Hunger Town (47 page)

‘Yes,' I said, understanding and amazed at my own self-control and apparent detachment. ‘Better if you don't come then, Jock. We don't know what the news might be. Nathan may not be to blame.'

He snorted contemptuously. ‘He has no personal loyalties, Judith. I found that out a long time ago. He's just a fucken bastard and that's all there is to it. But I could walk with you some of the way.'

‘No,' I said, ‘I'll ride my bike. It'll be quicker. But thank you.'

I gave him a light kiss on the cheek. ‘It's not your fault, Jock, that you have always been the bearer of bad news to me.' Imitating his Scots accent I added, ‘Ya canna help it.'

He returned my smile gratefully.

I made myself concentrate on my bike riding. It would not help my missing Harry if I got injured on the road. It seemed to be a particularly busy morning on Commercial Road. The traffic congestion was more bothersome, the clanging train bells more strident, the shouts of horse and cart drivers more aggressive, the actions of pedestrians leaping in to the traffic more reckless. Everything about me seemed exaggerated and, like my feelings, blown up to an hysterical dimension. But I managed to reach Nathan's small cottage at the far end of Nile Street in half an hour.

Shaking with apprehension, I knocked on the door. Miss Adelaide opened it. She looked surprised. ‘Why, Mrs Grenville, this is …' She halted. Something in my face warned her. ‘What do you want?' She barred my way. An aggressive little hen, devoid of feathers but bristling nonetheless.

I kept my temper. ‘I need to see Nathan.'

‘I don't think …' She paused. Was she going to lie that he wasn't home? I could see his hat lying on the hall table. She knew I had seen it. Nathan never went out without his hat.

‘He's busy,' she said flatly.

I stood my ground.

She moved to shut the door. I placed my hand firmly on it. ‘Miss Adelaide, I need to see your brother urgently. He went to Spain with my husband and has now returned without him. Do you really think it unreasonable of me to want to know where my husband is?'

She flushed, hesitated, and finally held the door open for me. I followed her down the short passage to a small sitting room. At the door she stood to one side to let me enter. Nathan, as always, sat at a table, a book in front of him. He didn't look up when I entered, although I knew, by a nervous tick in his cheek, he was aware of me.

Miss Adelaide hovered silently in the doorway. She had not introduced me. I crossed the room and stood in front of him. His eyes remained fixed on what he was reading—or pretending to read.

Suddenly I was sixteen years old again and he was the strange young man at the Chew It who had refused to look at me. The eight years since then flashed through my memory, like a set of cinematic images which, although brilliantly clear, never linger. And although so real, these images were neither orderly nor sequential, because each one was a precious recollection of Harry.

‘Where's my husband, Nathan?' My voice was tightly controlled.

He ignored me.

‘Look at me, Nathan. Where's Harry?' I demanded, my voice rising.

He glanced up but it was a mere flash of his glasses and his eyes didn't focus on me before he resumed his reading.

‘Look at me, Nathan,' I shouted. ‘What's the matter with you? Where's my husband? Where's Harry? Is he dead?'

I heard Miss Adelaide gasp and now he did look at me.

‘No,' he mumbled, ‘of course he's not dead. Well, I don't think so.'

I could hardly believe what he was saying. He didn't know whether Harry were dead or not. The world around me darkened to a murky fuzz. God, I thought, I'm going to faint. I took a deep breath and clutched the edge of the table.

‘What do you mean, you don't think so? You either know or you don't know, you rotten coward. Have you left him in some sort of trouble? Run out on him? That would be your style, wouldn't it?'

He was defensive. ‘No, of course I didn't run out on him. He ran out on me. Harry's not steadfast. He's not a good Communist. We argued and he mated up with some anarchist and they went off together. He was supposed to come back to Madrid but he didn't keep the arrangement. So I came home. That's all there is to it.'

‘That's all there is to it?' I screamed at him. ‘You came home without inquiring about where he was?'

‘Harry's a man, not a child. And don't yell at me, Judith. I wasn't his keeper.'

I tried to be calm. ‘No,' I said savagely, ‘just his friend. Where do you think he went with the anarchist bloke?'

He was casual. ‘Probably to the Asturias. He was talking about it. I told him not to.'

‘The Asturias?' I shrieked. ‘The Asturias, where the big mine strike ended in thousands being shot?'

He dared to shrug. ‘Harry was always reckless. Too easily involved. Too addicted to drama.'

‘You loathsome bloody bastard.' I was breathless. ‘You left him without even discovering if he were alive or dead or in need of help.'

‘Harry made his own choices.' His voice was flat and dismissive.

Terror overcame me. The reports of the miners' attempt to set up a commune in Asturia and their bitter strike, which ended in tragic disaster, had filtered through to even our mainstream press. Of the 8000 striking miners 3000 had been shot. The army had even dragged the wounded out of hospital, asked no questions about who they were or what side they were on, and shot them. Franco was dubbed ‘Butcher of Asturias'. What if Harry had been wounded and shot, no questions asked?

A violent nausea racked my body. Only by vomiting up the entire contents of my stomach could I rid myself of the excruciating pain that gripped me. I threw up all over myself, Nathan's table, Nathan's book and Nathan. Shaking and sweating, I continued to convulse.

Through a sick miasma I felt Miss Adelaide's arm about me. ‘Sit down, Mrs Grenville,' she was urging. ‘Sit down, my dear. Really, Nathan, I warned you before about being so tactless. You've worried Mrs Grenville. Now stop being so useless and bring me some towels and warm water.'

If I hadn't felt so ill I would have laughed at her idiocy. She was reproaching Nathan for being tactless but not for abandoning Harry.

I suppose he must have done as she ordered because I felt her wipe my face and do her best to clean my clothes. I wept hysterically.

‘Do stop, Mrs Grenville. You'll make yourself ill. I'm sure your husband is all right. We would have heard. The Spanish authorities would have notified someone—the Australian or perhaps the British Ambassador. We're not at war with Spain. Calm yourself. An Australian couldn't be shot and no one know. Please calm yourself.'

She held some water to my lips and I sipped thirstily.

Half an hour later I was still weak and distressed but able to step into the taxi she called for me and paid for. ‘We'll arrange to send your bicycle home for you tomorrow,' she said. ‘Now, please don't worry, Mrs Grenville. And please don't come again. Nathan has told you all he knows.'

I knew that this was not so and only had contempt for her fatuousness. But I was too sick to argue. Maybe Jock or Miss Marie might be able to delve deeper into the labyrinth that Nathan called his mind.

When I reached home I was too exhausted to do anything but drop my soiled clothes on the floor of the bathroom, drag a dressing gown about myself and curl up in the sitting-room chair. I was cold and I shivered. I saw myself cringing there, cowed and waiting for some further blow to strike me. Soon I must have a bath but lighting the chip heater was too much of an effort.

I had sat like this in this same chair, similarly despairing and afraid, when Harry failed to come home after the police raids. At that time I had vented my fury on him for his careless neglect in not letting me know where he was. But now I had no strength for rage. Despair drained my spirits and left only the terrible dregs of helplessness. My past worry over the police raids seemed laughable. If Harry had been mislaid then, how easy it would have been to find him or to discover news of his whereabouts.

But Spain! Thousands of miles away! What could I do about a lost husband in Spain?

I had prepared several cartoons about Spain while Harry was away. They had gone to the
Sun News Pictorial
and
Spearhead
. I had read about the slaughter of the Asturia miners by the Foreign Legion troops and pinpointed the mateship between Hitler and Lerroux, the leader of Spain's right-wing coalition. Lerroux had come to power against a backdrop of the rise of fascism in Europe and he seemed too comfortable in Hitler's company.

I had penned a pair of cartoons sitting side by side. One I had captioned
Spain
the other
Germany
. Both cartoons figured a line of men fronting a firing squad, each with a label about his neck. For Germany the labels read
Communist
,
Socialist
,
Anarchist
,
Gypsy
. For Spain each label read
Communist
,
Socialist
,
Anarchist
, but also
Asturias
. On the German side an officer addresses Hitler:
Are these all you want, sir? I have others.
On the Spain side an officer of the Foreign Legion addresses Lerroux:
We've cleaned up the Asturias. When do you want us to start on the rest?

I had also sent this cartoon to the
Daily Herald
in London. They had grabbed it and asked for others. ‘Events in Spain' they wrote, ‘are becoming headline news in England'. So I composed another: four crosses on a hill and over each crucified figure the captions
Justice
,
Tolerance
,
Compassion
and
the Asturias
. At the foot of the cross Lerroux is saying to Hitler:
A little crucifixion cures every trouble.

The efforts of the combined left-wing groups in Spain to launch a general strike had collapsed because of factional in-fighting and only the miners of the Asturia had attempted to carry it through. In true anarchist style—and in the spirit of the 1871 Paris Commune, as Miss Marie had sadly said—they struck and marched on the capital Oviedo. Along the route they took control of the towns, redistributed land to the peasants, seized mines and factories and set up Workers' Committees to run them. They bucked the centralist control of the Communist Party and pleaded with the socialists to help them obtain arms. But they were hung out to dry. When the troops of Franco's Foreign Legion landed on their coast it was all over. It was another failure of idealism in the face of guns.

And how futile my cartoons. I was merely some poor sheep bleating that there were wolves out there. Some of us bleated louder than others but in the end we were just carcasses for vultures to pick over.

Had Harry, I worried, marched with the miners to Oviedo? Had he been swept along by the inspiration of actually witnessing a new political system? One so close to what appeared to be pure communism but rejected by the communists? If he had been there, how confused he must have felt. How disenchanted. Was this what he and Nathan had rowed about—Harry's determination to find out for himself? If he were still alive.

At one stage the communists at the Port had put up candidates for the state election. But despite Harry's hopes it had all come to nothing.

Was their talk of revolution just hot air?

How casual we had been in our belief in violent revolution, how stupidly euphoric in our dream that it would all end in our victory. Now it seemed only youthful zeal, the result of the hubris of ignorance. The end of such dreams was death. Even if the miners of Asturia had been armed, their deaths at the hands of the crack troops of the Foreign Legion would only have been delayed.

Despair had soaked into my bones and like some corrosive acid dissolved my strength. I continued to just cower in my chair, cold and lost.

Jock returned and at his insistent hammering on the door I let him in and returned to my chair. One look at me and he asked no questions. He made me a cup of tea and sat while I drank it. But I left the biscuits on the plate.

He must have phoned Winnie because she also came banging on the door.

‘Oh, it's you, Winnie,' I said tiredly. ‘I'm really not up to a visitor.'

‘Nonsense.' She was brisk. ‘You smell awful, Jude.' Winnie was never one for niceties.

‘I suppose.' I shrugged. I didn't care.

She went into the bathroom, kicked my clothes to one side, wrestled with the heater, and eventually had the bath filled with hot water. ‘Come on,' she ordered. ‘Up you get. You'll feel better after a bath.'

‘It's Harry, Winnie.'

She pursed her mouth. ‘Jock's told me. We can't do anything about Harry at the minute. Now off with your underwear and in to the bath.'

She picked up my clothes and disappeared with them, I assumed to the laundry. I obeyed her, vaguely surprised that she wasn't weeping all over the place.

The bath helped. It was warm and comforting. She had left me a clean towel on the stool and a set of fresh clothes on the floor nearby. Feeling a little more normal I crawled out when the water began to cool, towelled myself and dressed.

In the kitchen Winnie had heated soup and made toast. I looked at it doubtfully. My stomach still churned.

‘Don't be a duffer, Jude. Get this into you. You'll feel a heap better.'

‘Harry,' I started to say again, but she interrupted me firmly.

‘We'll talk about Harry later,' she said. ‘Not now.'

‘It's Nathan,' I persisted.

‘Bugger Nathan,' she said. ‘Miss Marie's gone to talk to him.'

‘Oh,' I said. I was surprised. ‘I tried, you know.'

‘Yes. So I believe.'

‘He couldn't tell me much.'