Bettany's Book (70 page)
Authors: Keneally Thomas
I could look with the composure of an already disembodied soul at her going to visit Long. Let the living look to their busy, fevered courtships. Though I believe I could see in her a touching intention to keep a vigil here. But from my point of view, the angle of a man who had resolved to put an end to all his lust, grief and treachery, to cast himself down upon the mercy of the deity, her delicacy was meaningless.
With a strange energy and appetite, however, I ate the supper she prepared. I thought of my father, a man like myself far removed from life’s normal tide. I pulled down my copy of the four books of Horace’s odes. The best I could find – a classic Stoic credo – was in Book Three: ‘
Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit
…’ ‘The more a man deprives himself of, the more the gods will give him: naked I flee from the wealthy to seek a place amongst the unselfish …’ The most unselfish were the dead. And since grief was everywhere, virtue beyond me, vice inevitable, I began to think how correct it might be to go to greet both George and Phoebe in the shades. Bernard might wash and settle my body, a service of sisterhood rather than the coarser yet sublimer contacts I had imagined. Honest Long would conduct it to a dismayed but forgiving Paltinglass.
And yet liquor and sleep ambushed me, and I was disgusted to wake to a further dawn, and stagger into the parlour to encounter a solicitous Bernard. I was sure I would not so betray myself the coming night. I went outside and made a good play-act of discussing the day’s order of work with Long. I wanted Long to think: he’s taking it bravely. Yet that evening again I took drink and sleep overcame me and made a fool of my intentions. I knew now that within me lay yet another oaf than the
one who had desired Bernard even as Phoebe sickened. This oaf cared not for grief. He sought merely to breathe and go through his bland animal functions.
Another morning saw me in the yard, squinting and swallowing bile, and conferring again with respectful Long. I must not drink early in the day – so I told myself. Yet how could the time be tolerated without the blunting influence of rum? Again I was stupefied, and prostrated by noon, but at least I woke at dusk with a head so gravid that my neck felt inadequate to the task of raising it. Since the column of my bones could no longer sustain me, and all was ache, I was calmly set to act during the coming dark hours. I needed of course to eat a meal – I did not want Bernard running out to tell Long I had refused to eat. I did not want her large-eyed concern. And I took rum even then to stoke in me that sense of distance from the universe of normal feeling. There would not be enough time tonight for me to consume it in those quantities which might steal away my purpose.
The time came. Bernard was occupied in the kitchen. I went to the trouble of collecting a jacket before stepping out of the door. No nostalgic looks back at this or that surface. I wanted to be quit of all. I did not mind that I might be seen by some transcendent critic as a ridiculous figure in a bad play: I would not be here to bear the sneers of that. The ground was cold and wet beneath my feet. There would be a frost by the morning; it was palpable that the night ached for a conclusion – a gale of snow, a death. I would do my best to satisfy the requirements of the darkness.
Careless of damage to my fingers, I unknotted a near-frozen length of rope from the wool press, cursing its obduracy. Taking it inside the woolshed, to the best-constructed part of Nugan Ganway, where wool which had clothed Europe had been shorn and sorted and pressed, I could barely see the red beefwood rafters. I fetched a bench from the annex where the men ate during shearing, hauled the rope over the dimly seen roof beam and knotted it, testing it for a moment with my weight by lifting my feet off the chair. Then, summoning up the image of George and weeping for him, I made a hefty knot and placed the rope about my neck. As I waited on the bench a while, delayed by the interesting nature of my last second, I evoked both George’s face and Phoebe’s. The dead were palpable in every corner and shadow. I would meet in Hades earthy, sage Horace. I would encounter Phoebe to whom, as with God, amends must be made. I would encounter too the phantom man my son never
grew to be, and greet with least shame the mother of Felix, whose killers I had tried to punish. The murdered Catherine would bully, on my behalf, a capricious Deity, and the absconders would delight to see me brought to my extreme moment by the same hand which had helped finish them.
I enjoyed these few moments of assessment but despised delay and prevarication in the condemned. I stepped off the bench.
In darkness I engaged a final hope that the rope was adequate to send me to oblivion. And indeed, as the base fell out of the earth beneath my feet, I felt gravity and the noose connive to produce an enormous blow to the right side of my neck, below my ear, nearly adequate to sever the head from its shoulders.
And yet it was not adequate to bear my senses away, and all was consumed by the sensation of choking and of futilely seeking solidity, desiring it all at once as nothing had ever been desired, neither woman nor property nor wealth. I told myself that I had now taken adequate punishment, and already knew hell, and was entitled to draw back. For the blackness of the woolshed flashed with light and burned and burned in great gusts of airlessness. The earth was my hard spouse and would not return to me now that I had abandoned it. My father walked in from the sheep yards and added the pages of his book to the flames of my agony. And I saw, as a concrete figure stepping towards me, in a rush, howling, Death in dark weeds, scythe in hand, eager to close the transaction. The dullest, most gelid moonlight delineated the blade as it sliced at my head. I fell, and there was solid ground again, the ground, I supposed, of my interment. A hand worked at my hangman’s knot, and lost air, as painful as lost limbs, ached into my body.
‘Mr Bettany,’ said the reaper in Bernard’s voice, ‘whatever are you at for sweet God’s sake?’
The reason Death had Bernard’s voice was that I had misidentified. The one figure there was simply Bernard, straddling me with her thighs, shaking the air back into me. I felt great strength in her long hands.
‘Do you think it can be as easy as that, do you?’ she asked me, and so drew her right fist back and smashed it against my jaw. The woolshed filled up with light again, but I thought in a powerful, instant, fuddled way, ‘This woman may well teach me to accommodate myself in the world again.’
Reborn of her, I found myself engorged with love of the living, and dragged her towards me, a huge endeavour towards which she seemed to add her own strength. Soon I who had had no air was howling and
aching into her. Though within days of my wife’s burial, all this did not have the cast of betrayal. Rather, of triumph, and a necessary rite of resuscitation.
I let myself be led back to the homestead again. She opened the door for me and let me in. By the light of two lamps and of the low fire at the hearth she looked directly at me. ‘Look what you have brought us to, you poor fellow!’ She sat me down, then went away to get tea and make some embrocation with both of which she returned. With the bowl of embrocation she began to wash the rope burn on the side of my neck. When in plain, brute need I reached for her waist, she pulled herself clear. ‘No,’ she warned me. ‘No.’
In the subsequent days, I spent most of my time on my own in my desolated homestead, but attended by a severe Bernard. Suspended exactly between the living and the dead, I was suffused by an aura of azure sensual delight, shot through with a yellow sulphur of doom. I waited in a soporific daze for her to return to me and give me ease. I knew it would happen. My grief for Phoebe and George had begun to take on the colours of consolation as I waited. I waited stoically. In the face of hell, I was ecstatically stoic, grief-stricken and agape with wonderment at the one time. I drank and stumbled out for brief conversations with Long, none of which I could remember, all of them more meaningless chat about out-stations and stock.
On the second night I appealed to Bernard as she brought me food I was too feverish to contemplate. I appealed to her, and she said, ‘I would be most evil.’
‘If it was not evil when you scythed me down, why is it evil now?’ I said.
‘Dear God, the warmth of your poor wife’s body has not yet left the deathbed!’
But I persisted. ‘If it will not be wrong in a year, why – viewed from the standpoint of eternity – is it wrong now?’
She yielded at last. I did not know, I did not care, as I subsisted on Bernard’s ivory lineaments, whether she had told Long and the stockmen about my attempt to jump into the pit. I was not, however, without shame, but was prepared to let it cohabit the house with me, as one might in an extremity share a cave with a large dangerous beast. And everything was two-edged with her, was at the one time guilt and redemption. Yet by throwing an arm about her body and drawing her close I could in the unity of that embrace reduce the world to one sharp,
tolerable edge, sustained from the opening kiss into other intimacies of touch, into a fury of feeling and reaching. Then, as I gasped, all fell back again to two-edgedness. And of course at that moment I did not know for whose sake I should feel more ashamed. For Phoebe’s and George’s? For Long’s? For Bernard’s? For the sake of the steadfast condemned man I had been a few nights before?
During these days, Nugan Ganway functioned well, horses being reshod, my remotest shepherds greeting visits by Long and maintaining my flocks. On the fourth day I felt a passion to go out for an extensive ride, but first, and after thought, I tested Bernard with a question.
‘Will not Sean Long expect you to visit him?’
‘Long knows that I am needed here,’ she told me, standing back from feeding the fire at my hearth. ‘Long and all the men know how badly I am needed in your house now.’
‘Badly needed,’ I confirmed, and reached a hand for her wrist.
But of course as days passed the most unlikely, or some might say improper, of arrangements rose to be normal. After a week I emerged and went down to Long’s hut, and discussed a coming ‘bang-tail’ muster, that is, a muster of all our neglected hill cattle, which he had been urging upon me. There was no sign of altered knowledge or resentment from him. But then there would not be, since he – like many of his people – had learned to swallow resentment more profoundly than the marrow of his own bones.
Long told me he would need a dozen riders, and I promised that he would have them. Felix wanted to go, he told me, even though he was still mourning Mrs Bettany and George.
‘Are you sure he is matured enough to muster cattle?’ I asked. ‘We have had sufficient tragedies on Nugan Ganway.’
‘He dearly wishes to be with us, and is as robust as many boys of sixteen.’
‘You may count me in too,’ I told Long. It was mere justice to him for me to join in the risk.
His eyes were dark and deep-set and could hardly be read. But in some distant corner of his brain, Long must have hoped that I would fall – such things were possible – and the mad, unbranded, so-called ‘Bushian’ cattle would trample my head to pulp. For he suspected, surely, that in offering to go on a muster with him I was declaring myself restored, in so far as anyone could restore me. And he must have apprehended too that I would not surrender up to him the means of that restoration,
Bernard. I did hope this was tolerable to him, but if not he could – since he possessed his ticket-of-leave – take his share of cattle and work as overseer for someone else. He was still remote enough from his conditional pardon however, which well-behaved men such as he acquired after fifteen years of their sentence, that I had power over him. Yet I did not want to see him anything but well used. As long as he did not try to take Sarah Bernard, my daily rescuer, away.
Bernard and I lay at night in George’s room, awaiting for the time of grieving to pass so that the relationship could be formalised as a marriage. And in this ambiguous period, the thought of my father was a perverse comfort. Whomsoever I seemed to shock, I knew my father at least. There was ultimately a letter, conveyed to me on a visit by the new police magistrate, in which the Reverend Paltinglass urged me to consider the unspeakable sufferings of the Saviour and be wary of new and sudden and false attachments which grew merely from my present desolation.
News of my attachment to, or, more correctly, my passion for Sarah Bernard, barely needed lips to whisper it. The information was borne on the vigorous winds of the Maneroo, travelling further than pollen or bees. I confidently imagined Charlie Batchelor hearing of it in Yass, and the Finlays in Goulburn, and feeling justified in their attitudes. There were frequent confessional letters, published by the editor of the
Herald
in Sydney, from priests and parsons of all denominations, which declared that the communities of New South Wales seemed so debased and reprehensible that they deserved to be denied all rite and sacrament. I imagined I must reconcile myself to living not only beyond the limits, but beyond the sacraments too.
In the year after Prim’s visit home, Dimp’s unease about the annulment of Bren’s previous marriage had not diminished at all. She felt no rancour against Bren. As she saw it, the annulment itself was something he could not go back and amend. But it was the toxic root of her marriage. So she was able less and less to argue with him about it. Arguing, and raised voices, would have been a comfort. But what use was a debate between parallel universes, exchanges travelling meaninglessly on tangents into infinite space.
And then, some six months after Sudan’s civilian government fell, while Prim was still involved in trying to clear the way for a health survey of the Red Sea Hills camp named Alingaz, or Hessiantown, Dimp suffered what she saw as another crucial and revelatory experience in Sydney, and believed that, though an account of it would annoy Prim, Prim would need to be told by fax.
As always, she began with a plea for Prim’s return.
Your friends get blown up, and that awful regime comes in with – according to an article I read – moral police prowling the streets with power to take a person to court! Come home and bring Sherif too. He’s graduated from a British university hasn’t he? They’ll let him practise here.
If you were home I could tell you this better. But I have to tell you anyhow: I know the marriage is finished now. I have to stop moaning and act. I know you won’t be surprised to hear it’s Benedetto who brought it about – and no, it’s not Benedetto in the obvious sense. He kind of said the determining word, that’s all. What an admirable fellow he is! The Archangel Gabriel of my poor squalid little life.
I remember you used to warn me that I was wrong if I fancied that behind Bren’s old-fashioned front, and his ideas, and the functional way he embraced them and applied them, lay an exotic wizard, a sort of sage in a cave. You thought the cave was empty. And you said that’s okay as
long as you know it’s empty, but don’t go into this marriage thinking there’s something there, that the cave is full of charming goblins. You’ll deny having said it, but you did, once – during the Auger business. I thought it was your mess that made you talk like that. But it’s the truth. Most of Bren’s opinions are predictable to the core. Well, whose aren’t? But again it’s that cautiousness! A man who’d seek an annulment … But we’ve had that conversation. And his boringness is now out of kilter with my boringness.
The conversation at our last dinner got on to this character named Eddie Mabo. Only people in mining and those of like interest know about him – as yet, anyhow. He’s a Torres Strait Islander. With the help of a few lawyers from Melbourne he’s claiming ownership of his vegetable patch on an island, Murray Island. At the moment the case is being heard by the Supreme Court of Queensland. Doesn’t sound of much significance. Except all the industry newsletters Bren gets say that if Mabo wins, it will mean that Australia did belong to the Islanders and Aboriginals all along and the lot of it was filched illegally from them, in violation of international law. That may also mean Aboriginals have a right to block mining and drilling! The industry newsletters are full of panic at this, and the judge intends to go to Murray Island and hold a hearing right there. This is seen by Bren’s friends as an indulgence! See what I mean by predictable? If this Eddie Mabo wins, the result round here will be full-throated fucking hysteria! Gut fury amongst some of Bren’s set. You know the stuff: how dare those damn pinko judges give away our country! The Aborigines had this country for fifty thousand years and what did they do with it? Didn’t build a single 747 or put up one Sheraton. And now some Islander wants to turn the law of possession upside down just in time to bugger up the economic recovery! Etc., etc.
I think of Bren’s associate, Peter Ignacy and his wife, Thea. Did you meet them at our party? Peter was born in Hungary. Thea’s a Scot whose parents came from Glasgow. Tough little reddish beauty. Last year the Ignacys spent three whole weeks with Bren and I in a chalet in Aspen owned by an American bank. They’ve done well out of the Australian earth and the bounty thereof. I find it hard to believe that a native land claim could put a dent in the Ignacys’ happiness. They’ve got a huge Lloyd Rees in their dining room – it’s like a great blob of liquid light and it seems to gleam with love. Thea runs a second-hand shop for your crowd, Austfam. So she’s no primitive bigot and, unlike me, she’s not a
frivolous woman. But the rhetoric I mentioned above comes from Thea too. She has a sort of primal anger against this Mabo, just in case he succeeds. I get defeated by this sort of thing. I don’t know how to utter my dissent, you know. This whole business strips the air out of the room at the moment. Or the air cries out for things to be said, the air’s thirsty. And I find myself silent, and I wish I wasn’t. Big Bren is spraying the bloody earth with opinions, of course. Incautiously. That’s the whole thing – the sod is rampantly incautious when he should be wary. And cautious when he should be free! See the history of my life, under A for Annulment.
But again Bren, like the Ignacys, is a decent fellow according to his lights, and what else do any of us have to sail by? He has enthusiasms too. He bought a big Colin Lanceley for one of the lobby’s walls recently and was so pleased with himself. He’d seen one in a bank and thought it was great and wanted one similar. Bren said he bought it because it looked like a map of childhood seen from above – rivers and painted boughs and the whole caboodle. So he did that for love, and that should cover a multitude of banalities!
Now I introduce the difficult bit, the bit designed to test your patience. Benedetto. I hear your smirk, if hearing a smirk is possible. It’s not what I think of him though that’s the issue. It’s what he does. He’s at dinner at our place the other night, the night the Ignacys are there, and he’s brought along some sexy, glasses-wearing girl barrister from his chambers. And everyone’s talking like the clappers about this Mabo case and Thea Ignacy says one of the expected things. ‘My ancestors were Highlanders,’ she says, ‘and a person can’t help asking if the descendants of Aboriginals are allowed to try land claims, why aren’t the descendants of eighteenth-century Highlanders?’
And she’s a bit more proud of the originality of this argument than she should be. But I must confess I’ve never known the answer to that one – I’ve known there must an answer, but have been too lazy to pursue it. And yet whenever that idea is uttered, generally by someone more bombastic than Thea, I develop an absolute itch to find the answer, an enormously intense itch while it lasts, but easily forgotten. I have this intense desire to correct them. I feel there’s a place, and they ought to be put in it. But more, I feel if I knew the answer I would somehow understand being that curious thing: a woman of European (and as we now know, Semitic) descent living on this outlandish bloody continent.
Now Benedetto’s got a lot of credit with Bren and Ignacy. He took
and won some case over diamond drilling for them. So there he is, his broad face, close-cropped but thickly growing hair, his standard issue Italian brown eyes. He sits all through this talk about how the Mabo case is full of potential recklessness, and sits through Thea’s lines about Highlanders and how she had better put in a claim for Banffshire. And he’s able to say nothing. Dispassion is a great gift.
And after Thea’s non-original point, instead of spraying their own annotations on Mabo about the room, the men ask Benedetto for his ideas. And Benedetto grins without malice and begins to talk. I do not think, Thea, he says, smiling, that you could successfully pursue a claim to your ancestral land before British courts. It would be an enormously difficult case to research. The point is that rightly or wrongly the Scots were seen as having forfeited their land by rebellion. Parliament enacted laws to that effect, and those laws have not been challenged, so that the common law is against you on this. But the Aboriginals and the natives of the Torres Strait never committed any act to enable forfeiture of their land, and they did not forfeit it voluntarily through treaties. In Australia, says Benedetto, country was taken away not because it was forfeit for some act of sedition but because it was considered
terra nullius.
Land belonging to no one.
God, says Thea, I’m sick of people rabbiting on about this
terra nullius!
Yes, says Benedetto, but it means that either Australia was
terra nullius,
or else the native peoples had title to it. No middle possibility. If Australia was
terra nullius
when we occupied it, this man who wants to claim his ancestral yam and banana patch will lose. But otherwise he’ll win.
Bren soberly asked him what he thought would happen.
Oh, said Benedetto, I believe
terra nullius
is contrary to international law, and Mabo will win in the end.
All of this said lazily, and with a casual grin.
This was the moment, Prim. I felt an exhilaration out of proportion to the substance of the information. I actually felt I had been all at once set free by a Torres Strait man I’ll never meet and who wants secure title to his vegetable garden, and by Benedetto’s clear exposition. It was as if he had made rain in a dry town. I had betrayed myself into marrying wrongly. I’d mistaken the annulment for something enchanting. But it had made me invalid, and I lacked the power to walk until Benedetto had turned up and freed me with his few words. I found myself clapping,
and Ignacy turned to me and said, ‘But you’ve always been a pinko!’
That’s it. The whole incident. It’s happened in a thousand places in the nation – the same opinions and elucidations. But at the end of this explanation the contract between Bren and me did lie shattered. It’s a strange feeling. I feel that I must retrieve myself. It’s a pressing obligation, even though you’ll think it’s self-indulgence, and I can’t prove otherwise.
I’m trying to be more than serious. I’ve started looking for small houses for rent back in Redfern. I’ll keep you posted.
And just because I eat well and have lived in a palazzo, don’t be remiss with me. Accept this as an event of some moment in the life of
Your pilgrim sister,
Dimp
In Prim, panic revived. Dimp might say anything, and be socially rowdy. But Dimp’s job in Prim’s universe was to be, behind all the passion, steady, secure in her life and her marriage. If Dimp fell apart the world might too, in some radical way no one had thought of.
ould not help writing to her in fright and with even more of the usual and futile severity, of the kind which might itself serve as a provocation. She saw with some alarm that she could not refuse to believe in the idea of a word which once uttered changed the known world. She had had that same experience when she heard the word ‘slave’.
When I read your faxes I don’t want to read any more of the transcript. It seems Benedetto didn’t do you much of a favour, giving you that stuff. I see that as having set up too big a sense of debt in you, as if now you have to take everything he says as some sort of prophetic statement.
As for the idea of scales falling from your eyes as Benedetto spoke, I just don’t believe it happened. You sound like someone who’s likely to be converted to a sect just because some swami comes up with the right, plausible line. Just because you fancy Benedetto – well, I don’t have to complete the sentence. I could see the signs at your party.
You’re lucky to find me still here. I was supposed to be off with Sherif to Hessiantown. But Sherif’s finding it a bit slow getting Ministry of Health approval – they say they want to supply one of their own officials to work with us. I don’t know what their problem is – they might be sick of negative reports getting out.
I’ll let you know before I go, so your anguish isn’t sitting unread in
the fax tray for four or so weeks. I hope I don’t come back and find you’ve done something extreme.
Your stern and loving sister.
She had not sent it an hour when Sherif appeared at her office door with a letter from the Ministry of Health. They were permitted to make their journey. A government health official would meet them at Alingaz when they arrived.
Prim knew she would take her sister’s malaise with her on the journey, and had a superstitious fear it might poison things.
To take the road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, all informed travellers – and there are few of the uninformed variety in the Sudan – leave Khartoum at night and hope to reach the Red Sea Hills late the next morning. Thus Erwit, Sherif and Prim left the city after an early dinner. In two days the two nurses who had worked on Sherif’s earlier health surveys would come on by bus, which also made maximum use of darkness, slipping away east into flat country to the north of the irrigated fields of the Gezira.
The rains were late again this year. Indeed, Prim by now took their irregularity as the norm. The night Sherif, Erwit and she left was breathless. The upholstery of the Toyota exuded that peculiar hot-weather chemical breath which had always made Prim sick when her parents had strapped young Dimp and younger Prim, still sticky from the surf, in the back seat and told them not to fight.
As they left Khartoum, all their papers were in order. It was thus almost welcome to Prim to be stopped at the checkpoint on the edge of the city, to have to get up off the vinyl and explain to the officials that she was not carrying sacrilegious books, whisky or rifles. At each of the recurrent checkpoints they encountered through the furnace night, there was a petrol pump, and an awning beneath which sweet tea and flat bread were served.
‘Are you married to this gentleman?’ men, sometimes in khaki, sometimes in civilian shirts and pants, politely asked at each road block. Prim told them no, that the man there was a doctor, the other a mechanic and driver. They saw Erwit was Eritrean which caused them to frown, but slightly. ‘So you are not the woman of that man there?’ they would ask Prim again.