Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  I have heard too the sewing classes at Government House are coming to an end because of Mrs Governor being poor in health. Mrs Matron says the good woman is bound to return to England soon for she has the notion and desire to breathe her last at the house of her parents. This makes me understand my dear friend that I must act soon.

  I have made a copy for you of what I write to Mrs Governor. And I mean to put in her hands all the accounting I have made of things stored in the rooms of the Pallmires. And again I wish to know if you are my friend since I mean to tell you where I hide the record of all hoarded stock. It is under tea chests in one of the rooms. Since there is no bottom to the avarice of this couple and the childless yearning of Mrs Pallmire for loot and bounty I have hid my record under stores she does not need yet will never dispose of. I tell you for I wish to know whether you are still my Alice or the Alice of Mr Pallmire.

  Here is what I mean to hand to Mrs Governor at the next and last needlework class:

  Madam the wife of the Governor

  Parramatta

  New South Wales

  Dear Lady Gipps

  I trust you to see to it that – in saying what no one else will say – I am protected and awarded the favour of my Ticket of Leave which is due in a little time in any case.

  I join to this letter the lists I have made of all the goods the Steward and Matron Pallmire have kept in their house for their own joy and use and profit without the knowledge of the Governor and against the interests of the poor women in their charge. I have put on each page the date on which this measure of goods was held in their house and counted by me. As for the butchery a day of inspection would show that the better cuts do not go from there to the women of the cells and Tories but to the sundry butchers of the town. I know from your dear presence that you would not be pleased to hear of this misuse of goods and of prisoners. I know that though your gaze is mild it is also strait.

  As well as this Mr Matron misuses a Category 3 woman whom he keeps increasingly in his house. This is in no way the fault of the poor girl – it is Mr Pallmire who orders it of a girl who has no power.

  I trust all my future and my very breath into your hands. And I trust above all into your hands that poor Category 3 girl whose name is Alice Aldread. She is found guilty of manslaughter. But she has created no trouble in the colony and may be at peril from the women at the Factory who think that she has had some special treatment through no fault of hers from the Pallmires. That she has had but it has been of little joy to her. She must be put somewhere else and – if you will provide for it in your grace – her ticket of leave advanced.

  When women have no way to turn they look to a sister. If you will forgive me I dare see you as my kind sister and look in utter hope to you.

  Your petitioner

  Sarah Bernard

  RETURNED BY WAY OF ROME TO THE Sudan and a subtly smiling Sherif, Prim heard from Erwit that Fergal Stoner had been calling.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he wants to make some use or other of Austfam, to help him on his way to glory in Brussels.’ But an amused affection for the man ensured she called him anyhow, before anyone else.

  ‘My wife’s coming out to see me,’ Stoner told her.

  ‘You must be happy about that.’

  ‘Yes. I hope to persuade her to move here permanently – you know, show her the foreign school, and what nice friends I have. Come to a cocktail party at my place, okay?’

  He nominated a date, and Prim agreed to attend. ‘But are you actually serving cocktails? I mean, liquor?’

  ‘Yeah, well there’ll be a room off the courtyard stocked with gin and vodka. For infidels like you. They both go pretty well with fruit juice.’

  The house the EC had given Stoner was in Almoradah, a fashionable suburb with imposing houses worthy of a wealthy district in Saudi Arabia. Prim looked forward to going. She found that her brief time spent with Dimp had somehow encouraged her to be more conventionally curious about such matters as the sort of woman rash enough to marry Stoner.

  In the end Prim did not arrive at Stoner’s with Sherif – the morning of the party she received a panicked telephone call from a tremulous Helene Codderby. ‘Could you take me along with you, Primrose?’ asked Helene, sounding strangely unsure for a woman who knew her way so well in the Sudan. ‘Please. Please! It’s just something I feel I can’t face on my own. All those strangers.’

  Prim was surprised at that word, strangers. To Helene few people in Khartoum were strangers.

  So Prim and Helene entered by a double gate, through a little garden and to the door where a tall Southern Sudanese man pointed them into the shining, tiled interior of the house. They traversed the corridor to a broad shady courtyard, where young men in jackets, galabias, and white turbans came and went with bread and chickpea paste, delicious little cubes of lamb and dried tomatoes, and fruit juice. An unaltered Stoner came lolloping up, tall, bony, brown, but – Prim thought – a little boyishly flushed.

  ‘Prim, dear old Codders!’ he shouted. ‘Let me introduce you to Claudia straight away.’ For some reason his lips brushed Prim’s cheek.

  Claudia turned to them, green-eyed, lanky like her husband, handsome, large-jawed, and very northern European in complexion. The high sky seemed a violation of her pale skin as she moved from light to shade to meet them. She did not look timid, which was the idea Prim had somehow got from Stoner. So it was not fear of equatorial regions which had kept her in Britain.

  ‘Hello,’ she said in that English manner, putting emphasis on the double ‘l’ and stretching out the ‘o’. Stoner described the two of them – Prim and Codders – what they did in Khartoum. ‘See,’ he told his wife, ‘I’ve got loads of company here. And so would you.’

  His wife did not resent this didacticism. ‘It’s not the company,’ said Claudia Stoner smiling broadly at her guests. There was no trace of Yorkshire in her voice. ‘It’s that I don’t like the heat. But I suppose the marriage vows transcend temperature. When the children are old enough for boarding school …’

  Stoner dropped his voice and pointed to a door in the far corner of the courtyard. ‘There’s vodka in there should you need it. In the upper cupboards. Infidel gallons of the rubbish.’

  New arrivals were already queuing behind them to meet Claudia Stoner, and so Helene and Prim stood aside. They found themselves no more than a yard from Dr Hamadain, in a cotton suit, and Safi el Rahzi, the student, in shirt sleeves. Hamadain had recently been courted back home by the government from a professorship at George Mason College in Washington. Safi was in full eloquence on some subject, and did not want to pause, but Sherif’s urbane cousin held a hand up to halt the conversation and greeted them both by name. Helene Codderby – atypically – had nothing to say, and it was Prim who was left to congratulate Hamadain on his return and new post with the government.

  ‘Yes,’ said Helene, oddly distracted, ‘Ministry of the Interior, isn’t it?’

  ‘I am special adviser to the minister, yes. Troubled times, I’m afraid.’ His face shone with a sense of survival and of engagement.

  Safi said, a little loudly, ‘We were discussing guerilla training. I don’t mean the guerillas in the South. There was a rumour printed in the Washington Post that our government is training guerillas for activity against the Israelis.’

  ‘And I was telling my young friend here,’ said Dr Hamadain, ‘that if it is so, the Ministry of the Interior does not know about it.’

  ‘Perhaps someone has omitted to tell the minister,’ said young Safi with a smile. ‘The Washington Post said these operatives included not only Palestinians and Libyans, but Pakistanis as well. Mind you, though I mistrust anarchist-style protest and random bombings, I am no lover of the Israelis. They took my grandfather prisoner in the Seven Days’ War. But … guerillas?’

  ‘Your grandfather was an Egyptian then?’ asked Prim.

  ‘No, he was one of our soldiers who volunteered. My mother’s father. A professional soldier and an enlight
ened man.’

  The conversation ended there for the moment, for Sherif turned up, strolling in bare-headed, a half smile on his face, waiting to be introduced to Stoner’s wife. Prim went through that much commented-upon transformation: the entry of the lover alters the air, gives two-thirds of its humanity to the party. Prim was wearing the same gold-collared, loose white native dress she had worn to Dimp’s party and wore to almost every party in the Sudan. It sat on her body easily. She had a light shawl around her shoulders – something she had learned not from the Sudanese but from her mother. ‘To de-accentuate the bosom, dear.’ Sherif must have found it a fetching combination, for he whispered in her ear, ‘How are you, my little white ruffian?’

  An hour passed with Professor el Rahzi telling tales of his days at the London School of Economics and at Oxford. He was particularly hopeful, he told Sherif and Prim when the rest of the party drifted away, that the government was about to be forced to resolve the conflict in the South. The World Bank, which had been lenient with repayment reductions earlier, was putting pressure on now, had refused to ratify a new deal on its debt, designed to ease interest repayments until the war was won. To maintain a war in a world of falling commodity prices was, everyone had agreed, grotesque. But there must be secure Sudanese sovereignty over the South – that was the trouble – and that would take long peace talks. However, peace talks would attract international goodwill and investment, said the professor.

  Sherif asked Prim in a lowered voice, ‘Are you taking Helene home?’

  Prim nodded. ‘If I can find her.’

  ‘I think you’ll find her in the booze room,’ said Sherif with a smile. ‘I shall see you later, my soul hopes …’

  ‘Your soul can rest assured,’ said Prim.

  There was a fleeting contact of hands, and she went to the room in the corner, knocked lightly on the door and tentatively opened it. She heard a gasp and thought she had surprised lovers, but in fact it was Helene Codderby weeping, a tumbler of what looked like water, but proved to be raw vodka, placed beside her on the table at which she sat.

  ‘Helene! My God, what’s the matter?’

  Helene gamely composed herself. ‘I’m in love, bugger it!’

  Prim came to the table, leant on it, and made the normal gestures – hand on shoulder, rubbing of the upper arm. ‘But what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Do you know what I find just a little offensive?’ said Helene. ‘I’m in love with the bastard. But when he wants someone to act as a warning to his wife, he uses not me but you. You’re the one he kissed in front of her. He doesn’t say, “Here’s the charming Codderby, who is your rival.” What he says is, “Here is the delicious Prim Bettany, so you’d better watch out!”’ Her face contorted with tears again. ‘I don’t blame you in any way. It’s not your fault any more than it’s mine that I’m a plain old hank of a woman.’ And she went on shuddering with grief.

  Prim couldn’t stop herself asking, ‘Are you really telling me, Helene, that …?’

  ‘Of course. Better part of eighteen months. I was beginning to think it would grow into something until now. He’s a very driven man that way.’ More tears. ‘He likes his bloody home comforts, but he always has a plan for any stray woman.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ murmured Prim, fetching a glass and the vodka from the upper cupboard, and pouring herself some.

  ‘The point is,’ said Helene, ‘that he wanted his wife to think it might be you, not me. I’ve got to admit you’ve got a special kind of danger written all over you. It’s the charm of not knowing how good-looking, and so how dangerous, you really bloody well are. It’s just as well you’ve got Sherif to look after you.’

  They drank a while in silence. ‘It has been the best and worst time of my life,’ said Helene. ‘But dear Lord, I’m suffering the sufferings of the sinner now. I’m drinking a bitter bloody cup. Bottoms up!’

  They finished their drink.

  ‘I know it’s selfish of me,’ Helene said. ‘But do you think we could sneak out, if you don’t mind? I don’t want to see the bastard, and I don’t want to see his bloody English rose of a spouse.’

  They left the room and walked along the shadowed verandah and out by the corridor towards the street. Prim thought that perhaps it was not even safe being considered plain by both Westerners and Sudanese. It hadn’t saved Helene who, like any betrayed sister, sputtered with grief all the way to the truck.

  A few days after the welcoming party for Stoner’s wife, Prim received a call from Stoner, and felt disposed to treat it with suspicion. ‘Claudia and I,’ said Stoner, ‘wondered if you and your lovely doctor would like to join us at the Rimini tonight for dinner? I think Claudia’s a little, you know, envious of you.’

  So now he wanted to play married and betrothed couples! But she would not let him get away with it.

  ‘I don’t know that I want to,’ said Prim. ‘There’s no problem with Claudia. But Helene Codderby is pretty unhappy.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ murmured Stoner.

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t blab on you, you treacherous bastard.’

  Stoner had lowered his voice. ‘Look, I never made any undertakings to Codders, okay? She knew the score. And what’s a bloke to do now that the missus has moved in?’

  This was the truth – Helene had never implied he had made promises. He was not Auger. He was a lesser barbarian. On the one hand loyalty to Helene ought to prevent Prim going to dinner with the Stoners – Helene would be horrified to hear of it if she did. But on the other, she and Stoner had painted over UN insignia on the sides of transports and discovered a supposed famine.

  ‘I don’t think we ought to come at the moment,’ she said.

  ‘But Jesus, Prim, a man’s not a monk!’

  ‘No. You’re not a monk anyhow. You’re a total bastard.’

  In a louder voice than he had been using, he said cheerily, ‘Guilty, Your Honour.’

  ‘Yet everyone forgives you. I know I’ll forgive you, but not just yet. Thanks for the invitation. And love to Claudia.’

  In fact she spent the early part of the evening at Helene Codderby’s little apartment in the city centre, over whose rooftop the minaret of a mosque passed a dramatic shadow in late afternoon, and where they sat drinking tea.

  The subject of Stoner and the turpitude of men was soon exhausted. Quite naturally, politics came up next. ‘What were Safi el Rahzi and Doctor Hamadain talking about?’ asked Prim. ‘Pro-Palestinian guerilla squads training in the Sudan. Did you know anything about this?’ She had a few hours before been specifically reminded of the conversation at Stoner’s by hearing on the radio of yet another clash between Israelis and Palestinians in Hebron. Two Palestinians were dead. Paying the price, as Prim thought of it, for two thousand years of European anti-Semitism.

  ‘Yes,’ said Helene, dismally sipping her tea and grimacing. ‘It’s all the truth. There’s a camp out to the west, between here and Shendi. That’s where they’re billeted and trained until they’re needed. Islamic freedom fighters. Young fellows. High morale.’

  ‘This is really an astonishing country, Helene.’

  ‘Hamadain’s right. There may be ministers in the government who don’t know. The prime minister may not even know. That’s how it goes here.’

  ‘That’s how it goes anywhere, if you can believe the spy movies.’

  ‘If you can believe the spy movies. Do you think men suffer like this?’

  ‘I think women have been asking that very question for some time.’

  ‘But it doesn’t happen to a girl like you.’

  ‘What bloody rubbish,’ said Prim with an almost angry urgency. ‘Of course it’s happened to me.’ And with those words, Prim felt an electric jolt in her womb, something like, she imagined, a child turning over, but not in happiness. ‘It was a professor–student thing. It’s the reason I’m here. I’ll tell you that much, but no more. End of story.’

  Helene looked at her from under lowered eyebrows. ‘You know, I’m
utterly delighted to hear that. Aren’t I a bitch?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Prim. ‘Of course you are.’

  And in the shadow of the minaret, the finger of God, they both laughed and drained their tea.

  At two o’clock in the morning, Prim was woken at Sherif’s house by a banging at the door and presumed, for some reason to do with a recent but unremembered dream, it was the police. Bolting upright, she saw by the now switched on bedside light that Sherif was already wide awake.

  Sherif shook his head and went off frowning to answer the door. Professor el Rahzi had once admiringly said, ‘He’s rubbed a lot of noses at the Ministry of Health,’ but surely that was not grounds for arrest. Adultery was, under the Sharia. But fornication?

  She followed Sherif, stylish in his thin cotton bathrobe, going to meet destiny with grace, downstairs and through his office. He opened the door without inquiring, without inching it open and squinting forth, but with the authority of a man who would not accept he had anything to hide. Helene Codderby nearly toppled into the room. For a second or two, Prim wondered with a little impatience whether they were going to be subjected to howling, small-hours, he-done-me-wrong lamentations.

  ‘What is it, Helene?’ she called from the stairs.

  ‘The fighters, the bastards, the terrorists, whatever they are. They’ve come into town and blown up the Rimini. Two grenades in the dining room. Fergal and Claudia are both dead. Fergal’s hard to identify, but Claudia’s face is intact. The bastards killed a Saudi Arabian, an Egyptian engineer, two waiters and Fergal and Claudia. Jesus! Can you believe that? Jesus!’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Prim, coming forward and hugging her. ‘Oh Helene. The EC people called you?’