Three Summers (21 page)

She swallowed. ‘All different kinds,' she repeated in a firmer, adult voice, ‘and – and no one has the right to tell anyone else which is theirs. And yours is precious, and I'm sorry if I sounded like I didn't think it was.'

‘No, it's all right,' said Josh quickly. ‘It's okay, Mum.' His eyes sought the girl's. ‘It is, isn't it, Lou?'

Lou looked at him and didn't speak. She looked at Fee. They waited for her. They waited humbly.

The girl frowned. Her eyes left their faces and travelled upwards, considering the stars.

Still they waited. Her eyes swept down from the heavens and considered them. Finally she nodded. ‘Course it's all right,' she said. ‘Anyone can lose their rag.'

Fee's fists clenched by her sides and then opened slowly again.

‘And you're right, Mrs Howe,' Lou went on. ‘There
are
all different kinds of happiness. But just because you have one kind, it doesn't mean you can't have others. We can get married and Josh can still do his work—'

‘Oh, you're right!' said Fee eagerly.

The wind was very gentle now, no more than a breeze. She noticed how the moonlight threw leaf shadows over their faces and how their bodies inclined towards each other, over the small space between. ‘You've got,' Fee began, and then swallowed, and swallowed again, ‘the real true thing,' she finished, and looked Lou Harker straight in the eye.

Lou looked back. She smiled at Fee. It was a nice smile.

Then Fee took Josh's hand gently and placed it round Lou's thin back, in which you could feel every knob in the spine. Didn't her mother ever feed her? She took Lou's hands and placed them round Josh's strong neck, where they were obviously meant to be. Then she touched each child lightly on the top of their head, urging their faces together.

‘Mum—' protested Josh, but Lou's glance slid sideways and she winked at Fee.

Fee hurried home through the Barinjii summer night. She skipped lightly down the hill and skimmed across the schoolyard where she and Ruth had played beneath the peppercorn trees. ‘But what if you don't know who you really are?' Helen Hogan's ghostly voice was taunting.

‘But I do,' retorted Fee. ‘I do know who I am. I'm a happy person, that's me.' She felt light as a feather, light as thistledown, light as a summer breeze. She felt all of sixteen.

P
ART
T
HREE

The Real
True Thing

one

Ruth woke and the girl was standing over her, motionless beside the bed. She was a skinny girl with thin limbs and big hands and feet at the end of them, like an awkward puppy that would one day grow into a big, big dog. Her pale face was heart-shaped and her eyes were like sad grey stars beneath the glossy blue-black fringe. She didn't say anything when she saw that Ruth had woken, she simply kept on standing there, and her grey eyes, so deeply familiar that they brought a sad little ache to Ruth's heart, were quite expressionless. She could have been looking at any old thing: a jug on a table, a caterpillar crawling along a leaf, a piece of meat on the butcher's slab, waiting for the knife.

Despite her skinnyness and the almost translucent pallor of her skin, the girl was young and strong.

Ruth was getting on. Last birthday she'd turned sixty. ‘
Sixty!
' her best friend Fee had exclaimed. ‘I wouldn't have believed it possible, would you? That
we
could ever be sixty!'

‘Unnatural, that's what it is,' Ruth had replied.

A SILENCE
filled the big bedroom of the house at the end of Hayfield Lane, which was all by itself and a long way from anywhere.

Ruth lay perfectly still, but you could see she was breathing. Sometimes you could be afraid to breathe, the girl thought; it had happened to her many times. Dancey, her name was. Dancey Trelawny. Helen was her birth name, the one on the forms Ruth had signed, but the girl had said she didn't like it. ‘Dancey's my
real
name,' she'd told Ruth.

Since her early retirement Ruth had cared for several children; she was what they called an ‘emergency placement', until a more permanent arrangement could be found for children who had no one. ‘Though in this case,' the social worker had said with a long thin sigh, ‘a permanent arrangement might be a long time coming.'

‘You mean?'

‘Oh, she's not violent, nothing like that,' Sandy Jimpson had said quickly, ‘just a little – strange. Quiet. She's very quiet. And she never smiles. Some people find that disconcerting.'

There was very little in Dancey Trelawny's history to make her smile, Ruth had thought. She was the child of a woman called Tammy Trelawny, a single mother with addiction problems who'd followed an American boyfriend to the States when Dancey was eleven. After a few months the boyfriend had abandoned them, a new one had come along and Dancey had run off, hitched northwards, and joined a street family in Portland. She'd stayed with them almost six months before making her way back to her mother's squat in San Francisco. They'd returned to Sydney and two weeks later Tammy Trelawny had died of an overdose. Since then Dancey had been moving between temporary placements and residential homes; twice she'd run away.

‘That's her,' Sandy Jimpson had said suddenly, pointing through the window of her office, and Ruth had looked out and seen a thin, dark-haired girl sitting by herself on a bench in the garden, so near to them that if the window had been open the girl would have heard every word. And perhaps she had, because she'd looked up at them, and that was when, across that small distance, Ruth had seen that Dancey Trelawny's eyes were that same rainy grey as Tam Finn's.

Ruth had signed the papers and taken Dancey home.

‘
YOU
were sound asleep,' Dancey said now, and her voice held a trace of incredulity, as if it was a wonder to her how anyone in the world could sleep sound.

That walk home last night must have tired me out,' ‘yawned Ruth, and was puzzled to see a sudden tide of colour spread across the girl's pale cheeks.

Dancey turned sideways and then put up a hand to hide the blush. Almost immediately she took the hand away, because what did she care if Ruth saw and wondered? Let her! What did she care about anyone? She stared sullenly at the two framed photographs which stood side by side on the chest of drawers beside the bed.

There were photographs of Ruth's grandmother and her mother. Margaret May and Polly.

There was no picture of Ruth's dad. The photograph of Margaret May as a young woman had probably been taken by her friend Father Joseph; Ruth had found it in her nan's special box after her grandmother had died.

Dancey picked it up. ‘Who's this?'

‘That's my nan. Her name was Margaret May.'

‘Margaret Ma-ay,' repeated Dancey in a singsong voice. She studied the face behind the glass, and she thought it was a face that looked out at you, straight.

‘She looks a bit like you,' she said to Ruth, though grudgingly, as if, even in saying something as ordinary as this, she might be giving a little of herself away.

‘You think so?' Ruth smiled. She sat up and threw her hair back over her shoulders, as if Dancey's remark had made her eager to start the day. It was young hair, the girl noticed. Heavy. Hardly any grey.

‘Nan was my favourite person,' said Ruth.

Dancey said nothing, and Ruth considered her stern profile, the straight forehead and elegant nose, the determined tilt of the chin. She thought how there was nothing childish in it.

Dancey put the photograph back down on the chest of drawers and said, ‘She looks brave, your nan.'

‘She was brave,' agreed Ruth, remembering Margaret May's childhood in the orphanage, the years skivvying out at
Fortuna
, the marriage of which she had never spoken. She reached for the photograph and looked into it: Nan was in her garden, sitting on the wooden bench; behind her heavy roses bloomed along the wall. ‘She had the most beautiful garden,' Ruth said softly, remembering the feel of warm sandy paths beneath her bare feet, the scents of thyme and basil, the humming of bees and the squabble of magpies, a lone cicada singing from high up in the gumtree.

‘I know a garden,' the girl whispered.

‘You do?' It was difficult to imagine where in Dancey's blighted history this garden might have been. ‘Was it in America?' Ruth asked gently.

‘America?' For a moment the girl looked bewildered, then she said, ‘Oh no, it wasn't
there
.' She touched the smooth skin of one temple, and added in a sudden rush, ‘It's got a lake with pink waterlilies, and big old trees, and—' Her voice trembled, her hand rushed to her mouth as if she'd said too much.

‘A dream garden,' said Ruth, smiling, thinking how Dan–cey's dream garden sounded like the image she'd had of Tam Finn's garden at
Fortuna
, and how, in those first lonely weeks after she'd left Barinjii, she'd dream of walking there with him.

‘It's not a dream garden,' said Dancey, as if she had to make this very clear. ‘It's real. It's
somewhere
, in a real place, only I don't know where.'

‘Perhaps you'll find it some day,' said Ruth, and then they both fell silent, as if there was some mutual agreement to leave the subject of gardens alone.

Ruth put the photograph of Margaret May back on the bedside table. ‘She'd have liked you,' she said to Dancey.

The girl's head jerked round. ‘No, she wouldn't!' For a second the grey eyes blazed at Ruth, then they swerved away. ‘And anyway, I wouldn't have wanted her to! I don't need people to like me!'

Ruth made no response. She was treading her way cautiously through the wilderness that was Dancey, seeking steady ground. The girl had only been with her for two months.

Though that was longer than she'd been anywhere. ‘And she hasn't run away!' Sandy Jimpson had exclaimed delightedly.

‘I didn't lock her up,' Ruth had replied.

A sudden breeze rattled the blind, sending a swirl of warm air into the room. A blue shirt thrown carelessly across the back of a chair fluttered for a moment and then went still. Ruth glanced at the clock and saw that it was only ten to seven.

‘Hot again,' observed Dancey, her face once more expressionless. She reached for the second photograph. It was the one of Polly which had sat on the mantelpiece in the house at Barinjii. The girl stared down at the beautiful face. ‘Who's
this
?' she whispered.

‘My mother.'

‘Your mother?' said Dancey incredulously, as if mothers should never look like that. ‘This is your
mother
?'

‘Yes.' Ruth smiled again and Dancey blurted, loud and sudden as a child, ‘Where is she?'

‘She died when I was a baby. I never saw her, not to remember, anyway.' Ruth thought of the presence she used to sense out at the crossroads in Barinjii when she was a girl, and how, even now, on the borders of sleep, she sometimes had that sweet feeling of being rocked and held.