Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Anyhow, I have in my mouth something it will take a lot of the teas of China, and maybe later a bit of gin, to wash out – the taste of having been taken to the mountain top and told precisely why I can’t inherit the cities of the plain! Well, that’s the normal aftermath of a trip to that acidic place.

  I have one more trip in mind. Remember Sir Malik Bettany? Dad talked about him once or twice. A part-Aboriginal part-Tamil descendant of the very Felix in nearly-Sir-Jonathan’s journal. He turns out to be a very rich Tamil in Singapore. Owns import–export, hotels, and a bank! Knighted by Betty Windsor. Not related to us at all of course, unless Phoebe Bettany’s first suspicion is somehow correct and Felix is Jonathan Bettany’s kid. But as Bettany says, the dates are against it. In any case, this story is Sir Malik’s story too. So I might go up there and see if he’d like to divert a few million into a film.

  So I’m not moaning, or maybe I am, but if I don’t moan to you, then to whom?

  Dimp told her sister to be careful on her journeys and reiterated her plea that Prim return to Sydney. She could, she urged, share the rent of the Redfern house.

  Then: ‘As for me, stop worrying. I am where I must be.’

  SARAH BERNARD AS HER OWN WOMAN

  Sarah Bernard was, I felt, now established in Nugan Ganway as the staple of my life. She had not merely saved me from the noose but brought me Lethean forgetfulness. It was in her presence that I could survive the particular, horrifying idea that flesh of my flesh lay under the earth of newly consecrated Cooma, that mother and child lay in an unspeakable union of dust.

  As she understood my sensibility, Bernard rarely uttered Long’s name. Her demeanour towards her former possible husband did not seem at times nearly as guilty as mine towards the memory of Phoebe. It appeared to me in a way to be based on a hard-headed view of the world. May God look after my friend, Long, and heal all wounds, because I can do nothing more. This meant that her friendship with Long was conditional, and her love for my welfare was absolute. How could I not rejoice in such an outcome?

  I had never known such transports as those with which Bernard’s company rewarded me. Her skin to me tasted much more of salt than I think mine did to her, as if she had eaten enough bad Transport Board food to make of her an ocean. I had lost the blue opacity of Phoebe and inherited the deep green, salt turbulence of an honest thief. Her generosity of soul was so heedless, her unquestioning and unamazed discoveries of the limits of my body and spirit so wonderful that even the concept that she, like Long and like my father, had once fallen foul of judges, was one of the enchantments of her presence. Someone had presumed to judge this most noble woman!

  In a lover’s desire to know the beloved utterly, I did once idly, the savour of her skin on my lips, raise the question of her crime. She put the five fingers of her hand to my mouth. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I shall say I was falsely convicted, as does every thief in New South Wales, and you will disbelieve me.’

  ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘You know I cannot afford disbelief in you.’

  But she could not be persuaded. Perhaps she feared that I might in some future and inevitable anger hold it over her. But I felt I could not know enough and would never know half. I might also have been possessed by the knowledge that in my father’s case, we all pretended he had never been condemned and never seen a chain, so that the undischarged friction between his having been a prisoner and his seemingly solid, oblivious life in Van Diemen’s Land went on chaffing and rankling unseen, bearing away in the end the peace of two families, ours and the Batchelors’.

  But whatever my intentions, instantly thereafter I felt in her a strange reluctance towards my uncomprehending caresses. She pulled away from me and suggested we drink tea. The season was still full of occasional coldness, as this evening, and I thought of firing my black tea with rum, for which I had an increasing appetite, while she drank hers reflectively and penitentially, black and without sugar.

  ‘The thing I did not want to be trapped into saying was that I am not a thief,’ she told me then. ‘But you would ask and ask, and so I am forced to say it.’

  ‘I am certain you are not a thief,’ I told her with too much callow enthusiasm. ‘I would not so readily admit that you are not a nurse and an offerer of comfort, for these you are in abundance.’

  ‘No, you are for some reason enchanted,’ she told me, her dark and suspicious eyes on me. It was typical of this period, and of her problem, that she had found no name to call me except ‘you’. She could not call a suicidal fool cut down from the shearing shed rafters ‘sir’. She could not with a straight face call such a desperately joky figure ‘Mr Bettany’. And she could not – across the gulf we had suddenly traversed – call me ‘Jonathan’. ‘You’ it would need to be for some time yet.

  ‘The only convenient thing in New South Wales,’ she told me, ‘is to have committed the crime they accuse you of. Then you are fitted to the place. But the innocent are the misfitted! Nothing they say is believed, and so they are reduced to silence.’

  ‘But, Bernard,’ I said, for I too was a hostage to names. She had been ‘Bernard’ when preparing Phoebe for the grave, ‘Bernard’ when she scythed me down, and remained still ‘Bernard’. When she became known more profoundly she might become ‘Sarah’. The Master and Servant Act would be borne away, the solemn ordinances of the Colonial Secretary’s Department would die of irrelevance, and the pure and Biblical name would assert itself. ‘But Bernard,’ I said, awed by her hints of uncomfortable innocence, ‘assert whatever you like with me. You will never have a more loving audience.’

  ‘Is it love?’ she asked. ‘A child may love whoever feeds it. But that does not make the feeder its mother.’

  ‘You know everything about me,’ I told her. ‘I know nothing about you except that your generous soul and splendid body are the source of my new life. Assert any tale you like and I will devour it like a meal, like manna in the desert!’

  She shook her head. ‘Would you really believe that the daughter of a Manchester merchant could become so bored, so full of infant envy, that she could find the swearing of false oaths a recreation, relief from a dull life?’

  ‘I could believe it. The mysteries of human nature …’

  She was impatient with my platitude and shook her wonderfully sombre head.

  ‘I was a married woman,’ she told me.

  ‘It says so on your papers. But I believe,’ – indeed I had heard it from Phoebe – ‘that your husband is dead.’

  ‘I had the task of a resident housekeeper for a silver merchant named Mr Duncannon. But though I had perforce to live there in Tib Street, my husband Corporal McWhirter, who was a Scot, was permitted to call at Mr Duncannon’s, to visit me.’

  Corporal McWhirter, dead of fever in Jamaica, marched for a second through the room with his ghost of a claim on her.

  ‘We met mainly in the kitchen,’ continued Bernard. But was there a small room beneath the eaves to which this freckled corporal took his dark-eyed, impeccable wife? ‘Mr Duncannon’s fourteen-year-old daughter used to find means to come to the kitchen while McWhirter was there. He was a jovial and even loud sort of man, full of teasing. He could make a cup or a fork disappear up his sleeve, and all watching him would swear these objects had utterly vanished. Young girls liked him. I had liked him. He was the opposite to me. “Long Face” he called me. “Even Long Face is laughing at this one,” he would say. I don’t know why I tell you all this.’

  ‘No, go on,’ I urged. I was desperate for this story.

  She shook her head again. She wondered what was so compelling in what she recounted, and why I had urgency to hear it. ‘Now Mr and Mrs Duncannon belonged to a strict Chapel and their life did not abound in joy or forks which disappeared before your eyes. And it seemed that their daughter, Miss Duncannon, took particular delight in the liveliness of Corporal McWhirter. And he had plenty of stories, tales I had myself already been told but which were renewed for me by Miss Lucy Duncannon’s enjoyment. They c
oncerned such things as what he had heard from other soldiers of the customs of the West Indies, where the dead were believed to rise and speak and steal the ability of movement from the living. They concerned the alligators and burial pyres of India, where McWhirter had served, and the houses and manners of the Dutch in the Cape Colony he had once visited as part of the guard on a ship. This was more colour than was ever admitted into the parlours of the Duncannons, who were decent but believed that all images in books and illustrated papers were a vanity and snare. But McWhirter had been everywhere, even to Nova Scotia.’

  I was again for a moment envious of the much-travelled corporal.

  ‘One day Miss Duncannon entered the kitchen while Corporal McWhirter and I were engaged in the quite normal endearments of married people, an innocent embrace. Since I lived with the Duncannons six days a week, and Corporal McWhirter was not permitted to remain there overnight, Miss Duncannon should not have been surprised to see an exchange of caresses. But I saw that Miss Duncannon was unused to seeing such displays. There was certainly none between her parents, and to the preachers of her Chapel this would have been seen as a flippant embrace or even an evil one.’

  How I cherished and feared her bluntness, but also her occasional elegant phrasing. Like Phoebe she had caught the desire to talk like novels and not like felons. Speaking in the tongue of angels must have brought her some abuse from hard Londoners on her ship.

  ‘So she was jealous, this merchant’s child?’ I asked.

  ‘In her innocence, she thought the kiss was a betrayal. She had believed McWhirter’s teasing of her, and his compliments, had been love. And she could not imagine a more intense connection than a kiss. So it seemed to her an insult to her feelings for the corporal.’

  This assessment of Miss Duncannon was redolent of what my mother-in-law had once said of Phoebe.

  Bernard continued. ‘I knew there would be trouble. It was as if she was the wife and I the seductress, and I thought, “What will she tell her father?”’

  ‘Did she have such power over her austere parent?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps she did not, since it wasn’t to him she took her anger. But she did acquire all the cleverness of a rejected and jealous soul.’

  ‘Oh,’ I uttered, delighted that she again delivered the sort of sentence you got from novels as published in newspapers. My seductress educated by her own strong will and vigorous memory.

  ‘Do you know I am Jewish?’ she asked me then.

  ‘The little nun in Goulburn told me,’ I said. Indeed the fact had added to the sense that I had been engaged in a desperate Old Testament struggle, and was following a pillar of light to guide me out of desert places.

  ‘My father was a tailor to the poor,’ she continued. ‘But he was learned and read to me and sent me to Christian churches. He wanted me to behold what the English believed. I could make my way if I knew that. “Do not be afraid of Christ, because he was Jewish yet these millions of Gentiles honour him!” he said. Now he went to the synagogue in Bootle Street, but he made sure I went to St Ann’s and the Cross Street Chapel which the Duncannons themselves attended. He did not want me to be a Christian but to become learned in their ways so that I did not have the hard life he had even from other Jews. There was a German Jew clothing dealer by the name of Reichman who helped my father have a hard life. My parents had known him since they came to Manchester. My mother had collapsed in his warehouse before she died. I was a seamstress in his repairing shop from the time I was five. All the poor Jews from Poland and Russia bought their clothes from him, or sold them to him, and as they did it he would mock them, crying, “So here they come, I smell them, the Russians and the Poles, the Tsar’s outcasts who know not soap.” Statements of that nature amused him. Even when I was a child this Reichman was as good as blind, but he would feel fabric with his fingers and say, “That is a good one, that is good worsted.” He could tell good cloth even if he could not swear as to who presented it to him.

  ‘My little Miss Duncannon gathered up some of her best church clothing and delivered it to him, and he approved wonderfully of it and gave her a price of perhaps a third of its value, and she signed his receipt with my name, and answered to my name in a voice which, it must be admitted, was not a long way removed from mine, the voice of ordinary Manchester, which Mr Duncannon had brought with him from his childhood on his way to riches. She placed the money in a hole under a commode in my room, and then cried that her clothing was gone. Mr and Mrs Duncannon, who believed in their daughter’s innocence and redemption above their own, called the constables, who were delighted with their cleverness at discovering money and the receipt in my damp room beside the coal hole. It was the sort of room of which a policeman might easily think: the person who lived here must have a grievance.’

  ‘And this chapel girl,’ I asked with a childlike awe, ‘who believes vigorously in hell, would perjure herself?’

  ‘She would also be believed in preference to a daughter of Russian Jews. In any case, girls don’t believe in hell as strongly as they do in revenge,’ said Bernard, and then, ‘You don’t believe this. I can tell you do not believe this as more than a thief’s version. However, I don’t require your belief.’

  I did my utmost to reassure her. She smiled distantly, into a shadowy corner, and said, ‘Women not equipped as I, and shipped as I was shipped on the transport Whisper, died of sorrow and the bloody flux long before they landed.’

  ‘Equipped as you?’ I asked.

  ‘Equipped with that in my blood which makes me expect torment.’

  ‘Do you expect torment from me?’

  Again the smile, as if to an invisible audience, with more history to them than me. ‘No, for in my blood I expect joy in the end.’ I kissed her, but then recklessly set a test, one which she was entitled to resent.

  ‘Your friend Alice Aldread however? She did kill her husband?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Mind you, he had been poisoning himself with arsenic for years. But yes, she speeded the end. She filled his tea with poison.’

  For some reason she began to laugh, and I joined in, and all at once we could not cease.

  To me, as very distant thunder, came from Mrs Finlay a letter, sent from England, with the news that Mr Finlay, distressed at having neglected to become reconciled to his forthright daughter, and burdened with debts which, while not murderous, forced him to an agonising reappraisal of his place in the world, had perished in his sleep. A month after Phoebe’s death, Finlay himself went into the bitter ground. Mrs Finlay was selling the pastoral station they had owned at Yass, had retained the house where I had first met the child Phoebe, but had closed it down while she visited her son George and other relatives in England. Her tone was anguished and consolatory. I was pleased she would have left Goulburn before news of my supposed disgraceful betrayal of Phoebe was likely to have reached her.

  I did not grieve for Finlay, except for my mother-in-law’s sake – though I foresaw that she would make a very successful widow and perhaps be happier in that state than she had been married to her acidic and self-important husband.

  Phoebe had been some six weeks gone when I saw a spring cart crossing the ford of the Murrumbidgee down the long slope from our stockyards. I recognised as the driver of the cart the new Cooma Creek magistrate, Bilson, who had attended George’s funeral. He was with a woman. His wife perhaps? The cart was attended by two border policemen, and a native tracker, his feet bare in the stirrups. It was possible the magistrate had been sent to chastise me on behalf of the colonial gentry, and the possibility gave me a strange, angry interest in his arrival. But as he swung the cart into the yard before the house, he had a grin on his face.

  The woman beside him, whose nose bone and cheek points seemed at first to dominate her face, had eyes which burned with a notable fury of interest. Was this Bernard’s friend, the murderess? I asked myself. It seemed to be. She wore the sort of cap and apron which came from the Female Factory. I signalled Felix
, who was combing a horse in the yard, to come and help the woman down.

  Landed on Nugan Ganway, Alice Aldread leaned fully and breathlessly on young Felix’s forearm. The ghost of what had once been a splendid smile rose to her lips.

  ‘You’re a lovely boy for that,’ she said, and her voice, though not refined, was melodic. Her praise for Felix had no archness but was authentic, and the boy blushed for that reason.

  I presented myself and told her that I was Mr Bettany. And yet I felt a little like an impostor. It was an earlier and redeemable Bettany who had applied for her. The one who claimed her now was a different fellow.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘if I had the physical strength to kneel at your feet and rise again, I would do that. Since I was first in this colony, you are the only one to have treated me to the credit of being sane and able to be decent employed.’

  I told her that bendings of the knee were not necessary on Nugan Ganway, and that her friend Sarah was here. ‘And your wife?’ she asked. I told her Phoebe was dead of diphtheria. She coughed and could merely shake her head in condolence. I instructed Felix to lead her inside.

  Later, when I went indoors myself, I heard Sarah and her laughing from the cookhouse, and thought it a splendid sound. They might go, I thought, into my wife’s room and convince her unreconciled ghost with their gaiety. Then I heard Sarah say, in a way I knew at once she would not say to any man, ‘So I’ve brought you out of Egypt, Alice, as I promised.’

  Bernard, the universal saviour. For she had brought me out of Egypt too, even though she was a rescuer held at a distance from me by layers of statute, of Home and colonial ordinance, and of universal pretensions of respectability. But it was, above all, with someone who had shared the stink, peril and bafflement of the convict deck that she could plainly say, ‘I’ve saved you!’