Solomon's Song

by Bryce Courtenay

  Shortly after Joshua’s birth, Abraham contracts the mumps which results in him becoming sterile. Despite this explanation for the couple’s infertility, David continues to blame Elizabeth at every opportunity for only producing a single male heir.

  ‘You was married four years!’ he shouts, holding up four bony fingers in front of Elizabeth’s face. ‘Four bloody years before Joshua come along, before I got him born! Then, only then, Abe got the mumps what made his pistol fire blanks. You and that book-reading bastard who calls himself my son could have made me two more grandsons at least! Instead, you was gallivanting around in the cot using them fancy rubbers!’

  ‘What about you?’ Elizabeth objects. ‘You had Abraham. That’s only one child!’

  ‘Rebecca was sick. Sick doesn’t count!’ David yells back at her. ‘Four years you waited. You and him having a good time in the cot, eating me out of house and home, never a sick day between you, and at the expense o’ my bloody grandchildren!’

  On one such occasion, when David’s tormenting has driven Elizabeth to distraction, she bends down, thumping her knees with her fists and screams at the old man. ‘For God’s sake, Father, leave us alone. Don’t you realise, your son can’t even get it up! He never bloody could hardly!’

  ‘What’s that?’ David cries. Then, realising what his daughter-in-law has just said, adds, ‘That’s your bloody fault, girlie! Let me tell you something for nothing. There’s bugger-all wrong with my boy a good Jewish girl couldn’t fix!’

  ‘Well, then find him one!’ Elizabeth howls. ‘He’s no use to me!’

  David stops, not believing his ears. ‘You’ll not divorce him,’ he shouts. ‘There’ll be no divorce in this house, you hear?’ He points an accusing finger at her. ‘You leave and I’ll cut you off without a penny,’ he stammers, barely able to contain his anger. ‘You won’t even find work in a brothel, girlie! I’ll see you in the gutter with the dog shit!’ Shaking with rage he grabs her by the arm and pushes her so that she stumbles and falls to the carpet. Standing over her, both his fists clenched, his arms rigid at his side, he screams, ‘Joshua has got to have a mother, even if it’s only to wipe his arse!’ Leaving her on the floor, he walks from the room shaking his head. ‘Jesus Christ, I should never have let my son marry out!’

  And so, in the age-old manner of men holding women captive, Elizabeth, for lack of independent means, is rendered helpless. Nor can she hope to appeal to her husband to stand up to his father. Furthermore, by keeping Abraham busy and, in Joshua’s early years, frequently away on business, David prevents his son from attempting to win the child’s affection.

  David simply wants Joshua for himself and shortly after Joshua is weaned, his cradle is moved into David’s bed chamber with the nurse in an adjoining room and a door between the rooms. The cradle is later followed by a cot and then a cast-iron bed. Most of Joshua’s waking childhood is spent within bawling distance of his grandfather and when he reaches puberty and, as David tells himself, needs to pull his pud in private, he moves Joshua into the nanny’s old room, so that he still has direct access to his grandson at any time of the day or night.

  His tutors, the first employed when Joshua turned seven, are Englishmen, gentlemen fallen on hard times. All are paid well above what their vocations might normally command, as David is aware that they will not long put up with his interference, bullying and bad temper unless the reward for their services is sufficiently high to quell their inevitable disenchantment. Even so, Joshua will have four tutors in all before he is finally trundled off to Oxford.

  Joshua’s first tutor undergoes a routine which will be common to those who follow him. David interviews him in his opulent office, resplendent in the latest Edwardian style, making him stand like a naughty schoolboy in front of his mahogany desk even though the room is amply supplied with an ottoman couch and four comfortable leather armchairs of similar configuration.

  ‘I am not an easy man to please, Mr Smyth, and in the matter of my grandson you will find me even more particular. Whereas you are a gentleman, you should know right off, I am not. I am a rich Jew and I wish my grandson to be tutored as though he were a gentleman and a gentile, a rich goy. Do you understand me?’

  Smyth, who has only recently had his impecunious financial position alleviated by David and all his gambling debts paid, is happy to agree to just about any terms the old man wants to impose. He has been promised superior lodgings and a stipend far beyond the abilities of a second-class degree at Oxford, and he can’t quite believe his good fortune.

  ‘I shall do my best, sir,’ he assures David.

  ‘No, Mr Smyth, you will do my best, which I think you will find a bloody sight better than your best. We will begin with elocution. I desire my grandson to speak like a gentleman.’ David deliberately adopts a harsher version of his own accent and lack of grammar. ‘If he don’t talk proper and drops his h’s or his g’s like his grandfather, you’re in for the ’igh jump.’

  ‘I shall take particular care of his speech,’ Smyth promises.

  ‘Yeah, whatever, you look after his speech. I want him posh, not dead common like me.’ David looks steadily at Smyth until the other man is forced to drop his gaze. ‘What you study at Oxford University then?’

  ‘History, sir.’

  ‘History? What history?’

  ‘British. The history of the British Isles.’

  ‘You mean English?’

  ‘No, sir. That, of course, but Irish and Scottish. The Welsh, as well.’

  ‘Well, you’ll teach the boy English history, but no Irish. You understand, no Irish!’

  Smyth starts to protest. ‘Without a grasp of Irish history it is difficult to get a true perspective on England’s –’

  ‘You heard me, Mr Smyth. No bloody Micks! No Irish!’

  Smyth looks down at his toes, feeling like the schoolboy David has intended he should. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And we’ll have arithmetic, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. Reading and writing, o’ course, and Latin.’

  Smyth looks up. ‘I’m afraid I’m a poor Latin scholar, Mr Solomon, never got much beyond schoolboy Latin. I had just sufficient to scrape into Oxford,’ he says, with disarming modesty entirely lost on David.

  ‘Well, my grandson will be a schoolboy one day. That’s enough Latin for him. All he needs to know is what it says on coats of arms and the like.’

  ‘In which case I feel sure we will manage splendidly,’ the tutor replies.

  ‘Mr Smyth, do you ’ave a coat of arms?’ Smyth opens his mouth to speak and David puts up his hand, ‘No, don’t answer that, I know you ’ave, that’s why you got the job in the first place.’ David pushes himself away from the desk. ‘That will be all. You may go.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Smyth turns and walks from the study, conscious of David’s rudeness, but telling himself he has no choice but to countenance it. David calls after him, ‘Oi, boy, you wouldn’t know how to use an abacus, would you? A Chinee abacus, yer know, for counting and doing sums?’

  Smyth turns to face him. ‘No, I’m afraid not, sir.’

  ‘Hmm, be most useful for the boy to learn.’ David smiles for the first time. ‘Perhaps we can find a Chinaman to teach him, eh? Knew a whore woman once who used the abacus, fast as bleedin’ lightnin’ she was. Had these broken ’ands, see, all deformed like, but you couldn’t hardly see them when she worked them little black and red beads, beat anyone hollow who was usin’ a pen and paper to do their sums.’

  ‘Remarkable, sir,’ Smyth replies, unable to think what else to say, though he does wonder briefly what a whore would be doing with an abacus.

  ‘Mr Smyth, one more thing.’

  ‘Yessir?’

  ‘You will be polite to the boy’s mother, Mrs Solomon, but no more. You’ll not speak to her about his progress or, as a matter o’ fact, anything else. If I catch you doing so, you will be dismissed immediately. Do you understand me?’

  ‘P
erfectly, sir.’

  David has so effectively sidelined Elizabeth that she eventually loses heart and spends most of her day in her bed chamber quietly nursing a gin bottle. He puts this down to the inherent weakness in the gentile strain and is grateful that she no longer makes a fuss. He knows that his own mother, Hannah, and even the sickly Rebecca would have fought him to a standstill and most probably would have won. A Jewish mother has resources of resistance and sheer cantankery to a depth impossible to plumb.

  Not that Hannah Solomon much cared about how David turned out, other than to instil in him the same hate she had for his father Ikey and his so-called mistress Mary Abacus. Hannah believed that survival in a world where a Jew was considered even lower than the bog-Irish, depended on money and a heart filled with malice. ‘Vengeance is a dish best tasted cold,’ she’d say to him. ‘They’s all bastards, David, all greedy. Only thing you gotta learn is how to be a bigger bastard and more greedy. Know what I mean, son?’

  David has few illusions about the sort of man he is. Given his parents, he believes he is the logical outcome of Ikey and Hannah Solomon, two of the more rapacious creatures to step ashore from a convict ship. They were formidable in their capacity to create mischief or to make a shilling out of someone else’s misery.

  Hannah had been the owner of a dockside brothel, the most vile in London. She kept small boys and turned them into catamites. Little girls, orphans from the streets of London, were trained by her for the delectation of paedophiles and the most evil of the great city’s perverts and sexual predators. She would, for the right price, obtain dwarfs, nigger women, the deformed and even slobbering idiots from the madhouse, whatever the vile preference or sexual proclivities demanded. That was Hannah Solomon, a business woman who didn’t stop to weigh the consequences of any perversion beyond the price it might fetch in the market of the depraved. She believed that if there was a need and if she didn’t exploit it, someone else would. And in this regard she was probably right. London, at the time, was the greatest cesspool in the known world, and the exploitation of ragged children abandoned by their mothers to live under the bridges and in the underground sewage system was so common as to be ignored by the law.

  However, her four children were well cared for and were too young to be aware of their mother’s pernicious occupation. They lived in a pleasant, even by comparison to the houses around it, salubrious, Whitechapel house and were minded by a nursemaid, usually a malnourished Irish biddy, grateful for free board and lodging and a few pennies to spend on gin on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath, when Hannah remained at home with her children and the maid was given the day off to get drunk.

  This cloistered, albeit lonely life as a child came to an abrupt end when David was eight and Hannah was convicted of the theft of a batch of gentlemen’s fob watches and sentenced to be transported with her children to Van Diemen’s Land. Though the theft of the watches was no less an act of her own rapacity, Hannah believed her arrest and subsequent transportation were the result of a clever plan hatched by Ikey so that he and his whore mistress, Mary Abacus, could steal the contents of a large combination safe hidden under the floor of the pantry in the Whitechapel home.

  People who hold themselves to be victims seldom bother to examine the evidence leading to the circumstances in which they find themselves and Hannah was no different.

  How Ikey might be somehow able to force open the safe from as far away as America, where he’d absconded, Hannah never bothered to explain. Even after Ikey was recaptured and was himself transported to Port Arthur, so that the safe remained unopened in their boarded-up Whitechapel home, she continued to blame them.

  Hannah’s transportation and the wealth denied her became the basis for her hatred and bitterness and, as both emotions needed to have subjects for vilification, Ikey and Mary Abacus remained the principals accused of her demise.

  It was a bitterness and hatred for his father which she nourished in her oldest son during her years as a convict and, later, when, as an emancipist, she took up with George Madden, a successful grain merchant in New Norfolk.

  ‘You must promise me, David,’ his mother would say, ‘if I should die before that miserable bastard, Ikey Solomon, your father, Gawd ’elp us, or his whore, you will avenge our little family. What we have become is because of them two and they must pay for what they done to us. Listen to Mama, my precious. Every humiliation, every insult, every misery that has befallen you, every moment you’ve suffered is to be blamed on those two vile creatures who put us here in this Gawd-forsaken place and stole our money. Rich? We was, filthy bleedin’ rich, we could’ve been nabobs, kings and queens. It’s them two robbed us, took everything what was rightly ours!’

  She would repeat this sentiment every day of the miserable life David endured. Hannah was nothing if not persistent and persuasive and soon David’s young mind had become totally corrupted with a hatred for his father and a loathing for Mary Abacus. They were to blame for all his unhappiness, for the beatings he received at the hands of Madden, for every insult and humiliation he suffered working for him.

  ‘Mama, I swear on your grave, they shall pay,’ he would tell his mother earnestly.

  ‘Listen to me, David, my boy. You must learn to be a businessman like George, only better. He ain’t too well and I don’t suppose he’ll last much longer.’ She smiled and gave him a sly look. ‘He coughs somethin’ awful at night and sometimes there’s blood comes up. I’m happy to say he won’t take physic or see the doctor neither. I know he beats you somethin’ awful, but we’ll get it all when he passes on. Listen to me, poor folk can’t take revenge, only rich. That miserable whore Mary Abacus is getting rich with her brewery and what she stole from us, and she’ll be respectable soon enough and she’ll come after you, you mark me words. What she done to me she’ll do again to you and the others.’ Tears of mortification would run down Hannah’s face. ‘We’ll be rubbish and she’ll be respectable,’ she’d wail. ‘It’s money what earns respect, we must get what’s rightly ours and see her in the gutter again!’ Hannah would wipe away her tears and beckon to him, ‘Come ’ere then, give us a kiss. You’re a clever boy, David. I know you won’t let your old mama down. Remember, folk don’t ask how you got your gelt, long as you’ve got it. Money ain’t got no conscience, nor should you have.’

  Soon David equated the only love and affection he ever received with his ability to hate and as he grew to manhood he saw his business success and the subsequent wealth as the means to enable him to become a bully and to use his power to gain revenge for true and imagined hurts and insults. Throughout his long life, Mary Abacus remained the primary protagonist he must defeat. It was a promise to Hannah he was to keep better than she could ever have imagined.

  At the age of twenty-eight he’d conspired with Hannah to kidnap Mary’s adopted twins, Tommo and Hawk, in an attempt to blackmail Ikey into giving her his numbers to the safe in Whitechapel. The kidnap plan went disastrously wrong but Hannah comforted herself with the knowledge that she’d blighted the lives of both children forever and had somewhat evened her score with Mary Abacus, who loved the boys more than her life. ‘It’s no more than she deserves,’ she’d sneer. ‘Them two brats were bastards born of a fat whore, it’s all the bitch could love, a whore’s sons.’ Then she turned to him. ‘It’s not enough, David. We cannot rest until we have taken everything from them, you hear. Everything, we must have it all!’

  When Ikey died, leaving his half of the combination to Mary, Hannah, borrowing the passage money from Madden, sent David to England where the fifteen-year-old Hawk was learning how to grow hops in Kent.

  It was agreed that the two families would share the safe’s contents, dividing it equally, though David and Hannah had already planned for Hawk to be followed and robbed of his share soon after he emerged from the Whitechapel house.

  As David lies weeping in the bathchair, he thinks how terribly he was cheated by Hawk when the safe was opened and shown to be empty. How, over the past
twenty-one years, in the twilight of his life, he has clawed back his family fortunes and consigned Hawk and his so-called grandchildren, the last vestiges of Mary Abacus, to emotional oblivion by controlling everything the great whore built with her misbegotten gains. Now, he sobs, the nigger is back again, the perfidious bastard has come back to threaten him and his grandson, to destroy his life’s work.

  David feels a terrible anger rising up in him. It grows more and more intense and he knows he must release it, break something. He finds the spittoon and hurls it to the ground, though it is made of brass and simply clangs and bounces before coming to a halt. He is too weak to get out of the bathchair and the anger grows and envelops him until his entire body shakes uncontrollably and he cannot find the electric buzzer to summon help. His arms, flapping about like a rag doll, are beyond his control. He attempts to shout but his throat is filled with an anger and a panic that leaves him incapable of more than a gurgling sound. His legs are jumping wildly and still the anger grows until it is now beyond containing so that his last conscious thought is that he is about to suffer a heart seizure and suddenly there is only blackness.

  Almost an hour later David is discovered lying on the floor of the conservatory by Adams. He appears to have been thrown from the bathchair. His nose has bled profusely from the impact of landing on the tiled floor. The bleeding has now stopped but the front of his pyjama jacket is soaked in blood. His face is fixed in a state of rictus, a grimace not unlike one of his more unusually cantankerous expressions, though it appears to be permanently in place. When the doctor is called to examine the still alive but completely comatose old man, it is discovered that David Solomon has suffered a massive cerebral stroke.

  Hawk is not to know the news about David until a telephone call from Abraham the following morning asking to postpone the boardroom meeting. Abraham, ever polite, simply explains that the old man has had a stroke and that it would be most convenient if Hawk would be so good as to postpone their meeting for two days.