Solomon's Song (24 page)

Hinetitama smiles wistfully as Hawk talks, then she sighs and says, ‘Let it be, Uncle. Let them think of me like what you said. I could sing too,’ she repeats. ‘It was the one thing I done good.’

She attempts to sit up, struggling to get her head off the pillow, but she lacks the strength and Hawk calls to a nun for help. The nun brings Hinetitama to a seated position in the bed and continues to prop her upright as there are no pillows with which to do so.

‘What is it, dearie?’ the nun asks.

Hinetitama doesn’t reply and Hawk watches as she slowly brings her hand up to her neck, her trembling fingers plucking at the skin, searching for the chain which hangs about it. Finally she locates it and pulls at it to reveal Tommo’s little green Tiki from under her nightdress.

‘Take it, give it to the boy. Gawd knows it’s done me no good, but it’s kept me alive, I suppose that’s something, eh? Maybe it’ll do the same for him. I wore it ’cause me daddy left it to me, but a Tiki is not a thing for a woman to wear.’ She touches the little green idol. ‘Take it off, Sister,’ then looking up at Hawk she repeats, ‘Give it to the boy. Tell him it were his grandfather’s and now it’s his own good luck.’ Now, standing in Spring Street amongst the cheering crowd waiting for Ben’s platoon to march past, Hawk decides not to tell Victoria about finding her mother. The gift of the Tiki amulet has taken place two days before the parade by special permission of Ben’s company commander Major Sayers. Ben is expecting to return to Tasmania to rejoin his regiment as soon as possible after the passing-out parade and they may not otherwise have been given the opportunity to say their goodbyes to him.

Ben has completed his special weapons training course which involves in the main the Vickers machine gun, but he has, as well, been trained in the machine guns of the Allies, those of the Japanese, the Belgian Browning and the French Hotchkiss. He has acquitted himself well and has also during his time taken control of training a platoon at Broadmeadows and Major Sayers has made it known that he is most reluctant to lose him.

‘It was your grandfather’s, Ben,’ Hawk says hesitantly, not knowing how Ben will take the gift of the Tiki, perhaps thinking it is a piece of jewellery a milksop might wear. ‘I want you to wear it and never take it off.’ He doesn’t explain any further and Ben, somewhat bemused, puts the Tiki about his neck.

‘Dunno if they’ll allow me to wear it, Grandpa,’ he says a little sheepishly.

Victoria laughs at her brother’s apparent chagrin. ‘Oh, but it’s so handsome!’ She steps closer to her brother and takes the Tiki in her hand. ‘It’s a fat little man, such a pretty green colour too.’

‘It’s the Maori God, Tiki, the creator of life and, as he is said to have created all life, he is opposed to killing. It was given to Tommo by the tohunga, the Maori priests, who first asked the permission of the ancestors, it will protect you,’ Hawk says.

‘I should so like one just like it,’ she exclaims. ‘If it belonged to our grandfather it’s bound to be good luck, you must wear it always, Ben!’

Hawk laughs. ‘It is not an amulet to be worn by a woman, Victoria. Tiki is sometimes thought to be the creation of Tane, a female God, who some say was the real creator of life and that Tiki is the male,’ he clears his throat, ‘er… penis.’

Victoria blushes, but then quickly recovers. ‘So that’s where all the trouble started, is it?’

Now holding Victoria’s hand in the crowd, Hawk thinks back on Victoria’s innocent remark that the Tiki was bound to bring good luck. Good luck was never a commodity in abundance in Tommo’s life, nor in his own, for that matter. With the melancholy he feels at Ben’s leaving he begins to reflect on how almost everything he seems to have attempted has, in some way or another, failed or, at the very least, been a source of bitter disappointment to him. He has tried to be a good and honest man, yet those he loved the most he seems to have let down.

He thinks about his beloved twin, Tommo, and of his failure to rescue him when he returned from the Wilderness, tormented, mistrustful and broken in spirit. A fourteen-year-old drunk, mortally afraid of the mongrels, the spectre of whom continued to haunt him all his life, until finally he chopped off their collective heads in one horrific incident when he avenged the death of Maggie Pye.

With Hinetitama’s proxy votes now in his possession, this one thing at least Hawk thinks he may be able to rectify. That is, if he should live sufficiently long to train Victoria to take control of Solomon & Teekleman, with Ben there to support her against Joshua, who has always believed that he will inherit the vast conglomerate.

A sense of overwhelming panic suddenly grips him. If Ben does not return what will happen to his beloved granddaughter, Victoria? She has none of the cunning or the guile or even the knowledge to survive against Hannah Solomon’s rapacious descendants.

Hawk knows with a deep certainty that David’s side, even with the evil old man gone, will somehow contrive to crush Victoria, to steal what Mary Abacus and he have left her. Hawk can barely embrace the thought of this final failure. He suddenly feels older, much older, than the seventy-three years he has lived. His free hand moves to the inside pocket of his linen jacket and his fingers touch Hinetitama’s last will and testament. ‘Oh God, please let me be doing the right thing this time,’ he groans to himself.

Ben’s platoon is suddenly upon them and Victoria squeals with delight when Ben, instead of his head and eyes directed to the right in a salute to the general, has turned them towards Victoria and Hawk. And, while his hand has been brought up to slap his rifle stock in the traditional salute, his thumb wiggles in a gesture of recognition and there is a great grin on his gob.

A month after the parade they will go down to Port Melbourne to see him sailing off to King George Sound at Albany, Western Australia, prior to departing overseas in a convoy, but Victoria will ever remember this moment with the band playing ‘Sons of Australia’ and her brother’s thumb saluting them.

Victoria delights in the sight of her brother, the ever cheerful, ever optimistic Ben, marching off to war to put the Germans in their place. She is suddenly aware of being lifted, as Hawk, ignoring propriety, grips her under the arms and raises her high above the crowd so that she might be clearly seen by her darling brother.

After the passing-out parade they are unable to find a hansom cab or, an even rarer commodity, a motor-driven taxi cab, and so return home in the tram where they are packed like sardines in a can with weary folk, their damp clothes steaming in the hot tramcar, carrying sleeping children, returning from the parade. Hawk must bend his head awkwardly to avoid bumping it against the roof and he is grateful when at last they arrive at their stop and are able to walk the short distance to their home.

Victoria, who has hardly spoken a word on the short walk home from the tram stop, pleads a headache from the passing-out parade and goes directly to her room. After the excitement of the parade she is suddenly deeply depressed at the prospect of losing her brother without knowing when or whether she will ever see him again.

A short while later, Hawk, thinking to ask her if she’d care for a cup of tea, pauses at her bedroom door and then turns back at the sound of the broken-hearted sobbing coming from within. Somewhat heavy-hearted himself he retires to his study where shortly afterwards Martha Billings, his housekeeper, comes to inform him that a lad has arrived from the hospice and presents him with the letter the boy has delivered.

‘Will there be a reply? Shall I keep the boy waitin’, sir?’ she asks.

Hawk nods, tearing open the envelope absently. ‘Make him a sandwich, Mrs Billings, and give him a cuppa tea. If he’s the same lad as before he’ll take some filling, he’s a lanky lad but thin as a rake.’

‘They all looks the same ter me, dirty, smelly and cheeky and always bleedin’ ‘ungry!’ Mrs Billings says. Then ignoring the fact that Hawk is now reading the letter she continues, ‘Will you and Miss Victoria be in to tea?’ Again she doesn’t wait for a reply. ‘There’s only cold cuts, mind. What with all them going off in the parade, Mr McCarthy’s son, Johnny, like our Ben, is also off to fight the Germans. So, without so much as by your leave, he closes the butcher shop and trots off in his Sunday best to see him march in front o’ the bloomin’ Governor hisself.’

‘That’s all right, Mrs Billings, cold cuts with a bit of mustard pickle will be just fine.’

‘It’s not my fault you ain’t got a nice roast tonight. Wait ’til I see ‘im, I’ll give him a piece o’ me mind!’

Hawk completes reading the letter and looks up at the old family retainer he inherited from Mary and then from Ann Solomon. Martha Billings is one of the many children Mary rescued from the orphan school and employed. Although young Billings was no different to most of them, hungry with a cough and perpetually running nose, Mary started her in the home and not the brewery. She commenced her employment as a scullery maid and finally, when Mrs Briggs passed on, took over as Hawk’s cook. A year later Ann died and Hawk, who could not bear to remain in Hobart with the Potato Factory no longer under his control, brought the plump and perpetually prattling, always complaining Mrs Billings as cook and housekeeper to Melbourne.

As far as Hawk knew Martha Billings had always been a spinster, but Mary, who refused to have a butler, insisted that a cook needed authority over the other servants, and so ought to be a Mrs. She simply expunged Mrs Briggs’ spinsterhood. Hawk assumed that Martha Billings had continued this tradition and he never questioned her about her marital status.

Over time Mrs Billings has become so accustomed to this gratuitous addition that whenever she feels sorry for herself, which is frequently, she thinks of herself as a poor widow.

At such times, the man in her imagination is Mortimer, a partner of fanciful character who combines humour, manliness, morals, conscience and kindness with generosity, intelligence and a religious conviction. All of these attributes are of such a high standard that they are well beyond the aspirations of any male who ever lived.

This proves to be a good thing, for Mrs Billings has very little admiration for the living members of the opposite sex who, as far as she is concerned, spill food on the damask table linen and walk into her parlour with mud on their boots. Both crimes are in her mind worthy of the severest whipping if not a lot worse.

Careful not to be seen as potty by her peer group she only talks about her phantasmagorical husband to Sardine, a tabby of no particular breeding, who sleeps eighteen hours a day and will only eat minced lamb and gravy or a nice bit of raw snapper. That is, if she can wheedle a fresh one out of Cox the fishmonger whom she trusts about as far as she can throw one of the sharks, the flesh of which she suspects he substitutes for blue cod.

She has lately taken up seeing a part-time clairvoyant, an Irish woman who calls herself Princess Salome, her alter ego when she’s practising her gift of ‘the sight’, but in the daily domestic answers to the name of Mrs Brigitte Maloney and works as a filleter at the fish markets.

Brigitte Maloney, alias Princess Salome, told Mrs Billings about Cox’s shark substitution and so won her trust forever. That, and the fact that Princess Salome demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter and so obviously shared her deep distrust of men. She could quite clearly imagine John the Baptist coming in from the desert, filthy dirty, his great clodhoppers traipsing dirt around the palace and spilling his food all over King Herod’s clean tablecloth. A beheading was a small price to pay in Mrs Billings’ estimation.

Mrs Billings is invited by Brigitte Maloney to a free trial seance and when asked about her marital status finds herself forced to admit to being a widow, the alternative untruth being that her husband has abandoned her, an idea which her pride will simply not permit. In no time at all she is in touch with the saintlike Mortimer.

While Mrs Billings greatly enjoys these visitations from the other world her conscience eventually demands that she confess his non-existence to Brigitte Maloney, whereupon the Princess Salome becomes quite angry with her. ‘Mrs Billings, can you not see that you were married in another life?’ Brigitte Maloney does not wait for an answer from the bemused Mrs Billings. ‘So great was your love that no other man, no matter how many lives you may live, can take your dearest Mortimer’s place. Perfect love, my dear, is what every woman desires.’ She pauses, breathing heavily. ‘And perfect love is what you’ve had!’ Now she slaps her hands hard against her cheeks, ‘You have had the love of a man who has not been tarnished by life in this mortal world!’ The thought is all at once too much for her and she abandons the voice of Princess Salome and begins to talk in her normal voice, ‘Oh me Gawd! No comin’ ‘ome pissed as a newt, no Saterdee night leg over, no chunder on the parlour carpet, no gettin’ a backhand when you done nothin’ to deserve it, no farting in bed, no gamblin’ his wages on John Wren’s pony track at Richmond, no bleedin’ fist fights!’ Then, suddenly remembering her other persona, Princess Salome turns to Mrs Billings. ‘You have had a marriage made by God in heaven itself, my dear.’

Hawk has long since ceased to listen to Mrs Billings’ prattle. His housekeeper is simply a part of the background noise. Only Victoria can tell her to hush, for it is a toss-up between Sardine the cat and the young mistress as to whom Martha Billings loves the most among the living creatures of this earth.

‘It’s not that I didn’t try, Friday is always a roast,’ Mrs Billings persists. ‘The tram, by the time it come to our stop, was that full with folks going to the parade it just sailed right past, never mind a poor soul waiting in the cold. I thinks to meself, I might go into town, try that new butcher in Lygon Street, the I-talian. Fat chance! After four trams pass me by without so much as ‘ow’s yer father, I come ‘ome bothered and all f’nothing, me basket empty as a curate’s purse. There’s no tellin’ what’s gunna happen next. Mrs Maloney from the fish markets says there’s already talk of rationing and doing without!’

Hawk, oblivious to Mrs Billings’ prattling, now says, ‘Miss Victoria is not to be disturbed. If she’s hungry she’ll get something for herself later.’ He instructs without looking up.