Black Diamonds Read online

  ‘But —’

  ‘And we’ll demand that you replace him. Everyone’ll be onside for it. And you’re entitled to it, in all ways of looking at it. So?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I say; I’ve got to, properly.

  ‘You’re a puzzle, Danny,’ he says. ‘You get married after five minutes, but if you were any slower on this I’d say you were backward.’

  He shakes his head, but I’m not committing yet. France, once I saw her properly, seemed like she’d always been there waiting for me to catch on, but this is a big shift in thinking. I always expected to get married; I never expected I’d manage a mine; and neither of them at nineteen. Never expected I’d have money, either, and so far I haven’t felt the effect of that, but I know I will soon. It is time to be reasonable about it.

  More than time, it seems, when we come into the lamp room and Stevens is there waiting. He says, in front of the others, ‘Something for your wife from Mr Drummond, Ackerman,’ hands me an envelope and walks back towards the office.

  That’s it; decision’s made. I pull him back by his runty shoulder and tell him: ‘Mr Ackerman, thank you.’

  He tries for an eyeball but he knows; I crack with laughing, at him, and so does everyone in the room. I’d very much like to take him round the paddock and belt him for extra clarity, but he’s too small. And I’ve had my fun.

  It’s an offer to buy out her share of the mine. France throws it on the fire. She couldn’t sell even if she wanted to; not till she’s twenty-one, but she’s not going to tell Drummond that. Leave him to wonder. See why I love her?

  She says of my decision: ‘So that’ll mean you don’t go down that hideous — into the pit?’

  ‘Not that often. No.’ Not all day every day.

  She’s so happy she’s almost dancing around the tub and trying not to. And then we’re all over each other again. Dinner does get ruined this time, but it’s my fault she left it burning on the stove.

  FRANCINE

  Not a peep to me from Drummond, not even when the men down tools and win their coup. Daniel tells me all about it, not that there’s much to tell: it was over quickly, since the Wattle has just received a massively extended contract from the railways — Drummond didn’t tell me about that, of course; Daniel did. Drummond had no choice but to cave in to them, so they’d get back to work. It’s only the end of week two of this preposterous war and it appears that the lift in heavy industry is already well under way, in accordance with Father’s prediction, and I imagine my business partner is busy counting pennies in advance. I feel a little sorry for this hapless Stevens fellow, though, but Daniel tells me not to.

  ‘Save your sorrow for Robby.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He went to Sydney and joined up today.’

  Oh dear. Daniel knew he would, but the fact of it has clearly shocked him. If you read the papers, this joining up with the Australian Imperial Forces business seems to be spreading like a disease. There’ll be no trouble whatsoever filling the quota of twenty thousand. Despite plenty of loud dissent from the trade unions and the Irish generally, decrying, rather compellingly at times, Britannia as mistress of tyranny, ordinary men are lining up in droves across the country to volunteer to defend the Glorious Empire, the Realm and Dominions of King George V, whoever he is. All comers considered for service, except for Asiatics and the native Aborigines, who’ve been officially banned from the AIF under the new Defence Act. Why? Because, as the Bulletin portrays them, Chinamen are all treacherous and Jacky-Jacky’s a raggedy drunk? I don’t know anything about Chinese, except that they can grow vegetables anywhere, and that they get addicted to opium while they’re stealing White jobs; knowledge of Aborigines even scantier still, beyond consensus on their moral and intellectual inferiority; comprehension of Robby Cullen’s decision almost as slim, and there’s a tug upon my ignorance of tyranny, like a small hand belonging to a child I can’t see.

  ‘He won’t be the last from the Wattle, either,’ Daniel adds, staring out at the apple trees, grey shapes in the darkness.

  It’s hard to imagine all this going on beyond our little world, where, when I’m not diligently drudging, I’m perusing Common Diseases of the Apple which I’ve borrowed from the library, and bursting for Daniel to come home, reasonably coal-free from now on. Hooray for us. The Leprechaun’s power resonates. And I know Daniel will never join up: never been so chuffed at being wedded to a socialist German, even if he denies the latter. I had been worried that there’d be some big brouhaha against German Australians, but there doesn’t seem to have been much so far. Apart from a few silly incidents reported in the cities, mostly involving overzealous patriots and bricks through windows, German nationals are simply being asked to go home in a calm and orderly manner or be politely interned for the duration. Nothing like that going on in Lithgow: there aren’t any German Germans here; there’s a pony breeder called Keffler outside Wallerawang, apparently, but he’s really ‘Aussie’. Perhaps Daniel’s right: if you’re Australian, you’re Australian, no matter where you came from before that. So many seem to be taking that sentiment deeply seriously, though, and wedding it to Motherland pride. Preparing to stake their lives for it: we’ll show Blighty what we’re made of! It’s not helped by the jingo-jangle in the press: one super-excitable journalist even used the metaphor of Achilles to describe our projected manly might in the forthcoming tussle: Handsomest of All! Ha! Achilles: I’ve got him right here, if you please, and he won’t be going off to war.

  ‘It won’t be so many from here, surely,’ I say to Daniel now. Lithgow is, after all, a workers’ town and the opinion of the union leaders must count for something.

  But he doesn’t want to talk about it any more. We’re celebrating our own victory tonight and Daniel hits the piano. No singing, though I’d love him to; he doesn’t ever quite sing as such but rather talks to the music: ‘You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it. You made me want you, and all the time you knew it. I guess you always knew it’; hardly Al Jolson but I adore the sound of his voice — I’m unashamedly biased and most disinclined to ever hear that phonograph disc again. Now he plays his bit of Beethoven, the sonata Pathetique, and I think I know why. He played it last night and it turned me to vapour: trés pathetic. He’s a ceaseless wonder; he says he can’t even read music much — ‘Mum taught me.’ Sure. Some things can’t be taught; they just are what they are, as they come. Not exactly the world’s most difficult piece, and he avoids any tricky embellishment, but I can’t play it so well, and when he comes to the final bars I hear that he’s not just playing for me: tonight it fades with love and sadness. It sounds older than him, us, Beethoven too.

  We’ll see the fever in the flesh, I suppose, when we travel to Sydney at the end of September. We, or rather I, have to sign some papers saying that I agree to the terms of Father’s will; it’s only a silly formality, since it was all signed, sealed and delivered months ago, and I’m not of an age to be signing anything instead of my husband, but it needs to be done, and we may as well meet this Stanley and Bragg lot, quiet keepers of our universe as they are. Daniel’s skived off for the day — who’s going to say he can’t? He’s the manager and my husband. Father hoots as I futilely pin my hair getting ready to go, but it’s Daniel watching me in the soft dawn light. He’s wearing that dark suit, filling it and the mirror as he stands behind me. There are other things we could do today, and I half want to stay here and luxuriate in this weekday off, continue with the all-day-Sunday attention I lavished upon him as his twentieth birthday present. It’s a wrench to leave, and not just for that, but the buds on the apples are beginning to sprout and our secret valley beyond the fat cigars is at last warming up so I can sit outside and draw and dabble with my paints when I’m not drudging.

  Still, I’m interested to see what I’ve been missing out on in the city, and not a little thrilled to be stepping out with husband, even at this hour: I am Mrs Daniel Ackerman, look at me! No sly gla
res now: I am respectability itself. And I imagine that in no small part this is a result of Daniel’s I don’t want all this to change who I am intransigence: it’s proven I’m no snooty toff either, despite my rounded vowels: I scrub my own pots and pans. Oh, but I was once, wasn’t I, a snooty horror. I can hear Sister Simon- Peter bellowing: ‘Pride Cometh!’, never adding the ‘Before a Fall’, only pointing at the floor for me to kneel and receive standard three lashes across left shoulder. Grinning high above that memory: I’ve fallen rather well this time, I think.

  Five months ago I came up over the mountains and down into Lithgow by Father’s motor car, since gone to God, or rather to Mr Colin McLaughlin, previous owner of our hearth and home, who had the Austin thrown in with the deal. Father really did think of everything: I hated that contraption, and every divot and bend in the road had my fingernails, long since also gone to God, digging in the leather of the seat. So Daniel and I go up by train today, tooooot tooooot, engine puffing, probably with our Wattle coal, through the Ten Tunnels, black and like I can see the hands that made them, then above the sandstone curtain to Mount Victoria and Blackheath at the very top, tooooot tooooot, on and steadily down through Medlow Bath, with its Hydro Majestic resort, then Katoomba, with its swish Carrington Hotel, then Leura, then Wentworth Falls, where Father and I holidayed for several summers, all pretty little weatherboard towns between the tracts, no, oceans of gums and gums and gums sizzling blue beyond the weepy shades of brown and olive.

  Our carriage is full of men now. I hope they’re all off to work today, but suspect that at least some of them are heading for Victoria Barracks in the city. I clasp Daniel’s arm a little tighter and he smiles at me, then looks back out at the view over Woodford. He hasn’t been to Sydney since he was a little boy, when they moved from Kembla, so he’s taking in everything: the mountain range from this vantage really is something to look at.

  Then Sydney appears, briefly, at Faulconbridge, a great grey clumpy blotch on the horizon. Sydney: the Lions’ Den, or maybe Babel. The descent ends abruptly with the Lapstone tunnel and a sweep down to Emu Plains, where the broad spread of pasture land begins. This is the worst part of the trip for its monotony, but the men on the train chat faster and more and more cheerily the closer we get, and I block my ears to it. Seems most of them have decided to respond to the call for arms. Daniel whispers, still incredulous: ‘They’re all bloody mad.’

  And I nod. ‘Do you know any of them?’ I whisper back.

  ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘But that bloke at the very back, no coat, fair hair, he’s the younger brother of a bloke I went to school with, Templeton — already joined.’

  Despite my aversion, I turn around quickly to look at him. Good God, younger brother? He’s so baby-faced he looks like he should still be at school. ‘They won’t let him in, surely? He won’t pass for twenty-one.’ And surely he can’t have his parents’ consent.

  ‘Why not? They let his brother in and he’s a few months younger than me. For nothing you can buy a brand-new birth certificate.’

  I do the arithmetic: that boy must be about the same age as me. I’m going to sign meaningless bits of paper that say I’m a fairly comfortable lass today; he’s about to sign his life over to the army. This is too awful.

  And it gets worse. We lose the eager lambs when we take the tram from the Sydney Terminus to Hyde Park, since I thought Daniel would enjoy the walk from there down to Macquarie Street, but the park is teeming with men already snared. Let out from the slaughterhouse for the day. Wearing their straight-from-the-Lithgow-mills uniforms. That government contract must be worth a fortune. Cheap, no-fuss mass-produced gum leaves swirling beneath the feet of Captain Cook is what they look like. The Captain, up there on his plinth, always appears as if he’s about to burst out in Gilbert and Sullivan, but today he exceeds himself in absurdity.

  Daniel’s wearing his fierce look, he’s had enough of this now, no doubt thinking of his friend Robby, and the others whose names have fallen across our dinner table these past weeks. I don’t know these people, but Daniel does. He hasn’t challenged the decisions of his friends, says there’s nothing he could say — and it would be a little awkward given his new position, I presume; but he looks now as if he’d like to take a few of these strangers round the paddock.

  Seems he was right about the politics too: any dissent sounds like barking into the wind, or treason, if you believe the papers. Fisher has won for the Labor Party, and it’s provided no calming influence: Fisher has won over Cook’s if the Armageddon is to come, then you and I shall be in it by his own febrile claim that we will defend Britain to our last man and our last shilling. Shillings are going to pour in for Daniel and I at the end of next quarter, that’s for certain; but our ‘overwhelming’ Labor majority government is standing firm for its workers against exploitation by sending them off to fight a foreign foe on behalf of a foreign power. A small force has already been sent, to the tiny German colony in New Guinea, which it overran in a week, yet still we’re told to brace for invasion. From whom? From where? And I thought I was prone to moments of overstrung farce. I’m now prone to moments of intense nationalism too: how dare they do this, all of this.

  I’m not likely to refuse our shillings, though. Comfortable as we are, or will be, there’s not too much left in the bank for Daniel and I at present; Father wasn’t joking when he said he had to sell the house to pay for our new life. And Daniel, on principle, is not drawing a wage from the company. We can’t live on principles alone, not the way he eats, and today’s errand will enable our share from this last quarter to come through, which will contain half his forgone wage anyway.

  I’m still trapped in this moral conundrum, stepping up our pace through the park, when I hear: ‘Francy! Francy!’

  It’s Anne O’Dare, from school days, waving at me, dead ahead, from the arm of one of the snared: he’s a Joey’s boy under the drab khaki wool and the tidy puttees, but I can’t remember his name. He’s wearing one of those hats with the half-pinned-up brim that’s presently causing some controversy as being undignified; it rather suits him. But good God again, the picture sends me fairly reeling: we’re all Irish and Catholic and I can’t imagine they have consent from their parents, for any of this. If they do, I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that conundrum: as Sister Simon-Peter would conclude at all mentions of Great Britain: ‘And know that they are up to Great Nasty, Heathen Shenanigans as we speak! Pray for your brothers and sisters now!’ But there is some sort of nastiness going on in the Old Country, something to do with the stymieing of the Dublin parliament because of the war, as we speak, or will speak, since there’s no avoiding Anne O’Dare now.

  ‘Anne,’ I say; can’t say good to see you since I couldn’t abide her at school.

  Introductions, pleasant smiles and handshakes, and a gushy: ‘Oh, you don’t know? We’re engaged. Daddy’s throwing us a party — must send you an invitation — be wonderful.’ Big Fib, I’m sure: if memory serves, her Daddy is somehow associated with Sinn Fein and Father described him once as a card-carrying mongrel; she also wouldn’t invite me anywhere. And The Fiancé’s looking a little confused. I glance at Daniel, who’s looking dangerously close to touching his plain black brim and walking away; but he won’t: he’d never be quite that rude. But Anne is.

  ‘So this is your famous miner,’ she chimes, looking Daniel up and down as if he’s on exhibit. She is as imbecilic as they come, but I could still slap her, as I did once when we were about thirteen for some similar act of scalding stupidity. Not surprising she knows, though: Australia may be a vast land, but no woman would ever let that get in the way of the serious business of transmitting good gossip as rapidly as possible, not any bred from Our Lady at least. I remember now why I never made lasting connections there. She adds, so unnecessarily: ‘We’ve heard all about it.’

  ‘Well,’ says Daniel, very slowly, and I hold my breath, ‘you’ll know then that we’re in a bit of a hurry.’ Touch to the brim and he�
��s off, fairly dragging me. I wave silently at her as my rescuer resumes his pace.

  But the lark doesn’t cheer beyond the moment. I’ve already forgotten that Jo boy’s name, if I was even listening in the first place. That doesn’t feel very righteous under the circumstances. I feel like running back to wish him luck. I won’t, of course, and anyway Daniel’s a juggernaut now, so sprung I can feel the muscle tight under his coat sleeve.

  And it doesn’t get any better when we finally meet the surprisingly elderly Messrs Stanley and Bragg, even though they are genuinely friendly and more avuncular than polite in the way they handle the matter — efficiently and with firm assurances — of course they would be, they were associates of Father’s. But after I’ve signed here, here and here, the younger of the two, Mr Stanley, extends his hand to Daniel for farewell and says: ‘So have you come in to join up too?’

  Oh dear, oh dear. It was said just as an enquiry, because I suppose that is what Mr Stanley has been seeing and hearing every day, and Daniel does look as if he’s stepped off a recruitment poster: FIT MEN WANTED! Daniel drops the handshake and the silence is terrible: it goes on and on and on, until he finally says: ‘No.’

  I’m waiting for him to add a curt ‘Are you?’ But Mr Bragg, with his scratchy old voice provides a small mercy: ‘Good lad,’ he says, with a wink.

  ‘Quite,’ says Mr Stanley, nodding sagely.

  But it does little to ease the awkwardness.

  Daniel does not reply, and neither can I beyond: ‘Thank you, for everything.’ The return train to Lithgow doesn’t leave till three, and it’s only half past one; we were going to have lunch in one of the tearooms down by the harbour, but not even Daniel is hungry now, so we’ll go and sit on the platform and wait. I buy a bag of green grapes from the fruit stall. We won’t be returning to Sydney in a hurry, I don’t think.