Who could escape being possessed by these women’s calm acknowledgments of the buying and selling of human flesh? Prim couldn’t, she knew.
‘This fine woman here …’ said Helene, indicating Mrs el Rahzi, ‘… this woman here has herself redeemed a number.’
‘I’ve contributed a little when certain people were pointed out to me as worthy cases,’ said Khalda el Rahzi. ‘As the so-called owners of these people would say, the cash I gave over was compensation for the training, educational cost and general investment which had been put into them.’ Mrs el Rahzi yawned – the labour of her dinner party! ‘I have a servant who was bought out and whom you might wish to interview at your convenience. And the next time the Baroness von Trotke is in Khartoum, or her friend Connie Everdale, we shall organise a meeting.’
The women at the fire tray outside the door were now decanting the coffee sludge from the intensely brewed jebena coffee. Mrs el Rahzi, Prim and Helene, whisky downed, followed the coffee and the tray of small cups back into the dining room. El Dhouma watched Prim with his benign irony.
Revivified by the coffee, Prim and Sherif said their goodbyes and made their way out to Sherif’s green Mercedes. Sherif asked, in his ornate, slightly creaky way, ‘Why do you smile, my Miss Bettany?’ She smiled to know that they possessed the confidence, the euphoria of people who would in coming hours be mutually exhilarated, rewarded, sated.
‘I think it is appropriate in matters of seduction,’ said Sherif, putting both hands on the steering wheel, ‘that if a man has genuine tender feelings for a woman, he be willing to take her to his place, rather than just routinely to bear his desire to her address, where she has to face the scrutiny and comments of neighbours.’
Prim reached out and caressed his elbow. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Just get us on the road, sport.’
And yet after a hectic hour with Sherif, her mind reverted to the astonishing and redolent fact of slavery, as uttered by her new friend Khalda and her old one Helene.
Though in her association with Sherif, Prim tried occasionally but inconclusively to employ the traditional aromatic ointments of Sudanese lovemaking, dousing her breasts and thighs with delkah, it did not seem to attract added ardour from Sherif.
‘It is not necessary, that goo,’ Sherif reassured her. She felt fortunate to have been found by him, for he was not concerned by her ineptitude at the craft of seduction.
He seemed to find the inevitable sexual confessions of earlier life easier than she did. She glossed over Auger as a generic married man. Sherif talked with boyish relish of his American experience. Prim felt she was getting to know more than she wished to know about the medical student he had been engaged to – a great-grandchild of the slaves, he said, a strong-minded but naïve young woman from a family of Shreveport middle-class Baptists. It seemed from his anecdotes that he thought her nature too demanding and strident. But the worst thing, he said, was that he found the community of ‘respectable blacks’ from which she came, and to which she aspired, stupefying and perilous to the soul. Memory was both muted and urgent in them, said Sherif. It showed itself in the way visitors to the house, friends of the parents, talked endlessly about his manners, how good they were. He concluded that with one side of their souls they rejoiced in their enslaved history specifically because, to use his terms, ‘it had house-trained them’. An African who could manage to be as urbane as they believed themselves to be struck them as a novelty. The girl’s mother one day said to guests, as an explanation of Sherif’s courtliness, ‘Oh, but he’s been three years at Louisiana State.’
But his fiancée wisely saw right through him, he admitted. ‘Right to the selfish core. She knew she would not get from me an easy life. That I would have opinions to the point of discomfort.’
Prim, by the time Dimp started sending her the Bettany journal and letters had for some two years or more been willing to marry Sherif. He was her cherished companion who had redeemed her from the shame of the Auger business, opened the Sudan to her, and enabled her and Austfam to tell the truth about refugees. Yet she and Sherif were mutually embarrassed when the unspoken tension of the question occasionally brought it to the surface.
He said once, ‘There will be a time when I can marry you, but it is not yet. Is it selfish to say that marriage is for both of us too difficult?’ Somehow, she was willing to believe that he wanted his nation to be settled and stable first. Like many others, he suspected that improvement was at hand. There was too much pressure from too many good men and women in the Sudan. The prime minister, Sadiq el Mahdi, would surely for the sake of fiscal health and idealism ultimately evoke a pluralist Sudan! Not that Sherif and other Sudanese lacked pride in their Islamic history, in their descent from the seers, devotees, generals who had come out of the provinces to fight the British and Egyptians, their desire for Khartoum backed by the will of God.
So, he implied, he was waiting for an end to Sharia, an end to the war, and thus, it seemed, a fair and balanced environment for marriage. Prim was curiously content to wait also, since in a way she too felt the air aching towards a settlement, a beneficial resolution.
In the meantime, she cherished him more than she could convey to him or anyone else. Her lyricism was internal, not visible. The love poetry she wrote she kept to herself. She would hand it over perhaps when the Sudan and she and Sherif achieved between them some happy plateau.
Good morning, my good Nile,
I heard your living current in the night,
and sought your deeper wells, the Arabic and the Nilotic.
I have been calm in your dark pools.
I have heard the underflow however.
Better than you I hear
the drums, whirling and incantations
of your nubile mothers, and see
the quiet dusk submission to the east of your scholar forebears.
And all your heresies move lively
in cold clear depths, like muscled perch, the river’s king and queen.
You who are heretic to the Sudan
in failing to read God’s will in Crude Death Rate.
And to the West a heretic for seeing that the world is not to be perfected …
And yet you know a world turned upside down is still the world.
Beneath the rowdy moons of your tranquillity
and by the cunning war machines of your own peace,
I sit in shade and bless the river.
Prim received the Bettany and Bernard documents, as arranged and transcribed by Dimp, at regular intervals – usually about ten pages of transcript at a time. Each time a parcel arrived, Prim felt a combination of annoyance and fascination, as if her sister were using them as some sort of ancestral magic to make her come home. She always delayed reading them, as if her own enthusiasms and sins were likely to be exposed. She pretended they possessed for her only curiosity value, yet as firmly as she tried to make little of them, Dimp in Sydney tried to make much.
This is as big as Enzo Kangaroo, but it’s got my own blood in it! I’m surreptitiously making notes for a screenplay. I don’t know if it’s ancestor worship and I don’t care. I THINK IT’S THE NEW GRAND PROJECT. The more I read the more I know that, and the less confident I grow as well! What about these Moth people, eh? Can’t you just see it? All the ambiguities, black and white. But you read it and you can barely raise a fax that comments on it. Well … I’ll be quiet for now.
To be aghast at the past, to be stimulated by it in Dimp’s particular way, was a luxury of plush cities like Sydney, Prim thought. In the Sudan, the preposterous past served only as prelude to an even more astounding present, more Gothic – or should it be more baroque – than anything a previous age could yield up.
Prim thus feared that in her fever over their ancestors, Dimp was drumming up something from the depths of her sensibility. Something dangerous and engorged would bob to the surface and be a peril to shipping. Her fear seemed validated when a letter arrived which spoke of some sort of revelation Dimp had
experienced at Sydney airport. It was not a revelation in a religious sense, but rather one of those instantaneous changes of direction or of viewing the world which were at the same time both Dimp’s greatest strength and vice.
According to Dimp’s letter, she suffered this most dangerous reversal of sight on a day she’d been on her way to Melbourne to see old friends in the Victorian Film Office – the ones who had given her the development financing on Enzo Kangaroo.
I know whatever development cash they give me won’t be enough for the writer I have in mind, but it’ll be a start. And I also know, so you needn’t say it, there are bigger tales in the cosmos! But film’s not built to redeem anything. The story is all. The story has to levitate its producer, get her off her arse. And it’s an established fact that the earth’s despised themselves would rather watch ET than watch a social realist version of their plight. Honest!
Dimp’s flight was delayed three and a half hours by an aircraft refuellers’ strike, and the lounge at the Qantas Club filled up as catering staff tried to fuel those huge aircraft. Dimp sat with her little cup of coffee and the Australian amongst men in suits all fuming into cellular phones with loud, groaning self-absorption. As she waited, she saw a woman with auburn hair and wearing a fawn suit stepping amongst the full-throated malcontents. This woman looked stylish in a habitual sort of way, as if she dressed well every day. Dimp had always wanted to be that kind of woman! This one also looked like a genuine woman of business, carrying a briefcase and a cup of coffee deftly in the one hand as if she were used to having something else, a laptop maybe, or a file, in the other. There was something familiar about her – it began to tease Dimp all the more because the woman seemed to be making directly for her. In the end she stood above Dimp and asked tentatively, ‘Dimple Bettany?’ Dimp mounted the defence of her marriage. ‘Dimp D’Arcy,’ she said. The woman said, ‘Well, I’m Robyn D’Arcy. How are you?’
So this was Bren’s first wife! Little wonder that with her hair shortened since the days of her failed marriage her features were at the same time remembered and forgotten. She was good-looking, thought Dimp, with a Slavic kind of face.
In bewilderment, Dimp asked Robyn D’Arcy to take a seat. Slotting herself into the chair, she had the air of a woman who lived in a succession of chairs for many busy convenings, daily. Bren had depicted this woman as an occasional virago, but she did not look like it that morning: she looked like a servant of reason and order. A copyright lawyer. Bottle designs, patterns on tea-towels, computer software.
And she had introduced herself as D’Arcy. She still retained Bren’s name. Was that a flag of convenience, a form of vengeance, or a running sore?
Dimp looked at the pissed-off men in suits all around. They would probably like to be diverted by two women screaming at each other, in battle over a name. But in fact Robyn wanted to discuss destinations. Where was Dimp going? Melbourne. Robyn was going to Melbourne too.
She asked how Brendan was in the way a person asks about the health of an uncle. Dimp stumbled out an answer. For the moment she half-hoped Robyn might call her a slut in front of the entire company and tell her to leave the lounge. Dimp would have limped out more happily than she now sat playing tea parties with this intimately known stranger.
‘He’ll live to be a hundred,’ said Robyn. ‘You can’t kill them, you know. The D’Arcys. As much as they deserve it.’
‘His parents are both dead though.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Robyn. ‘I give you that. But at a great age, especially the old man. They were made of teak. Their longevity means you’re going to be stuck with Bren deep into the next century.’ The idea amused her, but gently, without an edge. ‘Does he have you going to Mass?’
‘Occasionally. The Jesuits.’
‘He got me going back to Mass, and discussing theology. And now I can’t stop. That’s not very fair is it? All I’m left with from my marriage is a sort of dogged faith.’
Dimp, wanting to switch subjects, asked, ‘Do you have a new …’
Robyn understood. She said ‘Oh, yes,’ and mentioned the name of a Supreme Court judge. He must have sighted her during a case, liked her fair hair, healthy face, brisk manner. ‘His wife died. We hope to be married next year. Quietly. It’s a bit intimidating, press-wise, to remarry, when you’re Bren’s cast-off. And hard for my friend too, given his position. It tends to be the subject of … of what you would call ironic report.’
Even now, no bitterness. She should be offering classes in the Zen of divorce.
And that made it even more certain that Dimp would say, ‘You know, in case you wondered: I didn’t meet Bren until after, you know, that bloody annulment business began.’
No bloody aplomb at all, thought Dimp. The first wife smiled, damn her, and said she knew. ‘I know you’re no scarlet woman, if there is such a thing anymore. I just hope, though, the judge will cure me of this Mass thing. Because they’re missionaries, you know, the D’Arcy’s. They visit the natives and rearrange the insides of their heads.’ She said it more like an anthropologist than a wronged person, and Dimp began laughing with her. What a likeable woman, bugger it! Robyn continued, ‘My parents were Serbian, but though they were agnostics, Bren saw me as Orthodox and so, ripe for conversion.’
Robyn’s situation reminded Dimp of Bren’s grandfather who, while serving as an infantry captain in the Middle East during the Second World War, met and wooed the daughter of a Lebanese surgeon from Alexandria. Dimp knew the story and had seen the pictures. A hulking, immortal-looking young man and a Mediterranean beauty with darkness and bemusement in her eyes, grinning their way down an avenue of Desert Rat officers making a nuptial arch of raised swords outside some domed church in Cairo.
Robyn agreed, ‘I got the impression that they’ve always done this – married out, made a raid, and brought back with them not only a young body but a young soul as well. I bet he had you promise to raise any kids as Catholics.’ Dimp had made that promise. ‘Except there’ll be no kids, will there?’ Robyn observed. ‘Bren’s great shame. He fires blanks, as they say.’ It was the first thing she’d said which could have been seen as bitter.
‘We intend to adopt,’ said Dimp.
‘So did we. Another contribution to the Kingdom of Heaven.’
Dimp rushed to Bren’s defence: to give him his due, he’d made his sterility clear. Robyn – and Bren – had found out a year or so before he left her. That is, in the third year of their marriage. And now she really began to talk.
When Bren moved out, he’d sought the annulment through the Archdiocese of Sydney. That meant both he and Robyn had to submit to some marriage counselling, and then be interviewed by a panel of priests, a psychiatrist and even a physician. The physician’s task was to question Robyn as a means to showing that the marriage had been consummated – penetration, ejaculation. Bren wasn’t claiming it hadn’t happened, nor was she. But it had to be cleared out of the way. If the marriage hadn’t been consummated, they were entitled to a more or less on the spot annulment – known as ‘the Petrine privilege’. When the doctor examined her, Robyn had told him, ‘It doesn’t prove anything, you know. I had lovers before Bren.’
‘Pardon me for asking,’ asked Dimp. ‘But why did you submit to all this?’
Robyn looked at her, a little dolefully but without resentment. ‘Pride,’ she said. ‘In a weird way I went along with the process as a way of sending it up. I really thought they’d break down and apologise, and not only the priests and doctors, but Bren too. You see, he’d really convinced himself that when he married me, he’d been unfit to understand the marriage contract, the true weight of the vows. And so, he was arguing, the marriage was invalid. He said it was his own fault, that he’d brought inadequate consent to the contract. But I hadn’t brought inadequate consent. And I wasn’t going to pretend there was something lacking with the contract I’d entered. For Christ’s sake, I did bloody contracts at law school. I dug my heels in at one stage. If we were to be divorced,
it had to be simply a civil divorce based on incompatibility! Not some fiction that we’d been unfit to enter the marriage. I wanted him to divorce me civilly and remarry someone else civilly if that was what he wanted, and have the guts to flirt with damnation!’
In the end, she said, she saw it was hopeless, and submitted herself, out of a kind of weariness, a resentful kindness, to further questioning by the Catholic psychiatrist. He asked her about lesbianism (because if she had lesbian tendencies, that would have been something Bren hadn’t known, and lack of full knowledge could bring the contract unstuck). A priest, a canon lawyer, questioned her about her maturity at the time of the marriage. Had she entered it with due discretion? She asked them who in God’s name would marry if they did it ‘with due discretion’? Who would marry, she asked the priests, if they had an adequate map of the other party’s DNA, just for a start?
But this reaction was taken by these very serious men, anxious to enable Bren and Robyn, if possible, to get out of marriage without losing their souls, as a sign that indeed she might have been deficient in the elements which make up a contract. As for Bren, he earnestly satisfied them on that score. And so the Archdiocese referred the documents to the Canon Law courts – the Rota – in Rome and, after an inordinate time, the annulment decree was issued and sent to Sydney.
Quite some time had passed by the time Robyn got to this point of the narrative, and the airline had opened the bar to deal with the complaints of the crowd of business travellers. Robyn and Dimp went to get some wine. Dimp felt she needed it. She had noticed a change in Robyn, from dispassion to a calm but profound anger. The Church, not willing to permit divorce for breakdown or for cruelty, was willing to go probing back to the day when Robyn had appeared in white at Riverview College chapel and given her smiling, awed, liquid consent. They had dug back to that day and found her ‘I dos’ not up to snuff. That, rather than the split-up as such, was what was corroding Robyn, and as it took longer and longer to refuel the planes, both wives, like old schoolfriends, went back to the bar until, when the Melbourne flight was at last called three-and-a-half hours too late, Robyn and Prim boarded it in tipsy, edgy sisterhood. Robyn had a weight off her mind. She had transferred it to Dimp.