Bettany's Book (91 page)

I don’t blame him at all for finding a companion in what is for him fairly fast time, or perhaps even of beating the gun a little – after all he was in her city and within her ambience while I stole his paintings. After an inappropriate bitch like me, why shouldn’t he comfort himself with a woman who knows the skills of womanhood as it is practised in his circles. Maybe he’ll be man enough to marry her, and if he does, I’ll be cheering from the sidelines. Laughing in the face of hell.

So, nothing to keep me from my sister’s side! Even the writer, Hugo, is steaming away. He shows me stuff. It’s beautiful. He has the tone and tempo of the speeches between Bettany and Phoebe, Bettany and Bernard. It’s so rare this happens in a screenwriter, that he reacts so well so early in the process, but it means I can come to support you at a second’s notice. You assure me there’s no chance you’ll be arrested. I hope that’s the case!

Ready to roll at any moment on your behalf, I am

Your sister Dimp

M
Y FATHER’S BOOK

Bernard and Tume, a Jewish woman and an Irish, ensured we celebrated a hearty Christmas, energetically bearing us through all the rituals of the bush Yule. My father, O’Dallow and I drank and talked enough to keep away all the ghosts and other absences at our tables.

One or two days later, my father asked me to go walking with him one hot morning around the stockyards. I was intrigued by the one tassel of smoke on the hill above. Some of the Moth people came back still, a scatter, though most of them had been drawn away into the Reverend Howie’s mission near Bombala, where he sustained and kept them in place with rations of flour, tea, sugar and tobacco. It was as if, when they first ate flour, or took tobacco into their mouths, they were doomed to lose connection with their earth.

‘I’ve been to see Mr Cantyman, the solicitor in town,’ my father told me. ‘I want you to listen calmly to what my intentions are as regards my estate, which is not insubstantial, as it happens. My law practice in Hobart still functions under the management of a somewhat better lawyer than Mr Cantyman, a young man named Fletcher.’ I remembered Fletcher as a fresh-faced junior clerk when I was a child. ‘The practice was somewhat devalued when my sins were made public. Had I misused clients’ funds, I might have been treated with slightly more lenity. The colonial Pharisees, who had come to me at Mr Batchelor’s kind urging, vacated the practice. But more recently, the population of Hobart has chosen not to punish Fletcher for my sins, and he is a man of such innate integrity that all goes well in that direction. The law office is not without its inherent value.’

I told him I was pleased to hear it.

‘Then there is the house at Sandy Point, which must go to your mother. Then there are cash and certain bonds, to be divided between you, your mother and Simon.’

I said the normal things about being confident we would not soon receive these benefits.

‘And then,’ he continued, ‘the 250-acre farm at Ross, and its livestock. Small enough by the standards of New South Wales, pitiable by the standards of Nugan Ganway. But a splendid little place not without value in Van Diemen’s Land terms. With this property I must seek your indulgence, Jonathan. I intend to leave it to be held in trust by my dear friend
Aldread, to pass to yourself and Simon at her decease. In this regard, all your pious wishes about her survival will probably go unanswered. She will not last long, I fear. And I did it for the poor little thing without her asking or even suggesting. But on the way back from town in the cart, when I told her, she was as happy as a bird. She had never been thought of as a recipient of the usufruct of a property, and it seemed to me that her heart was elevated by the very idea that I had seen her in those terms, and signified as much in a legal document.’

‘But Mother will hear this will read,’ I protested, ‘should anything happen to you.’

‘You presume that Aldread will live longer than me,’ he said with a genuine dolour in his voice. ‘I wish it were so. You even presume that your mother will live longer than me, which is somewhat a better wager, since she does not have my vice of soaking oneself with rum. My God, you should see yourself, you are so priggish, Jonathan. Where is your obedience to the Biblical injunction, “… a bruised reed he shall not break …” Is not poor Alice a bruised reed? But of course, that verse is not a matter of the sensual temper of humanity and so it is not taken seriously by good Christians! By and large, good Christians bruise all they can!’

‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘Your first duty is to your wife, to whom your vows were eternal.’

‘Oh Johnny, do you think you are in a position to enlighten me? The one difference between you and myself is that a fortuitous disease struck your spouse and delivered you of your so-called “eternal” vows.’

And he stood braced on his bowed legs, waiting and – I believed – hoping to be struck. I confess that I was angry enough to consider a patricidal blow, all the angrier of course for the truth of what he had said.

‘I shall write to Mother and tell her that I have no part in your decisions,’ I told him.

He brought his legs together, no longer seeking aggression, and took both my wrists in his hands. ‘Jonathan, I must be permitted – the law says so – to make my own testamentary arrangements. Your mother will not want. She may even be a literary widow, my son. Great days, great days! I believe I am no more than two weeks removed from the close of my manuscript! You must come to my fire and drink with me when it is all done.’

I said, ‘Of course.’ But I sounded like a churlish boy, and he laughed.
And why not? He had ensured that both his life and his death were calamitous to my mother.

It was more than two weeks though before my father finished and copied his grand essay. It was late summer at Nugan Ganway when he finally came to the homestead with the manuscript under his arm and hammered deliriously on the opened door. The evening was dry, far removed from the arts and the muses. A furnace wind was gusting and swirling, south-west one second, north-west another, all from a blazing interior. Ruby lines of fire swayed along the ridges, their confused smoke blowing all ways. From the distant peaks was blown ash which lay extinguished and sullen over the homestead yard, and on the bark roofs like dirty snow.

Yet our door was nonetheless opened in expectation of kinder breezes – even though they may not reach us for days. And there, as I worked on my accounts and stock books, my father appeared, wearing a hat and a good shirt and polished boots, with Aldread, smiling beneath her mob cap. ‘I am here,’ he called, ‘with the last scintilla, the last full stop!’ Aldread’s breath could be heard, grating away, part excitement, part disease. Her cheeks had sunken, and the rounded cheekbones seemed close to the surface of her skin – there was a collapse occurring within the planes of her face. I had come to fear both their smiles, though in many ways one could not have found a more pleasant-looking couple, both frayed by life, appearing genially at a door in the remoter Maneroo. The manuscript, tied in a cord of jute, looked like a work of true industry.

‘So it is done, it is done, my boy,’ he told me, bustling in and pushing the leaf-light Aldread before him. They hastened to their customary spots by the empty hearth. Bernard was at that moment visiting Maggie Tume’s sick son, Michael, who had chicken pox and was, according to Tume, uncontrollable by anyone but Sarah. Had she been present, neither my father nor Aldread would have entered quite so glibly. For in sundry ways Bernard was becoming particular about the homestead. She had lined the walls of our room with yards of blue cloth instead of the old device of pages from newspapers. She was a studious polisher, wiper and duster of most objects, expending particular care on the condition of the books in our growing library. She approached the volumes with her lovely long hands, tentative from reverence. Her manner was not quite
that of a proprietor, yet she had become possessive enough to make her a little resistant to my loud, intrusive father.

In any case my father and his book and paramour having entered, I fetched rum and water. While I was doing it, Bernard returned. She greeted both visitors, but then went to make herself tea, returning with it in a cup and saucer to sit at the far end of the table, a little distant from the rum-bibbing, enthused pair by the hearth. How readily she had absorbed my unease, and her frown was a guarantee to me she would not let them go too far. But she also applied her frown to Aldread who, against the normal wisdom of consumptives, insisted on fuelling her illness with heavy draughts of spirits, clearly for the sake of maintaining pace and companionship with my father.

After savouring a mouthful of rum, Father rose, passed across to my desk and undid the string around his manuscript. He poked the paper with his finger. He whispered, ‘I expect without any vanity but simply on the basis that a man knows the value of what he has written, to be within a year of this date in some editorial offices splitting differences with Carlyle, and J.S. Mill, and perhaps especially with Benthamites.’

Though I did not know exactly what differences these gentlemen represented, it seemed an exorbitant ambition.

‘Carlyle,’ he continued, ‘is a good open fellow, and so is Mill, and neither of them likely to summon up the unquestioning prejudices of the British Philistine against me. As for all the Pharisees,’ – it seemed to have become his favourite term of denunciation – ‘of the Established Church, I shall bathe in their hatred!’

His eyes gleamed, and behind him Aldread, who had merely witnessed this quiet conversation and thought my father a sage, blazed and beamed. He turned to Bernard, ‘Excuse me, madam, a second, while I point something out to my son.’

He went raking through the manuscript and found towards its close the pages he sought. He gave them to me, his eyes alight in expectancy of my praise.

Obediently, I began to read. The text embodied all that Father had told me in his discourses, both at Simon’s station and here on Nugan Ganway.

‘Farewell to the Stoic, for he has been long banished. The first of the heretics, he was punished long before the Arians, and centuries before the Cathars and Albigensians of Southern France whom the Crusaders put to the sword. For the Stoic practised the talents which struck the
Christian dispensation of St Paul at its base, which undermined all the Christian temples, as humbly as they began, as exorbitantly as they have spread upon the earth and clawed at the sky, steeple upon steeple! The Stoic needed to be crushed since he knew both how to take pleasure and to bear pain, gave an equal value to both, took equal authority from both, and needed no nod towards the suffering Christ crucified to give specious value to that what he either bore or relished.’

‘You see, you see?’ asked my father.

I saw it was an attack on Christianity itself. He would become another destroyed Stoic, and the rest of his family would inherit that destruction.

But I read on. ‘Nor did the Stoic’s wry self-knowledge, and his impulse to be wise, depend upon the standard Christian belief in the utter unworthiness of humankind and of oneself. Instead, he took to his judgements of humanity a wiser sense of the fallibility of all men, including high priests, than is found amongst the eunuchs of the Established Church. The Stoic adopted, in the face of humankind’s universal frailty and foolishness, the spirit of forgiveness and – what is closest to forgiveness – of amusement. He knew the weight to give love, and perhaps above all, the weight to give death, and in dying, relied on the strength of his own resources of wisdom, rather than on the false pieties of a whimpering Christianity. He could thus never be permitted any peace by the villainous castrati of Christianity …’

All I could think to say was, ‘This is strong material, Father.’ This assessment seemed to delight him. But privately I thought that no one would publish this. Would not decent people stand outside the editorial offices of any publisher who dared to print such blasphemies and bay their rage against author and printer alike? Yet that was what he wanted. He wanted the Pharisees to bay!

‘Your approbation means everything to me, my son,’ Father said, his eyes threatening to fill with tears. ‘You have yourself the makings of a Stoic – it is the way you have lived here, in this hard country. In the end, like me, you evaded the observances of hypocrisy.’

At this unwanted compliment, I looked at Bernard in astonishment. Her dark eyes understood already my discomfort. She knew too that I had been insufficiently stoic to wish to hang myself, for she had cut me down. Her eyes seemed to me to suggest ploys we could find.

I said, ‘You misunderstand me, Father. I have not proceeded by some plan of wisdom. I have stumbled along in blindness. Sometimes in increasing dark. Do not misinterpret me.’

Indeed, I hoped that I was not some case in point amongst his wad of pages.

‘Madame Bernard,’ said my father, sitting back and smiling after I had returned him his extraordinary pages. ‘I wonder would you sit with dear Aldread, your old friend, when I ride to town in two days to commit these pages to the English mail? Would be you so good? They say a package can now make its way from Cooma Creek to a London address in a little less than three months, dependent on shipping.’