Bettany's Book (48 page)

At this stage, Prim detected that a few people in the room began frowning as if she was leading them on an unexpected and puzzling journey. But she was embarked now. There was only one way down from this intimately harboured argument of hers.

‘So now, the skeletal mother we see on the poster, has tried with some craft to bridge the gap. She has collected edible or inedible grasses on hillsides, and boiled them with a handful of millet. She has fed her family and kept them alive on the seed of the thorn grass, the fruit of the
zisiphus
bush, the occasional collection of watermelon seeds, or of groundnut meal residue. She has set bear traps. She has broken open termite mounds and sought with her hands for the grains of millet that ants have stolen and stored in their chambers. She has dug up rats’ nests looking even for the husks of grain. She has combed camels for edible insects. And then, she has found that all this is not enough.

‘But her huge, vacant eyes, which are now used on a poster as a blandishment to make us generous, are not the product of too much passivity. They may be the product of too much activity. When the last grain has been eaten, the last grass has blown away, she lifts her children and begins to walk. It is difficult to carry a child across a loveless landscape, bearing on your shoulder a gourd of water and a satchel with some traces of groundnut meal in it. By the time she reaches the feeding station, sits in some shanty town near a cattle or camel market, she may have plans to make a living as a charcoal burner, but now the essential properties
of a living being have been leached out of her by gastroenteritis or malaria, by an unlucky fever or loss of the minerals of her body. Or she has recently given birth, perhaps on her path to the feeding station, and now her one new child hangs like a hank of flesh upon a breast which lacks milk.

‘She is a woman who, though without resources, had plans for her continued existence for herself and her children, but now her flesh has been reduced, and she is in the condition in which we behold her on the famine poster. But this is not a woman whose image we should easily exploit, nor should we flinch from her or feel distant from her. For she has exercised the limits of all her human skill, her capacity for adaptation, her gift for expediency and her loving familial choices. She is the Madonna of this century. We should all acknowledge with profound humility her exultant human valour …’

It struck Prim now, as an orator awaking from a trance, that her audience were still perhaps in it. Dimp watched her with a huge approving frown. But there was no way back to wells dug, inoculations given, nutrition levels assessed. She had daydreamed of defying Whitloaf and uttering the heterodox word: slavery. But she could not see how she could make a segue in that direction. Her Madonna stood centre stage. The slave would have to wait until she had exited the stage.

‘You have been very patient,’ she said.

There was generous but somehow ambiguous applause. She knew she had not delivered the normal aid-worker speech. She was asked if she would answer a few questions. Only one of them was in the vaguest sense to do with the latter part of her speech. A woman began her question with the statement, ‘Yes, Miss Bettany. I find those images of scarecrow women very hard to look at too.’ This woman was no fool, yet she had permitted Prim’s eccentric argument to penetrate only the first layer of skin.

Dimp and Prim stayed for one speech after lunch and then left for the airport. The day was bright by now and they looked out from Canberra’s terminal windows at the ancient quietude of dun hills.

Dimp said, ‘Next time you should go down and see the sheep station of nearly-Sir-Jonathan. It’s still there.’

‘You’ve visited it?’

‘Yes. It all happened in concrete time and place, after all. The people who own Nugan Ganway now claim their homestead is built on top of the original, in a dip in the hills, just like nearly-Sir-Jonathan says.’

Dimp seemed wan, and Prim reached for her sister’s hand and stroked the wrist. It was a broader and less angular wrist than her own.

‘I’d like to do that with you,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

Dimp smiled palely. ‘Two and a half hour’s drive from here. More or less.’

‘You shouldn’t have come, after that big party.’

‘No, no,’ Dimp insisted. ‘I wanted to. My smart sister. You know the woman who mixed the seed millet with dirt? That got to me … Our old Jewish great-granny. She strikes me as that sort of woman. Unstoppable. Though just as likely to be a poster girl for some damn misery or other. But not, of course, by her own choice.’

To remind her sister that what was said in the speech concerned modern women in Darfur and elsewhere would have seemed particularly priggish just then. Instead Prim imagined the two of them in some distant safe year. Two aged women who had worked it all out – or whatever in their lives could not be resolved had passed. It seemed to Prim a desirable plateau of simple comforts.

‘All right,’ she said to her proud sister who needed comfort, ‘we’ll have a bloody big gin and tonic on the plane.’

Letter No. 6, SARAH BERNARD

Dearest Alice

Your appeal causes me distress but I am taking action. I speak to Mrs Matron as we are drinking tea and conversing together. And it seems to me all threads of power meet at her. I ask: Could you get a Category 1 woman from the Asylum if she is not mad to start with? She asks what the woman did.

I tell her how I met you first in Manchester county prison where your solicitor let you wither and wait in a public cell – though he could have dipped into your husband’s money to pay for something better. As I tell her I remember when I came to that dark prison ward how you shone like a star with your every kindness. Remember that woman with the two children? Receiver of stolen goods? Both her tots had bad bowels and the whole ward full of a reek of thin shit! You wept softly. I thought this woman should not be here. Not this angel! You were above that place.

I tell Mrs Matron: The woman I speak of was married to a dyer many years older – a tyrannous man of very crooked desires and in the way of taking poisons for the sake of his health.

Mrs Matron looks under her rounded eyebrows. So this is your ducky is it? You want your ducky friend here?

It seemed that despite her might she is jealous to keep the tea and time she and I spend together.

But she is talking of helping. She says: I could claim that because of the death of mad old Martha I have a spare billet in Category 3–the one category a poisoning woman could be in. But that would be in a cell of seven feet by five in the far wing. But, better for your friend than the narrow cell named a coffin she might have had in the execution yard had the judge not been moved to pity! Then Mrs Matron goes on: I would like to be kindly but cannot have it otherwise than Category 3. The Visiting Justice would create a frenzy if I put her in with you!

But when the Visiting Justice is not visiting she does what she likes – this Matron Pallmire. But for the start I shall see my Alice in the cell of mad Martha – this is the cell of an old woman returned many times to the Factory by her masters for being tipsy. This is however but a start for you. But a start my friend Alice.

Mrs Matron sounds wearied when she says: I have never had a felon woman I could so easily chatter with and if you are to remain that to me I imagine I must keep you happy.

So I hope you will soon be delivered from the madhouse by the inter-cession of your true friend

Sarah

And Sarah Bernard did manage to have her friend moved to the Female Factory, since her next letter, numbered No 7 by Dimp, spoke of ecstatic reunion.

Letter No 7, SARAH BERNARD

Loving Alice,

It proved so easy to persuade them that I should be admitted to your cell. Mrs Matron calls the turnkey and says simply to take me to the prison wing of Category 3. Because I am now paid to supervise the laundry I can give a lummox like him sixpence – to keep everybody sweet. A nothing price to feel your hand on my wrist dearest Alice.

And now you are here at last like a simple miscreant! I urge you to behave cunningly and well for I have plans for deliverance whether it be yours or mine. Next step is Category 1 – for I am such a friend of Mrs Matron that I can protect you in such a place as the Factory. How I wish you were a simple mean thief like your best and unworthy friend is. I could see a faster rescue for both of us. But be brave lovely Alice and keep in your heart that gravest and most crafty patience which is in you if you do not give way to useless railing. Mr and Mrs Matron have very dark souls and will howl in hell. Yet they might be used as our aid.

But what a great pity that Mrs Matron dances in towards the end of my visit and looks down her plump nose saying: This is your friend then. Nice to have a friend like this who is pretty. It is wonderful to see in her this jealousy. Yet how can she be jealous of a wretch? There is enough of her soul left that she can see how secret rooms hoarded with sugar and flour are not a sufficiency to the soul. As is your sisterhood to me!

She paid you that praise – do you remember? She praised the two of us. She tells you: You do not look like Category 3 but then you are a friend of Sarah so of course you would not have the look of a witless thief.

Her praise is as they say mixed blessings. But fear not since I ask myself the one question all the time. It is this – How to use up Mrs Matron before she uses us up.

You were thinner. That grieves me but I can bulk out your rations now you are beneath the same roof as

Your loving Sarah.

M
ARRIED LIFE AT
N
UGAN
G
ANWAY

There was little enough nuptial holiday for Phoebe. She was impatient with the concept in any case, and determined to join our male cantonment in the bush. All the suggestions her friends made concerning the employment of convict servants she dismissed. The greatest and most miraculous index of what a spirit she had was that though trained in a Swiss academy for young women and prepared thus for the life of a European country estate managed with the help of servants, she took with a joyous zeal to the life of the bush hut. While waiting with her friends the Parslows for our marriage to take place, she had been studying books on colonial domestic management. She had the good grace to
relish our life, its awkwardness and wrong-headedness, its want of refinements. By now we had advanced from cooking the food for the homestead on communal outdoor fires to cooking in a separate bark outbuilding, and Phoebe joyously insisted on taking over those duties too, with occasional advice from O’Dallow, whom she liked for his Celtic morbidness and amusingly negative view of the world.

She cooked, for an example, a vast supply of plum duff, and O’Dallow, sniffing it, said, ‘Well they might turn up, those absconders, with this sweetness in the air, Mrs Bettany, and then you’ll have the blackguards by the nose.’

It seemed all sin, squalor and ill will were lifted from us for a joyous nuptial season. But neither nature nor the malice of men, which is itself part of nature, let much stand as still as I would like it to be. Riding in to our homestead from a visit to a southern hut one day, I found two well-saddled horses in the stockyard with the insignia of the queen on their blue saddlecloths and a blue-coated constable sitting on a log conversing with the wagon-driver Clancy. Inside, a hulking police magistrate, in a navy-blue uniform with silver crown at its collar, was drinking tea in the parlour with Phoebe, who raised a stricken face to me.

‘Look who we have,’ she told me. ‘Police Magistrate Purler has come all the way from Goulburn.’

She announced it politely but as if to say: Grief has too quickly entered our lives.

I thought myself, after many years, the inflexibility of law has arrived at Nugan Ganway – as distinct from the mere fictions of law with which Peske had played. Yet Purler himself did not much resemble grief, being florid, youngish, bear-like. He wore a black beard and his pistols rested for safety’s sake on a side table, dangerous beasts asleep for the moment.