Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  At dawn the next day Long was surprised and not a little pleased to discover that we were not leaving Nugan Ganway. My licenses had cost me £30, for which Peske accepted a cheque on the Savings Bank and gave a receipt.

  I now had paper for this land, and official title.

  AFTER PRIM’S FIRST VISIT TO Khalda el Rahzi’s house, she began to interview young men and women known to the eminent Mrs el Rahzi who claimed to have been subjected to slavery. Sometimes accommodatingly Mrs el Rahzi acted as translator, or at least as verifier of what Prim herself could make out, but on other occasions Prim used a sceptic like Dr Sherif Taha.

  Prim sent copies of the transcripts of interview to Peter Whitloaf, the Director of Austfam; to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva; and to the sundry national entities of Save the Children.

  In the meantime, she could not fight off the likelihood of a visit to Australia. The place exercised its own subtle gravity, but Dimp represented a more direct pull, and invited Prim to attend a third anniversary party in Sydney.

  Do come and see my dear D’Arcy, the annul-er, in his earnest impersonation of being my husband. Okay, I speak fondly, of course. But in spite of the good talking to you gave me, in the night, when a person is at her maddest, I do wake and I think he didn’t love Robyn enough and he doesn’t love me enough to risk the fires of hell. In the darkness, this can for twenty minutes or so seem a big issue. It begs the whole question of whether I’m worth risking damnation for, a proposition I very much doubt! But the idea of the suitor being willing to go to Hades for us must be deep in our brains, because the story is in all cultures, isn’t it, including Orpheus going to hell to rescue Eurydice? And now the question is, would D’Arcy go to Hades to fetch me back without first getting his return ticket stamped by the Vatican?

  But we’re going to celebrate the loving ambiguities which bind us, me and Bren, next February, last weekend of the month, with an anniversary party. And it would be wonderful for our morale if you could come so that we could both feast our eyes on our only living close relative.

  Dimp also announced she’d nearly finished a screenplay on Jonathan Bettany – his love of sheep and other things – wonderful stuff, she said.

  Like many of the guilt-stricken, he’s not very effective. Except in some ways. I mean he distributes carbines to his shepherds and stockmen as if they’re picks or shovels, and we know those Monaro tribes – that he called the Moth people – were decimated, cowed and driven off. He gives us the signal by talking about them as a problem – and his men deal with the problem out of his sight and at a distance from his own trigger finger. He might instruct them one way, but they pick up the message his own morality won’t let him utter, and they do the job. And yet he hates massacres and pursues those who commit them – have you read that bit yet?

  If you can come this February, we’ll buy you a first-class ticket! Bring Sherif too. No argument. D’Arcy can afford it. He’ll claim it off his tax if he has a single conversation with you about Sudanese mines and resources.

  Though Prim did not rush to read the Bettany transcripts when they arrived, she was engrossed, despite herself, although she felt guiltily that any interest she showed might somehow act as a subliminal message to Dimp to take it all too seriously.

  One day Sherif saw pages of the transcripts heaped on Prim’s coffee table.

  ‘What are these?’ he asked.

  ‘I told you. These are the pages of ancestor worship my sister sends me.’

  ‘The oldest religion,’ said Sherif. ‘At least, the only one people never lapse from. How much land did your old ancestor hold?’

  ‘By the end of his life, about 2500 square miles.’

  Sherif whistled. ‘What a pity he is not around now to fund our little surveys.’

  Prim held up the pages of Dimp’s letter. ‘My sister wants me to visit her for her wedding anniversary. Next February. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Go!’ said Sherif. He knew of her reluctance to go home and worried about her annual failure to return. So now, again, he said, ‘This time, go!’

  Prim put both hands to her forehead and rocked her head gently. ‘I don’t want to, of course, but I don’t know how to tell her.’

  ‘No wonder we have such affection for each other,’ said Sherif. ‘I am an internally displaced person, and you’re a refugee. Do you think it proper, my dear, to use Sudan as a bolthole?’

  ‘But it’s more than that.’

  ‘It can be more than that only after you have been home and reduced Australia to size.’

  Prim felt panic coursing up her arms, against the flow of her blood.

  ‘Would you come?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not this time. I can be a fit companion next time. And I look forward to it.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘Never more,’ said Sherif.

  So, with a sort of heady nausea, Prim understood that she must go home, and must somehow return intact from the experience.

  BETTANY AND MARRIAGE

  I had been for a time suffused by the excitement of a visit I’d made on my way home from the previous wool sale, the one during which my lapse from grace occurred at the Black Huts. On the way back home to Nugan Ganway, my very unease made it appropriate that I should visit Felix at Mr Loosely’s academy in Goulburn.

  It was mid-afternoon on a sunny spring day when I reached Grafton Street and stood with the eminent Mr Loosely on his back verandah watching his wife reading to a set of enchanted young scholars. They sat beneath the shade of a native beech on ground which sloped away pleasantly to the Mulwaree Ponds. Mrs Loosely happened to be reading from that evangelical classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress. She read musically and well, in the voice of a woman who enjoyed fighting the good fight.

  For the first time in two years I saw Felix, a robust lad of about eight years now. Though of mixed blood – and it may have been, as Goldspink had once suggested, Rowan’s or Brody’s absconders blood in his veins – he possessed the most handsome features of the Ngarigo. The awful grin for which I had given the boy his name had been eased by the passage of years, kindly instruction, and wonderment at the tale Mrs Loosely read. The rictus of old eased further as he lent ear to John Bunyan’s great book, listening along with other little pilgrims who were mainly the children of more or less prosperous liberated convicts.

  Mr Loosely called to Felix, who proceeded out of the circle and accepted my extended hand.

  I said, ‘How are you, young man?’

  He answered precisely. ‘I am very well, sir, thank you for asking.’

  Thin Mrs Loosely, book in hand, smiled and Mr Loosely said, ‘Felix, this is your benefactor, Mr Bettany.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Felix, bunching his mouth a little as in his infancy.

  ‘We must talk privately,’ Mr Loosely murmured to me. ‘We may wish to speak to you later, Felix,’ he told the boy, who nodded and rejoined the group of young New South Welshmen.

  Loosely took me to his small parlour, and we sat by his little deal table, which served as a desk. His bookshelves, however, around the wall, were enviably full.

  ‘As you know, Mr Bettany, this school is based on the fraternity of humankind. I stood up for the freed convict, but I am now shocked to find that the former convict, in some cases, comes to me and complains that I have taken in a native. Apparently his children are too refined to learn their letters, their numbers, their divinity, their manners in the presence of a native child!’

  I wondered at first was he asking me to pay a further fee still than the one I had already paid him, and I made some hints in that direction, but he did not take them up. His disappointment was not financial but political in nature; or perhaps I should say, philosophical.

  ‘What sort of race are we,’ asked Mr Loosely, ‘when one group accepts liberation purely as the platform from which to oppress others? This is a great mystery to me, since it means that even
in the midst of their oppression, their sojournings by the river of Babylon, their containment, their floggings, their misuse, they somehow admire the flogger, the oppressor, the misuser.’

  He seemed so distressed that he stood for a while shaking his head. ‘You must consider,’ I suggested, ‘the great Horace, who was never free of the slur that he was the child of a slave. It suffuses his poetry and his self-estimation, but it is fuel to his genius.’

  ‘No, no, you are right,’ he said. ‘Such heartburn as I have just expressed is a small price for what I have to tell you. I rejoice to inform you now that, far from being a threat to civilised impulses, the child you brought to me is a dazzling intellect. It is as if all the yearning for light which has lain pent up in these people for centuries, even for millennia has been released in him, has driven him to read and write and cipher. He is, let me tell you, a gem at mathematics. In the past year he has learned to figure long division in his head, without recourse to paper, and he demonstrates a hunger for learning rare amongst British children.’

  These claims made me nervous, even though I had been struck by the child’s urbanity in the yard and had heard him read very competently some years earlier. ‘You’re sure, Mr Loosely, that you are not disposed by your progressive nature to help this child along? To see things which may not be there?’

  Loosely did not seem at all offended by my caveat. ‘We shall call the child in, and you may perhaps make inquiry of him.’

  He went to the door and called to his wife to fetch Felix. As the boy knocked and entered, his eyes seemed to me liquid and quick.

  Mr Loosely said, ‘Young man, since this is your patron who brought you out of the bush and keeps you here at his own cost, I expect you would be happy to display your skills to him.’

  Felix turned to me and said, in an accent halfway between that of the children of the convicts and Loosely’s regional idiom, ‘I would be very happy to do so, sir.’

  Loosely said, ‘I wonder, Felix, would you be so kind as to tell your patron how many times 13 goes into 128?’

  Felix adopted momentarily a warp in his face equivalent to what I had first encountered, but it eased within a few seconds. ‘Nine with a remainder of 11,’ said Felix.

  ‘And now,’ asked Mr Loosely, ‘multiply 436 by, say, 321.’

  Felix closed his eyes. Seconds passed. Loosely smiled.

  Felix slowly but confidently uttered his results ‘139 956.’

  Mr Loosely thanked Felix, murmured to me, ‘In his head, sir, in his head,’ and then picked up from his desk a book of Macaulay’s Essays, a work I possessed myself at Nugan Ganway.

  ‘Would you please read that for your dear benefactor, Mr Bettany?’

  Taking the book, far more sophisticated than the child’s life of Newton he had read from for me years past, young Felix closed his eyes so that only a slit of vision must have remained. He considered the book so long that Mr Loosely turned to me as if to reassure me that this was the boy’s normal demeanour towards the essays of famous Britons. Perhaps ten seconds passed before Felix began to read: ‘There is great force about this speech. Cicero had not attained that perfect mastery of the whole art of rhetoric which he possessed at a later period. But on the other hand there is a freedom, a boldness, a zeal for popular rights, a scorn of the vicious and insolent gang whom he afterwards called the boni, which makes these early speeches more pleasing than the latter.’

  Looking at me, Mr Loosely reached out and took Macaulay away from Felix.

  ‘Thank you very much. Mr Bettany, in case you think I have falsely rehearsed this scene, would you care to put to Felix some problems of your own? Avoid for now pounds, shillings and pence equations, since I have not yet acquainted him with the banalities of finance.’

  I was delighted to be part of such a joyful experiment, but told Mr Loosely that there was no need for me to check the powers of Felix. Indeed, I told him, the normal process was that the schoolmaster tried to convince the parent that the child lacked qualities which time would often very well prove the child possessed in better portions than his original denouncer.

  I shook the boy’s hand again but with added warmth, and Mr Loosely dismissed him.

  The child left and we sat again. Mr Loosely fidgeted with the loose cover of the Macaulay.

  ‘I do not know whether what I have daily witnessed and you and I have temporarily seen here has had time to reveal its full possibilities to you, Mr Bettany. I am a school teacher, you are a young man of great promise, a settler. Now the talents of Felix clearly derive not from the debased European half of his soul but from that wandering daughter of Eve, his mother, the native. I ask you this: what if the desire for learning, thwarted by centuries of nomadism in such hearts as Felix’s, lies out beyond us, in the bush, amongst all the children of the natives? What if our children have somehow been sated over centuries with European scholarship, and turn dully to the light? What if, on your land holding, on all the stations within and without the limits of settlement, all the children of the natives – without even knowing it at the thinking level of their minds – wait to take to the skills of enlightenment with the same fury with which young Felix has taken them up?’

  It was one of those ideas which would go through even the dullest man like an electric shock.

  ‘It is of course possible,’ I told him. ‘The ignorant consider these people as less than human, but I have no doubt about their humanity.’

  ‘From what I have heard of the behaviour of convict shepherds and overseers, it is likely that there will be other murdered mothers and other Felixes. I would like to see men such as yourself devote a fragment of their wool clip to the education of these children. All in the hope that thereby learning will be renewed, nature revived, and society reconciled from top to bottom.’

  ‘These are honourable objectives,’ I told him.

  ‘Send to me another Felix – I have already written to other settlers with the same request. Write to the governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, who is a progressive man, and ask him to finance my school, so that the economic burden – which a good man such as yourself is willing to assume, but which other more fallible men might not welcome – can be taken by the state. I would take one native child for two pounds a year, and two for three pounds. There is of course no profit to me in this.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘there is an orphaned child of the natives – I have called him Hector – who is always at my homestead. He has a ready aptitude too.’

  ‘I do not doubt it. Orphaned? Full-blooded perhaps.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you bring him to me without creating problems with the sables?’

  I promised that Hector would be brought to him.

  Early the following month, when the child was present at the stockyard trying to persuade Long and O’Dallow to let him ride horses, I approached Durra and told him I would be taking the boy off, and when he understood he told some of Hector’s aunts who exhibited a short and passionate burst of grief. But Hector himself seemed willing to ride anywhere a horse would take him. I gave to Presscart, who had by accident killed Hector’s mother, the job of taking Hector to Mr Loosely. I also wrote to Governor Gipps as Loosely had requested, and recommended His Excellency to extend his patronage to him. Thus I was already in an excited frame of mind when the most startling events overtook me.

  So busy had we been at Nugan Ganway that Long’s lost brothers, the Irish absconders, were presences whose exact shape I had forgotten. They reimposed their existence on me, however, one dusk in late summer by riding up to the homestead. We had all heard them coming and were outside to meet them, and the one named Martin Rowan, or the Captain, who had once held Felix’s head in a stream, took from his jacket a sheet of paper he said he had been given at Treloar’s.

  He and the younger one, Tadgh Brody, dismounted and stood about explaining themselves in Irish to Long and O’Dallow, in whose company they were willing to adjust their mouths to gashes of brotherly
amusement. On coarse, journal paper, the note merely said:

  Dear Mr Bettany,

  I do not have the honour of your acquaintance but must tell you that your betrothed Phoebe Finlay is with me at Treloar’s in the care of Mr Goldspink. I have escorted Miss Finlay from Goulburn. She is quite ill from a storm we passed through. Could you kindly visit her at your first chance and restore her spirits.

  Sister Catherine (from the community of the

  Sisters of Charity in Goulburn, New South Wales)

  My betrothed, Phoebe Finlay? I interrupted the amusements of the two absconders and took them aside.

  ‘What is this about?’

  ‘There’s a holy woman and a young one there,’ Rowan told me.

  ‘Poor young woman’s got the collywobbles,’ said Brody.

  Did these two share a hut with them, the miraculously nearby Phoebe and her friend?

  I should have been afraid, to honour the tradition of the habitual bachelor, but I was excited. It was as if Phoebe had been summoned by my secret need of what Barley called a ‘rudder’. But she was ill, and I was instantly anxious. In my memory she had that delicacy which might easily be borne away by a fever.