Three Summers Read online

  two

  By the time she was thirty, Fee had five children, all boys, all Ruth’s godchildren: Matthew and David, Mark and Louis, and, last of all, Josh.

  ‘Five boys!’ Ruth marvelled, back home for Josh’s christening, holding her new godchild in her arms. ‘So many!’

  Fee laughed and Mattie said, ‘Well, see, it’s this way: we kept on trying for a girl because we wanted to call her Ruth . . .’

  Five boys. For Fee it was a life. There was hardly time to think: it was all rush and clamour, the days filled up, they brimmed and rolled away, flowed into weeks and months and years. There were first steps and first words and first days at school, paintings on the fridge door, home-made cards with Happy Mother’s Day spelled out in glitter, wobbly clay cats and dogs along the windowsills. Before they knew it, high school had arrived: sports days and swimming carnivals, dances and girlfriends, old cars, exams, and leaving home.

  Fee was happy. You could see it in the brightness of her face and hear it in her laughing voice. Children called out to her in the street, ‘Hello, Mrs Howe!’, adults smiled; everyone loved Fee. ‘It does me good just to see you, Fee,’ Ruth’s dad would say whenever she came into the shop. And sometimes in the evenings when the boys were all in bed, she’d look up from her book or her mending or the letter she was writing to Ruth and catch Mattie gazing at her at her from across the room – ‘Little one,’ he’d whisper, and then Fee would jump up from her chair and run to him so quickly, so lightly, you’d think she was a girl.

  Walking the familiar streets of Barinjii, where nothing much had changed, crossing the playground on her way to collect the smallest child, Fee would often think of Ruth: Ruth far away in London, studying, teaching, Ruth married and then not married, single again, Ruth at forty, without a child. ‘Do you think you’ll get married again?’ Fee wrote anxiously, because sometimes she felt she couldn’t bear that Ruth should be alone. ‘Probably not,’ Ruth replied cheerfully. ‘But look, I’m happy, Fee. Honestly. There are all kinds of happiness, you know – different kinds for different people, mine is just different from yours.’

  All kinds of happiness. But Fee wanted Ruth to have really loved someone and been loved back in return, perfectly – and this someone didn’t seem to have been her husband, Joe, about whom Ruth spoke so casually you’d think he’d been only a friend. There’d been no one she’d cared about at Barinjii – but whenever Fee thought this, she’d pause, and frown – because had there been someone she didn’t know about? Had there been something going on between Ruth and Tam Finn in that last summer before Ruth went down to Sydney University? It seemed impossible: Ruth and Tam Finn! And that was the time he’d been getting around with Helen Hogan, anyway – not that two girls at once would have been a problem for him! But Ruth always looked so conscious when his name came up, even now – and she’d known the peacock’s name, which no one else had, ever. Fee remembered that day they’d got their exam results; how she’d come back from Dubbo and found Ruth on the verandah, and you could tell she’d been crying. Had that been about Tam Finn? No, thought Fee, no it couldn’t have been – because if Ruth had been seeing Tam Finn, even for a single day, surely everyone in Barinjii would have known!

  RUTH’s letters came in long blue airmail envelopes. Wavy lines, like a child’s drawing of the sea, flowed over the stamps in the right-hand corner, and a postmark which said, London, SW1.

  London. When Ruth had first told her she was going there, Fee had found it difficult to take in. London was a place you read about in books and newspapers, a place you saw in films and on the television, a place that well-off people visited when they retired. But to live there! For years and years! So that it was like your home!

  ‘Oh, I’d never think of London as home,’ Ruth said once on a visit. ‘Not proper home. Even if I stayed there forever.’

  ‘Oh don’t!’ Fee had whispered. ‘Don’t stay there forever!’

  ‘Of course I won’t! But wherever I live, I’ll always think of Barinjii as home.’

  London. The word itself had a kind of magic. Fee spoke it aloud in the quiet house when Mattie was at work and the kids at school. ‘London’, she would say softly, standing at the kitchen window, staring out over the backyard, at the old shed and the peppercorn trees and the paddocks beyond the sagging fence. She remembered the day of the exam results again, how she’d begged Ruth to open the envelope because she’d been too scared, she remembered how bright the sun had been that afternoon, glaring in through this very window, and how, when she’d snatched the blind down, Ruth had given a little jump and said, ‘Oh!’

  And then a few weeks after, Ruth had gone to Sydney and then off to London while Fee stayed at home. ‘I love it here where I’ve always been,’ she’d said to Ruth that afternoon in the kitchen. If you could go back in time, Fee wondered, if it could be that very day again, would she feel the same?

  She did love it here, of course she did.

  Only—

  Only what?

  She didn’t know.

  Ruth’s house was in a place called Pimlico. Pimlico, SW1. ‘It’s shabby,’ she wrote, ‘little narrow streets and council flats and little narrow houses. But I love it – it’s near the river and I can walk there in the mornings. And it’s close to most places: I could walk to Westminster Abbey if I wanted to marry Prince Charles, or to Buckingham Palace if I wanted to have tea with the Queen! But I guess I’ll stay single, in which case, it’s so easy to get to work from here—’

  On a rare trip to Sydney, Fee went into a big bookstore and bought a London street directory. In quiet moments back home, she’d sit out on the verandah and turn the pages to Pimlico, SW1; she’d run her finger along Lilac Street, which was Ruth’s street; then trace her route down to the river, to Westminster Abbey and the Palace; then over the pages to Bloomsbury and the university.

  ‘We can go there one day, you know,’ said Mattie, discovering her out on the verandah one summer evening, dreaming, the directory open on her lap.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘London. When the kids are all grown up.’ He grinned at her. ‘Grown up and off our hands.’

  ‘They’ll never be.’

  ‘Sooner than you think!’ He waved towards the front gate where the youngest was swinging, singing a small wordless song. ‘He’ll be off to school next year, be at university before you know it.’

  ‘Josh?’ Fee shook her head at him. ‘He’s only five.’

  ‘Before you know it,’ Mattie had repeated, hunkering down beside her, his big warm arm sliding round her shoulders, his kiss like a solid promise on her cheek.

  TIME flowed on. Ruth’s dad sold his store and settled in at the new retirement village in Dubbo; the Hogans moved further west and their old house on the hill above Skelly’s dam remained empty, the doors and windows boarded, a loose sheet of iron clattering in the wind. Fee walked down Starlight Lane one windy afternoon and remembered Helen Hogan in the playground way back in primary school telling them scary stories beneath the peppercorn trees. ‘But what if you don’t know who you really are?’ she’d chanted eerily. The words sounded so clearly in Fee’s mind that for a moment she thought Helen was behind her, right there in the lane. She swung round, but of course there was no one. How could there be? Helen had grown up and gone to Sydney long ago. Out in the paddock the wind rippled the dark water of the dam, and she remembered how Ruth had been scared to walk past that place because it was where her granddad had drowned. People still said Don Gower’s ghost walked in the paddock, the dead calf tucked beneath his arm.

  Fee’s children were all grown now. Matthew and David were married, Mark had a job in Melbourne, Louis was teaching out at Broken Hill. Josh was still at home, but that was only for a little while; at the end of summer he’d be heading off to Sydney University.

  Josh was her favourite. People said parents shouldn’t have favourites, but how could you help it, children were people, weren’t they?

  ‘Who do you love best?’ th
e boys would clamour when they were little, clustering round her, pulling at her skirt and hands. ‘Who?’

  ‘I love you all the same,’ she’d tell them.

  Josh was the only one who’d never asked. He’d come to their bedroom early, before his older brothers were awake, and stand silently next to Fee’s side of the bed. Sensing his steady gaze even through her sleep, she’d wake and see his small face, a pale glimmer in the dusky room, his big eyes fixed on hers. ‘Here I am,’ he’d say.

  He was the odd one out amongst the boys: Matthew and David were mates; the middle ones, Mark and Louis, were inseparable as twins; Josh, three years younger, was on his own. He even looked different, small and slender and dark-haired, while the others were big-boned and sturdy, ruddy-cheeked and fair. They were noisy, he was quiet, a little air of loneliness clinging round him.

  She worried about him as she’d never worried about the older boys. She slept uneasily when he went away on camps and school trips, dreaming of accidents; of drowning and snakebite and a child lost out in the bush. She’d be washing the tea things and see the bus smashed in the middle of the road. She trembled when the note arrived for camp, though she signed it anyway; you had to, you had to learn to let them go. And when the homecoming bus pulled in at the school gates and the little crowd of waiting mothers surged forward, Fee would stand at the back of them, unsmiling, her heart already cold with dread, she was so certain he wouldn’t be there. In her dreams this had happened many times: the dream bus would spill out its children and sit empty by the gates, its seats and aisles laid bare. ‘Where’s Josh?’ Fee would cry, circling round and round it, running up and down the verge, but it was obvious from the blank faces of the parents and teachers that no one had ever heard of her child.

  In the real world Josh always came safely home. Straggling down the steps behind the others, foraging in the boot for his belongings, he’d avert his eyes from his mother until that last moment when he’d turn slowly, backpack in one hand, sleeping-bag in the other, and say, ‘Well, here I am.’ These days there was a note of accusation in the words, as if he knew all about Fee’s anxious dreams and despised her for them.

  Boys were like that, of course; the older boys had been the same. As they grew bigger they were fierce for independence, mothers were an embarrassment. It had seemed funny with the others, endearing, she and Mattie had laughed about it in the privacy of their room. With Josh it was in deadly earnest, like a knife stuck into her heart. Sometimes she thought he hated her.

  Even with favourites you had to let them go. You had to let them go so they could be happy; it didn’t matter about you. Fee thought of Ruth’s nan standing on the platform of Barinjii station, watching Ruth’s train disappear down the line. She remembered how the old lady had asked to get out of the car as they reached the first streets of the town, how Fee had looked back and seen the small figure walking slowly, all by herself, forever lonely, up the same old hill.

  At seventeen, Josh was a thin gangly boy with a distant manner, who seemed older than his age. He was clever at school, wrapped up in maths and physics, chemistry. ‘Not just clever, exceptional,’ his teachers said. He was sitting for the Higher School Certificate, he’d win a scholarship to Sydney, the teachers told them, and after that he might go anywhere.

  ‘You work too hard,’ Fee said, noticing the pale mauve shadows underneath his eyes.

  ‘It’s not work, Mum,’ he answered.

  ‘What is it, then?’ she asked him, and Josh went quiet for a moment before he replied, with a deep seriousness that made his voice tremble, ‘It’s seeing, Mum, it’s learning how to see.’ His eyes shone with the discovery. And Fee remembered the way Ruth’s pen had flown over the page in the examinations; her face alight with exactly this kind of joy. ‘There are all kinds of happiness,’ her best friend had written, and this was obviously Josh’s kind. He would win his scholarship, he would go away. Perhaps one day he would be famous; he would see all the places Fee had never seen. And she would stay at home again.

  BY the middle of that summer Fee was glad he was going away. Josh, who’d never got round to having a girlfriend, had suddenly taken up with Lou Harker, a skimpy little thing, one of a large family who lived in an old weatherboard far out along the Toongi Road. People said her grandmother had been a beauty, that Harry Finn, Tam’s father, had been wild about her for a little while, and that she was the reason Tam’s mother had run away from Fortuna. People in Barinjii would say anything, Fee knew, but Lou Harker definitely had a look of the Finns about her: that blue-black crow’s wing hair, those wide-set, slatey grey eyes. She was nineteen, two years older than Josh, and he’d met her in the big newsagent’s in Dubbo, where she’d worked since she’d left school. Now he was on the bus to Dubbo every afternoon, just so he could ride back with her after work. At the weekends he simply disappeared.

  They hardly saw him. He’d won his scholarship, he was due to leave for Sydney at the end of February, but the reading lists sent on by the university lay untouched and gathering dust on the desk in his room. It seemed he’d forgotten all about seeing, Fee thought bitterly – his eyes were fixed blindly on Lou.

  ‘He’s going to throw it all away!’ she wailed to Mattie.

  Mattie was imperturbable as ever. ‘He’ll be okay.’

  ‘No, he won’t; she’s out to catch him.’

  ‘Things’ll cool off when he goes down to Sydney, you’ll see.’

  ‘They won’t, I bet,’ said Fee. She’d seen the determination in the girl’s eyes. ‘She’ll find some way to stop him.’

  ‘Josh’s got more sense than that.’

  ‘Sense! She’s got him wrapped round her little finger!’

  A week before Josh was due to leave, Mattie and Fee were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea. Apart from the teapot and their cups and saucers, the table was cleared; the dishes had been washed and put away. Josh hadn’t come home for tea. ‘He said he’d be back,’ mourned Fee, ‘he promised me.’ An image of Lou Harker’s narrow face rose up before her. ‘Don’t go,’ the girl would have whispered. ‘Stay here with me.’ Fee’s full lips compressed themselves into a thin hard line and Mattie, who was watching her, thought how in all the years they’d been married he’d never seen such a mean expression on her sweet face.

  ‘Ah, he’s young, Fee,’ he said softly.

  ‘Well, that’s just it, he’s too young, he’ll—’ she broke off, and they both looked up, because outside in the quiet summer night the front gate had squealed open and then clanged shut and footsteps were coming along the front path and up the steps onto the verandah. Two sets of footsteps! And through the open front door a girl’s voice sounded gently but very firmly, ‘It’s going to all right, Josh. Everything. I promise.’

  Who was she to promise? Fee began to get up from her chair but Mattie put a hand on her arm and she sat down again.

  The screen door rattled. The footsteps sounded louder on the polished wooden floors. Halfway across the living room they stopped. ‘Everything,’ the girl’s voice said again, and then there was a small perfect silence in which Fee and Mattie heard the unmistakable sound of a kiss. A moment later, Josh appeared in the kitchen doorway, holding tight to Lou Harker’s hand.

  Those slatey eyes took in Fee and Mattie at a glance, a glance which said, quite clearly, ‘I’m not scared of you.’ As for Josh, his face was flushed and his hair was mussed about. He didn’t beat about the bush. ‘Mum, Dad,’ he said, ‘Lou and I are getting married.’

  The silence that followed could have been one of shock, except that Fee, at least, had been expecting something like this. Marriage would be the skimpy girl’s intention, her brilliant, shining goal. It was Mattie who seemed stunned by the announcement, one big hand coming down on the table: whump! Cups rattled in their saucers, the teapot trembled. He looked at Fee, who looked – she couldn’t help herself, even though she knew it was way too early for anything to show – straight at the girl’s belly. Not that there was one: Lou Harker was thin
as a stick. ‘Straight up and down as a drink of water,’ as Fee’s grandma would have said, and Fee was granted a sudden incandescent vision of herself at seventeen, clad in white satin, smoothing a hand over the new soft swell of flesh beneath her waist. And her grandma Milly’s kind eyes smiling into hers, and her own young voice whispering, ‘Don’t tell them, all right?’ And Gran’s sweet vanished voice replying, ‘As if I’d tell.’

  Mattie had been following the direction of Fee’s gaze, and when he realised its purpose his cheeks flamed with embarrassment.

  Josh glowered at the pair of them. ‘It isn’t that,’ he snarled. ‘That’s not the reason.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ said the girl, and her lips twitched slightly, as if she found Josh’s old parents funny. She caught the boy’s eye and very slightly nodded. Go on, she was telling him.

  Josh stepped closer to the table. ‘Anyway,’ he said accusingly, ‘what about you two?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Don’t come the innocent, Dad! You know what I mean.’

  ‘Know what you mean? I haven’t got a bloody clue, mate. Speak plain!’

  ‘Twenty-first of April, 1959,’ said Josh. ‘That plain enough?’

  Mattie blinked. ‘Our wedding day,’ whispered Fee. Beneath the tablecloth she reached for his hand. She knew what was coming. The skimpy girl had made Josh merciless.

  ‘And December the nineteenth, same year?’ he went on. ‘That one sound familiar?’

  Fee and Mattie looked down at the table. December nineteenth was their first child’s birthday.

  Josh raised a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes in mock concentration. ‘Let’s see, now. April twenty-first till December nineteenth: if I’m calculating right, that’s eight months, nearly. Stork come early, did he, Dad?’

  ‘You little devil!’ Mattie jumped to his feet, one hand balled into a fist. Fee pulled him down again.

  Josh moved back a little. ‘Sorry,’ he said.