Union Belle (20 page)

‘Did he say anything else?’ she asked.

‘Your father?’

‘The doctor.’

Gloria shook her head. ‘He just asked if I had anyone to sit with me. I said you’d be along soon.’

Ellen beckoned to Jack, and sat down next to her mother.

He came over. ‘Hello, Mrs Powys. Very sorry to hear about Alf Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

‘Thank you.’

‘He’s in surgery,’ Ellen said, ‘but Mum hasn’t heard anything else, have you, Mum?’

‘No, the doctor said he’d come and see me as soon as he’s out.’

Jack stood before them, looking uncomfortable. ‘Do you want me to stay?’ he asked Ellen.

Even in her distraught state, Gloria caught the intensity of the look that passed between them.

Ellen shook her head, although she very much did want
him to stay. ‘We’ll be all right. Thank you for bringing me through.’

‘No problem,’ Jack said.

‘We’ll phone Fred Hollis at the shop if there’s any news,’ Ellen added, ‘and he can pass it on. Can you tell Tom?’

Jack nodded, and then he was gone.

Gloria and Ellen sat side by side for several minutes, both silenced by apprehension and fear.

Finally, Ellen said, ‘Where did you get that cup of tea? Shall I get us another one?’

‘A nice young nurse brought it to me.’

‘Oh,’ Ellen said. She was desperate for a drink.

‘She went through there,’ Gloria said, pointing to a set of double doors opposite the waiting room with a sign above them saying ‘No Admittance’. Ellen went through them and found herself in a linoleumed, antiseptic-smelling corridor, turned left and kept walking until she saw a solid, middleaged nurse, whose name tag said ‘Sister Abernathy’.

‘Excuse me,’ Ellen said, ‘I wonder if you could tell me where I could get a cup of tea?’

The nurse looked very put out. ‘We don’t allow the public in this part of the hospital, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, my name’s Ellen McCabe and I’m waiting with my mother, Mrs Gloria Powys. My father, Alf Powys, was brought in earlier and he’s having surgery.’

Sister Abernathy’s round face softened. ‘Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry, love, you’re in the waiting room, aren’t you?’

Ellen nodded.

‘Well, I’ll see what I can do. But this is the operating floor, and it’s best if you stay where you were, I think.’

‘Have you heard anything about my father?’

‘Dr St John is still with him. But as soon as he’s finished I’m sure he’ll be along to see you.’

Ellen thanked her and went back the way she’d come. A
few minutes later another nurse brought them a cup of tea each, and instructions on how to find the public cafeteria if they wanted anything else.

They drank their tea. Occasionally someone would come bustling through the double doors, but no one stopped to talk to them.

Gloria said, ‘I’ll suppose I’ll have to nurse him when he comes home.’

Ellen looked at her. ‘You can do that, can’t you?’

‘I expect so. I’m just wondering how long he’ll have to be off the beer. You know your father, he can get very snaky when he’s deprived.’

‘Mum, I’ve never seen Dad snaky in his life. Tetchy, perhaps, but never snaky.’

‘Can you remember when he had that ulcer a few years ago, the one the doctor said was caused by too much booze?’

‘The one Dad insisted he never had?’

‘Yes. He was supposed to lay off the beer for three months while it healed, and do you know what I caught him doing?’

‘No,’ Ellen said, although she knew she was about to find out.

‘Putting whisky on his porridge. And in his tea, and on his bread pudding after dinner. And when I had him up about it, he said he had a perfect right to put whisky in or on anything he liked, because the doctor only told him to lay off the beer.’

‘You should have told me he was being difficult,’ Ellen said. ‘I could have talked to him about it.’

Gloria snorted. ‘You wouldn’t have been much help. The pair of you have always been as thick as thieves.’

They looked up as a man came through the double doors.

Gloria took a deep breath. ‘Dr St John, this is my daughter Ellen McCabe.’

‘Hello, Mrs McCabe. Your husband is out of theatre, Mrs Powys. You can see him now.’

‘How is he? Is he all right?’ Gloria stood up.

‘He hasn’t regained consciousness yet,’ the doctor said, ‘but we think we’ve relieved a little of the pressure on his brain. He’s had a very bad fall, Mrs Powys, and the outlook isn’t terribly good.’ At the shattered look on Gloria’s face he added, ‘I’m sorry to be so brutal, but there really isn’t an easier way for me to say it.’

‘Where is he now?’ Ellen asked.

‘We’ve taken him onto the ward, but he’s in a room of his own so you’re welcome to sit with him for as long as you like. I’ll take you there now.’

Gloria and Ellen followed him up and down floors and through what seemed to be a rabbit warren of corridors until they reached a small room that already had ‘Mr A. Powys’ written on a piece of card on the door.

They went in, Gloria gripping Ellen’s hand.

Alf’s face was an ashen grey and a thick bandage covered his head and his left ear. His eyes were closed and he was breathing shallowly through his mouth. Sister Abernathy was already there, moving around the bed smoothing the sheets and tucking them in firmly.

‘You can hold his hand and talk to him, if you like,’ she said. ‘We’re not completely sure, but he might be able to hear you.’

‘I’ll be checking on him regularly,’ Dr St John said. ‘We hope to see some improvement by the morning, but we may not. I’m sorry I can’t give you any better news.’

Gloria nodded, pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down. ‘Thank you, Doctor, I know you’ve done your best.’

He nodded, checked his watch and said, ‘I’ll be back at
about eleven. We’ll see how he’s going then, shall we?’

Hazel and Charlie arrived at nine o’clock the next morning, later than they’d hoped because they’d made a detour out to Pukemiro to drop their two youngest children off with Tom.

Ellen had telephoned Fred Hollis an hour earlier, with a message for Tom telling him there had been no change, although Dr St John insisted that Alf was ‘comfortable’. Fred had told Ellen that the whole town was thinking of them.

Ellen, Gloria, Hazel and Charlie took turns through the day sitting with Alf and talking to him, just in case what Sister Abernathy had said was true.

He may have heard them and he may not, but he never responded and at four-thirty on Sunday afternoon, Alf Powys died.

Gloria fell apart. She told Dr St John he’d made a mistake, then accused him of lying, and finally turned to the bed where Alf’s body lay and berated him for being such a drunken old fool. Then she collapsed over him, sobbing hysterically, and Hazel and Ellen had to pull her off while the doctor went away to get something to calm her down.

Hazel seemed stunned into silence. Ellen herself could not quite comprehend what had happened, until Sister Abernathy drew the sheet up over her father’s face. But she couldn’t cry, not yet. Feeling as though she were trapped in some sort of ghastly, muffled nightmare, she went downstairs to the public telephone and rang Fred Hollis again to ask him to pass the awful news on to Tom.

‘But tell him not to tell Neil and Davey, not yet. I want to be there,’ she said.

‘I’m so sorry, Ellen, I really am,’ Fred said. ‘If there’s anything we can do, anything at all…’

‘I know, Fred, thank you.’

‘Do you have a lift back? Because I can organise someone to come and collect you.’

‘No, thanks, Fred. Hazel and Charlie are here so we’ll come back with them. We’ll be leaving soon, I think.’

‘How’s Gloria bearing up?’

‘She’s not, she’s sedated at the moment.’

‘Oh, hell,’ Fred said. ‘And what about you, love?’

Ellen said nothing for a very long time, and then she started to cry.

On the other end of the telephone Fred felt his own eyes filling with tears, and wished he’d never asked. ‘There, there,’ he said.

When Ellen was able to speak again, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Fred, I have to go now. Please don’t tell Neil and Davey yet.’

She hung up and wandered back to Alf’s room.

Gloria was sitting with Charlie and Hazel on either side of her. She looked dazed, but she was quiet.

Hazel said, ‘What do we do now?’

Charlie, his face pale, took a deep breath. ‘We go back to Pukemiro and tell everyone we need to tell, then I suppose we’ll have to arrange for the undertaker to come and get him. And then we’ll need to sort out the funeral.’

Hundreds of people came, not just from Pukemiro but from Huntly and all the other mining communities as well. Many of them had to stand outside the church during the service, but no one seemed to mind.

The wake was held at the miners’ hall. On the morning of the funeral it seemed that someone from just about
every household in Pukemiro had turned up at Gloria’s house bearing a plate, so there was no shortage of food, despite the strike.

Gloria had pulled herself together, with only a little help from the tablets Dr St John had sent home with her, and conducted herself with great dignity. She dressed in her smartest clothes and applied her make-up impeccably, and only broke down when Alf was lowered into the ground at the cemetery.

Ellen and Hazel were in tears throughout the proceedings, but even they laughed when people began to get up at the hall and tell ‘Alf stories’, almost all of which involved alcohol and some of which had become legend over the years. Alf had been a drunk, but he’d been a happy drunk, and there wasn’t a single person in the town who bore him any malice, not even the deputies and the mine managers he’d driven almost to distraction for decades with his incessant demands for better pay, better conditions and wet time so the jokers could catch the earlier train into town and have more time at the pub.

Charlie went back to Auckland the following day, taking the children with him, but Hazel decided to stay with Gloria for a week. Ellen spent much of every day with them, and when Friday came she couldn’t find it within herself to meet Jack.

She saw him that afternoon, though, when he came to pay his respects to Gloria.

‘I thought you’d be here,’ he said, as she walked him to the door when he was ready to go.

Ellen touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come today. I just couldn’t.’

They walked slowly down the steps.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I didn’t expect you to. I did want to see you, though, to make sure you were all right. Are you?’

Ellen leaned against the rail at the bottom and sighed. ‘Not really. It was such a shock, Jack, I really thought Dad would last forever. I miss him so much it hurts.’

‘How are the boys?’

‘They were devastated. They still are. They thought the sun shone out of their granddad’s backside.’

‘They’ll come right, though, kids always do,’ Jack said.

‘Do they?’

‘I don’t know, I just said that to make you feel better.’

Ellen smiled. ‘You always try to say the right thing, don’t you?’

‘Only when it’s not too far from the truth. So do you. And I think kids are fairly resilient.’

‘I hope so, for their sake.’

She wanted to feel his arms around her, to be comforted and soothed. Tom was doing his best, but even as he cuddled her and told her that everything would be all right, it was Jack she was thinking about, and that only made her feel worse.

She would have dearly loved to have gone to him this morning—she felt she had no right to feel joy in the middle of such an awful time—and looking at Jack now, standing there with his hands in his pockets and his dark eyes regarding her with compassion, she wished she had.

‘I’m sorry about this morning,’ she said again.

‘Will you come next week?’ he asked, reaching out and touching her face.

‘Yes.’

Hazel went home, and Ellen spent Sunday afternoon with her mother. Alf had been gone a week, but Gloria still didn’t feel like leaving the house. When Ellen arrived she found her mother in the kitchen,
sitting at the table, with a decanter of sherry and two glasses in front of her.

Ellen was surprised. ‘It’s a bit early for sherry, isn’t it, Mum?’

‘No,’ Gloria said. ‘Would you like one?’

Ellen didn’t particularly like the sort of sherry her mother drank, it was far too sweet for her taste, but accepted because she didn’t want Gloria drinking alone.

‘Have you had some lunch?’ she asked. She was worried that with her father gone, her mother wouldn’t bother cooking just for herself.

‘Rose brought a shepherd’s pie over this morning, I had some of that.’

‘You have to look after yourself, Mum.’

Gloria pinched a roll of fat around her middle. ‘I’ll not fade away, dear, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

Ellen smiled. Had that been a hint of sarcasm? She hoped so—it would be a good sign.

They had a drink together, then another, and by the third, Ellen had decided that sweet sherry wasn’t that undrinkable after all. But when her mother offered her a fourth, she shook her head.

‘I’ve had enough, Mum. And so have you, I think.’

‘Not quite,’ Gloria said, pouring herself one more. ‘I need a bit of Dutch courage.’

‘What for?’

Gloria stared into her glass for a long moment, then raised her eyes.

‘Ellen, there’s something I need to tell you. I should have told you long before this, but I haven’t.’

Ellen waited, mystified.

‘Your father was a good man, he was decent, kind, honest and hard-working. We didn’t always see eye to eye and we were like chalk and cheese a lot of the time, but it
wasn’t always like that. When we first walked out together I thought I’d met the man of my dreams. He was good-looking, and he was funny, and he was quite good at, well, you know what I’m talking about.’

Ellen regarded her mother with something akin to shock. ‘Before you were married?’

‘Yes, before we were married. Your grandmother always said you don’t buy tomatoes without squeezing them first, so, well, let’s just say I wasn’t disappointed with the produce.’

‘Mum!’

‘Don’t “Mum” me, dear. You had a bit of a cheek wearing white at your own wedding, if I remember rightly.’