Bettany's Book (35 page)

Robyn agreed, ‘I got the impression that they’ve always done this – married out, made a raid, and brought back with them not only a young body but a young soul as well. I bet he had you promise to raise any kids as Catholics.’ Dimp had made that promise. ‘Except there’ll be no kids, will there?’ Robyn observed. ‘Bren’s great shame. He fires blanks, as they say.’ It was the first thing she’d said which could have been seen as bitter.

‘We intend to adopt,’ said Dimp.

‘So did we. Another contribution to the Kingdom of Heaven.’

Dimp rushed to Bren’s defence: to give him his due, he’d made his sterility clear. Robyn – and Bren – had found out a year or so before he left her. That is, in the third year of their marriage. And now she really began to talk.

When Bren moved out, he’d sought the annulment through the Archdiocese of Sydney. That meant both he and Robyn had to submit to some marriage counselling, and then be interviewed by a panel of priests, a psychiatrist and even a physician. The physician’s task was to question Robyn as a means to showing that the marriage had been consummated – penetration, ejaculation. Bren wasn’t claiming it hadn’t
happened, nor was she. But it had to be cleared out of the way. If the marriage hadn’t been consummated, they were entitled to a more or less on the spot annulment – known as ‘the Petrine privilege’. When the doctor examined her, Robyn had told him, ‘It doesn’t prove anything, you know. I had lovers before Bren.’

‘Pardon me for asking,’ asked Dimp. ‘But why did you submit to all this?’

Robyn looked at her, a little dolefully but without resentment. ‘Pride,’ she said. ‘In a weird way I went along with the process as a way of sending it up. I really thought they’d break down and apologise, and not only the priests and doctors, but Bren too. You see, he’d really convinced himself that when he married me, he’d been unfit to understand the marriage contract, the true weight of the vows. And so, he was arguing, the marriage was invalid. He said it was his own fault, that he’d brought inadequate consent to the contract. But
I
hadn’t brought inadequate consent. And I wasn’t going to pretend there was something lacking with the contract
I’d
entered. For Christ’s sake, I did bloody contracts at law school. I dug my heels in at one stage. If we were to be divorced, it had to be simply a civil divorce based on incompatibility! Not some fiction that we’d been unfit to enter the marriage. I wanted him to divorce me civilly and remarry someone else civilly if that was what he wanted, and have the guts to flirt with damnation!’

In the end, she said, she saw it was hopeless, and submitted herself, out of a kind of weariness, a resentful kindness, to further questioning by the Catholic psychiatrist. He asked her about lesbianism (because if she had lesbian tendencies, that would have been something Bren hadn’t known, and lack of full knowledge could bring the contract unstuck). A priest, a canon lawyer, questioned her about her maturity at the time of the marriage. Had she entered it with due discretion? She asked them who in God’s name would marry if they did it ‘with due discretion’? Who would marry, she asked the priests, if they had an adequate map of the other party’s DNA, just for a start?

But this reaction was taken by these very serious men, anxious to enable Bren and Robyn, if possible, to get out of marriage without losing their souls, as a sign that indeed she might have been deficient in the elements which make up a contract. As for Bren, he earnestly satisfied them on that score. And so the Archdiocese referred the documents to the Canon Law courts – the Rota – in Rome and, after an inordinate time, the annulment decree was issued and sent to Sydney.

Quite some time had passed by the time Robyn got to this point of the narrative, and the airline had opened the bar to deal with the complaints of the crowd of business travellers. Robyn and Dimp went to get some wine. Dimp felt she needed it. She had noticed a change in Robyn, from dispassion to a calm but profound anger. The Church, not willing to permit divorce for breakdown or for cruelty, was willing to go probing back to the day when Robyn had appeared in white at Riverview College chapel and given her smiling, awed, liquid consent. They had dug back to that day and found her ‘I dos’ not up to snuff. That, rather than the split-up as such, was what was corroding Robyn, and as it took longer and longer to refuel the planes, both wives, like old schoolfriends, went back to the bar until, when the Melbourne flight was at last called three-and-a-half hours too late, Robyn and Prim boarded it in tipsy, edgy sisterhood. Robyn had a weight off her mind. She had transferred it to Dimp.

‘From that point there was a curse on my journey,’ Dimp would confess to Prim in her letter.

Honest! I didn’t do much good with Film Victoria, and I was delayed long enough to have to stay overnight, and in my hotel room sat upright from a dream and began bawling like an orphan. Until I heard Robyn’s story I’d thought of the annulment as a touching amount of trouble for Bren to go to. But now I began to ask: If Bren’s marriage to Robyn was lacking in this due discretion stuff, what of his marriage to me? Were my vows any better than hers? And as for Bren, if he couldn’t make a valid contract at twenty-seven, why could he make one at thirty-three? If Robyn was invalid, why wasn’t I invalid too? And how do I know I’m not?

So I’ve been miserable as hell. You remember the time you found a famine out of the blue. I feel like I’ve found a blight out of the blue. The annulment once was a fringe charm of our whole approach to marriage. Now it seems like a mess of legalism at its centre. Give me a good talking to, eh?

Prim had a suspicion that her sister’s enthusiasm for Bettany’s memoir, for Bettany’s continual self-examination and seriousness, had somehow set her up to make too much of the first wife’s story of annulment. And the idea that Dimp might, with a Bettany-like solemnity, look for some single disabling element in her life and so would make too much of the annulment, caused in Prim a mixture of severity and panic. In Prim’s
map of the universe it was Dimp’s job to make sensible, whimsical progress, singing as she went. Prim was tempted to send an urgent chastising fax, but then thought Bren might see it.

‘
You’re turning me into a conspirator
,’ Prim complained by letter, taking up the disciplinary tone she didn’t seem capable of avoiding.

And as you always tell me, you don’t have to invite me to be censorious, so here’s some censoriousness for you! Listen, you’re a woman of too many damned omens. You meet Brendan’s ex-wife at the airport, and so you don’t do well at Film Victoria! As if the one were contained in the other. And … if you and Robyn D’Arcy don’t even believe in the annulment process, how could either of you be invalidated by it? Does Robyn still want to be married to Bren? No. And if she did at the time, she shouldn’t have gone through with the process out of perversity or pride or whatever it was.

I’m going to get tough with you, and ask this: Are you sure you weren’t daydreaming about being unmarried before you met Robyn? You depict your doubt as if it were a pain that came in the middle of the night. But I don’t believe it. If it’s a pain, it might have been one you were waiting to recognise, half-hoping it would strike. For the rest, you’re his wife, true and solid. I don’t think you ought to go looking in former wives for signs that you’re not! You’re not the most obvious wife for him, but that’s what excited him and you.

Why don’t you adopt that child you’ve been talking about? Why not do that as quickly as it can be arranged? There are plenty of them around here, desperate Southern Sudanese kids. All handsome to behold. Of course it’s not as easy as just taking one. You have a disadvantage with the Sudanese government of being outside Islam. And one of the chief marks of not being of Islamic background is amply demonstrated by your letter: you dramatise your life in an unwarranted way. Free of all risk of war and hunger and epidemic, you make risks up. That’s what you’ve done with Robyn’s rigmarole about annulment.

This is a harsh letter, but I’m busy. I thought there were refugees when I first came here! But it was nothing compared to the present! There is for example a nearly instant refugee centre in the Red Sea Hills for Nubas and others. The new camp is hundreds of miles away from the Nubas’ homeland. The government drives people there, to leave a free zone for army operations on the edge of the South. And we’re putting the midwives and the water into this instant town of twenty, thirty thousand.
Each of whom has real, not notional problems! See! So just live on with what you have. I try to.

She signed the letter in fear. If robust Dimp couldn’t find her way past a great doubt, how could Prim?

P
RIM FELT MORE COMFORTABLE WITH THE
letters of the convict Sarah Bernard than with the journal of Jonathan Bettany. Not only did she consider they resonated with an anguish not unlike the anguish of a slave, but Dimp did not seem to take from them any undue cues for her own life. Bettany’s journal was full of such moral honesty that it seemed to be laying down a basis of explanation for some later, exorbitant crime. There was a sense of a drift towards an abyss, and it made Prim anxious. Sarah Bernard, however, could be looked at without flinching, as a sister already in the abyss, and falling.

Letter No 4, SARAH BERNARD

Marked by her: A LETTER FOR NOT SENDING

My Alice

This sort of thing happens: a woman comes up thin but broad-shouldered and gives me a sharp little jab at the bottom of the stomach. As I gag I think how brave she is to take that risk – I could report her to the Pallmires and get her put in a cell. And she goes further and says: Don’t esteem yeself, duck. I cannot acquire breath fast enough to tell her she need not worry – that I have no grounds for esteem.

But why should they not be angry – these girls so often hungry? Since Mr Matron cum Steward dishes them out the bony segments of beef and bone that cannot be eaten. For the richer cuts they know one should visit the butcher shops of sundry friends of Mr Pallmire. And they think me party to that scheme. They think me sated. Whereas my heart shrinks and my mouth seems full only of acid.

I think certain plans of vengeance and I harbour the idea that the distractions of the new Irish women from
Eurydice
had saved me from
all humiliations. Now I tell you that is not the truth. I am armoured against great humiliations but not against unexpected and lesser ones.

Thus Mrs Matron appears again in the Tory and a silence falls. Handling the keys at her belt she says to me: Sarah my girl. Get the Sunday petticoat out of your clothing bag. Since it is afternoon I murmur I will not go again.

But Mrs Pallmire is not enraged. She touches my wrist. I can understand you are a tender one. She says it like a sister. I know you are a woman of qualities and thus I have made you my day servant. You must trust me and get the Sunday petticoat.

I do this now – the clothing bag is under my cot. She tells me: Also get the shoes with buckles. Out in the garden Mr Pallmire stands in a serge jacket. I see why some would like him from that smile on his meaty face. They would think him an honest beast. There is a woman from another Tory there in her Sunday petticoat. A slighter woman than myself and brown haired under her cap. She is young but attired precisely as me.

Mr Matron tells me: This is Elizabeth. Elizabeth you are looking at Sarah Bernard. Now we are going to have a fine time in the George Inn.

And so we all get in a cart and set off out of the gate and through the streets within sight of the house of the Governor on its slope. And we go into the door of the George Inn where a large and red faced woman is on the doorstep bawling: Bring my Johnny! Bring my Johnny! And so into the better taproom as frequented – says Mr Pallmire in his jolly way – by the quality and no ticket of leave.

At the top of the George is a room for dining but Mr and Mrs Pallmire are here for drinking and for display – to have us petticoated two there to show their power. To show official men and women with what ease of control the Pallmires govern the Factory. I come to believe we are here for little better purpose than that Mr Pallmire might be jibed and joshed and ribbed to his soul’s content by other men when he goes outside to relieve himself. So we are joined by two butchers and a cooper and they drink merrily and wink.