Bettany's Book (82 page)

‘I could take you aboard
Goulburn
in the morning.’

‘Better for your sake not to, Mr Barley. But an enthusiastic letter of reference and a request that I be offered any reasonable service would do as well.’

He said certainly, and wrote me an excellent introduction to a Captain Robert Parfitt. By then Barley’s womenfolk had gone to bed and so I said goodbye to my friend and drove back to town. I sent a message to Felix Bettany, Seaman Apprentice, care of the Seaman’s Mission, George Street, telling him to meet me at the Dockyard steps at six o’clock the next morning. I thought that surely the messenger boys of the Australia Hotel would not be sought out and questioned by a vengeful Treloar.

That night was consumed with longing and sadness. I had lost my son by blood and was about to lose my son by wardship. The pillow beneath
my head seemed full of the threat of subsidence, of fragility, and not having slept at all in my room at the elegant Australia Hotel, I rose at four and read a
Sydney Herald
in the cold smoking room to pass the hour to dawn. I was at the Dockyard in my phaeton before five, went to the hut where the boatmen congregated, and reserved as mine an old man with one glaucous eye and a second which did not seem much better. At half-past five I saw Felix walking beneath quenched lamp posts from the direction of George Street. At the meeting place outside Cooma, I had given him money to buy some sea kit, and I was pleased to see he carried a canvas bag, wore boots and the sort of droopy hat favoured by fishermen.

I intercepted him when he was close, put my finger to my lips, and fetched my boatman, whom I hoped had enough eyesight to take us to the
Goulburn
, but not much more. We were away at once, as the sun came up in the mouth of the harbour. The
Goulburn
was moored off Milson’s Point, and looked a well-made four-master of, I guessed, some 700 tons, larger than the old
Fortitude
on which Mother, Simon and myself came to join Father in Van Diemen’s Land. Felix and I were soon ascending the ship’s stairs. Captain Parfitt, a little mahogany-complexioned man in a straight-fronted naval coat which reached nearly to his knees, was on his quarter-deck, and watched Felix and myself climb aboard. A sailor in the well-deck greeted us and I begged to be allowed to present Captain Parfitt with Barley’s letter. The seaman indicated a companionway.

‘Wait here,’ I told Felix, and climbed towards the captain, who watched me through bright, narrowed eyes.

I told the captain that I carried a letter from Mr Barley. Parfitt’s entire demeanour altered and he now dropped at once the air of treating Felix and myself as intruders. He accepted the letter, and when he had read it, took off his cap and smoothed his streaked hair, still cocked from having recently risen.

‘Mr Bettany, sir,’ he said in a Lowland Scots accent not unlike that of Dr Alladair of Cooma, ‘how may I serve you?’

‘I have a very promising native boy, Felix, in my care. He wishes to go to Singapore, and perhaps later return. He is both a splendid scholar and a skilled horseman, and he wishes to add a maritime education to his admirable battery of skills. I would be grateful if you took him on as an apprentice steward or clerk.’

‘Mr Bettany,’ said the captain, ‘you must understand I am due to sail
on this evening’s tide and happen to have already signed a manservant-cum-steward all the way through to London. Which doesn’t mean of course that he is more reliable than your – is it Felix? – than Felix there. Could not your boy travel as a steerage passenger, and I and the mates will happily teach him the names of shrouds, the setting of sails, the use of the sextant and other mysteries, as well as setting him educative tasks?’

It was very cunning of the captain, I thought, to get me to pay for a passage and at the same time acquire a servant for no cost. I wished that Felix should be well-used and not left to idleness, chiefly because the boy, haunted and lonely as he might be, would need the bodily and intellectual distraction of a maritime life. I doubted the occasional attention the captain and his officers extended to a passenger, however charming they might find him, would fill his day with benign activity.

A middle-aged woman of average height and wearing a black dress appeared, drawing breath, at the railing amidships. She stared out across the harbour water at the town, or as Sydney-siders liked to say, city, where already the crisp sound of a good axeman at work could be heard, and the sizzle of cross-saws rose from the maws of saw-pits. I saw her notice Felix, and come up to him and begin speaking. She had the smile which, it seemed to me, everyone brought to meetings with this boy. I was cheered that Parfitt too would see that a warm conversation had begun between Felix and the woman I presumed to be his wife.

‘I would not want him to travel steerage, sir,’ I said in a lowered voice, like a man who wanted to reach an understanding with another worldly fellow. ‘Given that to travel steerage is to experience everything a sailor does, but to learn nothing. It is apposite to my needs that he take up the life of a mariner or find business ashore somewhere. It is
very
apposite.’

So of course I saw in his eyes that he took it that the boy was my son by a native woman, and that my motive for finding him a career on the broad sea was that he might not embarrass my white children.

I said, ‘I would be willing to pay his wages as far as Singapore, where he says he wishes to land.’

The middle-aged woman in the black dress was now leading Felix up the companionway to join us. Parfitt turned his head and watched her. But clearly, she did not need the permission others did to invade this deck sacred to males.

In a very jolly Scots accent she sang, ‘Captain Parfitt, have you met this splendid boy? Of a very fetching hue, but he talks like a Lord Chancellor, and when I asked him what he was doing here, why he says,
“Madam, I wish to learn a little of the sea”! Do tell me, is he going to sea with us?’

I knew that this woman was a kindly visitation and Parfitt glanced at me in a way which said, ‘Our secret, old man! Women would not understand.’ In the circumstances I was happy to remain under the suspicion of being Felix’s begetter.

‘Very well, Mr Bettany,’ murmured the little captain, ‘I will put him to task as an apprentice mariner if you will meet his upkeep. My wife takes delight in teaching reading to many young members of the crew.’

‘She will not be put to the trouble, captain. This boy is a prodigy. He reads not only English, but Latin and Greek as well.’ He half-smiled, disbelieving, and looked away into the top masts. ‘Then, maybe, Sir, he can read to the good wife.’ He called to his wife, who was already pointing out to Felix a vegetable garden on Blue’s Point. ‘He is joining us, my dear, as apprentice mariner.’

The woman beamed so maternally that I thought Felix stood the risk of being coddled.

‘What shall I call him for now on the ship’s books?’ the captain asked me in a lowered voice. ‘ “Felix, an Australian Native?”’

It would be convenient for him to be so listed. Then authorities in Sydney could never be sure, if they inquired, who Felix the Native was.

Yet I could not see him so plainly entitled. ‘I would like him called Felix Bettany, Captain.’

‘You are fond of the lad,’ observed Parfitt.

I was invited below, and the captain gave me tea in his little dining room, quite separate from the officers’ mess. Prints were bolted to the walls, and tartan curtains framed the ports. After he had extracted £25 from me for Felix’s tuition and upkeep, we discussed where Felix might bunk, and the captain said it should be in a little cuddy forward, with the ship’s carpenter, a reliable man and a strong Presbyterian. Now we were joined by Mrs Parfitt and Felix. Mrs Parfitt, having conducted Felix throughout the ship, drank her tea thirstily. ‘Oh, Felix is no deckhand,’ she told us. ‘He will read to us in the evenings!’ He would also be the target of blows and resentment from other members of the crew, if she were not careful.

‘Perhaps,’ the captain agreed. ‘But he must be put to toils as well. Mr Bettany wishes it so.’

I had a sense now of my time aboard aching to a close, and found it painful to behold in Felix’s eyes both the fear I had encountered there
ten years past, but along with it the intelligent willingness to attempt anything which did not seem fatal to other humans. I asked might I say goodbye to the boy on deck? I shook his hand in a corner under the quarter-deck.

‘You have the money I gave you?’ I asked him.

He said he did.

‘The captain will keep it safe for you. He has a locked box for these purposes.’

He nodded politely, for he had heard me say all this two or three times before, at the pier, in the boat on the way.

Then he began spontaneously to weep. ‘Is Goldspink my father?’ he asked. ‘Do I have that curse on me?’

His eyes had no childhood left in them, and it was apparent he feared himself a patricide.

With other deceits behind me, I was now accomplished at lies. ‘Goldspink was not your father. Your father was Rowan, the absconder, who was shot some years back.’ Better he should think his father had once tried to drown him than that he had broken his father’s skull. ‘In the most real sense of the term, I am your father. But now, I liberate you.’ I put my hand on his head, as the Romans did, freeing a slave. Manu-mission. But it struck me he could never come back to this haunted land, or at least, not back to Nugan Ganway. I said, ‘Here on this ship, and in Singapore, you will be free of evil dreams, Felix. You will be God’s favoured child.’

He began clearing away his tears. I looked at his arms, made muscular on stock rides at Nugan Ganway.

Mrs Parfitt now emerged from the cabin, and came towards us, putting a hand on Felix’s shoulder. ‘The tears of setting sail,’ she said. ‘In my day I’ve wept a lake of them myself, laddie.’ In that reliably banal way, she smoothed out the strange angles of our farewell and turned it into a normal departure. Soon I was back in my boat waving a farewell to Felix who stood at the midships rail. I was weeping myself, knowing I would never see a boy like this one again.

Yet I too had been somewhat freed by my endeavours in Felix’s regard. I was able to feel an unclouded joy, rather than a plaintive hunger, in returning to Bernard.

W
HILE
P
RIM WAS IN
H
ESSIANTOWN
, D
IMP
went to Singapore seeking funds.

What she called ‘a report from the front’ joined an earlier of her faxes in Prim’s in-tray in the closed office in Khartoum.

I stayed at Raffles, more or less to honour Great-uncle Ernest who’d gone to dances there when he was an Australian army officer, before Singapore fell. Do you remember how Dad had a box of his postcards from Singapore.

Raffles was the showpiece in those days. Now it’s full of Aussies in shirts and sandals, all screaming for a beer, and it’s surrounded by glass towers in which a person is told to stay if she wants less quaint and more predictable service.

Remember that time we went through here as kids on the way to England, and we stayed in the flashest hotel – the Marco Polo was it? I forget.

Anyway I’d already called Sir Malik Bettany from Sydney, talked to his secretary, claimed our common ancestor, at least in the spiritual or patronage sense, and he called back and said he would be delighted to have a meeting with me. He had only a very faint Malay accent. I was conscious that I sounded a lot more like the average rough Aussie than he did a Tamil. He seemed so curious too, so anxious to see an Australian Bettany, that I thought he would be very sympathetic to the cause. I confessed on the phone I had a proposition for him. He would certainly be interested, I was sure, in his esteemed ancestor’s history. He nominated his office, May 1, 4pm.

The great tower where Bettany’s Bank and financial services is located is near the junction of Orchard and Tanglin Streets, which is apparently a pretty serious commercial address in Singapore. The building sits on columns, which the Singapore guidebook says is meant to imitate the stilts of a Malay village. The guidebook also says Tamils are modest people who aren’t much involved in big wealth. But Sir Malik is the exception. The reception area has great blocks of marble, and makes pretty extensive reference to Singapore’s races. There’re Tang dynasty horses in an illuminated case, a golden Buddha ditto, teak panelling from the mainland, and behind the reception desk, a mural incorporating Sikhs, Muslims, British, Malays, Chinese, all doing industrious stuff.

I began to think that somehow I might have made a mistake coming. It looked so formal, it took itself so seriously, it lacked levity and it certainly lacked ambiguity. When I was taken into the man’s office, my panic got worse! Sir Malik is a slight, ageless-looking man, with a sculptured, bony head and handsome feminine wrists and hands. He has a cherubic smile and looks like a fellow who thinks positive thoughts. A descendent of one Moth person and many Malays! I believed I could just about smell the spices on his delicate hands. Apparently his father, Felix’s grandson, was shot dead in a frightful massacre of community leaders by the Japanese. This man would have been merely a child at the time. After the war Sir Malik’s mother ran the business until the man I saw before me graduated from Oxford.