Bettany's Book (29 page)

She went with Stoner to Khartoum airport to greet Anwar’s armada as it touched down. It was piloted, in the spirit of the event, by men from everywhere: Kenya, Egypt, Belgium, New Zealand. Anwar himself was accompanied by his Bolivian lover Julio. They had found their haven in Chad, just as Prim had found hers in the Sudan.

So as Anwar, Julio, Stoner crammed themselves along with her onto little seats, their knees tight up against the strapped cargo, it was not only possible to forget the larger questions, but also her failure of her sister. They were on their way to Aweil, after all, a dangerous market town and garrison to the west of the Nuba Hills.

Prim was with Stoner when he held respectful talks with the Sudanese brigade commander in the fortified military headquarters in the town. The commandant gave his permission for the opening of a feeding centre at a site south of the town. In this clearing, in a landscape of tall grass, palms, and equatorially lush trees, Stoner and Prim helped to pitch UNESCO bell-tents for Anwar and Julio to live in as they set up this first station and established a network of depots in the Bahr el Ghazal province. Trucks rented from contractors in Aweil, with ‘
laissez-passer
’ on both sides, would move the food.

At a small table in the depot clearing, Prim and Stoner ate dinner of wheaten bread and kebabs with Anwar and Julio on the second night. During the meal, tall men in military fatigues turned up to share the
food. They proved to be rebel officers, long-limbed, lean-handed, ritual scarring on their cheeks, dining within sight of the garrison lights of Aweil. The night air, laden with heat and ambiguity, swelled the throat.

Flown back to Khartoum, Prim spent unexciting but utterly engrossing weeks resupplying Anwar and Julio, whose depot was merely the first gesture of a broader plan to feed, restock and reseed a thousand villages depleted by war. She intended to fly back to Aweil, and had Austfam’s permission to take Dr Sherif Taha with her. His health survey at Adi Hamit had been so useful. Now he would conduct an investigation into the health and morale of the refugees on the edge of this southern town. On the strength of Austfam’s approval of him, he had the grudging permission too of the Sudanese Ministry of Health. His proposed study was considered, for good or ill, ground-breaking, at least in its potential.

All this activity, all this application to the needs of Southerners, distracted Prim from the truth: that she had abandoned her sister to marriage, and her solitary monomania over ancestors.

Letter No 3, SARAH BERNARD

Marked by her: NOT FOR SENDING

Dearest Alice

I have begun to think of strong means to make up for my weakness. Yes I would face hanging for murder if I needed to. There are knives sharp and blunt at table. I envisage myself taking them to hand. I see in my mind blood and potato falling from the mouth of Steward Pallmire and I hear the howls of Mrs Matron while I say: You thought I lacked any power but I was able to do this. It would be a lesson to all. I am ready to try it and only sometimes think what will befall my Alice on her own and inside that place where you are – and this where I am.

Well vice has been forestalled in its path and so has revenge. Because up from the river come one hundred and twenty further women from a new Dublin ship
Eurydice.
I note amongst the freckled ones a number of fair beings and wonder in my shame can some of them stand as victims in my stead.

And I find that Mrs Pallmire seeks me out in all the rush of settling these women in and wishes to drink tea with me. I cannot explain how
she wants that. But in some way I have suddenly become her familiar. She tells me: You are a true lady. It is strangeness itself yet who can say that drinking tea in her kitchen is not an improvement over what last happened. In the Tory in my new and sudden standing as servant and confiding friend to Mrs Pallmire I am safe from mockery. But I see Mrs Pallmire pause by a young woman fresh from
Eurydice
who grows silent and raises her eyes to the exalted Mrs Matron and there is in them a cow-like fear. I know this was the same exact gaze the poor girl raised to the magistrate at trial. It is a gaze pleading for punishment though she does not know that.

That same Mrs Pallmire takes from me the burden of destroying Mr Steward Pallmire. She is suddenly pleased to count herself my protector. I am meant to work in her house. But chiefly I sit and listen to her talk. She tells me that she met Pallmire when they were seventeen years – he working as an errand boy and porter in training at the county orphanage in Guildford and she as a servant. He was always very wry – so she says. She gleams when she says it. This is a very strange affection between them. She says he always had funny little songs. Then she asks me about my husband.

I say: I was married to Corporal McWhirter. He was tall and had pale skin but he was moderate in drink. He did not have funny little songs. He went to Jamaica with his regiment. When in Manchester City prison I had a letter from his brother who was a soldier in another regiment. Fever had killed him. It kills men in greater numbers in the West Indies than any cannon. But though I was really widowed M for married somehow went beside my widowed name when I was put onto the ship.

I commence bawling at that or rather tears leak out. I want to say he was a good man which was as much as I can remember to say for him. But I will not say it in front of her since it has no meaning for her. She thought Steward Pallmire a good man and a trump and likely rogue. Nothing to be said to her that means anything! In any case and whatever their condition – married or widowed or in exile – women cannot speak. Or they can speak but are not heard. Their words do not cause the smallest change in the course of this world which belongs to men.

And Mrs Pallmire asks: You did a silly thing when he was sent away to Jamaica?

I confessed to her that that is what some said. They said of me: Foolish girl without the love and guidance of her husband! The magistrate tempered my sentence to fourteen years on that account but could not
overlook the offence. As for innocence it is a word a person does not utter here without creating gales of laughter. The other women believe you my dear Alice when you tell how you were incited to poison your husband and what a Cyclops he was. They are reverent when you talk of your old husband. Doting son of an aged mother who exhorted him on her deathbed – as you have told me my dear – to mind his health by taking small dosages of arsenic and mercury salts – all of which he had to hand being a dyer.

They listened in silence when you tell them you took from his dyeing shop the substances of his trade. Red alizarin from the madder root. Mixed with alkaline salts it was potent but merely made him queasy. Yellow picric acid and Prussian blue were what you were driven to. It is an ornate crime and it stands telling again and again and is so unlike the dreary daily crimes of the rest of us. For them we cannot cry: Innocence!

And as I sit drinking tea with Matron Pallmire I am but one year done with my sentence and have six years to run before I get the half freedom of my ticket. I believe that as soon as I have done the correct services by you my Alice and given you rescue I must surely lie down under the weight of that time and perish by my own will.

We spend an hour together – this is Mrs Pallmire and me – when the tin box of tea on the sideboard has only a few leaves in it. Go across the hallway – says Mrs Matron – and into the side bedroom. Take the tin with you and fill it from there. I walk as she has instructed and open a door and find myself in a room where it is hard to move for hampers of piled soap on one side and cases of tea of which one has its lid prised. From it in that hushed cave of treasures I refill the tin not using a measure but holding up handfuls of dark china leaf. See how it falls into the caddy. I have lived by measures – an ounce here and one and a half ounces there – since I was first imprisoned. The room beggars my belief and it is for this room – for the permission to conduct this room and other rooms and fill them with plenty – that Mr Steward Pallmire is permitted by his wife to have his compensation from the girls in the Factory. This room contains what Mrs Pallmire finds precious and its piled-up preciousness with her can be felt in here.

I had discovered them in their hoarding – these two Pallmire people who give the women in the Tories four ounces of soap to last them for two weeks for body and clothing. These people who eke to each of us a few ounces of tea and there are women here who would sell their souls for tea or tay as the little red brick woman Carty calls it. Her sweetest
comfort. All the riches of soap and tea are in this room and God knows what in other rooms!

Yes – so I tell the Pallmires silently – you have been careless with me and I shall make a record. I am not a stupid woman. I have the cleverness to write a letter. And when next I am sent to a room like this one I shall make a count.

Knowing this I feel well at once. I feel too that small amounts are the failing of the convict women. We were innocent enough to take small quantities – crimes in ounces and mere pinches – not in pounds and pounds stored up.

I say to myself then: I have you two! I have Mrs Julius Caesar Matron and Mr Julius Caesar God-Almighty Steward Pallmire. I am altogether very pleased without thinking how rash it is to think this way inside the Factory. I think that our rescue Alice is in knowing what I know.

I put my name to this now and one day she shall read.

Sarah

I
TAKE OUR WOOL TO SALE

Clancy and I with our towering load, and with the axles holding up splendidly, slept at night beneath our wagon. We avoided Goldspink’s homestead, and the man’s odious company, and so traversed the limestone plains, sheltering only one night in an overseer’s bush hut before our approach to Goulburn. I set Clancy to camp near the racecourse but rode up on Hobbes to Finlay’s house. I was quite elated at the idea of a proper bed and glass windows and good china, as well as breathing within brick and exactly timbered walls after months of living in the midst of bark and beefwood.

The convict woman who was housekeeper met me at the door and asked me in at once, but I was disappointed to find that the house possessed a cold air, as if it were being only half lived in. Of course, with the lively Phoebe gone there was bound to be a sense of vacancy.

The housekeeper had told me that Mrs Finlay was away visiting relatives in Yass, but that Mr Finlay, who was out at the moment, had particularly said he wished to see me when I came through. Did I need anything?

Since my only baths in the past months had been in the Murrumbidgee River, I asked her could a bath be poured. A zinc tub was quickly filled
for me, and I sat amongst the steam in miraculous luxury, contemplating my coming wealth and mulling over the maker’s name imprinted in the flange of the bath: Tatlow and Sons, Manchester. That man, I thought, that Tatlow and not only his sons but also his daughters would one day wear cloth woven from the pastures of Nugan Ganway. Since I had made wool out of the world of Nugan Ganway, I felt an interest in all that was made on earth. Bettany was, like Tatlow and Sons, a creator.

I shaved off a large part of the beard I had grown, and then shaved again in case handsome Mrs Finlay returned home. Then, emergent from the bathroom, I was given the choice between a bedroom to rest in and a library to read in, and chose the library. The
Sydney Herald
had an essay on the grief convict servants caused their masters.

It was nearly six o’clock that evening when the housekeeper knocked on the library door and told me Mr Finlay was waiting for me in the front parlour. It was said in a hushed way, as if Mr Finlay were not used to being delayed. I found him behind his big front window, looking out at the sweet blue of an Australian dusk. He held in his hand, which was extended as if he had just finished reading, several sheets of writing paper.