Swords and Crowns and Rings (54 page)

‘You're doing the right thing, Cushie,' she had said, ‘I must say I have my doubts about Uncle Titus. Something rather disagreeable there. However, I shall outgrow him. But London's for me, I think.'

Already, by the time they left Sydney, Isobel was referring to the sophisticated child as
une belle laide,
born to be chic, one of those girls who set the style, become the rage. But Dorothy could see that Olwyn had thought of this long before her mother did.

That had been in 1925. And now it was 1931, and Dorothy was sitting beside the fire in what had become her own drawing-room, opposite her grandmother's unoccupied chair. Mrs Marion came in quietly, said, ‘Time you went to bed, Miss Dorothy. You'll be going out early in the morning again?'

‘Why, yes, Mrs Marion. There've never been so many people waiting as there are now.'

Her bedroom was now the French room. It was piercingly chill up there on the roof; the cold struck through the windows like lances. There was a hot-water bottle in her bed, but she could not sleep.

She had put delicate French furniture into the room, buying it cheaply at an auction room full of treasures from bankrupt estates. She wondered who had owned it, or if Ottilie had had similar furnishings. Ottilie, too, had lived here during a great Slump which almost destroyed the young colonies. Joey Jackaman would have ruthlessly cut staff, turned his older domestic servants into the street, told the others that the same fate awaited them if they didn't work longer and harder. Joey was an opportunist; he would have turned the eighties slump to his own advantage. Probably he had made Ottilie do without her carriage, chopped her dress allowance in half.

Dorothy was twenty-five and in the family was already regarded as an old maid. Only that day at luncheon Aunt Adela's ridiculous pot of a husband, retired from the Indian civil service, had bumbled at her, ‘Don't expect you to remain long in maiden blessedness, m'dear! The news will soon get around about the Mater's will.'

Aunt Adela had stabbed him with a look like a needle, and Dorothy replied neutrally, ‘Nothing can be done about Granny's will until Uncle Titus arrives from England.'

‘Oh, quite, quite,' muttered Aunt Adela's husband, and went on to talk portentously about the new firebrand in Germany, the leader of the National Socialists who, in the Reichstag elections of September 1930, had emerged as a major party, with 107 seats as against their previous dozen.

‘That Austrian blackguard will topple Hindenburg yet,' he pronounced. ‘At least the old man is an aristocrat; he has the right to the Von, you know.'

‘Say what you will about Herr Hitler,' cried Aunt Anna in her uncommonly bitter tone. ‘But what about this beast in our own State, this Lang, this Bolshevik, who has had the gall to
repudiate
!'

‘Interest on
British bonds
!' buzzed Anna.

Anna's military husband, who could turn his face red at will, turned it red: ‘And announces that he is going to do it
again,
the scoundrel!'

There was a hush at the blasphemy, broken only by the agitated tinkle of a Waterford wine-glass against Aunt Adela's gold tooth.

Dorothy, who had been abstracted and bored through the meal, looked at them closely. People of straw. She could almost see it sticking out through the nostrils of Aunt Adela's husband, as if he'd been a mummy.

She could just imagine Jackie Hanna taking him off, his bogus English accent, carefully acquired in some inferior Calcutta club, the lip, the nostrils constantly on the move as if the straw itched.

She asked, ‘Why not?'

‘Why
not
? Why not
repudiate bondholders' interest?'

Aunt Anna's husband outdid himself, turning ruby. The air was full of agitated talk, to each other, themselves, scarcely to the girl at all. Dishonour. Mother Country. All we owe. Hardly hold my head up. Bounder. Foundation of whole monetary system. Only young woman. Can't expect. We'll all be ruined. If this goes on. The newspaper. The Shop. Australia so foolish. So obstinate. Bonds. Shares. Terrible times.

‘Yes,' said Dorothy. ‘But Mr Lang is not repudiating interest payment. He is postponing it because of the slump.'

‘You know nothing about it!' snapped Aunt Adela.

‘Yes, I do,' replied her niece. ‘I read. I go to meetings. I listen.'

‘Dishonourable behaviour—shocking,' said Aunt Anna's husband. ‘The nation's name will be mud.'

‘But, Uncle Austen,' protested his niece, ‘England's name wasn't mud when she accepted Mr Hoover's moratorium on war debts. And it wasn't mud when the American government gave her reduced interest rates on her own war debts. Surely in bad times like these everyone requires negotiation? And that's what Mr Lang has asked for.'

The clatter broke out again, drowning her. Only young woman. Can't expect. Mother Country. Bounder. All be ruined. The newspaper. The Shop. Bonds. Shares. Terrible.

Aunt Anna's husband, now pale, shouted, ‘The fellow's a communist.'

‘But he isn't,' cried Dorothy. ‘The communists hate him. They say so.'

‘He's a National Socialist then, like that blighter Hitler!'

The man looked as if he were about to have a seizure, so Dorothy subsided into silence.

Aunt Adela's husband commented disparagingly on the cricket season, and gradually Uncle Austen came back on the rails. But once, in the middle of the other man's anecdote about Cartwright's rotten show in Bombay, actually when the Viceroy was present, Uncle Austen said to his wife in a hoarse whisper, ‘It's the principle of the thing, the principle!'

After that he regained his normal colour, leaning back and gazing around the table complacently. He had defended the god.

They departed immediately after luncheon, Aunt Adela skewering Dorothy with a stare hitherto reserved for sweepers.

‘Live and learn, my dear,' she uttered. ‘Dear Titus will straighten out some of
your
modern ideas.'

The manservant escorted them to their cars. When the man returned to the hall, Dorothy inquired, ‘Am I mistaken, Robert, in believing you were listening?'

‘At first purely by accident, Miss Dorothy.' His lips twitched. ‘But it was so enlightening that I...ah...lingered.'

She turned away to hide a smile. He coughed formally.

‘Excuse me, Miss Dorothy, may I ask if you have ever attended one of the Premier's public meetings?'

‘No,' said Dorothy. ‘But I'd like to. Very much. But I don't care to go alone, and so...' She shrugged.

‘There's one in Prince Alfred Park next month, Miss,' he said eagerly. ‘If it would be in order, I could escort—attend you. But we could not take the car close to the crowd. They tend to be unruly.'

‘So I imagine,' said Dorothy. ‘I'd enjoy that, Robert. Thank you for suggesting it.'

She and Robert attended several meetings. The grim disaster of the Depression became more intelligible to her, and her understanding of her grandmother's pity for its victims more complete.

Now she thought of those gaunt crowds, faces uplifted, mesmerised, as indeed she often was herself when the Premier spoke. She thought of the luncheon, her Jackaman relatives, her mother's face. As sleep eluded her, she became more and more depressed. She should not have spent so many hours that evening scratching over old memories. She dreaded having to see Titus again; that was why she was so deeply distrait.

The wind shuffled along the roof like an old man, throwing handfuls of leaves and little twigs at the windows, a lonely, lonely sound. Stars sat like apples on boughs not yet fully leafed. Just as old Joey Jackaman had modelled the exterior of his house on one he used to pass in London with his rag and bone cart, so he had had his garden planted solely with deciduous trees, like a London park. Only the go-downs, which Joey had used to warehouse his imports as they came off the jetties, retained their Malayan profile, a dense black zigzag against the dodging lights of the Harbour.

‘Those go-downs!' lamented Dorothy. ‘Oh, Granny, why did you choose me? I'm not the right person, I'm afraid.'

But she knew why. Clara had trusted her to carry out what she wanted her to do.

She got up at last and huddled in a blanket before the heater. If she was so cold, what was the state of the people in the terrace houses on the steep hillsides of Balmain? Most of the tenants were on sustenance, she had heard; electricity and gas had been disconnected. Landlords had given up trying to get rent. If they evicted these wretched people, what other tenants could they get? It was better to have the houses occupied than open to vandals and squatters, or burned down by the vigilantes now banded together to prevent evictions.

So often she had seen the scruffy children foraging for slack around the ships' coaling dumps. They even shovelled up the dust, moulding it with clay into chunks of fuel. Clara had watched them, tears in her eyes. Supplying coal to the poorer parishioners of her parish church, St Mary's, had been one of the old lady's many charities. That pig-pen, where Jackie had been—how arctic that must have been, for an old man to die!

She had thought of Jackie many times that week. It was partly because she was troubled about the will, and Uncle Titus; for when she was troubled she always longed for Jackie. But mostly it was because, from a Pitt Street tram, she had seen a dwarf in the lunchtime crowd, and had thought he was Jackie. She had jumped off the tram at the next stop, hurried back towards King Street; then knew she had lost him, and felt faint. As the crowd parted like a current, she saw him again, crossing over by Farmer's, and instantly obscured by the hips and thighs of passers-by.

Breathless, she caught up with him, touched him on the shoulder, knowing the moment she did that he was not Jackie, however changed. He turned a face stiff with displeasure. The family resemblance between dwarfs made the girl's heart thud. In consternation she stared, seeing only vaguely the aged features, large melancholy eyes. In a cultivated voice he hissed, ‘How dare you, young lady?' and she realised that he believed she had touched him for luck, as so many people had once touched Jack Hanna.

She said, ‘I beg your pardon. I thought you were a friend of mine.' But her voice was so low, his outrage so great, that he did not hear her, and moved away, rigid with dignity.

‘I'm so sorry,' she murmured again.

She longed for Jackie. He'd know what to do about Titus Jackaman, what was the best thing to do. He still seemed to her to be the most resolute and steadfast person she had ever known. She had been a witness to his early life. No one had been as well acquainted with it, not even Mr and Mrs MacNunn, for he had always put on a good face for them. But she knew. She knew how he had learnt to endure people's curiosity and silliness, their irrational antipathy, and turn the tables with a joke. She remembered his panic when he could not get work. But he had never broken, never given way, not even with those half-crazy people at the orchard above Ghinni.

She did not know why he had married; she only knew that it must have seemed to him to be the right thing to do. But even that had gone awry for Jackie. In 1929 she had read of the inquest on Maida and Carl John Hanna, and the pain she felt made her realise that the mysterious ties that trembled like electric filaments between her and Jackie were still there. For it was a pure pain, unsullied by jealousy. She felt hurt for him because she loved him, and his suffering was hers.

She had thought then, ‘I'm being sentimental, romantic. How people would laugh, even Granny maybe! First love. Never forgotten. It sounds silly, childish.'

Still, it was true. And so she turned away from old Clara's loving attempts to bring eligible young men across her path; she ignored Australia's brusque, sisterly demand: ‘Do you want to turn out a dried-up old spinster like me? It has its drawbacks, you know.'

In 1929, when firms first began to reduce staff, and the first crepitations of the world-wide Depression were heard, Clara Jackaman had organised amongst her more charitable friends a free breakfast in the Domain for the increasing numbers of workless men. Until her death, in the autumn of 1930, Clara had always managed to be sober enough to go to the Domain on her Sunday, and Dorothy accompanied her. Now it was Dorothy and Mrs Marion. They joined the small team of men and women who handed out the soup, bread, and hot coffee to those who had slept in ‘the Dom' the night before.

The previous Sunday they had had food for two hundred, and there had been nearly four hundred in the queue, frowsy, rubbing their cold arms in the first rays through the trees, yawning and shivering; some inert and defenceless, their heads drooping like those of old carthorses; some cracking jokes or being fierce and contemptuous towards the ‘do-gooders'.

‘Don't let that bother you,' Clara had said. ‘They feel like that because we've got something to give away and they've nothing. We'd be the same.'

Clara herself had once been like that. Her parents had both died in the cholera that followed the Great Famine in Ireland. She had been brought up in a Kilkenny workhouse and at fourteen sent out to Australia and indentured in Joseph Jackaman's sweatshop in George Street. There she had led the life of a slave until young James had run off with her.

When Jackie and Jerry MacNunn arrived in Sydney it was spring, curdy green leaves on the crippled plane-trees, and the evergreens glistening with sugary coal-dust. The Nun rubbed a little between thumb and finger, saying, ‘It's sharp, too. Can't do a man's lungs all that much good.'

All the way down in the train his spirits had been sinking. As he stood amidst the demented sounds of Central Station, he felt vulnerable.

‘I'm like a shelled snail,' he thought. But young Jack looked around with an awed, exhilarated glance, saying, ‘By gum, everything's so big!'

‘Wait there, Dad,' he told the Nun, and bowled up to a bobby standing statue-like near the winking Arrival Indicator to ask him where they could spend the night cheaply.