When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald

she’d found Des Molyneaux, who gave her Rusty Donovan’s Adelaide address.
    Their meeting was in offices of the legal sort, dark-stained wood and worn carpets, dim leadlight windows – lowered voices, curious restrained glances – the rooms of Bruce, KC. Man and wife were intruders upon each other’s self-protection. It would be sentimental to say so, and hurtful, but Buckler wanted the best for her, and saw she might reach it without him – of necessity, if need be.
    He was in battledress. She wore a cotton skirt and a high-buttoned blouse in the way she had of cultivating plainness, arguing against beauty but vital, like the female wren. His campaign ribbons and bravery decorations, hard-won, were rendered futile in her gaze.
    â€˜Look at yourself, you big soggy dope. I’m glad your greatest admirer can’t see you; pull your guts in, you look like a generalissimo in corsets.’
    â€˜Where is he?’
    â€˜You’ll find out soon enough.’
    Buckler peered around the door, as if Colts might be lurking. The model for this meeting was married life – their reunions over the years, the arrival of Buckler late at night, the dust of Limestone Hills in every crease of his pants, Faye emerging from her bedroom wrapped in an Onkaparinga blanket, Colts stumbling from the sleep-out in his striped pyjamas. Buckler considered the whim of taking Veronica in his arms and begging forgiveness, or whatever a man did this end of a comedy situation caught with his duds down.
    He’d always liked his homecomings. Veronica, the same as Rusty, had liked his goings away, his comings back. But only if they meant to him what they meant to her. Which they couldn’t, on account of their gender. It was a goodbye kiss being male, living life to the limit as a bloke. You made a strike against yourself through the power of your truthful contradictions.
    Veronica steered him to a room made available to clients and closed the door in the face of Bruce, KC.
    â€˜Why?’ came her machine-gunned questions. ‘Why did you stop loving me? Did you ever love me at all? When did this other life start – the secrecy, the betrayal of vows? I’ve met Mrs Harris – that Rusty.’
    â€˜How did you find her?’ he challenged.
    â€˜My God, you want an assessment? As I imagined her. A bunch of American officers paying court and obviously, by the look of you, that’s a surprise.’
    They sat in Andrew Bruce’s meeting room with the fathers of the firm in various photographic poses around the walls a tribute to strong-woolled merino enterprise. The Bruces were the princely owners of Eureka Station. Their sons went to Oxford and never came back, or dawdled a few years, living on dividends garnered between dust storms and turning themselves English. The photographs alternated donkey trains and camel teams hauling wagons of teetering bales to remote railheads. Watching from a rocky outcrop, a naked black man holding a bundle of spears.
    Veronica told Buckler that although Molyneaux, formerly an acolyte, had betrayed him, Colts might still believe in him, though barely, as she thought he would soon grow out of him, according to the signs.
    Buckler smiled annoyingly, his admiration having the quality of condescension. Her short, bitter account of their travels was as vivid as one of her paintings. He was not meant to feel blessed by her, but somehow he did, bending his thinning hair to her benediction. It was combed tight to his skull with a mixture of Bay Rum, which squeezed out in gold beads of sweat.
    â€˜Without you, Kings does his own feeling about everything. You should have seen him as we went along – a boy, a stung boy. In the mornings he’s crouched over the fire with your old greatcoat dragging in the dirt. By nightfall he’s thrown it off, making himself useful. Honestly, Dunc, you’ve come close to ruining him, just by your great example. Now