I stayed at Raffles, more or less to honour Great-uncle Ernest who’d gone to dances there when he was an Australian army officer, before Singapore fell. Do you remember how Dad had a box of his postcards from Singapore.
Raffles was the showpiece in those days. Now it’s full of Aussies in shirts and sandals, all screaming for a beer, and it’s surrounded by glass towers in which a person is told to stay if she wants less quaint and more predictable service.
Remember that time we went through here as kids on the way to England, and we stayed in the flashest hotel – the Marco Polo was it? I forget.
Anyway I’d already called Sir Malik Bettany from Sydney, talked to his secretary, claimed our common ancestor, at least in the spiritual or patronage sense, and he called back and said he would be delighted to have a meeting with me. He had only a very faint Malay accent. I was conscious that I sounded a lot more like the average rough Aussie than he did a Tamil. He seemed so curious too, so anxious to see an Australian Bettany, that I thought he would be very sympathetic to the cause. I confessed on the phone I had a proposition for him. He would certainly be interested, I was sure, in his esteemed ancestor’s history. He nominated his office, May 1, 4pm.
The great tower where Bettany’s Bank and financial services is located is near the junction of Orchard and Tanglin Streets, which is apparently a pretty serious commercial address in Singapore. The building sits on columns, which the Singapore guidebook says is meant to imitate the stilts of a Malay village. The guidebook also says Tamils are modest people who aren’t much involved in big wealth. But Sir Malik is the exception. The reception area has great blocks of marble, and makes pretty extensive reference to Singapore’s races. There’re Tang dynasty horses in an illuminated case, a golden Buddha ditto, teak panelling from the mainland, and behind the reception desk, a mural incorporating Sikhs, Muslims, British, Malays, Chinese, all doing industrious stuff.
I began to think that somehow I might have made a mistake coming. It looked so formal, it took itself so seriously, it lacked levity and it certainly lacked ambiguity. When I was taken into the man’s office, my panic got worse! Sir Malik is a slight, ageless-looking man, with a sculptured, bony head and handsome feminine wrists and hands. He has a cherubic smile and looks like a fellow who thinks positive thoughts. A descendent of one Moth person and many Malays! I believed I could just about smell the spices on his delicate hands. Apparently his father, Felix’s grandson, was shot dead in a frightful massacre of community leaders by the Japanese. This man would have been merely a child at the time. After the war Sir Malik’s mother ran the business until the man I saw before me graduated from Oxford.
His desk was clear, and there was a solidity to everything. He was beautifully dressed, in a blue, pin-striped western suit. Behind him was a huge photograph of the archipelagos of the Singapore Straits. His front yard. He bowed and did not shake my hand. ‘You are only the second Australian holder of the family name whom I have sighted. I remember, when I was a very small boy, about 1940, an Australian officer visited my father.’
That would have been Great-uncle Ernest.
Sir Malik said it had not been forgotten in his family, and did not go unmentioned by his great-grandfather, that Sir Felix Bettany’s fortune derived from a generous £50 given in time of hardship and ignominy by our ancestor. Nor did the family try to gloss over the fact that a part of them was in the truest sense Australian. ‘What sort of fellow would I be,’ he asked me, ‘if I did not affirm and celebrate Sir Felix and his startling gifts?’
This was a promising start. I told him about the film, describing it as an attempt to bring the tale of Sir Felix Bettany’s youth, of his escape from imprisonment, of the justness of my Bettany ancestor and Sir Malik’s, to the screen! The difficulty of raising funding at home, since people had a prejudice against nomads and the telling of tales of the obliteration of nomads! People did not want to be discomforted by that story, but I did not want to discomfort them. I told him I wanted to celebrate both worlds – the pastoral and the nomadic.
Sir Malik listened to all this earnestly, with his beautiful brown-blue hands on the desk before him, resting from his normal work and available for the new, the unimagined. By the time I finished talking, hope was thumping in my ears. It was not to be left thumping for long.
He told me with a frank little smile that the development sum I had mentioned was not large by the standard of his company’s operations. But there were other considerations. He had certain misgivings. He said the impact of Western films upon the youth of Singapore and Malaysia was less than edifying. We have strict standards, he told me, and they are routinely violated by films from the West. He said that through travelling a great deal he was aware of what the fashionable call ‘moral relativity’. But he believed that there were areas of the family tale better not depicted on film.
I wouldn’t mention Sir Felix’s first, Indian, wife, I assured him. Felix had had one, who died in childbirth, and the mention of her caused Sir Malik to flinch. I told him that the film, except for an endnote, would be made entirely in Australia.
But your great-grandfather, said Sir Malik Bettany, cohabited with a Jewish woman prisoner – so Sir Malik’s father had been told by Great-Uncle Ernest, who must have known the family secret. Are we to see that? he asked.
Straight away, I knew he wasn’t going to help me. He explained he’d just underwritten the manufacture of a new car engine for his Tamil brothers in Malaysia. He wasn’t sure they would understand his investment in a film which portrayed scenes of nakedness. Both as a businessman and an individual servant of God he could not contemplate investing in such a thing unless he had the last word on all scenes in the film, and even then …
It was hopeless. We made the politest small talk and I left. A secretary took me to the lift, and was amazed when I launched a surreptitious kick at the pompous marble panelling, while the lifts whispered their way up and down the height of this great marble pile, sighing like Sir Malik. The old bugger would not give me my £50 and hadn’t looked after me the way Jonathan Bettany looked after Felix!
So I’ll have to fall back on less conventional options. I have the problem of money, and the problem that Bren thinks my living alone is a stage, and will pass. I might be able to wrap up the two into one resolution. Anyhow, further details to come.
ALL THE WAY BACK TO KHARTOUM, on that tedious, hard road south to Kassala, Sherif seemed depressed and chastened. A clod of food lodged in a windpipe had taken his dignity away, betrayed him in front of Siddiq. So Siddiq had been able to sack Sherif, instead of the reverse.
Arriving in the city he asked to be dropped at his house, and it was apparent he wanted to be alone. As he left the truck, he placed a hand on Prim’s wrist. ‘I do hope none of this rebounds on Austfam or you, my dear friend Prim.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Prim. ‘Austfam will believe me.’
‘One betrays oneself,’ Sherif said dolorously, ‘not in hours but in seconds. And in front of someone like Siddiq!’
She accompanied him into the garden in which she had first waited for a consultation with him. She kissed him goodbye inside his gate. ‘Do you think,’ she risked asking him, ‘you might just give it all up and emigrate to England or the US?’
He said, ‘I would like to, but I have a girl here, you know. And in any case, I doubt I would be given permission to board a plane.’
‘You got angry with a pair of crooked officials, that’s all,’ said Prim. ‘That’s not a hanging offence. Certainly not with me.’
A ray of torchlight from the street struck the garden gate. It was the block’s so-called ‘Popular Police officer’ – a retired policeman armed with a torch and cane. These patrollers the new regime had installed were all over the city now, policing behaviour and morality. They were admirers and supporters of el Turabi.
‘I will see you back to the truck,’ Sherif insisted.
Prim said no, since she wondered if he still had a predisposi
tion to make scenes. But he would not be dissuaded and, speaking in a normal voice, led Prim out to the truck, opened the back door for her, let her climb aboard. The old volunteer policeman watched intently from the pavement, frowning at Sherif’s suspect association with a bare-faced infidel woman. As Prim entered the back seat, Sherif went and stood on the pavement by the old man, taking up a mock filial posture. ‘Good night Erwit, good night Primrose,’ he called, in English. Together, he and the morals officer watched the truck pull away.
Prim slept soundly, though the dreams she remembered were scarcely peaceful. She dreamt she told Sherif a number of times, ‘I am willing to become a citizen too.’ But then she was full of fear for what might befall the children she might have by Sherif: a boy conscript in the Sudanese army in the South. An infibulated girl embarrassed by her white mother.
She woke just before office hours, refreshed but in a depressed state. She tried to call Sherif but there was no answer. Irregularities of telephone service were not unknown. She would call him at mid-morning.
She called throughout the day, and in late afternoon had Erwit drive her around to Sherif’s. She had a key for the gate and for the house, which was locked up, and there was no answer to her ringing of the bell. She called the Omdurman Women’s Hospital and the hospital in North Khartoum, and asked for him. Both matrons said he had not been in.
Next, she called Helene Codderby. Had Helene heard anything? Helene went, at Prim’s request, to the magistrates’ court to look at the list of people presently on charges. Had Sherif got disconsolately drunk, and been arrested, and did he now face flogging?
Helene called back. There was a shudder in her voice, but there often had been since Stoner’s death. She had seen three women protesters from a mothers anti-war group sentenced to flogging for prostitution, and the birching occurred right there in court, with only the lean, brown backs exposed under the rotating electric ceiling fans. ‘It’s reached a pretty bloody pass,’ said Helene, disappointed Sudanese patriot that she was, ‘when the only terms on which a woman can show her back in public is to be flogged.’
But there was no Dr Sherif Taha on the court list. Helene had also called the el Rahzis to see if the professor could check the police stations. He had done it, said Helene, even checked the morgue. But he had no news either.
Throughout the following night, Prim rang Sherif’s number at all hours, and went again to his home at breakfast time. It was still locked. She let herself in. All looked normal, though with that wistful look of abandoned objects. The horrifying off-chance that his body might be there, that there might have been some sudden aneurism, was dispensed with. So was the chance that he might have been held by the police for some misdemeanour and then allowed back home.
Later, Helene called her again.
‘Remember Sherif’s school friend, el Dhouma? He’s senior counsel to el Turabi now, and likes to think of himself as the acceptable face of Islamic radicalism. But he’s not a bad guy. You could maybe ask him to see if Sherif’s … well, in the system somewhere.’
Helene gave her the number. Prim called and haltingly asked the secretary could she speak to Dr el Dhouma. She cursed herself that her Arabic was least viable when she most needed it. Dr el Dhouma would be free in an hour, the secretary said. She waited an hour and called again, and then again, and at last, in late afternoon, when the ministry was cranking itself up for business after the torrid hours, she was surprised to have a call directly from el Dhouma himself.
‘Miss Bettany,’ he said in a courtly and apparently delighted voice. ‘There has been some remarkable water passed under remarkable bridges since I last saw you.’
‘Yes,’ said Prim, less capable of urbanity because she was frightened for Sherif. ‘I called you because your clients are now so crucially placed. The security system is in their hands.’
‘And very competent hands they are, despite some recent slanders in the international press.’
If it had been a cocktail party, she might have mentioned the female protesters Helene had seen in the magistrates’ court.
‘I wondered if you knew anything of your school friend, Dr Sherif Taha? I was working with him in the Red Sea Hills on a health survey, and I haven’t been able to find him since we returned two nights ago. I’ve had a friend check the magistrates’ lists and another check the police stations.’
‘Ah yes, I suppose that would have been el Rahzi, generous fellow that he is. His friends always have him ringing around the police stations these days.’
‘I thought that you might be able to find out if anything has happened to Dr Taha? If, for example, he is somewhere in the legal process …’
‘Do you suspect he is?’
‘No. There’s no reason he should be.’ But she thought then a little information might help el Dhouma. ‘He was part of a health survey team funded by Austfam which was ordered away from the refugee camp named Alingaz by an official of the ministry. But he had done nothing illegal.’
‘Who ordered him away?’
‘Another old friend. Dr Siddiq.’
‘But Siddiq’s with the Ministry of War.’
‘The events were confused,’ Prim admitted.
‘You realise I am simply a counsellor, don’t you? I would be delighted to find out what I can. But he may simply have gone somewhere for a rest.’
‘Austfam and Dr Sherif work together. He would have told me. I would be very grateful if you could let me know anything, anything at all. He may, for example, need a lawyer.’
There was another stricken night, during which she had leisure to torment herself with the idea that had Sherif not known her, he might now be safe. She had ample time to talk on the phone to Helene, and inform Peter Whitloaf that Sherif was missing, and urge him as head of Austfam to begin making his own inquiries with the Sudanese Ministry of Justice.
When he called Prim at mid-morning, El Dhouma was not nearly so chummy as he had been the previous afternoon.
‘Your friend has indeed been taken into custody by the security forces.’
‘On what charge?’
‘Under emergency regulations of the National Security Act and on summary charges of placing the government of the Sudan in contempt.’
There came instantly to Prim an image of the el Kober gaol, with its vast walls of ochre adobe and its high watchtowers. Whenever she had driven past it, it seemed to exude a malign promise of torrid confinement.
‘Does he have a lawyer?’ she asked. ‘I must get him one.’
‘A lawyer can’t help him very much,’ said el Dhouma. ‘He’s not standing trial, not yet anyhow. He is being detained, that’s all. So there’s no need for you to go running about the city.’
‘But where is he?’
‘I’m not certain. In some detention house or other.’
‘You mean, a ghost house?’ It was a term which had come to be used for unofficial and unregistered houses of detention, where the security people could do their work far from supervision. It was said the army men of the Revolutionary Command Council and el Turabi’s security officials had got the idea from Pinochet of Chile.
‘ “Ghost house” is a ridiculous piece of Amnesty International jargon,’ said el Dhouma, though he did not seem particularly annoyed.
‘I won’t argue with you,’ said Prim. ‘But can I see him?’
‘The people I spoke to didn’t seem to think he was in Khartoum. There was some story of his being detained in Port Sudan, or Kassala.’
She thought, Siddiq is in all this. Hence Port Sudan.
But there was nothing to grasp on. They had taken away her power to react with their inexact news – unspecified violations; unspecified detention centres; unspecified cities.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘I have no trouble begging you. Should you hear anything more, call me. Any hour, day or night.’
‘I would like to help you, Miss Bettany,’ el Dhouma said. ‘But you must understand you have not exactly been a pleasant guest of th
e republic. Could you be depended upon to behave within the spirit of any latitude the government might extend?’
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘of course.’ For there was no other source of help. If Sherif had taken the trouble while in Louisiana to become a US citizen – hundreds of thousands of other Africans had done so – she could appeal to the American Embassy. They went in to bat for US citizens. As it stood, she had nothing to hold over el Dhouma. ‘If Sherif could be freed,’ she said, ‘you people can depend on my good manners.’
She set off before curfew to visit the el Rahzis, who seemed to her two rocks in a torrent of events. Led into the house by one of their Southern maids, she was alarmed to find the el Rahzis themselves in distress. The professor and Khalda had been comforting themselves with the standard medicine of sweet black tea.
Mrs el Rahzi rose with tear-stained eyes and embraced Prim. She asked, ‘Sherif is still missing? Who could have grounds to arrest him? Even in this regime one has to think it’s a mistake.’
‘But you are not weeping for Sherif,’ surmised Prim.
‘No, it’s Safi, our boy,’ Khalda told her, sitting her down and pouring some tea. ‘They came for him – the conscription people – a truckload of troops to conscript one boy. He violated his exemption when he was arrested. They’ve put him in the infantry, of course. He is in a special combat training camp near Wad Medani. No doubt they are telling him, as they tell farmers’ sons, that all the loyally Islamic snakes of the South will fall from trees upon their enemies. No doubt they are intoning, “Jihad!”, and promising him paradise should he tread on a mine.’ And Mrs el Rahzi turned her head and began to weep quietly, regarded by her doleful husband.
‘Did you speak to el Dhouma?’ the professor asked Prim.
Prim said she had.
‘Did he tell you where Sherif is?’
‘No. He said it wasn’t el Kober here in Khartoum. He said it might be Kassala or Port Sudan. Then he said a detention centre. I don’t know where to look, or how to start.’