Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  It was the person I most wanted to see, all the more disarming for being in a suit slightly too small for him. I was delighted to see him looking as I’ve never seen him before. Harried. He had been sweating over something, and I got the musk of that, which I liked pretty much. I wanted him to come in and fill my little hutch with it. Always been one for the sweaty fellas! No, I shouldn’t say that. It’s flippancy, brought on by nervousness. I’m more scared of your judgements than of anyone else’s on earth.

  No, Prim had mentally promised her sister. No judgements today.

  Benedetto had told Dimp he had taken delivery from Tim Huxpeth of an Arthur Boyd painting which he suspected used to be Dimp’s. She was flattered he had used that form of words – ‘used to be yours’. He’d tried to reach her at home, and one day the maid was in and said she was gone. Then he’d thought of Max, Hugo Ventriss’s agent. She’d told Benedetto earlier that she wanted to use Ventriss as a writer, and Benedetto knew Max was Ventriss’s agent. She’d told Max she’d rented the cottage as an office.

  In the doorway of the cottage, Dimp and Benedetto discussed the painting. It was one of those Dimp had sold. She congratulated him on acquiring a lovely work. God, said Benedetto, I’ve behaved so crassly. He asked could he come in and have some of Dimp’s wine.

  So, dazed with the glory and shame of what he’d just purchased from Huxpeth, he came into her little living room, and Dimp sat him down at the side of her desk, because he seemed in a mood to be told where to sit. He asked her what was happening – had something gone wrong?

  Dimp told him, ‘I’ve left Bren. That’s the sum of it. For good.’

  ‘And Bren gave you the paintings?’ Benedetto asked.

  ‘The paintings were actually mine from the start. You don’t have to worry about any caveat emptor stuff. Your title’s secure.’

  But he looked pretty agonised still, and on more than legal grounds. He said, ‘It doesn’t feel like a triumph, having the Boyd. It feels like theft. It feels like the meanest thing I’ve ever done. I felt I had to come around here straight away and apologise.’

  Dimp told him that that was irrational. But she saw that buying the painting had certainly made him look less certain than he was the night he had helped – with clarity of argument – to put an end to her marriage. She told him to enjoy the painting in peace, and mentioned the crucial dinner.

  With a flushed face he told her he hadn’t been the same person since that night. ‘It’s hard to ask this question without seeming a vainglorious bastard. But here we go. I’d had a fair bit to drink that night, and I just wondered if I had … if something I said … somehow caused trouble between you and Bren?’ Even as he asked it, he shrugged and shook his head and laughed at himself. When he’d awoken the next morning he’d had this feeling that he’d trespassed in some sizeable way. He had the impulse to call Dimp and ask her. But he didn’t. A man would need to be either very drunk or very desperate to ask such a question, he said.

  And then Tim Huxpeth had told him a lovely Boyd was available, and he’d gone and seen it and suspected it was the D’Arcys’, but didn’t specifically ask. He’d thought, they’re splitting up, and you, Benedetto, you smart alec, you bloody did it! He said his offer to take the painting off Huxpeth, was a sort of defensive, panicky gesture. He’d believed it would put him back on the rails, give him a centre. Well … it hadn’t. He’d really felt like scum then. What a futile, vain, stupid purchase. And the question went hammering on all the harder … that’s why he’d had the temerity to come and see her.

  ‘What happened that night, Dimp?’ he wanted to know.

  She told him about the accidental impact of his speech that night, the oblique power of his exposition of the Mabo case. She began unevenly but was sure she covered all the points of law, at least well enough for someone like her, someone inexpert but willing. As she spoke, he occasionally shook his head and began to lift a hand, as if he might want her to stop speaking. But he never completed the gesture.

  He was totally out of balance and Dimp said she felt she could reach forward and with one finger adjust him to the equilibrium he wanted. She told him to drink his wine and not to worry. ‘You were right all along,’ she said. ‘You took the curse off me, and you’ve had to carry it around yourself!’

  He laughed and said that was a Calabrian way of looking at things. Then he reached out and stroked her wrist.

  Prim was woken at 7 a.m. by a concerned Helene Codderby.

  ‘What does this press release you’ve sent mean, Prim? You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?’

  ‘I am going to do something very sensible.’

  ‘Look, you’re in a special position. You’re on an NGO passport. You are not a tourist. Tell me, what do you have in mind?’

  But she did not yet want to expose her sustaining plan to the banal light of day. ‘I might treasure you as a friend, Helene, but you’ll just have to find out at the same time as the others.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Helene said, her voice thin in that new way, as it had been only since the grenades of operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood had torn apart the Rimini dining room and Fergal and Claudia Stoner, ‘between now and ten o’clock, do re-examine the wisdom of anything you have in mind!’

  ‘If I’m mute, will they show their gratitude by letting him go? You and Amnesty are the first to tell me it’s not the way they operate.’

  ‘Are you doing this for him, or only because you need to do something for your own sanity?’

  It was true that the need to act was nearly superior to all other needs. ‘It’s a good question, Helene. But again, you name prisoners, even in your reports. And Amnesty. I asked the woman – she said they’re likely to be more careful in their treatment once they know the world knows.’

  ‘Don’t pin your hopes on what some faceless woman told you late at night from an office in London.’

  ‘I pin my hopes on my instincts for what will work.’

  ‘Please reconsider. You aren’t a human rights advocate, you aren’t a journalist.’

  But the conversation sputtered out into barely more than monosyllabic expressions of concern from Helene.

  At half-past nine, Prim had Erwit drive her into central Khartoum, to the Rimini with its blackened upper floor. They sat in the truck outside until, at a few minutes to ten, she emerged holding a sheet of rolled poster cardboard in her hand, and walked down the street to the Khartoum City Bank building. At her appearance there, a number of white and brown-skinned journalists emerged quickly from vehicles parked either side of the road. Some of them were fiddling with cameras. They knew they might not have long to do their work.

  In front of the closed iron doors of the bank building, Prim stood still, and the folded cardboard she held in her hands was unfurled. It said in Arabic and English: ‘Dr Sherif Taha of Khartoum is a prisoner in a ghost house like this one. He is illegally detained. Please protest at the unrecorded imprisonment of Dr Taha and many like him.’

  Stringers for The Times and the Guardian were there, and the man who sometimes got stuff published in the Washington Post, the US paper which was best on Africa. Helene was there with a microphone and asked Prim in her shaky voice what she hoped to accomplish. Under the blanket of the National Security Act, said Prim, men and women from all over the Sudan were summarily arrested and held in unacknowledged detention centres. One of them was her friend, Dr Sherif Taha. It was time to call on the detainers and the interrogators to cease, she said.

  Others threw in questions: What was Dr Sherif Taha to her? the man from the Washington Post asked. A respected friend and colleague, she told him. An eminent public health expert who had tried to keep health records separate from security records. Before she could explain, she saw a white police vehicle double-park in front of the bank building. Two immaculately uniformed police lieutenants descended. One of them asked Prim in English to accompany him and his friend. There was no reason she should not go with them. The stringer fr
om the Guardian was closest to her as she stepped off the pavement to enter the police vehicle. ‘Get it published,’ she told him, ‘for God’s sake. You see, I’m being detained for a mere placard.’ The lieutenants put her in the back seat, from which she saw Helene’s strangely wan face amongst the ruck of journalists. God bless them all. She had called them, they had come.

  The two lieutenants drove her to the police headquarters opposite the river-front parkland of the Blue Nile. They had nothing to say to her on the way. One of them led her indoors, the other followed with her placard. No one in the downstairs office looked at them as they waited by the lift, and on the second floor Prim was put in an unused office with a bare table and barred high windows. There she was left to wait more than two hours.

  In the first hour she had the exultant sense of having made exactly the correct gesture to rescue Sherif. But in the second hour the sort of questions Helene had raised began to intrude. There were no utter guarantees, as the woman at Amnesty in London had told her, that in a specific case the tried strategies would work. Amnesty had in its care prisoners from Chile to Siberia. Its brief was very reasonably what worked best for the majority of that sad army. But the minority must be numerous! Prim told herself: don’t doubt. This is not the hour nor the room for it.

  Sometime in the third hour the door was unlocked and Dr Siddiq entered.

  ‘Hello, Miss Bettany,’ he said pleasantly. Prim remembered the time she had first seen him, at the el Rahzi’s, where he had looked something of an outsider. Now he had, even more than at Alingaz, the relaxed gestures of an insider.

  ‘So here we see the connection between the Ministry of Health and the security system,’ Prim told him in defiance.

  ‘I am a doctor, and an army officer,’ Siddiq told her. ‘So why not? They asked me to call in because I know you. They’re puzzled as to why you’d do such a reckless thing.’

  ‘That’s a naïve question, Siddiq.’

  ‘Of course. You did it because Dr Taha is your lover. You miss his caress.’

  ‘I don’t need you to belittle my motives. You must know better than me what’s being done to him while we spar here.’

  Siddiq spread his hands. ‘Damn it all, Prim. He is being questioned, he is being held. That’s what I know. But you are a guest in the Sudan, and so is the NGO you represent. Why would you choose to make such a crass intervention in our legal process?’

  ‘Because it isn’t a legal process, and you know it.’

  ‘I’m told this isn’t the first time you’ve acted beyond your brief. You have made an unauthorised journey to the South and helped to remove Sudanese nationals into a foreign country. You have collected subversive and libellous information in interviews with Southerners, and denounced our government to sundry world bodies to whom you sent copies of those interviews. Your superiors can’t be too happy with you. You show an astonishing hubris. You can’t be amazed that the government is not enchanted by your activities.’

  Prim was not even particularly astonished that the government knew about her anti-slavery activities. Perhaps there was someone, some friend of the Sudan, in the organisations to whom she had sent her reports.

  ‘So I’m the sinner,’ said Prim. ‘Why is Sherif paying the price?’

  Siddiq opened the palms of his hands to her. ‘How do you know he’s paying a price? You can’t be sure of any such thing. He might have a wife and children in Shendi. He might be visiting them. I wouldn’t put it past him. It’s difficult for him having a turbulent woman such as yourself for a close friend.’

  ‘You know he’s detained somewhere. He’s detained for getting angry about your damn questions.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He’s suffering for wanting to blow the whistle on camps like Alingaz.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ asked Siddiq. ‘No doubt you wonder why we attempt to instil and enforce Islamic values, when we could instead be splendid hypocrites like Westerners! Do you really love these people, Primrose? Do you love the Nuba, do you love the Southerners? Is that why you are part of an aid alliance whose chief job is to service refugee camps here in the Sudan, refugee camps which put our administration under such great stress? But where are the helpful immigration officials from the West? They are outraged by Alingaz. But will they take the Nuba? No. It doesn’t suit their domestic policy. Oh dear! But let’s do the right thing. Let’s feed them where they are, as a means of keeping these people out of America, out of Europe, out of Canada, out of Australia! Keep them alive in the Sudan, oh yes! But for God’s sake don’t bring them over. And when some inevitable glitch occurs, why then we can blame Sudanese barbarity! Do you and your dear friend Sherif really believe that in the wonderful West your Dinka and your Nuba and your Northern Darfur peasant would be safe from all harm, all violation? Well, it’s something you won’t be putting to the test anyhow. Feed them around Khartoum! Feed them in the Red Sea Hills! But for God’s sake don’t let them settle in Clapham, or rent a room in Brooklyn. Or in … in Sydney! In white Australia! For God’s sake don’t let them go there!’

  Prim resisted an impulse to weep in bewilderment, for he was very nearly outdoing her in genuine rage.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she murmured, ‘what you say is fair grounds for despising the almighty West. But that’s not the point. The point is, why these ghost houses? Are they the fault of Sydney or Clapham? Just let Sherif go!’

  Siddiq grew thoughtful. ‘You know I don’t have that sort of power. Nor do I have utter control over every angry turnkey and interrogating police NCO.’

  Prim said, ‘If you people tell me what I have to do, I will do it.’

  ‘Oh yes. And then you would take him, if you got him back, to Australia. Shouting, “Come and see a real political prisoner! Risen from the awful Sudan prison! Alleluia!”’

  ‘I just want to see him safe.’

  ‘Well then, you do not go scouting for ghost houses. And you do not stand in front of any building with a placard. These are times of emergency. There are emergency laws.’

  ‘If I agree to behave myself, will you move him into el Kober, put him on the books, let him have a lawyer?’

  ‘I’ve just said I can’t control every twitch of the penal system! But you may, in the coming weeks get a call from the Foreign Office. You must be patient. That’s the way the government works, you know. One more stunt, though, and all bets are off. Talk to Amnesty if you want. They mean little to the people who hold Sherif. That’s all I can give you.’

  LONG AND OTHER TORTURED QUESTIONS

  I went to see Long three days after the sentence and two weeks before he was meant to hang, subject to the appeal Mr Handler had made to the Governor. He had put on some weight under Mr Bilson’s care and without the regular exercise of Nugan Ganway, and when I saw him come in, merely in wrist chains this time, as if he had earned the concession by good behaviour, I thought that he might have through eating well repented of all his talk of world-weariness, and his desire for a better place. The two constables handled him almost affectionately, having got to know him.

  As they withdrew we uttered the banal pleasantries.

  ‘Are you well, Long?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mr Bettany.’

  We stood at a table, the same table in the barred office where we had last talked at length, and he sat down at my invitation, and by then we were alone, and I could think of nothing to say. So I passed over some more tobacco.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I consider you’ve been very square with me.’

  ‘No, I have perjured myself,’ I said.

  ‘Not in my book. Treloar and Cladder got me, as I knew they would.’

  It was intolerable to be there with him and to be burdened with my knowledge. ‘I am determined to come forward. To hell with any charges of perjury. As for Felix, he can live secure and distant. I am determined. I must speak if I am to tolerate myself.’

  It was so apparent I rose to call for constables and for Bilson.

  �
��For dear Christ’s sake, sir, sit still. Come, sit. Please.’

  I obeyed him rather slowly. Disgrace could be delayed an hour.

  ‘Good, sir. Now, have no doubt you have given me what I seek, and all other actions are ruinous to the three of us – yes, to Felix, yourself, but above all me.’

  ‘This mad concept I should help you destroy yourself!’

  ‘And you should help not to destroy two others. For sweet Christ’s sake, don’t be a torment to yourself and to me. I mean it.’

  I shook my head weakly. ‘I have written to the Governor, by the way, Sean,’ I lamely told him.

  ‘Then I hope your best efforts of rescue do not count, since I do not want to be sent to Norfolk Island for life. But you know my increase of cattle? You have banked money for me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I would like it sent with news of my death to Bride O’Lúing, care of the parish priest, Glock-na-ballagh, Sligo. It is on this sheet of paper. Now, let us not be gloomy, Mr Bettany. Let us say that we had adventures … sometimes I wish I could go back to one of the old hearths at home, just to unburden the stories I hold.’

  ‘Would they believe you?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s not likely now. Justice Flense didn’t, and I had a better kind of jury than they have at home.’

  And now, we knew, somewhere on the road, from Bathurst or Goulburn or Sydney, a man was preparing to travel with a noose in his bag, while the Governor would soon be reading Mr Handler’s appeal.

  ‘Mr Bilson,’ Long said, holding his pipe clamped in his teeth, asked me what I thought had happened to Felix. I said, “Oh, he will never be seen again until he takes on a man’s face. He’s gone far down the Murrumbidgee to live with the Myall blacks. He’ll take a lubra for wife. He was a clever boy, that one, but never happy unless amongst his own.”’

  ‘But he liked his Latin and Greek,’ I said by way of gentle contradiction.

  ‘Oh,’ said Long, ‘but there’s no need for Mr Bilson to be so informed.’