted a smile.
    “I always knew I’d lose him, naturally. He kept inventing ways it would work out for us, without hurting Rex or the girls: ways that I’d come away with him. I could go on loving him knowing it would eventually be taken away; but he couldn’t deal with that: he wanted to believe it wasn’t true.
    “We were alone together only once, on the day after he got the news of the job on the Age in Melbourne. He persuaded me to come on a day trip with him in his car—down south, to Clare. Lockhart never knew. Mike hadn’t visited the farm since he left it for good. He wouldn’t call in, because his father was still alive, then. He really hated his father, did you know? The only person I believe he ever did hate.
    “So he parked the car a mile down the road, and took me up through the bush onto the top of one of those tall hills. He wanted to show me his home, he said. He loved that valley—but he didn’t love the farm or that tedious old house. He told me once that the past used to get into his dreams at night there: bits of some life a hundred years ago that he didn’t want to know about. Clare was that sort of place, I suppose.
    “It was a beautiful spring day. We sat in the grass on top of the hill, and we could look down on the property and on those green hop fields. The wattle was out, and the peach and pear blossom; it was all quiet, the valley, but alive, with a wonderful humming. We both knew we were saying goodbye; he knew it too. The difference was that I could say it. But he went on playing his game; he couldn’t bear not to, although we both knew that was what he was doing. After a year or two, he said, when he’d got some metropolitan experience and was ready to try his luck abroad, he’d come back and get me. I told him again that I couldn’t leave Rex, however much I wanted to, but he just smiled.
    “Mike was old-fashioned, don’t you think? Growing up on that farm out there, it was as though he’d grown up in the last century. Even the books he’d read. A lonely kid, his brothers already grown up, getting a lot of things from books. He talked about a sentimental story of Kipling’s: I forget the name of it. He saw us as lovers in that story. Well, I’ll bet he’s changed a bit these days: he’s a tough nut, from what one hears. And he never married. What was it about him, Ray? There was something in him you could never know: something far away in him that made you at peace.”
    She looked past me, out the window. It was after five o‘clock now, and the shadows were long in the Quadrant.
    “He left for Melbourne the next week,” she said. “And he phoned me regularly at the shop for the next eighteen months. Then, one January, he suddenly arrived in Launceston. We met twice, alone. But only to talk: once at the house during the day, when Rex nearly caught us; once in town when we said goodbye.
    “He’d quit the Age, he said; he had references to papers in London, and he was going there to try his luck. He wanted me to come with him, just like that; to finally cut the rope and join him. He was going in a week. And of course I couldn‘t, and he knew I couldn’t: it was still the game.”
    She looked back at me, her face empty. “I’d better stop talking. I’m sorry, Ray.”
    “Don’t be,” I said.
    “That’s all gone,” she said. “But you have to find him. That’s why I wanted to see you.”
    “Find him?”
    “You could go up to Bangkok. Talk to the Australian embassy people; the journalists. No one’s doing anything.”
    She wanted to believe he was alive. Her eyes had regained their color, in the fading light: young eyes in her middle-aged face, looking at me with the hunger of hope.

4.
    I’d reached the Derwent Valley, and