Three Summers Page 10

  The wind dropped suddenly. The air went still. Helen gathered her skirt up and examined the tear. It was a straight rip down the seam; Mum would probably be able to mend it for her, when she got in a better mood. Though that might take a while. Helen sniffed again, pushed her hair behind her ears, and looked out over the land. You got a great view from up here, you could see the whole world – their world, that was: past Skelly’s dam and Starlight Lane, over the paddocks to the green line of the creek, the little farms with their sheds and barns, and far away a great swathe of deeper green that was the beginning of the Fortuna property, its gardens and lawns and big old trees. Helen turned her head away from it; she knew she’d never get to go there, never get to see the peacock, whose name Tam wouldn’t tell her, or the famous lake where water lilies bloomed.

  Closer in was the town itself: Main Street with its shops and houses, the streets and lanes behind it, the school and the churches and the silos out by the railway line. She saw no sign of Tam Finn, but down in Main Street a small figure in a prissy blue skirt was hurrying past the post office towards Gower’s Store.

  Ruth Gower. Little Miss High-and-Mighty-Teacher’s-Pet, another one who didn’t know a thing. She’d get what was coming to her one day all right! Helen stuck her tongue out again. And yah! to her, as well.

  IN the living room of the house on Hopeton Street, Milly Lachlan was giving her granddaughter another fitting for the wedding dress. The bodice was too tight, Fee said – and round the waist as well.

  ‘Keep still now,’ Milly told her through a mouthful of pins. ‘Just this last little bit here—’

  ‘Ruth’s going tomorrow night!’ said Fee. ‘She’s really, really going!’ She shook her fair curls dazedly.

  ‘Keep still, lovie.’

  ‘But I can hardly believe it’s true! Imagine Ruth not being here!’

  ‘Ah well,’ sighed Milly. ‘These things happen; people grow up and go to other places.’

  ‘But she’s my best friend!’

  ‘Even best friends. She’ll come back on visits.’

  ‘But not for good.’

  ‘Ah well,’ sighed Milly again.

  ‘I’d be scared if it was me,’ confided Fee.

  ‘Would you, lovie?’

  ‘I like it here,’ said Fee.

  Milly smiled and pinned in the very last tuck. ‘There!’ she said. ‘You can look in the mirror now.’

  Fee picked up her satin skirts and skipped across the room. ‘Oh!’ she breathed. ‘Oh! It’s beautiful! I can’t believe it’s really me!’

  ‘It’s you, all right,’ said Milly.

  The beautiful dress fell round Fee’s young body like a river of soft light. ‘Mattie won’t know me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, he will,’ said Milly, ‘if he’s got eyes to see.’

  ‘He’s got eyes,’ smiled Fee. ‘My lovely Mattie.’ And she ran a hand down the wedding dress, across her breast, down past her waist, which wasn’t as narrow as it used to be, lingering gently on the new special place beneath the shining satin. She looked up and caught her grandmother’s smiling eyes. They grinned at each other.

  From the kitchen came the rattle of dishes and the murmur of placid conversation. Fee’s mum and dad were in there washing the dishes together, like they did every night. Mrs Lachlan washed, and Mr Lachlan dried.

  Fee stroked her tummy dreamily. ‘Don’t tell them, all right?’ she whispered to her gran. ‘We’re going to say it’s premature.’

  ‘As if I’d tell,’ said Milly.

  FATHER Joseph was out watering his tomatoes. The sun was setting, a great ball of crimson fire over the western plains. There’d been a grassfire over at Toysen’s Flat this afternoon, and the smell of smoke still drifted, mingling with the scent of water on damp green leaves. ‘Glory be to God in Heaven, Peace to those who love him well,’ carolled Father Joseph, and then, pausing to adjust the nozzle on his hose, he heard a faint echo of his Gloria drifting back from the paddocks beyond the fence. The sound went on and on – not an echo then, but someone out there, whistling his hymn. Father Joseph put the hose down and went to the back gate. A lonely figure was walking along the track towards him. A man, he thought at first, but as the whistler came closer, the slightness of his figure, and something in the way he moved, something at once fluid and uncertain, made him realise it was a boy. And then the whistling became a voice whose melancholy sweetness made the old man’s hand go to his heart.

  Glory be to God in Heaven, Peace to those who love him well—

  Father Joseph thought an angel might sing like that.

  The boy was close now, still swinging along the track, only a little way off across the tussocky grass, passing parallel to Father Joseph’s back gate. The last of the light showed a pale narrow face, the shine of blue-black hair – ‘Tam!’ called Father Joseph, because yes, it was the Finn boy. ‘Tam Finn!’

  The boy stopped singing and stood still.

  ‘Tam Finn!’ the old priest called again, but the boy made no reply.

  They were strange, the Finns. He thought of the time last Christmas when Harry Finn and his old mother had come to Mass. ‘How’s the boy?’ Father Joseph had asked them. ‘How’s Tam?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Harry Finn had replied, and then old Mrs Finn had recited, in her clipped fluting voice, ‘Tam is Tam and all alone, and evermore shall be so.’

  Daft as a brush, Father Joseph had thought.

  ‘Tam! It’s me, boy! Father Joseph! Over here!’

  This time the boy turned his head. In the fading light his eyes looked like two wicked fingermarks on the immaculate pallor of his face. He said nothing, but from his lips there came a low, savage hiss. Father Joseph felt the hate of it like a burn in his gut; he stepped back and crossed himself. The boy ran on along the track and the strange fluidity of his movements reminded the old man suddenly of a whirlwind he’d seen once, out Wilcannia way.

  And yet, as he turned in to his house, Father Joseph had the strangest feeling. It was almost a kind of guilt about the boy, as if there was something he’d missed, and kept on missing. Something he should have seen, he thought, blundering along the dark hall towards his study.

  But what? He had no idea. ‘Ah, Mammy,’ he whispered, ‘it’s a useless old thing I am these days.’ He entered the stuffy little room and reached for the light, and then stood a long while gazing round him at the clutter and a big moth dancing round the lamp, and the chair that his Maidie had sat in when she’d quarrelled with him, three weeks and two whole days ago.

  thirteen

  Ruth was packing the small suitcase that she would carry with her on the train. This time tomorrow night she’d be on the 7.20 down. She folded her new nightie and summer dressing gown, her new underwear, the clothes for her very first day in Sydney. She was placing them in layers, carefully, the nightie on the top, all ready, when all at once she stopped and sat down on the bed to cry. Which was stupid, of course, but it was all the last things, all this week, so many last things: the last time she’d catch the bus with Nan to go shopping in Dubbo; the last time she and Fee would spend a lazy Saturday afternoon together, doing nothing in particular, sitting talking on the verandah, kicking their feet in the ferns; the last time she’d walk over the paddocks to Benson’s farm to get a pot of Dad’s favourite honey for their tea.

  ‘They’re not last times,’ Nan had insisted this morning. ‘You’ll be back for Fee’s wedding, and for the holidays—’

  Oh, she was sick of hearing that, sick of it! And whatever people said, it wouldn’t be the same. She got up from the bed and stood staring down at the open suitcase, the neat folded clothes, and she felt in her heart that she honestly didn’t want to go away. She wouldn’t mind going to the teachers’ college, or even working in a bank – oh no, she wouldn’t mind. It was Nan who would hate it. Ruth picked up the new nightie and flung it on the floor. It was Nan who would hate the teachers’ college instead of university, who would hate Dubbo instead of Sydney – it was Nan who
wanted her to have this new life! And Nan wanted it for herself, not for Ruth, not really. She wanted it to make up for all the bad things in her own life: for the orphanage, and being a servant out at Fortuna, and the husband she never spoke about, who people said she’d pushed into the dam. She wanted Ruth to live the life she’d never had, the life where you might find the real true thing.

  But Ruth didn’t want to live someone else’s dreams. She wanted her own. And she wanted all the old familiar things: this room with its shabby furniture, this house, the verandah where she sat on summer evenings, Nan’s beautiful garden. She didn’t want to be a stranger in a huge unknown city. She wanted to be in Barinjii, walking down the main street where she knew the names of every person going by, every dog stretched out on the warm footpath, every cat on a windowsill – and where, at any moment, she might turn a corner and see Tam Finn.

  And Nan was making her leave. ‘I won’t,’ said Ruth, ‘I won’t and she can’t make me! And I’m going to tell her now!’ She slammed down the lid of the suitcase and hurried from the room, pausing on the landing for a moment, peering down into the hallway where, less than a month ago, she’d looked down and seen the letter from the university lying beneath the door. That day seemed like years ago. She was a different person now.

  Down there the hallway was in darkness except for a narrow strip of light gleaming from beneath the closed door of the living room. Dad had gone to bed an hour back; she’d heard his faint shuffly footsteps coming up the stairs, and that small soft sigh he always gave as he opened the door of his room. But Nan was still up. Nan was in that lighted room. In a moment, Ruth would go down there. ‘It’s you!’ she’d say to her, flinging open the door. ‘It’s you who wants to go, not me! It’s you who wants to have that wonderful new life!’ And then – and then Nan would turn round and look at her and there’d be that orphanage expression in her eyes, only this time Ruth would take no notice of it, she wouldn’t give in. Not this time! she vowed, running down the stairs, crossing the hall, standing still outside the closed door.

  There was no sound from inside the living room, not the faintest murmur, no click of knitting needles or the soft turning of a page. She reached for the doorknob, it felt smooth and cold in her hand. She turned it slowly, already uncertainty was creeping over her, and she opened the door so quietly her nan didn’t even hear her come in.

  Margaret May was sitting at the table reading in the way she always did: her eyes moving rapidly along the lines, her thumb and finger poised ready to turn the next page and the next, quickly, quickly, quickly! as if she feared that at any moment someone might come and snatch the book away.

  ‘Nan?’

  Nan looked up. The expression on her face was one that Ruth had never seen there before but which she recognised right away. It was panic. It was as if Nan had guessed everything that Ruth had been thinking upstairs in her room, knew every single word her granddaughter had planned to say, and now she sat waiting for the expected blow to fall, as she must have waited many times before when bad things had happened.

  ‘Ruthie,’ she said in a low flat voice. ‘Is something wrong?’ Her eyes looked blind.

  ‘No,’ said Ruth helplessly. She couldn’t say those things she’d planned. She wasn’t that kind of person. She’d be going down to Sydney after all. ‘Nothing’s wrong, Nan,’ she said. ‘I just came to say goodnight again, since it’s my very last night here.’ Her bare feet trod heavily across the carpet, she stooped and kissed the dry cheek, imagining she tasted a kind of terror there. ‘Goodnight again,’ she said softly.

  Margaret May took Ruth’s hand and held it tenderly. ‘Thank you, my Ruthie,’ she said, ‘thank you.’

  Ruth went upstairs. She picked the new nightdress up from the floor, folded it neatly and placed it back inside the suitcase, all ready for tomorrow night, all ready for the 7.20 down. She finished the rest of her packing, turned out the light and went to bed. A few minutes later she heard Nan come upstairs and walk softly down the passage to her room. Her door closed. Ruth fell asleep and woke again, suddenly, her mind filled with the image of Helen Hogan down by the creek, her red dress, the blood, her mocking voice saying, ‘Just remember that you know nothing, okay?’

  A gust of warm wind blew through the curtains and rattled at the blind, and the scents of smoke and dust and baked grasses filled the shadowy room. In Sydney there’d be different scents: the smells of streets and crowds and petrol and the sea. She got up and went to the window, staring out at the familiar buildings across the road: the dark closed fronts of the bank and the community hall, the bakery and Mr Tanner’s butcher’s shop, the post office where a single light was burning in an upstairs room, as if old Joanie Fawkes also found it difficult to get to sleep.

  A night bird called out across the paddocks – what if she never found anyone to love her down in Sydney?

  Somewhere in the street a door slammed, Bang! Then there was silence, into which the old hymn came drifting, faintly at first, so she couldn’t be quite sure she wasn’t imagining it, and then clearer and clearer, like a shadow that close up reveals itself to be a man.

  Come down, O love divine,

  Seek now this heart of mine—

  He was singing the words this time, and out there in the night the hymn sounded purer, more lovely than it had ever sounded in Father Joseph’s church on Sundays, as if each word was rimmed with the most tender love.

  Tam Finn was out there. Excitement welled in her; she didn’t hesitate. Pulling on her skirt and blouse, pushing her feet into sandals, she hardly noticed what she was doing, she was breathless, desperate to get outside before Tam Finn disappeared. When she rushed through the front door, the street was empty but the hymn drifted down it, riding in from the paddocks on that warm scented wind. She ran towards it, past the shops and houses and on into the paddocks where the moon seemed brighter, a big half moon like a bowl of shining blessings tipped over the land. As she turned into Starlight Lane Tam Finn stepped out of the grove of she-oaks, exactly as he’d done that first time. ‘Ruth,’ he said softly. ‘Here’s Ruthie.’

  She stood still, her breath so quick and loud she seemed to be almost panting, like Fee’s old dog Rusty, when he stood in the kitchen waiting while Mrs Lachlan cut up his meat. It was a wanting sort of sound, and she hated it, she couldn’t bear that it should come from her mouth. The excitement dropped from her and she looked around, hardly able to believe she’d come here, blindly, like the sleepwalker in Helen Hogan’s old story, as if another person lived inside her and did these things, a person who felt, who wanted, who went ahead without a word. One minute you were leaning on the windowsill of your old room, and the next – she turned to go back but Tam Finn reached out and placed his hands on her shoulders. ‘So you came,’ he said. ‘You know, I thought you might.’

  She looked up at him. His face was thinner and the skin around his eyes had a blueish tinge, as if he’d been ill. But perhaps it was only the moonlight, shining down on him.

  ‘So-o,’ he murmured, smiling. ‘What do you want, little Ruthie?’

  She looked away from him, down at her feet. Moonlight glittered on the buckles of her sandals and seemed to wink at her.

  ‘Here’s a girl who doesn’t know what she wants!’ said Tam Finn, and then his arms went round her and his body was all bones and sharp nagging angles and there was no comfort in it and nothing you could imagine to be love, even when he lowered his head and she felt his lips move gently against her hair. ‘She doesn’t know at all,’ whispered Tam Finn. ‘But I do, I know what this girl wants.’

  A light flashed suddenly behind them and Ruth jerked her head sideways to see. The porch light had come on in the Hogans’ house on top of the hill.

  ‘They can’t see us,’ said Tam Finn. ‘Not from up there on the hill. Not when we’re in the dark down here.’

  A small child’s voice cried out, ‘’Bonny! Here, Bonny, Bonny, Bonny! Good girl, Bonny!’ The light went out. A door slammed. Silence fell agai
n.

  Tam Finn laughed softly. ‘Good girl, Ruthie,’ he said, catching her chin in his long fingers, raising her face to him. ‘Oh, good girl!’ His grip on her body tightened, she closed her eyes and his mouth came down on hers; she felt the wetness of his lips, his tongue, and the utter strangeness of another person’s breathing turning into hers. She opened her eyes and saw his eyes, their dark rainy grey and a cloudiness beneath it like the sediment of poison at the bottom of a cup. The sediment shifted, and once again she had the impression of that other person hiding there, that frightened, importunate stranger knocking at her door.

  He drew his mouth from hers and pressed her face down against his chest. ‘Let me, ah, let me,’ he whispered hoarsely, and for a moment she thought perhaps he was saying, ‘help me,’ but all around them the trees were whispering and stirring, and the sound of her blood was rushing in her ears and she couldn’t be sure. His hand slipped beneath her skirt and there was the sudden shock of cold metal, of the snake ring against the warm flesh of her thigh. Over his shoulder she saw a strange moving glimmer on the hillside; the wind and moonlight had caught the dark water of the dam and it gleamed down at them. The sight made her gasp and pull away from him, and Tam Finn didn’t try to stop her.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said sadly, and he leaned his face against her breast for the briefest of moments, before turning to see where she was staring. ‘The dam,’ he said, ‘where they say your nan pushed your grandpa in.’

  ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, smiling his lovely smile. ‘She didn’t, Ruthie; that’s only a Barinjii tale. They’re fond of tales round here.’