Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Why did Long not deliver the blow? Surely he did not believe there was any value in O’Dallow’s drunken version of our lives? It was, in the end, merciful Clancy who laid down his fiddle, knowing it would not soon be needed, that the music was for now at its close, and picked up from the side of a stove used to boil tar in shearing-time a lump of wood. Crossing to the civil war, he brought it down behind O’Dallow’s ear. The bridegroom’s eyes rolled, his legs gave way slowly, but he did not fully collapse, for his dutiful wife held him up while calling Clancy a bloody pig and a foul bugger. Long cried, the most authoritative utterance he had made in the whole dispute, ‘The wedding party is over now. God bless all souls here. All you have heard is talking drink.’

  Full of more terror than fury I ran to the homestead before my emerging servants could manage to sight me. Entering my house, I heard Aldread’s sharp cough in her bedroom. A murderous felon occupied Phoebe’s room and poisoned that air. How could I have permitted that? But by a turned-down lamp light, how beautiful Bernard slept at the hearth, in front of a dwindling fire. A homely shawl sat on her shoulders. It would have suited my evil mood better had they been both together in there, had I heard Aldread’s vulgar laughter, a woman whose girlish levity and well-ordered features were very likely what had saved her from the fall from the scaffold.

  I made for the decanter of brandy. Let her sleep a moment longer, while I considered the other question O’Dallow had raised. Dying, and in Gaelic, the absconder had pleaded innocence. Well, a cynic might say, you would expect him to. Long had said both, ‘It was the very stroke of mercy,’ and, ‘She is no man’s woman, and never will be.’ He had made these claims with the equal force of a man for whom there’s no profit in admitting half the truth and shading out the rest. I took my brandy to the fire and sat down facing the embers. She did not stir. ‘What a pair we are,’ I murmured. And then, in thorough misery, I fell asleep.

  When I woke, she was leaning above me. I gave her a weary caress. What else was to be done when we had defied heaven? I told her to go to bed and I would follow. She obeyed, and as she entered George’s room, I heard a wide-awake cough from Aldread. I rid myself of the cup of brandy which had been sitting slack in my hand, and went to the door of the room now part-way converted from Phoebe’s to Aldread’s. Instincts of proprietorship, doubt and grief urged me to open the door and enter.

  I found Aldread propped up by pillows, wide-eyed as if expecting me. By the light of her stub of candle, her brow looked unearthly pale beneath her fair hair and mob cap, and her cheeks as red as if rouged.

  ‘I heard a riot out there, Mr Bettany,’ she told me. ‘I hope no one was hurt.’

  I could not help a kind of sharp laughter.

  ‘Isn’t that a peculiar concern from a woman who murdered her husband?’

  She looked briefly but without confusion towards the dark ceiling. In summer, brown snakes would sometimes penetrate the roofing and fall on the occupants, and perhaps she was invoking snakes now.

  ‘It was a peculiar concern which caused me to take his life, Mr Bettany, as I told the jury. It was not simply myself who suffered his bruises and his outrages, but other women, though I do not expect you to believe that …’

  Indeed, I pretended to be a sceptic.

  ‘So you are at one with the judges,’ she told me.

  ‘If I were a better judge, you would perhaps not be here.’

  ‘I must say then that I bless you for not being so good a judge,’ she said, with a smile some might have thought disarming.

  ‘There is a story that I am so bad a judge that you are more than a friend to Bernard.’

  I waited while Aldread’s breath rasped away in my departed wife’s room.

  ‘I have been a sister,’ she said at last. ‘Do you expect less when women who have never committed any crime but one are hurled together into the floating pit? But what have you got to fear, Mr Bettany? I am dying, and dear Sarah loves you for your honest soul.’

  I looked at her by the dim light, not knowing whether to damn or thank her. For even now there was a chuckle in her.

  ‘Is nothing ever serious to you, Aldread?’ I asked.

  She got out of her bed and stood by it. I could see her two luminous feet on the earth floor.

  ‘By God, Mr Bettany, everything is so serious that I have to laugh. But don’t misjudge that – it is merely the hindquarters of wailing and tears.’ She spat into the palm of her hand, and I saw that it was largely blood. ‘I swear by this that you have nothing to fear from me. Sarah loves your decent soul and that is that. I am about to drop into eternity, so if you envy me as some rival, God help you. If you look at me as someone crooked and perverse, I ask you what is more perverse than marrying a young woman when you are an old man, as my husband was, and wanting not her alone but her sister of fourteen as well! Prussic acid was in my hand a minister of a just God. I shall not cease to love Sarah while there is breath. But I who will go to God with a mouthful of blood tell you again, if you fear me you are a pitiable creature, and if you mistrust Sarah you have a mean spirit. Now send me to the magistrate, and get me flogged!’

  And she began to compose herself, as if to take to her bed again.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, and leaned against a wall.

  The merciless Aldread, though hard put for breath, had not finished haranguing me. ‘If I have been too forceful in my utterance. I beg your pardon, Mr Bettany.’

  Of course she did not sound as if she begged anyone’s pardon, and why should she, for she did seem, as she justly claimed, close to an end.

  And yet I felt that it was utterly true what Long had said, and that it would hang over my life like a banner. ‘She is no man’s woman, and never will be.’

  I was aware of Aldread’s eyes on me. The consumptive woman seemed to know everything, the doubled over and twisted and complicated history of my own clan not least. Or if she did not know it, she assumed it, and refused to accept my right to make complaints or fuss.

  I was left lamely to say, ‘I hope you’re telling me the truth, Aldread, for I tell you I’ve had enough grief for one lifetime.’

  She took a damp cloth and washed the blood off her hand and lips. I realised that it was time to go.

  AT MID-MORNING, PRIM SIGHTED THE refugee camps of Alingaz 1, 2, and 3. They ascended the slopes of three distinct wadis on the flanks of a red-grey mountain named Jabal Erbab. At the point from which the camp could be seen, Erwit negotiated with caution the steep oil-slicked highway, past a blighted area where oil trucks dumped the dregs of their cargoes before descending to Port Sudan to reload. The rubbled earth, unsoftened by any vegetation, fell away awesomely to one side. Prim, maintaining her composure by concentrating on the high ground, thought the camps were, in their way, a tribute to military intent: people had been relocated here, eight hundred miles from their home ground, so that the Sudanese army could enjoy a clear field of operations at Nuba Hills.

  They had been joined also and voluntarily by families of Beja nomads, who had a thousand years history here in the Red Sea Hills, but who had been driven in by the same factors which kept close to the road the Shukriyah they met the night before: uncertain seasons, the failure of ancestral wells, the increasing aridity of already dry hills, an acquired dependence on pumped water, and on Western, as well as traditional, medicine.

  Even people from as far away as Darfur were said to be have come here, moved on from camps near Khartoum. They too were camped in their separate community, in a gully on gritty south-facing slopes, not far from the abandoned Port Sudan railway line. In its swathes of hessian, the entire refugee settlement might in a happier republic have passed for a post-modernist artistic gesture – desert hills say, in the Mojave Desert, or to the west of Alice Springs, wrapped as a statement by Cristo.

  The Hessiantown clinic, a series of connected tents supplied by a number of NGOs, was located at the mouth of a valley in Alingaz 1. Around and above it, the shanties of the first 16 000 or so relocated Nu
ba rose. This part of the camp had been created so quickly, around a few old wells, that the normal blue UN plastic or well-ventilated tents of refugee camps were not in evidence. Adi Hamit, the Austfam-supported camp in Darfur, was a sophisticated city compared to this.

  The clinic was run by a robust Red Crescent-supplied Egyptian nurse named Nuara, who had already expressed by letter her willingness to help administer Sherif’s health survey. She was hopeful, she told Sherif, that a survey from such an eminent source might lead to more assistance – further nurses, midwives or Trained Birth Assistants, as the Ministry of Health called them. The team which would scour Alingaz 1 and delineate its sadnesses, its exiled skills, its crying needs would consist of Sherif as boss, Prim representing Austfam, the reliable Erwit, Nuara, two nurses Sherif had used for other surveys and a man who was being sent from the Ministry of Health, who might prove helpful or obstructive.

  It had been arranged that Prim and the two nurses would stay at the clinic tent. After spending some time talking with Nuara, Prim and Sherif walked a little way up the valley to the only permanent structure in Hessiantown, the house of Hanif el Suq, the official of the Sudanese Commission of Refugees. Erwit had already parked the Austfam truck outside a vast, wire-fenced food depot within which the house stood. Inside the enormous compound, the rations of thousands lay beneath canvas tarpaulins.

  Hanif el Suq’s correspondence with Prim had been clipped: ‘Please, Miss Bettany, ensure that you let me know in good time the date of your visit, since my work is extremely mapped out for me here, and seven days weekly.’ But the man Sherif and Prim met, sitting in the dwindling shade on the north side of his two-room residence, was a pleasant-featured, stout, vivacious fellow in neat, sweat-stained khaki. Prim could see a well-made bed against the east of his house, where it would get afternoon shade.

  Hanif stood up from the little anodised folding table at which he had been drinking tea. Simultaneously, by an open fire some yards to his right, a beautiful Nuba servant woman looked up darkly from beneath a white shawl, and then went back to stirring the pasta which was to be his midday meal. A large and unopened can of tuna sat on a red stone near the fire. Prim thought, where there is food, a woman can be bought with it. Hanif might be a man of honour. But the presence of food in a hungry landscape was a great corruptor.

  Hanif called to have chairs brought from the house, and a slight Nuba boy with shaven head – probably the woman’s son – appeared with two chairs. Soon Prim and Sherif were sitting and drinking more sweet chai, in one of the hottest noons of the year.

  ‘So you are here to make a survey of our Alingaz?’ Hanif asked, happy to show off his English.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It was built from nothing, you know. One day hills, a few camels, a goat. The next – phew! Hundreds of trucks and thousands of the Nuba.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sherif. ‘We understand. There are special problems.’

  ‘These,’ confided Hanif, leaning forward, ‘these are very backward people. They are like children.’

  ‘We might all be like children,’ said Sherif, with an edge Prim heard and Hanif perceived, ‘if we were ripped out of our villages on an hour’s notice to be taken a thousand miles away.’

  That concluded, the genial Hanif saw, one topic of conversation. ‘Do you like rap music?’ he asked, his eyes glittering. He shouted a command towards the house and soon the high-octane thud of a rap band could be heard, and the emphatic voice of a rapper.

  I went to the store

  and the man said pay,

  and I said I’ll pay

  another day

  ’Cause you poison the black man

  with all you sell,

  you send the babies

  to additive hell,

  and you charge top dollar

  to fry our brain

  and you grab our dollars

  for the same again.

  Well, listen, I’m here

  to collect my dues,

  put in a little lead

  to alter your views

  and you’ll see your body

  on the evening news!’

  Hanif’s smile broadened, delighted at this plaint for black justice. He was sure it would win Sherif back. Sherif raised his eyebrows at Prim, but his innate Sudanese courtesy restrained him from saying anything.

  When the track ended, Hanif hooted, raised his boots off the ground and slapped both knees. ‘You must join me for lunch, sir and madam,’ he said. The Nuba woman set enamel plates on the little folding table, and brought a mixture of spaghetti and tuna.

  During the meal Sherif gave Hanif an Arabic copy of the questionnaire and explained that the process would be based on random cluster sampling, told the best method given that the residences of this hessian city were not numbered. It involved, he told the not entirely interested Hanif, the survey team walking to the middle of the camp with one of the camp leaders, to any spot he might nominate, and from there, facing east, selecting a house, then going to the next, and the next, and continuing thus for thirty or so interviews. Then the team would move to a new location, face east, and began again. The aim was to achieve a ten per cent survey of all houses in Alingaz 1, and produce some 322 family interviews out of a camp population of 3220 households.

  Shovelling in his spaghetti, Hanif gave sceptical little snorts. ‘And I can just hear them all,’ he said. ‘ “The evil Hanif el Suq doesn’t feed us enough!” They are lucky, lucky people, but like all to whom something is given, they are still hungry, hungry.’

  ‘The matter of food rationing is not amongst the fifty-two questions we shall ask,’ said Sherif, though with a glint of professional annoyance in his eye. In his peevishness, he might well have said, ‘We don’t need to ask questions about officials of the Commission of Refugees. We know enough about them already.’

  ‘You know,’ Hanif told Prim, anxious now about Sherif’s coldness, and whether it was a threat to him, ‘these Nuba people, they are rebels. Both the Christians and the Muslims, just as much as each other. So they must be moved here, far from home. But here the sanitation is not good and the water is not good, and sometimes it has stopped running and needs to be brought in by truck until the new well is dug.’

  Sherif said, ‘You must tell the man from the Ministry of Health.’

  And there was the point, Prim thought. Sherif expected obstruction. He expected more obstruction because he was Sudanese, and perhaps because he had published. The uncomfortable testiness, which had been brought to the surface by the camel massacre on the Port Sudan highway, revived in him very easily. There might have been journeys once when a man like Hanif would have amused him. But this was not one of them.

  Hanif blinked, and to clear the air, Prim asked him where he was from. He immediately sat up and beamed. ‘I am a Kassala boy,’ he boasted. ‘A little to the south of Kassala. Is that right … to the south?’ He was asking for linguistic not geographic reassurance. He came from grass scrub country then, not far from the Eritrean border. ‘It is beautiful,’ he said. ‘It is green, and it has the mountains, better mountains than these. Like fingers in the air.’ His eyes were full of nostalgia, and perhaps the hope of a better posting.

  In the early afternoon, the heat was murderous, though the day was still and empty of the threat of blowing grit. It was simple justice, Prim thought as Sherif walked her down to Nuara’s clinic, that if the timing of the rains were dislocated, so too should be the timing of sandstorms.

  On this stroll, there was time, before a stupefied afternoon retreat from the sun, for Prim to chat with Sherif, but he proved uncommunicative.

  ‘What is it?’ Prim asked. With each syllable she felt a weight of hot air on her tongue.

  ‘Oh, it’s that Hanif fool,’ he said. ‘He thinks he’s such a rocket scientist. And we don’t know what this joker from the ministry will seek.’

  ‘We’ll get on top of him,’ she promised.

  ‘Maybe I’m getting old. But I think: wha
t is the point of understanding the processes of health in a refugee camp, if the refugee camps go on multiplying? If in number they outrun the very strategies?’

  ‘It will not seem futile once we start,’ she assured him. ‘Once we meet with the camp committee and see their faces. You’ll be all right once you’re not working in a vacuum.’

  That evening, Prim manoeuvred Nuara to invite Sherif for a meal of rice and flat bread, so that he did not have to eat with Hanif. But the meal was brief, and Sherif soon went back to his billet at Hanif’s depot. Black cloth pulled over her head, Nuara went forth on some visit, striding out confidently in sandals. Alone, Prim lit her so-called blizzard candle and picked up her current novel. It was a book Dimp had sent her, promising it would explain something about Dimp’s own situation. It had won prizes. It was skilful. Prim could see why Dimp should be captivated by a tale which reproduced the anguish and desperation of divorce. Yet the novel, which concerned the break-up of a marriage between a painter and a television producer who lived in London, annoyed and fascinated Prim in exactly the same way Dimp annoyed and fascinated her. Relieved of the imminence of physical death, sure of their daily bread, people turned to the death of love and friendship and endowed them with the weight of mortality, and equated the omens of such failures with a portentousness which in the Sudan applied to failures of rains, crops, and the deaths of children. Both the chief characters were so clamant in their expectation of happiness that they made a grating contrast with the stoic politeness of the Nuba women Prim had seen earlier in the evening, cooking by open fires. To the clients of Austfam, happiness began when water flowed, when the pannikin filled with sorghum, or when fever released its hand on a child. The griefs of the Hampstead couple in the novel were far too pastel and decorative for the absolute, ravenous latitude Prim occupied.

  Impatience eventually put her to sleep. On the edge of unconsciousness, she wondered if Sherif might break the dormitory rules and visit her during the night. But Nuara was a formidable housemistress, and a reluctance seemed to have set in Sherif. She felt that his hostility for Hanif was, in part, a hostility for her silliness over the camels and the truck driver. In a marriage of souls, one partner could never predict what would weigh most with the other.