Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘From that point there was a curse on my journey,’ Dimp would confess to Prim in her letter.

  Honest! I didn’t do much good with Film Victoria, and I was delayed long enough to have to stay overnight, and in my hotel room sat upright from a dream and began bawling like an orphan. Until I heard Robyn’s story I’d thought of the annulment as a touching amount of trouble for Bren to go to. But now I began to ask: If Bren’s marriage to Robyn was lacking in this due discretion stuff, what of his marriage to me? Were my vows any better than hers? And as for Bren, if he couldn’t make a valid contract at twenty-seven, why could he make one at thirty-three? If Robyn was invalid, why wasn’t I invalid too? And how do I know I’m not?

  So I’ve been miserable as hell. You remember the time you found a famine out of the blue. I feel like I’ve found a blight out of the blue. The annulment once was a fringe charm of our whole approach to marriage. Now it seems like a mess of legalism at its centre. Give me a good talking to, eh?

  Prim had a suspicion that her sister’s enthusiasm for Bettany’s memoir, for Bettany’s continual self-examination and seriousness, had somehow set her up to make too much of the first wife’s story of annulment. And the idea that Dimp might, with a Bettany-like solemnity, look for some single disabling element in her life and so would make too much of the annulment, caused in Prim a mixture of severity and panic. In Prim’s map of the universe it was Dimp’s job to make sensible, whimsical progress, singing as she went. Prim was tempted to send an urgent chastising fax, but then thought Bren might see it.

  ‘You’re turning me into a conspirator,’ Prim complained by letter, taking up the disciplinary tone she didn’t seem capable of avoiding.

  And as you always tell me, you don’t have to invite me to be censorious, so here’s some censoriousness for you! Listen, you’re a woman of too many damned omens. You meet Brendan’s ex-wife at the airport, and so you don’t do well at Film Victoria! As if the one were contained in the other. And … if you and Robyn D’Arcy don’t even believe in the annulment process, how could either of you be invalidated by it? Does Robyn still want to be married to Bren? No. And if she did at the time, she shouldn’t have gone through with the process out of perversity or pride or whatever it was.

  I’m going to get tough with you, and ask this: Are you sure you weren’t daydreaming about being unmarried before you met Robyn? You depict your doubt as if it were a pain that came in the middle of the night. But I don’t believe it. If it’s a pain, it might have been one you were waiting to recognise, half-hoping it would strike. For the rest, you’re his wife, true and solid. I don’t think you ought to go looking in former wives for signs that you’re not! You’re not the most obvious wife for him, but that’s what excited him and you.

  Why don’t you adopt that child you’ve been talking about? Why not do that as quickly as it can be arranged? There are plenty of them around here, desperate Southern Sudanese kids. All handsome to behold. Of course it’s not as easy as just taking one. You have a disadvantage with the Sudanese government of being outside Islam. And one of the chief marks of not being of Islamic background is amply demonstrated by your letter: you dramatise your life in an unwarranted way. Free of all risk of war and hunger and epidemic, you make risks up. That’s what you’ve done with Robyn’s rigmarole about annulment.

  This is a harsh letter, but I’m busy. I thought there were refugees when I first came here! But it was nothing compared to the present! There is for example a nearly instant refugee centre in the Red Sea Hills for Nubas and others. The new camp is hundreds of miles away from the Nubas’ homeland. The government drives people there, to leave a free zone for army operations on the edge of the South. And we’re putting the midwives and the water into this instant town of twenty, thirty thousand. Each of whom has real, not notional problems! See! So just live on with what you have. I try to.

  She signed the letter in fear. If robust Dimp couldn’t find her way past a great doubt, how could Prim?

  PRIM FELT MORE COMFORTABLE WITH THE letters of the convict Sarah Bernard than with the journal of Jonathan Bettany. Not only did she consider they resonated with an anguish not unlike the anguish of a slave, but Dimp did not seem to take from them any undue cues for her own life. Bettany’s journal was full of such moral honesty that it seemed to be laying down a basis of explanation for some later, exorbitant crime. There was a sense of a drift towards an abyss, and it made Prim anxious. Sarah Bernard, however, could be looked at without flinching, as a sister already in the abyss, and falling.

  Letter No 4, SARAH BERNARD

  Marked by her: A LETTER FOR NOT SENDING

  My Alice

  This sort of thing happens: a woman comes up thin but broad-shouldered and gives me a sharp little jab at the bottom of the stomach. As I gag I think how brave she is to take that risk – I could report her to the Pallmires and get her put in a cell. And she goes further and says: Don’t esteem yeself, duck. I cannot acquire breath fast enough to tell her she need not worry – that I have no grounds for esteem.

  But why should they not be angry – these girls so often hungry? Since Mr Matron cum Steward dishes them out the bony segments of beef and bone that cannot be eaten. For the richer cuts they know one should visit the butcher shops of sundry friends of Mr Pallmire. And they think me party to that scheme. They think me sated. Whereas my heart shrinks and my mouth seems full only of acid.

  I think certain plans of vengeance and I harbour the idea that the distractions of the new Irish women from Eurydice had saved me from all humiliations. Now I tell you that is not the truth. I am armoured against great humiliations but not against unexpected and lesser ones.

  Thus Mrs Matron appears again in the Tory and a silence falls. Handling the keys at her belt she says to me: Sarah my girl. Get the Sunday petticoat out of your clothing bag. Since it is afternoon I murmur I will not go again.

  But Mrs Pallmire is not enraged. She touches my wrist. I can understand you are a tender one. She says it like a sister. I know you are a woman of qualities and thus I have made you my day servant. You must trust me and get the Sunday petticoat.

  I do this now – the clothing bag is under my cot. She tells me: Also get the shoes with buckles. Out in the garden Mr Pallmire stands in a serge jacket. I see why some would like him from that smile on his meaty face. They would think him an honest beast. There is a woman from another Tory there in her Sunday petticoat. A slighter woman than myself and brown haired under her cap. She is young but attired precisely as me.

  Mr Matron tells me: This is Elizabeth. Elizabeth you are looking at Sarah Bernard. Now we are going to have a fine time in the George Inn.

  And so we all get in a cart and set off out of the gate and through the streets within sight of the house of the Governor on its slope. And we go into the door of the George Inn where a large and red faced woman is on the doorstep bawling: Bring my Johnny! Bring my Johnny! And so into the better taproom as frequented – says Mr Pallmire in his jolly way – by the quality and no ticket of leave.

  At the top of the George is a room for dining but Mr and Mrs Pallmire are here for drinking and for display – to have us petticoated two there to show their power. To show official men and women with what ease of control the Pallmires govern the Factory. I come to believe we are here for little better purpose than that Mr Pallmire might be jibed and joshed and ribbed to his soul’s content by other men when he goes outside to relieve himself. So we are joined by two butchers and a cooper and they drink merrily and wink.

  Oh she is not a good talker – so says Pallmire of me when I will not converse well with the cooper. He says: A pretty countenance but a sour spirit. And I am standing there as the cooper questions whether this could be so when I see entering the front door of the George the Visiting Surgeon of the Factory Doctor Strope. He leads his wife who wears a bonnet. As he passes the door to the taproom his eyes light directly on mine and I believe at once he sees all and chooses to ignore all. I see that in knowing of
the hoarding of the Pallmires I know nothing which Doctor Strope does not know and does not join with the broad world in not wishing to know. And so he passes on to dinner with his lady.

  If I am to punish the Pallmires I must go higher – to people who really do not know the character of the Pallmires and so might be surprised and shocked.

  Who these heavenly creatures might however be is unknown as yet to your abased friend

  Sarah

  IN POSSESSION

  On my return to Nugan Ganway, at my first inspection of Shegog’s shepherd’s hut, I found a woman of the Moth people in residence, wearing a skirt of flour sacking and making with some skill a damper on a bed of coals in the open air. The Moth people were still in the region and had rented Shegog one of their women for tobacco and tea. Some such association must have produced the genius Felix.

  As we rode up the native woman stood up watchfully, bending only occasionally to flip one-handedly the damper on the glowing coals. The eyes of this handsome anthracite woman were utterly vacant of scheming. For her sake I did not choose to yell commands into the smelly shambles of Shegog’s hut, but called out his name and invited him to appear.

  I brought to the encounter with Shegog, who now presented himself, scratching, a body of settler wisdom which said that though there must be inevitable congress between shepherds and natives, to allow one’s drovers to keep a native woman indoors was likely to create small wars both amongst the felons, and between us and the natives. The Moth people, out of resentment or what they saw as a familial relationship with Shegog, might also feel themselves entitled to kill cattle or sheep. Nor did I want to find, littering the pastures of Nugan Ganway, the poisoned bodies of native women of whom shepherds had tired.

  I took Shegog aside, intending to talk straight. The woman was continuing with her damper-making.

  ‘Is that woman your bushwife, Shegog, or is she a common convenience to you and the others?’

  ‘I am repelled by such an idea as “common convenience”,’ he told me. I think you might call her my bushwife if you wished to use an overarching term. She is a splendid and unspoilt woman if – like all her sisters – a little rank. She is my Diana of the Australian wood.’

  ‘Under any system of mythology,’ I told him, ‘she represents great trouble for us. You are to send her away.’

  He considered me and a tear broke out in one of his ill-assorted eyes.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘this is not a lightly assumed affection.’

  ‘I’m sure you are a good man, Shegog. But you must send her away. Come with me and do it.’

  Shegog looked dolefully down his nose and said, ‘Go, my darling. Go!’

  It seemed to be settled. But a week later, I found yet another native woman in residence, asleep in the hut. Again a confrontation – I had Long forcibly drag Shegog out into the open by the shoulder, bony and thin as it was, and sit him on a log by the door. Was this his station or mine? I asked him. He was kind enough to concede that he believed it was mine. I felt that I must show my own authority now, not depend on Long. On the trodden earth outside his door, I flattened him with a blow which stung my hand. As the woman woke and began wailing, I was privately disturbed to see that my attack had pushed Shegog’s teeth into his lip and caused his mouth to bleed. He stood testing the injury philosophically, like a man who had suffered a thousand such blows and was only interested in placing it in its order in a table of remembered assaults.

  ‘If she is here when I next come,’ I told him, ‘I shall send you back to the magistrate with an evil report.’

  ‘It is not the same woman, you know. She simply looks the same to you, Mr Bettany. The natives plague us to take their women.’

  ‘And they want rations?’

  ‘Some of our flour ration,’ he conceded. ‘It is our ration, and we reason that if we feed them they hold off spearing the sheep.’

  I said, ‘My Heaven, he should be a defending lawyer.’

  The woman crept out of the door with a kangaroo cloak about her shoulders and a length of burlap about her thighs. She stood by a tree looking anxious, and emitting a low continuous wail which I knew would increase in volume if we punished Shegog as he deserved. As in Van Diemen’s Land, the natives seemed a soft-hearted race.

  I turned to Long. ‘How does Shegog meet so many natives? We have hardly seen any.’

  But the hutkeeper had not yet finished educating us. ‘Let me tell you, Mr Bettany, they were back the day after I sent the other lubra off. You see, it’s apparent they do not think we can be of any harm to their women. They think of us as phantoms, they think us chimeras. They have strict rules of congress amongst themselves, for they see themselves to be the sole true humans. But their estimation of us is that we don’t count. Thus fornication – if you’ll pardon the blunt abstract noun, Mr Bettany – fornication with a white man is not a violation to them, no more than a thought. Not even a thought. It is a dream. And for having the dream, she receives, Mr Bettany, some tea and flour.’

  He shrugged and I looked at this too real and too alarmed native woman and wondered if all the phantoms of Shegog’s hut had shared her.

  ‘Oh you are a deep scoundrel,’ said Long. ‘You will keep your tea and flour and stop them spearing sheep both.’

  ‘I would love to accommodate that hopeful proposition, Mr Irishman,’ Shegog advised him. ‘But it might take cannons.’

  Adopting peaceable gestures, I approached the woman. She was still and looked at me levelly.

  ‘Come,’ I told her. ‘Come with me.’ I led her by the wrist, as she made a slight, querulous Oooh sound in a silken voice and I beheld with a shock that she was beautiful. I felt the coarse delicacy of her lower arm. I was amazed and not a little confused to hear this woman’s utterance as all the more familiar for being so strange. I could not forgive, but I suddenly understood, Shegog’s interest in her.

  I put her in the care of Long. She was quite content, it seemed, to stand while he took the rope he carried at his pommel and tied it firmly but not too severely around her waist. He attached the free end to his saddle. We would lead her home. We walked through the bright day, willing to lead our horses and be reflective. Attached to us by one strand of thin rope, the woman appeared not so much a captive but a companion, making no complaint but powerfully suffusing our thoughts. The woman-less nature of our lives had been made achingly clear. We had until that second thought it admirable. Now there was a chance we thought it regrettable. Yet though in the wilderness now christened Nugan Ganway I had known the stings of the flesh without which there is no virtue, I had no intention of taking a bushwife. What honour was there in it? Seduction with flour and tea leaves? Seduction by trade, of a woman who thought you no more than a provider of tobacco?

  But I knew too that both Long and I were frightened that whoever spoke next might, unless very careful, reveal too severe a need.

  I nonetheless took the risk. ‘Do you suppose Shegog and his shepherds used the poor woman communally?’

  In his careful way, as if I were asking him to solve calculus, Long answered. ‘All I know, Mr Bettany, is that even if Shegog turned this girl away from the hut, his shepherds might outvote him. You see, some parsons and surgeons start encouraging the men to vote on sundry matters on the ships, as a means of improving their minds. And the fellows get the habit.’

  And thus Athenian democracy is employed, I thought, to retain and abuse a native woman!

  ‘Well,’ I told him, delighted to overtop my inner unease with a show of appropriate authority, ‘I shall let them know they are all outvoted by me.’

  I could very nearly hear pulleys and mechanisms of mind and soul grind in Long. ‘It seems, Mr Bettany, that if there happened to be a white woman here it would serve more than a single purpose.’ It was ‘pair-puss’ as Long said it in his hard Irish accent. ‘It would lift the minds of fellows and put the manners on them. For I do know a reliable woman at the Female Factory. Learned, virtuous and with reserve, as th
ey say.’ ‘Rissairve’. I had never noticed nor been so reduced to petulance before by the way this good servant spoke his English. Nor was the distance, the chariness of ‘as they say’ welcome to me. I wanted to bark, ‘As who says?’

  But I swallowed my spite. ‘I believe it may still be a little early. Although you claim for her some rare enough New South Wales qualities.’

  ‘It is of no concern,’ said Long. But I felt a moment’s inane smugness that he had in his way expressed a liking for this unknown, virtuous convict woman.

  We could now see the smoke of two native fires on the ridge above us. Not wanting to aggrieve any sensitive native elders by treating their sister like a trussed, dragged slave, we made a casual approach to the area in which the Moth people were spending their Australian spring. The archaic trees and the great jumbles of huge stones large as houses we met as we ascended had the air about them not of a season but of centuries, and the woman who had caused such discontent in Long and myself began singing low but with a piercing, nasal intonation. When Long slipped the rope from her wrist she seemed content to wait with us. It was true. We were her phantasms. She might wake from us when she chose – at least she thought so.

  ‘And though they might think we’re nothing,’ said Long as if answering my thought, ‘yet they take the pox quick enough. There’s pox now amongst Docker’s shepherds. They have given it to some women. I warn our people.’