Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘My handsome and successful son,’ he said, holding his arms wide with a frankness which I thought was new to him. ‘Greet your twice-betraying and twice-betrayed father!’

  I did not know what to make of any of this, so I took one of his hands and shook it to prevent the embrace I think he sought. ‘You look so well, Father,’ I said. He was the man I remembered, older and with the light in his eye which I had once trusted and thought the light of talent, but which I could now see was unreliable, or had somehow run that way.

  Simon had suggested that Father dine with all of us that night.

  ‘Does this sit well with Elizabeth?’ Father asked gently. And then, ‘I believe my daughter-in-law fears I may be some plague on legs.’

  I realised the time might come when I would need to say, ‘You are, Father, you are.’ But my old reverence for him as mentor and parent and seer kept me filial. Besides, whatever shame he had, I had mine.

  Inside, by the fire, Simon and my father and I drank rum and water prior to dinner, and when it was served Elizabeth came in, and her small appetite and weary look, I hoped, had nothing to do with my father’s supposed sins. She excused herself early, the table was cleared and we sat again by the fire, as beyond the wall the tall trees seemed to creak with cold.

  ‘Have you heard from your mother?’ Father asked me.

  ‘She is only an intermittent writer,’ I told him. ‘Her most recent letter told me to maintain towards you my affection as a son.’

  ‘A virtuous woman,’ he said. ‘Of all who have eaten of the tree of knowledge, I believe that we males were most over-toppled by the experience, even if we have conveniently made it seem that Eve should take the blame. Did she tell you she would not have me back?’

  I went red at this frankness.

  ‘Well,’ he continued. ‘I have betrayed her twice, once with politics and the other time with my affection. I cannot complain if she, who has no treachery in her, does not want to see it happen again!’

  ‘This is of great grief to us, Father,’ I said with feeling.

  ‘The conventional advice when I was young,’ said my father, ‘was for a philosopher to have a wife of simple virtue. As an anchor, you see? A woman of unthinking loyalty. I certainly achieved that.’

  I noticed that my father was, as the stockmen said, giving the rum a nudge. He drank heartily, his eyes were alight. ‘The problem is that if my mind was too active, your mother’s, I’m sure you’ll see, was too docile. There was no benefit in her forgiving me, and loyally trooping with the infants to Van Diemen’s Land. The uselessness of that proposition has now been proven.’

  ‘But you should not be apart now,’ I said, lamely. ‘After so much. With old age coming on. With all mistakes acknowledged and set aside!’

  ‘I shall tell you something, Jonathan,’ he said. Both his eyes and his cheeks were aglow now, and there was a wildness of thought and gesture there which I had never seen. ‘I very nearly convinced myself that my early heresy against the state was wrong. But all the time there was a cool cell in my mind in which the prisoner writes on the wall: “I am right, and I do not recant.” Wealth is an evil, though in a vast country like this its blunter wrongs are not obvious! There is no sense at all in invoking Christ’s name unless we adhere to the radical nature of His message: “Sell all you have and give to the poor …” “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle …” Oh, we must appease the law of Christ when it comes to desire and marriage, since that is a good thing for mortgages and inheritance. But when Christ urged community of property, well then, of course he was engaging in parables and hyperbole! He did not mean Mr Huge Coffers, who eyes and begets bastards on his convict maid, but cleaves to his stupid colonial wife and thus is permitted to be called virtuous by the parsons and the Van Diemen’s Land Philistines.’

  ‘Father, don’t excite yourself like this.’ Simon tried to stop his flow.

  But Father was reaching for the rum bottle without invitation. ‘I say nothing about your mother,’ he yelled. ‘I say nothing.’

  My brother looked at me with bleak eyes, and I could see what he had been through, with a sick wife and a father whose lack of repentance emerged in liquor.

  ‘I say nothing about your mother,’ he repeated, sipping his dram without benefit of added water. ‘Although I could say this. She is a woman of genuine virtue. That is, she is the type of woman of whom men make fools.’

  ‘I’m going to put away the bottle,’ said Simon, rising to do it.

  ‘My friend Horace would disagree with you. “… dissipat Euhius curas edaces … Bacchus drives out voracious cares.” Horace, you must know by now, was not a straightforward man or a man of one pedestrian affection. His life too was a set of betrayals. He was redeemed by his poetry. I too, Jonathan, am engaged in redemption.’

  ‘Father writes a great deal,’ said Simon in a thin voice which said it was all beyond him.

  ‘It’s nearly nine,’ said my father with sudden energetic compassion. ‘It’s time you were abed, Simon. You’re the true labourer in the vineyard. Perhaps Jonathan would indulge me by taking a final sup in my hut?’

  ‘I must take my saddlebags to my room,’ I told the old man. On this night I thought of him as that, an old coot, gazing at me with a feral eye. ‘You go first, Father, and I shall follow.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, snatching up the bottle to depart.

  It still contained enough for a few drams. ‘… mihi parva rura et,’ he intoned, ‘spiritum Graiae tenuem Camenae, Parca non mendax dedit et malignum spernere vulgus.’

  Then he exited elegantly translating. ‘Destiny which is no liar has allotted me a little farm, a capacity to attend the classic Muses and a soul which spurns the envy of the mob …’

  ‘I had no idea that you have been suffering this,’ I said to my brother.

  Simon told me, ‘Mother gave us the greatest gift: of being content with the usual, with the world as it comes. Without that we’d be like him.’

  The image of Bernard rose to mock this homely proposition. If only I did have my mother’s steadiness. There had been indications of it earlier on. But now I was my dangerous father’s dangerous son.

  ‘Simply thank God,’ suggested Simon, ‘that your remoteness prevented him from deciding to visit you and Phoebe. Elizabeth will soon be gone back to visit her mother’s English relatives, and when that is so, he will make fewer inroads on my happiness.’

  ‘And when she returns?’

  ‘We shall deal with that. My prayer is that by then he will be back in Van Diemen’s Land, a mild invalid, taken out of action by Anno Domini, under Mother’s management. Under that regime I believe she could bear being pointed at in that small society as the unfortunate wife of a traducer.’

  We said goodnight and I went to join my father. His lamp shone robustly in his window, with a pedagogic intensity. When I knocked on his door, he bade me in joyously. He was already pouring two glasses of rum. By what moral authority could I say, ‘No, Father!’ I was too vividly conscious that we both drank from the one malign cup.

  My father was living in this overseer’s hut in one large, not unpleasant room. There was his old sea-chest, which the carpenter had let him make during his time on deck on that unmentionable, unfathomable first sea voyage of his. He had a good cedar table and a comfortable but narrow bed, and a long-legged cupboard on top of which his shirts and pants and smalls rested, for within its open doors sat books and journals, including Cruden’s Concordance, the Biblium Vulgatum, the King James Bible, Byron’s poetry, Horace, Cicero and Macaulay’s Essays, which seemed to be everywhere in the bush and which I would have guessed he secretly dissented from.

  He brought out from this cupboard some of the ill-assorted collection of books in which he had been writing – a ledger, a cash book, a commercial diary, all of various page sizes. Even an old half-empty stud book had not escaped filling at his hands. He plonked them, opened at pages of tight scholarly writing, on the cedar ta
ble. He sat beside me and took a long pull at the rum. ‘What would you say was the greatest Christian virtue?’

  I laughed. ‘After seven years of sheep farming, I don’t quite know. St Paul said faith, hope and charity, and the greatest of these is charity.’

  My father said, ‘That in a sense is true.’ He went rooting through the stud book and found a passage of his own writing. ‘ “Charity is but equability under another name,”’ he quoted. ‘ “But the emphasis is significant. St Paul was attempting to find a specifically Christian face for a virtue which the old world had practised with considerable dedication. This virtue was oikeiosis, kinship, affection. Oikeiosis led to equanimity, the acceptance of one’s state. Perhaps it would have been better to leave kinship as a chief virtue of civic men in a civil society, rather than try to dress it up in the divine and purple robes of charity.”’

  He closed the stud book with a thump. ‘I wrote that,’ he told me. ‘That is the burden of my book. What did Epictetus say? “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.” The greatest crime of Christianity may well have been that it took suffering out of the sphere of human courage, Jonathan, and turned it into something else – turned it into expiation, into the imitation of Christ. We suffer for our sins, and to be made closer to our Redeemer – so every cheap village parson tells us! Until perhaps the fourth century, civilised man was willing to bear the slights of the gods for his own dignity. Thus he was validated by the Stoic tradition. He suffered to show that he could suffer and still sing. He suffered to show that we could be at the one time bound by fate, a web of initiating causes, and yet be free. We have the right, whatever happens to us, not to complain. Oh, but no! Christianity requires that we should snivel, for it has smothered the Stoic tradition. These days we suffer because God is displeased with us, and because we have sinned. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” is the continual infantile cry in every Christian church from Port Arthur to Ultima Thule. Not, “I am a man who can bear anything for the sake of my name.” Not that. But grovelling.’ He mimicked a narrow, parsonical tone. ‘Forgive me! Forgive me!’

  I dared not say anything.

  ‘Remember! Something I told you in the classroom at Hydebrae, Van Diemen’s Land. When the Emperor Constantine conquered his opponents at the Milvian Bridge, what is he said to have seen in the sky?’

  ‘I do remember this –’ But I was interrupted.

  ‘Yes, I probably told you this tale as a time-serving convict. Now I tell you as a free but flawed man and for a different purpose. Constantine saw in the heavens a cross, and burning beneath it the words: “In hoc signo vincis”, “In this sign you shall conquer.” Primitive faith, you see, replaced the Stoicism of the obedient soldier. Could it be argued that it was the swamping of Stoicism by other sects, including the sect of the Nazarene, which fatally weakened the legions and the administrative capacity of Rome? I believe so. I make a case in my book.’

  ‘That is a fascinating argument,’ I said lamely. ‘Though there are some who would be offended by it.’

  ‘They deserve offending,’ said my father. He waved his arm about. ‘I ask you, Jonathan, what virtue did Horace take a sane pride in? What does he most treasure amongst the resources of his soul? Not chastity, for unlike the worthies of Van Diemen’s Land, he made no false claims to chastity, and was thereby more chaste! Not expiation, for he looked upon the republican crimes of his youth with whimsy, and on those who forgave him with frank but unkneeling gratitude. His virtue was an ability to bear adversity in an obscure location! Horace blessed the flawed but unavoidable world he found himself in. “Though I am poor, the rich seek me out,” he wrote in recognition of the irony of his destiny. I hope too to be in that position. He on his Sabine farm, me in trans-alpine New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land. Men are robust creatures, not ninnies. Under Christianity they pretend to be ninnies once a week, but apart from that one hour, their real life, if they have courage, resembles that of Horace, Horace the rationally sensual, Horace the forebearing.’

  Again what could I say? He was looking at me with a raised, rum-blurred but still cutting eye. Who was I to defend normal Christianity against such a persuasive voice?

  ‘This you see returns us to the question of myself and Mrs Batchelor and your mother. How does it happen that certain passages of Scripture are given literal weight, and others are not? Let me tell you, Christ himself was a Spencean Philanthropist, Christ himself was a revolutionary, and he howled down property more often than he howled down poor lapses of flesh and affection! How many times must he say it? “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven …” Ah, but there – it seems – He is being an exaggerator, there He is working in figures of speech. It is His funny little way of exaggeration! The Lord could not possibly have really expected virtuous people to do that! And the message comes again and again. In Luke: “Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation.” And on and on.’

  ‘But I could in some lights be called wealthy,’ I protested. ‘Am I to be damned?’

  ‘How could I say that of my son?’ he asked. ‘But it is a problem you have.’ He began hand-waving again, racing on with his argument. ‘The Stoics call for good behaviour because reason and fraternity are thereby glorified. Virtue is simply politeness and fellow feeling. Vice is inevitable but must be its own education. Not a matter for pietistic grovelling before some altar, but an issue of calm assessment. The Stoics urged dignity in the face of both passion or desolation. Their founder Zeno exhorted them to perform “acts of which a reasonable account can be given”. That was not good enough for the Gospels as interpreted by parsons! Not only did a man have to behave well in the street and the home amongst other men and women, he had to deny his interior and unbidden thoughts. Christianity, by bearing Stoicism away, made true virtue, the virtue of the man who applies reason to his turbulent thoughts, impossible. Hypocrisy was guaranteed. If a man is to be condemned for one infidelity as well as for a hundred, thinks the sinner, why not the hundred? And this all the more so when the other supposed sinner is a woman of robust thought, rare in Van Diemen’s Land, as you know.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘please, I do not want to hear this.’

  ‘No,’ insisted my father. ‘No. This is my book, you see. Stoicism could deal with betrayals. It drove out morbid jealousy as it drove out morbid guilt. Horace could regret our flawed nature but accepted it as the real condition of his own pilgrimage. Prim schoolteachers liked him for his statement about hating the vulgar and profane crowd. They do not copy for their students the passages where he imagines a bracelet removed from a white arm prior to the mysteries of love. And like them, a reforming convict, I tried to make Horace a Christian for the sake of getting by in Van Diemen’s land. But it is not so. And I shall now expiate my hypocrisy in this book.’

  ‘My God,’ I called out, full of terror. ‘Never mind Horace! What of expiation for my mother, for the Batchelors?’

  He took a huge swig of his rum.

  ‘They too,’ he said, ‘will be reconciled by my book.’

  Stumbling back oppressed to Simon’s homestead in double dark, I comforted myself that no one would publish his cracked book, if indeed he did not succumb to rum before finishing it. There you are, I told myself. See him! That is what you will become if you are foolish.

  Steely skies overtook us as we returned from visiting Simon and my father. In the Port Phillip Pass, it was not yet snowing, but the sky was taut with grey, aching clouds. I let Presscart and some of the other men gallop ahead of Clancy’s wagon, for amongst these high, dark crags the squalid yet familiar comfort of their hearths called to them. I stayed with Clancy and Felix, taking the same pace as the wagon. Though longing to see not only Phoebe and George, but in a different sense, Bernard, I felt delayed by the paternal mess behind me and the familiar but precious torment ahead. I had
calculated that my rival Long would receive his conditional pardon within a year, and thus be able to marry Bernard without reference to me, and move away somewhere, taking her and his share of the cattle with him.

  We made Nugan Ganway at last light with the wind screaming around the boulders above the homestead. The poplars Phoebe had planted as wind break between the homestead and the Cooma track were infant in growth and thrashed about pitiably. Some of the men were out piling extra stones onto their bark roofs to stop them blowing away.

  Going indoors at least from this turmoil of nature, I found that my beautiful Phoebe sat wrapped in a rug by our fire indoors. She was reading a story of a carthorse to my sturdy little George, now a little under a year old. Her theory was that one read to a child whether they caught the specifics of what was read or not. But her cheeks were reddish and her eyes, if anything, desperate.

  ‘We must get you to bed,’ I said, strangely delighted to be of simple service to Phoebe.

  I would make an excellent hospital attendant. First I went and rang the bell outside our back door which summoned Bernard. I could hear Presscart and Clancy drinking tea with her in her cookhouse and teasing her. She was in her way easier in manner with these men than with Long. She amused them with her own careful humour. When I rang she came at once – no last words, no delay. She would make Long a successful wife. Like him she was driven by tasks, and embraced them for their power to ease memory.

  ‘Bernard,’ I said, ‘I think my wife has a sudden fever. She might need broth and tea, and little George must be looked to.’

  Bernard’s long hands crushed the apron at her hips. In the parlour Phoebe saw her coming and trustingly raised her jaw. Bernard admirably asked, ‘Do you have neck pain, Mrs Bettany?’

  ‘No,’ said Phoebe. ‘I feel generally out of sorts, and my joints ache.’