Bettany's Book (75 page)

Full of more terror than fury I ran to the homestead before my emerging servants could manage to sight me. Entering my house, I heard Aldread’s sharp cough in her bedroom. A murderous felon occupied Phoebe’s room and poisoned that air. How could I have permitted that? But by a turned-down lamp light, how beautiful Bernard slept at the hearth, in front of a dwindling fire. A homely shawl sat on her shoulders. It would have suited my evil mood better had they been both together in there, had I heard Aldread’s vulgar laughter, a woman whose girlish levity and well-ordered features were very likely what had saved her from the fall from the scaffold.

I made for the decanter of brandy. Let her sleep a moment longer, while I considered the other question O’Dallow had raised. Dying, and in Gaelic, the absconder had pleaded innocence. Well, a cynic might say, you would expect him to. Long had said both, ‘It was the very stroke of mercy,’ and, ‘She is no man’s woman, and never will be.’ He had made these claims with the equal force of a man for whom there’s no profit in admitting half the truth and shading out the rest. I took my brandy to the fire and sat down facing the embers. She did not stir. ‘What a pair we are,’ I murmured. And then, in thorough misery, I fell asleep.

When I woke, she was leaning above me. I gave her a weary caress. What else was to be done when we had defied heaven? I told her to go to bed and I would follow. She obeyed, and as she entered George’s room, I heard a wide-awake cough from Aldread. I rid myself of the cup of brandy which had been sitting slack in my hand, and went to the door of the room now part-way converted from Phoebe’s to Aldread’s. Instincts of proprietorship, doubt and grief urged me to open the door and enter.

I found Aldread propped up by pillows, wide-eyed as if expecting me. By the light of her stub of candle, her brow looked unearthly pale beneath her fair hair and mob cap, and her cheeks as red as if rouged.

‘I heard a riot out there, Mr Bettany,’ she told me. ‘I hope no one was hurt.’

I could not help a kind of sharp laughter.

‘Isn’t that a peculiar concern from a woman who murdered her husband?’

She looked briefly but without confusion towards the dark ceiling. In summer, brown snakes would sometimes penetrate the roofing and fall on the occupants, and perhaps she was invoking snakes now.

‘It was a peculiar concern which caused me to take his life, Mr Bettany, as I told the jury. It was not simply myself who suffered his bruises and his outrages, but other women, though I do not expect you to believe that …’

Indeed, I pretended to be a sceptic.

‘So you are at one with the judges,’ she told me.

‘If I were a better judge, you would perhaps not be here.’

‘I must say then that I bless you for not being so good a judge,’ she said, with a smile some might have thought disarming.

‘There is a story that I am so bad a judge that you are more than a friend to Bernard.’

I waited while Aldread’s breath rasped away in my departed wife’s room.

‘I have been a sister,’ she said at last. ‘Do you expect less when women who have never committed any crime but one are hurled together into the floating pit? But what have you got to fear, Mr Bettany? I am dying, and dear Sarah loves you for your honest soul.’

I looked at her by the dim light, not knowing whether to damn or thank her. For even now there was a chuckle in her.

‘Is nothing ever serious to you, Aldread?’ I asked.

She got out of her bed and stood by it. I could see her two luminous feet on the earth floor.

‘By God, Mr Bettany, everything is so serious that I have to laugh. But don’t misjudge that – it is merely the hindquarters of wailing and tears.’ She spat into the palm of her hand, and I saw that it was largely blood. ‘I swear by this that you have nothing to fear from me. Sarah loves your decent soul and that is that. I am about to drop into eternity, so if you envy me as some rival, God help you. If you look at me as someone crooked and perverse, I ask you what is more perverse than marrying a young woman when you are an old man, as my husband was, and wanting not her alone but her sister of fourteen as well! Prussic acid was in my hand a minister of a just God. I shall not cease to love Sarah while there is breath. But I who will go to God with a mouthful of blood tell
you again, if you fear me you are a pitiable creature, and if you mistrust Sarah you have a mean spirit. Now send me to the magistrate, and get me flogged!’

And she began to compose herself, as if to take to her bed again.

‘Oh God,’ I said, and leaned against a wall.

The merciless Aldread, though hard put for breath, had not finished haranguing me. ‘If I have been too forceful in my utterance. I beg your pardon, Mr Bettany.’

Of course she did not sound as if she begged anyone’s pardon, and why should she, for she did seem, as she justly claimed, close to an end.

And yet I felt that it was utterly true what Long had said, and that it would hang over my life like a banner. ‘She is no man’s woman, and never will be.’

I was aware of Aldread’s eyes on me. The consumptive woman seemed to know everything, the doubled over and twisted and complicated history of my own clan not least. Or if she did not know it, she assumed it, and refused to accept my right to make complaints or fuss.

I was left lamely to say, ‘I hope you’re telling me the truth, Aldread, for I tell you I’ve had enough grief for one lifetime.’

She took a damp cloth and washed the blood off her hand and lips. I realised that it was time to go.

A
T MID-MORNING
, P
RIM SIGHTED THE
refugee camps of Alingaz 1, 2, and 3. They ascended the slopes of three distinct wadis on the flanks of a red-grey mountain named
Jabal Erbab
. At the point from which the camp could be seen, Erwit negotiated with caution the steep oil-slicked highway, past a blighted area where oil trucks dumped the dregs of their cargoes before descending to Port Sudan to reload. The rubbled earth, unsoftened by any vegetation, fell away awesomely to one side. Prim, maintaining her composure by concentrating on the high ground, thought the camps were, in their way, a tribute to military intent: people had been relocated here, eight hundred miles from their home ground, so that the Sudanese army could enjoy a clear field of operations at Nuba Hills.

They had been joined also and voluntarily by families of Beja nomads, who had a thousand years history here in the Red Sea Hills, but who had been driven in by the same factors which kept close to the road the Shukriyah they met the night before: uncertain seasons, the failure of
ancestral wells, the increasing aridity of already dry hills, an acquired dependence on pumped water, and on Western, as well as traditional, medicine.

Even people from as far away as Darfur were said to be have come here, moved on from camps near Khartoum. They too were camped in their separate community, in a gully on gritty south-facing slopes, not far from the abandoned Port Sudan railway line. In its swathes of hessian, the entire refugee settlement might in a happier republic have passed for a post-modernist artistic gesture – desert hills say, in the Mojave Desert, or to the west of Alice Springs, wrapped as a statement by Cristo.

The Hessiantown clinic, a series of connected tents supplied by a number of NGOs, was located at the mouth of a valley in Alingaz 1. Around and above it, the shanties of the first 16 000 or so relocated Nuba rose. This part of the camp had been created so quickly, around a few old wells, that the normal blue UN plastic or well-ventilated tents of refugee camps were not in evidence. Adi Hamit, the Austfam-supported camp in Darfur, was a sophisticated city compared to this.

The clinic was run by a robust Red Crescent-supplied Egyptian nurse named Nuara, who had already expressed by letter her willingness to help administer Sherif’s health survey. She was hopeful, she told Sherif, that a survey from such an eminent source might lead to more assistance – further nurses, midwives or Trained Birth Assistants, as the Ministry of Health called them. The team which would scour Alingaz 1 and delineate its sadnesses, its exiled skills, its crying needs would consist of Sherif as boss, Prim representing Austfam, the reliable Erwit, Nuara, two nurses Sherif had used for other surveys and a man who was being sent from the Ministry of Health, who might prove helpful or obstructive.

It had been arranged that Prim and the two nurses would stay at the clinic tent. After spending some time talking with Nuara, Prim and Sherif walked a little way up the valley to the only permanent structure in Hessiantown, the house of Hanif el Suq, the official of the Sudanese Commission of Refugees. Erwit had already parked the Austfam truck outside a vast, wire-fenced food depot within which the house stood. Inside the enormous compound, the rations of thousands lay beneath canvas tarpaulins.

Hanif el Suq’s correspondence with Prim had been clipped: ‘Please, Miss Bettany, ensure that you let me know in good time the date of your visit, since my work is extremely mapped out for me here, and seven days weekly.’ But the man Sherif and Prim met, sitting in the dwindling
shade on the north side of his two-room residence, was a pleasant-featured, stout, vivacious fellow in neat, sweat-stained khaki. Prim could see a well-made bed against the east of his house, where it would get afternoon shade.

Hanif stood up from the little anodised folding table at which he had been drinking tea. Simultaneously, by an open fire some yards to his right, a beautiful Nuba servant woman looked up darkly from beneath a white shawl, and then went back to stirring the pasta which was to be his midday meal. A large and unopened can of tuna sat on a red stone near the fire. Prim thought, where there is food, a woman can be bought with it. Hanif might be a man of honour. But the presence of food in a hungry landscape was a great corruptor.

Hanif called to have chairs brought from the house, and a slight Nuba boy with shaven head – probably the woman’s son – appeared with two chairs. Soon Prim and Sherif were sitting and drinking more sweet
chai
, in one of the hottest noons of the year.

‘So you are here to make a survey of our Alingaz?’ Hanif asked, happy to show off his English.

‘That’s right.’

‘It was built from nothing, you know. One day hills, a few camels, a goat. The next – phew! Hundreds of trucks and thousands of the Nuba.’

‘Yes,’ said Sherif. ‘We understand. There are special problems.’

‘These,’ confided Hanif, leaning forward, ‘these are very backward people. They are like children.’

‘We might all be like children,’ said Sherif, with an edge Prim heard and Hanif perceived, ‘if we were ripped out of our villages on an hour’s notice to be taken a thousand miles away.’

That concluded, the genial Hanif saw, one topic of conversation. ‘Do you like rap music?’ he asked, his eyes glittering. He shouted a command towards the house and soon the high-octane thud of a rap band could be heard, and the emphatic voice of a rapper.

Hanif’s smile broadened, delighted at this plaint for black justice. He was sure it would win Sherif back. Sherif raised his eyebrows at Prim, but his innate Sudanese courtesy restrained him from saying anything.

When the track ended, Hanif hooted, raised his boots off the ground and slapped both knees. ‘You must join me for lunch, sir and madam,’ he said. The Nuba woman set enamel plates on the little folding table, and brought a mixture of spaghetti and tuna.

During the meal Sherif gave Hanif an Arabic copy of the questionnaire and explained that the process would be based on random cluster sampling, told the best method given that the residences of this hessian city were not numbered. It involved, he told the not entirely interested Hanif, the survey team walking to the middle of the camp with one of the camp leaders, to any spot he might nominate, and from there, facing east, selecting a house, then going to the next, and the next, and continuing thus for thirty or so interviews. Then the team would move to a new location, face east, and began again. The aim was to achieve a ten per cent survey of all houses in Alingaz 1, and produce some 322 family interviews out of a camp population of 3220 households.

Shovelling in his spaghetti, Hanif gave sceptical little snorts. ‘And I can just hear them all,’ he said. ‘ “The evil Hanif el Suq doesn’t feed us enough!” They are lucky, lucky people, but like all to whom something is given, they are still hungry, hungry.’