Margaret May took both Ruth’s hands in hers. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Well, Ruthie, here you go.’
Ruth’s throat felt swollen, almost closed. ‘Oh, Nan,’ she said at last, swallowing hard and then leaning forward to kiss the old lady’s cheek, and Margaret May brushed the damp hair from the girl’s forehead, smoothing it gently back over the crown of her head, in long strokes, like a blessing, over and over and over. ‘Be happy,’ she said softly. ‘Be happy, Ruthie.’
Ruth nodded dumbly. ‘I’ll try,’ was all she could find to say.
Fee and Mattie came hurtling from the train. ‘Oh, it’s so lovely, your cabin!’ cried Fee. ‘It’s got a little sink, with a tiny cake of soap, like you’d find in a doll’s house – and cupboards, and a seat that turns into a bed, with sheets and a blanket and pillows—’ She was laughing with delight, and all three of them smiled and gazed at her with love, and Ruth thought how Fee was the kind of person you just hoped and hoped would always be happy and that nothing bad would ever happen to her.
The delight drained suddenly from Fee’s lovely face. ‘Oh Ruthie, you’ll forget me! You’ll have other friends, Sydney friends, and you’ll change, you’ll be all different, you won’t want me! You’ll think, How could I ever have been best friends with that dumb little crybaby Fee?’
‘Fiona Lachlan!’ said Ruth sternly.
‘Oh!’ Fee jumped back, startled at the sound of her full name, and the fierce expression on Ruth’s face. ‘What? What?’
Ruth rushed forward and held her close. ‘I’ll always be your friend, Fee! Always and always and forever!’
Fee gave a great happy sigh. ‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
A whistle blew. ‘Time’s up!’ Fred Wheeler yelled from down the platform.
Ruth flung her arms round Margaret May. ‘I want to stay with you!’ she whispered.
‘Of course you don’t,’ said Margaret May. And she released Ruth’s arms and gently turned her round again towards the train. ‘There!’ she said, and Ruth felt a firm little push, just beneath her shoulderblades. ‘In you go,’ said Margaret May.
FOR a long while she sat beside the window, watching the familiar landmarks go by: the silos and the water tower, Anderson’s dairy, the showground where the carnival came every New Year. She sat with her face pressed close against the glass that was still warm from a day’s travel across the plains, looking and looking and looking – because it was just possible that she might catch a last glimpse of him, of Tam Finn, roaming across the paddocks or wandering the narrow roads that skirted them. The train circled round Barinjii, past the highway and the crossroads where Ruth’s mother had died. ‘Bye Mum,’ she whispered. ‘I’m going but I’ll come back again.’ The wheels rumbled over the bridge, and there was the end of Starlight Lane and Skelly’s dam gleaming sullenly in the last of the light, and the Hogans’ old house on top of the hill. And there was Helen Hogan in her red dress standing in the backyard, doing nothing, staring out over Barinjiii, as if she was looking for someone, looking and looking and looking . . .
They came to the crossing gates on the Bulga Road where a slight figure in a blue shirt was standing holding a bicycle, waiting for the train to pass. He waved, and for a second, because of the blue shirt and because she’d been looking, hoping to see him, Ruth thought that it was Tam Finn. But as the train sped over the crossing she saw it was a man waiting there; that his hair was grey, and the blue shirt was more faded than Tam Finn’s had been.
It was her father. He’d ridden all the way out from town just to wave her goodbye. ‘Dad!’ she cried, and she waved and waved and her father saw her and a smile broke over his face so that Ruth could see how it was true what Nan said: how he might once have been a laughing, singing kind of boy. Then he was gone. The sun began to sink but she stayed by the window for a long time, watching the light fade away and the country outside grow unfamiliar, so that if she’d got off into the dark she wouldn’t have known the way home.
She pulled down the blind and ate the sandwiches Nan had made for her, ham and lettuce, tomatoes and bright yellow cheese, and at nine o’clock the guard came with a cup of tea. He pulled down the bed for her, said, ‘Breakfast at five tomorrow morning, sleep well,’ and then went out again. Ruth took off her skirt and blouse and hung them on the hanger in the tiny wardrobe, she put on her new dressing gown and slipped into the bathroom across the corridor. She washed her hands in her own small sink with the tiny cake of soap that Fee had admired, and crawled between the stiff cold sheets with NSW Railways printed in blue along the hem. She closed her eyes and at once fell into a strange half-sleep, full of images and dreams and the screech and rattle of the train’s speeding wheels: ‘Let me, oh, let me, help me, let me, help me,’ they sang. Skelly’s dam loomed up like a great blank gleaming eye, and she felt Nan’s firm hand against the centre of her back and heard her voice saying, ‘In you go.’
‘She pushed him in,’ the train wheels chanted down beneath her, ‘pushed him in, him in, him in—’
‘No she didn’t,’ Ruth said sleepily, and the train wheels sang, ‘Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t,’ and then, going faster, ‘Did, did, did.’
‘That’s just an old story,’ Ruth mumbled in her sleep, ‘Even Tam Finn said it was.’ And the train gave a sudden jerk, and rattled over a long bridge into the dark country on the other side where the wheels began a new song. ‘Tam Finn!’ they sang, ‘Tam Finn, Oh! Tam Finn, Tam Finn, Tam Finn!’
WHEN the old Holden reached the edge of the town, Margaret May leaned forward and said to Mattie, ‘Could you let me out here, dear? It’s a beautiful evening and I’d like to walk a little, it isn’t far to home.’
‘She’s all by herself now,’ said Fee, gazing back through the window as they drove on towards the town.
Margaret May walked on slowly. She took her time – there was no hurry, she’d prepared cold meat and salad for tea and left it in the fridge for Ray. ‘Well, she’s gone,’ she murmured to herself, and then a little further on, ‘Well, she got away.’ As she walked the sun sank down below the horizon and stars began to wink and twinkle in the pale greenish sky. A crow called mournfully across the paddocks, and by the time she reached the first streetlamp a cold wind had sprung up, and she shivered and thought, Not much left of summer now. Past the garage she turned left and, out of habit, began to walk up the long slope towards Saint Columba’s. The door was open, a soft warm light shone from inside, and Margaret May thought longingly of the little brown Virgin in her corner beneath the window, her calm, impassive face – but she had made a promise to herself in the church that morning, and it was a promise she would keep; she would not go in there again. She would never speak to him. She squared her shoulders and walked on.
From the window of the sacristy Father Joseph watched her pass and remembered again that long-ago night when he’d carried her from the hospital, and he thought that the feel of those frail baby bones in his hands had passed into his soul forever. He opened the window and called, ‘Maidie! Maidie!’ but outside in the twilight the small determined figure kept walking on. She passed beneath the streetlamp and its light shone down on her and he saw for the first time that her hair was white. He hadn’t noticed this before; he hadn’t even noticed when it had first begun to turn from brown to grey. Five minutes back, if anyone had asked him the colour of Margaret May Gower’s hair, he’d have answered unhesitatingly, ‘Brown.’ As he watched her cross the road away from him he thought, not of their long friendship or how he had betrayed her in the church this morning, or even of the possibility that she might never speak to him again, but of how unutterably strange it was that they should both have become old.
PART TWO
Happiness
one
When she graduated from the university, Ruth left Sydney to study in London. ‘London, eh?’ her dad marvelled when she’d received the grant that would take her there. ‘All that way!’
Ruth hesitated, taking in his skinny figure,
the shoulders stooped a little now beneath the old grey pullover, his mild and blameless face. ‘I could always stay and teach in Sydney,’ she began. ‘It’d be closer to you.’
Ray Gower wouldn’t have a bar of that. ‘You go,’ he’d said. ‘You go to London, Ruthie. Your nan would have wanted it.’ He rubbed his hands together and wagged his head at the wonder of it all. ‘By golly she’d have wanted it, eh?’
He was right. Ruth thought of her nan in the garden on that bright morning the Leaving Certificate results had arrived: the almost reverent way she’d held the letter, as if it was some precious object; the fierce, triumphant light in her eyes. ‘A girl like you should see the world,’ she’d declared.
Nan had died in Ruth’s first year at university. Ruth had come back home for the funeral, and all the way up in the train she’d been unable to believe that Nan had really, truly gone. It had to be a mistake, she’d decided; poor Dad had got it all wrong somehow. By the time the train was halfway to Barinjii she’d convinced herself that Nan would be there at the station to meet her, that at this very moment, as the train rolled through the flat country past Orange, Nan would be out in her garden cutting flowers for the little green vase in Ruth’s old room. But when she’d stepped out onto the platform her grandmother hadn’t been there, only her friend Fee with her new husband Mattie, and one look at their faces had been enough to tell her that her dad’s message hadn’t been any kind of mistake. It was true: Nan was gone.
Father Joseph had performed the funeral mass. He’d known Nan since she was a baby, and in the graveyard the old man had broken down, collapsing on the dusty grass, his robes spread out round him like a big child’s party dress, bawling out that special name he’d had for her, ‘Maidie! Maidie!’ He’d sounded like a child left all alone. Six months later he’d gone, too.
SO Ruth went to London, studied for her doctorate and became a teacher at the university. When she was thirty-three she’d married Joe, a teacher in the music department. They didn’t last long together; two years and she and Joe went their separate ways, amicably, even happily. When she looked back on her brief marriage, Ruth thought that neither she nor Joe had been the marrying kind. Being single suited them best; they were naturally solitary.
But there were other times, especially those nights when she woke from a dream of Barinjii so vivid that the scents of heat and dust and baking grasses seemed to fill her cold little room, when Ruth would think there might be another reason. An imprint of love had been stamped on her heart when she was a girl, an image to which no one else could ever correspond. Tam Finn, she would think, Tan Finn, Tam Finn, Tam Finn, Oh! And she would see his pale narrow face beneath the glossy black curls, the rainy grey eyes gazing into hers, and hear his voice pleading, ‘Let me, oh, help me, let me!’ She would hear the tune of the old hymn he used to sing, roaming the paddocks of Barinjii, the notes so pure they seemed to promise some perfect loveliness she hadn’t been able to grasp and might never ever find: ‘the real true thing,’ as her nan used to say.
Reading Fee’s letters from home, which always ended anxiously, ‘And are you happy, Ruthie?’ Ruth would answer that yes, she was happy. There were all kinds of happiness: she had her friends and students in London, and Fee and her godchildren back home; she loved her work – and there were so many other small perfect pleasures: a sudden unexpected snowfall in winter, long summer evenings in the garden of her small house, walks beside the river before the sun was up, mist rising from the water, a sky the colour of pearls, an old hymn floating through the doors of the Cathedral: Come down, O love divine, Seek now this heart of mine—
There were mornings when Ruth looked out from her bedroom window and felt in love with the whole world. That was happiness, surely; that was the real true thing.
Though she had had no children.
Her friend Sally Fitzgerald had no children either. ‘Do you ever wonder what a child of your own would have looked like?’ Sally asked her, one cold grey winter’s day when they were sitting in Ruth’s pretty living room drinking wine and listening to the London rain dripping down onto the sodden bushes and cold fallen leaves.
‘No,’ Ruth had answered.
‘You’re lucky then,’ said Sally. ‘I do, all the time. It’s like finding an old book with a page missing, the page that turns out to be the one you most wanted to read.’
Ruth didn’t wonder what a child of her own would have looked like because she knew. It would have been a pale-skinned child with glossy black curls and eyes that were the colour of rain. It would have been Tam Finn’s child, if he hadn’t said to her, that long-ago night in Starlight Lane, ‘Well, little schoolteacher, off you go then . . .’
‘WHAT happened to Tam Finn?’ she asked Fee on her first visit home from London. There they were again, sitting on the edge of the front verandah, swinging their bare feet in the ferns below. The house in Hopeton Street belonged to Fee and Mattie now; Fee’s parents had moved to the coast when Mr Lachlan had retired.
‘Tam Finn? No one knows really,’ said Fee. ‘He went off to Sydney ages back, just after that business with Helen Hogan’s dad.’
‘What business with Helen Hogan’s dad?’
‘Didn’t I write to you about it?’
‘No.’
‘I thought I had. That’s what kids do to you; they take away your brain cells.’ Fee settled her spine more comfortably against the verandah post. ‘Well, it wasn’t all that long after you left for Sydney the first time. The Hogans found out Helen was pregnant and Mr Hogan drove out to Fortuna and beat up Tam Finn. Harry Finn wasn’t at home but old Mrs Finn was there and they say she just stood watching, and when Mr Hogan was finished with Tam all she said was, “Now get off my property.”’
Ruth kicked angrily at the ferns.
Fee looked sideways at her friend. ‘So you never saw him down there in Sydney? Tam Finn?’
‘Of course I didn’t!’
But the thing was, for a long time down in the city, whenever she turned a corner into a new strange street, Ruth had half expected that Tam Finn might suddenly be there. He would be there, and he would walk towards her, smiling, and say, ‘Here’s Ruthie.’ Even in London, walking by the river before the sun was up, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see him come walking over the bridge, a solitary figure in the misty morning light. ‘Why should I see him down in Sydney?’ she asked Fee. ‘We hardly knew each other.’
Fee shrugged. ‘Oh, stranger things happen.’
‘So he didn’t come back here? Not once?’
‘No,’ answered Fee. ‘I don’t suppose there was any point, really. His dad died, and old Mrs Finn hated Tam. There was nothing for him here – remember how his dad left Fortuna to his cousin?’
‘You mean that time when he got chucked out of Ag School? When we were kids? You mean his dad never forgave him? Just for that?’
‘They’re hard people, the Finns. Remember old Mrs Finn? She’s still going strong, would you believe? Still living out at Fortuna, with the cousin’s family.’
There was a silence, then Fee said, ‘They shot the peacock, you know.’
‘What?’
‘The peacock, the one they used to have in the garden at Fortuna. They shot it.’
‘Tam Finn’s peacock? Why? Why did they do that?’
‘The cousin said it made too much noise.’
‘Dancer,’ whispered Ruth.
‘Was that its name?’
‘Yes.’ Ruth brushed a straggling lock of hair behind her ear. Her hand was trembling. ‘Someone told me, I don’t remember who.’
‘Ah,’ said Fee. ‘Poor old Tam Finn, eh? He lost everything.’
‘You didn’t like him back when we were kids.’
‘Well, that’s just it, we were kids; we didn’t know anything much.’
‘No,’ said Ruth, and looked down sadly into the ferns.
‘You had a bit of a crush on him, didn’t you?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. I could
tell. That last summer, before you went away.’
‘You never said anything.’
‘I never said anything because you’d never have admitted it. And you’d have been mad with me; no one likes having their crushes pointed out to them.’
It hadn’t been a crush, thought Ruth. It had been a mixture of curiosity, and fascination, and lust, all of which she’d been too young to understand – just as she’d been too young to understand that look of desolation in his eyes; it had simply frightened her, like Helen Hogan had frightened her, down by the creek in her red dress that was the colour of blood.
The funny thing was how the fascination was still there. ‘I didn’t have a crush on him,’ she said, and knew that she would never admit to that fascination, which might even be a strange kind of love, not even to her best friend, not even when they were old. She would never admit it to anyone if it couldn’t be to him.
‘What happened to Helen Hogan?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. She went off to Sydney – to have the baby, I suppose.’
‘And she never came back?’
‘Never. And neither did Kathy Ryan, remember her? She was one of Tam Finn’s girls. And Ellie Lester?’
Ruth saw them, a trio of girls: one fair, one dark, one auburn haired, like a procession of princesses in a fairy story. They’d all be middle aged now; they’d most likely be married, with other children.
‘You’re the only one of Tam Finn’s girls who came back again,’ said Fee.
‘I wasn’t one of Tam Finn’s girls!’
Almost though, thought Ruth. She’d almost been one of them.
‘Lucky you weren’t,’ said Fee, ‘seeing as the three of them disappeared. You know what I reckon?’
‘What?’
‘I reckon that if they ever drain Skelly’s dam they’re going to find bones down there. And they won’t be sheep and cattle.’
Three Summers Page 12