Three Summers Read Online Free

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 .’
    â€˜M’mm.’ Ruth stretched her long arms up into the shining air. ‘I didn’t.’
    â€˜You didn’t?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜But sometimes I think—’ Margaret May was quick. ‘What do you think?’
    â€˜Oh, nothing.’
    â€˜Something, or you would have said.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜What?’
    Nan smiled and repeated, ‘You’ll wake up in Sydney. You’ll love it there.’
    â€˜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