Bettany's Book (5 page)

She took the marked pages. She still had residual faith that what she had written was in place, there in the text, amenable to calm explanation. But the passage was nothing that she had written, or remembered, or even particularly agreed with.

‘I didn’t write this,’ she told him.

‘Prim … that’s the normal student denial.’ So he had reduced her in a few seconds from friend, lover and colleague to temporising student.

She knew instantly what he had done. He had acted with a criminal determination no one would believe him capable of. For the sake of his grievous marriage, and to evade the frenzied lover asking, ‘When? When?’ he had altered her dissertation at source, on the disk. He had butchered it, robbed it of its connections, emasculated its argument and introduced undigested lumps of Verner and Ackland. Short of strangling her, he was sending her into thorough exile. He was extirpating her. And she knew even then that no one would believe he had gone to all this trouble.

His voice trembled as he read a series of page notations he had jotted down on a notepad. ‘Turn to page 37, please. Then pages 42, 46 to 48, 53 to 55 …’

‘You did this,’ she said. He who was clever at word processors in an age when many scholars were still fighting a delaying war against them. He could – as the new phrase had it – ‘desk-top publish’ scholarly newsletters. So he had spent dark hours to alter matter through cut, paste,
copy; to devise a new version of her dissertation. She flicked the pages and found the font correct but the contents largely strange. ‘You did this, Robert.’

‘Prim,’ he said, looking out the window again, ‘do you know how mad that sounds. I haven’t betrayed you. You’ve betrayed me.’ He seemed genuinely to believe it. ‘It’s like this – I don’t think for a moment your direct purpose was to cheat. You don’t need to. But I think you were actually testing me. Seeing if I would cover for you. Well, we may be great friends, Prim. But I can’t cover for you on this.’

Everything was apparent to Prim now. ‘You want to get rid of me – from the university. From all scholarly life. You don’t want to be worried by me. You want your shitty marriage.’

‘That’s hysterical,’ Auger said. Men could say that, hands spread concessively, chin lowered. It was one of their best tricks.

‘My God, I didn’t want to test you. I wanted to impress you. And I did. The real text. Weren’t you impressed?’

‘I can’t be impressed with that,’ he said, nodding to the text in her hands.

‘I have another copy of what I wrote at home.’

‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘After all, weeks have passed since you put this one in.’

‘Look, Robert, you
know
me. I’ve got too much intellectual vanity to play this sort of game.’ Could someone else have done it, altered the text? A jealous woman student? ‘Someone has tampered with this, and if it’s not you, then I apologise.’

‘I should think so,’ said Auger. ‘You do me very little credit, Prim.’

‘How much credit do you do me?’ she asked.

‘Dr Rabin and I are required to report this to the dean.’

‘This beggars belief,’ said Prim. She stood up and walked about the office.

He knew he had routed her now. ‘I can’t avoid it. I have only to wait until another graduate student, or an academic working in this area seeks out your dissertation, and they’ll notice it too, what Rabin and I have already noticed. It’s a gross lift, Prim. I know I’m partly to blame for the fact you haven’t been happy–’

‘Don’t you presume you can talk about my happiness,’ she warned him. So he was happy to give that up, the consoling tone, and fall back on his habitual authority, that of a tenured academic eminent in his field.

‘Well, I just know this whole time has been very stressful for you, Prim.
I know what you wanted out of our relationship. If I have added to your anguish in any way …’

‘
In any way
?’

‘We can get you therapy,’ he offered.

‘Get therapy yourself,’ she told him. She grew dizzy with an enormous just rage. She was determined against the odds to be believed by somebody.

‘In any case,’ said Auger, ‘the dean is waiting to see you.’

‘If I see the dean, I’ll tell him everything.’

‘So we’ve already got round to vengefulness, have we, Prim? I’ve already approached the dean, and confessed my association with you. There’s forgiveness for lapses of sexual morality, Prim. But none for plagiarism.’

It was still incomprehensible: the last ten months described as a lapse! She could not find any handhold on such a fatuous word. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I very much want to see the dean.’

But the interview she had when she got to the dean’s office was marked by the same kind of uncomprehending, brutal words Auger had uttered. One of them – again – was ‘lapse’, another was ‘counselling’. ‘But I can produce a copy of the dissertation in its true form,’ said Prim. ‘I’m sure you could,’ said the dean. ‘The point is the copy you did submit. And whatever it meant, whatever your motive … attention-getting or otherwise … it’s still plagiarism.’

She must face reality, the dean told her, and admit the plagiarism. Otherwise the matter would have to be taken to the post-graduate committee and higher. After her excellent record, he was willing to accept that this had been an aberration created by stress. ‘You may have,’ he suggested tentatively, ‘without deliberately knowing it, wanted to bring your unfortunate relationship with Professor Auger, the details of which he has confided to me, to a conclusion, and subconsciously thought the best way to do that was to offend him.’ It was a sentence she laughed at madly at the time. A pompous, half-thought-out, Auger-suggested and amateurish stab at a psychological explanation.

When she told the dean that Auger had altered her dissertation, the dean politely called that paranoia. If it were the truth, anyhow, she could appeal. But with the greatest respect, the dean did not believe it.

The depiction of her as one who plagiarised for attention brought on disabling rage, then and later. It was so vast and appalling an accusation that she thought it capable of snuffing out her life with its hugeness. It
proved to be an accusation that grew within her like a foreign, unchosen organism clamped around her vitals. Its malign nature made any further contest with these men, and with the man Auger, impossible to tolerate. Prim could neither confess to plagiarism nor throw herself on their mercy; neither take up their proffered counselling nor appeal to the vice-chancellor or the university senate. She could not bear to have the accusations, the comforting myth of attention-seeking, a plausible one in male eyes, raised again. She knew it would simply kill her.

She walked out of the university gates on Missenden Road and caught a cab home. There she found Brendan D’Arcy and Dimp drinking. She numbly drank some champagne with them and told them nothing.

‘How is the thesis?’ asked D’Arcy lightly, though he was so engrossed in his own happiness he did not wait for an answer. They insisted on taking her with them to a restaurant, where she conversed like a living being with a stake in things. It was only after she had been in the women’s lavatory for half an hour that Dimp came looking for her.

‘I’m giving up the university,’ Primrose turned from the mirror to tell her sister.

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

Dimp put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. ‘What is it?’

‘All you have to know for now is I’m leaving.’

‘That bloody Auger,’ said Dimp. ‘I’m so sorry.’

I will not weep at a name, Prim promised herself.

Dimp said, ‘You must hate me for not doing more.’

‘Why? You’re innocent.’

‘I should have intervened. I could read the omens, but I was too busy with Bren.’

‘No, no.’

‘Jesus, I should have warned you.’

‘And I wouldn’t have listened.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll go somewhere. You know what? I’d like to go to another country. What I mean is, another culture. Somewhere where I’m considered an aberration. Ugly if possible. No, maybe not ugly. That’s self-pity. I’d like to go somewhere I’m considered neutral. A non-player.’

‘Where could that be?’ Dimp asked.

‘I have some ideas,’ said Prim. ‘I have a degree, and some references from earlier in my career.’

‘Come back to the table,’ Dimp said softly, taking her arm.

‘I can’t.’

In fact, Prim barely emerged from the house in Redfern for the next three months. A strength in her forbade either suicide or full-blown mental illness, but in the end, for the sake of not being eaten alive nocturnally by the ridiculous remembered sentences of the dean and of Auger, she was forced to take a course of anti-depressants, hating herself the more, as if she were fulfilling out of a pill bottle the predictions of Auger, and comporting herself according to his lies.

Ultimately she went to Canberra, the national capital, a derisory choice of domicile for most Sydneysiders, and worked for an aid body, or NGO (non-government organisation), as such instrumentalities liked to call themselves. This one was named Austfam, was active in the South Pacific and Asia, and had a presence since the East African famines of the 1970s in Ethiopia, and a small office in the Sudan.

Dimp asked her repeatedly what she thought she was doing in Canberra, that artificial capital which imposed on its citizens sudden scarifying winter frosts and summer excesses of heat. But Prim had begun attending training courses run by the Australian Development Assistance Bureau and by the Australian Council of Overseas Aid. Most of her colleagues thought of Asian development as the primary Australian duty. Prim thought of the Sudan, where the Austfam office was run by an eccentric man named Crouch, and the post of assistant office administrator and field officer had just come on offer. Her decision to apply was motivated by altruism, but also by the fact that she lacked the facial markings, the orderly scarrings, the broad eyes and splendid pigmentation considered essential elements of beauty amongst many Sudanese.

She would not be desired there. And that was fine with her.

Prim went to the Austfam office in the city of Khartoum in 1984. In flight from the Auger business, she did not have the room to bring to the experience the enthusiasm of the tourist, or more cultural curiosity than she needed for her job. The broad-streeted city proper was held in place between the Blue and White Niles, which met each other – amidst beds of rich silt – in Central Khartoum’s north-west corner. Near either of the rivers it was possible to imagine the city as fabled oasis, and the focus for the million square mile immensity of the republic. But south of that, on the rubbly, sandy earth of the New Extension, where head offices
of many NGOs and other agencies were located, all the supposed aura and magnetism of the fabled rivers seemed remote to her. Prim’s training, and the Austfam manuals she had read, had told her how to dress in East Africa – for example, long sleeves instead of short – and implied that for a woman there was a certain danger of committing errors of dress or behaviour if a person went wandering on her own. When she did go out with a woman acquaintance, over the White Nile to fabled Omdurman, a place everyone at parties in the New Extension told her she had to visit, she had for a while felt edgy and exposed. That feeling soon passed, but she was very happy in any case to stay close to the office–residence, located in a high-walled, two-storeyed, flat-roofed villa of plastered brick in the New Extension. Behind the house lay a little yard of dust, and a cinder-block garage which also served as quarters for a man named Erwit, Austfam Khartoum’s earnest Eritrean driver.

Prim lived in a small, sweltering room behind the office, but took meals upstairs in Crouch’s apartment. A peculiarly aged-looking man in his mid-thirties, Crouch stooped around the office, his brush of red hair all thrust forward spikily above features which appeared misanthropic. At first she mistook his air of melancholy for disenchantment with his job, and when she started attending Arabic classes with him each week at the monastery of the Vincentian Fathers in the New Extension, Prim found he had not achieved much competence in the language, and feared she too would not become fluent. She suspected that, despite all pretended breadth of intellect she was already, at twenty-four, too culturally set to enter and move with confidence in the new cosmos of Arabic.

Prim had worked at Khartoum’s Austfam office no more than six months, chiefly looking after routine correspondence with the Sudanese Ministry of Health, with the Sudanese Commission of Refugees, with Austfam offices in Canberra and Sydney, when Crouch told her he was being considered for the job of heading the largest Austfam operation, in Cambodia. A few months later, it was confirmed.

Before he left, Crouch took Prim out for her first experience ‘in the field’. They went to a water project at a village near the Nuba Hills, some four hundred miles south-west of the capital, where Austfam had helped fund a not particularly successful small dam. When they left the main road west, something like fervour entered Crouch’s voice. Like Prim, he clearly found this country engaging, perhaps partly because it resembled remoter Australia. Even the gum Arabic bushes were acacias, and would not have seemed out of place in Australia’s central deserts.
As they passed an informal plantation of these bushes, and saw little bowls placed at the base of the narrow trunks to catch the amber resin, he expatiated on that ancient industry – how gum Arabic resin had been until the age of synthetic chemicals the world’s fixative. Pills, paints, lollies, said Crouch. ‘Now the water basin’s sunk to buggery, and people can’t get the yield they want.’

Old men in dust-grey galabias took Crouch and Prim to a little dam, a quarter full of murky water, with lines of acacia trees laid out on the terraces above to hold the earth in place. Women were drawing up this water in plastic buckets with ropes attached. They would use it for watering stock, said Crouch. They were travelling quite a distance to take drinking water from an old British well – Crouch showed her on an ordnance map where it was. Prim would need to set up Austfam funding for a new well to be drilled.