The Road to Gundagai (37 page)

He seemed to have forgotten she had asked him to call her Blue. She hesitated, wondering if she should take the book upstairs or if he’d welcome company. Mr Thompson solved the dilemma by adding, ‘That’s one of Joseph’s sister’s books.’

‘She lent it to you?’

‘No. I meant she wrote it. She’s written quite a few.’

She looked at the author’s name: Felicity Mack. ‘Joseph said his sister’s name is Flinty. Has he got more than one sister?’

Mr Thompson lowered himself into his armchair. ‘He has two. Kirsty is supposed to be studying Arts at Sydney University.’

She caught the inflection. ‘Supposed to be?’

Mr Thompson grinned. He had a good grin. Blue hardly noticed the slackness of half his face now. ‘Joseph says she spends half her time at the aerodrome, learning to loop the loop. Flinty is short for Felicity, and she uses her married surname. She and Sandy didn’t marry until just after her first book was published, but she published it as Felicity Mack anyway.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘Flinty told me at the wedding breakfast she wasn’t going to let Sandy get away again. There’d be no backing out if she used his name on her book.’

Why would a woman want to marry a man who might be unwilling? ‘Did he want to back out?’

‘He was badly scarred in the war,’ said Mr Thompson briefly. He used his right hand to hold up his left one, showing a faint discoloured area across his hand and along his arm. ‘I was scarred myself when I was younger than you. An accident at a jam factory.’

The scars were hardly noticeable after so many decades. ‘Did your father own jam factories?’

The grin appeared again. ‘I was the odd-job boy. I repaired the canning machine, kept the boiler stoked. That’s where I met Matilda. She worked at the factory too. Long story and for another day,’ he added.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tire you.’

‘You haven’t.’ He was telling the truth, she thought. He looked interested. Alive. ‘I saw your elephant out by the river when I was shaving this morning. She was puffing sand all over her back. Fascinating. Does she do that often?’

‘Sometimes. I think it might be to get rid of flies. Or maybe just for fun.’

‘It was fun to watch her.’

‘Mr Thompson, do you know who is running Laurence’s factories now?’ She suddenly felt guilty. The factories had just been a source of income, something Willy would take over some day in the future, while she married, as women did. Now she knew they were places where people worked the jobs that kept their families fed. If the factories closed, those jobs would go.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know. I could find out for you, but your Mr Cummins will have all the details.’

It seemed strange to hear of ‘her’ Mr Cummins, as if she was important enough to have a solicitor. ‘I wonder if Uncle Herbert is managing them. Though he has his own business.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Your father had a brother?’

‘He’s my great-uncle really. My aunts are just my mother’s cousins too.’

‘You didn’t ask him for help?’

‘I was planning to, just before …’ Before a small boy arrived in my bedroom at midnight and dangled me out a window and down a wall, she thought. ‘… before I joined the circus. But I never knew him well. For some reason my parents never saw him much.’

‘Do you think he’d do a good job running your factories?’

‘I don’t even know enough about them to feel that they are mine. It’s been as if I had one life, and then the world turned into marshmallow for a while. And then I was with the circus, and well … life outside it was for other people, not us.’

‘A marshmallow world.’ He absent-mindedly wiped a drop of spittle from the corner of his mouth with a white handkerchief. ‘I like it. It’s what I’ve felt the last few months.’

‘You’re getting better,’ she said tentatively.

‘For what it’s worth.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘How could you? One day I was Mr Thomas Thompson, industrialist. The next day I was a cripple who could hardly speak.’

‘Perhaps I do know,’ she said quietly.

‘I’m sorry. Yes, perhaps you do.’

‘Is it interesting, running factories? Dad seemed to think so, but he was interested in everything.’

‘I think I’d have liked your father. Yes, it’s fascinating. You’d think it was just the same old thing, day after day. But there are always challenges. New markets overseas, new products. You can’t stand still in business. You need to reinvest, new machinery, new ideas —’ He stopped and looked out the window. ‘Everything I haven’t been doing for the past five months,’ he added. He looked back at her. ‘Like to come to the factory with me after lunch?’

‘Very much.’ She found that she meant it. ‘You make wireless sets, don’t you? How do you sell wireless sets overseas? I mean, people there wouldn’t even know about ones made in Australia.’

‘Find out who might be interested in selling them and write to them. Send samples. One of my biggest contracts is with the British Army. We’ve needed it the last few years, I can tell you. That contract has kept a lot of people in jobs.’

‘Unemployment is a difficult problem,’ she said tentatively.

Mr Thompson shifted in his armchair, one hand moving the other till it sat on the hand rest. ‘It’s not. It’s a simple one.’ The slurred words were easier for her to understand now. ‘People just have to be less selfish.’ He gestured at the polished wooden furniture of the room, the richly coloured rugs on the floor. ‘Most factory owners claim they can’t keep going in times like these without cutting wages. But how can a bloke live with himself if he lives in a house like this and runs two motorcars and then cuts the wages?’

‘But you still live in a house like this.’

He gave her his half grin. ‘Didn’t cut the wages though. Cut the price of wireless sets and phonographs — we make phonographs too. Profit isn’t as high with lower prices, but we sell three times as many, which means we employ three times as many men too. Five times, as some of them are on three-quarter time. And we only run one car now, not two.’ He wiped another bit of spittle from his chin. ‘Andy McAlpine runs a flashier car than we do. Buys a new one every two years.’

‘But you can’t employ everyone.’

‘Not even close. There are men knocking on the factory door every day looking for work. Matilda’s set up a camp for the unemployed down the river, out of town. Better than those susso camps near the coast, but it’s still pretty rough. At least we give them proper building material for their huts, not just hessian and kerosene cans. Matilda’s set up a lavatory block, proper pit dunnies and showers. There’s a school and a teacher.’

‘You’re good people,’ said Blue softly.

‘Are we? Sometimes what you don’t do feels heavier than what you do. Our boys go to a good boarding school, not a one-teacher shack. There’s always more needed.’

‘And you made yourself ill trying to do it,’ said Blue shrewdly.

He gave another half grin at that. ‘That’s what Matilda says. But she won’t stop either. Got the local chicken keepers to form a union — they were only getting sixpence a dozen for their eggs before, but now it’s one and three, and two and six for a plucked chicken. Every house in the district has a vegetable garden now, or she wants to know why.’

‘People don’t object to being told what to do?’

He laughed, holding his hanky to his mouth to stop the spittle escaping from the slack part of his mouth. ‘They’re used to her. Her great-grandfather was just the same. He was the first white settler out here. No one could hold a candle to him, except his grandson, Matilda’s father. Her dad got the Shearers’ Union going here, back in the nineties. The whole country still sings about him.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Blue.

‘
Once a jolly swagman
…’ The tune was wobbly, but recognisable.

‘The swaggie was her father? The one who died in the billabong?’

Mr Thompson nodded. ‘Wouldn’t give in when old Drinkwater — he used to own this place then — refused to let union labour onto his land. People remember how her dad fought to make things better …’

‘
You’ll never take me alive, said he
.’ The quiet voice came from the doorway, not singing, but giving the words more meaning than Blue had ever heard in them before. ‘I was there when he said that. There when he died too. I never knew my father for long, but he taught me not to give up. You do what’s right, and you keep on doing it.’

Miss Matilda came into the room. She looked tired, but love shone from her eyes as she bent down to kiss her husband on the forehead. She looked back up at Blue. ‘
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong
… That’s all it takes, enough people like my father who keep trying to make things better. There’s no scab labour at Gibber’s Creek or Drinkwater. We’ll get through this Depression, and we’ll do it by standing together. Now, my darling,’ she added to her husband, ‘it’s lunchtime. Mah is back. The dining room, or a tray in here?’

Mr Thompson looked from his wife to Blue, then back again. ‘The dining room,’ he said. ‘All in the dining room together.’

Chapter 32

Lunch was sheep, as usual, but sheep transmuted by an expert, a rib roast boned and stuffed with breadcrumbs, lemon and herbs, a thin sliver of meat around the stuffing, served with fresh lettuce, slightly wilted from the heat, radish roses, quartered tomatoes, thin rounds of orange and a moulded beetroot ring.

It was luxury to have salad again; and it was home-like to sit at a table, so much so that she felt a pang of guilt, with Madame lying so still and ill above them, as though by enjoying this so much she was insulting the life the old woman had created for the Magnifico family.

And yet, she remembered, Madame herself had said, ‘You are lucky you are not real circus.’ Madame would understand.

Mah helped herself to more beetroot. ‘There’s peach betty for dessert. Mrs Mutton showed me how to make it. We worked out a way to make squished flies in an oven too. It’s easier than making them in a pan.’

‘I hesitate to ask,’ Mr Thompson ate with one hand only, the food already cut up for him, ‘but exactly why are you squashing flies in my kitchen?’

Mah grinned. ‘They’re biscuits. Good ones. They’ve got a layer of currants and dates, ginger sometimes too. They last forever, even in summer. Mrs Mutton will bring them in with the tea.’

‘I’ll reserve judgement till I eat one then. I offered to show Miss Laurence the factory this afternoon. Would you like to join us, Miss Malloy?’

Miss Matilda looked at her husband sharply and then at Blue. A smile twitched, and was gone.

‘Yes, please. But call me Mah.’

‘And I’m Blue,’ said Blue. ‘Definitely not Bluebell.’

‘Why not?’ Mr Thompson swallowed the last of his meat with evident enjoyment.

‘Because it makes me sound like a small wilted flower.’

‘I should make a gallant rejoinder to that, but my wife might object.’

Miss Matilda laid her hand on his useless one. ‘Make all the gallant remarks you like.’ Her body seemed straighter, as though whatever weight she had carried had suddenly been lifted. ‘Enjoy the factory,’ she added to Blue. ‘Excuse me if I don’t come. I had enough of factories when I was young to last me all my life.’

It was hard to think of this woman ever working in the slums of Sydney. She looked as though she had grown from a seed under one of the big red gums near the river and had put down roots that coiled deep into the soil. But perhaps you didn’t have to be born on a patch of country to put down roots there, thought Blue.

Mrs Mutton brought in the pudding.

Mr McAlpine brought the car around, not his own green one, but the one that Miss Matilda had driven. Mr Thompson clumped down to it, managing to hold his stick in his semi-paralysed hand, dragging his useless leg. He paused by the car and looked down to the river. ‘The elephant,’ he said abruptly. ‘I know it sounds crazy, but it seems to be, er, signalling to you.’

Blue grinned as Sheba plodded up to the edge of her paddock, her ears back. ‘I don’t know if she was signalling or smelling us. She smells with her trunk, Madame said, and she hears better than she sees. I think she wants company. Or carrots.’ She hesitated. ‘Would you like to meet her?’

The right corner of Mr Thompson’s mouth lifted. ‘I’ve never been introduced to an elephant before. Would you do the honours?’

The four of them walked slowly down towards Sheba’s paddock. The elephant waited by the fence, her trunk still up, and gave a small sharp cry.

Mr Thompson looked from Blue to Mah. ‘Either of you speak elephant?’ Andy McAlpine grinned.

‘I think,’ said Mah, ‘that she’s saying she’s lonely and dreadfully neglected. She’s used to having everyone around her.’

‘And now she only has sheep.’

‘Nothing wrong with sheep,’ said Andy, as Mr Thompson doffed his hat politely to Sheba.

‘It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Sheba.’

‘She’s the Queen of Sheba actually,’ said Blue.

‘Ah, we are entertaining royalty then. How grand. Your majesty, then.’

Sheba gave a small huff. Her trunk reached out slowly enough for Mr Thompson to check his instinctive step backwards. He stood still as Sheba touched his neck gently and then his arm. ‘By Jove, I think she’s trying to shake hands with me.’

‘Or steal your watch,’ said Blue, then wished she hadn’t spoken. Confessing that they had an elephant pickpocket could confirm all Mr Thompson’s prejudices about circus people. But instead he laughed.

‘We might get her one of her own for Christmas. What’s that blue thing in the tussocks? Over there by the rock.’

‘Her teddy bear.’

‘I … see …’ Mr Thompson’s lips twitched again. He spoke directly to Sheba. ‘I promise I’ll visit you after dinner, your majesty. With carrots.’

Sheba trumpeted at them as they walked slowly back to the car.

The factory was smaller than Blue had expected. It seemed that while wireless sets were big, the actual wireless components were small. Her father’s factories included those big smelly sheds Fred remembered from his days in the industry, where hides were cured and trimmed and treated, as well as the factory itself and the warehouses.