Solomon's Song (27 page)

Hawk knows that, with his increasing age, Victoria is his only real hope of getting Solomon & Teekleman back under the control of his side of the family. Ben is essentially an outdoors man and his bum sits more comfortably in the saddle than on an office chair. Although he seems to attract the co-operation of those around him, his is a leadership by example and not out of a sense of being superior.

This lack of ambition in Ben has also been apparent to David and Abraham, both of whom have secretly kept a watchful eye on the young man as he was growing up. They are now certain that Ben will never prove a danger to Joshua and have forgotten about him.

But Victoria is an altogether different proposition. When David first discovered that Hawk’s granddaughter, then only fourteen years old, used the abacus with consummate skill, he had her progress monitored and forbade his son to admit her at any stage into any aspect of the company. ‘She’s another one!’ he’d raged. ‘Another Mary bloody Abacus! She’s not to be employed, not until hell freezes over, you hear me, Abraham?’

‘But why, Father, she will one day be a major shareholder, it is as well not to make an enemy of her now. She is still a child but will eventually be a woman, and will marry and have children and assume a woman’s place in the home. Surely we have nothing to fear if, when she is eighteen, we bring her into the company where we will be able to keep an eye on her?’

‘The abacus!’ David shouts. ‘Can’t you see, it’s the bloody abacus!’ It is almost as though, in his eyes, the abacus itself is an instrument potent enough to destroy them all. It becomes apparent to Abraham that to the superstitious and ignorant old man, the abacus is a dangerous, almost mystical weapon placed in the hands of a young sorceress who, through some sort of witchcraft engendered by the Chinese counting beads, will triumph over them.

Ignoring the fact that there has only ever been one woman and one abacus, he makes it sound as though there have been a succession of Marys since time out of mind. ‘You’ll see!’ he screams. ‘Soon her fingers will grow crooked and her talons grow sharp as a ferret’s teeth!’

And so Hawk, unable to place Victoria within the Potato Factory, has her trained in every aspect of bookkeeping and accountancy. After which, she sits for her university entrance examination and wins one of the very rare places for a female student in the law faculty of the University of Melbourne. Hawk, afraid that as the only woman in the faculty she will suffer at the hands of the male students, persuades her instead to gain her articles. By pulling strings, he finds her a position as articled clerk in the office of the prominent city law firm Slade, Slade & Hetherington, in Collins Street.

There are very few women solicitors in Victoria, but Hawk thinks it would be good training for her agile and questioning mind. This proves to be a not altogether ideal arrangement. A female articled clerk is far from welcome in a profession and a clerks’ chamber dominated by males. This is even further exacerbated when the other articled clerks in Slade, Slade & Hetherington are confronted by a young woman who is not afraid to express an opinion, doesn’t know her rightful place as a female and is a junior. They also discover that she can be inordinately stubborn when she thinks she is right and has the audacity to possess more than a modicum of grey matter and a logical mind to boot. The only other female in the company is the tea lady, Mrs Wilkinson, a timid creature in her late forties in a mob-cap, who addresses the most junior clerk as sir.

Because of all of these things, but mostly because she is female, Tommo’s daughter is given the work nobody else wants to do. These are inevitably tasks well below her intellectual capacity which she performs generally with her bottom lip tucked under her top teeth, but essentially without complaint.

Her working life filled with tedium, Victoria is hungry for some intellectual stimulus and is astonished when one day Mrs Wilkinson approaches her while she is alone in the firm’s library looking up torts for a senior partner and asks her if she would like to attend a meeting of the St Kilda branch of the Labor Party. To her amazement, after a whispered conversation, she discovers the tea lady to be far from the tepid creature she appears to be.

In fact, Mrs Wilkinson proves to be a veritable firebrand who introduces Victoria to the politics of poverty, the rights denied to the underprivileged and the conditions of the working classes. Victoria needs little encouragement to take sides, she has already gained a dim view of lawyers in particular and the business world in general, what Mrs Wilkinson calls ‘the lining of fat around the hungry belly of society’, meaning by this the world dominated by middle-class males who think themselves superior by dint of money, a privileged upbringing and a stint at Melbourne Grammar.

For the first time in her life, Victoria hears the viewpoint of the other side from men who wear cloth caps and women who cover their heads with cheap scarves and wear knitted jerseys with holes in them, but who nevertheless have fine minds, have read widely and have a mission to fight for the rights of the working classes.

The fact that she is amongst the most privileged of them all in terms of wealth never occurs to Victoria. Hawk has not let her grow up in a wealthy environment nor molly-coddled her in childhood nor ever allowed her to develop a sense of privilege. Brought up on one of Hawk’s hop farms near New Norfolk she and Ben have had a natural and easy upbringing, attending the local primary school.

When Ben reached the age of twelve and the limits of the education locally available, Hawk brought in as his tutors Mr and Mrs Wickworth-Spode, recent immigrants to Tasmania. Mr Wickworth-Spode, a graduate from Cambridge, was the retired headmaster of a boys’ school in England and a mathematics and history teacher, while Mrs Wickworth-Spode had been a teacher of English and Latin at Roedean, a famous English public school for girls. Both were fanatical gardeners and with a cottage of their own, all the gardening space they could contend with and a generous salary as well, Hawk was able to attract them to the New Norfolk farm.

It soon became apparent that Ben was an indifferent scholar with his eyes constantly turned to the schoolroom window and the promised freedom of what lay beyond. But the ten-year-old Victoria, who would rush from primary school to sit in on the last hour of Ben’s lessons, proved to be a naturally gifted learner, in particular with numbers. She would often confound Mr Wickworth-Spode as her little fingers blurred across the abacus to return an answer to a sum in the time it took a bemused Ben to chew a couple of times at the end of his yellow pencil.

When it was Victoria’s turn to come under the total influence of the redoubtable husband-and-wife team, they doted on her and gave their every attention to her education. It was a happy childhood with the rigours of a sound education admirably mixed with the easygoing business of life in the country, and Hawk keeping a sharp eye on their progress when he visited them once a fortnight from Melbourne. Hawk brought Victoria at eighteen to live with him in Melbourne while Ben remained, by choice, in Tasmania learning hop farming, taking over the management and the general supervision of the hop farms when he turned twenty-one. Mr and Mrs Wickworth-Spode retired to the cottage with Mr Wickworth-Spode doing the books for the four estates and Mrs Wickworth-Spode keeping the kitchen supplied with vegetables.

Despite her private tutors and an education which proves to be well in advance of the people she meets of her own age, Victoria doesn’t see herself as above her contemporaries. They know her as a young woman with a confident and outgoing personality and friendly disposition.

By contrast, she constantly earns the disapproval of the senior law clerk and even sometimes makes her opinions known in the august presence of one or another of the male partners when she believes an injustice has been perpetrated. She is also prepared to accept their rebukes if she is proved to be wrong, though she seldom lets her emotions override her logic and so she is more often right than wrong, which doesn’t endear her to any of the men. If it were not for the importance of Hawk’s personal financial dealings with the firm and the fact that her marks in the periodic law examinations are the highest in the State of Victoria, it is doubtful that Slade, Slade & Hetherington would continue to employ her.

Hawk can see that she is unhappy and attempts to mollify her. ‘My dear, it is never wise to bite the hand that feeds you, they will not change their ways because you have proved them to be fools. Stay the course, bite your tongue, be patient, your time will come.’

‘But, Grandpa, it is not my intention to seem difficult, I wish only that they will be just and fair.’

Hawk laughs. ‘Justice requires integrity and there is little enough of that among lawyers. They would sooner get rid of you than have to deal with their own consciences.’

‘But it’s not fair!’ Victoria protests. ‘The poor are evicted from their homes so that our clients can build factories on the site rather than find locations where electricity, gas, drainage and roads must first be built. Then they erect sweatshops in which women work for starvation wages!’ Victoria has already picked up the vernacular of the Labor Party. ‘That is just one case I am working on,’ she continues. ‘What’s more they will win. They’ll win because there is no one able to oppose them!’

Hawk looks at Victoria shrewdly. ‘Have you thought to find out who owned the homes from which the poor were evicted?’

‘Of course,’ Victoria snorts. ‘The rich slum landlords who sell them to the developers at a huge profit but which is still less than what it would cost to develop virgin land with all the utilities to be resourced.’

‘Ah, there you have it, the very principle upon which English law is based, the right of property over the rights of the common man. Throughout the history of English law the penalties for damaging property have always been greater than those for harming people. The law has always protected the “haves” and punished those who have nothing. It is very simple, my dear, it is the “haves” who have always made the laws.’

‘But, Grandpa, they are hypocrites and the mayor announces to the world at large that they are clearing the crime-infested slums for the benefit of the city when their true motive is to build factories convenient to the city, the railways and the port! The mayor is one of the shareholders in their development syndicate!’

‘And what would you have them do? Build homes for the poor with hundred-year mortgages and no interest payments?’ Hawk chuckles. ‘Ours is a profit-based society with the upper class owning the capital, the middle class utilising it and the working class enduring the consequences. The poor will always be among us and while there is very little profit to a lawyer in defending a poor man’s plea for justice, there is a great deal of money to be made out of helping a rich man to exploit him. That, my dear Victoria, is what you are up against and, quite frankly, I don’t like your chances.’

‘But we are supposed to be an egalitarian society where Jack is as good as his master.’

‘In my experience wherever there is a master and a Jack travelling along the same road, it is Jack who carries the master’s portmanteau but the master who gets paid for the wares within it. Money, not class, is the equaliser in this country, Victoria, which is perhaps better than class controlling it. No profession understands this better than those who practise at the law.’

Victoria looks up, appealing to Hawk. ‘Grandpa Hawk, they are not even clever men, they think to please their clients with sycophantic advice, invitations to the races at Flemington and the cricket at the MCG and suppers of roast beef and claret at the Melbourne Club. They are rapacious, selfish and vainglorious and would step over a beggar rather than throw him a coin. They don’t even get their Latin right!’ Victoria says in a final expression of her frustration.

‘Spoken with all the insight of the very young,’ Hawk laughs. ‘If brains and Latin were the sole criteria for success in business there’d be a poor living in store for most of us.’ Nevertheless, he is delighted with Victoria’s strong sense of justice but realises that, while he shares it, his attempts to be just and honest have brought nothing but misery and failure into his own life.

Victoria will often outline a case to him in which she has acted as articled clerk and Hawk learns that she has a capacity to see both sides of a question and draw a quick and accurate conclusion. If ever she should qualify and find herself in charge of handling a case in front of a magistrate, he knows she has a tongue that can cut like a whip and an ability to quickly spot a fool, whether barrister, solicitor, witness, defendant, policeman or magistrate. Victoria may not be a blood relation of Mary Abacus, but she has the same uncanny ability to know what is wheat and what is chaff, what is useful and what is pure hyperbole. Perhaps it is the same instinct Tommo had as a gambler, to know what was real and what was bluff.

At the age of twenty-two Victoria sits for her final law examinations and passes with flying colours. During the course of a celebratory dinner, Hawk, admittedly somewhat reluctantly, points out to her that there may be some future advantage in being counted among the members of Melbourne’s society. He adds that while he believes himself not suitable as a black man to make her introductions he can quite easily find the right chaperone to do so.

Victoria is mortified by this suggestion. ‘Grandfather, how could you think such a thing? You of all people!’ she cries. ‘It is everything I am against! They are the people who exploit the workers, who cheat and lie and rob the poor and you want me to join them?’ She is barely able to conceal her anger at Hawk’s suggestion.

‘Not all of them. Not all rich people exploit the poor,’ the ever reasonable Hawk protests.

‘I can’t think of any who don’t!’ Victoria snaps, letting her indignation override her logic.

Hawk laughs. ‘Well, I can.’

‘Who? They’re all the same. I see them every day.’

‘Well, you, my dear, soon you’ll be richer than most of them. You don’t exploit the poor.’

Victoria is scornful in her reply. ‘Tush, the money Ben and I get when we’re thirty from Great-grandmother’s will won’t make us rich?’