Bettany's Book (45 page)

‘He’d be fascinated by the paintings. He’s the sort of man who would want to know everything. He’d be asking me about Burke and Wills and what they meant.’

Brendan, in shirtsleeves – a tailored Italian shirt – came through carrying bottle and glasses on a tray, and with easy command led the women to face the low sun on his massive, tiled sundeck. Out here, Dimp put her hand on her sister’s shoulder as they all sat at a white table.

‘You’ve got to miss this, where you are now,’ said Dimp with the standard Sydneysider pride. It was their great and simple vanity, this unmerited harbour which had fallen into their hands and which had imposed a particular style on their lives.

‘Of course I miss it,’ Prim said at last, but it came out as the sullen enthusiasm of a teenager.

Dimp inclined her head to murmur, ‘I reckon I know why you wouldn’t bring your Sudanese fella.’

‘The truth is,’ Prim lied, ‘he’s very busy.’

Prim could see, behind her sister’s face pressed up close to her own, her own features submerged.

‘Oh yeah, yeah. Too busy eh? The truth is, you were scared he’d become the tame fuzzy-wuzzy at the party, and be patronised.’

With a tug, Dimp undid the string at the neck of her blouse. It reminded Prim how the small Dimple Bettany had always wrestled within her clothes, and would unconsciously unbutton herself at the wrists, the school tie already hanging loose from her collar. All the teachers asking her why she was not more like her little sister Primrose, and Dimp so incapable of imagining or desiring regularity in her dress that she did not even take her sister aside later for vengeful slaps.

Prim said, ‘Sherif has to scramble to put together a living. And he’s too proud to let me buy him a ticket.’

‘Yeah. But just the same … I’d love to see the guy,’ said Dimp, then turned to her husband, who was still struggling with the wine cork, and asked, ‘How do you think my little sister looks?’

‘Right up to the family standard for pulchritude,’ said Brendan,
pouring glassfuls, passing them to Prim and Dimp and then himself hungrily drinking. ‘Christ, much needed. You must be zonked, Prim.’

‘I’m fine. It’s just a bit unreal, being back.’

She was delighted that all peevishness seemed to have gone from her voice. The hateful tone from the inept past, from Auger-obsession. She did not want to be the mad, sullen bride.

Dimp smiled lusciously. ‘If you’re a little culture-shocked now, it’ll get worse with the party. Rich bastards who don’t deserve to exchange the time of day with a true labourer in the vineyard like yourself.’

‘Rich bastards,’ nodded Bren, still concentrating on his wine. ‘In other words, undeserving friends of mine. But you know I’ve come to a theory – no, not a theory – a
conclusion
on wealth.’

‘Save us that,’ said Dimp.

‘No. I’ll run it by your sister and see what she thinks. I mean, I know a lot of the rich, she knows a lot of the poor. Between us we have the basis of an opinion.’ He turned to Prim. ‘My theory’s this. Wealth is generally interpreted in economic and political terms, and so it’s a great cause of social unrest. But wouldn’t people on both sides of the economic divide be a bloody sight happier if they knew that wealth or affluence or whatever you want to call it is a biological outcome as much as it is the fall-out of an economic system? It’s like having red hair, say, as much as it is about the classic Marxist view of capital.’

Dimp said, ‘Holy bloody hell. Wealth’s genetic as long as your father leaves you a bloody goldmining company!’ She winked at her sister. ‘This is Bren the thinker at work.’

‘Well, I won’t bother responding to the goldmining gibe,’ said Bren with good humour, ‘except to tell your sister that gold was in the pits when I began my public life, that’s why I went into the venture business. My father didn’t leave me a Chicago office. But say gold was flourishing when I started, and say my father did have a Chicago office to service Canadian and US mining companies. Aren’t such assets themselves genetic markers? As much as an ability to be good at rugby or to be able to paint well?’

‘The answer,’ said Dimp, ‘is no.’

‘But,’ Bren continued, ‘I’m not arguing this in a way which counts wealth as a superior gift or something. The simple truth is that most of the wealthy people I know are that way because they can’t bear not being that way. Everyone vaguely wants wealth, but not everyone needs it to be able to breathe. Others have some little genetic spur that makes them, above everything else, want to race pigeons, or paint, or study classical Greek.’

‘Genetic spurs eh?’ said Dimp. She seemed to be enjoying herself, Prim was happy to see. All her talk about the annulment seemed distant from this sundeck, and its wine and disorganised chatter. ‘That’s funny talk for a bloke who sees God’s will in all things. So God chooses the wealthy by giving them these little DNA sprigs.’

‘Yeah, but biology is part of the divine plan too, the rules of the game he created and plays by.’

But then Prim saw a shift behind her sister’s eyes. Even if Dimp’s tone remained jovial, the conversation was no longer mere game-playing. ‘Pity he didn’t make a game where we’re not all ripping each other’s throats out all the time. And if biology drove you to me, why did God need you to get an annulment from the Holy See?’

‘Oh come on,’ said Bren, looking at his wine. ‘Low blow!’

Prim saw from the peculiar narrowing of Dimp’s mouth she was familiar with from childhood, and from the rounding of D’Arcy’s shoulders, that the harsh edge of an unappeasable discord had been casually reached. It was frightening to see that the annulment question did seem to lie at the bottom of all argument.

But Dimp was ashamed that she had let the beast out into the daylight, and turned quickly to her sister.

‘From tomorrow, there’ll be a bit of noise in the house. The housekeeper will be back and people delivering stuff, and one of Bren’s secretaries supervising everything.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Prim, wanting herself to fill the air with busy sound. ‘I have to have coffee with people from the Sydney office of Austfam tomorrow.’

Bren abandoned the question of wealth, biology and God’s will. ‘By the way – tell me if you’re too tired to discuss this – but you wouldn’t know a place called Adiel, would you?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’ And she tried to sound it.

‘How about Melut?’

‘Melut’s down south, on the White Nile.’

‘That’s the one.’

Prim smiled. ‘You know more about the Sudan already than most outsiders.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s what we do. D’Arcy Coleman Venture, I mean. My Chicago office found the capital for a Canadian company, Alberta Petroleum, to go into a joint venture with the Sudanese government extracting oil from a well at Adiel. After extraction, they pump it to the river and
ship it north by barge. I’ve got to tell you, it was a decent sum we raised. The deal was made in good faith with the government, which assured us it had sovereignty and control over the area.’

‘Sovereignty shifts around a bit down there.’

‘That’s what we found out.’

‘But are you still involved in the well? Isn’t it the problem of this Canadian company now?’

‘I’m not directly involved. I have to keep tabs. I have to be ready to restructure the financial deal in case of problems. And there have been problems. A month ago a group of rebels turned up at the well and told the Alberta personnel that the site would be attacked if they did not immediately withdraw.’

‘I really had no idea,’ said Prim.

‘The next thing is,’ Bren went on, ‘I see a memo telling me that the Sudanese government has moved a battalion of infantry with armoured support to secure the well area.’

‘The government can’t afford to lose sites of that nature,’ Prim told him like a professional briefer. ‘If they want to pay their foreign debt and go on fighting the war.’

‘And doing something about their bloody awful deficit,’ said Bren.

‘How did the battalion manage?’

‘Pretty ordinary. They were routed one night, some of the Sudanese personnel and one Canadian driller shot, and outbuildings burnt. But the rebels didn’t attack the well itself, because they say it and the oil in it belongs to them … what are they called? The Southern People’s something or other.’

‘Liberation Army, SPLA. Although it has factions. It could be the SPLMA, the Liberation Movement Army! There are tribal and political differences in the South.’

There was a sudden, more muscular mood change from Bren. ‘There always bloody are! I wish the bastards would just let my friends extract the oil, that’s all.’

Dimp laughed, jolly again. ‘Look at my capitalist! Isn’t he a lad?’ She winked at Prim.

When you lived in four levels of grandeur on Sydney Harbour, Prim understood, it
would
seem reasonable that the politics of distant places should readjust themselves to your desire.

‘Do you stand to lose much then?’ she asked, exaggerating the compassion in her voice.

‘If it goes totally bad I stand to lose commissions,’ he said jovially, but smiling to put her at ease about her sister’s future. ‘Of course it’s not really my money to start with, and it’s all underwritten and insured to buggery. But apart from the commissions, it means the people my staff approach to raise future capital will not be as open to us as before. Look, I’m not asking for sympathy, but if you put the world together, all in all, with Aborigines in Australia, Blackfoot Indians in Canada, the SPL – whatever it is – in the Sudan, the sort of deals I put together become harder and harder to conclude, and less frequent. And I’ve got a sumptuous woman to maintain.’

‘Don’t give the bastard any sympathy,’ Dimp told Prim.

Yet he had a sort of hulking charm which made it easy for Prim to simulate concern. He was a pleasant fellow, brisk, meaning well. But she had never fully seen what it was that had attracted Dimp, who displayed a faint, indulgent tiredness as she listened to him.

Prim was delighted to have got through the conversation well – to have saved it in fact, to have re-channelled it. She had feared, coming home, that she might manifest herself as one of those censorious aid workers. ‘Business is down? Tough luck! You ought to see how people live in the Sudan!’ She knew that some people had always mistaken her shyness for censure anyhow, and was therefore pleased that with a hard case like Bren she had been able to seem a contributor of interesting fact.

The offices of Austfam were not in any of the high-rent buildings around Sydney Cove but in that seedy stretch west of the point where George Street becomes Parramatta Road. In the spirit of their surroundings and their trade, the employees of Austfam dressed more for down-at-heel comfort – old batik dresses, open neck shirts – than for corporate success. There was very little slickness at Austfam.

Peter Whitloaf, the head of the NGO, who commuted between Sydney and Canberra, was an exemplary beanpole. In his cardigan, he looked like a Trappist monk in mufti. But Prim knew enough by now, from meeting such folk as Stoner, that here at the bosom of aid and development bodies could be found, as well as an undeniable altruism, at least as intense a voracity to prove, to survive, to succeed, as anywhere else in the human scheme. And a hunger for funds, which other NGOs competed for as well, and for credit, credit being something she had
unintentionally acquired for Austfam in the case of the Darfur emergency and through Sherif’s health surveys.

Peter was both a decent fellow and an operator. Formerly a federal minister’s press secretary, he was at Austfam by choice. After Prim had been greeted, pecked on the cheek, and answered the inquiries of the outer office staff – ‘Yes, I am thinner. It’s the malaria from a few years back’ – she was welcomed by Peter Whitloaf like an uncle encountering a favourite if over-exuberant niece.

‘Prim,’ he said. ‘Ah, still a girl, still a girl.’

In his office they talked about what he called ‘Austfam’s footprint’ in the Sudan. Peter said how delighted the board of Austfam was at the community health studies Prim had organised. They had not only served as a useful guide for those deploying aid in the field, he said, they had also raised the profile of Austfam in ‘the literature’.

‘This Sherif is a godsend,’ he continued without apparent irony. ‘Which brings me to the question of the new Khartoum administrator we’ve been promising to send you.’

Of course, she saw at once. They must intend to end her solitary residence at Austfam, Khartoum. So she felt more than pleased when Whitloaf hurried to say, ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you I don’t think we can find a second person yet. But there’s a consultant Austfam employs. He’d like to visit before the end of the year and make an assessment of our operations. That would take a month or two. I wondered if you felt you could hold out another year on your own?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Prim. ‘I can manage.’

‘Well, that’s the bad news. The good news is we would like to make you officially our senior office administrator there. You’d get five or six thousand more in salary. But there’s a minor problem about it. This promotion would make you totally responsible for Austfam’s good name, and totally and exclusively dedicate you to Austfam’s work, in the Sudan.’

‘Of course,’ she said.

Whitloaf looked at the ceiling. ‘These letters of yours to the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and so on, which you’ve been kind enough to copy for us. The ones about … about slavery of a kind. Southern people in unjust forms of bondage – that comes as no surprise, I suppose … But this interest of yours is a bit worrying to us.’ He looked at her direct. ‘Some of the board think it an internal administrative matter for the Sudanese government, and that buying into it is extraneous to our mandate in the area.’

Prim felt the blood move to her face. ‘I don’t agree with them. It’s part of the refugee problem, and there’s no doubt the refugee problem’s within our mandate.’ She wondered if her anger was inordinate.

‘Look, Prim, when we go into a Third World country we all pick up the politics and our opinions are swayed one way and another. And sometimes it’s true that despite being neutral we find ourselves becoming proactive. We might decide a certain rebel group is better and juster at distributing equity than the government. So we send a little more aid their way than the government might like, and we get threats from various ministries as a result. But over-involvement in this slave business has the risk of getting us into real trouble with Khartoum. Here’s a government which says, again and again and angrily, that there’s no systemic slavery in the South or North and that if there are residual cases the culprits will be prosecuted. And yet in the same city there is a woman representing an aid group who says, here is instance after instance of slavery.’