Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘You are going,’ she acknowledged. ‘But you are coming back?’

  ‘I shall be back before night.’

  ‘If you are back by night, my love, I shall make sure I am here to greet you.’

  Abased and weeping, I left her in Bernard’s care and took myself out to the four-wheeler phaeton. Felix was there, wearing boots and a jacket, and with moist eyes. Since he seemed, by the standards of Nugan Ganway, dressed for the funeral, I asked him, ‘Would you come with Long and George and me, Felix?’

  ‘With you and the little bloke,’ he said. I recognised the phrase. Presscart had always called George ‘the little bloke’.

  Felix climbed into the carriage, his back holding the little polished coffin in place. Long, helping me board, inspected me carefully, as if loss had turned me into yet another person.

  ‘You’re such a good fellow, Mr Bettany,’ he said, ‘that God should be kinder.’

  I raised a hand to prevent any other honest and quaintly phrased condolences from him. He climbed into the driver’s seat, shook the reins, and the bright-cried currawongs and magpies mocked us on our way.

  George was amongst the first of the scatter of young to be placed in the new churchyard at Cooma, and to have the benefit of the earnest, East Anglian-accented prayers of the Reverend Paltinglass, whose ceremonial style was a comfort to me and both sharpened and soothed my grief. Paltinglass and the editor of the new Cooma newspaper had between them spread the news of the Bettany calamity, and my old friend Peske, the District Commissioner, was there, full of suppressed excitement since he had just been given a post in Madras. Cooma Creek’s first police magistrate and his family also attended.

  After we saw George into the earth, Long supported me back to the parlour of the very manse in which George had been born. Family by family the mourners left, men and women muttering their helpless condolence. As the wind mounted outside I began to dread the coming bereaved night. But at least I had a simple contract to fulfil – to return to Phoebe by nightfall.

  With Paltinglass’s priestly best wishes, Felix, Long and I rose to the cushioned seat of the phaeton. Climbing the hill a mile out of town, I stood in my seat to reach for a cap beneath it, and was bent over in a very insecure posture when the wheels hit a large stone. I felt Felix clutch at my coat tails, but he could not stop me pitching head first from the vehicle onto the track. The disturbance caused the horses to bolt, and Long passed the reins to Felix and jumped down to run beside them and try to catch hold of their heads. But he could not manage it. With Felix their hostage, the horses left the track and galloped uphill, reduced to their untamed instincts, and making for a wooded spur to the right.

  Sitting up in the dust, shaking my head, I saw with some dread that Felix was rising to abandon the vehicle. I wanted him to remain amongst the upholstered cushions rather than take that risk. But with the cushions spewing forth around him, he jumped to the ground and landed with grace. The phaeton disappeared over the rise, and vanished towards its ruination.

  My head was ringing from the fall. Long limped, but Felix ran to us. ‘I undertook to be with Mrs Bettany by dark,’ I told Long.

  The phaeton, if still intact, might be miles off by the time we found it. But we were a mile from the new public house along the track, Long reminded me, and suggested the three of us walk there. In the tap room were a few of Treloar’s stockmen, who grew reverently silent as we entered. So they had heard the news of George. I asked the innkeeper, by rumour a former London burglar, whether there might be someone there who could loan me a horse. ‘Now you mention that,’ he told me, ‘we’ve Mr ’arrington from Yass.’

  I remembered the name; the man was a station agent I had met once in Barley’s company in Sydney. He was fetched from the parlour and offered me his black mare, asking only that one of my men return the horse the next day.

  I was strangely more consoled by the kindnesses of these strangers, the stockmen, the innkeeper, Harrington, than I had been by the funeral rite from The Book of Common Prayer, and gained hope again for Phoebe. I gave Felix and Long a sovereign to buy them dinner and, if necessary, accommodation, and told them I would send horses for them in the morning. They were to find the phaeton or its wreckage and retrieve or, if necessary, shoot the horses. Then I rode off. Four miles along the road, as I mounted the side of a stony hill, another sign of hope. I saw off to the right my carriage and its two horses, their reins caught in the front wheel and a broken trace conveniently preventing forward progress. The dashboard was shattered and sundry cushions could be seen strewn about the hillside, but Long would have little trouble finding and repairing it tomorrow.

  There was still plenty of light as I splashed on the good mare across the ford of the Murrumbidgee. As I came into the front parlour, Bernard was feeding logs to the fire. She read me with dark eyes. ‘God bless you, Mr Bettany,’ she said outright, in that strange way of hers, blunt yet elegant. ‘Your wife has been asking.’

  I went in with renewed hope to Phoebe. But it seemed that only her eyes had any capacity for movement, and she was already, I hated to see, a wraith. A mocking God had preserved my phaeton but would not preserve my wife. All that had happened that afternoon had been a series of divine teases, not gracious omens of hope.

  I held Phoebe’s hand. ‘George is at rest,’ I said, and with a sudden surge of belief which would have done honour to Mr Paltinglass. ‘He would greet you in paradise, but he wishes you should live and remember him.’

  She tried to speak through that pernicious veil which was crimping all her powers of voice and breath. ‘But he is lying in that cold place,’ she whispered.

  All belief fled. ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘He has ascended.’

  After preparing a meal for which I lacked appetite, Bernard intended to be Phoebe’s night nurse again. The contrast between this noble office, and the more intimate one my base mind had previously devised for her, chastened me. I thought of my father and Stoicism. What had Father quoted to me before I rode off from Simon’s? Some rubbish of Epictetus. ‘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.’ Want the death of your son, and your life will go well! Want your wife to choke, and your life will go well!

  That night I set myself wakefully, on top of the covers, wrapped in a rug, at Phoebe’s side. I watched her by lamplight, how fine-featured she was even in this extremity of disease. I allowed myself to sleep for no longer than ten minutes at a time. Thus, I was awake at two o’clock in the morning when, by the stump of candle that was left, I saw her straining to sit. Her breathing was strangled. ‘George has come back anyhow,’ she told me.

  I denied it, but her face was full of delirious certainty. ‘I knew the Moth people would not keep him. They are too kindly.’ She began to choke, and as I tried to restrain her, and make her rest against my shoulder, a convulsion set in, arching her body. Then all the tension of the disease left her in a second. I was stupid enough to think her better.

  Bernard removed the shawls and nightdress from my wife’s tiny shell. I saw with unspeakable regret and remorse the breasts which had fed George, the stomach which had borne him, that girlish abdomen, and the mound of hair marking her womanhood, her motherhood.

  ‘I’ll look after the washing and laying out, Mr Bettany,’ said Bernard. ‘You should go outside and take some brandy.’

  Through tears I said, ‘You have been very good to us, Bernard. You might have caught the disease yourself.’

  ‘It is an honour to serve a noble woman.’ Bernard told me. ‘It is for the crimes of others she has been punished.’

  I went to the parlour and obeyed Bernard by pouring some brandy. As I drank I was sharply aware that in the next room the body of my wife, whom I had vowed to cherish unto death, was receiving its last mercies from the woman I had wantonly desired.

  I was not fit to travel after the Reverend Paltinglass had committed Phoebe’s coffin, itself remarkably small, lik
e a young girl’s, to the same alluvial pit in the churchyard at Cooma Creek as George’s. I wrote to Mrs Finlay with the grievous news, but there was hardly time for her to have received the letter. We had not taken the chance of any more phaeton accidents and lashed the coffin, with Phoebe’s wraithlike, stiffened body within it, to the tray of the bullock wagon. Alladair, who bravely attended the funeral despite the risk that I might begin ranting, unjustly or otherwise, at him, took me back to the Paltinglass manse as if I were an elderly person. Good Paltinglass sent his young children to bed early, lest their fresh complexions cause me to rail like Job. Alladair, with the connivance of Mr and Mrs Paltinglass fed me whisky and a dose of some opiate which utterly felled me. I would not later remember who had helped me to the bedroom I occupied that night.

  Riding back to Nugan Ganway the next afternoon with a sombre Felix, I became aware of the unfamiliarity of my own self. It was as if I had met a plausible stranger, someone I did not choose to know better. I was aware of a parallel strangeness in the landscape about me. I did not wish to occupy that landscape. I had become so estranged from the world I had once so coveted. It could no longer provide me with an outer skin. I shook out the reins impatiently.

  In the house that evening, I was aware that Bernard, who had not attended the funeral, had packed away all traces of Phoebe and George in sundry chests. Their ghosts occupied the death room, if at all, in the faint smell of naphtha.

  ‘You may return to your normal pursuits now,’ I told Bernard.

  I could look with the composure of an already disembodied soul at her going to visit Long. Let the living look to their busy, fevered courtships. Though I believe I could see in her a touching intention to keep a vigil here. But from my point of view, the angle of a man who had resolved to put an end to all his lust, grief and treachery, to cast himself down upon the mercy of the deity, her delicacy was meaningless.

  With a strange energy and appetite, however, I ate the supper she prepared. I thought of my father, a man like myself far removed from life’s normal tide. I pulled down my copy of the four books of Horace’s odes. The best I could find – a classic Stoic credo – was in Book Three: ‘Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit …’ ‘The more a man deprives himself of, the more the gods will give him: naked I flee from the wealthy to seek a place amongst the unselfish …’ The most unselfish were the dead. And since grief was everywhere, virtue beyond me, vice inevitable, I began to think how correct it might be to go to greet both George and Phoebe in the shades. Bernard might wash and settle my body, a service of sisterhood rather than the coarser yet sublimer contacts I had imagined. Honest Long would conduct it to a dismayed but forgiving Paltinglass.

  And yet liquor and sleep ambushed me, and I was disgusted to wake to a further dawn, and stagger into the parlour to encounter a solicitous Bernard. I was sure I would not so betray myself the coming night. I went outside and made a good play-act of discussing the day’s order of work with Long. I wanted Long to think: he’s taking it bravely. Yet that evening again I took drink and sleep overcame me and made a fool of my intentions. I knew now that within me lay yet another oaf than the one who had desired Bernard even as Phoebe sickened. This oaf cared not for grief. He sought merely to breathe and go through his bland animal functions.

  Another morning saw me in the yard, squinting and swallowing bile, and conferring again with respectful Long. I must not drink early in the day – so I told myself. Yet how could the time be tolerated without the blunting influence of rum? Again I was stupefied, and prostrated by noon, but at least I woke at dusk with a head so gravid that my neck felt inadequate to the task of raising it. Since the column of my bones could no longer sustain me, and all was ache, I was calmly set to act during the coming dark hours. I needed of course to eat a meal – I did not want Bernard running out to tell Long I had refused to eat. I did not want her large-eyed concern. And I took rum even then to stoke in me that sense of distance from the universe of normal feeling. There would not be enough time tonight for me to consume it in those quantities which might steal away my purpose.

  The time came. Bernard was occupied in the kitchen. I went to the trouble of collecting a jacket before stepping out of the door. No nostalgic looks back at this or that surface. I wanted to be quit of all. I did not mind that I might be seen by some transcendent critic as a ridiculous figure in a bad play: I would not be here to bear the sneers of that. The ground was cold and wet beneath my feet. There would be a frost by the morning; it was palpable that the night ached for a conclusion – a gale of snow, a death. I would do my best to satisfy the requirements of the darkness.

  Careless of damage to my fingers, I unknotted a near-frozen length of rope from the wool press, cursing its obduracy. Taking it inside the woolshed, to the best-constructed part of Nugan Ganway, where wool which had clothed Europe had been shorn and sorted and pressed, I could barely see the red beefwood rafters. I fetched a bench from the annex where the men ate during shearing, hauled the rope over the dimly seen roof beam and knotted it, testing it for a moment with my weight by lifting my feet off the chair. Then, summoning up the image of George and weeping for him, I made a hefty knot and placed the rope about my neck. As I waited on the bench a while, delayed by the interesting nature of my last second, I evoked both George’s face and Phoebe’s. The dead were palpable in every corner and shadow. I would meet in Hades earthy, sage Horace. I would encounter Phoebe to whom, as with God, amends must be made. I would encounter too the phantom man my son never grew to be, and greet with least shame the mother of Felix, whose killers I had tried to punish. The murdered Catherine would bully, on my behalf, a capricious Deity, and the absconders would delight to see me brought to my extreme moment by the same hand which had helped finish them.

  I enjoyed these few moments of assessment but despised delay and prevarication in the condemned. I stepped off the bench.

  In darkness I engaged a final hope that the rope was adequate to send me to oblivion. And indeed, as the base fell out of the earth beneath my feet, I felt gravity and the noose connive to produce an enormous blow to the right side of my neck, below my ear, nearly adequate to sever the head from its shoulders.

  And yet it was not adequate to bear my senses away, and all was consumed by the sensation of choking and of futilely seeking solidity, desiring it all at once as nothing had ever been desired, neither woman nor property nor wealth. I told myself that I had now taken adequate punishment, and already knew hell, and was entitled to draw back. For the blackness of the woolshed flashed with light and burned and burned in great gusts of airlessness. The earth was my hard spouse and would not return to me now that I had abandoned it. My father walked in from the sheep yards and added the pages of his book to the flames of my agony. And I saw, as a concrete figure stepping towards me, in a rush, howling, Death in dark weeds, scythe in hand, eager to close the transaction. The dullest, most gelid moonlight delineated the blade as it sliced at my head. I fell, and there was solid ground again, the ground, I supposed, of my interment. A hand worked at my hangman’s knot, and lost air, as painful as lost limbs, ached into my body.

  ‘Mr Bettany,’ said the reaper in Bernard’s voice, ‘whatever are you at for sweet God’s sake?’

  The reason Death had Bernard’s voice was that I had misidentified. The one figure there was simply Bernard, straddling me with her thighs, shaking the air back into me. I felt great strength in her long hands.

  ‘Do you think it can be as easy as that, do you?’ she asked me, and so drew her right fist back and smashed it against my jaw. The woolshed filled up with light again, but I thought in a powerful, instant, fuddled way, ‘This woman may well teach me to accommodate myself in the world again.’

  Reborn of her, I found myself engorged with love of the living, and dragged her towards me, a huge endeavour towards which she seemed to add her own strength. Soon I who had had no air was howling and aching into her. Though within days of my wife’s burial, all this did not have the cast of be
trayal. Rather, of triumph, and a necessary rite of resuscitation.

  I let myself be led back to the homestead again. She opened the door for me and let me in. By the light of two lamps and of the low fire at the hearth she looked directly at me. ‘Look what you have brought us to, you poor fellow!’ She sat me down, then went away to get tea and make some embrocation with both of which she returned. With the bowl of embrocation she began to wash the rope burn on the side of my neck. When in plain, brute need I reached for her waist, she pulled herself clear. ‘No,’ she warned me. ‘No.’

  In the subsequent days, I spent most of my time on my own in my desolated homestead, but attended by a severe Bernard. Suspended exactly between the living and the dead, I was suffused by an aura of azure sensual delight, shot through with a yellow sulphur of doom. I waited in a soporific daze for her to return to me and give me ease. I knew it would happen. My grief for Phoebe and George had begun to take on the colours of consolation as I waited. I waited stoically. In the face of hell, I was ecstatically stoic, grief-stricken and agape with wonderment at the one time. I drank and stumbled out for brief conversations with Long, none of which I could remember, all of them more meaningless chat about out-stations and stock.

  On the second night I appealed to Bernard as she brought me food I was too feverish to contemplate. I appealed to her, and she said, ‘I would be most evil.’

  ‘If it was not evil when you scythed me down, why is it evil now?’ I said.

  ‘Dear God, the warmth of your poor wife’s body has not yet left the deathbed!’

  But I persisted. ‘If it will not be wrong in a year, why – viewed from the standpoint of eternity – is it wrong now?’

  She yielded at last. I did not know, I did not care, as I subsisted on Bernard’s ivory lineaments, whether she had told Long and the stockmen about my attempt to jump into the pit. I was not, however, without shame, but was prepared to let it cohabit the house with me, as one might in an extremity share a cave with a large dangerous beast. And everything was two-edged with her, was at the one time guilt and redemption. Yet by throwing an arm about her body and drawing her close I could in the unity of that embrace reduce the world to one sharp, tolerable edge, sustained from the opening kiss into other intimacies of touch, into a fury of feeling and reaching. Then, as I gasped, all fell back again to two-edgedness. And of course at that moment I did not know for whose sake I should feel more ashamed. For Phoebe’s and George’s? For Long’s? For Bernard’s? For the sake of the steadfast condemned man I had been a few nights before?