Bettany's Book (92 page)

‘Mr Bettany,’ said Bernard, moving her limpid eyes to meet his, ‘I must go to Cooma Creek with your son within the next few days. If you will trust us, we will commit your pages to the English mail, and you yourself might then continue to keep Alice happy company.’

Though I knew nothing of this proposed journey, a saving instinct prevented me from denying it was planned.

My father seemed delighted. ‘It will be properly packed, and I shall give you two guineas to cover postage.’

‘And I shall bring you change then,’ said Bernard.

My father turned to me. ‘I am pleased, my boy, that you have the courage to profess your attachment to Bernard so publicly. As indeed you should.’

If this excursion took place, it would be the first time Bernard and I appeared in that tiny settlement in the same carriage, creating a buzz which would certainly reach the Reverend Mr Paltinglass, one of my father’s Pauline eunuchs. My friend the police magistrate would be similarly thoughtful. I found myself for a second thinking like my father – it is mere hypocrisy which makes them think that way. Would they rather me abuse Bernard in secret or acknowledge her as a soul worthy of my honour? The truth was that they would all probably prefer private vice over frankly declared frailty. It was blatancy that the people my father called ‘colonial Pharisees’ most objected to. But was there not at least raw truth in blatancy? If it revelled in sin, at least it did not pretend otherwise.

Bernard was still waiting for me to confirm her offer. I was all at once very pleased that she regarded herself well enough to require of me a public avowal, the avowal of moving in the same phaeton in Spring Street, Cooma Creek. And I could read her plan, a reasonable one: to benefit herself, to benefit me.

‘Yes, Father,’ I said. ‘Allow me to commit your work to the mails.’

So an evening later, my father brought the manuscript to me, packaged
in oilcloth, bound with that same strong jute we used to bind the wool bales. And two guineas. I protested that I could afford the postage myself. He forced the money upon me. Bernard and I would leave a little before dawn, I told him, so he should not expect to see us before we went. I did not wish to be waved away by him.

It had rained during the night, damping the fires in the mountains, quenching the ashes in the stockyard. Bernard and I emerged from the homestead carrying
The Death of the Stoic
into a splendid late summer dawn, the early sun marking each of the great glacial boulders which littered our high plain. Thus Bernard and I, side by side in the phaeton, made our public way towards the outer world, in so far at least as it was represented by Cooma Creek. We reached and crossed the Murrumbidgee, which flowed well for the time of year and the hot season we had just passed through, and would soon, I hoped, be replenished by autumn rain. We drove on some miles until we encountered one of its bends.

‘Stop here, Mr Bettany,’ Bernard told me. Unobserved by anyone but myself, she reached into the second seat of the phaeton, extracted
The Death of the Stoic
, and unbound the oilskin with its inked London address prominent on it, took out the wad of white pages covered with my father’s frantic hieroglyphics, and walked alone along the stream, to some rocks which in the best times of the year were sometimes near-rapids. She-oaks on the banks protected the place from too close an inspection by passing travellers. Resting her left knee on the pages, she extracted some from the wad and began tearing them into small segments and launching them on the river, which flowed away, however languidly, some hundreds of miles to the west. It bore
The Death of the Stoic
into the interior of New South Wales, into an Australian oblivion rather than towards the world of argument, heresy and renown. In this weather and in the Murrumbidgee’s muddy stream the fragments, edging along on a sluggish tide, would very quickly lose the appearance of something laboured on by my father and take on the aspect of mute fragments of bark or sere leaf. Bernard barely looked at me through this process, but she worked with frank determination. The clause-less contract had been forged between us. She was willing to be ruthless for me.

She returned to me with the jute and the oilskin with its London address: Evans & Pauley, Publishers, St Martin’s Lane, London. Holding these, her eyes alight with intent, she grimly kissed my cheek. There was
no air of triumph nor of malice, but rather the sort of sad wisdom my father professed to admire in Stoics.

‘If he had been of right mind,’ she said, ‘he would have done the same thing himself.’

In awe I helped her back into the phaeton. But as we passed the inn where, in the wake of George’s death, I had once borrowed a horse to ride back to dying Phoebe, I saw a convict groom saddling a horse, and with the sight the practical issues arising from Bernard’s sacrilege began to intrude.

‘We must send a package of some kind,’ I argued. ‘He is likely at some time to go to Cooma Creek and speak to the postmaster.’

Bernard seemed already to have considered this. ‘These publishing gentlemen,’ she told me, ‘may be surprised to receive a great wad of copies of the
Cooma Creek Courier
.’

‘They might write though in return and thank the sender.’

‘We ought erase the sender’s address,’ she said simply. The corners of her rich mouth turned up in the most subtle irony. ‘The gentlemen in London will have to think that the gift from Cooma Creek is the work of an unknown and generous soul.’

Even in this treachery against the book, the great display of paternal energy the manuscript represented, I was confident Bernard had an answer to every problem cast up by her drastic action. I said, in what might have been a panic had Bernard not been there, ‘He will want a letter in return. He will need a good and authentic letter telling him it has been received. Since he is no fool, I doubt I can counterfeit such a letter.’

‘Don’t fret,’ Bernard told me. ‘That is easy.’

‘How is it easy?’

‘Mr Pigrim – the owner of the
Cooma Creek Courier
was once the forger of share certificates and bank bonds.’

‘You can’t tell me that seriously.’

‘Sir,’ she said. ‘This is New South Wales! He also has a printer, a little fellow who works on the heavy press. He can forge any postmark: London, Dublin, Edinburgh. He’s done it for a number of people I have known.’

Again I had a sense that anyone who had been through the convict institutions had an alternative map to the society of New South Wales than the one I carried in my head.

‘Why would people want forged postmarks?’

‘They might want well-forged letters and postmarks to show a minister
of God that a husband or wife in one of Britain’s kingdoms – someone they will never again lay eyes on – is dead. And thus they are free to take a spouse here.’

‘Are you talking of O’Dallow and Tume?’ I remembered O’Dallow’s affecting letter, supposedly from Ireland, telling of his wife’s death. Was this the work of literate Mr Pigrim of the
Cooma Creek Courier
and of his printer?

‘I would not speak one way or another of Maggie Tume, Mr Bettany. You must judge her on her merits, which seem to be notable. But you might think of Mr Pigrim for your needs. If you would like me to, I could undertake the business with Pigrim, so that if by some awful outcome your father discovered the plan and became enraged, his rage could be against me.’

I laughed. It seemed the era’s final weight had been lifted from me. I did not feel that this was any dreadful onus to carry either. Bernard had saved my father from himself, I was certain, as well as saving Mother, Simon and myself from him as well. It was an admirable morning’s work.

‘I’m pleased to see you prefer me over the world of philosophy,’ I told her, smiling and speeding my team along past the inn with a shake of the reins.

She said, ‘You are the one I wish to keep in the breathing world.’

T
HE CALL CAME ON A DAY WHEN A
little rain had fallen on the grateful capital and people confidently expected more. A secretary from el Dhouma’s office told Prim to expect to be collected at 8p.m. that evening.

She was ready by 7.30, had gone to the extent of carrying a head shawl, and though in need of a gin and tonic, thought she had probably broken sufficient of the republic’s laws and did not want whatever official was coming for her to sniff the liquor’s acrid juniper berries on her breath.

A white police vehicle like the one she had been loaded into outside the City Bank building arrived in the street at 7.45. She heard it draw up and from the window she saw a lean and wiry police officer, with epaulettes on his shoulders and wearing a white uniform shirt and trousers, emerge and lean on the bonnet, smoking and savouring the kind air which followed rain. Prim put the shawl over her head, and picked up her NGO passport and a few Sudanese pounds. She went to the window
again to see if the policeman had moved, but he had not, and was still looking idly up the broad street.

She turned back indoors and took the stairs, emerging by way of her small front garden through the gate, and went right up to him.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Good evening.’ ‘
Masaaha l-khayr
.’ The greetings she had learned six years past in Arabic class. ‘You were sent for me, professor?’ Out of respect, ordinary Sudanese often addressed strangers as
ustaz
, professor.

He turned his clean-shaven, neatly made features to her. His uniform was spotless, though he must have been hours on duty.

‘You are not Miss Bettany,’ he accused her.

‘I am,’ said Prim, though fascinated by the chance that she wasn’t.

She produced her passport. He looked at it for some time.

‘You have darkened your hair then,’ he said.

She denied it.

‘They said at the ministry you were blonde,’ he said.

‘You are here in connection with Dr Sherif Taha,’ Prim reminded him.

‘I have a Swedish penfriend,’ continued the captain. ‘He sent me a picture of Britt Ekland, signed in her own hand. She is a wonderful actress. But I think she is old now.’

So at the ministry this was how they had persuaded him to do this job – ‘She looks just like Britt Ekland, captain.’ Prim had found an Arab– English dictionary in a store in Khartoum once, and there was within its covers a whole chapter entitled ‘Swedish blondes’. Did it come from the attraction of opposites? Britt Ekland would herself probably not be averse to this trim, enthusiastic captain.

‘Come to the truck then,’ he told Prim, reconciled to her merely light-brown hair.

‘Are we going far?’ Prim asked.

‘Across the river,’ he said. ‘Omdurman.’

He held open the back passenger door for her, and when it shut it locked instantly. A metal grill separated Prim from the driver’s seat, which he now entered. She found herself shivering, and believed it fever, though then decided she did not like any form of detention. When she was small Dimp had for a joke once locked her in a pint-sized luggage-lift in a small hotel somewhere – Brisbane or the Gold Coast. She had beaten in terror at the grey walls, while Dimp laughed outside in the breathable air.

They turned left into the main road out of the New Extension, and
rolled smoothly over the railway line, through the city, across to North Khartoum. There was a slightly greasy moonlight on the White Nile as they crossed to Omdurman. They passed the wall of the el Murradah stadium, and the shanty town and old cemetery of stately but decayed tombs through which Sherif had taken her once to see the dervishes reel in fervour towards unity. She remembered the appropriate Sura of the Koran on God’s closeness to man: ‘We are closer to him than he is to his own jugular.’

‘Lovely,’ she heard the captain say. ‘Lovely night. There will be more rain.’

The Omdurman military hospital, like many official buildings in the Khartoum region, in less menacing days had reminded Prim of Kipling. Despite the fact that it lay beyond a high wire fence, its long shaded verandahs and large windows seemed to her to evoke cheeky Cockney redcoats recovering from Dervish lances, Mahdist muskets, or fever.

A solitary sentry waved the captain’s truck and the captive Prim through the gate. A sentry was also sitting with the curious listlessness of a museum guard beyond a counter in the chief office inside the door. There were a number of desks with medical files open on them, of which this man had care, and on the counter lay a log book. ‘Write your name and address and sign it,’ said the captain. ‘English will do.’

‘What is my friend Sherif Taha doing in a military hospital?’ she asked, pausing before signing, trying to make the signature worth something.

‘Because we care for him. Sign your name.’

He led her past one ward full of men lying behind mosquito nets in dim blue light. By a bed from which the mosquito net had been taken lay a corpse beneath a sheet, the nose sharply delineated. It was of credible length to be Sherif’s. Had the captain brought her to sign for the body? Had that been the nature of the log book? Then she discerned, crowded into the far corner of the bed by a chest of drawers, two slim figures in white, weeping, the woman with her grief covered by a veil.