Free Three Summers by Judith Clarke Page A

iniquity.
    â€˜I—’ she began, but he waved her words away.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜My Ruth won’t be in any Abortion Car,’ she told him coldly. ‘She’s got her wits about her.’
    â€˜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