Hunger Town (46 page)

But I also had to confess privately to the less worthy motivation of wanting to retaliate against Nathan. As I had once said about his sisters, I found it very difficult to subscribe to a set of ideas when I disliked the people who pedalled them. Then, maybe, I reflected, there was some justice in my viewpoint. Were ideas really bigger than the people who held them? When Harry returned home I must discuss this with him.

My father didn't believe in being sick. He regarded illness as either a personal affront to his manhood or a weakness that should be ignored. That was until my mother had a heart attack one afternoon. Suddenly she collapsed into a chair, complaining of pains in her arm and an unbearable pressure on her chest. ‘As if a horse has stepped on me, Judith,' she gasped, panting and sweating in distress.

Fortunately I was visiting and sent my father running for the doctor while I did what I could to comfort and calm her. My own heart pounded in fear and it seemed an age before my father rushed back accompanied by the new doctor who was now the Medical Officer for the Port. He was a slightly built man who looked pathetically young but there was no doubt about his competence. He examined my mother and sent my father to call an ambulance from the nearest phone booth.

‘Adelaide hospital for you, Mrs Larsen. You'll get good treatment there. Better than we can provide here at the Port. Our casualty hospital is not fitted out to manage heart attacks.'

My father, who had been so cool and capable on windjammers, panicked. He managed to control himself until after the ambulance had left and then he burst out, ‘She's going to die, isn't she, Judith? They only take people in an ambulance if they're going to die.'

I tried to soothe him but none of my assurances, that she would live because the doctor had said that he thought it was only a mild heart attack, consoled him.

‘How will I live without your mother, Judith?' He was lost in bewilderment and plunged into the deepest gloom and despair. Since I was more worried than I'd admit to him it was hard to be patient.

Reluctantly, he came with me to Adelaide to visit her in hospital, but when we got there he said he'd wait outside. ‘Can't abide hospitals,' he muttered. ‘All those sick people. Some don't seem to know what day it is. Their heads have gone as well as their bodies.' He shuddered. ‘I look at them and know they're dying. Can't stand it, Judith.'

‘What a lot of rot, Dad.' I tried to be bracing. ‘They're here to get better. You just see them at a very bad time.'

He was disbelieving. ‘That's what all those doctors want us to believe. None of them would have a job if they told us we wouldn't get better. It's all a con. You go in, Judith, your mother will want to see you.'

‘And she'll want to see you, Dad.'

It's hard to tell a father that he is being both stupid and selfish so I settled for suggesting to him that he was being a little irrational, which, I assured him, was quite understandable, given that he was so shocked.

To my surprise he admitted that I might be right and with a shame-faced grimace plodded after me down a long white corridor smelling of disinfectant—that clean impersonal smell so peculiar to a hospital.

In my mother's ward there were three other women; two of them looked very ill. A nurse bustled in and pulled the curtains around one of them. She did something mysterious, we heard a slight moan, and she bustled out again.

My father looked askance at the closed curtain. ‘I told you, Judith.'

I ignored his silliness and taking his arm directed him to where my mother lay propped up on pillows and smiling brightly at him. ‘Why, Niels,' she said, ‘dear Niels.' And she held out her arms.

He embraced her awkwardly and then stood helplessly beside her bed—a large lumbering man completely at sea—although, I reflected, if he had been completely at sea he'd have had a lot more ideas on how to manage.

She smiled lovingly at him and took his hand. He clutched it. ‘It's all right, Niels. I'll be home very soon. The doctor says I'll need a little rest but will make a complete recovery.'

He looked at her doubtfully. Irritated I thought that he should be the one reassuring her.

‘I'm not trying to deceive you, Niels,' she insisted. ‘You know I'd never do that. I really will recover.'

His mood lightened slightly and he sank into a chair beside her. I left them to have some time to themselves and wandered outside. There was a seat in a small garden and I sat in the sun and watched a bee bury his nose in the bosom of a flower while he worked his back legs in a sort of ecstasy. Maybe the nectar was particularly delicious. Maybe he was excited at his new discovery or maybe he was just rejoicing to be alive on such a lovely morning.

It was a relief to see my mother so improved and without pain. I wondered where Harry was. I couldn't tell him how ill she'd been. With no forwarding address I was unable to reply to his letters. He'd be sorry to hear about my mother. She'd always been so kind to him. He loved her, I knew that. In some ways her motherliness was more real to him than his own mother's. Mrs Grenville seemed so emotionally absent most of the time. Once he had said to me in sad resignation, ‘For a long time it's been hard to make any real contact with her. Sometimes I wonder if skating on the surface with her has crippled my ability to have deeper relationships. I've failed so often to reach her that I've given up. No matter how I try she just flits away from me into a set of fantasies.'

‘Darling Harry,' I had consoled him, ‘you're certainly not some kind of cripple. A man more quickly involved in other people's suffering I've never met. You're warm and lovely.'

‘Dear Jude,' he had replied, ‘when skies are blue whatever would I do without you?'

‘What'll you do?' I had laughed. ‘You'll cuddle me.'

‘Mm,' he said, ‘that's a very good idea.' And he did just that.

Although Harry's letters had come at reasonably regular intervals, I wasn't overly worried to not receive one for several weeks. My mother needed help and I spent much of my time on the hulk.

His last letter had told me that the Communist Party in England was organising their trip through France and in to Spain. They would take the ferry from Dover to Calais where they would be met. There would be plenty of contacts to help them. Nathan, he wrote, was confident and pleased but in many ways, ‘I just tag along'.

‘It may be difficult to post letters, Jude, but I'll do my best. I have been learning from my French phrase book to ask: Where is the post office? How much is a stamp to Australia? Tell Miss Marie I could really do with her help. Once again, all my love, Jude. This is the really important part of the trip and it's a relief to know that it's coming up because it helps me to see the end of our journey and with the end I can again think of coming home to you.'

Little by little Jock fell into the habit of looking after me. At first it was just the occasional job but now he sometimes dropped in to drink a cup of tea with me, ask for news about Harry, discuss happenings in the Communist Party, or comment on my latest cartoons. It was a comfortable friendship. I was grateful for it and always pleased to open the door to him. I knew he was a lonely man and sometimes cooked him an evening meal. He ate his meat and vegetables with the serious concentration of a child, saying very little. But he lingered over his sweets, eventually resting his spoon in the empty plate, and remarking with wistfulness, ‘I always enjoy little delicacies like stewed fruit.' So I always cooked some apples or pears for him just to watch his eyes light up.

Sometimes he had bursts of rage at the latest political event but at other times he reminisced about his early days in Glasgow: the gangs he joined as a young man and the street battles; his father putting him on the mat one day and ordering him to find work or leave home; his early days as a unionist in the shipyards and eventual rise to union organiser. ‘I learned to be a hard man, Judith, a varry tough negotiator, an ultimatum man. Then of course I joined the Communist Party.'

I asked him why.

He shrugged. ‘They were organised. I liked their ideas and they didn't compromise. Suited me. I'm not a shilly-shallying man. If you don't have one road to travel, because you're always wondering about the other tracks and where they might lead, you won't get anywhere.'

One evening as we finished our meal I asked, ‘And why did you leave all this, Jock, and emigrate?'

He didn't answer for a few minutes and his eyes had a distant sad expression. I waited, concerned that I had clumsily intruded into something painful in his life.

At last he said quietly, ‘I had a wife, Judith, a poor wee lassie. She was never strong.'

I remained silent, sensing that he needed no response from me.

He went on, ‘She died. Consumption. It's the scourge of the poor in Glasgow. Very few families escaped it. Many lived with it but eventually …' He stopped, then added, ‘In Glasgow in the winter the sun only shines, if at all, for maybe two hours a day and then it is darkness. The streetlights come on at four in the afternoon. And the cold, Judith, it eats into your bones. Poor Jean. We would sit together in front of a few bars of the gas fire and she would talk of the sun. “Imagine, Jock,” she would say, “of having a whole day, a whole working day from eight o'clock in the morning to six at night, of sun. What an indulgence that would be. What a luxury.
”
'

I knew my eyes had filled with tears, imagining the young woman dreaming so piteously and uselessly of the sun, the sun that is free to everyone if they can find a place where it shines.

Jock continued, ‘So when she died I packed up and came to Australia. The blokes in the union reproached me for leaving them. I told them to get fucked. I'd had enough of the bloody country.'

I jumped up to take his empty cup to the sink. There I dabbed my eyes. It wouldn't do to let Jock see my tears, which were not only for poor Jean who died in the cold but also for Harry somewhere in Spain. Neither Jock nor I wanted to succumb to our loneliness.

When he visited during the weekend he was keen to help me in the garden. Often he was disappointed in the small plot of earth he and Frank had dug over. ‘This is no good, Jude,' he said, ‘I think we need to buy better soil to get plants to grow. It'd be nice to have a wee bit of garden.'

‘Yes,' I agreed. ‘Perhaps when Harry …'

He looked at me quickly. ‘Of course, lassie, I've no mind to intrude.'

‘You haven't.'

He kicked a bit of the soil and dust rose in a cloud. ‘Dry and useless,' he said.

‘Well, if you like, Jock, a wee bit of garden would be nice and Harry isn't much of a gardener.'

‘That's OK,' he growled. ‘He can play the piano. I canna do that.'

‘Like you canna swim, Jock?'

He laughed at me. ‘Many things I canna do or canna abide, Jude.'

It was Jock who brought me the news that Nathan had returned home. He arrived at the front door flustered and stricken with anxiety. The only other time I had seen him in such a state of perturbation was the day the police raided communist headquarters and the homes of comrades. Recalling my panic on that occasion, I once again felt ill. Something terrible must have happened.

‘What is it, Jock?' And my unsteady voice squeaked with apprehension.

He blurted out his news, his face a deep guilty crimson as if what he had to tell me was his fault. ‘I must tell you this, Judith. You will hear it from others. Before you ask, I havna spoken with Nathan. I didna know what to do. I didna want to frighten you, but you should know.'

All of this was said in a rush and I could not make head nor tail of it. ‘What are you telling me, Jock?'

He looked blank. ‘I'm telling you, lassie, that Nathan's come home.'

Bemused, I stared at him. ‘Nathan's home?'

‘Yes.'

‘But where is Harry?'

He looked distressed. ‘I canna say, Judith.'

I didn't seem able to take it in. ‘Harry hasn't come with him?' I stopped. ‘No, of course he can't have. I'd be the first to know.'

I was still trying to understand, to take in the suddenness of it all.

Jock's self-control worried me more than if he raged. The tension in his body made me feel that at any moment he might explode. That he was holding himself in so tightly so as not to scare me made me even more terrified. Something dreadful had happened and he was keeping his rage over it to himself.

‘Where is Harry?' I repeated. My brain didn't seem to be able to ask anything more complicated.

He didn't reply.

I put my hand on his arm and shook it. ‘Jock, where is Harry?'

‘I dinna know.'

‘But Nathan is here? In Port Adelaide?'

‘Yes,' he snarled.

‘And what does he say?'

‘I havna seen him. I couldna. I was frightened I would kill him. I couldna speak with the fucken bastard.'

‘So no one has asked him where Harry is?'

‘No.'

I took a deep breath. ‘Might he be dead, Jock?'

He flinched. ‘No, Judith, no, I'm sure not. Even Nathan wouldn't have concealed that.'

‘Then?'

‘It must be a Party matter, Judith. Some bloody Party matter.'

‘But Harry's not home, and Nathan is.' I didn't know why I kept stupidly repeating this. He understood my confusion but had no more to add. As calmly as I could I said, ‘Then I must go to see Nathan. He's the only one who knows what all this is about. Will you come with me, Jock?'

He shook his head. ‘I canna, Judith. You know my hot temper. I canna be responsible for what I might do to him.'

His large calloused hands worked nervously. They were powerful and so were the muscles in his arms. He was a short man but had probably been a pugilist in his youth.