‘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.’
‘Are we to be totally driven in our actions by the claims of governments?’ asked Prim.
‘Of course not. But beside the true, visible problems, this one is … you know, it’s controversial. Unproven, if you like. And that word – “slavery” – has such a melodramatic weight. And Sunday, in Canberra … you must remember that your audience are generally middle-aged and older people who’ve been committed to the support of bodies like ours since their youth. We don’t want to distract any of them from the main game. Whereas the slave-liberators – I have heard of them, including the von woman – are attending to a minute part of the tapestry of African misery. But they demand centre-stage for it. It’s part of their absolutist, Bible-bashing view of the world.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Prim and stood up.
‘I didn’t want to make you angry,’ said Peter Whitloaf. ‘I actually thought I was offering you a promotion and a fraternal caution.’
‘And I don’t get the one if I don’t take the other?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Look, Peter, the subjects, the people I interview. They think they were part of a system of literal slavery.’
‘Only after the von woman had told them that by paying money for them.’
‘No, their knowledge is deeper than that. Bloody hell, Peter, read my case histories!’
‘Well, they’re certainly illustrative of a problem. But is it slavery in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin sense?’
She found herself laughing, richly, like Dimp. ‘I’ve had this argument so many times. With Sherif even. Maybe this is a man thing, after all. Women – von Trotke, my friend Mrs el Rahzi, even the BBC correspondent Helene Codderby – they all think slavery exists. The chaps, however, won’t believe it on any terms.’
‘Thanks a million,’ said Whitloaf, regarding the ceiling again.
‘We’re told by her critics that if von Trotke goes round buying adolescents back, she is driving the price up and encouraging more captures. But that doesn’t prove that there isn’t a slave market. It proves there is a market, subject to supply and demand, like toothbrushes and bottles of gin. But if I want to be my own boss in Khartoum I can’t say that? That there’s a market?’
‘I’d prefer you didn’t if you’re speaking for us. On Sunday, these people want to hear about our development and aid programs.’
‘I actually intended to tell them about development and aid.’
‘And the health surveys?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘Ah, but I have a mind to change my speech now.’
‘Don’t.’
They sat in a silence which seemed to make Peter uneasy, but he kept his long neck stiff, willing her to do the right thing.
In the street after leaving the office, Prim was all at once suddenly overcome by the absence of Sherif. She felt something like a digestive leadenness, a pain in the joints, but it all carried his name. Perhaps what she felt now was exhaustion at having kept a strong hand over her edginess, her capacity to whine and threaten, the capacity which had soured Auger. She had managed herself well, she was conscious, both when discussing the inconsiderateness of the southern Sudanese rebels with Bren, and this morning while arguing robustly, rather as Dimp would argue, the semantics of bondage with Peter. Her depression descended further as she neared the bus stop.
But as she paid her fare, seated amongst middle-aged men retired too early by the mechanism of corporate downsizing and emitting a faint, defeated musk of late-summer sweat, and watching young mothers come to town with their children to buy bigger school shoes or larger shirts, she reached towards Dimp for an antidote to melancholy, and envisaged the paintings she had cleverly bought, and felt a new surge of affection. She would give Dimp the best of presents, something infinitely superior to the set of Bach cantatas she had already bought her. She would enjoy the party in its own right. She would at last reduce the distance between herself and the event. She would be sociable in a new way, and thus enjoy the night as Dimp would enjoy it. That was a redeeming pledge.
Hence, next morning, when Dimp had an appointment for hair, face, nails and leg-waxing at Evelyn’s beauty parlour in Double Bay, and wanted Prim to go with her, she went along happily, though she had always been wary of beautification. From the windscreen of the car the vigorous light of a Saturday morning in Sydney looked supremely familiar. Yet everyone seemed so healthy. People in their forties looked agelessly young. She had forgotten too, in flat Khartoum, how hilly her home city was. Dimp drove sagely, squinting in concentration at New South Head Road and its cinemas and coffee shops.
In her side-street salon, their hairdresser-in-chief was Evelyn herself, supervising the team of women who went to work on the two sisters. Tall and thin and calling everyone, ‘Darls’, Evelyn greeted Dimp with a simple heartiness.
‘Oh, the adorable Dimp D’Arcy,’ she shrilled.
She led them to the waxing room, and within the peach-coloured walls they hung their clothes, changed into short terry-towelling gowns and lay together on parallel tables to have their legs waxed. Evelyn, telling them she would see them later, left them to the waxer’s mercies.
‘What are you both wearing?’ asked the waxer, after their initial small talk. ‘You know, at the party?’
Prim had until this moment thought that regretfully the only thing she had that was party-suitable was the white embroidered gow
n she had bought in el Fasher years before, a stand-by that she still wore on visits to the el Rahzis. Now, as the waxer began to pull off the strips of cloth, stinging her by peeling out the hair of her lower legs, she realised that it would perfectly fit the event. What it lost in texture would be gained by its novelty. As the hair came off her lower legs, Prim felt the long neglected glands of her vanity begin to secrete. She felt as if she were about to be initiated into a delightful tribe, where simple things said – ‘You’ve had this done regularly?’ – carried a complicated subtext to do with the sisterhood of desirability.
Afterwards, the waxer soothed their stinging legs by rubbing them with balm, and so sent them forth to Evelyn.
‘Your hair’s lovely, darls, but so brittle,’ Evelyn told Prim as she languidly inspected it after it was sleek and shampooed.
‘That’s the Sudan,’ said Dimp, from her chair. ‘My sister lives in the Sudan.’
‘In the Sudan,’ said Prim, like a woman who daily thought of her hair, ‘it doesn’t matter how hard you try.’
‘That’s the Sahara, isn’t it?’ asked Evelyn, massaging her scalp, a sensation Prim was enjoying more than she would have thought.
‘Close enough to it,’ said Prim.
Dimp winked at her, at one in her strategy.
‘Does you husband’s job take you there?’
‘No,’ Prim said blithely, her soul evened out by shampoo. ‘I’m not married.’
‘Oh but you will be, darls,’ Evelyn assured her. ‘A honey like you.’
While their hair was blow-dried and styled – yet another experience Prim found delightful, soothing, therapeutic, and a relief from intractable questions – their nails were attended to. This is the Western equivalent, Prim thought, of the henna, the tattoos, the delkah. Next, their faces were made up – or ‘made over’, to quote Evelyn – at dressing tables by enthusiastic young women.
So, glowing, Dimp and Prim left Evelyn’s, walking with the slight stiffness of their enhanced perfection, and sat at an outside table in front of a Hungarian coffee shop and patisserie.
‘That’s what I love about Double Bay,’ Dimp said. ‘It’s Budapest transported. Not a misplaced England. You can hear the bloody Danube pulsing away.’
And indeed from a sound system within the patisserie, a violin and an accordion played a languorous, worldly Magyar tune. Prim tried to imagine herself and Sherif in this place at the end of the world, taking excellent coffee, done in the style the Hungarians had learned from the Tartars. Men and women looked at them. Two radiant sisters, sharing the one pastry.
Dimp leaned forward again. ‘That Auger thing still has its hooks in you, doesn’t it?’
‘Less and less,’ said Prim. ‘I believe I can look you in the eye and say less since I came home.’
‘You should have come home sooner.’
‘Well … a person doesn’t know that. Coming home taught me there’s no danger in coming home. Not yet, anyhow.’
‘That’s good. You’ve been delivered of your demon. Good for you, sis.’ By her emphasis, Dimp implied she was still possessed of her own devils.
‘Come on,’ said Prim warily. ‘That annulment thing. You’re not serious, are you?’
‘God, yes. For some bloody reason I still am.’
‘And yet you knew about it. You knew about it even when I was making an idiot of myself with Auger.’
Dimp stared at her for the undistracted half-second the competitive, honking traffic streaming into Double Bay permitted. ‘It isn’t just that if one marriage can be annulled another can be with the same ease. It’s also the other thing: Bren has told both of us, his first wife, and me, he loved us. But he didn’t love us enough to cover his miserable Irish –Lebanese arse.’
‘But that’s ridiculous,’ Prim argued. ‘Love is always conditional.’
‘Yes. But there’s one side of my soul says otherwise. I’d like him for his own sake to take a risk. I don’t mean “venture capital”, which is a flash phrase for minting money. What I want is for him to risk everything. Sometimes I can’t help myself thinking it’s my mission to bring him to it. Look, verbally, he’s willing to make unconditional commitments. But then I find he’s got a stainless steel guarantee from a canon lawyer. Christ, what sort of love is that?’
‘The sort you live with. And have a party to honour.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Dimp as more coffee arrived. She scooped some cinnamon-laden cream off the top. ‘You’re right, of course. But being right doesn’t quite swing it.’
Prim was all at once the older sister, the wise counsellor. ‘You’ll feel better after the party.’
‘I’d like to come to Canberra with you tomorrow,’ said Dimp.
‘Won’t you be tired?’
‘Tired and emotional. But I want to hear one of your outrageous speeches.’
‘Outrageous?’
‘Yes, you remember. You always gave the weirdest speeches at school. I mean, the weirdest and the most interesting. Remember that time you were thrown out of the debating team for saying Australia was a Third World country?’
‘I can’t remember that,’ said Prim.
Dimp began laughing with a raucousness which did not quite suit her present peerlessness. Her legs were alabaster smooth though, and that was a start.
The social confidence built in Prim at Evelyn’s salon disappeared with the first guest to enter Dimp’s house. Not that there was any awesome authority, any clear intimidating opulence amongst the guests. The men tended to dress down, lean and serious, with trimmed hair, and collarless white shirts under baggy linen jackets, they looked rather like Prim’s (and perhaps their own) idea of French film directors rather than the merchant bankers, venture capitalists, brokers, lawyers who were Bren’s preferred company. Even when Dimp’s friends from film, the director of Enzo Kangaroo, Frank Varduzzi, and his wife, Septima, arrived, Prim felt just as lost, almost to the point of impoliteness. The promise of that morning, the promise of drawing normal, sociable breath, evaporated.
For a while, Dimp brought everyone up to meet her, as part of the house tour, and that made things better – ‘My sister came all the way from Khartoum! Just to be at our anniversary!’ But soon the guests arrived in such numbers that this nicety became impossible. She noticed Bren enjoying himself with a group of balding men. Occasional bursts of male laughter punctuated what seemed to be Bren’s enjoyably glum economic prophecies. A handsome red-headed woman, ample in an emerald dress, came bouncing up to Prim where she stood leaning on the stone balustrade above the harbour. She had the expectant smile of someone who was about to be recognised.
‘Skinny Bettany,’ she said, reviving a nickname even Prim herself had forgotten. ‘Primrose. You remember me? I was in Dimp’s class at Abbotsleigh. Sue Crosier. You must remember me. I was the one who was jealous because your sister had that great nickname. Tits!’
Prim did remember, discerned the child’s face behind the woman’s. In the years before the Bettany parents died in their car smash, she had been one of Dimp’s gang of part-sullen, part-hilarious, adolescent cadres. The memory was welcome, Prim was pleased to find, and she felt her social impulses at last unleashed. Conversation could now make its own heedless, instinctive way, in Sydney as in Khartoum.
‘I wish I’d done what you did,’ said this former child named Sue. ‘I’ve often thought about it. Little Skinny Bettany. Doing it hard in some shithole, eh? What shithole is it?’
‘The Sudan. And you’re pulling my leg.’
‘No! I’ve never spent time anywhere interesting. Potty-training is as close to squalor as I’ve ever got. And I’ve got two kids now. Do you remember a fellow called Jason Eckhardt? Played rugby for the Wallabies, which is a huge deal with men we meet. Secret of his success. Well, I married him, and the kids both tore their way out of me like bloody flankers breaking away from the scrum.’
‘I haven’t had the guts yet to have children,’ said Prim.
‘Because the world’
s supposed to be so bad? I suppose it is where you live.’
‘No. I just wouldn’t … have the courage. And by the way, that’s probably why I’m in Khartoum. I lack the guts to live normally here. And I couldn’t join a convent. So …’
‘Boy, you are hard on yourself. You always were a serious one, even though every fourteen-year-old boy had the hots for you.’
‘You know,’ Prim said, ‘I think of those times and I realise that despite the boredom, perhaps as few as fifty million people in the entirety of history have ever lived as well as we did then. As securely.’
‘Oh, this is the chastisement is it, young Skinny?’
‘No. But no one lives as securely as that in the Sudan. No one.’ Prim felt the wine, anxiously imbibed, now speaking with welcome authority. ‘It’s just good to see that despite all our good fortune, we had what everyone has. Divine discontent.’
‘Well, I’ve certainly got it. Look around you. The people within fifty metres of us are the people with whom I will spend, unless Jason does the dirty on them in business, every Saturday night from now until I’m on a walking frame. Every single Saturday night. Unless I’m watching my son, who’s four and shows every sign of playing rugby for Australia. That would be quite a nice break, actually.’
‘You have an unlimited future,’ Prim asserted, giving a stranger advice with great assurance. ‘One day you could even do the same work I’m doing if that was what you wanted. I mean, when the children grow up.’
‘Oh, Jason would be very bloody happy about that!’
Had Sherif come, Prim realised, all these conversations would have been different. People would have become earnest. Earnestness was what Africans were for.
She was aware now of a large young man with a half-whimsical smile, wearing a fairly beaten-up fawn jacket, waiting for a chance to insert himself into the conversation.
‘It’s the gorgeous Frank Benedetto,’ said Sue Crosier, hugging his large fawn arm close to her, still with ambitions to be the flagrant schoolgirl. ‘When are you going to ditch that solicitor friend of yours and let me clear out with you?’