Free The People's Train by Thomas Keneally

ticking like a clock, under a tree. Amelia opened her front door without a key – an aspect of Australia that I couldn’t help admiring. I was reminded of the remoter villages of Russia, where most people couldn’t afford locks. The air inside the house was thick and smelled of some spice Amelia had been careful to put in place to fight some of the indignities of the climate.
    Amelia went to the kitchen to prepare things, insisting that it was her kitchen and she would not tolerate Hope or myself in it. I suddenly found it hard to start a conversation with Hope. I knew I was in the classic and well-worn stages of sentimental love, a delusional sickness. The marriage of souls I respected best in the world was that of my sister to Trofimov the miner. It was a marriage of equals. Or if not, it was Trofimov himself who was the unequal partner, stricken with his miner’s chest. And I thought too of the comradely marriage between Vladimir Ilich, our party leader, and his wife Krupskaya, which I had not observed directly. By contrast the state I was in was the same despicable one that led in the end to such glories as premature age for women, wife-beating, squalor, and a million domestic meannesses. If a man is a Marxist, he is meant to have the attitudes of a monk. There is meant to be no false romance in his life, no doomed and morbid loves as in Tolstoy. Fraternity and utility are the virtues of his existence. When I went to the railways in Perm, I felt I fulfilled my utility there. I found enough belief and hope to sustain me – like a Christian pilgrim of ancient days – in the long escape from the Aldan to Nikolayevsk-on-the-Amur.
    Yet my pilgrim composure was – for the moment – gone. I knew it was better for a man to react sensibly to desire without dressing it up in the tatty and theatrical clothes of deathless adoration. Yet I was tempted to spout to Hope about devotion.
    From where we sat, Hope and I could see on Amelia’s mantelpiece and occasional tables photos of a younger Amelia and her husband, the English socialist stevedore who had brought her to Australia.
    Ah, I said, it is very nice and cool in here.
    As she threw her head back to let the cooler air at her throat I studied the wonderful lines of Hope’s face. They were of the kind, I thought, that men would prefer to remain stationary, a head placed on a pedestal, a painting, an object for viewing. She would not consent to such a role, of course, this woman who had stood up for us with such coolness and wit in the magistrates’ courtroom, this counsellor wise and skilled and ironic.
    Suddenly she said, We are not going to win this.
    No. But winning will be holding out, I told her. People should get used to holding out if they want to win in the end. By enduring they learn, for example, to understand the way the press works, the way most bourgeois support falls away ... how the strikers take the blame for their own hopes. Learning that is no small thing; it is a sort of victory.
    She lowered her head, made a doubtful mouth, and did not seem too cheered by my argument.
    But do you really, really, Tom, foresee the end you want? I mean, the true end? The golden age?
    Oh yes, I told her. These things are hard to believe in until they come about. But the slaves were freed, the serfs were freed. And capital will fall.
    She shifted her head to one side. She didn’t have a taste for waiting that afternoon.
    Well, I tried to comfort her, some things happen suddenly. At a ... at a gulp.
    A gulp?
    She laughed at my choice of word. I blushed, as red-faced as some provincial bank clerk. Where we sat, the silence grew, and then dear Amelia arrived with a tray of tea and teacups and put it on her dining table. Both Mrs Mockridge and I stood and bent to the tray, anxious to be helpful in setting things out on the table. I was happy to be at this work. When the tray was clear – milk, sugar, teapot, cups and saucers, ornamental spoons and sugar – Amelia chirped