Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  He came about eight. He said he was surprised to see lamplight from my father’s hut and, going to the window, could see my father nodding, it seemed, by the fire, with Aldread, her head back, on the far side of the hearth. She seemed to have been overcome by a profound weariness. Had they sat there all night? Had they drunk too much? I thanked O’Dallow and went hastily to the door of my father’s hut. My father watched me enter with wide-open unblinking eyes but failed to perceive me. His tongue was fallen into the corner of his mouth behind teeth more crooked and stained than I remembered them. His skin was blue and the features swollen. He had perished in some paroxysm.

  I turned to sleeping Aldread to accuse her, the practised poisoner, of having produced this alteration, as I then thought of it, in him, but of course she was gone too, the same way. There were spilled mugs of tea beside both of them. They had died parallel deaths.

  Unable to breathe, and shaking and gasping, I hastened back to breath’s sole provider, Sarah Bernard. I found her in the outer kitchen with Maggie Tume again, but she saw my face and came straight out to me.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked me, while I felt a childlike gratitude for the instant recognition of shock and yet more grief at this place once so Arcadian and now swept by curses.

  ‘My father and Aldread,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, holding me by the wrist. She looked very pale herself, nearly as blue as Aldread. She led me back to my father’s cottage, and inspected both their faces, murmuring, ‘So she was willing to die with him.’

  ‘She poisoned him,’ I said, thereby railing against the opposite proposition.

  ‘No. If she had, she would still be here. Look at the spilled tea. It was a mutual self-murder. They died together.’ So though she had a farm in Van Diemen’s Land to inherit, she inherited it for, at most, seconds.

  With her deft housekeeper’s hand, Bernard closed Aldread’s eyes, and then my father’s. The death of the Stoic. ‘He was the only man she had regard for,’ she said. ‘I was unkind in my thoughts.’

  Her tears came on and reached a pitch where I thought selfishly, if she cannot be comforted, who will be left to comfort me? I held her. For it was insupportable to think he might have gone into the shades, had taken the Stoic sacrament, to wait in Hades for his tract to be recognised, honoured and celebrated. A tract which Bernard herself had committed to the Murrumbidgee River.

  ‘Had I known it was a killing matter, that silly manuscript …’ I started.

  Bernard said, ‘Oh, but hush, how were you to know? Had I known … It was not a matter for taking poison. That silly book.’

  But I was my father’s defender. ‘It was not utterly silly. It was well-reasoned. It was not however … decent and appropriate.’

  ‘Poor Alice,’ she murmured. Helping me outside, onto a bench on the verandah, she said, ‘I will get Maggie to lay them out.’ I sat there shuddering as the sun came up over the eastern range, turning the earth and the pasturage a rich, wet brown.

  Soon Maggie returned with Bernard, and the two women, passing me, Maggie exclaiming but mercifully restraining her feelings, looked altered by the hour’s solemn demands. Bernard’s hand trailed over my shoulder, and I felt its living blood.

  ‘Sit still, love,’ she whispered. ‘Sit still.’

  When the women had finished, I sent Presscart to town for Dr Alladair. Appearing in his role of coroner, he should at least be able to name the poison they had taken.

  Nugan Ganway, August 23rd 1844

  My dearest Mother,

  You will perhaps by now have heard news of my father’s, your late husband’s, death by an apparently accidental poisoning. Such was the verdict brought down by the Cooma Creek coroner. I find it hard to believe that a just God would keep him stringently answerable for actions which in the past year have proved extremely volatile, and I hope you might, as the capping nobility of your life, forgive him for the hectic dance he led us. He was buried in Cooma with the rites of the Established Church. I did not call on a Wesleyan minister to fulfil the task since the excesses of Wesleyanism had tainted his youth.

  I can guarantee you a few things: his book, of which Simon may have told you, will not be published, which is a blessing both to the family and to the world, and he is not buried with his paramour. And since the coroner, a friend of mine, steered clear of any verdict to do with suicide, preferring to accord to Father’s convict associate all the suspicion of possible homicide or suicide, the entirety of his estate will pass to you.

  I am thinking of remarrying, after a suitable period, and I must warn you that my intended bride, though a woman of the greatest honesty, devotion and probity, is a former convict. I know that you would have questions about this, but I do ask you as an indulgent mother to approve my choice. I am resolved to give happy children, who are not acquainted with the sins and follies of the fathers, to this world. Despite the history of my father, I refuse to believe there is anything irreparably tainted about transported felons. I believe that crime is in the blood of us all, and that Father’s crime, to which we owe all that we are at present, good and bad, did not of itself condemn him to the follies of his later life, which were follies not unfamiliar to free men of no proven criminality.

  My wife-to-be convinces me of these realities through her own goodness and generosity. Indeed, I believe I could not have sustained the loss of Father, or the circumstances of that loss, without her aid. One day I hope to present to you your innocent grandchildren.

  Your ever-devoted son,

  Jonathan

  The apothecary Lattimore had the temerity to present himself by my father’s grave as, on Paltinglass’s lips, Paternoster gave way to the final words of repose. I felt a rage at this impudence mount in me. I had seen my father walking with the apothecary after Long’s hanging. In my sleepless desperation I lost sight of all other culpability, including my own. This man seemed to me, above all others, responsible for my father’s stupidity, and somehow its encourager. This man was the one who had handed the poison over the counter to my father. This man had encouraged and catered to my father’s heresy that Stoicism was a religion whose one mystery, dogma and sacrament was self-destruction. I could barely find patience to hurl the clod of resignation in on top of my father’s coffin before I cornered Lattimore, who was beating a fast retreat as if he had read my fury. So anxious was I to confront the apothecary that I postponed the saying of the normal grateful sentiments to the Reverend Paltinglass.

  ‘Sir, I believe that the chemical substance which contributed to my father’s death was purchased across your counter. What possessed you to give it to such an unstable old man?’

  I had an image of my father’s bandy gait and plausible smile; he was almost physically in our conversation.

  ‘It was a dyeing substance, Mr Bettany. He said that his companion wanted calico dyed. Blue was her colour. Indeed, every time I saw her in town she wore a blue apron. I sold him a few grains of cyanic sulphide in the best of professional faith. I can understand your sense of loss, sir, but not your accusation.’

  And he squared his shoulders, this oafish little man with an East Anglian whine in his accent, as if he dared to fight me.

  ‘That substance should not be sold,’ I told him, ‘in quantities sufficient to cause death.’

  ‘Then you would put, Mr Bettany, such an inhibition on industry and commerce, indeed on the beautification of the world, such as could not be borne.’

  I began to raise my arm to strike him – had I started I would not easily have been restrained. But Reverend Paltinglass was by my elbow, and across a few rude memorials to Cooma Creek’s recent dead, my eye caught Bernard’s. She was waiting for me in the phaeton and had not wanted to join the few men at the grave side.

  ‘You’ve done everything a son could, Jonathan,’ the priest told me.

  I began to laugh. ‘Indeed I have.’

  ‘You are distressed. There has been too much loss. But delivered of this burden, which like a good
son you did not seek to shirk, you are free now to remake your life. If you accept the sacraments of the Church, notably the sacraments of Matrimony and of the Lord’s supper, I look forward to rewelcoming you fully and joyfully to the Communion of Saints.’

  ‘The Communion of Saints,’ I said, not without mockery. Lattimore had turned and gone. ‘Where is this Communion?’ I asked. ‘Where have I seen it?’

  To give Paltinglass credit, he did not attempt to lecture me. ‘I have spoken too frankly for a season of loss, Jonathan, forgive me.’ He too nodded and moved away.

  ‘But I have your stipend, sir,’ I called after him. I took a small purse from my pocket with three sovereigns in it. Two for my father, and one for Aldread who would be buried later in the day, also in consecrated ground. Alladair had suggested that the clear self-destructive colour of their final act had obviously derived from Aldread, but he did not pursue the subject for fear of making my father into a suicide.

  The awkward exchange of cash took place. I walked away to rejoin Bernard and await the burial of Aldread.

  It was now nearly spring again. As Bernard and I approached Nugan Ganway at the close of that awful day, a blue line of snow punctuated with the dark dun of eucalypts showed to the south-west on the furthest mountains. It was a crystalline afternoon, and as we splashed across the first loop of the Murrumbidgee, flowing strongly with snow-melt and winter rain, I identified the place where Bernard had destroyed The Death of the Stoic so energetically. I had never thought that any blame attached to me, nor did I now see it as attaching to poor Lattimore. I brought the phaeton to a stop, all its four wheels on the stones and silt of the bumpy ford below the homestead. The water flowed north-west, and was silvered with late sun. I do not say that in that second happiness returned, but a plan of life certainly arose. This tortuous river was the Jacob’s Ladder which would lead me out of tainted Nugan Ganway.

  ‘My dear,’ said Bernard softly, ‘are you well?’

  ‘I am reflecting,’ I said, looking into the dazzle of bright water. ‘This river has been followed by sundry gentlemen hundreds of miles to the due west.’ The word ‘hundreds’ itself was a comfort. ‘It has been assumed because rainfall is not as ample over there that that country will not serve a pastoral purpose. And yet it is said to be covered with native saltbush. It is not as if our sheep here have proven delicate, or are unfamiliar with drought.’

  I wanted to investigate these propositions. I would be a less fanciful occupier of that country than I had been of Nugan Ganway. In expecting too marked a paradise I had made it a tainted garden. But out there, beyond the ranges and due west, the rain would be sparse enough to remind me that I should not expect the Elysian fields. I would travel from an overwrought landscape into hard and honest earth.

  Perhaps.

  ‘Before shearing,’ I told Bernard, ‘I would like to ride off with O’Dallow and inspect that country.’

  ‘I can ride,’ she announced. ‘I shall discover it with you.’

  PRIM’S ADMISSIONS HAD BEEN PUBLISHED in the Australian press and made much of. Whitloaf said the statement Prim had signed came as a surprise to Austfam but was obviously extracted from her under duress. He said he had spoken by phone to Ms Bettany and she was fine. He praised her work for the Sudan. But his letter to her was – if not lacking in compassion – more hard-headed.

  While the Austfam board acknowledges it has been negligent in giving you support in your post, it is a matter of some disappointment that, prior to the arrival of Mike Lunzer, you unilaterally chose to make your statement, virtually ensuring the closure of our office in Khartoum and Austfam’s expulsion from the Sudan. Mike Lunzer will attend to those matters, of course, so you don’t need to be too stressed in the days before your departure. You have on a number of occasions brought us considerable kudos, Prim. But I trust you understand that whatever coercion you may have been subjected to in this matter, your confession creates a problem both for the Australian government and – a very different thing – for Austfam. This is another excuse, if it were needed, for NGOs to retract aid operations to the Pacific Basin and south-east Asia, and to withdraw from Africa. I’m sure you understand that it also confirms the accusations of some more conservative members of the Australian parliament who believe that Austfam is far too politically motivated, and is in part, as I have heard a minister say, ‘a civil rights monitor’. So, subject to your ultimate explanation for your actions, I would be less than frank if I did not tell you that we feel bemused, and as if ground has been lost.

  Waiting in nervous uncertainty for Sherif to be discharged from hospital, Prim received daily phone calls from Dimp.

  ‘Did they torture you? Tell me. Is this call being listened to? Are you free to speak?’

  Prim reassured her. ‘I expect to be expelled within a week,’ she told Dimp, who was cheered by such an immediate time frame.

  Trailed by a police car, Prim attended hidad, the three days of mourning, at the el Rahzis.

  Helene, who had declared she would attend the el Rahzis every day, was there when Prim visited. ‘Congratulations, Primrose,’ she said unaffectedly. ‘I wish I could get out by declaring myself an enemy of the regime, which I am. You’ll be a heroine in the West, but I suppose you’ll be totally incapable of exploiting that, God bless you.’

  Primrose blushed stupidly. ‘The only way I could be a hero is for the worst reason. An Islamic government says a person is a criminal, and the West believes the opposite out of pure prejudice.’

  ‘But sometimes out of wisdom too,’ said Helene, kissing her cheek. ‘Try to see me before they send you out!’

  The mourners at the el Rahzi’s were chiefly fellow-students of Safi, some in army conscripts uniform, who looked at Prim in what she knew an impartial observer might call awe. Either the more senior mourners – the professor’s remaining colleagues at the University of Khartoum, for example – had already paid their respects or had stayed away, motivated by the damnable caution of the mature.

  Prim did not dare ask Khalda whether el Dhouma had come, or even Siddiq. When she rose to go, and went to the twin chairs in which the professor and his wife received and farewelled mourners, Khalda held her close.

  ‘You were not harmed?’ she whispered.

  ‘I was not,’ said Prim.

  ‘The day will come,’ said Khalda, ‘when the world will say there is slavery in the Sudan.’

  Prim wept and joined her tears with Khalda’s. It was Khalda’s nobility of soul which enabled her to speak of slavery when her son had been murdered by the state.

  Prim spent her time otherwise in briefing a young woman at the Oxfam office on Austfam’s development projects – midwives-under-training, proposed health surveys. At dusk one evening, at the hour of muezzins’ call, her phone rang. It was the police captain, Britt Ekland’s admirer.

  ‘You can collect your friend the doctor from the front of the hospital in an hour. You are to take him to his house, and to leave again before curfew.’

  Prim ran down to her truck. She barely had wit to turn the key in the ignition and wondered if she would need to call Erwit. But she did not want anyone with her. By concentrating she was able to move the four-wheel drive out into the broad streets of the New Extension. With its stunted palms and neem trees it had both the air of an artificial city, which Khartoum was in a sense, and that peculiar intensity which the familiar takes on when it is about to be left. She and Sherif were about to depart! Every line of rooftop had an extra edge to it.

  When she was routinely halted by a white-uniformed Sudanese traffic cop near the White Nile, her hands trembled on the steering wheel. When he waved her on she had to let a shiver pass through her body before she could put her foot on the accelerator. She crossed the river, brassy with the last of the light. Beyond the cemetery she missed her turning, and uttering the usual antipodean curses – ‘Bugger it, bloody hell!’ – made a perilous U-turn in the face of an oil truck and a string of donkey carts.

  She
saw him waiting by the gate, he and a sentry standing together, but with their shoulders turned from each other. He wore a light suit, very stained, as if he had worn it in the ghost house. A battered straw hat sat on his head – perhaps a gift from the hospital. She waited for him to see her coming, but he persistently looked the wrong way. Even when she parked, his eyes were averted, and she had to run to him, and touch his elbow. Turning, he seemed startled, as if he had been told that someone else would fetch him.

  ‘I’m taking you home,’ she said with a smile.

  The sentry watched, wondering would he see a rare sight, a kiss or caress between a Sudanese and a white woman.

  ‘Ah yes,’ murmured Sherif. ‘Home it is! Are you well?’

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re going to your place.’

  ‘Home, James!’ he cried.

  Sherif had always walked with what Prim thought of as a slow dignity, but more so now. Climbing into the passenger seat as she held the door, he said, ‘Would you do the seat belt? My neck is a little stiff still. My back – you see – it’s a problem.’

  She reached over his waist, spilling tears. ‘Don’t cry,’ he told her brightly. ‘It won’t make the Nile any higher.’

  It was a Sudanese proverb, and his loyalty to his own idiom moved her to increased tears.

  ‘Do you have any coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll stop at the corner and buy some.’ She slotted herself behind the steering wheel and slammed the door in the face of the sentry.

  ‘Are you in pain, darling?’ she asked, pulling away. ‘Do you have pills for it?’

  He unleashed his strange new laugh. ‘They gave me ten aspirin,’ he said, and anyone else would have thought he was hugely tickled by that, the gesture, the precise number.