Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

‘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.

  Letter No 12, SARAH BERNARD

  Marked by her: BE SURE TO DESTROY THIS

  Dearest Alice

  The first thing I know there is trouble Mr Pallmire enters the kitchen when I am drinking some tea. Mr Pallmire says: Bernard come with me! I wonder am I to be beaten but he takes me into one of the little storerooms near the butchery – it has a drain in the centre and there is a pile of hard soap on the floor – a little mountain of it – and he gives me a mallet and says: Break it up Bernard. Break it up and when you have done you are to get in the constables to wash it down the drain. I see that it is fluster and fear and not rage which is at work in the man now. He leaves me as if I were his most trustworthy servant and I break away with the mallet though the soap is very hard and as I hammer away I rejoice within me.

  I take my time but nobody comes and interrupts me. But when I emerge to drink tea at one o’clock what would I see but a magistrate I had never seen before and unfamiliar constables at the walk bridge and hammering at the door of the Pallmires. And other strange constables are on guard before the butchery and the storeroom door. When Mr and Mrs Pallmire are led away, the women of the factory come up out of the laundry and whistle and hoot and shriek to leave the poor ears of the Pallmires ringing. And amongst the loudest are my old friends – the little brick red woman Carty and the hefty brick red woman Connolly.

  Then I see you in the kitchen window with the blue kerchief and try to go to talk to you. But the new magistrate – a young man – asks me come with him. I gather my canvas bag and go with him to a carriage and later find myself amongst his servants in a well-ordered farmhouse beyond Parramatta. Here I am given very little duties indeed – except the housekeeper gives me ironing which is a memory of the Factory. He had me into his parlour to quiz me and I have told him about you Alice. He has promised that you will be sheltered and given consideration. He said that he would remove you from the Factory to a trusted position in Parramatta Gaol on probation, And in view of the damage done to you if you were good for two years he would have you in process for a ticket. All I can tell you is his household is very sober and there is an air of truth here. He is a disciple of John Wesley though he gave me a lecture on why the Wesleyans had been foolish to depart the Church of England.

  As for me I can tell you the Visiting Surgeon and this good magistrate are determined that I should be rewarded for my devotion to truth which is – I hope you will believe me – also a devotion to you. I have been allowed to write to Long at his station. He is a man I trust above all others. Wherever I go I shall mention your name as a good servant. I can if all parties are agreeable be assigned to that station which I believe I would like since it is according to Long far from the malice of most men.

  I do not doubt you Alice. You were true and kept the secret which could have been sold with profit and at my deepest cost to the Pallmires. You are indeed a decent woman as I always knew.

  Your firm friend

  Sarah

  Letter No 13, SARAH BERNARD

  Brave Alice

  You should receive this since I have asked Constable Henley at the Factory to deliver my letters to you in the hospital at Parramatta Gaol for five shillings to be sent in September by bank order from Goulburn. Should I get an indication this is not done then Henley can go sing. I was so sad to find your coughing has worsened but I will get you to a better and tonic clime – you will be better I know in this drier country inland.

  We are a little army of women – nine of us – with tickets of leave and passports to travel inland and have been put here for the night in the cell of the convict depot at Liverpool. Not for doing wrong but for the same reason the Female Factory was put in place – to protect us from the men and the men from us. The greatest surprise is that I share this journey with my former Tory friends the little red woman Carty and her protector Connolly. The girl child of Carty is with us – she lies asleep on the cell floor. All the while her mother and the large red woman and some of the others stand at the window swapping pleasant words with constables and convicts – many speak their language but I hear others say: You come out here dearie and I shall properly stamp your ticket better than a magistrate. They laugh like women who have learned nothing from their ordeal. But now I see through that and I think they h
ave learned something. They have a plan and are both looking for a husband. Whoever weds the big red one will be subject to her fierce rule but even here we see so few women that someone would eagerly wed her.

  The little freckled one who has a good heart keeps wondering aloud how I am given a ticket of leave a year early but explains it thus: It must be because you are given to learning!

  All the activity of human souls in these places along the road! There are black men in top coats and no pants or wearing a possum skin rug. There are unhappy soldiers of the 50th Regiment who wake up for me the ghost of my dear husband Corporal McWhirter. It seems a military life is barely superior to the life of a felon though I must say I am damned – yes damned – if mine shall not be superior to that of any dolt of a soldier.

  My employer is to be a Mr Bettany of a district named Maneroo and a station named Nugan Ganway. He has been persuaded by my friend Sean Long that I am what he needs – namely a housekeeper and educated. I hope you will agree – friend Alice – that I am something of that nature. When I was called by the Parramatta magistrate to hear of my assignment – they said it: an educated woman. I know it is vanity to like to hear such things but I like it Alice.

  With women from the Factory I was marched by a constable to Church Street Parramatta and given into the care of the Scottish driver of a furniture wagon. This fellow was warned of cancellation of his ticket if he set hand on us and failed to have us report to police magistrates along the way. It is handsome furniture on the wagon for a man named Batchelor who is at a station named Inchecor beyond the distant town of Yass – the wagon driver Tolhurst keeps marvelling someone can afford such niceties in hard times. People in this outer world of the colony speak of hard times till one is sick. We could my dear friend tell them of real hard times. But would they be interested?

  The land is not mountainous at all but Tolhurst tells us the mountains are ahead. You will all be pushing and heaving says he. Even the bairn.

  But I know it from breathing the air. At the heart of the country of slavery we shall have our freedom my darling friend. With friendship and company – the chief ingredients of a good life. More from my destination.

  Yours Ever

  Sarah

  IN THE APRIL OF STONER’S DEATH, the windows at Prim’s flat needed to be closed against sharp little grains of sand pinging by the million against the glass, eating the paint on the metal window frames. Under a low grey dome, cars moved by noon with headlights on. No planes penetrated the murk because Air Sudan pilots, who connected the Republic to Arabia, the Gulf, Ethiopia, to the world’s current, were on strike. The rumour was that the government lacked the money to pay them. Thus a double isolation held the capital in place. In the city, captive to grit, prices of food had risen beyond all reason and the Sudanese dinar and pound were worth maybe half of what they had been six weeks before when Prim had returned to Khartoum from Australia. The war in the South was in its permanently unresolved condition, the government still able with any certainty to call itself a government only in the garrisoned towns such as Aweil.

  Prim was suffering from some recurrent gastroenteritic virus she had caught, she believed, on one of the two planes she took to get back home. Sherif knelt beside her, placing damp cloths on her forehead, caressing her neck with a washer as the squalls of grit attacked and receded.

  Recovering in this turning season, Prim found even Sherif could be edgy. It was, she understood, the edginess of guilt – his country had failed to take care of Fergal and Claudia Stoner.

  ‘You’ll write about Africa, won’t you?’ Sherif asked, in a murmur with some acid to it. ‘Murderous Africa. You worry it out, you shake your head.’

  ‘No. Not like you think.’

  ‘Good,’ he said after a time. ‘Africa can be interpreted only from the inside.’

  ‘If you don’t know I know that,’ she protested, ‘we’ve reached a pretty pass.’

  One morning, which happened to be wind-less and clear, Prim answered a call from Mrs el Rahzi, who said, ‘There is a particular Austrian woman you have expressed an interest in meeting.’

  An Austrian woman. It must be the Baroness von Trotke who had brought children out of slavery. ‘I see,’ said Prim.

  ‘Well, she has flown up by charter aircraft from Kenya with her Canadian friend, and we are about to have tea. Could you join us, do you think?’

  ‘Immediately,’ Prim said. She called for Erwit, who loped inside in his ever-clean white shirt, grey pants and sandals to mind the office and phone in her absence. Prim drove with some haste along the Sharia el Muk Nimir, over the heat-emitting railway line towards the city proper. North-east past St. James’s Circuit and the Sudan Club to the elegant houses behind the University of Khartoum. She parked and rang at the el Rahzis’ gate. Through gaps amidst the buildings of the university she could see trucks rolling along the embankment of the Blue Nile like promises of normality. It was suddenly hard to believe that, as Helene Codderby claimed, somewhere officers were arguing with each other about what to do with this government, this war, this political entity of the Sudan.

  Mrs el Rahzi herself – smiling, prompt, beauteous – opened up to let Prim in. ‘Come through to the garden,’ she said. ‘It’s a good day at last for sitting outdoors.’ Through the cool, wide corridor they reached the garden, with the sudden kindness of well-cropped brown grass somewhat faded and swamped with sandy fall-out from the skies. Here, flowering acacias and three palms grew. ‘The lungs of the residence!’ Mrs el Rahzi often commented.

  In shade provided by an awning, two white women, seated at the table before half-drunk milk teas and a plate of honey cake, stood up to greet Prim. One was lean, with pale skin, her brown hair in a tight bun and her style graceful and languid; the other a small, husky woman with cropped blonde hair and an honest grin. The tall one, of course, the one with the Hapsburg languor, was von Trotke. ‘Connie Everdale,’ said the shorter woman, shaking hands and confirming Prim’s assumptions. ‘I’m madam’s pilot.’

  ‘She is Jehu the charioteer,’ said the baroness, laughing musically, in faintly accented English. ‘Her chariots are afire. She can land a Beechcraft or a Cessna on a schilling.’

  ‘Please let us all sit again,’ said Mrs el Rahzi. The party obeyed her as she poured tea for Prim.

  ‘I hear,’ said the baroness in her high, amused voice, which reminded Prim in a way of Sherif’s modulation, ‘that you are one of those rare NGO people who believe in the literal existence of Sudanese slavery.’

  ‘Yes, though I have the indulgence of Austfam to pursue the matter purely as an individual,’ said Prim. ‘My superiors are uneasy.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the baroness, and Connie Everdale nodded and reached for more honey cake. ‘I can predict what their arguments are since I am so well-acquainted with them from other sources. The West had, at one stage, industrial slavery in the metaphorical sense. Conscripting under-age boys into armies or rebel fronts is endemic in Africa. What of a family fostering a Southern child into a household and requiring it to go to a Koranic school and change its name? European settler families used to do that sort of thing, taking in this or that African boy as a kind of house-slave, giving him a Christian name, and so on.’

  Prim smiled. ‘They’re some of the objections I’ve heard, yes.’

  ‘Well, honey, let me ask something,’ said blonde Connie Everdale. ‘If they are not slaves, why do we have to pay to get them back?’

  ‘Oh that is easily answered,’ said the baroness, still playing the role of sceptic. ‘Why, we are obviously naïve to spray money about, and so we encourage the practice of child seizure!’

  ‘And so, you see, hon, if slavery exists,’ Connie Everdale concluded, ‘we’re the slavers, buying and selling. Honest to God, that’s what we get told.’

  Mrs el Rahzi rose with the tea pot and went around replenishing cups.

  ‘So are you based in Kenya now?’ Prim wanted to know of the baroness.

  ‘Not exa
ctly. I flew from Rome to Nairobi, and my friend here, the good Constance, collected me in one of her aircraft and took me up to Lokichokio where she lives.’ Lokichokio was a town in northern Kenya, close to the Sudanese border. Prim knew that much of the food and medicine of the continuing but shrunken Operation Safety was flown into the southern Sudan from there on aircraft chartered by Save the Children, the Red Cross, and others. ‘Connie has a veritable armada of aircraft.’ Baroness von Trotke’s eyes glittered. ‘Six or seven Cessnas, four Beechcraft, two old DC6s, three Ilyushins, and two Sharps. You know the Sharps? Like a butterbox in structure, yet it flies.’

  ‘Good passenger payload,’ murmured Connie dreamily. ‘And low maintenance. That’s what we came up here in.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve spent a few days in Lokichokio, and now Connie has flown me up to Khartoum to see friends, amongst whom Khalda is top of the list.’

  Connie and the baroness beamed at Khalda and Prim.

  The idea of Connie’s bush squadron intrigued Prim. She asked the pilot who her clients were, to charter all these aircraft.

  ‘A lot of NGOs,’ said Connie airily. ‘Some government ministries. Before … that’s before I accepted Jesus as my saviour, let me tell you straight out that I made my money out of flying khat into Somalia and around Sudan. I’d willingly fly cargoes of khat now if that’s what it took, if that’s what gave me the funds to buy out cargoes of misused kids from the South. But the baroness here is a little strict about hallucinogens and narcotics.’

  ‘The principle of double effect,’ the baroness, raising her chin, stated. ‘You can’t use a bad means to achieve a good end.’

  Connie said, ‘I used to take khat myself. I was a mad kid when I first came to Kenya in the late fifties.’

  ‘And now they still think you’re mad,’ said the baroness with her tinkling laugh. ‘So at least you are consistent.’

  ‘That’s what my mama said to me, spouse of dear Doctor Everdale of Stratford, Ontario. “You seem bent on difference, my girl.”’