Three Summers (18 page)

‘
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.'

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.