Cold Light
Page 1
About the Book
It is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the League.
Edith Campbell Berry, who joined the League in Geneva before the war, is out of a job. With her sexually unconventional husband, Ambrose, she comes back to Australia to live in Canberra.
Edith now has ambitions to become Australia’s first female ambassador, but while she waits for a Call from On High, she gets caught up in the planning of the national capital and the dream that it should be ‘a city like no other’. When her communist brother, Frederick, turns up after many years of absence, she becomes concerned that he may jeopardise her chances of becoming a diplomat. It is not a safe time to be a communist in Australia or to be related to one, but she refuses to be cowed by the anticommunist sentiment sweeping the country.
It is also not a safe time or place to be ‘a wife with a lavender husband’. After pursuing the Bloomsbury life for many years, Edith finds herself fearful of being exposed. Unexpectedly, in mid-life she also realises that she yearns for children. When she meets a man who could offer not only security but a ready-made family, she consults the Book of Crossroads and the answer changes the course of her life.
Intelligent, poignant and absorbing, Cold Light is a remarkable novel, which can also be read as a companion to the earlier Edith novels Grand Days and Dark Palace.
CONTENTS
I Know Who You Are
Lunch or Luncheon or Dinner or Obed
The Chat with Janice
Two Footmen in Crimson Livery with Powdered Wigs, Carried on a Silken Cushion
Dinner at the Lodge, and Adam Lindsay Gordon
‘Let us despair; let us despair awfully and enormously’
Mistress of the Capitolium: Spinning the World on One’s Thumb
Furnishing the Capitol
Moscow on the Molonglo
Geomancy Loose in the Capitol
A House Arrives
Arthur Circle – Householders, Homemakers, Homebodies
In the Room of the Geomancer
The Broken Cumquat
Best Show in Town
‘And we have done those things we ought not to have done / And there is no health in us’
Conspiring
Judgement Day
Loss of a Mentor
Intensity of Observation
Anything Goes. No.
Bloomsbury on the Molonglo
The Show Goes On – ‘My dear, I know not if that is a man or a woman, but it is the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen’
The Man with Two Children
I Am Recalled
Declaration of the Free
Becoming a Mother of Sorts
A Career of Sorts
Grooming and Other Lessons
Secret Sessions
The Correct Line
Nerve Case
Dilemmas of Her Own: the Test at Alpha Island
The Wisdom of Lakes
Living Without Love
The Mastering of Envy
Becoming a Diplomat
Did Eros Remember Her Name?
Caviar Manoeuvres
Bungled?
The Passenger
Epilogue
Postscript
HISTORICAL NOTES
The League of Nations
The British Secret Intelligence Service
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Groupers and the Split
Bloomsbury
Firestone
Rationalism and Humanism
Nuclear Tests in Australia
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
The Communist Party of Australia
The Name of the Communist Party
The Communist Party and Espionage
The 20th Congress
The Art of Living in Australia
The Lampshade Shop Case Dishonour Roll
The Trinity
A City Like No Other – The Planning of Canberra
WHO IS WHO IN THE BOOK
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
To DAVID ELLIOTT GYGER, OAM, editor, opera critic – my first mentor, who, when I was young, introduced me to all that is best in traditional American liberal values, arts, thought and manners – and much more.
And to OWEN HARRIES, professor, foreign affairs analyst, editor, ambassador, friend and advisor over many years and, together with his wife, Dorothy, charming dinner table companions.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s fortunes are uniquely geared to those of a single, relatively new and controversial technology that can be used either as a weapon or as a practical and useful tool, that has almost infinite capacity to inflict harm but that also has an almost infinite potential to generate the energy on which the world will increasingly depend in the coming centuries to improve the conditions of life of its growing population.
History of the International Atomic Energy Agency – The First Forty Years, David Fischer, 1997.
*
Circe: . . . we’ll breed deep trust between us . . .
Ulysses: . . . not until you consent to swear, goddess, a blinding oath you’ll never plot some new intrigue to harm me!
Straightway she began to swear the oath that I required – never, she’d never do me harm . . .
Homer, The Odyssey, Book 10, translated by Robert Fagles, 1966.
*
Twirl went pale. Nierenstein blurted, ‘How can the Congress of the World do without this valuable material I’ve collected with so much love?’
‘The Congress of the World?’ said don Alejandro. He laughed scornfully. I had never before heard him laugh.
‘There is a mysterious pleasure in destruction,’ he said.
The Congress, Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author, from a special issue of fifty copies by Enitharmon Press, London, 1974.
*
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spell . . .
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1848, translated by Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, 1888.
*
What’s this war in the heart of nature?
Why does nature vie with itself?
The land contend with the sea?
Is there an avenging power in nature?
The Thin Red Line, James Jones, 1962.
*
The past is unpredictable.
Old joke from the Soviet Union.
This book is, in part, based on the dramatic reconstruction of real people, identified by their actual names, and on fictional characters, who sometimes embody features of people who existed at the time (see Who is Who in the Book). Where people who actually existed say anything substantial, their words are taken from documentary sources or constructed within the context of existing evidence or from the author’s personal knowledge of the person.
All the substantial events depicted (and quite a few of the insubstantial events) are inspired by documentary sources.
The book is about how things were or might have been: but, above all, it is a work of the imagination. It is a novel.
I Know Who You Are
1950
‘I’m your brother,’ he said, holding his cap in both hands.
He stood there in the lobby of the Hotel Canberra on a Sunday afternoon in summer, dressed something like a Welsh miner on his
way to chapel: a woollen suit, a nondescript tie, and boots not shoes. The only anomaly, a briefcase held between his legs.
When a message had come from the hotel reception saying that there was someone to see her, she had put on lipstick and given her hair a quick brush and, with curiosity, come to the lobby. She had not expected it to be her lost brother. She had expected, well, she did not quite know what she expected – Someone with Good News. A Message from On High.
And then she decided that he was dressed as a civilian from during the war. He was dated – he had the austerity look of turned collars and patching and ‘make do and mend’. Something everyone was now trying to leave behind.
‘I know who you are,’ Edith said, moving towards him.
He looked down at his cap with a laugh, as if it were part of a costume, and pushed it into his side pocket. Then he held out his hand to shake hers, but she continued, without hesitation, bypassing his hand, into the embrace of a sister for a brother, an embrace she had never used, an embrace-in-waiting, and she felt her body unbending from the shoulders, down to her waist, and, as this was her brother, she found her body permitting itself to then be lightly against his. The hold of the embrace, though shaky, felt natural enough. They both yielded to their shaky embrace, his arms enfolding her loosely, with some masculine pressure. ‘I know who you are.’
She calculated his age – he was five years younger than she. She had last seen him when he was seventeen or so. Oh God – how old was she? She had changed her age so many times. She put her age up for her application for a position at the League, put it down on her marriage certificate with Dole, put it down again on her marriage certificate with Ambrose. She had, well, decided to shed another two years on her return to Australia – if anyone were to ask – to make herself less forbidding to the men who might offer her a position; but whatever permissible subterfuge about her age, past or present, she was still, inescapably, five years older than her brother.
His woollen suit smelled newly dry-cleaned. Perchloroethylene. He must be hot. He felt hot.
She held to the embrace, knowing that when she came out from it she would need words that she had not yet found.
He too held to her. She felt the broken breathing in his chest. He began slightly to pull from the embrace, but she held him.
Then, almost simultaneously, they pulled back from each other and she opened her eyes, wiping them with the side of her hand.
‘Do you have a handkerchief?’ she asked, with something of a laugh. She continued to hold one of his hands.
He remained awkwardly anchored by the briefcase between his legs. From a trouser pocket he pulled out what seemed to be a folded, unused handkerchief and handed it to her.
‘Perfectly clean,’ he said.
‘Thank you for the assurance,’ she tried to joke, dabbing her eyes. She tried to find her brother in the face of this man.
‘Thought you might not have recognised me. Thought I might have changed beyond recognition.’
‘Would you have recognised me?’
He nodded. They stood looking into each other’s face.
‘Or do I know who you are?’ she then said. ‘After all these years, I perhaps don’t know who you are.’
‘I know who you are – you’re a notable.’ There was brotherly sarcasm around the word notable, but also some deference.
‘Not at present.’ She went to hand back the handkerchief and then stopped, saying, ‘I think I’ll hold on to this. I may, I suspect, need it again. I’m a nobody at present.’
She sniffed and wiped her nose lightly. ‘Let’s sit down. We’ll go to my rooms, but first let’s gather ourselves.’ She gave out a laugh for no good reason.
They sat down at an afternoon-tea table in the lobby and she let go of his hand. They stared at one another and then away.
She said then that she should send a note to Ambrose to let him know that they had a visitor. ‘Ambrose, my husband.’ So many questions to be asked. ‘Are you married?’
‘Not married. I know about your husband.’
‘You do?’
‘Information comes my way.’ He didn’t smile.
Mystery man. She reached out to touch his cheek with the back of her hand. He nodded in silent acceptance of the touch, a way of returning it. She said, ‘You disappeared from our lives. Tell me about you. How was your war?’
He shrugged. ‘I was overseas for a time just after the war ended. Prague. I know about you – official of the League of Nations.’
‘Not me. Tell me about the things you’ve done. One at a time.’
She somehow had to order this conversation.
‘In the army during the war. On Salt, the army newspaper.’
‘A reporter? And you say you were in Prague?’
‘I came back only last year. I worked there for Telepress – the Czech government news service.’
This made no immediate sense to her. She’d had a reporter in her life, married him, divorced him, now dead.
‘I had a husband who was a reporter; I seem to remember he talked of a Madam Kotatkova of Telepress.’ That was a weird thing to say, but Frederick brightened.
‘I worked with her. What was your husband’s name?’
How remarkable that they could have met. ‘Robert Dole – The London Telegraph.’
Frederick shook his head.
‘How did you end up in Prague?’
‘The Party sent me. A few of us went there for training. To see how a new communist state worked.’
The Party. She would leave that for now.
‘And here?’ She was in a rush and did not leave him time to answer. ‘Did you come to Canberra to find me?’
‘I work here.’
She gestured around at the hotel.
He laughed. ‘No, not here.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘Finding someone in Canberra isn’t hard. Read about you in the paper.’
‘Oh, that – a few weeks ago – when we arrived from London. The reporter promoted me somewhat – up a level or two in the League.’
She had a feeling that she may have promoted herself up a few levels in the exuberance of the newspaper interview. ‘What are you doing in Canberra?’
‘I’m in politics.’
‘As is everyone in Canberra.’
‘As you were.’
‘I was never really in politics. As members of the League secretariat we thought of ourselves as above politics.’
‘No one is above politics.’
‘That sounded to me like an admonition. Are you running for parliament?’
‘I’m not in politics like that,’ he said, mimicking her, teasing her.
‘How, precisely, then, are you in politics?’
‘I’m an organiser with the Communist Party.’
He said it as if it were a rather unexceptional part of everyday life. She looked anew at him, as if to spot the communistic characteristics that might, somehow, be displayed in his being. Perhaps his suit might be something a communist organiser would wear, or was that a rather mad thing to think?
‘Rather an unpopular thing to be right now. I would keep it under my hat. Or cap. And what, or who, pray, do you organise?’ She tried to be jocular.
He moved his head as if shaking off her jocularity but did not answer.
She asked if it were a full-time job. ‘Or is it a secret job?’
He considered this. ‘I judge the situation. Sometimes I am discreet; sometimes I am not; sometimes I am something else.’
In her mind, she heard the words of communist colleague Noel Field, from the League days, from before the war, which she kept in her memory as a warning about those who worked for revolutions. ‘To say the truth and not to say the truth, to be helpful and unhelpful, to keep a promise and break a promise, to go into danger and to avoid danger, to be known and to be unknown . . .’ She said the last bit out loud: ‘He who fights for communism has, of all the virtues, only one – that he fights for co
mmunism.’ She laughed to lighten it up. To laugh and not to laugh.
‘That amuses you?’
She shook her head, squeezing his hand by way of apology for making light of his world. ‘A flash from the past. Your invitation to Ambrose and my wedding came back unanswered. And the invitation to my first wedding, also. I seemed to have some old PO address for you. I’m married to a man named Ambrose Westwood. I mentioned that. Formerly Major. Formerly a medical doctor. He’s Counsellor with the British High Commission.’
How remote the résumé sounded. As if seeing Ambrose and her through the wrong end of a telescope. My husband. She was used to him being so described in social situations and by law. But for her he was not a husband. She’d had a husband. Robert had been a husband. She wanted no more of husbands. She had done with husbands. And the word husband, she knew, was a lid, which, with Ambrose, did not screw on properly. A lavender marriage as she had heard FO types describe the marriage of Harold Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West. And probably that was how they described Ambrose and her marriage. Or something like that. Maybe there was no description for what they had. She should find another flower with which to describe it. Ambrose described himself sometimes as Something More or Less than a Husband.
How would a brother deal with all that? Wouldn’t have to.
‘What exactly is your work?’ she asked.
‘I’ve told you.’
‘Is that a job as such?’
‘They pay me a labourer’s wage. Yes, a job.’
She let go of his hand, not meaning it as a distancing gesture but because her palms were sweating. Though it might seem like a distancing. She wiped her palms on his handkerchief and took back one of his hands and smiled to him. The Communist Party revelation was throwing her. For all her travels, all her diplomatic experience, communists were still somewhat alien to her. There had even been communists who had visited their home when Frederick and she had been growing up. She had dealt with Russian communists in Vienna, when she was working with refugees for UNRRA after the war, after the League had collapsed. Knew some around the League. Knew Noel Field. And now she came to think about it, she knew some in Spain during the civil war. But she had not known an Australian communist. She had not known a brother who was a communist.