Bettany's Book (15 page)
Authors: Keneally Thomas
She realised then that she would need to lead him to her bed simply because it provided the only arena for the energies now running in the room. On the way in he said nothing: no noble exhortations to think again, no confession he had been waiting to be led in by her for a week or a month. Earnestly she unbuttoned his shirt and saw that dense, African body below. It had a young man’s lustrous hair on it. So he was still young beneath the middle-aged demeanour.
He took over, undressing her with a set of scarcely audible sighs, and was so swollen, she observed, that he had scant time to say the expected and demanded things. But he said she was very beautiful. ‘I haven’t got any kohl or henna,’ she told him. ‘No
delkah
.’
‘What’s all this chatter,’ he asked her. After cupping and praising her breasts, by entering he drove from her body all the skilled arguments about versions of womanhood, ornamentation and device. She grabbed his hips. She held him roughly. She demanded he reach a certain limit only she knew well. He must be dragged, and incited to do superbly. She saw her knees lock him to the task. Imagine, she thought. Imagine.
In Prim’s first five years in the Sudan, Dimp had pleaded with her frequently to repent of her wilful choice of life in Khartoum and take a post somewhere more accessible. At the very least, she said, Prim should come home for a visit. Dimp made plans to visit Khartoum herself in 1986, not least to inspect the lover to whom Prim made occasional and typically guarded references in her letters. But then Bren’s annulment came through, and her marriage was planned.
Dimp had an unquestioning sense that she should be married to Bren. She was the sort of woman to whom the initial risks a man took were
of great and binding significance. His first ardent approach to her at the film-tax seminar was a gesture of appropriate and compelling scale. She had not doubted since that hour that she was bound to him by it.
On top of that, the trouble he had taken seeking an annulment, to cancel at its root one marriage so that she was his first wife, was a rite of extreme ardour to her. In her view of the world, it was an unnecessary process, but she was impressed by how much it meant to him, of how it added weight to his purpose.
At the time of the wedding, Prim sent her warmest wishes but pleaded that an emergency in the Southern, tropical part of the country, where Austfam maintained a feeding station, made it impossible for her to come back. It was apparent Prim was engaged in pressing humanitarian efforts, but pleased to be.
Prim took some leave the following year but found reason not to fly further than London. She was still grotesquely scared of coming home. Bren did not want his wife to go and fetch her, either. It might be counter-productive, he suggested with his lumbering canniness. Well, maybe they could call in briefly, detouring from the Gulf, on a trip to Europe.
For whatever reason – though Dimp had no doubt of her love for her sister, or her sister’s for her – no visit, either way, occurred.
Some time after her marriage to D’Arcy, in a Southern Hemisphere summer, when she and her husband were happily established on the edge of the massive harbour in their house named Woolarang at Double Bay, Dimp faxed her sister. She had just heard on Radio National that the elected government of the Sudan which had come into being a little time after Nimeiri’s fall, had been deposed by a group of army officers. So, Dimp understood, Prim had by 1989 lived under three Sudanese governments – the supposedly Marxist government of President Nimeiri, the civilian government just toppled, and now a military council. This seemed another reason for her to come home. Military rule surely would make Prim’s spartan life even less comfortable.
The second subject of the fax was a Sydney barrister named Frank Benedetto. Dimp was sure Prim had met him at a party, before she left Australia. ‘He acted for Bren’s company once. A pleasant, bear-like sort of fellow, you know. Recently made a Queen’s Counsel – I wonder what his Italian mum and dad think of that! Well, he got a Master’s degree in pastoral history before he did law! That is, a degree in sheep!’
This man Benedetto told Dimp that he liked to visit all the old houses
of the squattocracy in New South Wales and Victoria, and whenever there was an auction involving one of those old places, he would turn up to bid. ‘Second-generation Australian,’ wrote Dimp to her sister, ‘but he’s more interested in that stuff than the rest of us!’ Recently he had attended the sell-up of a sheep station named Eudowrie in the Riverina, the estate of a deceased, remote Bettany cousin, an old man – someone they had not met, unless perhaps, when they were infants, their father had taken them to visit the place. Dimp had a hazy memory of visiting some broad, wide-open pastures, of herself and Prim chasing lambs, and an old man telling them to stop because it wasn’t good for the lambs’ hearts.
Benedetto’s reason for turning up at this sheep station auction was that he believed a nineteenth-century manuscript entitled
Sheep Breeding and the Pastoral Life in New South Wales
, a work published in 1882 by a Bettany ancestor, Jonathan Bettany, was likely to be part of the estate. ‘You remember the book,’ Dimp told her sister. ‘Father sometimes showed it to guests. It had that bloody big fold-out map of pastoral leases in the back which made about as much sense as an anatomical drawing. It had riveting chapter headings like “How to Choose a Balanced Flock”, or “The Tobacco Water Cure for Scab in Sheep”, or “Thoughts anent the New Land Bill now before Parliament”. He wrote of a diphtheria epidemic which hit the Monaro, but even made that boring. But he’s a hero to this Benedetto.’
At the auction, Frank Benedetto bought the station papers, the stock books and so on, and the prize, the manuscript of
Sheep Breeding
, for a mere $8000, and passed them on to the Mitchell Library for nothing – an act of largesse such as particularly the son of Calabrian immigrant peasants might relish. But Dimp reported to Prim:
There were some other and more private documents of our esteemed ancestor nearly-Sir-Jonathan, Member of the Legislative Assembly for New South Wales – ‘Missed a knighthood by a whisker,’ as Dad used to say – which came with the papers. Benedetto knew from Bren and from
Enzo Kangaroo
that I was a fully paid-up Bettany, and he thought I should have what he called these ‘more private’ papers. He sent the stuff by courier. So I have the documents, and can tell from a quick read that Benedetto has behaved with great delicacy.
The main item Benedetto’s given me is a sort of confessional journal from Jonathan Bettany – it’s headed
Bettany’s Book
and reads almost as
if it were written with publication in mind, a far more literary publication than
Sheep Breeding.
This may be a rare intimately personal account of Australian pastoral life, and that makes it all the more interesting that Benedetto gave it up out of some sort of sensibility! If it’s to be published … well, he thinks that ought to be up to me. Then there’s a series of letters written in her convict condition by his wife, our ancestor, of the revealing kind all of us maybe write in hours of stress but which we might hope to get rid of before we die. I intend to exercise some rare discipline and leave them until I’ve transcribed a large slab of the memoir, which I’ll send to you in bits.
But – and this is fascinating – these papers show that Mrs Bettany, our ancestor Sarah, was not only a convict, but Jewish as well. Don’t you wish our poor parents were around for that piece of news? To hear that! The wife of nearly-Sir Jonathan Bettany, great man of sheep! Isn’t it stimulating? I wonder if that modicum of Hebraic blood explains my filmic tendencies, and your career as a pilgrim.
Amongst the documents, said Dimp, was a picture of nearly-Sir Jonathan and nearly-Lady Bettany, as they were in the flesh and as they might have been aggrandised if his pastoral Free Trade party had remained in government in Macquarie Street a little longer.
He is sitting, she is standing, according to what you’d loosely call the habit of the time. He is older, a little paunchier than the ideal pioneer should be, but not too much so. A very handsome, square-faced, clear-eyed fellow with eyes a bit startled by life or the photographer’s flash. Wearing a very well-cut suit, but the way a man who is muscular does, as if he’s just waiting to throw it off, put on dungarees and jump into the saddle again. He certainly loved bloody sheep!
But Dimp was not content to mention the photograph, and promise to send it on to Khartoum. It had clearly precipitated in her, a woman nearly without clan, a tide of clannish analysis.
As for her, Sarah, the wife, she is luscious. A-1. Splendid. Dominant. A long head, piercing dark eyes full of intelligence. A superb figure despite the five kids she bore him. So, muted along the way by a few Scots brunettes, she’s clearly the wellspring of our problems, Prim, of – I might
as well bloody say it, since every other bastard does – our beauty. Came to us through father, those fine lines he had in his sixties and even in his casket, even in death. Those darker features were not quite Anglo-Scots, were they? They were what attracted and scared the hell out of Mum. What’s in this picture, a kind of alien lushness from Poland or Russia – or even from somewhere like Persia, something Sephardic Jewish – that’s what attracted her to Dad, but then she was panicked by it in us. Poor old thing, she tried to tamp it down for our own good with our pretty, crocheted, bloody silly names – Dimple for me, Primrose for you.
For the time being Dimp promised to attach a good photocopy of the photograph.
So I am sending you in batches what I have transcribed of the old boy’s journal, and the old girl’s letters, in a belief that it’s important to know what the founding virtues of your ancestors were. But, more important, to know what were the founding crimes.
Such a statement, Prim thought when she read it in Khartoum, was pure Dimp. She inspected the photocopy of the photograph. The splendid upright woman did have a face a bit like Dimp’s. But there was in Bettany’s eye, she was sure, some of her own discontent. More than she would ever tell her sister, Prim fancied she saw in him a desire like her own: to find new landscapes in which to remake himself.
M
Y CHILDHOOD AND JOURNEY TO
N
EW
S
OUTH
W
ALES
My father used tell my brother Simon and myself in the vaguest terms that when he was young he was very like the poet Horace. He had been raised on Quintus Horatius Flaccus (BC 65–8),
Odes, Books I–IV
, and Horace was the classic poet he loved above all, and attempted to teach the colonial-hearty Batchelor boys and ourselves at Hydebrae, west of Ross, Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania.
Father’s constant references to Horace may have been in part his way of letting us know that in his youth, like the poet, he had committed some crime, or let me use my kindly mother’s phrase, some ‘mistake of politics’. It was clear to me even then that his crime had been more a matter of enthusiasm, since, unlike
real
convicts and felons, he was
respected by the better people in Hobart and Ross. They accepted that whatever he had done – something ill-advised and republican – had been a matter of a good heart, exuberance and earnest intent. It was a sin from which everyone, including himself, had long recovered. Mother, Simon, myself, were after all its beneficiaries. It had brought us from a small house in Manchester, in a sunless street with a cloaca in the midst of it and typhus on every corner, to temperate and robust Hobart. O, happy crime –
peccatum felix
. Or so it seemed to us.
The small disadvantage of our situation was that everyone knew father was a former ticket-of-leave man as all in Rome knew that Horace’s father was a freed slave. But it was taken for granted that only the meanest of people mentioned it aloud. So few of these were there, and so well was father greeted by the progressive settlers such as the Batchelors, that he was as empty of any grievance as were Horace’s sunnier verses.
Vino et lucernis Medus acinates
immane quantum discrepat: impium
lenite clamorem, sodales,
Et cubito remanete presso.
By wine and the light of lamps
Drawn Median daggers are inappropriate,
So soften the row, mates,
And keep your elbows tucked in place.
As I got older, I gathered a little more intelligence of father’s mistake, and of my English antecedents.
‘According to Suetonius,’ father told the Batchelor boys and my brother Simon and me one day, ‘Horace’s father was a
salsamentarius
, a seller of salted fish. Similarly, my father was a fishmonger from Widnes. And like Horace’s father he possessed a noble mind.’
In the trap on the way home from the little Anglican church in Ross one Sunday, Mother said dreamily – she often gave her most important news in a state of false torpor – ‘I like Anglicans greatly. They’re less likely to lose their common sense than Wesleyans. Your father’s father was a Wesleyan, and interpreted the words of the Gospels in a fanatic way.’
I wondered what this fanatic way might have been, for I intended to
avoid it. In a book from the case of books Mother had packed for us to bring to join Father, I found an old history of Greece, and inside its cover, in an arduously achieved hand, misted by the increasing greyness of the paper, the words, ‘The Society of Spencean Philanthropists.’ Then, in the back of another of Father’s old books I found a verse:
Hark how the Trumpet’s Sound
Proclaims the Land around
The Jubilee;
Tells all the poor oppressed
No more shall they be cess’d
Nor landlords more molest,
Their Property.
I waited several weeks before I asked my mother, one howling Tasmanian winter’s evening by the fire, ‘Ma, could you tell me what is the Society of Spencean Philanthropists?’
My mother looked up from needlework with a severe fright in her eyes.
‘Where did you hear of them, Jonathan?’
‘Someone mentioned them. It might have been that parson, the Reverend Munroe, at Mr Batchelor’s.’
‘What did he say about them?’
‘He said something about having known them … Not here! In England.’
‘How would he know of them? Was he trying to blacken your father?’
I had got deep in, since it was her acutest fear that someone would discuss my father’s crime. ‘No, no. Was Father one of these Philanthropists?’
‘Your grandfather was one of that cracked fraternity,’ she said in a lowered voice, without lifting her eyes, as if the shame were hers. ‘He influenced your father, but he no longer does.’
‘Well, he’s dead, isn’t he, Ma?’ I remarked.
‘Yes, he is dead, nor does he have any influence.’
At that age I was simple-minded enough to think that the two things – dead, no influence – were the same.
After I had reassured my mother, she in turn told me that Spence had been a Londoner who put fanatic weight on those parts of the Gospels which had to do with property. The rights of the poor, the verses in
which Christ called on his followers to sell all they had to give to the poor, the difficulties for rich men entering heaven, and so on – all that Spence and his Spenceans interpreted by the letter, and so expressed contempt for the rights of property. ‘Wesleyan, of course,’ said my mother. ‘That is why your father and I have now embraced the Anglican faith, since you never hear such folly from them.’
I would not have said Father had ‘embraced’ the Anglican faith. The verb was too strong for his good-humoured attendance at Sunday service. He had begun attending before we all arrived, while he was still an assigned convict tutor to the Batchelors, permitted by some arrangement of Mr Batchelor with the Convict Department to wear a suit.
As part of their belief that Christ wanted property equally distributed, Mother explained, the Philanthropists wanted the monarchy removed, and the king of England banished or punished in some French Jacobin manner. I found this all hard to believe – not that men would propose it, but that
this
was the nature of my genial father’s dereliction.
For by now we were possessors of a pleasant 2000 acre farm, Tiverton, adjoining the Batchelor estate, and Father, having achieved not only his ticket-of-leave but being in receipt too of a conditional pardon, had hired a young free settler to run the farm while he himself conducted four days a week a respected law practice in Hobart. The habit of ownership had grown on him. But my grandfather, the fishmonger, had been one of the chief distributors of Spence’s tracts and seditious newspapers – the
Giant Killer
, or
Anti-Landlord
, for instance – in the North. He was typical, said Mother, of the self-educated tradesmen, the law clerks, the Wesleyan preachers of a particular stripe who belonged to that society, and into which my father had been born.
Naturally, while Mother was willing to talk, I pressed the issue and found that Father had tried to swear into the Philanthropists the son of a prominent Tib Street cloth merchant. It was not to be wondered at that after the Philanthropists had already rioted in London, at Spa Fields – about which until that moment I had heard nothing – the authorities should treat my gentle father as if he was of the same colour as the extremists. But he was not – he would never have been a credible comrade of the cockade-wearing men who tried to take the Tower and the Bank of London, their malice, incompetence and drunkenness all rivalling each other.
The less than fair reality was that Father had been one of the few Philanthropists transported. That had been due to the excessive fervour
in sentencing by the Manchester magistrates. ‘Your father was always,’ said Mother, ‘too easily influenced by the sight of misery amongst people whose names he did not even know.’ That was why his transportation was such a blessing, for whatever could be said of Van Diemen’s Land, no one starved, and indeed the lower classes, particularly as represented in the felon and ticket-of-leave ranks, distracted anyone from too much compassion by their frankness, their vulgarity, their poor morals and their dram-drinking.
Now I really saw why Horace was my father’s favourite. Take this example: Horace’s former-slave father, involved in the fish trade, had sent his son to Athens to study philosophy. Similarly, my grandfather the fishmonger had indentured his son as a law clerk to an ‘eminent solicitor’ (my mother’s term of course). While Horace studied, the assassins of the Emperor Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, arrived in Athens and turned the heads of all the students. While my father studied, he was influenced by his own father towards the Spencean Philanthropists. Having been appointed a military tribune by Brutus, Horace saw him as his fellow philosopher, and volunteered to serve in his republican forces on the battlefield of Philippi, just as Father had agreed to recruit and perhaps fight for the radical Philanthropists. Horace found himself no soldier, just as Father had found himself no revolutionary.
