Union Belle

by Deborah Challinor

  ‘You’re not doing any of that, Tom. It’s not the answer, it wouldn’t make anything better.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Because you couldn’t live with yourself, that’s why.’

  ‘You don’t seem to be able to live with me now.’

  Ellen bit her lip. This was going to be the hard bit: more half-truths, more lies, more stealing from him. But he had to have something.

  ‘It’s not the strike, not entirely. You’re right, it has been a long time and I am tired of living like this, scrimping and trying to make ends meet and worrying all the time. But I’m used to strikes, remember. ‘This isn’t the first and I’m bloody sure it won’t be the last.’

  ‘It could be, if we lose. And we are losing,’ Tom said. He manoeuvered his legs so she was standing between them.

  ‘No, we’re not. They can dent the trade unions, but they’ll never smash them completely.’

  ‘So what is it then? Tell me, Ellen, please, I have to know. I feel so…oh, shit, I don’t know what I feel.’ His face reddened as he struggled to put his feelings into words, and failed.

  Ellen smoothed his hair. ‘It’s everything. It’s the strike, it’s Dad going and what Mum had to say about him—it’s just everything.’

  It wasn’t quite the truth, but it wasn’t too far from it. Losing Alf so unexpectedly had devastated her: it still did, every time she thought about it, and she missed him so much. Finding out that he hadn’t been her real father had been equally shattering but, to her surprise, she was no longer feeling quite so bad about it. She’d always considered Alf to be her dad in every sense of the word, and he’d certainly never behaved towards her as if he were anything else. He’d raised her and loved her and cared for her like a natural father—probably better than many natural fathers, she suspected—so she hadn’t missed out. She’d had a lovely childhood, and she and Alf had always been the best of friends. She hadn’t even asked Gloria much more about what her real father had been like, he mattered so little to her compared to what she felt for Alf. She had loved him then, and nothing had changed now.

  ‘Is that really it?’ Tom sounded as though he didn’t quite believe her.

  She made herself say, ‘Yes, that really is it.’

  ‘And will we be all right again, when the strike’s over and you’ve got used to not having Alf around?’

  He wanted reassurance, she could hear it in his voice, and she couldn’t give it to him. So she did the best she could: she bent down and kissed him.

  He kissed her back with a passion that almost frightened her, then, trapping her between his legs, gazed up at her. She saw the look of need in his eyes and, to her surprise, felt the beginnings of sexual desire stirring within her.

  Neither of them said anything for several long seconds, which seemed to stretch out and fill the kitchen.

  Then Tom settled his hands tentatively on her hips, and pulled at the hem of her cardigan. This is horrible, isn’t it?’ he said.

  She smiled at his silly, incongruous comment. ‘It’s one of Mum’s efforts.’ He knew that, of course; he’d seen it hundreds of times before and had suggested himself that it should be put out of its misery and chucked in the incinerator.

  He moved forward, and rested the side of his face against her belly. Ellen lifted her hand and stroked his hair. She felt exceedingly strange. But Tom needed this, for reassurance and to make him feel better. What else could she give him? Surely not promises, not now, because she knew she’d never be able to keep them.

  He stood up, undid the buttons of her ugly cardigan and slid it off. Her shoulders were bare underneath, and he pressed down on them to urge her onto the floor. She went easily, pulling him after her.

  It only took him a couple of minutes, and even before he’d finished Ellen was crying. She clung to him tightly, feeling that everything had changed so fast and it was all so awful and Tom was her husband but she knew she wouldn’t be able to give Jack up, no matter what.

  Tom felt her breath hiccupping out of her chest and tried to wipe away the tears that were running across her temples and into her hair. ‘Don’t cry, love, please don’t cry. It’ll be all right.’

  TWELVE

  On 6 June, after a WWU rally at the Auckland Domain that had drawn 17,000 people and threatened to get out of hand, Holland reinstated the temporarily lifted ban on all public WWU meetings.

  On the same day, across the Tasman in Sydney and Melbourne, police staged mass raids on the offices of the Australian Seamen’s Union and the Australian Waterside Workers’ Federation, tearing out drawers, ransacking cabinets and confiscating large numbers of records and files. No one was arrested, but 4000 Sydney watersiders walked off the job and congregated at their union hall to register their protest, and to send a cable pledging continued ‘solidarity in the struggle’ to their fellow wharfies in New Zealand. There were walk-offs in Queensland and at Fremantle as well. The industrial action wasn’t a direct result of what was happening in New Zealand, but the enemy was the same, and when news filtered back to the New Zealand strikers, they took comfort from it.

  But the following day the tide had turned again, a lot closer to home when the watersiders at Port Chalmers voted en masse to return to work. Not a band of scabs cobbled together by the government, but the original union members. Their president was quoted in the papers as saying that it was a decision between keeping the men together, or dragging them down even further into poverty and degradation. He had seen it as his duty to make the move, he was also quoted as saying that somebody certainly had to.

  Apart from the Timaru watersiders, who had accepted employer conditions at the beginning of May, this was the first port union to actually vote to return to work. It was a huge blow to the watersiders and to Jock Barnes in particular. Some thought—and others hoped—it was the beginning of the end for him. But a meeting of union representatives from the freezing workers, miners, seamen, drivers and labourers a week later resolved to continue fighting until there was an honourable settlement for the watersiders. There were now enormous cracks in the strikers’ campaign, but they still weren’t ready to give up.

  But Ellen, walking down the street on the way to visit with her mother, wasn’t thinking about the strike. It was almost halfway through June now, and the colder weather was definitely setting in. This morning, she had stood at the bend in John Street and watched the boys as they’d walked the hundred or so yards to the school, sighing as they’d jumped in the icy puddles in the shallow drain between the road and the grass verge, soaking their shorts with muddy water. Their socks and shoes were drenched as well, and no doubt they’d develop streaming colds by next week, which meant a trip to Dr Airey that she wouldn’t be able to pay for.

  Arriving at her mother’s house, she saw that the lawns needed mowing and the hydrangeas could do with a trim, and made a mental note to ask Tom to come down when he got the chance. Her father had always done the lawns, his one concession to Gloria’s obsessive need to have the smartest house in Pukemiro, and it was very unlikely that Gloria would ever get out and push the mower around. She cleaned and polished everything inside the house to within an inch of its life, but anything outside had always been Alf’s domain. Which was why the shed at the back was almost falling down and the outhouse needed a good paint and the grapevine growing along the back fence a thorough prune, but no one could see those things from the street so Gloria had never been particularly bothered about them.

  ‘Mum!’ Ellen called out as she went inside.

  The range had been stoked so the kitchen was nice and warm, and the cake tin was already on the table along with the tea caddy and a jug of milk. Gloria had finally given up insisting that all visitors be received in the lounge. It had been a silly and pretentious habit anyway, Ellen had always thought. Alf had always sat in the kitchen, and she suspected that her mother might now be taking comfort from adopting the same habit.

  ‘Mum, where are you?’

  ‘Coming, dea
r,’ Gloria replied from the hall.

  In the four weeks since Alf had died her mother had lost a lot of weight. She’d been a sturdy woman for many years—ever since Ellen could remember, in fact, although she’d seen pictures of Gloria when she was younger, looking very slender and glamorous—but her clothes were hanging off her now. She did look better for it, but under her make-up her face was drawn and quite pale. Gloria liked to sew, however, and insisted that it gave her something to do, taking in her skirts and dresses. Ellen couldn’t think of anything more boring, sitting around the house all day unpicking seams and sewing them back together again, but her mother seemed happy to do it. Gloria was a member of the Country Women’s Institute, but there were only so many different types of preserves you could make and knitting patterns you could have a go at before you ran out of new things to try. Or got bored, as was the case with Ellen. She hadn’t been to a CWI meeting for some weeks now, too busy with her relief work. That, and meeting up with Jack as often as she could.

  A few hours at his house once a week on a Friday just wasn’t enough any more, and over the last few weeks they’d come to an unspoken understanding that they would grab every possible second together. It was risky, even foolhardy, and they knew it, but they couldn’t seem to stop themselves. There was a feeling between them that things could very well change soon, in ways beyond their control; rather than serving as a warning, it was drawing them closer.

  It was difficult enough to find the time to be alone together, never mind coming up with suitable excuses. She was busy with relief work on Tuesdays, and with the boys and the housework; Jack was still going up to the Pukekohe markets on Mondays, and there were regular union meetings at the Huntly town hall that he wouldn’t even contemplate missing, and she never asked him to. As a member of the union committee, he also put in a fair few hours just yarning with the rest of the men, taking note of the latest questions, grumbles and opinions, something that Pat insisted they all do. If there was anything in the wind, he wanted to know about it as soon as possible. And of course, Tom was often at home, and Ellen couldn’t justify going into town more than once a week—there just wasn’t the money for needless shopping trips any more.

  But they had managed to get together yesterday. After her Tuesday morning stint at the relief depot, she’d walked over the hill from Pukemiro to the Junction, caught the train into town as far as Rotowaro, then got off and backtracked slightly to meet Jack, who was waiting for her up the road in his truck. They’d driven up Hangapipi Road, parked under a tree and spent a precious two hours alone.

  She hadn’t told Jack about what had happened with Tom, not about the sex and certainly not about his suggestion of going back to work. She was worried that it would make Jack think less of Tom—no matter what state their marriage was in, she couldn’t do that to him.

  It was odd; she believed now that she was hopelessly in love with Jack, yet she didn’t want Tom to be hurt. What did that make her, she wondered? She had no idea. A naïve fool, probably. She had no idea about a lot of things any more. The strike had gone on for so long now that she’d given up trying to plan for anything, or even bothering to look beyond the end of each week. They were in debt to Gloria, they were in debt to Farmers’, and to Fred and the Co-op in town, the boys needed new shoes and wouldn’t be getting them unless Gloria offered to pay for them, which she probably would, and Neil had put his elbows through all of his jerseys and was growing so fast that his sleeves were halfway up his arms. Her hair looked like a bird’s nest because she refused go to the barber who was doing haircuts for free, she needed a new winter coat which was out of the question, and she’d been reduced to using old-fashioned rags when she had her period instead of the Modess sanitary pads she much preferred. It was revolting, washing out the bloodied squares of towelling and hanging them out on the line for the entire neighbourhood to see, but she’d noticed she wasn’t the only woman doing it. Still, Tom might be back at work by the time her next period was due, and she might be able to afford to buy something decent.

  ‘You’re looking a bit brighter today,’ Ellen said as her mother filled the kettle.

  ‘I had a lovely night’s sleep. I had a couple of sherries before I went to bed.’

  ‘You want to watch out, Mum, you’ll be turning into Dad soon.’

  ‘I don’t think so, dear,’ Gloria said over her shoulder. She laughed. ‘He had years of dedicated practice to get to the state he was in.’

  Ellen was pleased to hear her making jokes; for the first couple of weeks she’d barely been able to say Alf’s name without bursting into tears. She had seemed a little better lately, although Ellen expected it would take her mother a long time to get used to living by herself. She would be all right, financially, though. Alf had left a tidy sum in the bank from savings and his pension, which had startled everyone because they’d all assumed he’d drunk most of it away. Everyone except Gloria, who had apparently kept a very close eye on what he did and didn’t spend. This had amazed Ellen even more, as she’d always had the impression that her father had done exactly what he’d wanted to do, and bugger the consequences. But it seemed he’d not been too bad with their money at all. It was true that on several occasions, when Gloria had sent him down the street to get groceries and to get him out from under her feet, he’d kept on going, hopped on the train and spent the lot in the Huntly pub, but that was just Alf.

  ‘But still,’ Ellen said, ‘you don’t want to become reliant on having to have a few drinks to get to sleep.’

  ‘Don’t worry, dear, it’ll sort itself out in time,’ Gloria said as she sat down. ‘How are those little bugalugs of mine? Davey ate every one of his Brussels sprouts when they were here for their dinner the other night, even though I could see they were nearly choking him. Very proud of him, I was, for that.’

  Ellen raised her eyebrows. ‘How did you get him to do that? I have to just about force them down his throat with the kitchen plunger to get him to eat them at our house.’

  Gloria tapped the side of her nose. ‘I told him Brussels sprouts were his grandfather’s favourite vegetable.’

  ‘Were they?’ Ellen hadn’t known that.

  ‘No, he hated them, said they were nature’s very own little packets of vomit. But I thought Davey was looking a little peaky and could do with some extra iron. Are they all right, the boys? Are they getting enough to eat?’

  Ellen nodded. ‘They’re getting enough, but they’re not getting much variety.’

  ‘Because if they aren’t,’ Gloria said, ‘I can always help out.’

  ‘No, Mum, we’re fine. Only just, though, I have to say.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake, have a piece of cake, it’s sultana,’ Gloria said, tapping the cake tin with the teaspoon. Squinting because she’d left her glasses on her bedside table, she peered across the table at her daughter, at the sag in the waistband of her skirt and the fragile narrowness of her wrists. ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘So have you,’ Ellen said.

  ‘My beloved husband has just died, yours hasn’t. What’s going on, Ellen? Are you making sure everyone else gets fed and going short yourself? Because I know you, young lady, and that’s exactly the sort of thing you’d do. Or is it something else? Is there something you’re not telling me?’

  Ellen took a moment to smooth a wrinkle out of the tablecloth. ‘I do give the best bits of meat to Tom and the boys, you’re right. And other things. But they need it, the boys are growing and, well, so does Tom.’

  Gloria crossed her arms. And how are you going to cook for them and do their washing and get the shopping in while you’re lying on the floor having fainted from hunger? Tell me that?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Mum, it’s nothing like that.’

  ‘Well, what is it like?’

  Ellen kept her eyes down and her mouth closed.

  Gloria sat forward; Ellen could feel her eyes boring into her. ‘You’re fretting and don’t tell me you’re not, because like I said,
I know you. Come on, what is it?’ she said, then added, ‘As if I can’t guess.’

  Ellen forced herself to raise her eyes and look her mother in the face. But when she did, she saw not disapproval and recrimination as she had expected, but empathy.

  ‘You are, aren’t you? You’re having an affair with Jack Vaughan.’

  Ellen considered lying, but couldn’t really see the point any more. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Gloria sighed. ‘I thought you might be.’

  Ellen thought she sounded sad, not angry, and that was worse. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Because of the way you looked at him at Carol Henshaw’s wedding when he was prancing around the dance floor with Andrea Trask…’

  ‘It wasn’t happening then,’ Ellen said.

  ‘I expect it wasn’t, but it was coming, though, wasn’t it?’

  Ellen nodded.

  ‘And the way the pair of you have been carrying on whenever you’re within a hundred yards of one another.’

  ‘We haven’t been carrying on.’

  ‘Well, maybe not to that extent, but you only have to look at him looking at you to see something’s going on. And if I can see it, then I’m sure plenty of other people can, too.’

  Ellen’s stomach lurched. ‘Has somebody said something?’

  ‘Not yet, but they will, you mark my words. You know what this town’s like—if you change from strawberry jam to marmalade everybody knows by lunchtime.’ Gloria got up to fetch the kettle. ‘Do you know what really gave it away?’ she said as she poured hot water into the teapot. ‘Jack coming to the hospital. When I saw him I said to myself, “Thomas, you bloody fool.”’

  Ellen knew Tom had let her down when he’d refused to come to the hospital, and the memory of it still hurt, but she still felt the need to defend him. ‘But you know how much he hates hospitals.’