Solomon's Song

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘And what is that?’ Victoria asks.

  ‘Goodwill,’ Hawk replies.

  Victoria looks genuinely shocked. ‘You’re not serious? Goodwill? You said yourself, people are greedy and can’t be trusted?’

  ‘Well, take Sidney Myer again. He has established a pension fund for his workers, he is a Jew but allows the staff to hold Christian services in the shop at lunch time. He has a choir, a Friday night get-together for his staff, annual picnics and now he has introduced what is called “a spiff”, that is, his sales people are paid a penny in the pound commission as an incentive. Is this not the beginnings at least of a caring company?’

  Victoria looks appealingly at Hawk. ‘You’re going to say, when a generous person controls a company and is in a position to make the right decisions, management and trade unions don’t necessarily have to be at each other’s throats. Is that it, Grandfather?’

  ‘Very good, my dear. If you were to join Solomon &

  Teekleman and rise to the top it would be a great opportunity to show your character, to show how things might be different.’

  ‘Well, what about Joshua? He has been groomed to run Solomon & Teekleman virtually since birth?’

  ‘We have the majority now, Victoria. We have the say.’

  Victoria shakes her head. ‘How could you say that! How is that fair? If he were better than me I wouldn’t want to be chairman. I would hate that.’

  ‘Better? How can he be? He is the product of his grandfather, he will run the company much as his grandfather did. There is very little of Abraham and a whole lot of David Solomon in that young man, he would be the devil you know and want to be rid of, Victoria.’

  ‘But I would always have to fight him, he’d never give in.’

  ‘Aye, that’s true. If you were a union official you’d always have to fight him and he’d never give in. The proposition I hope, with your permission, to put to Abraham is that he remains overall chairman, that I become the chairman and managing director of the Potato Factory and take you with me to train you to eventually run it. Then, upon Joshua’s return from the war, he will take over Solomon & Co., whereupon I retire and you replace me as managing director of the Potato Factory.’ Hawk shrugs. ‘After that it’s your personal donnybrook with Joshua.’

  ‘I see, him with one company, me with the other. So that I can learn to practise what I preach, our ideal of a fair-minded company, and Joshua does it his way. The performances of the two companies may then be compared. What if his is better, and greed and bullying proves to be better than sharing the wealth?’

  ‘Well, that’s for you to find out, I didn’t say it would be easy. If it’s a disaster you could always resign and join the trade union movement,’ he teases Victoria. ‘A little wiser in the ways of the world by then, I daresay.’

  ‘But, Grandfather, you do believe that fairness and honesty will win the day, don’t you?’

  ‘I have always tried to be honest and fair in my dealings in life and to be perfectly frank with you my life has been a failure. But that doesn’t mean you will fail. The very predicament we find ourselves in at present, with David having snatched control of Solomon & Teekleman, was because I wanted to be fair-minded.’

  ‘You mean you don’t think I can do it?’ Victoria challenges.

  ‘No, I didn’t say that. I said that I had not been successful. But Mary Abacus was, so why not you?’ Hawk replies.

  ‘I have never understood why you wanted to join with David and Abraham in the first place, if as you say their way of doing things was so very different to yours? You didn’t need to do it, you were already a huge success and, as I understand it, they were in financial trouble. It’s never made any sense to me?’

  Hawk sighs. ‘Because out of something rotten came something good and then out of that something good has come something rotten again and I am stupid enough to believe it might yet come to something good.’

  ‘Whatever can you mean?’ Victoria says, puzzled.

  ‘Ah! It’s a long story and one I would only wish you to hear if you decide to come into the company so that I might train you. If you don’t I will not burden you with it, it is too long and painful and not worth the telling unless it ultimately helps your determination to succeed where I have failed.’

  ‘Grandfather, that is so very unfair!’ Victoria protests. ‘You want me to make a decision without knowing its entire purpose?’

  ‘Nevertheless, I want you to decide using your own free will. Whatever you decide to do, I shall accept your decision. If I were to tell you my reasons for wanting you to take your rightful place in the company you own, you may well be persuaded by your emotions and not by your own reasoning. I should not want that to happen.’

  Victoria spends the next two days alone, taking her meals separately then announces that she wants to talk to Ben who hasn’t, as expected, returned to Tasmania. Four days after the passing-out parade he was told to report to Major Sayers, his Victorian company commander.

  The major, a scouse, comes straight to the point. ‘Look, Sergeant Teekleman, we need you here. I’ve spoken to your C.O. in Hobart and he’s agreed you can stay with us, though in fairness I ’ave to say he put up a fair bit of fuss, no, more than that, he was bloody angry.’

  ‘But why, sir? It was clearly understood that I’d be allowed to return to my own regiment, to my mates?’

  The major shrugged, ‘Ard luck, lad, we need another instructor on machine guns. Sergeant Freys, the chief instructor, has been diagnosed with cancer, he won’t be going overseas with us.’

  ‘But, sir, there are ten other sergeants all of whom did the course with me, all of them Victorians.’

  ‘It’s damned ’ard luck. I know. But there are other considerations I am not at liberty to divulge like.’ He points to the ceiling. ‘Made higher oop.’

  Shortly after Ben’s instructions that he is to stay with the Victorian regiment it is announced that the troopships which are to take the Victorians and Tasmanians to King George Sound in Albany will be delayed three weeks. There are no official explanations for this, but a major story in the Age speculates, as it turns out correctly, that it is because the prime minister and the war cabinet do not want to send the convoy ships to Western Australia without the protection of the battleships HMAS Sydney and HMAS Melbourne in case the German navy decides to hunt in Australian waters.

  Victoria contacts Ben at Broadmeadows and he requests and is granted forty-eight hours’ leave. She books two rooms overnight at a small hotel in the Dandenongs so that she might talk undisturbed with him about Hawk’s proposition.

  Victoria arrives home at ten o’clock in the evening of the second day and goes immediately to Hawk’s study to tell him that she accepts the challenge he has given her.

  ‘I am delighted, my dear,’ Hawk says, rising and embracing her. ‘But now you must tell me why? I cannot believe that my arguments alone have persuaded you.’

  ‘Well no, not entirely, it was Ben.’

  ‘Ben?’ Hawk says surprised. ‘I didn’t think Ben took much interest in business matters?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t, but he’s got an awful lot of commonsense.’ Victoria smiles. ‘“Sissie,” he said after I’d told him how I felt and what you’d said, “the bloody unions are never going to let you rise high enough in their ranks to really change things. Grandfather Hawk is probably right, there are just as many crooks, greedy and corrupt blokes protecting their arses in the unions as there are in big business. The army’s the same, full of bullshit artists that don’t know their arse from their elbow. What’s more, how far do you think you’re gunna get as a woman in the Labor Party, eh? You ain’t gunna get into parliament, will ya? A woman in parliament, heaven bloody forbid, she might take her knitting into debate! Do a pair of baby booties when the house is in session!”’ Victoria is a fair mimic in her own right and she has Ben’s soft drawl down pat. ‘“But, look at it this way, sis, if you join Solomon & Teekleman and you go against Joshua and you beat
him, you can do things your way and make a bloody big difference, possibly change the way business is done in Australia. Grandfather Hawk is right about money and power. Mind you, round this bloody place there’s no bloody money, it’s just power! But it doesn’t always have to make you corrupt, does it?”’ Victoria concludes. ‘Well, that’s what he said anyway.’

  ‘He said that?’ Hawk exclaims, impressed. ‘And that’s what made you decide?’

  Victoria nods. ‘Now, will you tell me all I must know about the past?’

  ‘First you must eat something. Mrs Billings has left a plate in the oven for fear you’d return and starve to death on boarding-house food. Hawk imitates the housekeeper, ‘“She’d be a shadow, that one, left to her own! Can’t even boil an egg, too busy doin’ sums on them bloomin’ beads! Young girls these days got nothing in their ’eads what’s useful. I don’t know what the world’s coming to, her goin’ off and staying in a boardin’ ’ouse!”’ Hawk then adds in his own voice, ‘Better eat something, though, or we’ll never hear the end of it.’

  ‘It was a perfectly lovely little hotel and we had a scrumptious lunch before we left, but a little supper would be nice. Will you sit with me, Grandfather? Have a cup of tea?’ Victoria smiles. ‘I can make a cup of tea.’

  It is nearly two before they finally rise from the table and Hawk has told Victoria the whole story of the two families and the bitter conflict which has always existed between them and the reasons for it. He leaves nothing out. Finally he tells her of Teekleman’s death and Hinetitama’s demise until she returned to die in the St Kilda hospice and that, with her proxy, they once again control Solomon & Teekleman.

  When Hawk has completed the story they both remain silent for some time, Victoria weeping softly. ‘It is not too late to decide against joining Solomon & Teekleman. I would completely understand if you are reluctant to carry the burden of such a past. Though Abraham Solomon is a reasonable man, Joshua has been bred to commerce by his grandfather and he may prove equally recalcitrant and unforgiving.’

  Victoria looks tearfully up at Hawk and sniffs, ‘No, I’ve made up my mind, I want to be with you.’

  ‘Well then, there is one last task, though more a pleasure than a task.’ He rises and goes to his desk and taking a small key from his pocket he opens a drawer and takes out Mary’s Waterloo medal attached to a thin gold chain. ‘Your great-grandmother asked me on her deathbed to give this to you. It was her talisman, her great good luck. It was only removed from her neck on two occasions, when it was stolen on board the convict ship she came out on by the assistant to the ship’s surgeon and when she died. Will you wear it? On the back it says “I shall never surrender”, four words which made everything possible for Mary. Will you take it for yourself, the medal and the words?’

  Victoria gasps as she is handed the medallion. ‘Oh, I know it was wrong, but I was so envious of Ben when he received our grandfather’s Tiki. I would so much have liked it for myself.’ Victoria, already emotionally exhausted, bursts into tears as Hawk takes the medallion back again and places it about her neck. ‘I shall treasure it all the days of my life, Grandfather Hawk. Thank you, thank you,’ she says, barely above a whisper. ‘I shall wear it with the same pride as did Mary Abacus.’

  She goes to bed in the small hours of the morning exhausted but unable to sleep, her pillow wet with tears for the sad past of her family. She sees the dawn light growing through her window and hears the call of the currawongs, always the first of the birds to greet the new day, and then the next thing she knows, Mrs Billings is shaking her. ‘It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, lovey. Mr Hawk says to bring you a nice cuppa. I’ve got a nice bit o’ fish for your tea and some new taties and them baby beans you likes. I dunno what his nibs thought he was doin’ keeping you up so late, you comin’ ’ome after a long journey like that. That’s men for you, don’t think do they, does what they wants, never mind the feelings and welfare o’ others, especially us womenfolk!’

  Victoria smiles, sipping the tea, her whole life seems to have changed in the last few days but the whingeing rock of Billings can be relied upon to remain ever the same. ‘It was my fault, Mrs Billings, he was telling me the story of our family.’

  ‘Hmmph! I could tell you a thing or two meself, but I won’t, it’s not for me to say, being in service and all.’ She points to the Waterloo medal about Victoria’s neck. ‘Give you that, did he? That were her most precious possession. Never mind the money, it were that she treasured above rubies. Always knew when things were not going good, she’d sit on the porch in her rocking chair ’olding the medal in her broken fist waitin’ for them birds.’

  ‘Yes, Grandfather Hawk told me, it was her talisman and her great good luck.’

  ‘Yes, that and them bloomin’ parrots. Did he tell you about them green parrots, that were also her great good luck she’d say?’

  Victoria shakes her head, trying to recall if Hawk said anything about green parrots. ‘No, I don’t think so?’

  ‘Well, you saw them yerself, you was three years old.’

  ‘I don’t remember. What about the green parrots?’

  ‘Miss Mary, she’d sit on the porch o’ the big house in Hobart to watch the parrots come past. They’d fly over the roof going to their roost higher up the mountain. “Here they come, my great good luck,” she’d shout for one and all to hear as they passed over.’ Mrs Billings warms to the story, happy to be a part of a family legend. ‘Your great-grannie, she loved them birds. Well, the day she died, the very minute she went to her peace, the parrots started to come, but they didn’t fly over like always, they settled in the garden, on the roof, in the trees, there was more green parrots than there was leaves on the gum trees. Hundreds o’ thousands o’ them. They made so much racket you couldn’t hear nothing, everything was vibrating green. They stayed an hour then they took off, all o’ them together. It were like the roaring of the wind, just their wings and the screeching fair blow’d the ears off yer ’ead.

  ‘Well, next mornin’ at sunrise I’m in the kitchen garden ’anging out the tea cloths like I always does first thing. I looks up to the porch expecting to see Miss Mary, her in her favourite chair, waiting for the parrots to pass over. But o’ course she ain’t there this partickler mornin’, she’s dead, ain’t she? But it’s time for the parrots to fly over so I waits, remembering the strange thing what ’appened the night before. I waits and waits. You could time them birds on a clock, you could, always ten minutes after sunrise, but they didn’t come, didn’t fly over. Not that morning, not ever again. The parrots never come back again and if you think I’m lyin’ I’ll swear it on a stack o’ Bibles,’ Mrs Billings says. She looks at Victoria darkly. ‘The luck’s run out, see. That’s what happened to Mr Hawk. There’s no more luck, it’s all been spent by Miss Mary, used up.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe you, Mrs Billings, that’s just superstitious nonsense,’ Victoria cries.

  ‘You mark me words, young lady, the luck’s run out with the green parrots.’

  Hawk and Victoria arrive at the head office of Solomon & Teekleman on the dot of ten o’clock, having waited in the motor car around the corner for five minutes so that they wouldn’t appear over-anxious by arriving early.

  They are met at the door by Abraham’s secretary, a tall, dour man of whom it is claimed that he has never been seen to smile. There is a greyness as well as a mustiness about him as though he has been locked in a cupboard for several years never seeing the sunlight. ‘Sir Abraham is expecting you, sir,’ he says to Hawk, while managing to completely ignore the presence of Victoria.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Phillips,’ Victoria chirps brightly, but receives no response.

  Hawk is impressed, she has done her homework and knows the name of Abraham’s private secretary, whom he is certain she cannot have previously met. ‘I don’t believe you’ve met my granddaughter, Phillips?’ Hawk now says. ‘Victoria, this is Mr Phillips, Mr Phillips, this is Victoria,’ he says smiling. He can sen
se that Victoria is more amused than upset by Phillips’ original rebuff.

  ‘How do you do?’ Victoria smiles, extending her hand.

  ‘How do?’ Phillips mutters, averting his eyes and pushing forward a limp hand which scarcely touches the tips of Victoria’s gloved fingers before being withdrawn. ‘Follow me please, sir.’

  Sir Abraham Solomon is seated at the head of the table as Hawk and Victoria enter the boardroom. There are three men around the long mahogany table and another is seated away from the table, in the corner furthermost from the door. They all rise. Abraham in his fifties is a balding, corpulent, clean-shaven man dressed in a well-cut, three-piece, dark-navy woollen suit. He wears a black tie and gold tie-clip, and his starched collar seems to cut somewhat into his jowls. Everything about him, right down to his highly polished black boots, starched shirt cuffs and gold cufflinks, bears the hallmark of those who do business in the big end of town. ‘Good morning,

  Hawk, good morning, Miss Teekleman, may I introduce you to my colleagues?’

  Abraham turns towards the three men standing. ‘Hawk Solomon you already know, this is his granddaughter Miss Victoria Teekleman.’

  ‘Miss Teekleman, at the far end is Sir Samuel Sopworth, then Mr Bramwell Cumming two chairs up on the right and, next to him, Mr John Miles. Not joining us at the table is Mr Parkin, who will be taking notes as an observer.’

  Victoria has heard of two of the men, Samuel Sopworth, who is a famous accountant, and Bramwell Cumming, a notorious barrister known in Labor ranks as the scourge of the union movement. John Miles, whom she hasn’t heard of before, has the pinched and fussy look of a successful lawyer, a type with whom she is all too familiar. Parkin is an unprepossessing-looking man in a suit one might expect a clerk to wear, a misfit, and doesn’t appear to belong to the same world as the four other men. Though somewhat older, he has a quite startling resemblance to one of the members of her Labor Party chapter, who is a clerk in the railways office in Flinders Street. Then she suddenly remembers that he is also named Parkin, George Parkin, and has on several occasions boasted of his older brother, who he claimed worked in Trade and Customs, and with the previous month’s election of the Andrew Fisher Labor government has been made head of department under the Hon. F. G. Tudor, Minister for Trade and Customs.