‘What are you doing about ten o’clock on Tuesday morning?’ he proposed, and kissed her cheek lightly. ‘No, you deserve better than me.’
‘Not at all. It’s not what we deserve but what we fancy. I’ll be available as soon as I’ve dropped the kids at kindergarten.’
Primrose admired these easy flirtations. Benedetto and Dimp’s old school friend had such an exact sense of where dalliance ended and seriousness and hurt set in. They had learnt it somehow, had in youth clearly plucked down some lesson that was in the air, above their heads.
Benedetto nodded towards Prim. ‘You’re so obviously Dimple’s sister. I’m the fellow who sent Dimp those papers of your ancestors. I hope they didn’t contain too many shocks.’
‘It was very sensitive of you, Mr Benedetto, to care.’
‘Well, I’d be a historian if it paid the rent better. But all I wanted was the old boy’s manuscript: Sheep Breeding and the Pastoral Life.’
‘You didn’t read the private journal and the letters?’
‘Well, I began reading and saw that both became kind of confessional. So I thought they were your business, and Dimp’s. I couldn’t just hand them over to the public library without Dimp seeing them first.’
‘They’ve excited her,’ said Prim.
Benedetto smiled. ‘Well, she’s a woman of gracious enthusiasm.’
‘Oh dear!’ said Sue. She was vamping it up, choosing to take Benedetto’s confession melodramatically as a sign that he had affection for Dimp, and not for her.
‘I really am concerned only,’ Benedetto said, ‘with the question of how these Englishmen, Scots and Irish made their fortunes. I’m a dry-as-dust historian, I’m afraid, and a very poor Italian indeed, because their love life means very little to me. It’s the romance of the fleece, the Australian pastorale, I’m into.’
‘But I think you should have felt free to have a read of the stuff. After all, Dimp intends to broadcast it all to the world in a film.’
‘Yes. Native born Australians have a facility to broadcast the faults of their ancestors in a way which would be considered improper, best kept in the family, in Calabria. But then that’s all Calabrians have, their pride. If we had harbour views,’ he gestured out across the water, ‘perhaps we could be heedless blabbermouths too.’
This was needlessly philosophic for Sue, who excused herself.
‘So,’ said Frank. ‘Do you really read the Bettany material your sister sends you, in your house in Khartoum?’
‘She asks me the same thing, pretty continually,’ Prim told him. ‘But the answer – anyhow – is yes. But I … well, I don’t want to get into conversation with her about it. It seems she’s a little over-stimulated by it. These things reverberate for her.’
Benedetto said, ‘She’s a storyteller, you see. She hasn’t stopped being one, just because of all this …’ He gestured towards the interior of the house and then up-harbour.
A sun-tanned couple came up – they had been out sailing all day and had a maritime glow – and engaged Benedetto in talk of a court case. Benedetto had a pleasant way of making obscure legal points to the man, who was clearly a lawyer himself, and then restating them in succinct English for the sake of Prim and the man’s wife. The case was a challenge by a group of East Arnhem Land elders – people who lived some 1500 kilometres north of the mysteries of Mount Bavaria – against a proposed bauxite mine. The elders were seeking to present their case directly to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and Benedetto was their counsel. Their grounds would be a point of international law as old as Grotius, said Benedetto. The wife asked a little coldly why they would not be happy with the bauxite royalties they would receive. Well, said Benedetto, their sense of the world, their security in who they were, depended on securing an area of coastline between Cape Arnhem and Port Bradshaw against further bauxite mining.
‘It’s very complex, isn’t it?’ asked the wife, though it sounded more like warning than comment.
‘And don’t you think,’ said the husband, ‘this appealing to outside tribunals could set an irksome if not dangerous precedent? On the one hand, legal progressives like you, Frank, couldn’t wait to cut out Australian appeals to the Privy Council of Great Britain. But here you are encouraging an appeal to another outside court, this International Court of Justice.’
Benedetto raised his big hands gently to the right elbow of the husband, the left of the wife, including them and, by glance, Prim, in a fraternity of the enlightened. ‘Well, this isn’t an appeal. But I accept your point. You and I know that conservative Australia hates anyone to go to outside arbiters. It’s a post-colonial insecurity. We have input into The Hague though. It’s our court as well as the world’s. And we’d like it to stick to judging the real baddies – people in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America – not nice girls and boys like us. But … it’s available, and as you know, clients want to use the courts that are available.’
This calm exposition fascinated Prim, but the couple made some unconvinced remarks and drifted off to talk with others about their day’s sailing.
‘What does Bren think of all this?’ Prim asked Benedetto. ‘I mean, you’re trying to stop mining, no less!’
‘He hates me and he loves me.’ Benedetto seemed to relish Bren’s ambiguity. ‘I’ve represented miners often enough. And he knows enough to understand secure title is in everyone’s best interest. As much as miners jump up and down, they’ve got nothing to complain of here. In other countries, their mines get blown up by the locals!’ Benedetto gave way to the affectionate laugh of a man who possesses many friends and understands his enemies, and Prim’s splendid sister, dressed with her normal dazzling inadvertence in a long silk gown painted with pink and scarlet tropical flowers, appeared at her side.
‘Are you two going to consider talking to other people tonight?’ Dimp asked, but her grin had an uncertain and annoyed quality, something Prim remembered from childhood, nothing as raw or inane as suppressed jealousy, but an annoyed ingredient of it. It was the first indication Prim had that her sister was capable of finding Benedetto interesting as more than a supplier of obscure family documents.
Morning came too early for Prim. Surely Dimp would stay in bed and miss Canberra. But no, she was already up, lipstick applied with more energy than accuracy, dressed for business in a suit, to catch the cab and take her sister to Canberra. Dimp slept in the window seat for the short hop from Sydney to Canberra, the early sun lighting her face and, Prim thought, illuminating a definite drag of discontent in the skin. In the bright brown landscape of the lower Monaro – Jonathan Bettany might have sighted these pastures on his way to places such as Yass – only Canberra looked fogbound from 20 000 feet, and so they descended to Australia’s only misty town of that morning.
After the long night – they had enjoyed a last, sweetly meaningless glass of wine with Bren at 2 a.m. on the balcony – it might have been a pleasant thing for both sisters to wrap themselves in the woolly comfort of fog, but the sun was already burning off the vapours and there was no risk that the miasmas would make inroads on the sessions of the annual conference of the United Nations Association.
There was a homeliness about a parliament which was constructed within the contours of a hill, as Canberra’s was. Delivered to the gloom of the underground Parliament House car park, Prim and Dimp ascended to a confused pearliness of light.
Inside, Dimp told her as they entered the building’s reception hall, those marble columns were meant to reproduce the verticals of grey gums, the dun eucalypts of the Australian bush. But there was something in Australian flora, in the Australia of Jonathan Bettany, which resisted marble. Prim had not much sense as she passed amongst these stone saplings that she was coming to the heart of a home forest.
The meeting was held in the Senate hearing room, and at its rear stood a table with tea bags and Nescafe, the same table which could have been found in a thousand remote shires of Australia. The Australians had the same faith a
s the Sudanese – that tea was a solution. They had somewhat greater reasons to hope so.
A pleasant middle-aged woman who had until recently been a senator showed dazed Prim the rostrum and the microphone. The room filled with awesome rapidity, and decent faces were raised towards her.
‘We might start,’ said the former senator.
Prim saw her sister settle two rows from the back of the hall. A rare bird amongst the wise ones, amongst these men and women whose passion for international affairs, and not their relationship to the speaker, dictated the order of their day. She saw Peter Whitloaf, looking wan, settle himself not far from Dimp.
The former senator introduced Prim and she stood.
‘I’m Primrose Bettany, Acting Administrator, Austfam, Khartoum.’
She was surprised to see her name float away safely above the heads of the listeners. She began to speak of the meat and potatoes of emergency and development aid, as she had with Whitloaf. Adi Hamit was a good stand-by for this, as were a dozen other camps. Midwives, health workers, Operation Safety. The supply of seed and livestock to Abu Grada, the town in Darfur allotted to Austfam after the 1985 emergency. Sherif’s work. Why it was that in December there was the largest incidence of respiratory disease in Adi Hamit. Mortality rates, the nutritional status of children under five, and of women. A disquisition on the war and its impact upon Sudanese society and its well-being. A cautious examination of the failure of government policies. And many safe sentences were uttered beginning with, ‘Austfam participated in …’ ‘Austfam initiated …’ ‘Austfam met the expense of training …’ Whitloaf’s face was raised in something like hope.
‘It would be appropriate,’ said Prim, ‘to end with some personal observations.’ Peter Whitloaf crossed his hands on his knee and stared at his knuckles. Prim saw too the radiant, proud, engrossed face of Dimp. Obviously Dimp had no idea that her sister had given a very ordinary report to this point – to her it was all new material, it was as if it had been conjured and was thus as clever as film, fiction, or any of the forms beloved of Dimp.
‘One impression is that the concept of famine is very poorly understood by us. As fruitful as it might be in gathering money for emergency aid, the term makes no allowance for the fact that seasonal malnutrition is common every year in the Sudan and elsewhere. Plots are planted at the beginning of the rainy season. Men, and their entire families, sometimes leave their village to find work at that stage, but in confident hope of returning for harvest. They are often seasonally hungry in May, June, July – most millet, other than fiercely guarded seed millet, has been eaten by this time. The husbands might go and sell fodder or charcoal for cash or food. But if the rain does not come, and the crop fails, then malnutrition claims the entire year, as it did in the Darfur emergency. Nonetheless, we are scarcely entitled to look at people suffering these events as utterly hapless, as purely and simply victims.
‘Yet if we think of much aid advertising, particularly emergency aid advertising, images of haplessness and victimhood come to mind. We can each of us here envisage the skeletal women and children who are favoured in some posters; women and children who are in fact probably long dead by the time their images are presented to the eyes of the West. Such images are of people so removed from us by hunger, so inhuman in their skeletal condition, that though we pity them, they have become a different kind of being, they are pure ineffectuality, and the one recourse open to them is death.’
Whitloaf raised his head suddenly here, but seemed to have resolved to bear her exuberance bravely.
‘One thing I learned working for Austfam is simply this: when we see these figures, we should salute them as the figures of heroes rather than flinchingly behold them as the figures of sub-humans from another economic planet which we shall never visit. For if such a figure was a Sudanese woman, a shrunken baby at her breast, she has seen seedlings die and fields crack beneath the sun. She has seen drought lower the water level in the well in her village. She has walked fifteen miles a day to fetch the family water from some water source not yet dried up. She has hauled that meagre ration back to her family. She has asked: Do I wash, do I cook? What do I drink and what does the family goat drink? And as the dry continues she fights the easy options – she tries not to feed her children the family’s millet seed, the seed of the next harvest. I knew a woman who mixed her seed millet with sand and buried it in the earth to prevent her hungry children eating it. But then the drought takes the family livestock. She has tried to drive them to market perhaps, but there has not been water or pasture along the way. And in the towns the price of the millet she wishes to buy has increased ten-fold. For a time of emergency is as ever a splendid time for speculators to buy livestock cheaply and sell grain expensively.’
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 s
kin.
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
Bettany's Book Page 37