Swords and Crowns and Rings (59 page)

The Jackaman sisters and their husbands felt cold winds blowing all about. Under the circumstances the terms of old Clara's will, particularly in that area relating to the establishment of a shelter for destitute men in the old waterfront go-downs, seemed catastrophically improvident. All that money being dribbled away,
going out of the family
, in an absurd cause!

They made no bones about letting Dorothy know what they thought about it.

‘Mother was merely buying her way into heaven,' commented Aunt Anna, but she at once saw her mistake when an expression of mulish affront settled over the young woman's face, reminding Anna disturbingly of Clara herself.

Jack Hanna still walked miles every day looking for work. He made some fleeting social contacts, and attended some of the many free lectures in church and Masonic halls. He heard about Douglas Credit, Keynesian economics, socialism, radicalism, evolution, the truth of the Bible. It was during a lecture on the Holy Land, with lantern slides, that he realised he was really attending these free shows because of the cocoa usually passed round afterwards. The Church of England often provided biscuits and rock cakes as well. Girls handed round the cocoa, and he thought he might get friendly with one. But he never did. He got smiles, sometimes a shy word or two about the lecture or the weather or even the rock cakes. He wasn't backward. He asked two or three of them if they'd care to come out for a cup of tea; he tried hard to get up a conversation, even about the stupid lolly-tinted slides; but he had no luck.

He was not hopeless. He was just lonely. One Sunday morning, looking from his high window across the sunny, deserted streets, across the steely glass of Darling Harbour to the smoking chimneypots of Balmain, he found himself crying. He didn't know whether it was the smoke, which spoke of Sunday dinners being put on, and people who at least could sit down with other people to eat, even if the dinner was no great shakes. Or perhaps it was the church bells ringing across the water from the spires that spiked up from Balmain's cobby hills, reminding him of bells jangling through Kingsland and other towns like it, snoozing Sunday towns, like cudding cows, and the huge lovely sky over all.

Cushie's people had lived over there, in Balmain or Birchgrove, above the great dock, on some lean road carved into the hillsides, amidst Moreton Bay fig-trees, or even apple-trees.

He hadn't cried since Maida and Carlie died, except in the night, dreaming, that first year.

‘This won't do,' he thought. ‘This bloody well won't do. A man could go off his scone this way.'

So he walked out to Surry Hills to see Jerry, who was camped on his bed in his groom's cubby-hole, his teeth in a glass on the floor beside him. Jack didn't like to wake him up, but Jerry was thoroughly pleased to be wakened. He went out and bought some pies, and a slice each of khaki boiled pudding with a blob of sweet sauce on it. It was supposed to be hot, but was little more than feverish.

‘Wire in, me old Jack,' invited Jerry. The two men ate gratefully, Jerry talking enthusiastically: how he enjoyed the work, the other blokes, real decent. They called him Mac. He supposed he might never be called Nun any more. Seemed queer! His cubbyhole would be bonzer in winter, warm as toast, and not a flea. He did not see his humble service to animals as being humble. It was just wonderful luck, you wouldn't believe it. And Heenan had given him a pretty broad hint that he might be put on permanent. He'd have to have a word with them up top first.

Here Jerry lowered his voice. One of the blokes, silly mug, had been caught smoking in the loft. It was his job that Jerry might inherit.

‘You've got to think of the horses, you see,' he explained.

Jack realised then that his father had stopped smoking. He was profoundly impressed. It made him realise as other things had not how important this job was to Jerry. He felt that perhaps older people needed satisfactory jobs even more than young ones; they had narrower worlds. They needed hard edges, secure boundaries to their lives. Somehow this made Jerry seem remote: Jack had never felt this before.

He listened, grinned, joked, and all the time there was this unassuageable pain of loneliness in his heart. It wasn't a boy's loneliness any longer, but a man's. He felt he might go through life with this longing, this sensation that there was a pit inside him, never to be filled. He faced up to it, looked at it carefully: it was like a kind of haunting, as irrational and inherently terrifying. Now he knew he had seen its traces on many faces. It was what made old people withdraw into themselves, peering out suspiciously through tiny windows at the world, as the reclusive pensioners of Towser's house peered at him. It was not that they were defensive in their loneliness: it had changed them to a different kind of person, that was all.

‘Well,' he said, not to himself but to the loneliness, ‘see how you get on with me, sod you.'

For some time now George Vee had been nudging him in his gentle, off-hand way, to join the Unemployed Workers' Movement, to help in their fight against evictions particularly.

‘Just join,' said Towser. ‘Be there. Lend weight.'

‘On the principle that every little helps?' cracked Jack.

Towser said seriously, ‘It's just a kind of demonstration, you know, drawing attention to the uselessness of evictions. Some landlords can be easily intimidated. You'd be surprised.'

‘To tell you the truth,' said Jack, ‘I've no fancy for being arrested and thrown into pokey.'

Towser laughed. ‘If it came to that, there'd only be a fine, and we've got together a small fund to cover that. But mostly we can get out of the way before the police can grab us. They don't really want to get us, you know, they just want to evict families without opposition.'

Jock said belligerently, ‘A man has to do what he can. It's to do with self-respect, you understand?'

Towser laughed. ‘Watch out, Jack, or he'll mow you down with solidarity and the immortal band of brothers.'

Jack thought it over. Maybe it'd be a bit of a lark, if nothing else, and give him something to talk to Jerry about. Even though the Nun disapproved of Towser, he was strong on solidarity and sticking to your mates. So he told Jock and Towser that next time there was a picketing he'd go along with them.

In the meantime he thought he'd try a new tack to cure his loneliness. He began to hunt up girls.

The district was full of prostitutes. If you turned over a stone they'd dart in all directions like slaters. But he did not have enough money for the professionals, even at Depression prices. He went around the streets looking for amateurs, usually in couples, self-conscious and giggly. The first one he approached said, ‘No, I couldn't reelly, I reelly couldn't, I mean reelly', and hurried off hoop-backed, swinging her patent-leather handbag in agitated arcs. ‘Come
on
, Dulcie,' she called from a distance. Dulcie, tittering, shot after her. Jackie heard the first one say, ‘No, it ain't a kid, Dulcie. Use yer skull. I tell you it ain't. It's one of them freaks.'

At last he cornered a jumpy girl with a murky skin and a cast in her eye. When he spoke to her she scrambled off a few feet like a spider, looked over her shoulder apprehensively, and let out her breath. ‘Crumbs,' she said, ‘you gave me a start speaking to me so sudden. Ain't you little! My cousin Kev was one of youse. Gee he was cute. He died young but. Me name's Valda.'

She was willing, even for the five shillings he had, and talkatively led him to ‘a good place', along alleys that sunshine had not warmed for more than a century, the pavement sticky, the interstices of the clammy walls clogged with slime, and into a cleared space under the dark approaches to the Bridge. The monstrous structure reared over them like an anaconda, fuzzed here and there with clusters of spotlights where men were still working, for the Bridge was to be opened to traffic in a couple of weeks.

Valda led the way to a patch of grass she knew. She wore green woollen gloves, which she would not remove.

‘Can't, dear. I got this dermo, see? That's why I got the bullet from this sandwich place where I was working. Oh, it was a lovely place, as much as you could eat really, with crusts of loaves, and fag-ends of devon and fritz, and ham that had turned funny. Well, come on, love, I'm a bit pregnant and I don't exactly feel a box of birds.'

Whether it was the dermatitis, or the gloves, or the pregnancy, Jack found himself useless. Embracing that body was like embracing a plank with a faint firm bulge in the middle. She became bored and cross, though she tried to hide it. Her cozening servility, plus the gloves, put Jack off more than ever, and his annoyance at himself at last boiled over into a shameful contempt for her. He jumped up, put himself to rights, listening with one ear to her gabbled reassurances. It wasn't his fault...often happened...he'd be good in a minute or two...the tales she could tell.

‘Oh, shut your mouth, you silly cow,' he said roughly.

To his amazement she flew into a temper. No need to...just because...calling names...people have feelings...

He had thought a girl like her would be hardened to obscenity and abuse. And after all, ‘silly cow', what did it mean? Nothing. Then it struck him she thought she wouldn't be paid, he'd wasted her working time. As she flounced off, he ran after her and thrust the Nun's five shillings into her hand.

‘Here.'

She whirled and threw it at him. ‘Call me silly cow!' she snarled at him. He could see she was searching for some wounding epithet. He waited, knowing that it would be some reference to his dwarfism, for it always was. At last she bawled, ‘Silly cow yourself, with knobs on!'

The schoolgirl insult, her independence in throwing the money at him when she needed it so badly, seemed to him to be admirable. Skinny little solitary, with all the trouble in the world, no brains to speak of—she still valued her self-respect, and if anyone had a go at it she was ready with a kick in the shins.

Even if he could have found the coins again in the semi-darkness, he scorned to search for them. They were a monument to Valda.

Going home, he felt as cheerful as if the encounter had been as physically satisfying for him as he had intended it to be. Somehow the incident had put him to rights. He even found himself whistling.

‘You've got to laugh, eh—me old Jack?—you've got to laugh,' his father often said, and he was right. Jack wanted badly to tell him about the woolly gloves, but he thought Jerry might be shocked.

A week or so later Towser told him that a family was being evicted from a house in Newtown. The landlord was a notoriously hard nut; they had been up against him before.

‘This time we'll stay put as long as we can, really give the bastard a good go. Are you game, Jack?'

‘That damned, mildewed lot!' commented Australia. She paced around the room puffing like a chimney, bent over with a paroxysm of coughing, and angrily flicked her cigarette into the fireplace. Dorothy noticed how thin she was. Her sharp pink face was worn, her narrow sophisticated nose had a touch of the town rat about it. ‘Hell, I'll have to stop it. I'll kill myself with these blasted fags.'

‘She's very nearly an old woman,' Dorothy thought.

The following day Australia was to sail to San Francisco with her business manager. She tried, from genuine kindness, to conceal her irritation with her niece.

‘Talk, girl,' she shouted silently. ‘Say what's on your mind, and go away and let me get on with things.'

But Dorothy did not know where to start. How could she explain her fears? ‘Don't go away, Aunt Australia. Stay and help me...help me do what? Be firm with Uncle Titus. More than that. Help me not to say Yes when I want to say No. But I can't say that to her, I'm too ashamed.'

She gazed at her aunt, desiring only to see a vigorous ally who would guess what she needed and supply it.

But Australia was too tired, too impatient. She found herself speaking, more to take her attention away from the girl's anxious face than to distract Dorothy.

‘...we are extended dangerously, so I called the family together. Thank God I've retained 52 per cent, but the family has the rest. I asked them to forgo dividends for a couple of years, plough in some more capital until things looked more stable. And with one outraged, foaming voice they said they couldn't afford it. Victoria, the old humbug, fell back in her chair and limply whispered something about indigence. Reduce staff, they said, cut costs, I told them I had cut costs to the bone for more than two years, but reduce staff I would not.'

Dorothy suggested, ‘Wouldn't it help if you did?'

‘I won't do it,' said Australia shortly, looking around for her cigarette-case. ‘They're already rostered, by their own agreement. Only four days a week for the last year. Most of them have been with me for twenty or more years. There are several who worked for Grandfather Jackaman. No, I shan't reduce staff.'

‘It's good that you feel like that,' said Dorothy.

Australia smiled briefly. ‘Well, the radical newspapers have fitted all of us employers out with horns and tails, but there are plenty of firms in Sydney that have retained full staff, believe me. Austen says it's my baronial complex; that I enjoy having a thousand people dependent upon me for a stable existence. God, how I detest that man. How could Anna –?'

‘And you think you can raise finance in Philadelphia?' asked Dorothy, without interest.

Australia nodded. ‘Without risk to Jackaman's, I trust. But...well, never mind.'

She felt an objective tenderness for the girl. Poor little devil! She'd have to say something, and quickly, or the child would be here all the afternoon. ‘Now then, it's Titus worrying you, isn't it? He wants to set aside dear old Ma's dream of turning the go-downs into shelters, grab his share of the maintenance fund? Of course he does. Why on earth did silly Mother bring him in on the project?'