Solomon's Song (23 page)

The voting rights on this ten per cent, which have been unavailable to Hawk for the twenty-one years Hinetitama has been away, are the difference between his side controlling a majority shareholding in Solomon & Teekleman or David and his son doing so.

Hawk promised Tommo on his deathbed that he would always care for his daughter but when he took the boat back to Hobart in response to Ann’s telegram he arrived to find that Hinetitama had absconded.

In a state of shock he listened while Ann told him the story of how Hinetitama had taken up singing with Teekleman and was nightly to be seen drunk in one or another of the pubs around the waterfront until she was the laughing stock of the town. She told how Teekleman, in the middle of one of his famous ’skols’, that is the drinking down of a pint of ale in a bout with another drinker, a competition in which he had never been beaten, suddenly dropped the tankard of ale and clasped his hands to his chest, collapsing to his knees. He was dead from a sudden and massive heart attack before his forehead struck the wooden floor. Without the giant Dutchman to take her home when she looked like making a fool of herself and despite Ann’s efforts to dissuade her, Hinetitama had been on a continual binge almost from the moment Teekleman had died. Like all alcoholics, the single glass of gin placed in her hands by the nefarious Isaac Blundstone had been the beginning of her undoing.

Told in a moment of sobriety by Ann that Hawk was returning to Hobart, she’d that very night packed a few things into a canvas bag and disappeared. Hawk arrived in Hobart on the overnight steamer to discover that she was last seen in the drunken company of Captain Ben ‘Blackbird’ Smithers of the windjammer The Fair Wind, one of the sailing ships still plying between the island and the mainland.

Smithers, a former captain of a whaling ship, was notorious as a blackbirder, plundering the islands in the seventies and early eighties, kidnapping Kanakas and bringing them to Queensland to work in the cane fields. He was never apprehended and, like Teekleman, is a drunk and a thorough scoundrel.

From that moment, Hawk searched Australia and New Zealand, even sending detectives to Canada, the new Dominion of South Africa and the United States of America but to no avail. Somehow Hinetitama managed to evade him.

Just before her disappearance Hawk had concluded the deal with David and Abraham Solomon which relied on her shares and proxy in the new conglomerate for him to be chairman. Unable to utilise her ten per cent shareholding he lost his voting majority in Solomon & Teekleman, giving David and Abraham control of the giant enterprise. When David became chairman he immediately removed Hawk from the Potato Factory and Hawk was reduced to being no more than a large shareholder.

Despite his untimely demise, Hawk never sought to find Hinetitama simply to regain her proxy, but because he was guilt-stricken, forced by her absence to break what he considered his sacred word to his twin Tommo. That is, until he received a note from the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Charity Hospice in St Kilda.

The Sisters of Charity Hospice for Women, St Kilda

14th August 1914

Dear Mr Solomon,

Sir, it is with some hesitation that I write to you.

However, after prayer, I am convinced that I have no choice in the matter and so I crave your indulgence.

In recent weeks there has come into our hospice a half-caste woman suffering from delirium tremens, malnutrition and cirrhosis of the liver, in all, an advanced state of alcoholism from which the doctor does not believe she will recover.

She answers to the name of Mary Gibbons, but says that her true identity is Hinetitama Solomon.

I hasten to add that information obtained from alcoholics is usually not to be relied upon. Except, in the case of Mary Gibbons, at such times when her mind is clear, she persists in asking that we contact you as a matter of urgency. It is not usual for someone in her condition to retain such a persistent and consistent obsession and so I am forced to conclude that it may have some validity.

Sir, we do not believe that God will grant Mary much longer on this earth. If this poor demented soul has had any connection with you in the past, then I can only hope and pray that you will see it in your heart to grant her final wish some priority.

I remain yours, in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ,

Angelene Denmeade,

Mother Superior - Sisters of Charity.

Upon receiving the letter Hawk makes the messenger boy wait and immediately pens a letter to the Mother Superior thanking her for the information and urging her to give her patient all the medical attention she needs without regard to the costs involved. He adds that she is to be given a private room if such exists and asks Sister Angelene to assure Mary Gibbons that he will visit the hospice that very afternoon. With a penny in his pocket for his trouble and the letter placed under his greasy cap for safekeeping, the lad runs off.

Hawk arrives to discover that Mary Gibbons is once again in a state of delirium. He is to wait almost two days before she recovers sufficiently to see him. He takes lodgings at a bug-ridden boarding house across the road, leaving instructions with the sisters at the hospice that he is to be called at any time during the day or night when she comes out of her delirium.

Close to midnight two days later, Hawk is finally summoned to the bedside of Mary Gibbons. A nun carrying a hurricane lantern leads him through the darkened ward to her bedside. She hangs the lamp on a hook suspended from the ceiling and, without a further word, leaves him alone with Tommo’s daughter.

The lantern throws a circle of yellow light over the bed and Hawk sees immediately that the emaciated old hag lying in the bed bears no resemblance whatsoever to the beautiful woman who forsook her two children all those years ago.

But he knows almost at once that it is Hinetitama in the bed. On her face she carries the distinctive moko markings of her Ngati Haua tribe and attached to a cheap metal chain about her scrawny neck and resting on the coarse material of her cotton nightgown is Tommo’s greenstone Tiki.

Hinetitama is by now fifty-four, though she appears to be at least twenty years older. She has always been small, taking her size from Tommo rather than her Maori ancestors. But now she seems diminutive, a tiny wreck of a woman, her unkempt hair white and her face deeply wrinkled. Her dark eyes are sunk into her skull, though Hawk sees at once that they are clear and follow him closely as he bends over to look into her face. She is toothless and repeatedly smacks her gums together, her once elegant Maori nose and the point of her chin almost touching to give her the appearance of an old crone.

Hinetitama lifts her right hand slightly to acknowledge his approach but it trembles beyond her control and falls back to her side. ‘Hello, Uncle Hawk,’ she cackles.

‘Oh, my dear, what has become of you?’ Hawk cries, at once overcome. Tears appear instantly and he reaches for his handkerchief to brush them away. ‘Hinetitama, what have I done to you!’ he cries again in anguish.

‘Nuthin’, Uncle. I done it all meself. I could never learn t’behave meself. I were always a bad ‘un.’

Hawk takes her tiny claw in his hand. Her nails are chipped and broken and while the nuns have scrubbed them clean the brown tobacco stains remain on the first and middle finger of her right hand. ‘I searched so hard to find you, how ever did you escape me?’

‘Yeah, I know’d that well enough. Always some bugger sniffin’ about, askin’ questions. Promising rewards.’ Her eyes light up and she raises her head from her pillow. Hawk sees there is still a spark of defiance in them. ‘But youse didn’t get me, did yiz?’ She falls back exhausted. ‘Nah, it wouldn’t'a worked out. It were best I left the young ‘uns to you, Uncle. I was never gunna be a good mother t’thum.’

‘But, my dear girl, you left everything behind, the most fortunate life. You had so much to live for. Mary’s shares made you a wealthy woman. Why did you not come back to claim them?’

Hinetitama sighs. ‘Them shares? They’s for the brats, had’ta be somethin’ good comin’ t’them two little ‘uns.’ She closes her eyes, too exhausted to continue, then in a voice not much above a whisper asks, ‘Ow’d they turn out them two?’

Hawk tells her about Ben and Victoria though there is no sign that she is listening or even still conscious. Finally, at the insistence of the nun on night duty, he leaves in the early hours of the morning, with instructions that he is to be called the moment Hinetitama is again lucid.

Over the next week he returns home to dinner each night and leaves soon after, giving Victoria the excuse that he has business which must be conducted at night and continues until too late to return home, which in a sense is the truth. Apart from the occasions when they are allowed to visit Ben, he remains at the boarding house and whenever his niece has an hour or so of clarity he visits her.

Hawk slowly begins to piece together her life, though Hinetitama’s mind is too far gone for him to get anything but a sense of her misery and the terribly hard life of a woman who lives rough and cannot get through a day without a black bottle cradled in her arms. To an alcoholic one day is much the same as another, one place as good as another, and the abuse of every kind a poor, drunken woman suffers at the hands of men doesn’t alter. She had been abandoned in Cape Town by the nefarious Blackbird Smithers and drifted into a life as a sometime chanteuse, though her drinking made her unreliable as a singer and this soon became a euphemism for practising the oldest profession in the world.

She’d lived in District Six, once the Malay slave quarter, now inhabited by their descendants who had become a mixture of the many races of Africa and were known as Cape Coloureds, a people thought to be neither black nor white and so alienated from either extreme.

District Six is its own private world, in some parts it is still a respectable Muslim community but in others it has become a notorious slum where violence is commonplace and Cape brandy the standard fare for its people. Tucked into a fold on the slopes of Table Mountain, the folk who lived there trusted no authority, kept their own counsel and solved their own problems.

Hinetitama, in the guise of Mary Gibbons, was as safe from discovery and the prying enquiries of any detective under Hawk’s instructions as it might be possible had she disappeared into the depths of China. Starting to cough blood and thinking she was dying, she had somehow managed to persuade the captain of a Russian whaling ship bound for Melbourne and thereafter to hunting the whale in the Pacific to give her passage back to Australia.

Gradually Hawk begins to talk to her about her will and makes her see what she must do to ensure her shares in Solomon & Teekleman go to her children. ‘It’s the one decent thing I done thum,’ she says, over and over, ‘the one decent thing.’

Hawk tries to persuade her to see Ben and Victoria and tells her that Ben is going off to the war in Europe. But Hinetitama won’t be persuaded. ‘Nah, they don’t want to see me, an old woman what’s a derro. I’d be ashamed meself, them two seein’ me like this.’ Despite Hawk’s pleas she is unmoved, the old stubbornness inherited from Tommo still there.

He’d seen the same wilfulness emerge in the next generation, when Victoria, as a child, would stamp her tiny foot and yell at her nanny, ‘I won’t and you can’t make me!’ after which no amount of admonishment or punishment would prevail against her. Now as a young woman Tommo’s granddaughter is equally certain of what she believes and, while of an altogether sweet nature, she is not easily dissuaded once she determines upon a course of action.

Ben, thankfully, is too easygoing to get into a bind about almost anything. But with Hinetitama’s shares and her proxy safely in his pocket, Hawk knows that the cheerful Ben will not lead the family in the next generation, that he has neither the desire nor the kind of intellect to do so. Victoria, as Mary had claimed from the outset, has the brilliance and the willpower and, yes, the sheer stubbornness required to eventually run Solomon & Teekleman.

Hawk reassures himself that Victoria, with her good looks and the wealth she will bring as her dowry, will find herself a good accommodating husband and that this may somewhat soften her nature. Perhaps she will even marry someone capable of sharing in the running of the giant enterprise Solomon & Teekleman. In the meantime he must keep Abraham as chairman, for he has served the company well and Hawk bears him no animosity, knowing that his demise is entirely the work of David. Even though his father has been retired since the advent of Federation, Abraham is still unable to go against the old man’s will.

‘What you tell them kids about me?’ Hinetitama on one occasion asks him.

Hawk smiles. ‘I told them how beautiful you were, a Maori princess, with a voice that could charm the birds out of the sky.’

Hinetitama smiles. ‘I could sing good, that’s the one thing I had goin’ for me.’ Then she sighs, ‘But the grog and tabacca took it away like everything else.’

Hawk continues, recalling the lovely young girl he once knew. ‘I told them how, when I visited you each year in New Zealand, we would go for long walks in the forests and, like your mother, you could imitate the birdsong of every species and that you knew all the names of the trees and the plants of the forest and the flowers in the meadows and along the river banks. How, even at the age of ten, you could set an eel trap or weave a flax mat or a fruit basket and cook me a nice fish dinner.’ Hawk sighs. ‘You were an enchanted child, Hinetitama, always singing and laughing and up to some sort of mischief.’

‘What you tell them, the brats, why I left them, hey?’ Hinetitama asks suddenly.

‘I said that you were a songbird and couldn’t stay in one place for long, that you wanted to sing to all the world and that, with some people, it is wrong to try to clip their wings and keep them in a cage.’

Hinetitama squints up at him. ‘And they bought that shit!’

Hawk laughs. ‘At first, when they were kids. Later they just accepted you were gone from their lives.’

Hawk did not tell her that when Ben and Victoria grew older and asked him about their mother he had been forced to tell them the truth, that she was wild and wilful and drinking heavily and simply couldn’t abide the constraints placed upon her in the narrow Hobart society. That Victoria, in particular, is not the sort who can be fobbed off with a fairytale forever. He thinks how sometimes, much to his embarrassment, she says to him, ‘Now I want the truth, Grandpa Hawk. Don’t tell me any cock-and-bull story!’