Bettany's Book (72 page)

He used a cricketing metaphor. Five per cent would knock some of your rake-off to leg, he said. It’s one of those, eh? Burning a hole in the old creative duodenum. Are you really called Dimple?

I told him I was, and he said, Shit. Fair dinkum eh? He told me then he preferred to write plays. Plays got produced, whereas the studios paid
him to write screenplays that never got made. He said, I write the first draft and then I go off jet-lagged across the Pacific to some meeting in Burbank or Universal City and some idiot holds up the script in his hand and tells me that he doesn’t see what’s at stake between the bloke and the girl. And why don’t we give the hero this pet bloody parrot? Everything goes to hell from that point, he said, and he satisfies no one, least of all himself, and the film isn’t made. He said, I don’t know why I’m complaining. Faulkner and Fitzgerald warned the whole world of writers what would happen if they took the Devil’s candy.

I said, This will get produced. I tried to blaze with zeal, though I didn’t even have the development money. I said, If I don’t get development cash on that scale, I won’t trouble you further. And he said, Okay. But 4 per cent of budget will be fine. I don’t want to feel too beholden to you. Then he laughed in a way that gave me hope.

I got a call the next day from his agent, a Londoner, now domiciled in Sydney, named Max.

Hugo got $700 000 US for his last American screenplay, he told me, expecting me to faint.

I think I could run to that, I told him joyously. It is wonderful to surprise these people.

Look, he said, no offence, but it’s a long time since you produced anything. I presume your husband’s underwriting this one?

I told him to presume again. That made him really nervous. He wants me, when the time comes to contract Hugo, to present a bank statement. He doesn’t want to start Hugo off on what looks like a generous payment, and find there’s nothing left in kitty when he’s done the real work.

This is what I promised: $200 000 on contract, $150 000 on delivery of first draft, with a bonus of $50 000 if it was delivered in three months, a term which balances creativity with urgency. The rest of the money is to be spread over subsequent re-writes and polishes.

My, you are keen, said bloody Max.

Then I bought an economy ticket to Los Angeles, even though I knew Bren wouldn’t have blinked if I’d used one of the corporate credit cards and gone in comfort. I believed I would talk them round in LA the way I talked Hugo round.

But I’m afraid it’s proved a pretty dismal trip. I’ve got to find Hugo’s $700 000 somewhere, and a few thousand for me to live off while I’m putting the thing together. If I can get provisional commitments of
production money from a studio that would be the key – the rest of it could be raised in Australia, by way of the usual tax dentist investors, or else through the Film Finance Corporation.

In Los Angeles, in the ‘business’ – that’s the first mistake, that they call it a business, as if it’s like making tractor transmission boxes or computer hard-drives – there are loads of people willing to buy me breakfast, drinks or dinner, and to say, No, I’ll pay. Your treat when we make a movie in Australia. I met with production executives from Miramax, the crowd I really want to back me. I tried Savoy, and people whose cards I have from Fox, Universal, Sony. In the abstract they all want to put money into a picture produced by me in Australia. They’ve told me this in the past. But it always turns out to be any picture except what I’m proposing at the moment. But they all loved
Enzo Kangaroo!
Jesus, yes. They were just talking to Martin Scorcese or Sidney Lumet or Milos? Forman or Sydney Pollack, and it’s his or their favourite film of all time. You Australians have a lot to teach us! Blah, blah.

One of the problems I have is that the word has reached across the Pacific from Sydney to California, and it’s become one of those aphorisms these people ‘in the business’ like to fall back on, Aussie frock dramas are officially passé. American audiences don’t get ’em. They’re even going off the British frock dramas as well. And settlers and Abos? No one really gets that stuff!

So now I’m back home in my little house which I love and enjoy greatly. But no one’s given me any development money. I’m looking out at brazen Sydney light, at the tangled roofs of Redfern terraces. The alternative is repentance, and then back to the art gallery-cum-dormitory which dear old Bren considers home. How can I turn back to a man who spent more time buying his mobile phone than he spent condoning my purchases of Australian glories, of Blackman and Boyd, of Whiteley and the great Fred Williams? Fred Williams saw the continent as I wish the film to see it, with its glories and its secrets seemingly there, behind the veils of trees, waterfall, boulders.

Anyhow, I have in my mouth something it will take a lot of the teas of China, and maybe later a bit of gin, to wash out – the taste of having been taken to the mountain top and told precisely why I can’t inherit the cities of the plain! Well, that’s the normal aftermath of a trip to that acidic place.

I have one more trip in mind. Remember Sir Malik Bettany? Dad talked about him once or twice. A part-Aboriginal part-Tamil descendant
of the very Felix in nearly-Sir-Jonathan’s journal. He turns out to be a very rich Tamil in Singapore. Owns import–export, hotels, and a bank! Knighted by Betty Windsor. Not related to us at all of course, unless Phoebe Bettany’s first suspicion is somehow correct and Felix is Jonathan Bettany’s kid. But as Bettany says, the dates are against it. In any case, this story is Sir Malik’s story too. So I might go up there and see if he’d like to divert a few million into a film.

So I’m not moaning, or maybe I am, but if I don’t moan to you, then to whom?

Dimp told her sister to be careful on her journeys and reiterated her plea that Prim return to Sydney. She could, she urged, share the rent of the Redfern house.

Then: ‘As for me, stop worrying. I am where I must be.’

S
ARAH
B
ERNARD AS HER OWN WOMAN

Sarah Bernard was, I felt, now established in Nugan Ganway as the staple of my life. She had not merely saved me from the noose but brought me Lethean forgetfulness. It was in her presence that I could survive the particular, horrifying idea that flesh of my flesh lay under the earth of newly consecrated Cooma, that mother and child lay in an unspeakable union of dust.

As she understood my sensibility, Bernard rarely uttered Long’s name. Her demeanour towards her former possible husband did not seem at times nearly as guilty as mine towards the memory of Phoebe. It appeared to me in a way to be based on a hard-headed view of the world. May God look after my friend, Long, and heal all wounds, because I can do nothing more. This meant that her friendship with Long was conditional, and her love for my welfare was absolute. How could I not rejoice in such an outcome?

I had never known such transports as those with which Bernard’s company rewarded me. Her skin to me tasted much more of salt than I think mine did to her, as if she had eaten enough bad Transport Board food to make of her an ocean. I had lost the blue opacity of Phoebe and inherited the deep green, salt turbulence of an honest thief. Her generosity of soul was so heedless, her unquestioning and unamazed discoveries of the limits of my body and spirit so wonderful that even
the concept that she, like Long and like my father, had once fallen foul of judges, was one of the enchantments of her presence. Someone had presumed to judge this most noble woman!

In a lover’s desire to know the beloved utterly, I did once idly, the savour of her skin on my lips, raise the question of her crime. She put the five fingers of her hand to my mouth. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I shall say I was falsely convicted, as does every thief in New South Wales, and you will disbelieve me.’

‘No,’ I insisted. ‘You know I cannot afford disbelief in you.’

But she could not be persuaded. Perhaps she feared that I might in some future and inevitable anger hold it over her. But I felt I could not know enough and would never know half. I might also have been possessed by the knowledge that in my father’s case, we all pretended he had never been condemned and never seen a chain, so that the undischarged friction between his having been a prisoner and his seemingly solid, oblivious life in Van Diemen’s Land went on chaffing and rankling unseen, bearing away in the end the peace of two families, ours and the Batchelors’.

But whatever my intentions, instantly thereafter I felt in her a strange reluctance towards my uncomprehending caresses. She pulled away from me and suggested we drink tea. The season was still full of occasional coldness, as this evening, and I thought of firing my black tea with rum, for which I had an increasing appetite, while she drank hers reflectively and penitentially, black and without sugar.

‘The thing I did not want to be trapped into saying was that I am not a thief,’ she told me then. ‘But you would ask and ask, and so I am forced to say it.’

‘I am certain you are not a thief,’ I told her with too much callow enthusiasm. ‘I would not so readily admit that you are not a nurse and an offerer of comfort, for these you are in abundance.’

‘No, you are for some reason enchanted,’ she told me, her dark and suspicious eyes on me. It was typical of this period, and of her problem, that she had found no name to call me except ‘you’. She could not call a suicidal fool cut down from the shearing shed rafters ‘sir’. She could not with a straight face call such a desperately joky figure ‘Mr Bettany’. And she could not – across the gulf we had suddenly traversed – call me ‘Jonathan’. ‘You’ it would need to be for some time yet.

‘The only convenient thing in New South Wales,’ she told me, ‘is to have committed the crime they accuse you of. Then you are fitted to the
place. But the innocent are the misfitted! Nothing they say is believed, and so they are reduced to silence.’

‘But, Bernard,’ I said, for I too was a hostage to names. She had been ‘Bernard’ when preparing Phoebe for the grave, ‘Bernard’ when she scythed me down, and remained still ‘Bernard’. When she became known more profoundly she might become ‘Sarah’. The Master and Servant Act would be borne away, the solemn ordinances of the Colonial Secretary’s Department would die of irrelevance, and the pure and Biblical name would assert itself. ‘But Bernard,’ I said, awed by her hints of uncomfortable innocence, ‘assert whatever you like with me. You will never have a more loving audience.’

‘Is it love?’ she asked. ‘A child may love whoever feeds it. But that does not make the feeder its mother.’

‘You know everything about me,’ I told her. ‘I know nothing about you except that your generous soul and splendid body are the source of my new life. Assert any tale you like and I will devour it like a meal, like manna in the desert!’

She shook her head. ‘Would you really believe that the daughter of a Manchester merchant could become so bored, so full of infant envy, that she could find the swearing of false oaths a recreation, relief from a dull life?’

‘I could believe it. The mysteries of human nature …’

She was impatient with my platitude and shook her wonderfully sombre head.

‘I was a married woman,’ she told me.

‘It says so on your papers. But I believe,’ – indeed I had heard it from Phoebe – ‘that your husband is dead.’

‘I had the task of a resident housekeeper for a silver merchant named Mr Duncannon. But though I had perforce to live there in Tib Street, my husband Corporal McWhirter, who was a Scot, was permitted to call at Mr Duncannon’s, to visit me.’

Corporal McWhirter, dead of fever in Jamaica, marched for a second through the room with his ghost of a claim on her.

‘We met mainly in the kitchen,’ continued Bernard. But was there a small room beneath the eaves to which this freckled corporal took his dark-eyed, impeccable wife? ‘Mr Duncannon’s fourteen-year-old daughter used to find means to come to the kitchen while McWhirter was there. He was a jovial and even loud sort of man, full of teasing. He could make a cup or a fork disappear up his sleeve, and all watching
him would swear these objects had utterly vanished. Young girls liked him. I had liked him. He was the opposite to me. “Long Face” he called me. “Even Long Face is laughing at this one,” he would say. I don’t know why I tell you all this.’

‘No, go on,’ I urged. I was desperate for this story.

She shook her head again. She wondered what was so compelling in what she recounted, and why I had urgency to hear it. ‘Now Mr and Mrs Duncannon belonged to a strict Chapel and their life did not abound in joy or forks which disappeared before your eyes. And it seemed that their daughter, Miss Duncannon, took particular delight in the liveliness of Corporal McWhirter. And he had plenty of stories, tales I had myself already been told but which were renewed for me by Miss Lucy Duncannon’s enjoyment. They concerned such things as what he had heard from other soldiers of the customs of the West Indies, where the dead were believed to rise and speak and steal the ability of movement from the living. They concerned the alligators and burial pyres of India, where McWhirter had served, and the houses and manners of the Dutch in the Cape Colony he had once visited as part of the guard on a ship. This was more colour than was ever admitted into the parlours of the Duncannons, who were decent but believed that all images in books and illustrated papers were a vanity and snare. But McWhirter had been everywhere, even to Nova Scotia.’