Union Belle (19 page)

‘Granddad will be fine,’ Ellen said again. She didn’t want Neil to be here when Dr Airey arrived, just in case. ‘Go on, I’ll be home soon.’

Neil gave her a last, doubtful look and disappeared.

‘You hop off too, eh?’ Len said to Chris, anticipating that Dr Airey would need a bit of space.

He arrived five minutes later. Without preamble he crouched down next to Alf ‘What happened?’

‘He fell on the steps and must have hit his head,’ Gloria said, very obviously trying not to cry now. Ellen put her arm around her.

Dr Airey leaned closer and wrinkled his nose. ‘Been at the pub, has he?’

Gloria said, ‘I told him it would be the death of him.’

‘It’s not been the death of him yet, Gloria, he’s just out cold,’ the doctor replied, although he definitely didn’t like the blue tinge to Alf’s lips. ‘When did it happen?’

‘About half an hour ago,’ Gloria said. ‘I heard him fall but I didn’t…I didn’t go outside straight away because I thought the silly old bugger had just fallen over. He’s always doing it.’ She burst into tears.

Dr Airey nodded. Thirty minutes was a long time to be unconscious, but he didn’t think any earlier intervention on Gloria’s part would have made a difference. He gently lifted Alf’s eyelids and shone a small torch directly into each eye. The pupils were already fully dilated and didn’t change in response to the light—another ominous sign.

Next he examined the gash behind Alf’s ear. It was about three inches long and had bled copiously, as head wounds did, but it was what he discovered under it that bothered him. He looked away and focused solely on his sense of touch as he pressed his fingers delicately over and around the cut, wincing as he felt a spongy mass beneath it give sickeningly. When he detected what he suspected might be shards of bone, he stopped his examination immediately.

Wiping his bloodied hands on a tea towel, he checked Alf’s pulse, which was slow and erratic, then got to his feet, his heart sinking. He knew Alf Powys well, and was very fond of the easy-going old tosspot.

‘I’m phoning for the ambulance,’ he said to Gloria. ‘He seems to have quite a serious head injury, I’m afraid.’ At the stricken look on her face, he added, ‘I can’t say exactly how serious, but as he’s been unconscious for half an hour I think we’d better get him through to the hospital.’

Gloria looked as though someone had just slapped her across the face. ‘Hospital? The hospital in Hamilton?’

‘Yes, they’re properly equipped for this sort of thing.’

‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’

‘Come on now, Gloria, I think it’s far too premature to be thinking anything like that,’ Dr Airey said. ‘Let’s just get him to the hospital, shall we?’

Gloria nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, lets get him to the hospital.’

She had stopped crying now, but her voice had taken on an eerie calm, and to Dr Airey that seemed somehow worse.

While Ellen sat on the floor with her father and Dr Airey checked his pulse every few minutes, Gloria changed into her good coat and shoes and collected her handbag. Alf still had not moved, although he had begun to groan sporadically. He also wet himself, the dark stain of his urine spreading out across the front of his trousers as the others looked on helplessly. Ellen fetched a rug and put it over him, and a pillow for beneath his head.

Tom arrived, and sat down at the table with Gloria, stunned. Dr Airey observed them—Gloria with her hat on and her handbag balanced on her knee as though she were sitting at the Junction station waiting for the midday train into town, and Ellen on the floor gently and repeatedly stroking her father’s limp hand—and sighed.

‘There won’t be room in the ambulance for everyone,’ he said. ‘I’m sure they’ll let you travel with him, Gloria, but Ellen, I suspect you and Tom will have to make your own way to the hospital.’

‘I’m not going,’ Tom said.

Ellen looked at him in surprise.

‘Well, one of us has to stay with the boys. We can’t send them over to Bert’s, he’s already got his hands full.’

‘What about Milly?’ Ellen said. ‘She’ll take them.’

‘I’m sure she would,’ Tom said, ‘but Ellen, love, do I really need to be there? He’ll come right, you’ll see, give it a couple of days and he’ll be fine.’

He looked at her, wanting desperately to say what was bothering him, but he couldn’t get the words out. He was a superstitious man, although he would never admit it, and was convinced that if they were to all sit around Alf’s bed at the hospital weeping and being miserable as though he’d already died and it was simply a matter of the undertaker turning up with the coffin, then he actually might die.

‘I’ll come if you really need me,’ he added, ‘it’s not that I don’t want to.’

‘No, you’re right,’ Ellen said, knowing full well that he really didn’t want to. ‘It would be better if you stayed with the boys,’ she added, giving him a legitimate reason to stay behind.

‘I’ll ring Hazel first thing in the morning,’ he said. ‘She’ll probably want to come down if Alf’s going to be stuck in there for a few days.’

Dr Airey regarded Tom uneasily; the man was a miner so surely he’d seen the likely outcome of this sort of injury before? And then he realised—Tom was putting on a brave face for the women.

‘Would you, Thomas?’ Gloria said, sounding relieved and grateful. ‘That would be a big help.’

‘First thing,’ Tom promised.

‘But how will I get to the hospital?’ Ellen asked. She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll have missed the train.’

Tom thought for a moment. ‘Why don’t I ask Jack if he’ll run you through?’

Ellen opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again because it felt exactly right, the idea of being with Jack now. Guiltily, she realised that she very much needed to see him, to be close to his solid and reassuring presence. Then she
looked at Tom, and remembered that not long ago he would have steadied her and given her courage. She wanted both of them, but she needed Jack.

‘Will he be home, do you think?’

Tom shrugged. ‘I can soon find out.’

The ambulance arrived. Alf was lifted onto a stretcher and loaded into the back of it, with Gloria perched at his side, one hand clutching her handbag and the other resting proprietarily on his arm.

Ellen and Tom stood by the front gate and watched as the ambulance drove away, then went next door to tell Len and Rose what was happening. Rose offered to mind the boys if they wanted to follow Alf to the hospital, but Tom explained that he would be staying behind. He suggested then to Ellen that she go home, tell the boys some sort of half-truth about their grandfather, then get herself ready to go to Hamilton. While she was doing that he would go around to Jack’s and sort out a ride for her.

As Tom headed off up the street, Ellen almost called out after him to tell him that she did want him to go with her after all, that it was really important that he did, but the words dried up before she could get them out, and by then he had disappeared around the corner and it was too late.

E
llen sat in silence, barely aware of the Waikato landscape flicking past in the darkness. She glanced over at Jack.

‘All right?’ he asked, his eyes on the road.

‘Mmm.’

He’d arrived to pick her up so promptly she’d barely had time to change her shoes, run a brush through her hair and grab her bag and coat. She’d hugged the boys tightly, promising that their grandfather would be fine, then given Tom a quick kiss goodbye, feeling oddly self-conscious because Jack was standing in the kitchen with them, and then they were off. Lost in her own thoughts, she had said very little to Jack so far, and he’d seemed content to let her be.

But now he said, ‘Penny for your thoughts, or don’t you feel like talking?’

‘No, it’s not that,’ she said after a moment. ‘I’ve been thinking about Dad.’

‘Banging his head like that?’

Ellen shifted in her seat to face Jack. ‘No, just him in general. What a lovely father he’s been. He is,’ she corrected.

Jack nodded but didn’t say anything. He’d been more than happy to bring Ellen through to Hamilton, although he had felt a shadow of guilty unease when Tom had turned up. If she wanted to talk, that was fine by him, but after what Tom had told him about Alf’s condition, he doubted there was anything he could really say to ease her worry, or her fear.

‘I can remember when I was tiny, I would have been about three I suppose, or maybe four,’ she said, ‘when he used to come up at the end of his shift and I’d wait for him at the mine entrance. ‘And he’d always smile when he saw me and his teeth looked so white in his dirty face, and he’d pick me up and give me a cuddle and swing me up onto his shoulders on his way to the bathhouse. Then he’d put me down and tell me to play while he was in there, but not to sit on the concrete or I’d get piles. And by the time we got home I’d be covered in coal dust and Mum would always tell him off for getting my clothes dirty! But I loved it, Jack, I loved riding along way up high, hanging onto his ears so I wouldn’t fall off. I felt like I owned the town when he did that, I really did.’

Jack smiled at the image.

Ellen did too. And he was always making things for us, for me and Hazel. Hazel’s my sister, she’s eleven years older than me and lives in Auckland with her husband and kids. Dad built us a swing, and a slide that used to give us splinters in our bums, and a playhouse.’ She laughed. ‘He pinched the wood for it from the Pukemiro Collieries sawmill, a couple of planks a night when it was dark. Took him about three months to get enough.’

‘Sounds like the perfect dad,’ Jack said.

‘And he made us a canoe, for in the creek, with a pair of paddles, one each. That wasn’t quite so successful, and Mum had a fit when she found out about it sinking, but Dad was there so we were all right. I don’t think he told her half the things we got up to. She was always much more strict on us than Dad ever was. He took us down the mine a few times, too, and didn’t tell her about that either. She would have gone berserk. She’s always said thank Christ she never had sons, because there would have been hell to pay between her and Dad about letting them go on the coal.’

‘Did he want boys, your Dad?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Well, if he ever did he never showed it. He always said Hazel and I were his little princesses, that he couldn’t have asked for lovelier daughters if God had given him a pad and a pencil and told him to order exactly what he wanted. Mum spoiled us, making us all sorts of lovely little dresses so we’d be the best-dressed kids in Pukemiro, and spending no end of money on shoes and what have you for us, but Dad was always the one who gave us more of the things that didn’t need money. Do you know what I mean?’

Jack nodded.

‘He’d spend lots of time with us, especially when we were little, and taught us all about the weather and plants and animals and the coal and all that. Especially the coal. I could tell the difference between three different types of coal by the time I was five.’

Jack wasn’t surprised. He already knew Ellen well enough to know that she was very bright, and had an appetite for the sort of knowledge a lot of women wouldn’t be interested in, such as how machinery worked and the different techniques used for mining. It delighted him, and he could see now that a lot of that had come from her father.

‘I was jealous of Hazel, though,’ Ellen confessed. ‘She was so much older than me and was allowed to do more exciting things. Dad wouldn’t take me underground until I was eight, he said it was too dangerous, so when he took her down when she was fifteen, which she didn’t want to do anyway because she hated getting dirty but Dad said it was in her blood and she had to have at least one decent look. I remember sitting at home bawling my eyes out because it was so unfair. And she did come back filthy, too, and had to lie to Mum and say she’d fallen over on the
railway track.’ She shot Jack a guilty look. Actually, I was really pleased when Hazel got married and left home. She was twenty-one, and she’d met this lad Charlie Hammond the year before, boating on Hamilton Lake. Mum pushed and pushed her to get out of Pukemiro and “meet a better class of boy”, I think was how she put it, and anyway she’d gone through to Hamilton with some friends to go boating, and she did meet someone, and that was Charlie. Who Mum always insists on calling Charles, like she says Thomas. Charlie turned out to be from Auckland, and over the next year he came down to see Hazel quite a bit, then he asked her to marry him, which Mum thought was just wonderful, and I suppose Hazel did as well. I can’t really remember because I was only ten. I do remember being a right little brat, though, following them around all the time and annoying them. Dad taught me to do this,’ she said, slipping her left hand down the neck of her blouse and under her right armpit, and flapping her arm to make a farting noise. ‘Dad and I thought it was hilarious, and I think Charlie might have, too, but Mum and Hazel were disgusted with me.’

Jack laughed out loud. ‘I can imagine.’

Anyway, they got married and Hazel went to live in Auckland, and I was absolutely chuffed because I had Dad all to myself for another ten years.’

‘Has he always been a union man?’ Jack asked.

He knew Alf had, but he wanted to keep Ellen talking about him because it seemed to be doing her some good. When he’d arrived to pick her up earlier, her face had been deathly pale and her eyes red and brimming, and it had been all he could do to stop himself from gathering her up in his arms and rocking her and telling her not to worry because he would fix everything.

‘Ever since I can remember,’ Ellen said. ‘He was always
going off to meetings all fired up, and coming home from work and chucking his bag down on the kitchen floor and declaring, “Right, that’s bloody it, we’re out!” Poor Mum, she nearly died of shame when the Puke men went on strike during the war. I think she was convinced the Allies would be brought to their knees by any sort of industrial action in Huntly, and that Dad would get his name on the front page of newspapers all over the English-speaking world for being a saboteur.’

‘I think the government thought that, too. About the industrial action, not your father,’ Jack said.

‘Probably. But he’s always been a natural negotiator, Dad. He’s got the gift of the gab and people listen to him. Except for Mum, she doesn’t. I remember when Tom and I were going out together…’ She stopped. ‘Oh, you probably don’t want to hear about that. Sorry.’

Jack shrugged. ‘I don’t mind, not if you don’t mind telling me about it.’

Ellen looked thoughtful. ‘No, I don’t, because it’s a story about Dad, not Tom. Turn right here.’

‘What?’

‘Turn right.’ Ellen pointed to a road coming up at the north end of Victoria Street. ‘We need to go around the edge of the lake to get to the hospital.’

‘Oh, right,’ Jack said, who for a moment had almost forgotten why they were driving to Hamilton.

‘Tom was living at Rotowaro,’ Ellen went on. ‘His parents lived there, too, but they’re out at Raglan now. I met him at one of the local dances. He was underground at Alison then. I knew Mum wouldn’t approve of him, just because he was a miner, so I didn’t take him home for months. It was tricky—whenever we went to the same functions as Mum and Dad I had to pretend I barely knew him. But then when we got serious we couldn’t really avoid it. She
knew anyway, of course. You can’t do anything in Pukemiro without everyone else knowing your business.’

‘I know, I’ve been worrying about that,’ Jack said, bringing the conversation back to the present.

But Ellen ignored him, intent on her story. ‘She was very nice to him when he finally did visit, and got the good tea service out and everything, but as soon as he’d gone she said, “Don’t get any ideas about marrying that one, young lady, because he’s the wrong man for you.” And I said “Yes, Mum” and took no notice, but then he did ask me to marry him and there was hell to pay when I finally told her.’ Ellen shook her head as she recalled how relentlessly Gloria had gone on and on about the horrendous mistake she was about to make. ‘She said Tom would never amount to anything, that he’d spend his entire working life underground and never earn enough money, that we’d be trapped forever living at Rotowaro, which she was wrong about because he moved to Pukemiro as soon as we were married…’

‘That probably wasn’t what she meant, though, was it?’

‘No, but I’m happy living in a mining town, it’s where I belong. It’s where I’ll always belong. In the end she said she’d see me marry Tom over her dead body.’

‘Really? Christ, that was a bit steep, wasn’t it?’

‘I thought so, especially since I know that underneath she actually quite liked him, even then. And Dad really liked him, he thought he’d make a lovely son-in-law. Tom was a miner, he was moving up in the union, and he liked a beer. What could be better?’

‘I think I can guess what came next,’ Jack said.

‘Yes, Mum and Dad had the most God-awful barney about it. I mean, they’ve always bickered and squabbled—well, Mum has, Dad’s generally just ignored her and gone on his merry way—but I’ve never seen them at each
other like they were then. They fought for days. Dad even yelled, which isn’t like him at all. He got really angry and told Mum to stop interfering with my life because it just wasn’t on. And Mum yelled back and said of all people he should know what she was going on about, and he said yes, he bloody well did know and wished to God he didn’t. It got really nasty. It was awful.’

‘Sounds it.’

‘In the end, Dad put his foot down and said that Tom was a good man and if I wanted to marry him that was fine by him, and he didn’t want to hear another word about it from Mum, ever.’

‘And did he?’

‘I’m sure he did, but she quietened down after that. Although she’ll still have a little go now and then. She likes Tom, I know she does, but I think she still hasn’t quite forgiven him for not being the man she wanted for me.’

‘So what was your mother really worried about, do you know?’

Ellen felt herself blushing and was grateful for the darkness in the cab of Jack’s truck. According to her, she wanted me to marry a man who wouldn’t bore me, who had the ambition and the passion to keep the marriage going and keep me satisfied and happy. Those are her words, not mine.’

There was a long minute of silence, while Jack pretended to concentrate on his driving and Ellen gazed out through the passenger window into the night.

‘And did you?’ he asked eventually.

Ellen closed her eyes. Up until very recently she would have said yes, but she couldn’t now, not with any degree of conviction, and the realisation saddened and dismayed her. If she had only met Jack ten years ago, then her children would be his and not Tom’s, and she wouldn’t have to go
around feeling as though she were being torn in half every minute of every day. Was it possible to love two men at the same time? Or did she only love one man, and was merely infatuated with the other? She didn’t know, and didn’t have the energy right now to try and work it out.

‘I don’t know, Jack,’ she said. And then, with a truth that trickled through her veins like ice water, she added, ‘No, I don’t think I did.’

And there it was—out now, and out in front of Jack.

He reached across the seat and squeezed her hand gently, and she was grateful to him for not saying anything.

As they neared the hospital a few minutes later, the imposing line of buildings overlooking the lake lit brightly against the night, Jack said, ‘Shall I drop you off and come and find you? Or would you rather I waited in the truck?’

‘Oh, Jack, I could be hours, we could be here all night,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely of you to offer but, well, I wouldn’t feel…’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘I understand, it’s not my place. I just don’t like to think of you up here all night by yourself.’

‘I’ll have Mum.’

He looked at her sympathetically. ‘What if I just come in and find out how he’s getting on, then I can tell Tom and the boys when I get home? They’ll be waiting for news.’

Ellen smiled at him gratefully. She didn’t want him to go, not yet.

They parked the truck and walked together through the front doors of the main hospital building, and Ellen asked a passing nurse where she might find her father. The nurse indicated a nearby lift and told them the next floor and turn right.

Gloria was looking very lonely and bereft, sitting on a chair in what appeared to be a waiting room. Someone had
given her a cup of tea, but she hadn’t touched it. Her face was splotchy and her lipstick had come off, which looked odd to Ellen, who was so used to seeing her mother with her peach-coloured lips, even just around the house.

Ellen went over to her, while Jack hovered near the door.

‘What’s happening? Where’s Dad?’ she asked.

Gloria reached out a shaking hand. ‘He’s been taken into surgery, about twenty minutes ago. The doctor took one look at him and said he needed to go to theatre right away. Oh, Ellen, I’m so frightened.’

Ellen was startled. She had never heard her mother say she was frightened, and certainly never in association with her father. Angry, insulted, embarrassed or exasperated, yes, but never frightened.