Tim by Colleen McCullough Page B

so you must be sure to tell me if you ever feel sick, and then hang on until you get outside. All right?"
    "All right, Mary."
    After a little while Mary cleared her throat and spoke again. "Have you ever been out of the city, Tim?"
    He shook his head.
    "Why not?"
    "I dunno. I don't think there was anything Mum and Pop wanted to see outside the city."
    "And Dawnie?"
    "My Dawnie goes all over the place, she's even been to England." He made it sound as though England were just around the corner.
    "What about holidays, when you were a little boy?"
    "We always stayed at home. Mum and Pop don't like the bush, they only like the city."
    "Well, Tim, I come down to my cottage very often, and you can always come too. Perhaps later on I can take you to the desert or the Great Barrier Reef for a real holiday."
    But he wasn't paying any attention to her, for they were coming down to the Hawkesbury River, and the view was magnificent.
    "Oh, isn't it lovely?" he exclaimed, wriggling on the seat and gripping his hands together convulsively the way he always did when he was moved or upset.
    Mary was oblivious of everything except a sudden pain, a pain so new and alien that she had no real idea why she should feel it. The poor, sad fellow! Somehow events had conspired to stunt his every avenue of expansion and mental growth. His parents cared for him very much, but their lives were narrow and their horizons restricted to the Sydney skyline. In all justice she could not find it in her heart to blame them for not realizing that Tim could never hope to get as much out of their kind of life as they did themselves. It had simply never occurred to them to wonder whether he was truly happy or not, because he was happy. But could he perhaps be happier still? What would he be like if he were freed from the chain of their routine, permitted to stretch his legs a little?
    It was so difficult to draw all the threads of her feeling for him together: one moment she thought of him as a small child, the next moment his physical magnificence would remind her that he was a man grown. And it was so hard for her to feel at all, when it was so long since she had done more than merely exist. She possessed no built-in emotional gauge whereby she could distinguish pity from love, anger from protectiveness. She and Tim were like a wierdly juxtaposed Svengali and Trilby: the mindless it was that mesmerized the mind.
    Since first seeing Tim all those weeks ago she had confined herself to action, had kept herself mentally out and about, doing things. She had never allowed herself to sit in the quiet withdrawal of private contemplation, for by nature she was not given to probing how and why and what she felt. Even now she would not do it, would not pull herself far enough away from the center of her pain to come to grips with the cause of it.
    The cottage had no neighbors closer than two miles, for the area was not yet "developed." The only road was atrocious, no more than an earthen track through the eucalyptus forest; when it rained mud made it impassable and when it didn't rain the dust rose in vast, billowing clouds that settled on the vegetation nearest to the road, petrifying it into spindling brown skeletons. The ruts, ridges, and potholes in the road itself imperiled the stoutest car so severely that there were few people willing to risk the inconvenience and discomfort for the sake of isolation.
    Mary's property was quite large for the area, some twenty acres; she had bought it with an eye toward the future, knowing that the cancerous encroachment of the city would eventually lead to development and fantastic profits. Until such time, it suited her love of solitude very well.
    A track diving into the trees indicated the beginning of Mary's land; she swung the car off the road and put it over the track, which continued for about a half a mile through the beautiful, aromatic bush, virgin and unspoiled. At the end of the track lay a big clearing which opened on its