‘Did you?’
‘Not in the way I imagine people are supposed to mourn. In my own undemonstrative way, yes. I gave time to some contemplation of their lives – perhaps that’s not mourning. No, I was not sad.’
They left that subject and he remarked that he was enjoying the change of fare here at the lunch – perhaps a concession to her generosity. He said, ‘I’m enjoying this relapse back into the aristocratic life.’
‘Perhaps it’s time for you to return to the bourgeoisie?’ she joked, not feeling at all relaxed or witty.
He said, ‘Did you hear what Janice said about our dinner order?’
She noted that he used the word dinner in the Australian way, meaning lunch – their family hadn’t used it that way. ‘She said something like, “Nothing is too good for the working classes.” The art of gastronomy is hardly decadent. Peasants practise it.’
‘The Party leadership think a Chinese meal is living it up.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve lived the proletarian life – not much fine dining – although we did live it up in Prague: French wines, banquets in palaces. But here I have done my share of manual labour. Feel my hands.’ He held them out to her, and he looked at them himself, pinching one with the other. ‘They’ve become rather soft since I took on organising. In revolutionary situations it was how it was decided who should be shot – by the roughness of the hands. Aristocrats were identified by their soft hands.’
She resisted touching his hands, but said, ‘Be careful – you could be shot.’ It reminded her of Frederick as a small boy asking their mother and her to feel his biceps.
He said he wanted his life to rise – or fall – with the lowest rung of the economic system. He wanted to share their fate.
She found that admirable. But she felt that as adults they were now very much apart, and sooner or later that had to be said.
She was in danger of ignoring one of her rules – learned the hard way – that you do not sever a relationship during a meal. It left you with the rest of the meal to get through, sitting together in the mess and distress of the severance. And it ruined the appetite. Although she hadn’t invited Frederick to this lunch with a decision to formally end the relationship, she had it as an option. Maybe she had to find, if not a filial bond, some urbane modus vivendi for their relationship. She was now inclined to see that ending it may be the only way of managing it – they were incompatible in sundry ways and, more seriously, he was likely to pull her down, even if, in some strangely twisted way, they had both given their lives to what they saw as making a better world. But for comfort, if there was to be a severance today, then it should not be done until coffee and after at least another drink.
They were both drinkers. Her mother had been a person who drank perhaps too much, although that allegation of drinking too much had once been levelled at her back in the days of the League. Unjustly. She had worked harder and more thoughtfully at the League than most of the others, including those who did not drink alcohol. She had, though, become aware that she drank more than other women of her milieu. Ambrose drank less than she.
She also now accepted that those who drank deeply often had some disharmony to their lives, but there were also those who were, well, just perplexed by existential matters and needed the comfort of the glass. She put herself in the second category, although, unwillingly, she forced herself to consider the possibility, just the possibility, that she might also have some deep-seated neurotic demon reflected by her marriage to Ambrose. Dr Vittoz, back in Geneva, would certainly wish to talk about that. She was glad he was a long way away. She had no wish to visit that.
She questioned her brother about drinking. Had not communism, as an all-encompassing belief, as a source of all explanations, relieved him – as he had said at their first meeting – of inner contradictions needing the relief of alcohol? He replied that he tried not to drink so much as an example. He himself found it disappointing that some of the comrades drank so heavily, especially the intellectuals. He paused, as if to consider whether he had said too much to someone outside the Party. ‘And some of the leadership, too.’
He winked at her. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said that. We do try to weed chronic drunks out of the Party – the bad cases.’
Frederick said that socialism – and working for socialism – did resolve much of the pain that came from alienation from work and society.
‘So the worker will feel much better under socialism, will not need to take to drink?’ She tried not to sound sarcastic.
With some fire, he said loudly, ‘Yes, the worker will feel better, will not feel powerless, will not live in permanent anxiety about losing their job, their pride, of being crushed by the calamities of life, will not feel robbed, will not feel left out. The worker tries to suppress the pain with drink but, of course, they don’t fully understand what it is they are suppressing. People try to survive, of course, by living beneath these fundamental questions, letting the great issues drift above them like storm clouds. They live in their gardens, fill their lives with family matters, use the rhythm of work as a drug, and then, after work, they use alcohol as a drug. They live within the minutiae of life.’ He then added, ‘Mother and Father both thought it could be fixed in a piecemeal way. It can’t. Because the great problems of our species are of a whole – everything is interlocked. For anything significant to change, everything has to change.’
‘As you do, I believe we change the world meeting by meeting,’ she said. ‘Conversation by conversation. Every argument in the workplace or around the kitchen table about the best way to do something, the fair way to do something, a way of doing something better – these are fights for a civilised world.’
‘In capitalist-controlled democracy, piecemeal reform is just compromise after compromise until the original goal is lost in a fog of words. Watered-down palliatives.’
Perhaps this was a conversation he needed to have with her – with her especially – because of their kinship. It was important, perhaps, for him to carry his sister with him, to have her agreement.
However, she could not quite take him as seriously as the content of his talk demanded. He did, at times, sound like the younger brother trying to parade his learning in front of his sister. She kept having images of him as a serious little boy following her around, reading to her from a book or magazine, propounding his new enthusiasm or some amazing fact he had come across – that coral was a living animal, not a plant, not stone.
She could see that a permanent rift between them would suit her best, given the circumstances.
An inquisitive question came to her. ‘How deeply are you and Janice romantically involved?’
Frederick shifted in his chair, and again his face took on an expression of studied thought. ‘Having something of a leadership role in the Party, affairs with a member can lead to favouritism and so on. Inevitably, communists marry communists, but leadership requires other considerations. Sleeping around is not what communists do – sleeping around is more the hobby of intellectuals.’
‘But you’re having an affair?’
‘We are, but we keep it discreet within the Party.’
To say the truth and not to say the truth. Her mind went back to Noel Field. ‘You must have known the American Noel Field when you were in Prague?’
‘I do. I met him. Why mention him?’
‘I met him in the Disarmament Section of the League in 1937. We believed that he spied for the Soviet Union. I quoted Noel Field at our first meeting. He once said to me that the communist vow went something like this: “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 . . .’
Frederick broke in, ‘He was quoting Brecht. Berthold Brecht.’
‘I don’t think he acknowledged that at the time. At the time, when I first heard it, it seemed that he was passing it off as his own. Anyhow, you know then how it finishes: “He who fights for commu
nism has, of all the virtues, only one: that he fights for communism.” ’
‘It’s Brecht.’ He laughed. ‘You could say that the capitalist has, of all the virtues, only one: that he fights for profit.’
She smiled. ‘I understand that a couple of years ago – just after the war – Field defected to Czechoslovakia, to a communist haven. But he and his wife were accused of spying for the Americans and thrown into gaol. I’ve heard that when his brother and his foster daughter went to Prague a year ago to find out what had happened to him, the communist government arrested them and they all went to gaol. Have you heard what is happening with the family? Is that the communism you want?’
‘We can’t decide his case from this distance. One man has two eyes, the Party has a thousand eyes. The Party sees and understands more than any individual member.’
‘What do you make of his – or Brecht’s – description of the communist?’
‘I think that I serve historical truth when I fight for communism. What violence or deception would you not commit to rid the world of vileness? Sometimes deception is a method.’
‘What must be the magnitude of the vileness that it requires us to take up arms against a government?’
‘I’ll tell you what vileness is.’ Again, a vehemence entered his tone, but it was not aggressive, it was compelling. ‘It’s vile that the possession of money or a superior intelligence quotient or luck should decide the quality of a person’s life – when something as crass as inherited wealth, or any of the talents of birth should decide who gets the riches of the world. That’s vileness. That birth or money should decide whose children get the best health or best education or who can afford to be defended before the law. Life for children should not be a lottery of rich and poor – and any system that always punishes its poorest and weakest when the economy goes wrong is vile and is not a civilised system. We know how to solve this, but the rich block it. And they tell the masses that one day they could be rich. Look at the American films, which pretend that anyone can be rich. The lottery is another cruel joke invented by capitalism. When you win, you lose your friends and workmates and family – you are then separated from them by the wealth. You win wealth and you lose everything. It is a parody of our society.’
She was again moved by her brother’s fiery humanity. Some of this came from the dinner table of their childhood.
‘At the League, we thought we could change vileness through concerted world mediation.’ She laughed. ‘Bruce thought all the League needed to prevail was an international air force.’
‘Then you will understand that a revolutionary situation is a battlefield situation. You must be familiar with the term “military necessity” ’
She said she remembered a line from the film For Whom The Bell Tolls, where the anarchist is worried about killing a young man from his village who is guarding the bridge for the fascists. ‘The communist, Robert Jordan, tells the anarchist that the sentry must be killed “because of the necessity of the bridge”.’
‘Right. Because of the necessity of the bridge. Well, there is revolutionary necessity. A true Bolshevik does what has to be done to carry through the revolution. Sometimes this means Browderism and his call during the war for class peace – that was correct for the duration of the war, but now we face different conditions. That is why the Party can turn 180 degrees – if such change is to the advantage of the Party; if such change is dictated by objective reality.’
She knew who Browder was, but perversely she wasn’t going to seek Frederick’s approval by revealing it.
She said, ‘At the League, we worked to restrain military necessity: we do not kill civilians if we can avoid it. Or destroy monuments or artworks. Or mistreat prisoners of war.’
‘Come on, Edith – all armies kill civilians. And as for prisoners, we only treat prisoners in a civilised way because one day we might find ourselves a prisoner and we’d wish to be treated likewise. You cannot restrain an army if you want it to win. So with the Party.’
She continued to be intrigued by his range of voices: now the teacher, now the army general, now the commissar, and also, in there among the voices, the little boy brother trying to show how frightful he could be.
She came back, ‘Some military commanders would decide that the battle is better lost than to continue it and destroy so much of value – there was General Choltitz, who disobeyed Hitler’s order to destroy Paris. Otherwise, there would be nothing left worth fighting for. We would have destroyed it all. And between us – as brother and sister – how would I ever know if your behaviour towards me was a revolutionary necessity? A time of class peace?’
‘You wouldn’t. And there is only negotiated affection, which is the pretty dress in which economic or political reality chooses to clothe itself. In a given situation, the Louvre would have to go.’ He added, his voice changing again, softening, ‘I would probably order someone else to do the actual dirty work.’ Then he said, in his charming voice, ‘I would try to get into the Louvre. Save a few pictures that I liked.’
They both chose to laugh away the discomforting impasse.
She recalled talking with Xavier, a French army officer, just before she came back to Australia. He had been fighting the uprising in Algeria. He had said to her that when fighting revolutionaries who used terror, an army had to adopt a position of having no fixed values.
Frederick said, ‘I suppose if the destroyed paintings were any good and needed to express the new order, someone else would eventually paint them again or create paintings just as good, if not better, to replace them. Or most would fade from the human consciousness through sheer irrelevance or meaninglessness.’
They moved to the safe ground of reminiscence, talking of the time their father abolished Christmas and instead celebrated some Rationalist saint. Neither of them could remember who – was it J. S. Mill?
She then said, ‘I have just realised that Mother’s money, which you donated to the Party, would pay your salary! You’re employing yourself!’
He was embarrassed. ‘In a manner of speaking, I suppose, yes.’
He took a pipe from his pocket and went about filling it and lighting it. She had never seen her brother smoke. It made him seem like an undergraduate seeking the status of a scholar.
Janice arrived with ports, coffee and petits fours. She asked if everything had been alright with the lunch and whether they would need anything else. She commented, ‘It seemed more like a grand luncheon than a lunch.’
Edith said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Janice, you may as well pour yourself a glass and join us. Frederick has told all.’
Janice looked at Frederick with a face Edith could not read.
Janice then reached over to take Frederick’s port glass, drinking the undrunk portion.
Edith said, ‘Pour yourself a glass.’
Janice poured herself a glass, but sat on the arm of the armchair to imply that she was simply pausing – not joining.
‘So, I am exposed? What have you two been discussing?’
Edith said, ‘How we should live. We have been discussing how a communist brother and non-communist sister can have anything to do with each other.’
Frederick said, ‘And false consciousness.’
‘Good, I’m glad you have resolved all that and false consciousness.’
Frederick stood up, went to his briefcase and took out a roneoed document. He handed it to Edith. ‘I thought that this is the sort of thing you could involve yourself in. Maybe get some paid work with the Peace Council,’ he said.
With a slight twinge of vanity, she had to get up and find her newly acquired glasses. She hated putting them on in front of Frederick and Janice.
The document, entitled Australian Peace Congress Draft Programme, had the wording she knew from such pamphlets – the familiar words – ‘rally’, ‘congress’, ‘delegate commission’, ‘factory delegates’. She had seen these sorts of pamphlets back in Switzerland and in England.
Janice sai
d, ‘Yes, Mrs Westwood – it would mean a lot to have you on the platform.’
Frederick was making movements to show that the lunch was finished. He took his suit coat from the back of his chair and put it on. He seemed not happy with this threesome. This time it was he who was deciding when their time together was finished. He did pour himself a half glass of port and bolted it down, and then took a petit four.
Janice stood up and took the stacked tray, saying to Frederick, ‘You can carry this for me.’ She took his briefcase and he took the loaded tray.
‘It won’t impress you and me,’ Frederick said to Edith at the door, ‘but the Dean of Canterbury is attending. As well as professors, writers, ministers of religion. Jessie Street – do you know her? Alan Marshall, the writer. Think it over.’
‘Is it a communist activity? The papers say it is.’
‘Does it matter?’
She laughed. ‘It could matter very much to the High Commissioner. But yes, I will consider it. Would get me out of this hotel into the real world.’
He and Janice exchanged satisfied glances.
Without any demagoguery, Janice said, ‘You could explain that seeing as the League failed to keep the peace, it may be the correct historical time for the masses – the people of the world – to make the peace themselves.’
She could not shake off the feeling that her brother and Janice were very provincial revolutionaries – or would-be revolutionaries. She could not take them as seriously as they wished to be taken in a sunny country.
She waved her hand. ‘I am looking for a position in External Affairs – I am married to a British diplomat. I suspect that this is not the sort of thing I should be involved with. But I will think about it.’
Frederick frowned at her. ‘Isn’t there something terribly wrong with the way you are living if you can’t take personal action on the biggest issue of our lives?’
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