Bettany's Book (53 page)

‘Yes,’ said Helene, oddly distracted, ‘Ministry of the Interior, isn’t it?’

‘I am special adviser to the minister, yes. Troubled times, I’m afraid.’ His face shone with a sense of survival and of engagement.

Safi said, a little loudly, ‘We were discussing guerilla training. I don’t mean the guerillas in the South. There was a rumour printed in the
Washington Post
that our government is training guerillas for activity against the Israelis.’

‘And I was telling my young friend here,’ said Dr Hamadain, ‘that if it is so, the Ministry of the Interior does not know about it.’

‘Perhaps someone has omitted to tell the minister,’ said young Safi with a smile. ‘The
Washington Post
said these operatives included not only Palestinians and Libyans, but Pakistanis as well. Mind you, though I mistrust anarchist-style protest and random bombings, I am no lover of the Israelis. They took my grandfather prisoner in the Seven Days’ War. But … guerillas?’

‘Your grandfather was an Egyptian then?’ asked Prim.

‘No, he was one of our soldiers who volunteered. My mother’s father. A professional soldier and an enlightened man.’

The conversation ended there for the moment, for Sherif turned up, strolling in bare-headed, a half smile on his face, waiting to be introduced to Stoner’s wife. Prim went through that much commented-upon transformation: the entry of the lover alters the air, gives two-thirds of its humanity to the party. Prim was wearing the same gold-collared, loose white native dress she had worn to Dimp’s party and wore to almost every party in the Sudan. It sat on her body easily. She had a light shawl around her shoulders – something she had learned not from the Sudanese but from her mother. ‘To de-accentuate the bosom, dear.’ Sherif must have found it a fetching combination, for he whispered in her ear, ‘How are you, my little white ruffian?’

An hour passed with Professor el Rahzi telling tales of his days at the London School of Economics and at Oxford. He was particularly hopeful, he told Sherif and Prim when the rest of the party drifted away, that the government was about to be forced to resolve the conflict in the South. The World Bank, which had been lenient with repayment reductions earlier, was putting pressure on now, had refused to ratify a new deal on its debt, designed to ease interest repayments until the war was won. To maintain a war in a world of falling commodity prices was, everyone had agreed, grotesque. But there must be secure Sudanese sovereignty over the South – that was the trouble – and that would take long peace talks. However, peace talks would attract international goodwill and investment, said the professor.

Sherif asked Prim in a lowered voice, ‘Are you taking Helene home?’

Prim nodded. ‘If I can find her.’

‘I think you’ll find her in the booze room,’ said Sherif with a smile. ‘I shall see you later, my soul hopes …’

‘Your soul can rest assured,’ said Prim.

There was a fleeting contact of hands, and she went to the room in the corner, knocked lightly on the door and tentatively opened it. She heard a gasp and thought she had surprised lovers, but in fact it was Helene Codderby weeping, a tumbler of what looked like water, but proved to be raw vodka, placed beside her on the table at which she sat.

‘Helene! My God, what’s the matter?’

Helene gamely composed herself. ‘I’m in love, bugger it!’

Prim came to the table, leant on it, and made the normal gestures –
hand on shoulder, rubbing of the upper arm. ‘But what’s wrong with that?’

‘Do you know what I find just a little offensive?’ said Helene. ‘I’m in love with the bastard. But when he wants someone to act as a warning to his wife, he uses not me but you. You’re the one he kissed in front of her. He doesn’t say, “Here’s the charming Codderby, who is your rival.” What he says is, “Here is the delicious Prim Bettany, so you’d better watch out!”’ Her face contorted with tears again. ‘I don’t blame you in any way. It’s not your fault any more than it’s mine that I’m a plain old hank of a woman.’ And she went on shuddering with grief.

Prim couldn’t stop herself asking, ‘Are you really telling me, Helene, that …?’

‘Of course. Better part of eighteen months. I was beginning to think it would grow into something until now. He’s a very driven man that way.’ More tears. ‘He likes his bloody home comforts, but he always has a plan for any stray woman.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ murmured Prim, fetching a glass and the vodka from the upper cupboard, and pouring herself some.

‘The point is,’ said Helene, ‘that he wanted his wife to think it might be you, not me. I’ve got to admit you’ve got a special kind of danger written all over you. It’s the charm of not knowing how good-looking, and so how dangerous, you really bloody well are. It’s just as well you’ve got Sherif to look after you.’

They drank a while in silence. ‘It has been the best and worst time of my life,’ said Helene. ‘But dear Lord, I’m suffering the sufferings of the sinner now. I’m drinking a bitter bloody cup. Bottoms up!’

They finished their drink.

‘I know it’s selfish of me,’ Helene said. ‘But do you think we could sneak out, if you don’t mind? I don’t want to see the bastard, and I don’t want to see his bloody English rose of a spouse.’

They left the room and walked along the shadowed verandah and out by the corridor towards the street. Prim thought that perhaps it was not even safe being considered plain by both Westerners and Sudanese. It hadn’t saved Helene who, like any betrayed sister, sputtered with grief all the way to the truck.

A few days after the welcoming party for Stoner’s wife, Prim received a call from Stoner, and felt disposed to treat it with suspicion. ‘Claudia and I,’ said Stoner, ‘wondered if you and your lovely doctor would like
to join us at the Rimini tonight for dinner? I think Claudia’s a little, you know, envious of you.’

So now he wanted to play married and betrothed couples! But she would not let him get away with it.

‘I don’t know that I want to,’ said Prim. ‘There’s no problem with Claudia. But Helene Codderby is pretty unhappy.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ murmured Stoner.

‘Don’t worry. I won’t blab on you, you treacherous bastard.’

Stoner had lowered his voice. ‘Look, I never made any undertakings to Codders, okay? She knew the score. And what’s a bloke to do now that the missus has moved in?’

This was the truth – Helene had never implied he had made promises. He was not Auger. He was a lesser barbarian. On the one hand loyalty to Helene ought to prevent Prim going to dinner with the Stoners – Helene would be horrified to hear of it if she did. But on the other, she and Stoner had painted over UN insignia on the sides of transports and discovered a supposed famine.

‘I don’t think we ought to come at the moment,’ she said.

‘But Jesus, Prim, a man’s not a monk!’

‘No. You’re not a monk anyhow. You’re a total bastard.’

In a louder voice than he had been using, he said cheerily, ‘Guilty, Your Honour.’

‘Yet everyone forgives you. I know I’ll forgive you, but not just yet. Thanks for the invitation. And love to Claudia.’

In fact she spent the early part of the evening at Helene Codderby’s little apartment in the city centre, over whose rooftop the minaret of a mosque passed a dramatic shadow in late afternoon, and where they sat drinking tea.

The subject of Stoner and the turpitude of men was soon exhausted. Quite naturally, politics came up next. ‘What were Safi el Rahzi and Doctor Hamadain talking about?’ asked Prim. ‘Pro-Palestinian guerilla squads training in the Sudan. Did you know anything about this?’ She had a few hours before been specifically reminded of the conversation at Stoner’s by hearing on the radio of yet another clash between Israelis and Palestinians in Hebron. Two Palestinians were dead. Paying the price, as Prim thought of it, for two thousand years of European anti-Semitism.

‘Yes,’ said Helene, dismally sipping her tea and grimacing. ‘It’s all the truth. There’s a camp out to the west, between here and Shendi. That’s
where they’re billeted and trained until they’re needed. Islamic freedom fighters. Young fellows. High morale.’

‘This is really an astonishing country, Helene.’

‘Hamadain’s right. There may be ministers in the government who don’t know. The prime minister may not even know. That’s how it goes here.’

‘That’s how it goes anywhere, if you can believe the spy movies.’

‘If you can believe the spy movies. Do you think men suffer like this?’

‘I think women have been asking that very question for some time.’

‘But it doesn’t happen to a girl like you.’

‘What bloody rubbish,’ said Prim with an almost angry urgency. ‘Of course it’s happened to me.’ And with those words, Prim felt an electric jolt in her womb, something like, she imagined, a child turning over, but not in happiness. ‘It was a professor–student thing. It’s the reason I’m here. I’ll tell you that much, but no more. End of story.’

Helene looked at her from under lowered eyebrows. ‘You know, I’m utterly delighted to hear that. Aren’t I a bitch?’

‘Yes,’ said Prim. ‘Of course you are.’

And in the shadow of the minaret, the finger of God, they both laughed and drained their tea.

At two o’clock in the morning, Prim was woken at Sherif’s house by a banging at the door and presumed, for some reason to do with a recent but unremembered dream, it was the police. Bolting upright, she saw by the now switched on bedside light that Sherif was already wide awake.

Sherif shook his head and went off frowning to answer the door. Professor el Rahzi had once admiringly said, ‘He’s rubbed a lot of noses at the Ministry of Health,’ but surely that was not grounds for arrest. Adultery was, under the Sharia. But fornication?

She followed Sherif, stylish in his thin cotton bathrobe, going to meet destiny with grace, downstairs and through his office. He opened the door without inquiring, without inching it open and squinting forth, but with the authority of a man who would not accept he had anything to hide. Helene Codderby nearly toppled into the room. For a second or two, Prim wondered with a little impatience whether they were going to be subjected to howling, small-hours, he-done-me-wrong lamentations.

‘What is it, Helene?’ she called from the stairs.

‘The fighters, the bastards, the terrorists, whatever they are. They’ve
come into town and blown up the Rimini. Two grenades in the dining room. Fergal and Claudia are both dead. Fergal’s hard to identify, but Claudia’s face is intact. The bastards killed a Saudi Arabian, an Egyptian engineer, two waiters and Fergal and Claudia. Jesus! Can you believe that? Jesus!’

‘Oh God,’ said Prim, coming forward and hugging her. ‘Oh Helene. The EC people called you?’

‘The police called me. The police knew I knew Fergal. What do you think of that? A state where everybody knows everything, and nothing gets bloody done. I identified the bodies. The poor bloody shredded bodies.’ She was babbling with grief now. ‘They didn’t know what hit them. She would have died with his bullshit in her ear. He would have died full of the usual plans. Oh Fergal! Fergal. You sod!’

Prim was aware not only of shock, the guilt and horror of the reality that she might have occupied the same deadly table, but of loss as well, loss of the villainous ally, the predictable friend, the manipulator without whom nothing happened, without whom there was no lover for Helene, no bread for the stricken, no succour and, of course, no father for his children.

Prim, while still embracing Helene, saw that Sherif had turned ash-grey. ‘That the Stoners should have to pay …’ he murmured.

Prim sat up the rest of the night with Helene, as she poured out her utterance of love, bewilderment, resentment, not least against the victim. They worked through tea and got onto whisky, and then Helene announced that Prim and Sherif must accompany her during the morning to an address in Central Khartoum, where Fergal and Claudia Stoner would be placed in lead-lined coffins for shipment on the next night’s flight from Nairobi to London.

‘So soon?’ asked Prim.

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Helene, ‘They are dead. Don’t doubt me. They are dead.’

And yet when they went to what proved to be the police mortuary, and saw Fergal and Claudia hauled in plastic sacks, tied at both ends, into their respective lead coffins, Prim still thought, ‘They are leaving too soon.’ It was as if they were relieving their killers of the reproachful weight of their presence. Helene could not be comforted and was nearly mad with grief.

The throwing of the two grenades into the dining room of the Rimini, had left the upper floor of the building blackened, since one of the grenades which had killed the Stoners had also started a fire from a burst gas cylinder. Afterwards, when Prim drove through Central Khartoum, the black and shattered upper floor always drew her eye. It was as if the Rimini’s Italian proprietors meant to leave their upstairs floor in ruins as a reproach, with shutters hanging, blasted, by one hinge. Displaced Southern urchins and the children of the urban poor still begged at the front door and visitors still defiantly came, as if in protest at the randomness of terror.

Diplomatic pressure from the British and Egyptian governments caused Sadiq el Mahdi, the prime minister, to expel half a dozen men, three Libyans, two Pakistanis, an Egyptian – who may have been involved in clandestine operations in the Sudan. It altered nothing. There were places on the Lebanese border where these men were greeted as heroes, said Helene Codderby. They had shown that the West could not with impunity support the shooting down of Palestinians in Hebron.

An urbane but very formal Spaniard replaced Stoner. A more careful, more diplomatic, less intrusive presence, he seemed to Prim to keep Stoner’s programs, particularly the one in the South, merely ticking along. The air of expectation, of coming redemption, which had somehow always attached to Stoner, had vanished.

One night Prim woke alone in a panic and crisis of her own – Sherif was off at the hospital on some emergency. What am I doing? Stoner dies. The war goes on, and so the slave reports go on too, and nothing alters. The health surveys are made, and the refugee camps proliferate. Australian flour is intermittently flown south, but who does it feed? Wells are dug but run dry. I am here now because of Sherif, she realised. And this, though a superlative reason, did not seem an adequate justification for taking up space on the Nile, for inhaling this particular good, dry air. She knew that one day she would have to go home, and that this was as inevitable as death, but closer.