Bettany's Book (78 page)

Prim touched his wrist, despite the risk of Nuara observing this intimacy. She was unable to say anything adequate, since he had worked so energetically to get here. Siddiq was guilty of the grossest violation.

‘Remember,’ she said when she could speak, ‘you decided yesterday to wait until you were calm. You’ll have to do the same today. I’m coming
up to the depot for dinner. We’ll just pretend the others aren’t there.’

It was, of course, the wrong thing to say. ‘Pretend?’ he asked her, devoting some of his fury against Siddiq to her. ‘It’s easy for you and Austfam to write off an expensive survey. To say, bad luck, old fellow. Too much static. We’ll go somewhere else next time. Let me tell you, this place could become the worst of all. Have you seen the latrines? Have you heard of cholera? How will Nuara cope against an epidemic, with her popgun arsenal of nice little pharmaceuticals? And our data is worthless. The world knows nothing of Alingaz, and will continue in ignorance because of bloody Siddiq and his funny bloody questions!’ He nodded and stood by her little desk. His head sunk. ‘He has made me an arm of government.’

Prim said lamely, ‘It is a dreadful betrayal.’

‘But I shall not be angry,’ Sherif declared. ‘I shall not give him the satisfaction. Tomorrow morning, we’ll simply pull our personnel out. I’m sorry, Prim. I did not choose to waste Austfam’s resources. But I am sure you agree we can’t continue.’

‘It would be an obscenity to go on,’ she told him. ‘I’ll complain to the Ministry of Health. So will Austfam. This mixing of health surveys and intelligence should not have happened.’

Sherif looked weary and had closed his eyes. ‘Let him turn up tomorrow morning, with his bright face, ready to set out on further deceit. And I’ll tell him then. I am going, you are going, Erwit is going, and the two nurses. We are turning away in protest. I hope it will have some negative impact on his career, though I doubt it.’

He managed a grievous smile, which Prim returned.

‘It will be hard at dinner,’ he admitted. ‘But I will do my best to behave.’

The hour came. The women emerged from their hessian shelters, talked and dressed each other’s hair, and the children ran and chirruped as if occupiers of their own ground, their ancestral gardens. Prim switched off the laptop, packed away the questionnaires in a box kept in the clinic, and walked up the floor of the valley with Sherif to dinner in Hanif’s compound.

At the table shared with Erwit, Sherif and Siddiq, Prim guided the conversation to safe and fatuous subjects. She spoke of Sydney and of coming to the Sudan, and of finally being made Austfam administrator.

Siddiq said, ‘It seems strange to the Sudanese eye that they would leave a woman on her own in a difficult post.’

‘Well, they’re all difficult posts, aren’t they?’

‘What would you say the average person in your country knows about Africa?’ asked Siddiq, quite pleasantly, wanting to be informed.

‘Very little,’ said Prim. ‘Australia is a country on both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But the only ocean it has any consciousness of is the Pacific. If you asked most Australians whether they shared an ocean with Africa, they would say no.’

‘Amazing!’ said Siddiq.

‘I do not say they are not good people. They are very good people. They are paying for this enterprise, after all.’

She stopped there, fearful Sherif may be provoked in some way by her comment.

‘But,’ said Siddiq, laughing indulgently, ‘They do not make your black natives very happy, I believe. A state is like a great family, too crowded to work properly. And yet it is also like a great underground serpent. It burrows its way towards the light.’

Sherif swallowed the tinned fish and pasta which was the standard fare of Hanif’s establishment, and said nothing.

Siddiq fell back to talking about the English-style grammar school he and Sherif had attended in Almoradah, a fashionable part of Khartoum.

Sherif spoke only once. ‘It is no use talking about
that
Sudan, my friend. That Sudan is gone. So many urbane people have been driven out.’

‘But they will come back,’ said Siddiq. ‘They will come back once the foreign press stops maligning us, once we win in the South, and when the economy is on an even keel.’

Sherif laughed, perhaps a little too loudly. For all the years she had known him, Prim had never had to worry about this, that he might turn volatile at dinner parties. Yet there was something to laugh at in Dr Siddiq, who was fascinated rather than challenged by the contrast in his own life – of being trained as a little Englander, yet being a thorough, modern Sudanese, a Sudanese who could live under the regime of Omar Bashir and his
éminence grise
, el Turabi, head of the National Islamic Front. Siddiq was narrating some faintly derogatory school story about Sherif, when Sherif’s mouth took on a severely vulpine look, a prelude, Prim assumed, to unmanaged fury. An instant later, hawking sounds arose from his mouth, and suddenly she, Siddiq and Erwit realised that he was choking. Erwit took the most immediate and effective action,
dragging Sherif upright and applying a fair Eritrean imitation of the Heimlich manoeuvre. Sherif’s breath drew in with a long and agonised gasp, as some pernicious clod of food was released from his mouth into the night.

But you have been so humiliated in front of Siddiq! Prim thought, feeling for him. Choking, the most demeaning of human experiences. Painfully, Sherif got his breath back. He stumbled to Hanif, who, not one of the dinner party, had risen in alarm from the place beyond the table where he sat listening to his short-wave radio.

‘Where do you get red salmon, you bastard?’ asked Sherif. ‘Where do you get red salmon, you prick from Kassala?’

For it had been Hanif’s red salmon, sold at a reasonable price to Siddiq, which they had been eating with their pasta.

Siddiq moved in closely to prevent Sherif from violence. ‘He buys it with his wages, of course. Let him go!’

In fact, Sherif did let go of Hanif’s shirt. ‘Do you know what I suspect?’ he asked Siddiq. ‘I suspect that this fellow keeps two sets of books. He keeps a set of books in which the population of this camp is inaccurately represented! And then he keeps his real books in which it is accurately shown, the savings made are recorded, and similarly listed are the names of all those in nearby towns to whom he has sold ration cards.’ Sherif turned on Hanif again. ‘Where is your second set of books, you prick?’

Siddiq tried to restrain Sherif by the shoulders, and his efforts worked in a way, for Sherif now turned to him.

‘And you, you son of a bitch! I said no supplementary questions! But you are using us as camouflage under which to grill the locals. Or are they locals? After all, they’ve been dragged from the Nuba Hills! What are they doing here? What is a man who boasts about the grammar school he went to doing twisting things here? How do you put the two sides of your soul together, you bastard?’

He delivered an open-handed slap to Dr Siddiq’s cheek. The act seemed to create a silence which encompassed nature and the camp. But then Prim realised it did not exclude the noise of Hanif’s short-wave radio.

‘You,’ said Sherif to Siddiq, ‘have violated my trust. You have used me as a front. When I tell the people who really matter in Khartoum about you, do you know what you’ll be seen as? You’ll be seen, in the language of our grammar school, as a cad and a rotter! I’m withdrawing my team in the morning. You can face the people of Alingaz alone, asking your poisonous little questions.
Old bloody chap
.’

Siddiq sat down and considered Sherif.

‘You won’t have to withdraw your team,’ he said. ‘I’ve tolerated you to this point. But in view of this assault and your refusal to be co-operative, I’m withdrawing the support of the Ministry of Health. I have the power to do it. The power to cancel you. I haven’t disgraced your inquiry. You have made mine trivial. Are you Sudanese? And is this not a time of extraordinary peril to us? These people have been moved here by necessities of state. That means nothing to you beside getting your results published in some elegant British or American journal. To hell with you, Sherif. You always were a poseur. I withdraw
your
permission. You cannot withdraw mine. You can go tomorrow at any hour of your choosing.’

In a very small voice, Sherif, who had by now realised that his choking fury had deprived him of any advantage, said, ‘You are totally …
totally
… despicable!’

Siddiq laughed, stirred the remnants of his dinner, and murmured, ‘Who sounds like a grammar school house master now?’

A
MURDER OCCURS

Even in the midst of condolences, my brother Simon had not ceased writing to me inviting me to bring more stock across the alps for ultimate sale in Melbourne. But I clung to Bernard, convinced of her salutary nature both by what Aldread had told me and by the daily pabulum of her kindness and sensibility. I delayed in answering Simon’s assurance, supported by some newspaper reports he sent me, that the Melbourne market had re-entered a period of boom and bubble, using the coming shearing season as my pretext. But when the shearing was complete, I chose not to take the wool to Sydney myself, leaving that task to Long and sending a letter to Barley which said, ‘Give me at least 10 pence per pound and let it go at that!’ I could not, for one thing, easily face the excessively sympathetic Barley, who called me ‘dear fellow’.

Barley met my price, exceeded it by a ha’penny, and wrote to urge me to put hope in work and time, the two great reconcilers! He said he understood that my usual reluctance to taste the pleasures of Sydney had been fortified by events.

I trusted Long to bank my return on the wool and carry a bank draft back to Goulburn to buy more ewes. For whatever reason, he did all
that impeccably, remarkably so given his limited capacity to read. Exact copies of every document were brought back to me. I hoped it was not that he did not despise me too much to stoop to steal from me. I hoped in fact he had forgiven me.

When Long presented these records to me, I said on impulse that now he had returned it was time to drove over the alps the 4000 sheep Simon had been calling for. We would take them to Simon, and he and his men would take them on to Melbourne with a lesser number of his own flock, which he was still building up. So Long and I selected stockmen and assessed the low chance of mountain storms, all as if nothing at all had befallen our brotherhood. I was not chiefly concerned about mere friendship anyhow. I was concerned as to whether I could find my breath away from Bernard.

The expedition was gathered. Felix, who had not been permitted to take the wool to Sydney in case the men encouraged him in bad habits, wanted to come, and was one of my stockmen. His full-blooded cousin Hector, of whom much had been expected, was still living with the nuns in Goulburn, and was believed at eleven years of age to be content to stay on there as a familiar of Mother Ignatius and hewer of all the kindling she and her sisters required. In that, as in the mind, Felix was the more daring.

I barely slept the night before we left. I felt unbalanced, and doubted I would be much use aboard my dear old Hobbes. I murmured, ‘I would not drag you through that country, but if only you could come.’

‘No,’ Bernard told me. ‘It is time you found your bravery again without me, and it will return to you once you make your own tracks.’

All night, penned close in to the homestead, we could hear the flocks protesting, as if they were aware that a hard journey would be required of them. Next morning, departing, I felt dismal and ill. It was no normal start-off, and in the saddle my breath proved so impaired I doubted I would reach the hills to the south-west. I engaged in last looks back at the homestead, which would be under the general protection of O’Dallow, whose outburst in the woolshed had been, I believed, immaterial to his general sobriety and reliable temper. I saw that O’Dallow’s step-urchin Michael, the boy who had provided George with the opportunity for his last dear games on earth, ran barefoot and grandly free of all disease at the tail of the flock we were taking to Simon.

Her face bisected by light, Bernard had come onto the verandah late, not wanting to encourage that dependence which made me feel I might
at any second crumple and fall from Hobbes’s back. There was no sign from her, her mouth was closed. Near her, on a chair, sat Aldread, and from a great distance her lifted shoulders gave her a brittle look. There was a way that Long, departing, put a thumb to the rim of his hat, a signal of some extravagant gallantry in him. Oddly, sullenness would have been more welcome.

The further we went, the more confident I felt. This, our first day out, was most clement, and the natural exuberance of my surroundings, the valleys of boulders and forested ridges, eased me along.

We awoke in our blankets the next dawn to the annoyance of drizzle and low cloud. ‘It will burn off,’ Long promised me. Yet the sky remained low and vile all day, and the sheep moved amongst ghostly gums in vaporous air. We depended on our dogs to sniff out those who would lose themselves from the flanks and vanish from the flock. The afternoon turned freezing and snow was aching to fall on the steep hills over which we took the sheep. In that air we found an abandoned hut of patchy construction – Long surmised it might have been a place used sometimes by the absconders. I had a sense that he had all the time known where it was. We crowded in, more or less cosily, except for those who had the first shift with the flock. By a mutton-fat light Felix got out his trigonometry text and began studying, and I felt a sting of tears on my lashes. I had introduced him to Horace and geometry as if they were unmitigated goods, instead of traps for the young voyager. We stayed there that night, and as wind howled, we drew our possum-skin rugs close. I moved my blanket to a halfway point of the hut, so that I might be Felix’s rampart. As I settled, I was aware of Long, close to me.