Bettany's Book (94 page)

Prim looked up at Dr Hamadain. The words ‘prejudicial and vainglorious’ coloured her mind and threatened to undermine her. ‘Which Sudanese people have I wronged? I haven’t wronged Dinkas, or Nuer, or Nuba.’

He sighed. ‘Do you care to quibble, or do you want to get Sherif out?’

‘I want to get Sherif out. Will he be given an exit visa?’

‘I can’t give an absolute guarantee, but I shall bring my influence to bear on that. I mean, I’ll seek to ensure it happens. You have my word.’

‘And will you expel Austfam itself?’

‘That’s still being considered. It’s very likely. But after your poor behaviour, I can’t make any deal on that!’

‘But you solemnly pledge Sherif’s visa.’

‘I do, to my utmost goodwill and ability, yes. Let him go away and complain about us to the kangaroos!’

‘When will I see him again?’

‘When he’s released from hospital. I believe that will be in a few days.’

She knew she must sign the statement. ‘I would like to add Austfam to the list of those I apologise to.’

‘I’m sure the government has no problem with that,’ he said, looking at the screen. He keyed in a sentence, and the printer whirred again, producing three pages, one of which he passed her.

She read it and nodded. ‘Do I sign it?’

‘You sign all three pages of the statement. Then you will read it. We have a television and audio studio here in the ministry.’

‘When will I read it?’

‘Tonight. As soon as you’re ready.’

‘My God,’ she said, and began to tremble.

‘You’ll be fine, Miss Bettany,’ Dr Hamadain told her as if she were a nervous actress.

‘But if it will be on television, I must see the Arabic translation.’

Hamadain shook his head in amused disbelief. ‘We don’t have the time to argue over an Arabic draft. I tell you it will be fair. You are making a very thorough confession anyhow. It will not be softened by Arabic. On the other hand I assure you we won’t call you Satan incarnate or such. We want you to go home safely.’

He was solicitous as he guided her from the office and, trailed by some sort of bodyguard in a white
galabia
, accompanied her into the small strobe-lit room where two men – a camera operator and a sort of floor manager – were covering with white cloth the wall-sized view of
Khartoum in front of which members of the Command Council generally made their pronouncements to the people. She was unworthy to be identified with Khartoum, unworthy of the Elephant’s Trunk, the confluence of both Niles.

It was Hamadain himself who became her director: after the first read-to-camera, he said, ‘Maybe once more to be safe.’ Both times she read without emphasis but without playing tricks, without twitches, winks, or avoidance of the camera with her eyes. What was the point of ambiguous gesture when the confession was so comprehensive? And in so far as there was life in the confession, she wished to convince herself that it was the sort of life which would signal to those she loved – the el Rahzis, Helene, Dimp – her fundamental unrepentance.

‘Thank you, Miss Bettany,’ Hamedain said.

The cameraman stood back from the one fixed-angle camera. He looked very bored for a man who had just heard the utterances of an enemy of his people. Accompanied at a distance of perhaps four metres by the bodyguard in white, Sherif’s cousin escorted her out of the front door of the ministry. Any idea that she could find her own transport now was a little fanciful. All her efforts went to combat the numbness in her neck and shoulders, and the grotesque urge to lean against a wall and vomit. A Mercedes stood below the stairs, and a driver, smoking, was propped against the passenger-side door.

In a lowered voice, Dr Hamadain said, ‘I’m glad we could finalise this. There will be policemen in cars placed either end of your street to prevent harm to the Austfam offices and to you. They may follow you when you drive too, so don’t be alarmed. You won’t hear from me again. But if you get anxious because Sherif seems a little time in hospital, call me at this number.’ He gave her a card. ‘Don’t worry. We are not playing ducks and drakes. You are too ruthless. What you did in Central Khartoum, that was ruthless.’

‘There are societies,’ she said, swallowing, ‘where it would be a routine little gesture.’

‘And a futile one,’ said Dr Hamadain. ‘Peace be with you. I believe your Sydney is a golden city, and perhaps in happier times I shall see you there.’

‘Then you should look in the telephone book under Sherif’s name.’

‘Sherif’s name? Very well.’

Pulling her head shawl tight so that the driver could not see her tears, her facial tremors, the agony of her nausea, she stumbled to the car.
There was a sibilant expulsion of breath through his teeth as he extinguished his cigarette and prepared to drive.

I
CONSTRUCT A LETTER

Before an answer was even possible from Messrs Evans and Pauley of London, I noticed with some alarm that my father was fretting in expectation. His appetite had certainly waned, yet he drank even more. Scales of dead flesh appeared on his cheeks and around the rim of his beard, which he let grow wildly. I had hoped that the book was a fad and would now be half-forgotten. In fact it was the dominating issue of his life, more significant than his sins or the matter of what my mother might be doing, and how faring, in Van Diemen’s Land.

Each evening he would hobble bow-leggedly to my hearth to talk feverishly about his hope for his manuscript, and each day seemed to undermine the bright-eyed confidence with which he had sent it off.

‘I expected them to read it at a gulp,’ he would say, ‘and put it down at last excited and determined to use every means to get an answer to me quickly, lest I take it from them and give it to another publisher.’

‘You cannot yet know they are not doing just that,’ I – his treacherous son – told him. ‘That they are not employing as we speak every most urgent means.’

As the autumn drew on into winter, and my men and I attended to lambing amidst occasional early winter blasts of wind from the southwest, I argued he could not expect anything before late June, if then. He would shake his balding scholar’s head, as if that span of time was beyond tolerating.

Bernard too, reading in her seat by the table – she never held a book one-handedly, but laid it open on a table, and reverently avoided any unnecessary contact with it – became aware that a mania about time was growing in my father, and that no short, formal notice of rejection would satisfy him.

‘Will you take me to Pigrim and his forger?’ I asked her eventually. For I felt that the betrayal was filial, and the son, myself, should attend to it with what was left of honour.

Bernard and I thus found cause to visit the town again as partners in life, an action which had an air of normality about it since we had done it the first time. We entered the premises of the
Courier
, and Pigrim, a
solid, bald man, greeted us pleasantly at the counter. He was very much in character with his paper, which while attracting the advertising of all the community, being yet the only town newspaper, pursued like the
Goulburn Herald
a democratic, progressive line of a kind which gave people like Bernard, my father and himself an equal claim on the benefits of colonial society as someone like Treloar.

The time I had dared read what it had said about the trial and execution of Long, it had been fair and compassionate. The fact that I had a convict beloved – or ‘paramour’ as some people would no doubt put it – whom I was willing to bring to town seemed to have increased rather than diminished my standing with Pigrim, not that his was a sector of society from which I could receive benefit.

I could receive the benefit of his printing press however, and of his elegant red ink, and I asked if I could speak to him privately. He invited Bernard and myself to his office, which was not properly an office but a mere chest-high wooden enclosure.

I told him the problem frankly. My father waited on word from some business in England. The lack of it was undermining his health, and I was concerned. Could he produce a few good pages with this particular London company’s address on it, and then I would compose a reassuring letter? I had no idea of the look of this company’s stationery, but I was sure anything official-looking would be adequate.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I could certainly do it. I have an inordinate love of such japes. After all, they got me to this country. But my English crimes were based on need, not on criminality, and not, I think I can say, on greed. My father’s tin mine was burned by some Chartists. I forged share certificates to help him raise the money to re-equip it. He himself was innocent of their falsity, as your father will be of this. I know of your father. I have seen him ride through the town with the consumptive woman. One day he called to visit me to discuss similarities between Sean Long the convicted murderer and Socrates. I believe he too was transported, and his view was that for a fallen society, one needed a fallen Socrates – Long.’ Pigrim shook his head. ‘I can see that he might need soothing, and reassurance, even reassurance kindly counterfeited. And I might or might not have provided some services to my fallen but not inglorious brethren. But I am here above all to make my way as an editor.’

‘This conversation will never be referred to again,’ I assured him. ‘I shall not admit it even to my dreams.’

He smiled and said, ‘That is a bold assurance, and I trust it. But Mr Bettany, if you are to send such an encouraging letter to a fellow of your father’s cleverness, you will need a good replica of a postmark on it.’

‘Yes, I shall,’ I confessed. I did not tell him that Bernard, who had sat quietly and let me attend to the business, as if I were my own prime mover and all my instinct of joy and survival did not arise from her, had already told me he could provide postmarks.

He nodded to a man wearing a cap of paper and quietly setting print on a machine in a dim corner. He dropped his voice, ‘That gentleman there, Joseph, is a skilled Londoner and can make postmarks. He is one of the Hebraic tribe, and yet has done postmarks chiefly for the convenience of Australian men and women who hope to marry in the Christian way here, since there is no hope of reunion of spouses. Your father is right in that, Mr Bettany. This is the Hades of the earth, and while in heaven we are not married nor given in marriages, as both St Mark and St Luke’s Gospels say, in Hades we must be. Now my little Cockney can make you a London postmark, and charge very little more than his time.’

I looked at the thin, industrious, beak-nosed features of the compositor. This was indeed a world of mysteries.

‘So,’ said Pigrim, ‘you choose the date for the postmark, Mr Bettany.’

He passed me a calendar and, as I looked at it, he spent his time on galleys of copy for the next Tuesday’s edition.

I chose a date. May 5. Had the manuscript been received in April, and promptly read and after much discussion rejected, the letter would be drafted in early May, and posted about that date.

‘Very well,’ said Pigrim, looking up and approving my choice. ‘Could I please have the London address you would like the letter to come from?’

I handed the address to him, and he sighed and shook his head, no doubt at the words ‘Booksellers and Publishers’. ‘You may pick up your pages whenever you wish. Write your letter at your leisure, since it would not be arriving for some months yet. But – I stress this – burn any residual pages. And one other small thing, do not put a date on the letter that is later than the postmark date you just now chose. Then bring it me in its envelope, with three penny stamps on it, and my friend Joseph will do the postmark.’

I shook his hand. He was a minister of mercy, and I thought how more useful he was to this disordered society of New South Wales than the Reverend Paltinglass with his pallid charity and Dr Alladair, who had
promised so much yet in my experience had chiefly proclaimed the death of people I loved.

Bernard and I walked out, me seeming to support her, but the reverse being the truth, and while passing in front of the haberdasher’s and dentist’s, encountered my father emerging from Lattimore’s apothecary shop. He had been to the post office and held a modest sheaf of mail in his hand, which he passed entirely to me. ‘Nothing for me,’ he intoned. ‘Still, nothing for me.’

One of my letters was from Treloar, proposing a bang-tail muster, a muster of all his and my cattle, for the following September. Another had Mother’s handwriting on it, and I did not open it. I packed Treloar’s letter back into its envelope.

‘I was going feverish at Nugan Ganway,’ Father told me. ‘So I rode in on horseback. And here we are in the streets of the same town on the same day, pillars of the community. Shall I buy you both a drink, or shall you buy me? The Royal Hotel is nice, but back behind that copse, beyond the manse, lies Carolan’s shebeen, and the company is good and rowdy there.’

I could think of nothing worse than a shebeen, and I looked at Bernard and saw that she too could think of nothing worse. But I followed him into the teeth of the wind, over the fallen deadwood of the gum trees, blowing up against my ankles beyond the manse. Inside the shebeen’s dark slab timbers, a fire was raging in the hearth. There was a pallid fiddler at the bar, some unsatisfactory ticket-of-leave man. Approaching the counter my father clapped his hands in time to the music. He asked Bernard what she would like and she said tea, and he glimmered and said he doubted they had tea here.