Bettany's Book

by Keneally, Thomas

  But years passed, and no tale arose to consume Dimp in the way Enzo’s tale had.

  At one of Dimp’s breakfast tax seminars, a man wearing the name tag Brendan D’Arcy, the letters CEO, and the further elucidation: D’Arcy Coleman Mineral Venture, waited in line behind suited men and women, accountants with clients to advise, asking her for clarification of certain points. In the body of the room the tables were being stripped of their plates of half-eaten fruit and eggs. Other men and women were briskly rushing out the door to business, and only this fringe of questioners remained to protect the guest speaker from her habitual quandary, ‘What in the hell shall I do with the rest of the day?’

  Dimp had noticed D’Arcy during the seminar and, automatically answering questions, watched him join the line, wait, scrape his slightly unruly sandy hair, do some tie-straightening, and flinch at his watch every time he consulted it. She had heard of him in an indefinite way, but had never felt his urgent presence, and she rushed through her answers to the others to ensure he wouldn’t leave. At last he stood in front of her, his large, beefily handsome face flushed and his sportsman’s shoulders held crookedly.

  ‘I’m Brendan D’Arcy,’ he said like a complaint when his time came, watching the last accountant go and looking suspicious of the waiters. ‘I liked your concise and humorous delivery.’

  She thanked him. D’Arcy was big-boned, with generous features and eyes, which shone like an uncertain boy’s.

  ‘I want to ask you out,’ he said, earnestly fixed on her face. ‘I’m separated from my wife. You probably hear that from many men, but in my case you can check the files of the scurrilous Sydney Morning Herald last February and soon see whether I happen to be telling you the truth. The ‘Stay in Touch’ column. We made it, Robyn and I. No kids. Marriage annulment is under way, civil divorce to follow. No chance of reconciliation.’

  Dimp tried to speak a normal sentence, like the ones she had been speaking until a moment ago, something about section 10B(a) of the federal Film Finance Act. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I don’t read the Herald …’

  ‘I have to tell you,’ he continued with his leaden and yet fascinating sincerity, ‘that you are a most exquisite and intelligent woman and that I would like to court you. I’m no seducer or casual fornicator. It’s against my religion. If all this sounds mad as a cut snake, so be it. I was under necessity to say it. Would you accept my card?’ At last he grinned. ‘I would be very happy if it ever got to the stage where you knew that number by heart.’

  D’Arcy was not to know that in taking the risk of such an unorthodox approach he was doing what was best calculated to attract Dimp. She was convinced by his entire demeanour and the redness of his face that this was not a normal speech for him, and the idea that this was an exceptional effort for him captivated her. Even though she was used to men making exceptional efforts, they had not done so on such a notable – or original – scale as D’Arcy. If he was working according to some modus operandi, she believed, he would surely not have used such a homely image as ‘mad as a cut snake’. Prim would have rushed away, Dimp knew, appalled at his brawny and extravagant sincerity. Dimp saw a depth behind the gesture.

  She felt a despicable colour creeping over her face, but such flushes of blood only made her look more startling. ‘But you don’t know anything about me.’

  ‘I’ve heard you make a pretty good speech,’ he said with a bluff but tentative smile. ‘And we can’t learn much more in here with these bloody waiters clattering away. Could I have your card, by any chance?’

  ‘I don’t have a card to give you. I don’t carry them.’

  ‘My God, a cardless person. I didn’t know they still existed.’

  ‘Well, I’m not really any sort of business woman. I have an ability to budget films and understand the sections of the Tax Act relating to film.’

  ‘Ah,’ he murmured. He spread out the sound, as if he savoured the originality of her lacking a card. He seemed to believe it supported his instincts about her. ‘Do you know anything at all about me?’

  Despite being a cursory student of financial pages, she had heard that company name, D’Arcy Coleman. It had begun as an old-fashioned goldmining company – this man’s grandfather or great-grandfather had exploited reefs of gold in Queensland and Western Australia with a Scotsman named Coleman, whose descendants, if they existed, must now have little or no role in D’Arcy Coleman, since D’Arcy got all the press attention.

  Later she was to find out that he had turned his ancestral company away from old-fashioned mining. He had been one of the first in Australia to promote the concept of an Australian mineral futures market, and had also created a venture capital division, operating from offices in Sydney and Chicago, to raise finance for mining and drilling operations from the Australian deserts to Siberia. The word ‘Venture’ itself shone on his card, so it appeared to Dimp, with golden promise. She wondered whether this man might extend his definition of venture not only, as he had, into a blunt speech about desire, but into films, perhaps her own.

  The problem remained, however, that she did not have a film. When driven along by Enzo’s tale, she had believed that there were tales beyond this one which she would not so much pick up but be picked up by. She’d simply have to look around and a lovable, urgent story, howling to be told, would present itself. It had not proved to be the truth. By now she feared Enzo was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, like Citizen Kane for Orson Welles, all else seemingly smaller by contrast, the mere filling of time while waiting for death. She had, for something to do, taken an option on a book, a sort of Australian version of Chekhov, about three tormented Edwardian sisters trapped in spinsterhood, running a genteel hotel in the Blue Mountains. An engineer for the Zigzag Railway asks to stay at the hotel. ‘Ho-bloody-hum,’ as Dimp told Prim. The tale did not possess her. It was as easy to take a rest from, to postpone, as piano practice or an amateur painting class. It might make a nice art-house film, but the audience would know how to connect the dots from the first arrival of the engineer, about seven minutes into the film. And when film functionaries at the Australian Film Institute or the New South Wales Film Corporation found problems with it, Dimp found herself strangely calm, and even consoled. For this film you did not go begging door to door, insistent, making loud cajoling jokes. You casually thought of who else should be contacted in a month’s time. Film Victoria? Okay, but I’ve got to do a few seminars first. And there was time, friends told her. She was only twenty-six now. A child wonder.

  On the morning D’Arcy turned up in front of her, Dimp had no creative risk on hand to match the scale of risk he seemed to be taking. A CEO of venture, of futures, of glittering concepts, driven to reckless declarations, which waiters could perhaps overhear! She later wondered whether part of her early enchantment was a belief that she might catch a fervent idea from him.

  Though he said he was no seducer, he was, within two weeks, Dimp’s lover.

  On meeting him, Prim liked D’Arcy but thought he was a more limited man than her sister seemed to believe. Prim was, however, so confused by men herself that she did not feel she had much authority to say anything. Occasionally, as she saw more of him, she would find herself waspishly answering some blunt assertion of his about politics or economics. Not that she knew much about either – she had just been accepted into the graduate anthropology program at the University of Sydney. ‘Oh, anthropology!’ he’d said, as if that were a complete key to her beliefs. She found irksome his male bent for taking the difficulties of his business too seriously, for speaking as if he had chosen a uniquely tough way of making a living or, more exactly, enhancing a fortune. He seemed to Prim to imply that the returns barely justified the outlay of effort, which was clearly a ridiculous idea. Had he never asked himself what it was like working by the year on one of the mining dredges operated by the companies whose money he found?

  Love had made Dimp apolitical, and though vaguely agnostic, she found it almost endearing that Bren went to confess
ion at St Canice’s, Elizabeth Bay, once a month. She could imagine him wrestling sombrely with his conscience and confessing to improper desire for women and wealth, to neglect of his late father’s sisters, termagants who lived in apartments at Potts Point. She was intrigued rather than appalled by the question of whether he felt bound to mention the times they made love, every incidence of sex, every departure from the theologically approved positions. Apparently his Jesuit confessor was already slated to perform their wedding ceremony. He’d always seemed to be modern, said Bren, considered the church annulment to be as good as granted, and had advised D’Arcy that the intent to marry cast a holiness, or at least a blamelessness, over sex with Dimp. ‘They never talked like that in the old days,’ said D’Arcy, whose charming father had apparently maintained some notorious affairs when affairs were really something: the risk of an eternity of flame and the social ignominy of being named co-respondent, all for two hours with a woman.

  Some time after this conversation, D’Arcy’s first marriage of five years was indulgently annulled by Mother Church, a process Dimp was loath to ask about, and his civil divorce was all but finalised, with Bren, to his credit, never uttering a complaint about his first wife’s financial and property claims on him. But the priest had reinforced Bren’s intention to raise a difficult matter with Dimp, one he confessed he should perhaps have mentioned earlier. All the medical evidence, he said, indicated he was sterile. There was always a chance of intermittent or remissive fertility. He and Robyn had considered adopting a child but felt that they had never reached the plateau of mutual trust where it seemed the right thing to do. He and Dimp could adopt, and a person never knew … Sometimes the very act of adopting made conception more likely. That seemed to happen with supposedly sterile women, anyhow.

  So intensely was Dimp captivated that she took hulking D’Arcy’s confession as a matter of lesser significance. ‘We’ll adopt children,’ she blithely told Prim. By now, apart from lecturing and doing the occasional film budget, her job was still that of taking the three-sisters-and-smouldering-engineer project around to the various state and federal agencies which financed development, and talking with them by letter and telephone. In fact her living continued to come from tax seminars. But then the film investment rules were altered by the federal government, as it seemed to Dimp, overnight. The tax advantages were taken away. Too many bad films not recognisably Australian had been made purely for the tax break, said the Minister for the Arts. As soon as the change was mooted, Dimp was no longer a frequent seminar requirement.

  About this time, while he and Dimp were inspecting a potential marital house at Double Bay, Bren took Dimp aside by a sundeck railing over the harbour. It was time for another of his unblinking, solemn talks. ‘Now I like films as much as the next man, dear old Dimp,’ he told her. This habitual endearment – ‘dear old Dimp’ – made her pleasantly imagine them as a doughty aging couple. ‘But I know they’re such risky business. And there’s so much else which will give you a return, including forestry futures.’ She loved him talking in this way, for having so many investment options in his head, golden apples gravid on a brain stem. ‘I know from my experience with Robyn’s family that money and advice about money are something best offered to people you don’t give a damn about. The whole thing has so much ability to do harm. I think we ought to take a pledge not to get involved as a couple on different sides of contracts. I mean, by that, film contracts too.’

  ‘Good idea,’ she told him lightly. She had no film she was passionate enough to be suppliant about, so it was easy to see the reason of his statement.

  ‘This is love speaking,’ he assured her. ‘You get that, don’t you? This is love, not meanness.’

  He explained that he had been reckless enough to give Robyn’s family some useful intelligence about American silver futures. ‘Don’t go overboard with this,’ he said he’d advised them. ‘The price isn’t a real value. It’s a story about value.’ They assured him they understood this. But Robyn’s father, brother and brother-in-law all lost huge amounts, borrowed to the extreme limit of their investments in overvalued real estate in the eastern suburbs, and the infection reached D’Arcy and Robyn, or at least served as a trigger for the expression of profounder doubt.

  And so the pact was made, and made all the more readily by Dimp because – in the increasing absence of tax-seminar orations and an obsessing film – she believed her true profession now to be D’Arcy’s woman. But there were difficulties inherent in Dimp’s role. Both sisters had inherited from someone – not their dapper father – a sartorial negligence. Their mother, they remembered, sometimes wore her lipstick inexactly, her slip would show beneath her dress, or a bra strap be exposed. Dimp therefore lacked the absorption with dress and decoration which might have made it possible for her to be, full-time, a rich man’s consort. She wore clothing and used cosmetics carelessly. Her clothes, particularly as her marriage to Bren drew closer, were good quality, and carried the right labels – Chanel, Armani, bags and shoes by Prada, minimum requirements for the sort of people D’Arcy mixed with around Woollahra, Double Bay, Point Piper. But they hung indifferently on her, and achieved credibility only through the lustre of her brown hair, her green eyes, and broad cheeks. Uncharacteristic of the flagrant age she lived in, she hated large, carbuncular bracelets and rings. She favoured the small, the delicate, and D’Arcy seemed to like nothing better than to visit a jeweller with her, and have her explain to him the virtues of the discreet gem, the understated gold. There have been periods in history – the French revolutionary era, or amongst poets from the Elizabethan to the Romantic age – when an affected heedlessness of dress was the rage, and Dimp was so well-endowed a being, ‘better rounded than her sister’ as people had said throughout their adolescence, that even sloppiness looked like style on her. Only she and her sister knew that at a later age she would be seen as a charming but bedraggled old woman.

  The Bettany girls had what was known as a protected childhood. They had been sent by their doomed parents to an all-girl grammar school on the sedate north shore of Sydney, and their party-going had been strictly supervised by their frenetically anxious mother and by a calm, intractable father who arrived to collect them at eleven wearing a cardigan, grey pants, slippers, his brilliantined auburn hair looking as carefully combed as it had when he left for work that morning. Their father represented a combination of elements the girls thought of as subtly combined to bring down on them the maximum of social torment, as he appeared handsomely squinting in his neat – though in the girls’ eyes disreputable – clothes at the door, asking in a voice hardly to be heard above the party’s clamour, ‘Are Dimple and Primrose here?’

  Their mother sent him, since no boy was ever trusted to take them home, yet Prim thought that if boys grew up to be like her father there must be some genial ones capable of it. Dimp, who from fifteen went to winter rugby matches at the boys’ school, Knox Grammar, and was invited to a livelier range of parties than Prim, became an aficionado of the brief embrace, the open-mouthed kiss, and some more turbulent and unseemly mysteries still. Prim came along to parties in her sister’s lively and generous wake, but after a while she got a reputation for being ‘frigid’. The adolescent Dimp would advise Prim to cool it a bit, smile at the boys, relax. She was good-looking enough, bugger it! They all fancied her, for Christ’s sake.

  Dimp considered ‘frigid’ an insult, she didn’t understand the subtle pride it gave her sister.

  Dimp had got from somewhere a gift for earthiness, which had from childhood secretly amused Prim but alarmed herparents. She had the nature to study Australian coarseness. It had been reinforced by listening to some of the Knox boys, and even from studying patterns of speech in Australian soapies. To absorb an Australian rhythm, too, she had only to listen to snatches of talk from brickies working on their Bannockburn Street, Turramurra, neighbours’ house. Though she was vigilant with what she said at school, she had an ambition to be known as a calling-a-spa
de-a-spade Australian, and her parents did not know where that came from.

  Prim was in the meantime proud of her reputation as an ice-maiden, not least because at the Knox Grammar–Abbotsleigh School formal a particular type of boy would try to melt her down, and she liked to feel aloof from their hot breath, to feel the irrelevance of a kind of swelling in them, even more pervasive than the limited, boring rigidity in their groins. Seeming to be more innocent than she was, that was a great plan with these hulking, gasping boys. Showing them that she gave their dance floor erections no credit at all. That was better fun than acknowledging their heat, taking it with you out for some uncertain, unresolved fumble under an angophora by the rugby field. While Dimp was merciful and felt sorry for their urgent need, to Prim, icy virtue had joys that fingers-and-thumbs lust was incapable of supplying.

  This conviction ensured that Prim went to university a virgin, where Dimp had preceded her as a male-loving daughter of experience. Boys who met Prim as an undergraduate felt a distant but readily defeated hope, while boys who met Dimp could not believe they had blundered on a sensual presence whose very company, the mere chance to buy her a schooner of beer at the Union, was an experience of bountiful promise.

  Primrose was ultimately persuaded into two inconclusive and largely joyless couplings by a tall architecture student she met at the university Labor Club – led there by Dimp – where too much cask wine was always drunk. Dimp’s turning up at the Labor Club, Prim found out, was considered such a political coup by a group of young Fabian socialists that she seemed to them a prize of the ideological wars. And though by now she defined herself as a thinking feminist, Primrose too was cherished by the Labor Club and found the sensation of being a prize less unwelcome than she was supposed to. From this glow, this delicious conceit, she found the courage for her intellectually stimulating but physically inept affair with the architecture student. While it lasted, she could for that time still be an icon, or – she wouldn’t use the term aloud – a trophy, while safe within her known status as the architecture student’s girlfriend.