Bettany's Book (52 page)

But that Class 3 cell where I now spend two nights and should spend seven is worse to me than Mr Pallmire. So there is no sense in you writing a letter saying Mr Pallmire is worse when I know to be shut in is worse. In this world all is use! And I would rather be used in a clean house than in a dirty little cell of seven feet length.

I am not a girl for crying out Alas and Woe is me. So do not take time to be shocked or to be a judge!

You say in every letter: friend – good friend – best friend. And I tell you that all these thoughts of defeating this man Pallmire and this woman are a mad thing. You will not do it. For it cannot be done. You must wait and be reconciled. You cannot rescue yourself. You cannot rescue me. And better not to try.

And my cough. I have been coughing since
Whisper
so nothing new. It is improved not harmed by kitchen warmth and rum. For I like rum. It is a poison I admire. What is to be said then? What is to be done? The asylum was one room in hell and this another and we move about them. That is the story. The story of Sarah and her dear friend

Alice

And so a reply from Sarah.

Letter No 9, SARAH BERNARD

Friend Alice

You say to me I cannot bring about a rescue! And I tell you I shall not cease to try. As to you playing up so to Mr and Mrs I can only agree that women are mysterious creatures and cannot be easily read or judged by any other soul. I mean with a greater fervour than ever to liberate you and I have started to take measure of all that Mr and Mrs Pallmire hold in their house. Do you know that in a side room intended for children some two hundred pounds of soap is stored in wax paper? Where children should sing dumb soap sits.

Lady Gipps the wife of the Governor has asked for some well-behaved women to be sent to her – the list to be made up by Mrs Matron. The good Lady Gipps wishes these women to visit Government House for needlework lessons. Says Mrs Matron: It is lovely! Wait until you see it! So from the way she talks it seems my name is to go on the list. Is this the opening of the cell door for us unhappy girls? Being your true friend who does not judge but now signs herself

Sarah

It seemed that Sarah Bernard was daily moved to prove to Alice that useful efforts might be made against the Pallmires’ interests.

Letter No 10, SARAH BERNARD

My dearest Alice

I have learned sewing on the verandah and in the parlours of Government House. This is a habitation of grace and light as Mrs Matron has said. The wife of the Governor walks from one to another of us. She is very lean and very pale and I think not so well. Her scent is of a coldness and a holiness. When my old papa the Jew decided I must be shown the good order of the Christian faith and how it was all white linen and calmness and no ranting Hassids he took me to St Anne Tib Street. There was a cold and calm came down in the second after the candles were snuffed. To my ear and nose Lady Gipps has this same calm and holy coldness. It is only when we leave her house and start off back to the Factory that the heat rises up off the clay pan and flies crawl without a by your leave into our eyes – as if we were already dead. Only then do we feel the state of bondage reach out and take us in again.

This Lady Gipps is the woman to hope in though – when they are finished it is to her I must hand over my lists of what Mr and Mrs Matron retain in their house. Then I would hope we – you and I Alice – will have a proper reward and dignity. But how can a person be sure that they and not you are punished? That is the pause on all I do.

And one other thing is true. I understand your laughter yet every time I hear it I am sapped of will and find reason for delay where I should find reason for daring. But I shall look for the opening to be brave and be clever for the sake of my dear friend despite all.

You might destroy me with this letter but I trust you not to. As for your most loving friend it is still

Sarah

A firm answer came from Alice.

Sar

For now we must be content I think with what we see of each other in Tory and at the house of Mrs Matron! You should not write letters since it is dangerous to us both. I know not where you keep safe your letters and lists and other guff you write. You tell me you make out copies of all you write to me. It is as if you wish to show God what you have written, or at least some gentleman somewhere. Well that is you! That is your nature Sar – that you write and copy and I do not quarrel with it!

Let us just exchange a word when we can rather than the letters. I am sick of eating paper since there is no hiding place for me whether in the Class 3 cell or in the house. And what is the use? You say Sar that you want to do this and dream of doing that but all you have done till now is enjoy the smell of Mrs Governor. Until there is something done there is nothing to write.

I am still your friend.

Alice

Driven by such scorn, Sarah Bernard took her extreme risk.

Letter No 11, SARAH BERNARD

Marked by her hand: THIS MUST BE DESTROYED

Dearest Alice

I am still – as you see from this – in ownership of some of the blue government paper which Mrs Pallmire hoards. But despite my supply I had recently heeded your call not to write about helpless intentions of mine which never come to ought. Well things have come to more than ought now for I have done what I proposed to do. It was when I saw he had given you a blue kerchief for round your neck. It was a mark of such a special favour and when Mrs Matron saw it I could see in her eyes that she was lost – she looked like a girl who is snubbed by a boy.

And now we shall see what our friendship is because if you were to show this letter to Mr Pallmire or pass on the news of my purpose then I would know your constant friendship has been altered for the worse by Mr Pallmire. But you are not to be angry to hear me say I am willing to be sunk in a hole in the earth or drowned or strangled or sent to the Hunter River or Norfolk Island or whatever Mr Pallmire might do to protect his place in the earth.

I have heard too the sewing classes at Government House are coming to an end because of Mrs Governor being poor in health. Mrs Matron says the good woman is bound to return to England soon for she has the notion and desire to breathe her last at the house of her parents. This makes me understand my dear friend that I must act soon.

I have made a copy for you of what I write to Mrs Governor. And I mean to put in her hands all the accounting I have made of things stored in the rooms of the Pallmires. And again I wish to know if you are my friend since I mean to tell you where I hide the record of all hoarded stock. It is under tea chests in one of the rooms. Since there is no bottom to the avarice of this couple and the childless yearning of Mrs Pallmire for loot and bounty I have hid my record under stores she does not need yet will never dispose of. I tell you for I wish to know whether you are still my Alice or the Alice of Mr Pallmire.

Here is what I mean to hand to Mrs Governor at the next and last needlework class:

Madam the wife of the Governor
Parramatta
New South Wales

Dear Lady Gipps

I trust you to see to it that – in saying what no one else will say – I am protected and awarded the favour of my Ticket of Leave which is due in a little time in any case.

I join to this letter the lists I have made of all the goods the Steward and Matron Pallmire have kept in their house for their own joy and use and profit without the knowledge of the Governor and against the interests of the poor women in their charge. I have put on each page the date on which this measure of goods was held in their house and counted by me. As for the butchery a day of inspection would show that the better cuts do not go from there to the women of the cells and Tories but to the sundry butchers of the town. I know from your dear presence that you would not be pleased to hear of this misuse of goods and of prisoners. I know that though your gaze is mild it is also strait.

As well as this Mr Matron misuses a Category 3 woman whom he keeps increasingly in his house. This is in no way the fault of the poor girl – it is Mr Pallmire who orders it of a girl who has no power.

I trust all my future and my very breath into your hands. And I trust above all into your hands that poor Category 3 girl whose name is Alice Aldread. She is found guilty of manslaughter. But she has created no trouble in the colony and may be at peril from the women at the Factory who think that she has had some special treatment through no fault of hers from the Pallmires. That she has had but it has been of little joy to her. She must be put somewhere else and – if you will provide for it in your grace – her ticket of leave advanced.

When women have no way to turn they look to a sister. If you will forgive me I dare see you as my kind sister and look in utter hope to you.

Your petitioner

Sarah Bernard

R
ETURNED BY WAY OF
R
OME TO THE
Sudan and a subtly smiling Sherif, Prim heard from Erwit that Fergal Stoner had been calling.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he wants to make some use or other of Austfam, to
help him on his way to glory in Brussels.’ But an amused affection for the man ensured she called him anyhow, before anyone else.

‘My wife’s coming out to see me,’ Stoner told her.

‘You must be happy about that.’

‘Yes. I hope to persuade her to move here permanently – you know, show her the foreign school, and what nice friends I have. Come to a cocktail party at my place, okay?’

He nominated a date, and Prim agreed to attend. ‘But are you actually serving cocktails? I mean, liquor?’

‘Yeah, well there’ll be a room off the courtyard stocked with gin and vodka. For infidels like you. They both go pretty well with fruit juice.’

The house the EC had given Stoner was in Almoradah, a fashionable suburb with imposing houses worthy of a wealthy district in Saudi Arabia. Prim looked forward to going. She found that her brief time spent with Dimp had somehow encouraged her to be more conventionally curious about such matters as the sort of woman rash enough to marry Stoner.

In the end Prim did not arrive at Stoner’s with Sherif – the morning of the party she received a panicked telephone call from a tremulous Helene Codderby. ‘Could you take me along with you, Primrose?’ asked Helene, sounding strangely unsure for a woman who knew her way so well in the Sudan. ‘Please. Please! It’s just something I feel I can’t face on my own. All those strangers.’

Prim was surprised at that word, strangers. To Helene few people in Khartoum were strangers.

So Prim and Helene entered by a double gate, through a little garden and to the door where a tall Southern Sudanese man pointed them into the shining, tiled interior of the house. They traversed the corridor to a broad shady courtyard, where young men in jackets, galabias, and white turbans came and went with bread and chickpea paste, delicious little cubes of lamb and dried tomatoes, and fruit juice. An unaltered Stoner came lolloping up, tall, bony, brown, but – Prim thought – a little boyishly flushed.

‘Prim, dear old Codders!’ he shouted. ‘Let me introduce you to Claudia straight away.’ For some reason his lips brushed Prim’s cheek.

Claudia turned to them, green-eyed, lanky like her husband, handsome, large-jawed, and very northern European in complexion. The high sky seemed a violation of her pale skin as she moved from light to shade to meet them. She did not look timid, which was the idea Prim had
somehow got from Stoner. So it was not fear of equatorial regions which had kept her in Britain.

‘Hello,’ she said in that English manner, putting emphasis on the double ‘l’ and stretching out the ‘o’. Stoner described the two of them – Prim and Codders – what they did in Khartoum. ‘See,’ he told his wife, ‘I’ve got loads of company here. And so would you.’

His wife did not resent this didacticism. ‘It’s not the company,’ said Claudia Stoner smiling broadly at her guests. There was no trace of Yorkshire in her voice. ‘It’s that I don’t like the heat. But I suppose the marriage vows transcend temperature. When the children are old enough for boarding school …’

Stoner dropped his voice and pointed to a door in the far corner of the courtyard. ‘There’s vodka in there should you need it. In the upper cupboards. Infidel gallons of the rubbish.’

New arrivals were already queuing behind them to meet Claudia Stoner, and so Helene and Prim stood aside. They found themselves no more than a yard from Dr Hamadain, in a cotton suit, and Safi el Rahzi, the student, in shirt sleeves. Hamadain had recently been courted back home by the government from a professorship at George Mason College in Washington. Safi was in full eloquence on some subject, and did not want to pause, but Sherif’s urbane cousin held a hand up to halt the conversation and greeted them both by name. Helene Codderby – atypically – had nothing to say, and it was Prim who was left to congratulate Hamadain on his return and new post with the government.