Three Summers Read online

  The truth about Don Gower wasn’t hard to find. He was a sulk. Nothing ever pleased him; she’d discovered that almost right away. The first time he’d made love to her, he’d dragged himself from her body and muttered hopelessly towards the ceiling, ‘Is that all?’ He could turn anything to dust; even the birth of their first child had failed to raise a smile. ‘That him, eh?’ was all he’d said, and after he’d taken himself from the room, his footsteps echoing down the corridor of the cottage hospital, Margaret May had lain in her bed with little Charlie and she couldn’t help remembering the christening of Milly Lachlan’s first child a month back; how Frank Lachlan had stood in the church with his arm around Milly and the baby and his smile had been like melted gold.

  Don could sulk darkly for weeks. He wouldn’t answer when you spoke to him; the boys kept out of his way. ‘Dad’s in a mood,’ she’d hear them whisper, scuttling away to their rooms; it didn’t seem right that they should have to live like that. Or he’d pick a fight with one of them and then go rushing off into the night. In the early years she’d stayed awake, waiting for him to come back. Later, she slept on. She’d begun to find it hard to say his name, the name which, long ago in the kitchen at Fortuna, it had almost stopped her breath to hear.

  Don. Like a dead bell tolling.

  It had been pouring with rain, that last time he’d rushed off from the house. The creek had flooded for the first time in thirty years, all the dams were brimming – just thinking of that night made her mouth grow dry, and she almost ran past the graveyard, suddenly overcome by a childish fear that he might come back, rise up accusingly from beneath that granite slab, large with forbidding life, or quite simply walk out from behind a tree. There were nights when she couldn’t sleep for fear that someone like him might come for Ruth, some big handsome Barinjii boy who knew nothing and wanted to make sure Ruth knew nothing either. Men didn’t like it if a girl was clever, and they sensed it right away. It didn’t matter if you were tied down with a house and babies, it didn’t matter if you never had a moment to yourself, if your life was as thick and stupid as a cow bailed up in a milking pen, leg tied; they didn’t like you being clever and you had to pay. She didn’t want Ruth to pay.

  The path brought Margaret May to the back of the presbytery, where she could see Father Joseph’s bulky figure in the garden, forking the earth round his tomato plants. He was the nearest she’d ever come to having a parent, and she loved the old man, though there’d been times when he’d let her down. Like that time way back in the orphanage when she’d given up praying to the statue and complained to him about the nuns. ‘Ah, but they’re hardworking women, Maidie,’ he’d said, ‘and they have their sorrows, too.’ He’d swept the damp hair from her eyes and then laid his big hand on the top of her head where it had felt like a promise of some kind, but it wasn’t enough for her, it couldn’t make up for all the cold nights and the pinching and pushing and the sting of Sister Therese’s skinny cane.

  ‘But they’re cruel!’ she’d insisted.

  He hadn’t answered.

  ‘Father?’ she’d whispered, tugging at his sleeve. ‘Father Joseph?’

  ‘Sorrow can make us all cruel, Maidie,’ he’d said at last.

  She’d stamped her foot. ‘But they’re nuns!’

  On and on he’d gone, then, as if he’d been addressing a whole churchful of people instead of one small, unhappy girl. ‘Ah, the sorrows and the cruelties of this world, Maidie, they make us what we are. That’s why we must always try to be kind to others, see? Like the good Lord was kind.’

  ‘He wasn’t kind to me!’ she’d bawled, remembering the statue in the chapel, the endless, useless prayers.

  She’d been eight at the time. Later on, when she was fourteen, he’d found her the job at Fortuna. He’d driven her over to the property himself – his horse, she remembered suddenly, had been called Patrick. Father Joseph would have been quite young then: black hair came to mind, and ruddy cheeks, and a way he had of running up the broad stone steps of the convent, taking them two at a time.

  Now he was old, and old-fashioned too. She longed for him to share her joy at Ruth’s good fortune, but she knew he still believed that a woman’s place was in the home. He hadn’t said much when she’d told him about her hopes for the scholarship, but she suspected this might be because he’d thought Ruth hadn’t stood a chance of getting one, and she felt a little stab of anger for the way a clever girl had to prove herself over and over again.

  ‘Father!’ she called, and the old man turned and saw her and his big craggy face was like a shadowy country lit up by the sun.

  ‘Maidie?’

  She burst out with it straight away. ‘The letter’s come!’ Her voice trembled with triumph and joy. ‘Ruth’s got the scholarship! She’ll be going down to Sydney in a couple of weeks!’

  She watched his face change, the light go out of it, the furrows deepening between his brows. ‘She has?’ he said, and she could see him struggling to take it in: how a girl could have won this glittering prize and what might happen to her now. A breeze blew up and the leaves of the tomato plants swayed and a few big drops of rain fell.

  ‘It’s the greatest chance for her!’ said Margaret May.

  ‘The greatest chance?’

  ‘She’ll have a life!’

  Father Joseph sighed. He leaned forward and touched her lightly on the arm, an arm still so slender that his big fingers could easily have encircled it. ‘Margaret May,’ he said, and his use of her formal name seemed to sound a warning, ‘shall we go inside to the study then, and have a little chat?’

  THE study, dimly lit from one small window, crowded with ponderous old furniture, made her feel weak and suffocated. It was in this very room that she and Don had sat to discuss the arrangements for their wedding, and except for the layers of dust and old newspapers, it seemed unchanged. Before she could stop herself, Margaret May had taken the very chair she’d sat on all those years back, and Father Joseph had settled into his. The third, Don’s chair, was piled with books and yellowing notes and a scattering of junk mail.

  The old priest folded his hands in his lap. ‘You’ll never be letting her go to that place, Maidie?’

  Margaret May’s lips tightened. ‘You mean the university?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Of course I’ll let her go.’

  There was a silence. Father Joseph bent and flicked at a dead leaf which had attached itself to the hem of his cassock. When he straightened up again his voice was distant – she might have been any old sinner. ‘Have you considered the teachers’ college for Ruth, Margaret May? Just down the road from Dubbo there? Why, she could board during the week and come home at weekends. You’d have her by you still.’

  ‘I love Ruth more than anything in this world,’ said Margaret May. ‘You know that, Father. She’s the joy of my life, but I don’t want to limit her by having her stay with me, I don’t want to imprison her. Teachers’ college is all very well, but the university, it’s such a great chance for her!’

  ‘A chance for what?’ The last word came so fiercely that the newspapers fluttered on the empty chair and in the new silence which followed they were both aware of the shuffle of slippers outside the study, of Mrs Ryan listening at the door.

  Father Joseph cleared his throat loudly and then waited while the shuffling faded away down the hall. He said more softly, ‘It’s a sink of iniquity down there.’

  ‘Iniquity?’

  ‘Sin! That place, your university, is fit for Sodom and Gomorrah!’ He leaned towards her. ‘Only the other day I was reading how there’s teachers at that place who advocate free love! Who corrupt young minds, who think nothing of, ah, sleeping with the young girl students, of, of—’ he spluttered, struggling to get out the word, ‘ruining them, Margaret May!’ He drew a big chequered hanky from his pocket, and scrubbed at his brow, all the while staring at her angrily, eyes popping, as if in her desire for Ruth to have a life she was somehow part of this iniquity.
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br />   ‘I—’ she began, but he waved her words away.

  ‘Margaret May, do you know they have a thing down there for these poor ruined girls, a thing called the Abortion Car, and how twice a week it goes round the city, gathering them up, taking them to the doctors’ surgeries?’

  Down in Sydney, the Abortion Car had long since ceased to function, but Father Joseph had no idea of this: in his old mind its sinister black shape cruised the wicked streets of the city for all eternity.

  Colour flooded into Margaret May’s face, a tide of anger that he could only think of her clever granddaughter’s success in terms of aborted motherhood.

  ‘My Ruth won’t be in any Abortion Car,’ she told him coldly. ‘She’s got her wits about her.’

  ‘Wits mightn’t be enough.’

  His words made her flinch, brought a cold flutter of recognition to the pit of her stomach: recalling how her own wits had turned to jelly when she’d seen Don Gower standing at Fortuna’s kitchen door. ‘They’ll do to be going on with,’ she said.

  The old man shook his head and stared down at the floor. ‘She’ll lose her faith for sure,’ he said sadly.

  She ignored this. ‘I want Ruth to have a profession, Father. I want her to get the best education possible. I want her to be able to provide for herself, come what may.’

  The priest leaned back in his chair and his voice turned suddenly jovial. ‘It’s some fine fellow who’ll be coming along for your Ruth, Maidie! Some fine Catholic boy who’ll give her a home and family – and isn’t home and family enough for any good Catholic girl?’

  Margaret May felt a flicker of hatred for her old friend in his big leather chair. How could he talk like this when he knew what had gone on with her and Don? And in other families round here? He’d seen the bruises, the black, punched eyes beneath the Sunday hats – he heard confessions, didn’t he? Had his own wits been frozen over there in Ireland, long ago, when he was a poor grateful boy in the seminary? Could he never learn a new thing? With a small angry movement she turned from the sight of him and gazed through the small window at the dark side passage, thinking of her own marriage, the endless tedium: lighting the stove in the morning, crossing the dark yard to the woodpile, the copper boiling, cold washing flapping on the line, the children coming, Don and his furious silences. Closed up with him in the house: in winter the rain like a steel shutter at the windows, in summer the sun like a sword at the door. And this was the kind of existence he would wish on Ruth!

  She’d never been anywhere and yet when she was a child in the orphanage she’d look out the window at the full moon riding in the sky and felt absolutely certain that one day she’d see every marvellous place in the world, that one day she’d find the real true thing.

  As if he had read her mind, the old man rumbled, ‘Are you sure it’s not you doing all the wanting, Margaret May?’

  Wanting. With startling clarity she saw Don’s wrist, the triumphant flick of it, turning the knob of the radio away from the broadcast of Romeo and Juliet that she’d been waiting for all week, ever since she’d seen it advertised in the radio pro–gramme. They’d done the play at school, she’d loved it; she could still hear Sister Anselm reciting in her beautiful clear voice, ‘My child is yet a stranger in the world—’ How those words had struck her then, when she was young. It was how she’d felt, always – a stranger in the world.

  The night of the programme she’d got the kids to bed early – they were still little then – and settled down to listen to the radio in the kitchen. The play had got no further than Juliet begging her mother to delay the marriage, when Don had come up from the storeroom and stalked in through the door. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It – it’s a play. It’s Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘Bloody snobs’ rubbish!’

  Flick. Tinny dance music had filled the room. ‘There, that’s better,’ he’d said.

  She’d never bothered to check through the radio pro–gramme again.

  After a while you stopped wanting things. She didn’t want Ruth ever to stop wanting things.

  ‘Maidie?’ the old priest was saying.

  ‘I want Ruth to have a profession,’ she repeated stubbornly.

  He shifted in his chair, leaned forward to her again. ‘But don’t you see, Maidie, how it makes the man feel shamed when the wife has a job outside the house? People think he can’t support his wife and family, they talk.’

  ‘People will talk about anything.’

  ‘Ah—’ he spread his hands in sympathy, ‘but it makes him feel useless, Maidie.’

  ‘The more fool him!’ she cried. They glared at each other. ‘I want her to get away from all that!’

  The priest exploded. ‘Did Our Blessed Lady want to get away?’ he demanded. ‘Did Our Lady’s mother, the blessed Saint Anne, want her daughter to have a profession? And yet the angel came to Mary, uneducated as she was, and she bore a child, and wasn’t that child our dear Lord Jesus, the light of all the world?’

  Somewhere in the house the telephone was ringing. Father Joseph stopped shouting and listened. The shrilling ceased, and in the silence that followed they both heard the housekeeper’s voice saying, ‘Saint Columba’s Presbytery, Mrs Ryan speaking.’ Then there was another small silence in which they both heard footsteps approaching down the hall. A tap on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ roared Father Joseph. The door opened and Mrs Ryan’s pink face, timid as a sugar mouse, peered round.

  She frowned at Margaret May and turned towards the priest. ‘That was Mr Lester on the phone, Father.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Father Joseph impatiently. ‘Tell him I’ll call him back later, would you, Mrs Ryan?’

  ‘He wants to know if you’ve spoken to the boy.’

  Father Joseph shifted his weight in the chair. ‘Tell him I have.’

  ‘Yes, Father. And would you be wanting tea?’

  ‘Maidie?’ he asked, and Mrs Ryan gave the visitor another frown.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Margaret May.

  ‘And you, Father?’ the housekeeper persisted.

  ‘No thank you, Mrs Ryan.’

  When the door had closed behind the housekeeper Margaret May said in a low, passionate voice, ‘So this is your kindness!’

  He looked bewildered. ‘Eh?’

  ‘When I was little, at the orphanage, there was this day I told you the nuns were cruel to us—’

  ‘You were a child!’ He waved his hand dismissively, but she refused to be put off in this way.

  ‘You said sorrow makes us cruel, and that one should always try to have kindness in this world.’

  ‘You’ve a memory on you like an elephant, Maidie.’

  ‘I’m glad of it,’ she said. ‘It helps when you’re trying to work things out.’ She leaned forward. ‘So do think spoiling a young girl’s great chance in life is kindness, Father Joseph?’

  He was ready for her. ‘It’s kindness all right, Margaret May, for I’m not spoiling the girl’s chances, I’m trying to prevent her being spoiled.’

  She rose from her chair. ‘I was spoiled,’ she said bitterly. ‘I was spoiled, Father, and it wasn’t education or Sydney University that spoiled me.’ She picked up her basket and walked out of the study, straight down the hall.

  Mrs Ryan was dusting the statue of Saint Peter that stood by the front door. She glanced up avidly as Margaret May swept past.

  Father Joseph walked out of the study. ‘Margaret May!’ he called, and then more softly, ‘Maidie.’

  The old name got to her. She turned. He was standing there rubbing his hands together, and the rasp of his dry skin was the only sound in the hall. ‘The good Sisters,’ he said placatingly, ‘the ones you mentioned back in there, from the old place—’

  ‘What of them?’

  ‘Do you know where the poor souls are buried, Maidie?’

  She shook her neat head.

  ‘Way out the back of Ivanhoe, that’s where. Ah, it’s a terrible spot, Maidie! Not a tree in
sight, the wind blowing, and the dust and sand, and those big old tumbleweeds careening across the graveyard like imps loosed out from Hell. You wouldn’t wish a resting place like that on any poor soul.’

  There was something strangely beseeching in his voice, as if he wanted her pity, not for those long-dead Sisters, but for himself.

  ‘I’m sorry for them,’ said Margaret May. Glancing down at her basket, she noticed the bunch of basil still there, and held it out to Mrs Ryan. ‘It’s some fresh basil for Father Joseph’s tomatoes,’ she said.

  Sensing forgiveness, the priest’s face lit up with a smile. ‘Your basil and my tomatoes, Maidie!’ he exclaimed, rubbing his hands again. ‘A feast fit for a king!’

  Over the distance of the hallway, Margaret May looked her old friend straight in the eye. ‘My Ruthie’s going to Sydney University,’ she told him, ‘and there’s nothing you can say will change our minds!’ Her voice rang strong and confident, but as she went down the path and out through the front gate a sense of loss gathered in her heart and seemed to fill the very air she breathed, so that sudden tears came welling in her eyes.

  eight

  When Ruth arrived at Fee’s house a little after twelve there was no one at home; Fee hadn’t got back from Dubbo, and her mother was out as well. The rain was gone and the sun was blazing; her damp hair and clothes had dried but she could feel the sticky tear tracks on her cheeks. She hurried round to the garden tap to wash her face, then kicked off her sandals and sat on the edge of the verandah to wait, swinging her feet in the ferns below and humming the melody of Tam Finn’s hymn which had crept inside her head.

  Tam Finn. A small sudden sob jumped up from her throat. ‘Oh, shut up,’ she told herself angrily. He’d been teasing her, that was all. Playing with her; spreading his blue shirt on the ground to keep her from the damp, reaching his hand out, seizing her ankle and then letting her go, jumping up so she’d think he was coming after her. He hadn’t really wanted to come after her. It was – another small sob burst from her – it was humiliating. Ruth looked out along the empty street. All the way here she’d been longing to tell Fee what had happened down in Starlight Lane, but now she was glad there’d been no one at home. When you were upset and started talking to people you sometimes told them things you later wished you hadn’t: like how, when he’d taken that blue shirt off and beckoned her to lie down with him, secretly she’d wanted to, and when she was running through the rain she’d wanted him to be there right behind her, wanted him to catch her; when she’d turned and found the lane empty her heart had dropped like a stone.