Three Summers Page 2

  ‘Some special occasion!’ Ruth had scoffed, because that was Nan all over, imagining special occasions and unknown people who would ask her to them, imagining a whole life for her, before anything was certain, making plans with such excitement you’d think that imaginary life was hers.

  Ruth stared at the skirt for a long moment, struggling to imagine that far-off special evening, the unknown room where she would dress up in this skirt and her new best blouse, stand in front of a different mirror to brush her hair, getting ready to go out. The picture wouldn’t come; she had never liked parties; Nan’s ‘special occasion’ didn’t seem like her. She touched the top button of the skirt and her hand jumped back as if the cold ivory had given off a small electric shock. But it was an image from the dream of Tam Finn that had shocked her, rushing in suddenly from that other world: how Tam Finn had laid a fingertip right in the very centre of her forehead, and it had felt exactly like this button, cold as old, old bone.

  She slid the skirt back onto the rail and closed the wardrobe. Down in the street, the dogs began to bark, first the high shrill yap of Fancy, old Mrs Tregoar’s little Pomeranian at number 81, then the deep roar of Kray, Mal Burton’s big Alsatian at number 89. ‘Shut up, you silly bugger,’ Mal was bellowing.

  Ruth’s heart seemed to freeze beneath the thin stuff of her nightie, as it did every morning when the postman came. Up at the school the teachers had told them the exam results would come either this week or the next. Today was Friday, and Ruth had given up on this week, because letters hardly ever seemed to come on Friday. Next week then, she’d told herself yesterday when Fred Fawkes had sailed right by their door. Monday, perhaps. Things took a long time to reach Barinjii and when they arrived they smelled of the Western Express, of diesel oil and tobacco smoke, of dry curled sandwiches and boredom and heat and dust.

  She crossed to the window and pulled up the blind. Fred Fawkes was cycling slowly down the footpath on their side of the street. She watched him slide two letters into Dr Tierney’s box at number 103 and then ride on past the Carver place, half vanishing in the shadows of the big trees that lined the vacant lot next door. A moment later he came into sight at the very edge of their shop and rode on so close beneath her window she could see the comb marks running in greasy ridges through his brylcreemed hair. Clack! went their letter flap and panic squeezed at her heart again, because what if it was the letter? And what if her marks weren’t good enough after all? Not even for the teachers’ college out at Dubbo?

  ‘The teachers’ college!’ Nan would sniff whenever Ruth mentioned it. ‘We can do better than that!’ How would Nan feel if Ruth couldn’t even get in there, if she had to stay in Barinjii and wear her nan’s beautiful new clothes to serve in the shop? Or to work in the bank or the Shire Council office, waiting for some boy to come along so she could get engaged like all the other girls? And that boy wouldn’t be Tam Finn, because even if she had been his type, everyone knew that Tam Finn wasn’t the marrying kind. The men from Fortuna married late, and when they did marry, it wasn’t to a Barinjii girl: the Finns married girls of their own sort, girls from the great properties further west, girls who’d never been behind a counter or made their own clothes or even stood trembling at a window, waiting for the postman to bring a letter which could change their lives.

  And that letter was lying down there in the hall; she could feel it. She ran from her room and stood at the top of the stairs, peering down over the banister, along the dark passage to the door, where a single long white envelope was lying face down on the carpet beneath the letter slot. It could be anything: an electricity bill or a rates notice or a letter from one of the shop’s suppliers, but her heart hammered wildly as she went on down the stairs because she knew, and when she reached the door she stood there for a moment, quite still, before stretching out one bare foot and turning the letter over.

  Miss Ruth Gower,

  109 Main Street,

  Barinjii, NSW

  It was the one. A thick white envelope with a crest in its corner. The crest; the one she’d first seen on the application forms Miss Austin had helped her to fill in at school: the broad-armed cross with an open book lying in its centre, the curly maned lion prancing above it, one paw raised jauntily. ‘Sidere mens eadum mutato,’ Miss Austin had read out, and then translated, ‘Though the constellation is changed, the mind is universal.’ She’d looked up at Ruth with her small bright twinkling eyes. ‘They were thinking of the great English universities when they decided on that motto, Ruth, places like Oxford and Cambridge’ – her voice had lingered on the famous names – ‘all under the northern sky, my dear. And they wanted to say that though their new university at Sydney was under a different sky, its pursuit of excellence would be the same.’

  They’d been standing at the window of the tiny shack-like library of Barinjii High, which was nothing more than a single smallish room, with shelves on three sides and one long table in the centre with a dozen chairs arranged around it. A blotchy view of Barinjii painted by the headmaster’s wife hung above the shelf of reference books; Mrs Elton had got the wheat silo on a lean, it looked as if it was about to tumble gently into Ed Howe’s timber yard. Outside the window lay a field of trampled grass where a late-winter wind was tossing dust and bits of chaff, beyond the field was an unsealed road and then miles and miles of straw-coloured paddocks beneath a high blue sky. Miss Austin had stared out across the paddocks, repeating dreamily, ‘the pursuit of excellence.’ Then she’d sighed and said, ‘That’s what life should be about, always!’ and her bright eyes had scanned Ruth’s face again. ‘Remember that, my dear. Remember it. Whatever sky’s above you.’

  Ruth snatched up the envelope and held it close against her chest. ‘Please, oh please,’ she whispered, and then slid a fingernail beneath the flap, and drew out the two thick sheets inside. Dear Miss Gower, she read, we are pleased to inform you that— ‘Oh thank you! Thank you!’ breathed Ruth, because it was all right, it must be all right because if they were pleased it surely meant she’d got the scholarship – her eyes raced on down the page and there were the longed-for words at last: ‘full scholarship’ and ‘living allowance’ and then her marks on the second page, four As and two First Class Honours, in English and History. She’d be going to Sydney!

  And Nan wouldn’t be disappointed, she wouldn’t get that bleak orphanage expression in her eyes. Ruth brushed the sheets against her lips, she kissed them. ‘Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!’ she cried again, and then went perfectly still, wanting to fix the moment in her memory forever: this Friday morning in January, 1959, standing in the shabby hallway in her old blue nightie, the crested letter clutched fast, the shaft of yellow light spilled across the faded carpet from the kitchen’s open door.

  And Tam Finn was gone. The boy from Fortuna dropped from her mind like a stone down a well, sinking beneath the deep dark water without a sound. She’d made it all up, those strange feelings about him, that sense of recognition and familiarity, it had been dreams, the stuff of long dull summer holidays – how else could it so suddenly drop away?

  ‘Nan!’ she called, rushing down the hall and through the kitchen to the back door, the letter held fast, the letter which would make everything new. She flung the door open, the light burst on her, the green of the garden, the great blue sky above. ‘Nan!’ she cried, waving the letter, waving it wildly, ‘Nan! Nan! Look! It’s come!’

  three

  When she’d come out into the garden this morning, Ruth’s nan had been seized by a wonderful idea. It was the hydrangeas – the wonderful shining blueness of them the moment she’d opened the back door, the great blooms seeming to float in the air, their rounded shapes like the billows of a picture-book sea. She’d take a big basket of them up to Saint Columba’s; she’d arrange them round the feet of the little Virgin; it would make her look like a young girl stepping out into a sunlit sea.

  Father Joseph had rescued the small wooden statue from an abandoned church out Carpina way. ‘They�
��d left her there!’ he’d exclaimed indignantly to Margaret May. ‘Can you imagine that, Maidie? The sheer bloody heartlessness of it! Leaving her stuck out there in all weathers, standing in the heat and wind and rain!’

  Left her there. The phrase had trembled in the air between them and Margaret May had remembered early mornings in the orphanage, waking up while the others were still asleep and feeling exactly like that: how she’d been left there. ‘Oh yes,’ she’d said softly, ‘I can imagine it.’

  Father Joseph had stared at her. ‘You can?’

  ‘Heartlessness,’ she’d said. ‘I can imagine that.’

  ‘Ah, Maidie,’ he’d sighed. He was an old fool sometimes but she had a kind of tenderness for him; his was one of the first faces she’d seen on earth. It was Father Joseph who’d brought her to the nuns, from the hospital – where a young girl had been forced to give her child away – and sometimes Margaret May thought she had a memory of that night, of the sulky rattling through dark country, of lying inside it looking up at a field of bright stars. There’d been a smell of tobacco and horse.

  She cut the big blooms carefully, picturing the way they’d look when she’d arranged them in the church, with the light shining down from the big window. She hummed as she worked, because these days there was a special happiness inside her at the thought of her Ruthie’s new life down in Sydney; away from the confines of Barinjii, she knew her granddaughter’s life would open like a flower. Her own life had been like a series of prisons: first the orphanage, then the skivvying at Fortuna, then Don – but none of that mattered now because Ruth would get away.

  When the basket was full, she picked a bunch of fresh basil from the herb bed and tucked it in beside the flowers. The ground in this sunny spot was dry and she filled the big green watering can and brought it back along the sandy path. Two big magpies hovered round her feet with glistening eyes, watching the water trickle down from the nozzle of the can. She took up a trowel, scooped a small depression in the earth and filled it with water. ‘There you are,’ she told them. ‘Quickly now, before it soaks away,’ and the big birds stepped forward delicately and bent their glossy heads to drink.

  Dragging the heavy can along the path had made her feel a little breathless and she sat down on the bench for a moment, one hand pressed to her heart, gazing up at the translucent sky. On mornings like this she could feel a kind of glory over the earth, a tender veil thrown down from heaven: the small breeze fluttering the leaves, the scents of thyme and lavender and basil trembling in the air, the climbing roses in full bloom, a great fall of pink and white tumbling down the warm stone wall.

  Father Joseph had built that wall for her only a few weeks after her husband Don had drowned. He’d brought the stones from the old quarry in the battered ute he’d had in those days, taking her two older boys with him for the ride. He’d laid the stones slowly, carefully, while Charlie and Vin skittered round his feet, and Margaret May had sat on this very bench nursing the baby, Ray. Father Joseph had worked in silence, never saying a word about the dead man or God’s mercy or Don finding peace at last – he’d known she couldn’t bear to hear any of that, he’d known she’d hated Don.

  ‘Nan!’

  The magpies flew up in a rush. Ruth was tearing down the path towards her, still in her old blue nightie, barefoot, hair all tangled, waving a long white envelope, and when she saw that envelope Margaret May’s old heart jumped. She stood up.

  ‘Nan! It’s come!’

  Margaret May held out her hand and took the letter gently, almost reverently. She saw the crest on the envelope, and Ruth’s shining, happy eyes, and her own eyes lit even before she’d slipped the two sheets from the envelope and read them quickly through. ‘Oh Ruthie!’ she gasped, flinging her arms round the girl’s slight body, holding her tight, and then stepping back to survey her granddaughter lovingly, every inch of her, from the crown of her head to the long toes of her bare brown dusty feet. ‘I knew you’d get it,’ she breathed. ‘I knew, I knew.’

  ‘M’mm.’ Ruth stretched her long arms up into the shining air. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘I was worried, Nan,’ the girl confided in a rush. ‘I thought I might only have imagined I’d done well. I thought I might only get enough marks to go to teachers’ college—’ ‘Teachers’ college!’

  Now that the letter had come Ruth could laugh at the disgusted expression on Nan’s face. ‘Or not even there!’ she cried. ‘I thought I might have to get a job at a bank, or stay home and help Dad in the shop.’

  Margaret May drew in a quick, sharp breath. ‘Ah no,’ she said. ‘Not you.’

  ‘It could have been me, Nan.’ There was something in her nan’s refusal to doubt her that Ruth found worrying, even disturbing. It was like a hand pressed against her chest, squeezing out the breath. She stared into her grandmother’s flushed face with a little frown. ‘I was afraid of letting you down,’ she said, and it was true, for in these long weeks of waiting the thought of Nan’s disappointment had kept waking her up in the night.

  Margaret May shook her head. ‘Letting me down, that’s not important. It’s letting yourself down that counts.’

  ‘But sometimes I think—’ Margaret May was quick. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Something, or you would have said.’

  ‘It’s—’ Ruth bit her lip and frowned. ‘Sometimes I think I don’t know what I want, not really.’ Because it had come over her, the second she ran through the kitchen door and the loveliness of the garden had burst on her like a wave, its colours and scents, its markings of sunlight and shade, the bees humming and Nan sitting there on the bench, her face turning towards her – how soon all of this would be far away, and she didn’t want it to be. It was almost like she wanted to stay. And yet she wanted to go, too. I hardly know who I am, she thought, and at once heard Helen Hogan’s nine-year-old voice saying, ‘But what if you don’t know who you really are?’

  ‘It’s like I’m half asleep sometimes, Nan,’ she confided. ‘In a sort of dream.’ She rubbed at her eyes, confused, and suddenly Tam Finn was back again, swinging across her mind like some cold, enormous bell. An image of his white face in a thicket of green leaves struck her so sharply that she hardly heard Nan saying, ‘You’ll wake up in Sydney.’

  ‘What?’

  Nan smiled and repeated, ‘You’ll wake up in Sydney. You’ll love it there.’

  ‘M’mm.’ Ruth could still see Tam Finn’s face. His grey eyes were the colour of rain. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she sighed.

  Nan sat down on the bench. She reached out her hand and pulled Ruth gently down beside her. ‘Ruthie, now listen,’ she said, ‘This place is your home and I know you love it, but here every day is the same, more or less. In Sydney, every day will bring something new!’

  ‘I like every day being the same.’

  ‘You think you do, now, but later on you might hate it, Ruthie.’ Margaret May’s voice took on a sudden vehemence, it was as if there was a fire burning down inside her, ready to burst out. ‘Waking up every morning to the same old round, day after day after day, that’s one way to live, certainly, but for some people it’s not enough, Ruthie.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Ruth doubtfully, and a scarce second later, without even meaning to, she cried out, ‘But Nan, it’s so far!’

  Margaret May’s face became stern, a fierce light gleamed in her eyes. ‘Far doesn’t matter,’ she said, looking down at the letter in her hands. She stroked the crest, running her finger along the lion’s curly mane. ‘You’re going to have such a wonderful time at the university. You’ll meet all kinds of people, people you can talk to about the things that matter—’

  ‘I can talk to Fee. We talk about things that matter.’

  ‘Of course you do. But there are other things, so many other things, Ruthie—’ Margaret May spread her hands. ‘A girl like you should see the world.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ countered Ruth.<
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  ‘That was different. Those were harder times.’ Margaret May looked out into the distance and the orphanage shadow came into her eyes. Ruth could hardly bear to think of the place where Nan had grown up, abandoned now, though you could still see it from the highway, all turrets and towers and barred windows on top of its rock-strewn hill.

  ‘See those rocks up there?’ Nan had said one afternoon when they were passing in the bus. ‘They were one of the punishments.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We had to pick those rocks up and cart them around to the back on Saturday afternoons. Big as babies some of them were, and didn’t they tear up our hands! And you know, however many we moved, there still seemed just as many next time. We said the nuns made the big girls carry them back to the front at night when we little ones were asleep.’

  ‘What did they punish you for?’

  ‘Just for being there. Because we were the children of sin.’

  ‘But it wasn’t your sin.’

  ‘It wasn’t anyone’s.’

  After the orphanage her grandmother had been been sent to Fortuna to work as a housemaid. ‘Nan, what was it like at Fortuna?’ Ruth asked now. Her voice lingered on the beautiful name; she had a longing to hear the great house described because it was Tam Finn’s house, the place where his family had lived for generations. She felt she would give a little piece of her heart to see its rooms and passages, the famous garden with its lawns and flower beds and peacock, the lake and the great English trees.

  ‘Fortuna?’ said Nan. ‘Why did you think of that place?’

  ‘No reason. I was just remembering how you went to work there. What was it like, Nan?’

  ‘I can barely remember it. A great cold kitchen, as big as our whole upstairs it was, and dark, and, oh!’ she flung her hands up in the air, ‘Rooms, Ruth! Endless hallways of them, upstairs and down, rooms, rooms, rooms, all for us girls to clean!’