Bettany's Book (44 page)

Phoebe and I were at last shown to the nuptial room by our friends, and, as Peske said, ‘left to our delights’. When the door closed and our retinue could be heard withdrawing to their own rooms or returning to the
dining room, Phoebe turned with lustrous eyes and kissed me at length. This, I thought on her mother’s authority, was – however delightful – from books. It was the point at which novels ended.

‘We should prepare,’ she told me.

‘Yes, you must be ready for a long rest, after such a day.’

‘Such a day?’ she asked, raising perfect eyebrows, as if I had amused her by quaintness. ‘Jonathan, do you wish to wash now, and undress?’

‘No. You prepare, my darling. I shall sit and read a while.’

‘Very well. But I shall need help in lifting off my wedding dress.’

Phoebe stepped out of her satin wedding slippers and I took the weight of the hoop of the dress as Phoebe raised it off her body. She, in bodice and drawers, and I in my wedding suit lowered it to the ground, where it stood by its own stiffness.

‘Phoebe,’ I said. ‘How you must have suffered in that.’

‘I suffered but I gloried,’ she told me.

A screen with embroidered swans had been erected and a servant had placed soap, a water basin and towels in its lee. Phoebe went behind this screen, and I sat, still fully dressed, and read a
Goulburn Herald
report I had already read once yesterday on the civic amenities and industries of Brussels, in the new kingdom of Belgium. The very remoteness of the subject matter was a delightful comfort to me in my exhausted and over-instructed condition, as behind the screen Phoebe washed and sang to herself in French. The young flexibility of her voice touched me, so that I was moved to a frank but hopeless desire.

I remained seated, and Phoebe emerged from the screen in milk-white feet and a long white muslin gown, very simple, very charming. Still singing absently to herself, she knelt a second by the near side of the bed, said in silence what seemed like perfunctory and routine prayers, and got beneath the sheets. I dropped my paper, crookedly pulled my chair across to her, took her hand and kissed it. ‘It has been a very hard long day for you, dearest Phoebe,’ I said.

She lifted my hand and kissed it, in deliberate mimicry. ‘And for you.’

‘You should sleep now.’ I closed my own eyes and yawned a little as if she were a child in need of a demonstration. But Phoebe pulled my head down suddenly and to my delight and confusion gave me a long, thorough, knowing kiss. I was bewildered, since the mother had told me such a kiss was not within the child’s giving. ‘Eros and Morpheus,’ she said. ‘Love and sleep. Do they go hand-in-hand? Not according to what I’ve heard, Jonathan.’

There was another kiss, to which I responded thoroughly, and soon sleep was abandoned. It transpired, as I discovered in later wondering and delighted conversations with my wife, that not only had Phoebe read innocent ‘romances of sighs’ favoured by the English, but had acquired as well a full map of what might be called love in the flesh from certain white-covered French novels which the girls of the Geneva
academie
passed amongst themselves. On top of that, many of the French and Spanish maidens who attended the
academie
were willing to speak matter-of-factly of the joys of marriage awaiting them, of which they had had a full and frank account from older sisters, cousins and even from younger aunts, and had also speculated on the question of taking young lovers should they be required to marry older men. Lastly, it seemed young men of the town would on spring nights climb the walls of the
academie
after the lights had gone out and call to the young women in their rooms, sometimes with a particular piquancy of suggestion which was itself an introduction to the mysteries of Eros. Some of the bravest girls managed midnight meetings with young men in a summerhouse in the gardens, and though these ended with honour intact and virginity retained, the adventurous girls who returned from these assignations related to their sisters every detail of the boys’ most ardent and concrete wishes.

I wondered whether Mr and Mrs Finlay would be pleased or disappointed to find that their daughter had not entered marriage as blindly as they believed.

Letter No 5, SARAH BERNARD

My Dearest Friend

I confess to you I have written letters I did not want you to see and have kept to myself – so terrible might this place be thought to be even by you who are amongst the mad! But the lunaticks may not have the wit to be as evil in purpose as is this place. It grieves me you must come one day here for the next stage of your supposed reforming. Though I know you may prove safer in the narrow cell of your category than in the public raucous wards. I have become a friend of the Matron and to tell you this is more a confession of shame than a boast. But it means I am secure from certain things and I have been careful to use my place here to give a little more sugar and tobacco twist to the Irish women around me in
the Tory who stand by me when some of their kind would seek to tear me to pieces. Let me tell you this: Steward and Matron Pallmire behave like very emperors and empresses and their quarters are both quarters and storehouse for all they have amassed. They know how things are done and profit by that.

But never mind. I write to tell you I have found a small amount of power over them both. On some nights I sleep in the Matron’s house and sometimes on a litter in a room full of sugar from the West Indies where poor Corporal McWhirter perished. And on such a night Mr Steward Pallmire came to the door and opened it. He was shuddering from rum as you might believe. I said: Go Away! And he looked as shocked as any old tyrant. As shocked if I might say as that old tyrant of yours when the venom cut his breath! I said: Go away sir! Mrs Pallmire will not permit it. He called me a name but just for something to say. And I was surprised I now felt no threat though I had felt much threat earlier. So he turned away and belched and went off like a curbed child. For he knows his wife and I have begun to talk at length. It seems as if she needed a friend. That is the strange thing. They might be kings and queens but lack airs. And they simply do what they do.

I thought then I have some power and must practise at it to bring Alice here. And once here to make her safe! I was all at once redeemed you see.

This letter you might think is all boast. But I am blithe to have a little of my might back – that is all. That is why I write. I will use what is now my influence with Mrs Pallmire. Do not hope over much but hope some! And know that not only a boast do I include on this page but at the same time my true heart.

Your friend in life and death
Sar

A reply from Alice Aldread lay amongst Sarah Bernard’s letters.

Lovingest Sar

I send this to you by a constable for a high price. I am in such trouble here the surgeon disliking me. You must get me to the Factory for it can not be worse and must be better. My life and soul depends on it for I am so misused here. One thing is I shall see your kindly face.

Yours ever

Alice A

P
RIM WOKE IN STILL
,
COOL AIR
which seemed – no other concept fitted – laundered. This was strange enough by the standards of Khartoum to cause her an instant of frenzy in which she knew nothing – not her name, her starting-out point, nor this destination. But then the stampede of her brain gave her back the faculty to name her place. She was in a bedroom in her sister’s house, the house of Mr and Mrs Brendan D’Arcy. The curtains were drawn, but she knew the window looked south over blue reaches of water to Shark Island and a distant Opera House and Harbour Bridge. She rose and verified this with some fear. For this was the landscape of her shame. But she was pleased to see too that the afternoon sun, reddening subtly down-harbour, carried barely a flavour of reproach. Thought of in Khartoum, the Auger affair seemed perhaps a pervasive tale of Sydney. Had Mrs Auger entertained people with the tale of the berserk student who had been so naively besotted with her husband the professor that she had stolen the words and opinions of an international scholar to impress him? ‘Ah yes, the plagiarist!’ She had felt the reflex of terror when, on boarding a Qantas flight in Rome, having flown from Khartoum to Rome on the ethnically neutral Austrian airlines, she had heard the Australian intonation of the pilot, that long, dry accent merciless as the Mount Bavaria landscape, and just as full of ambiguity.

But now that she woke beside that great pool of blue harbour, she could see by the nature of the light that these fears had been vain. She knew she could deal with this situation, not with total confidence but with valour. And the place, as seen from her window, had an air of vast, splendid, loutish indifference. Sydney, as ever, was sailing on its heedless way towards dusk, hauling intact its plentiful and traditional cargo of sins, rackets, venalities, forgeries, accommodations and systems of favours. It was also true – how had she forgotten it? – that it was always this year’s fish, this week’s, that were frying in Sydney. Dazzled by harbour light, the city had a short memory. Social commentators, historians, said that. So Sherif could have been here, sleeping the profound sleep of a tourist who had flown from Khartoum to Rome to Sydney. Sherif could have woken here with bewilderment in his eyes, and she could have been, in her own city, the expert, the casual local. ‘Darling, you’re in Sydney! Look … Do you see those ferries!’

In three nights time, the anniversary would occur. Before then Prim
was to meet her boss Peter Whitloaf in Sydney, and then, the day after the celebration, make a speech in Canberra to the United Nations Association and supporters of UNESCO and sundry NGOs. On Tuesday she would leave Australia and be back in the Sudan in nine or ten days.

Dimp’s unpretending delight at seeing her – sudden energetic hugs, shrilling expletives – had been both wonderful and scary, a cheque presented against a bank of sisterhood and love which was supposed to be located in her, in Prim. She feared she looked good only on paper, and was a ghost company. The ghost of the Nile. As always it was Dimp who seemed so substantial, so present.

Prim wandered out, on the third of four floors, into a house full of stillness. She delighted in the works on the walls – Dimp had acquired these paintings for D’Arcy, and amongst them were the now fashionable native artists, the desert ochres of people not utterly unrelated to the Burranghyatti – the renowned Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri for one. On the walls of the hugest room, the harbour was echoed by two nineteenth-century paintings of that great reach of water by Conrad Martens, and by the light-drenched works of Australian impressionists like Roland Wakelin and Grace Cossington Smith, their late 1920s, early 1930s preoccupation with the great arch of the Harbour Bridge rising incomplete into the sky. On a far wall hung a Brett Whiteley nude-by-the-harbour, and a flamboyant John Olsen celebrative of this particular place, the bowl of deep blue by the shores of which her sister and Bren lived, and the emblematic gold of sky above. There was further Australian vividness scattered through the rooms: Ned Kelly; the explorers Burke and Wills whom Central Australia consumed; the Australian digger and the mad bride of the bush, a woman dashing in her phantasmal veil through the vertical of the ghost gums. Prim half-amusedly recognised her former Sydney existence in this harpy–victim. She, Primrose herself, with her phantom, sullied veil, run mad in Sudan?

Distantly, from the blue water beyond the windows, the voice of a commentator on a tour ferry could be heard, and the vivid paintings of this huge sitting room continued to echo the nature of things beyond the glass doors onto the sundeck.

Dimp and her husband arrived home at the same time, at dusk, loudly entering. Bren said, ‘Jesus, a man could do a glass of wine.’ And then he lowered his voice, ‘Do you think your little sister’s up?’

Prim remained quiet like a child hiding, as Dimp, business-suited but with her jacket undone, went to check Prim’s bedroom, came frowning
towards the front of the house and discovered her. ‘Here she is! She’s up!’ And there was no doubting the delight, even the relief, which entered Dimp’s face, as if she knew explicitly how indefinite Prim felt, how skittish and likely to bolt. She subjected her flighty sister to an intense scrutiny and murmured presciently, ‘Bet you’re sad you didn’t bring your bloke! Fucking’s the best cure for jet lag.’