A Town like Alice

even their silences were intimate.
    After breakfast, as they sat smoking cigarettes over a last cup of coffee, he said, "I've been thinking. I'm going to give up Midhurst, soon as Mrs Spears can find another manager." She listened in consternation; what was coming now? "If we could get a grazing farm for fattening, in back of Adelaide, at Mallala or Hamley Bridge or Balaklava or someplace like that, that's on the railway down from Alice Springs and not too far from the abattoir, that's what I'd like to do. I think we might be able to find a place like that only about fifty miles from the city, so as we could get in any time."
    She sat in silence for a minute; this needed careful handling. "Why do you want to do that, Joe? What's wrong with Midhurst?"
    "It's too far from anywhere," he said. "All right for a single man, perhaps, but not for a married couple. Now Adelaide's a bonza city. I'm a Queenslander, but I like Adelaide better than Brisbane. I haven't seen Sydney or Melbourne, but Adelaide's a bonza city, oh my word. It's got streets and streets of shops, and trams, and cinemas, and dance halls, and it's a pretty place, too, with hills behind and vineyards growing grapes to make the wine. We could have a bonza time if we got a farm near Adelaide."
    "But Joe," she said, "is that the sort of work you want to do? Just buying store cattle from the outback and fattening them? It sounds awfully dull to me. Are you fed up with the outback?"
    He ground his cigarette out on the floor beneath his heel. "There's places that suit single men and places that suit married people," he said. "You've got to make a change or two when you get married."
    They had the breakfast table between them, separating them much too far for their newfound intimacy; she could not deal with so serious a matter as this without touching him. "Let's go outside," she said. So they went out and found a patch of sandy grass at the head of the beach in the shade, and sat down there together. "I don't think that's right, Joe," she said slowly. "I don't think you ought to leave the outback just because we're getting married."
    He smiled at her. "The Gulf country's no place for a woman," he said. "Not unless she's been brought up and raised in the outback, and sometimes not then. I've seen some married people out from England try it, and I've never known it work. The life's too different, too hard."
    She said slowly, "I know it's very different, and very hard. I've lived in Willstown for three weeks, Joe, and so I know a bit about it." She took his hand and fondled the great scars between her own two hands. "I know what you're afraid of. You're afraid that a girl straight out from England, a girl like me, will be unhappy in the outback, Joe. You're afraid that I'll get restless and start making excuses to go and stay in the city, for the dentist, or for shopping, and things like that. You're afraid that if we start at Midhurst you'll be trying me too hard, and that our marriage will go wrong." She raised her eyes and looked at him. "That's what you're afraid of, isn't it, Joe?"
    He met her eyes. "Too right," he said. "A man hasn't got a right to try and make an English girl live in a crook place like Willstown."
    She smiled. "It isn't only English girls, Joe. Australian girls, girls born in Willstown, they run a thousand miles to get away from it."
    He grinned. "That's right. If they can't stand it, how could you?"
    "I don't know that I could," she said thoughtfully. One had to be honest. "Are all the towns in the Gulf country the same?"
    He nodded. "Normanton's a bit bigger; it's got three pubs instead of one, and it's got a church."
    There was a long silence. "I'm afraid of things, too," she said at last.
    He took her hand; he could not bear that she should be afraid of anything in the new life before them. She had been brave enough last night. "What's that?" he asked gently.
    She said, "I'm afraid of changing your job." She paused. "I can't believe that that would ever work out properly, that a man should change his work because his wife couldn't stand conditions that he could. You've been used to a property about two thousand square miles big, Joe, going off for three weeks at a time with packhorses and never going off your own land. What would a man like you do on a thousand acres?"
    He grinned weakly; she had put her finger on the spot. "Get accustomed to it pretty soon, I should think."
    "I know you'd do it," she said quietly. "You might even learn