Bettany's Book (87 page)

Next, Handler asked me for a summary of my relationship with Long. I praised his honesty, indeed his sense of honour, his competence and his loyalty. Then he asked me of my experience of Goldspink. I painted a less than complimentary picture of the man. But Cladder returned at the end of this process and asked me whether it was true that Goldspink had pointed out my run to me, my beloved station, and I had to admit he had.

Long nodded to me marginally as I left. If he still wanted my virtual silence, I had done nothing to thwart him. Yet he must have despised me in at least an abstract way for my evasions, for in saving Felix I was also saving myself. I left the stand a perjurer, but still hopeful that Long would be saved. I assured myself I would consider confessing to my perjury if by some obscene juridical shift he were found guilty.

I did not count on the number of witnesses Cladder had marshalled against Long. An interminable succession of Treloar’s Mount Bulwa stockmen came forward to testify that Long had frequently uttered threats against Goldspink’s life. They said he told them why, too. The absconder Rowan, before dying, had told Long in the Irish tongue that Goldspink was responsible for the death of Sister Catherine. As for Long’s capacity for inhuman rage, a border police sergeant was called
who testified that he had seen Long point-blank shoot the wounded absconder, Rowan, as he lay dying.

Mr Treloar was called after the noon recess. He had gone to the trouble of having his servants exhume Goldspink’s body for transportation in a coffin to Cooma Creek, where Dr Alladair had inspected the skull. Cladder therefore called Dr Alladair, and asked him whether he thought the grievous damage inflicted on Goldspink could have been the work of a boy of no more than fourteen years. Alladair said that it was unlikely that Goldspink could have been overpowered by such a child. One blow could have been surreptitiously delivered, but Alladair believed it would not have brought instant unconsciousness and that against a boy, Goldspink would have made a successful riposte.

At the end of the day, I met Mr Handler and asked him what his assessment was. He thought the Crown case was even stronger than he had expected, but that it was largely an argument of circumstance and that he might be able to circumvent it.

‘By the way,’ he asked me, ‘have you seen Mr Barley?’

My heart clenched. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Mr Barley of Sydney?’

‘Cladder has brought him in by subpoena. He is at the Royal.’

I walked back to the hotel with Handler, my legs quaking and threatening to give way. What could I do, plead with him to back up my perjury? I had always imagined Barley’s visit as a scene of collegial joy, of his exclamations about the splendour of the country, not the squalor of its occupant.

Entering the Royal, I found Barley sitting in the lounge. ‘My dear old friend,’ he said. ‘Who is this scoundrel Cladder? But at least it gave me a pretext, eh? What is happening? Is my good fellow Long standing trial?’

It was a splendid act. I ate dinner with him, and the act continued. Or was it innocence? I could barely remember precisely what I had asked and told him that night in Sydney.

We slept, and I rose ready for judgement to descend on me. At ten o’clock, Cladder swore Barley in, and I sat and flinched.

‘Did Mr Bettany tell you why he travelled to Sydney almost immediately after returning to Nugan Ganway from the far side of the alps?’

‘He was distressed, looking for a runaway half-caste boy for whose education he paid as a Christian,’ said Barley, so brightly, so confident of being believed. ‘But since he was in Sydney he took the opportunity to visit me and discuss my new wool stores at Darling Harbour, and other matters.’

Cladder asked him what the other matters may have been.

‘Well, he seemed to think his ward might have hidden on one of ships in harbour. He asked me to write to a captain I knew, Parfitt, captain of
Goulburn
, asking him had he seen this lad.’

Was this a possible interpretation of my request for a letter to Captain Parfitt? It probably was, if one had an innocent belief in one’s friend, as Barley seemed to have.

I sat in a dream as Cladder asked his questions, but when he finished and Handler rose I realised that the greater peril would arise from him.

He asked whether Barley had received the impression that I wanted to be introduced to Parfitt to remove a potentially guilty ward from the scene.

‘Of course not,’ said Barley. ‘You have a very poor estimation of sort of man my friend Bettany is.’

And Barley was thanked, and left the stand, and I was left to wonder at how thoroughly lies could be reinforced out of the mouth of innocence.

That evening I promised Barley that he would make his first tour of Nugan Ganway the following day. When Handler was out of the room, he said, ‘I know that you reside with a convict woman. I raise the matter merely in case of your discomfort.’

‘That is not the least. My world has gone to hell, dear Barley. My mad father resides with me as well.’

We laughed together.

‘My eye,’ he said, ‘my eye will be for landscape.’

I thought that God should ensure that every scoundrel and liar had a friend like Barley.

Barley admired Nugan Ganway, took my arrangement with Bernard as a given, and admired that splendid woman too. My father’s confident assertion during the evening that Long was, besides himself, Nugan Ganway’s only Stoic, brought frowns of bewilderment to Barley’s brow.

Bernard set him up a comfortable bed on the ottoman, and when I came out early the following morning, he sat by the fire he had revived himself, with a blanket over his shoulders.

‘Did you sleep well?’ I asked him.

‘I was conscious of being far from home,’ he said. ‘And even in another age – with this talk of noble suicide by Long. What will happen to your father’s ideas if poor old Long is acquitted?’

I wanted to plead with him to bear with my chaotic household. But I realised that the day before he had told the Crown Prosecutor the truth as he knew it. He had simply begun from the innocent premise that in any dealings with him, I operated in terms of honour. His belief in me had coloured his testimony. Perhaps after a day at Nugan Ganway, he had begun to ask whether it should have.

So, as Long’s trial entered a third day, Barley and I rode from out-station to out-station, looked at flocks and boulders, climbed ridges to enable him to exclaim on the splendour of the country. But sometimes he would look at his watch. He meant to be well on his way back to Cooma Creek and Sydney. He did not choose to be baffled into insomnia again by my father, nor to have his faith in what he had thought of me, and in what he had said in court, undermined by another night under my roof.

While Barley and I rode, O’Dallow had kept post at the court, and as Barley went north by carriage, O’Dallow passed him, coming home on horseback to Maggie Tume. O’Dallow reported, ‘I don’t believe they can in any way find the poor fellow guilty, even with Treloar roaring and cheering in the Cladder’s ears.’

But I knew that O’Dallow’s one trial, years ago in some Irish County Assizes, had not necessarily equipped him to be an expert on justice in New South Wales.

The next day, not wanting to betray grief or relief I sent Presscart to town to wait out the verdict. He came back after dark. It had taken till mid-afternoon, but the jury had found Sean Long guilty, and Justice Flense condemned him to hang subject to an appeal to His Excellency the Governor of New South Wales.

P
RIM HAD THE FAX NUMBERS OF
H
ELENE
and various other journalists and stringers of the Western press around Khartoum. Overnight she contacted them, notifying them of a demonstration she intended to make, telling them to assemble as if informally at ten o’clock that morning one block north of the Hotel Rimini. The fax suited her in Helene’s case, because she did not want to have to argue her intentions on the telephone.

In her mood of fiercely adhered-to purpose, she was equipped still to read and hear almost recreationally of Dimp’s ruin or redemption in
Sydney. Dimp had recently given her a rare call. ‘So you
are
back from that Hessian place,’ she’d said. She had told Prim that in a few days Bren would return to Sydney from the United States. She had checked with his office. She was in a state of ‘a little tension’, knowing that Bren would walk into a house from which the hoarded art had been stripped. While he stood there shocked, she would have to call him and tell him flatly what she had done, and why.

Prim had wished her a slightly derisive good luck, and Dimp asked if anything was wrong. But Prim had not been able to bring herself to share the news of Sherif’s disappearance. She had been able to share it with Amnesty. Why not her own sister?

In a fax sent the next day, Dimp had confessed herself consoled that Hugo Ventriss was at work on the screenplay – or if he wasn’t, he bloody well should have been, after the advance he’d received. And then she passed on what she considered more solemn news. Drinking a glass of wine and in a fraught state, she had answered a knock on the door and, answering it, found Frank Benedetto. Dimp announced this as if it would greatly surprise Prim, which it did not.

It was the person I most wanted to see, all the more disarming for being in a suit slightly too small for him. I was delighted to see him looking as I’ve never seen him before. Harried. He had been sweating over something, and I got the musk of that, which I liked pretty much. I wanted him to come in and fill my little hutch with it. Always been one for the sweaty fellas! No, I shouldn’t say that. It’s flippancy, brought on by nervousness. I’m more scared of your judgements than of anyone else’s on earth.

No, Prim had mentally promised her sister. No judgements today.

Benedetto had told Dimp he had taken delivery from Tim Huxpeth of an Arthur Boyd painting which he suspected used to be Dimp’s. She was flattered he had used that form of words – ‘used to be yours’. He’d tried to reach her at home, and one day the maid was in and said she was gone. Then he’d thought of Max, Hugo Ventriss’s agent. She’d told Benedetto earlier that she wanted to use Ventriss as a writer, and Benedetto knew Max was Ventriss’s agent. She’d told Max she’d rented the cottage as an office.

In the doorway of the cottage, Dimp and Benedetto discussed the painting. It was one of those Dimp had sold. She congratulated him on
acquiring a lovely work. God, said Benedetto, I’ve behaved so crassly. He asked could he come in and have some of Dimp’s wine.

So, dazed with the glory and shame of what he’d just purchased from Huxpeth, he came into her little living room, and Dimp sat him down at the side of her desk, because he seemed in a mood to be told where to sit. He asked her what was happening – had something gone wrong?

Dimp told him, ‘I’ve left Bren. That’s the sum of it. For good.’

‘And Bren gave you the paintings?’ Benedetto asked.

‘The paintings were actually mine from the start. You don’t have to worry about any
caveat emptor
stuff. Your title’s secure.’

But he looked pretty agonised still, and on more than legal grounds. He said, ‘It doesn’t feel like a triumph, having the Boyd. It feels like theft. It feels like the meanest thing I’ve ever done. I felt I had to come around here straight away and apologise.’

Dimp told him that that was irrational. But she saw that buying the painting had certainly made him look less certain than he was the night he had helped – with clarity of argument – to put an end to her marriage. She told him to enjoy the painting in peace, and mentioned the crucial dinner.

With a flushed face he told her he hadn’t been the same person since that night. ‘It’s hard to ask this question without seeming a vainglorious bastard. But here we go. I’d had a fair bit to drink that night, and I just wondered if I had … if something I said … somehow caused trouble between you and Bren?’ Even as he asked it, he shrugged and shook his head and laughed at himself. When he’d awoken the next morning he’d had this feeling that he’d trespassed in some sizeable way. He had the impulse to call Dimp and ask her. But he didn’t. A man would need to be either very drunk or very desperate to ask such a question, he said.

And then Tim Huxpeth had told him a lovely Boyd was available, and he’d gone and seen it and suspected it was the D’Arcys’, but didn’t specifically ask. He’d thought, they’re splitting up, and you, Benedetto, you smart alec, you bloody did it! He said his offer to take the painting off Huxpeth, was a sort of defensive, panicky gesture. He’d believed it would put him back on the rails, give him a centre. Well … it hadn’t. He’d really felt like scum then. What a futile, vain, stupid purchase. And the question went hammering on all the harder … that’s why he’d had the temerity to come and see her.

‘What happened that night, Dimp?’ he wanted to know.

She told him about the accidental impact of his speech that night, the
oblique power of his exposition of the Mabo case. She began unevenly but was sure she covered all the points of law, at least well enough for someone like her, someone inexpert but willing. As she spoke, he occasionally shook his head and began to lift a hand, as if he might want her to stop speaking. But he never completed the gesture.