Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘I shall again talk to my tame policeman.’ The professor had a former student who was a police captain. ‘Wait with my wife, would you?’ said the professor, and went out for his car keys. In the midst of his own anguish, he was going off to talk about Sherif. Perhaps it was a welcome distraction.

  ‘Does your husband have any vices at all?’ Prim asked Mrs el Rahzi after the professor left.

  ‘Stubbornness,’ said Mrs el Rahzi, ‘but that means he is stubbornly faithful too. We could all make do with a little less of his determination. Oh to be one of those families who know how to keep a low profile! That’s the gift we should try to give all our children!’

  ‘Safi won’t be easily tyrannised by NCOs.’

  Mrs el Rahzi’s eyes filled with tears again. ‘As long as that does not annoy them,’ she said.

  The professor was gone two hours, a period of time Prim and Mrs el Rahzi filled up by reiterating their chief concerns for their menfolk. At last the professor was back home, frowning.

  ‘All I could find out is that he’s in a house of detention. I’m sure my friend the captain doesn’t know where. The way that system is run, it’s hard to know. But I’d guess he’s here in Khartoum. Why would they take him further? You take a criminal back to stand trial in the place the crime was committed. But this is not a crime. This is arrest on the basis of emergency powers. He has no charges to answer, except the charge of being himself.’

  ‘El Dhouma put me in my place for using the term “ghost house”,’ said Prim, and began to cry in her powerlessness.

  ‘Don’t distress yourself, dear Prim,’ said the professor. ‘Why would they need to lay a hand on him?’

  As well as her confusion, Prim was engorged with a fury which, for Sherif’s sake, she must, by the second, minute and hour, swallow.

  ‘Do you happen to know where any of these houses of detention are located?’ Prim asked. She did not herself want to use the term “ghost house” any more. It was a description which hung heavy not only on the oppressors but on the victims too.

  The professor looked at his wife. ‘It doesn’t serve any purpose knowing that.’

  ‘But do you know?’

  ‘There appears to be one in the old Khartoum City Bank building.’

  ‘Right in the middle of town, near St James Circuit?’

  It was barely a mile south-east of where they sat.

  ‘Yes. The bank was bought by someone bigger and it moved out and … You notice the windows have been whitewashed, the ones facing the street. The back windows have been wired over. It’s unlikely he’s there. But that’s the point. No one knows. A fellow can’t be extricated from any one ghost house by due process.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Prim. ‘What a system!’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ said Khalda. ‘The totalitarian imagination is so fertile in absurdity.’

  ‘Any other places?’ Prim asked the professor.

  ‘There’s a boarded-up restaurant in North Khartoum,’ said the professor. ‘I forget its name though. And that’s just a rumour.’

  ‘Where’s Connie Everdale when we need her?’ Prim asked. ‘If we could get her to fly up here and put Safi and Sherif aboard, she’d have them in Kenya in three hours.’

  She saw the el Rahzis exchange glances, as if she had blundered upon a stratagem they had also thought of for Safi. An impulse of caution made her step back from pursuing that idea. But if it could be arranged, and if Sherif could be found, what a dazzling moment for them to ascend to neutral heavens under the care of Connie.

  ‘I’ll report Sherif’s name to Amnesty International,’ said Prim.

  ‘A reasonable thing to do,’ said the professor. ‘Though you should perhaps wait a couple of days yet. Amnesty are not enthusiastic about people who have just recently vanished, and might be let go tomorrow. And … their lists of missing are so crowded. I don’t want to dampen your hopes, Primrose, but they will present his name to the government, and the government will say they don’t know where he is, he is not on the records. That’s what ghost houses are designed for. Deniability.’

  The concept that Sherif’s location and existence might be indefinitely denied panicked Prim. She rose. ‘Look, forgive me, but I must go. I have to talk to Helene Codderby.’

  ‘You are understandably enraged with us because we are Sudanese,’ said Mrs el Rahzi, a tear breaking on the lower lid of one of her eyes.

  ‘I will never be angry with you,’ said Prim. ‘You are two of the most noble souls I have ever met.’

  She knew she should stay and comfort Khalda, but there was no time if she was to get to Helene’s before the curfew.

  Since Stoner’s death, Helene Codderby had got, if anything, thinner. She had taken on a stoop too, and her old air of citizen-of-the-Sudan had vanished. She had almost become tentative, though her reports for the BBC African news still read well.

  It happened there were four ghost houses she knew of in Khartoum alone. One was in the old Khartoum City Bank building – the professor had been right about that. Another was located in the Fashoda Restaurant in North Khartoum. There a number of amplifiers projected music into the street, so that the place seemed like a dance club. There was another house on the way to the airport in the New Extension, and a fourth on the northern edge of Omdurman. ‘Not counting el Kober prison, which has its own interrogation centre.’

  ‘Can we find out which one a particular person is held in?’

  ‘No. They even move them around. It’s a system to confuse any well-meaning inquiries.’

  ‘I can’t even contact Amnesty tonight,’ said Prim. ‘They’ll be closed, won’t they?’

  Helene said, ‘Well, there are such a multitude of prisoners the world over, held in violation of their rights, that I read somewhere the London office has to be staffed twenty-four hours. Simply to deal with concerned parties, such as yourself. Would you like to use my telephone? I know the press man there. I have his number.’

  Prim took the number and raced home before the curfew. As she drove, she began to curse herself for not accepting Helene’s offer of her telephone. Blows might be landed on Sherif as she used up time on the road. She rushed into her office and called the London number directly. Only a year past she would have had to go through the exchange, where the government would have been able to employ people to listen to sensitive calls. Possibly, even in the awful condition of the Sudan, they could still afford it, though she suspected with direct dialling it might be more technologically difficult.

  She got on to the duty press officer at Amnesty. It was a woman with a well-bred voice who was still new enough to treat incoming calls without boredom. Prim explained how her friend had evaporated, had not appeared on any police or court records. It had been informally confirmed that he had been arrested.

  Prim must keep in contact, said the sympathetic woman. If by the end of the weekend Dr Sherif Taha had not reappeared, they would make an inquiry of the Sudanese government about his whereabouts. ‘I’m sorry we have to wait so long,’ said the woman. ‘But they love making fools of us by releasing those we inquire about prematurely.’

  ‘Give them the name prematurely! Get him released!’

  ‘I can understand how you’d feel like that. But we have to think about what works for the mass of prisoners. So maintain contact, and we’ll act in a few days time.’

  Prim wanted to ask, ‘How many times will he be beaten or shocked with electrodes by then?’ But in a world full of nations in which so-called state security preyed on the citizenry, it was too banal a question which even a woman as newly oppointed as this would have already answered a number of times. Besides, a scheme had descended out of the air and upon Prim, taking her up for once into tolerable air. It was a plan contrary to her own welfare, contrary to the welfare or the standing of Austfam, but she was certain it was good for Sherif.

  ‘Just confirm one thing,’ she asked the press officer. ‘Your research shows that it’s better for the prisoner if
you draw attention to the fact he’s being imprisoned. Isn’t it so? Treatment then generally improves? Because they, the captors I mean, know that we know?’

  ‘That’s right. That’s why we get ordinary people to write letters to governments, demanding the release or fair trial of this or that prisoner.’

  The world must be full of such letters, thought Prim. They must be thicker than snow.

  ‘Then would it help my friend if I brought public attention to what’s happened to him? I mean, he’d be better treated.’

  ‘There’s … gosh, I couldn’t swear to it. There’s no absolute guarantee. Just the same, it’s what we’ve found.’

  ‘Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘But you will keep in touch?’ asked the press officer. ‘You won’t take any action likely to endanger yourself?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Prim said and hung up.

  An impetus had grown in Prim as she had spoken to the press officer in London. Her intentions solid within her, and with the comfort of coming action, Prim did not mind as much the next crazy fax from Dimp. Instead of being oppressed by news of her sister’s extreme acts, she could read about them now almost as if they were gossip. They had already wrought any damage they could. Under the impact of Sherif’s detention, they possessed that degree of remoteness.

  Bren, said Dimp, was gone for the moment, was off to his Chicago office, and in his absence she had decided how the seeding money could be got, decided that she was going to get it, and decided she was bloody well entitled to it.

  Did Prim remember one Binky Enright? Dimp asked. He had a gallery, but he was also once very keen on Dimp. He had no objections when she asked if she could use his number 2 van. ‘Because, you see, I still have the receipts for all the paintings I bought for Bren, and all of these documents, including guarantees of authenticity, carry the measurements of each painting, each Blackman and Williams, the Arthur Boyds, the two Sali Hermans, the huge light-filled Lloyd Rees, the five Sidney Nolans, the two Olsens.’ Already she had a joinery at Woolloomooloo run up packing cases for her, which she collected and stored indoors overnight. The third step in her plan was the most audacious.

  Dimp confessed that like Bettany she was somehow pleased when nature reflected her moral tonality. Thus she was gratified when, driving to Double Bay the next day, she saw a steely sky settle over the city. The harbour might all at once have been a dour loch in Scotland. The stealthy colour of the day was an aid to a stealthy wife. That’s what she fancied anyhow. She knew by instinct Bren had not changed the alarm code at Woolarang, that he didn’t have that particular degree of narrowness; a fellow of limits, but not as paranoid as some. He believed too she might one morning wake, get in her car, come back, punch in the code, make a cup of coffee in the kitchen and wait – reading the Herald and cured of all discontent – for him to get home.

  Not living there any more showed Dimp as soon as she entered that Woolarang was a memorable house. And silent too. For it was the day off for the maid.

  She wrote:

  You remember, you come in through the loggia into a dining room, a bit overpowered by one painting from the Burke and Wills series, and another of the Ern Malley sequence, which Bren – God forgive me! – particularly likes. As a visitor now, I asked myself why I’d done it this way. Why the walls of a room built for egregious pleasure, for epicureanism, should be covered with the anguish of Australia’s explorers and its equally lost venturers: poets? On most days of course the corners of the startled eyes of Burke and Wills – lost and dying in the merciless centre of Australia, poor bastards – weren’t immune from the sparkle of the harbour. But they were today. They looked as if they knew they were about to be purloined and put in a crate. And the figures in the Arthur Boyds – the Aboriginals, brides, World War I diggers – had the fugitive look of children about to be sent to a boarding school from which they doubted Bren would have the will and affection to retrieve them. I spent a busy hour easing the first half-dozen into their crates.

  By lunchtime she had got to the warehouse of another old friend, Tim Huxpeth, whom she’d had had a crush on when he played rugby for Knox. He was now a famed broker of paintings. Dimp told Tim that her husband had business problems and wanted the paintings quickly capitalised. Tim and his staff started removing the first shipment from the back of the van, for he was used to the tale Dimp told him. If someone was going broke and wanted to liquidate paintings without letting the world know, or if a couple were splitting but didn’t want to advertise the fact or have it turn up in the papers, he’d pay cash for paintings and retrieve the outlay and a percentage more through sale to his network of private clients. He liked to deal, but he was also willing to take a bit of a risk. Due to Bren’s delusions about Dimp’s possible return, there had been nothing in the press about the split-up of the D’Arcys. But it might not have stopped Tim if there had been.

  On her second trip to Woolarang, Dimp fetched the insurance documents from the safe – all in her name.

  She made three trips in under four hours, and left Bren all she thought he needed – a Grace Cossington Smith, a Margaret Preston he liked, and one Nolan, the Colin Lanceley – and a note for the maid saying that she had taken the other paintings for reframing. Tim had the works valued within a day. Before Bren returned to find his paintings gone, Dimp had received by express delivery a cheque somewhere in excess of $1 600 000.

  Before you unleash judgement on your poor sister’s head, let me say that this is all I want from the marriage, ever, and I solemnly assure you I’m willing to sign a settlement to that effect. Woolarang itself is worth $8 000 000. So he’s getting off very, very cheaply. I’ve called the lean screenwriter, Hugo Ventriss, and put him on notice to start work for big bickies! All is movement. I know you won’t approve, but necessity is necessity, and Bren will be better for this, not to mention

  Your adoring sister,

  Dimp.

  I refuse to satisfy you with a starchy letter, Prim thought, too preoccupied in any case. Play with legalities if you wish! My love is in a real prison.

  Seeing her sister’s fax on her desk the morning after she had received it, she was ashamed of having read it, and tore it up.

  I VISIT LONG, AND AM MYSELF VISITED

  I drove gratefully and innocently past Cooma Creek without knowing that I was passing Sean Long by. My thoughts were now upon manifesting myself to Bernard as more than a dependent child. In late afternoon I splashed across the Murrumbidgee with the last light on my shoulder, a man whose sorrows had been amended to scale, whose anxieties could be appeased by hope, and whose promise had been retrieved. I saw that Michael O’Dallow, riding a waler bareback and without boots, was playing at annoying some sheep in the pasture below the notched hill which was once more for me the centre of things, the hill both of skulls and of resurrections. He spotted me and raced away to tell Bernard and his father. He would willingly unharness, rub down and stable my team, and I could walk straight into my homestead and repossess its spaces.

  Alerted by Michael, Bernard stood before the house, her hands wrapped up in an apron. O’Dallow and Maggie were also out in the open to welcome me. I got down from the phaeton, grasped Bernard’s arm briefly, and shook hands with O’Dallow. Bernard’s welcome surprised me by being muted even by the standards of her reserved nature. She assessed my face, my rare willingness to be jolly and make happy plans, with a little dispassion.

  ‘You have not heard about Sean?’ she asked.

  ‘Sean?’ I asked. ‘Sean Long?’

  ‘He was arrested here by the police magistrate, Mr Bilson. Eight or so days back. Did you not read the papers, Mr Bettany?’

  I had in a way been too blithe about returning, too wistful about Felix, to read much, though I now remembered that the innkeeper at Bredbo had looked at me a little strangely, as if gauging what I knew. He must have read something of the arrest in the Goulburn Herald.

  ‘What did Bilson say the charges were?’

&nb
sp; ‘Why it was murder,’ said Bernard, distress in her eyes. ‘The killing of Treloar’s overseer. He had given me help, but I could not save him.’

  ‘Sean is in the cells at Cooma Creek,’ O’Dallow called. ‘He awaits trial before a circuit judge. He would admire to see you, Mr Bettany. He would like to know whether you found that young fellow, Felix.’

  I turned and told him earnestly I had not. I had barely found a soul who saw Felix pass. He nodded in a way which was either acceptance or belief, and said in his leaden, reliable voice, ‘You should look Long over, sir. He might have an idea to hang and be done. He is of a peculiar mind, Mr Bettany.’

  It was more than apparent they looked at me to save Long – Bernard, O’Dallow and Tume were all equally awaiting my word. I was aware of harbouring my first secret from Bernard.

  ‘He shall have the best counsel,’ I told them all. It would have to serve.

  Bernard had few questions for me that night. Her attentions to me were if anything more tender, augmented by her concern for Long. Do you notice I am a new man? I wanted to ask her. But was I a new man, now that I was myself in a bewilderment over Long?

  Late the next morning, Police Magistrate Bilson, a wiry little fellow, greeted me in his office in Cooma, in a manner to which I was getting used: sympathy combined with an air of inquiry which bordered on full-blown suspicion.

  ‘The native boy who fled the manse?’ he asked. ‘Did you find him?’

  When I said no, Bilson blinked and said, ‘That is indeed a pity, since he may have witnessed the killing.’

  ‘He was always sensitive to ghosts. The child, seeing a body, may have been put to flight in terror. He may also have had an irrational fear of punishment.’

  ‘Well, he need not have feared that, since your overseer swears the boy did not commit the crime, as convenient as it would be for him to swear the boy did.’