Bettany's Book (64 page)

‘You might not think,’ she said drowsily, ‘that with all that has happened I could still be astounded at my country. You might think, “Oh, Africans are used to oppressive regimes.” I assure you they are as much of a surprise to me as to anyone. I don’t care. As long as he gets Safi out.’

They drank more tea. Khalda nodded, her chin dropped, and she fell asleep, breathing audibly. At last Prim and Sherif could look at each other as they would if alone, and Sherif’s annoyance was clearer than it had been as they had loaded the car at the airport.

‘Assure me you won’t go slave-trading any more with that Austrian lunatic. It is unwise. Believe me. El Dhouma is correct about one thing. These are not laughing matters.’

She patted his head. ‘All right,’ she told him. ‘No more flights.’ She heard, by the air he expelled, that he had not been casually concerned for her.

Mrs el Rahzi stirred then, forcing a close to a debate which still had some distance to run. She stretched, covered a yawn, and spoke. ‘It isn’t pleasant to be beholden to el Dhouma. He’s changed. Politics changes all of us. I was embarrassed for you, Primrose, and for my husband, at the imputation that the professor was on some improper enterprise in going to Nairobi.’

It was first light when a car was heard outside, and the gates of the garden opened. Prim could hear the professor’s voice and Safi’s in discussion. Mrs el Rahzi rushed into the hallway and Prim and Sherif did not think it right to follow. There was a soft wailing, and much conversation. Something of Safi’s argument could be heard. ‘The Islamic Guard are permitted to parade in the university. Why aren’t we permitted to parade for a peace settlement?’

Prim heard the argument move down the hall from the front door, past the door of the living room and towards the back of the house. It was as if Safi were prowling for food or medicine. A long parents-and-son discourse, marked only by the mildest traces of anger, settled in the kitchen.

Without warning Sherif wrapped Prim in his arms. There was urgency. After they left here, roadblocks permitting, the strenuousness of sex could be let substitute more fruitfully for the strenuousness of an argument. They could hear the kitchen debate become sporadic. Soon Safi appeared in the living room, in a white shirt with a torn collar and stained fawn pants. He was barefooted, as if the police had kept his shoes and he had been willing to forget them. He said, ‘My mother tells me you have been absolute pillars. It was very kind of you to stay with her through the night.’

‘Are you well?’ asked Sherif.

The young man smiled. ‘I go unpunished, even here at home.’

‘But no doubt your parents counsel you to be wise,’ said Prim, before Sherif could say something similar.

‘Oh, yes. I do feel sorry for anyone who falls into the hands of police and security in their present uncertainty of soul.’

His father came in, put a hand on his son’s shoulder, and gently told him to go to bed. ‘Goodnight, my good friends,’ Safi called, departing. The professor said, ‘He is carrying bruises. I will not tolerate it.’ But there was also that in him which knew he would – for a time – need to.

A
TIME OF ANGUISH

Over the years of grazing at Nugan Ganway, Charlie Batchelor’s Merino flocks had remained in the care of my shepherds, and, year by year, I calculated the natural increase due to him. In return he left to me all matters such as the management of the flocks and the annual sale of wethers, easier now that there were closer towns where some could be disposed of. He did me the honour of accepting without complaint or quibble my reckoning of his share of natural increase, of trusting that I kept strict stock books, and he never disputed any cheque that I might send him. Nor had he shown any panic when wool prices fell.

I was shocked and surprised therefore to get a sudden curt letter from my old friend and boyhood intimate.

Sir,

I would be pleased if you could deliver to my property at Inchecor, Yass, the proportion of your flocks which has been kept in trust for me. As is the normal business arrangement, those lost in the transfer shall be to your account, and I shall expect to be compensated for their loss. You may delay delivery of my share of the cattle until your next muster of them, but I expect to be in receipt of either the beasts themselves, or of the money from their sale, according as I shall direct, soon thereafter.

After years of freedom and ease in our partnership, Charlie wanted the harshest letter and not the spirit of our fraternal arrangements to operate between us.

‘I should be obliged,’ the letter continued, ‘if this could be attended to with dispatch, and if my beasts were at Inchecor before the end of the month.’

It was fortunately an easy time of year, after lambing, but I cursed having to make this journey. George was now sufficiently advanced, though only in months, not in years, to know when he had my attention and Phoebe’s. He would sit up in his cradle by the warm hearth and make faces at us as he mouthed, say, a little sweet currant damper, whose disintegration in his hand as he chewed and sucked it would create a comic amusement in his face, while causing Phoebe and me to dissolve into laughter. He loved to cause laughter, and knew how to produce that effect.

His eyes were quick, and his hair was growing quite flaxen, and I could see him as a tall, forthright, amusing New South Welshman of a future decade. One could tell by looking at him that he would develop great social ease, as distinct from his father, who for sundry reasons of temperament and history was often uneasy in refined company.

I did not want to leave George and my laughter with Phoebe. And in deciding whether it should be myself or Long who led the drive to Inchecor, I pretended to consider only the joys of the hearth. But I was also monstrously aware that should I leave Long behind, the affection between him and Bernard might perhaps reach some deciding phase. Yet I must go myself anyhow – to find what had injected rancour into Charlie’s summons of his flocks, and remake that lifelong brotherhood. After all, Charlie was to me an instrument of mercy. One of the ways in which I knew myself to be a gentleman was that the Batchelors had declared me to be one! Any permanent rejection by the Batchelors would throw a deep shadow over my own estimation of myself.

It took some days for Long, O’Dallow and other of my stockmen to cut out and assemble Charlie’s portion of all the flocks in my yards around the homestead. Long’s admirable sheepdogs – we now thought of these offspring of my original bitch, Bet, as Long’s – brought them to fold and then sat about the homestead with pricked ears, sniffing at and hoping for the coming journey.

To deliver Charlie’s sheep and to inquire into the meaning of his letter would take me at least ten days, and I would have also to leave Phoebe and my little son at the coldest season of the year. But I now, both hating and congratulating myself in equal measure, devised almost without trying, a means to leave Long in charge at Nugan Ganway, the obvious and wise provision, without allowing Bernard to spend much time with him.

I thus found myself heartily engaged in domestic arrangements and willing to discuss them. I said to Phoebe, ‘You’ll have Bernard here to get up to baby George. She could rest in the same room as Georgie, after all.’

My ears reddened, since I thought it was transparent to Phoebe and to all intelligent persons why I made such suggestions.

‘But I like to get up myself to George,’ said Phoebe. A true and splendid bush mother – avoiding the usual intermediaries between herself and her child. It was yet again shown how criminal it was of me not to love her without distraction. ‘However,’ she conceded, ‘I’ll enjoy Bernard’s company while you’re gone.’

At the moment of this conversation, Bernard was in the homestead kitchen. I had until now escaped her dark scrutiny of my plan. Again, I thought my enthusiasm was like a rash – the wise would notice it at once. Nonetheless I went to speak to her. The cooking fire in her chimney corner raged merrily, and the range smelled of succulent contents – beef, as it happened, slaughtered by O’Dallow. She was attending to it and before standing upright looked around at me with her profound eyes in which all the wistfulness of exile seemed to pool. She could not have faced her judge in Manchester with the terror with which I now faced her.

‘Bernard, I must take sheep to Yass. You should sleep every night in the next room to Mrs Bettany and rise to help with George if he is restless. I am concerned Mrs Bettany might become exhausted.’

‘Then that’s what I’ll do, and very happily, Mr Bettany,’ she said, nodding. A slightly strange order of words, I thought, like much she uttered. Her own strange guarantee.

It was not a small thing which I was about. Charlie Batchelor’s share of my present flock had grown, in spite of drought, fire, scab, fluke and the incursions of the Ngarigo people in summer, to a majestic 9000 beasts. Along the trail, such a flock might spread for miles. If Charlie really took these back, and was not just involving me in an annoying gesture, would I replace them from my own resources? I had a certain unease about spending my cash reserves, or borrowing. There was another consideration: under the influence of Sydney radicals, the British government was considering an end to the transportation of prisoners to New South Wales – no more Longs, O’Dallows, Presscarts. No more Bernards either. If it happened, where would my labourers come from?

Yet there was in strict business terms a positive aspect to Charlie’s demand. It would mean a saving on any further employment of shepherds, a saving on expenditures (shearers, soap, tar, woolpacks, and so on) and would enable me to get my flock sizes down much closer to the approved number of about 800 sheep per flock.

These were the provident considerations I made, swallowing chagrin at Charlie, as I got ready to return his stock to him. It was only in the matter of the ticket-of-leave housekeeper that I wrote fantastical cheques against that other precious resource, my supposedly unassailable affections.

O’Dallow, Presscart, Clancy, the dignified Felix, delighted to be asked to come, riding a large-shouldered black waler and tall as a boy of fourteen, made up the team which – with myself – drove Batchelor’s flocks
through the long hollow west of the homestead. I turned around and looked back, and saw half in shade by our verandah Phoebe and our son in Bernard’s dutiful arms, and then, closer to me and by his hut, Long, who seemed somehow connected to the two women in understanding, a seamless thought linking three minds. It was as if all three of them saw me clearly and, from a generous unearned love, indulged me. I did not look back again until I made the top of the first rise to the north of the homestead, from which they appeared as mere patches of colour.

We followed our Murrumbidgee stream for some way north-west, before it veered away from our path. We crossed the Limits of Location, and traversed the western side of the Limestone Plains, their pleasantly folded hills and fine pasture. Here grass had returned to the broad common grazing lands, and I rarely needed to ask local pastoralists if they could accommodate Charlie’s flock for a day or so. Our path took us well to the west of Goulburn, so I was saved the trouble of writing appeasing notes to either of the Finlays.

In this country, New South Wales seemed almost restored to its old self. Farmers who had survived were rebuilding. The little towns of Bungendore and Collector, though quiet, had more than one inn, and all the offices of civilisation from schools to apothecaries to police magistrates.

On the Yass road, as I galloped ahead of the mob, I encountered by the roadside a convict constable, wearing his thick leather belt, and guarding a very fleshy-looking female convict. As I passed he gave his cap a leisurely tip. I saw light chains, worn loose, around the woman’s wrists.

‘What is this?’ I called to him.

‘Nothing of yours, sir,’ the woman herself told me.

‘You know what it is, sir,’ said the constable to me. ‘Her master’s sending her back to the Factory for unruliness. Happens with all you gents, so you’d know the story, sir.’

‘I do not know it,’ I told him with a heat whose source was similarly a mystery, and kicked Hobbes’s flanks to get past.

‘Lucky fellow you, sir!’ the constable called after me. And he and the woman laughed as my flocks, or Charlie’s, milled past. She was a version of what Bernard might have been. Had this woman been sent me as housekeeper it would have saved all anguish, put me to the small trouble of returning her, and kept me in dull contentment.

In camp that night, sitting last at the fire, I was approached by
O’Dallow. ‘Sir,’ he said, as ever like a notice of motion at a meeting.

I threw a branch on the fire. ‘I’m very pleased with the pace of this drive,’ I told him, because it was the truth but also to loosen him. ‘We are truly old experts in these matters now, O’Dallow.’

‘Sir,’ he said affirmatively.

‘Is there something with which I could help you?’

‘I was thinking to marry the little cook Tume if you permit, Mr Bettany.’

This pertained to something I forgot to mention earlier, that Phoebe had become so dependent upon Bernard’s company, and had sufficient demands on her time, we had decided to employ a ticket-holding woman from the Factory to cook for the men. I had asked my father’s old friend Dr Strope of Parramatta, still Visiting Surgeon at the Female Factory, to select the right woman. Weeks later she arrived on one of Finnerty’s wagons, a wiry, dark-complexioned but pleasant-featured little woman named Maggie Tume. She had been with us perhaps a month, and was loudly authoritative with the men. Now O’Dallow wanted to marry her after their brief acquaintance, though it was a fairly long courtship by the standards of the convicts. A woman of promise, she shared the same language-of-the-hearth as him.