Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  They laughed.

  And then Edith thought, This is not a game, these are not playground secrets. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t tell me too much.’

  ‘I’m sure they know about it, even if they don’t know the where and how. The Party had a rehearsal of working underground at the start of the war – before we were all on the same side – hidden printing presses in caves and so on. Back then it was the Labor Party that was after us. Evatt was hunting us down.’

  They sipped their tea.

  Janice said, ‘I suppose I feel you are more or less on our side.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I am a humanist. I was for disarmament. I think that could be achieved – down to the level of police forces. But no, I’m not a communist. I admire the entrepreneurial spirit.’

  ‘You’re a bourgeois liberal.’ She laughed. ‘I was one once. And, I suppose, so was Fred. You must come and meet some of the others in the branch; the Canberra branch is somewhat cerebral. And we have a couple of reformed bourgeois liberals.’

  ‘I am thinking that I will make a rule that you and Frederick may each use the word bourgeois once a month.’

  Janice took a piece of the Belgian chocolate and put it in her mouth, closed her eyes and exclaimed, ‘Divine.’

  There was a moment of silence while they ate their chocolate, making large eyes at each other.

  Janice then asked, ‘Are you someone who eats their chocolate slowly or the person who gobbles it? I’m a gobbler. But I won’t gobble yours.’

  Edith smiled. ‘I’m a gobbler who tries not to be. It’s amazing that we have any of the chocolate left. You went on to university? You must wish for a career?’

  ‘I did law in the lazy way, reading books not on the course, going to too many meetings, hanging out at Manning. Drinking pots and pots of tea. Eating too much raisin toast too thickly buttered.’

  ‘Raisin toast. I would love some raisin toast. Haven’t had it since uni. I must buy some. And you have career plans?’

  ‘I didn’t qualify as a solicitor, just the degree. My dad’s a lawyer. The Party wants me in this sort of job for a while – in the Miscellaneous Workers Union. I see that as my career – as an agitator. A miscellaneous agitator.’ Janice gave the word dramatic volume. ‘The MWU represents the lowest-paid workers of all and the most badly treated – caretakers and cleaners and waiters and servants and gatekeepers. I’ll run for a position in the union.’

  ‘You believe socialism will win out?’

  ‘It seems to be winning out in the world. And this country is dividing into two – those who get the best because they’re rich, and those who get what the rich give them. Or steal from their workplace.’ Janice giggled and stirred her tea. ‘But let’s return to you – what’s a woman with all your worldly experience in high places doing sitting in a hotel room writing letters and drinking tea with servants?’

  Edith had been trying not to see herself that way. ‘I’m fishing for a position with External Affairs. They won’t employ a married woman. Even married women who do not feel married . . .’ She shouldn’t have ventured that. She continued quickly, ‘And the High Commissioner is against wives of diplomats working, says that in his experience there’s never been a wife of a diplomat who wished to work. I thought I would get in under section 47 of the PS regulations – taking in people from outside the public service with special skills. I will try to get in through that window.’

  ‘What about Exempt Employment?’

  ‘As you probably know, that’s used for the hiring of cleaners, and so on, the really low positions.’ Oh, oh. ‘Low, that is, in pay, I mean,’ she corrected.

  ‘Were there any women ambassadors at the League?’

  ‘One – a Romanian.’

  Janice tentatively returned to the remark that had obviously stuck with her and that she had probably been turning over. She raised her eyebrows and said, ‘How do you mean you “don’t feel married” ’

  Edith pondered her reply.

  ‘That is, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  Edith looked at Janice with an expression that asked for trust, wondering if she could risk trust. She then realised that she was hungry for a confidante and was drawn to making Janice her confidante. She felt she could trust a SCEGGS girl. ‘Oh, I suppose I meant a Bloomsbury marriage. Ambrose and I are married legally, so he could move comfortably in the Foreign Office and so on – socially – but we never saw our lives together as being, well, that of a conventional married couple.’

  Janice looked at her questioningly, hoping for more.

  That was enough for now.

  Janice let it go. ‘As a chambermaid, I know he sleeps in the other room sometimes. I thought it must have been because he snored.’

  Edith laughed. ‘Everyone snores a little, but we rarely sleep alone.’ Enough about that. ‘We are very close. We’re good pals.’

  Again Janice looked at her, remaining silent for a few seconds, taking it in.

  ‘I am not sure I follow,’ she said, and then laughed. ‘But I am sure that I should not ask any more questions.’

  ‘Perhaps another time.’

  ‘Next time, you must tell me about Bloomsbury.’ Janice finished her tea and stood up. ‘Fred told me you mentioned it.’ She looked at her watch. ‘You made me forget that I’m working. We communists must be good workers otherwise they’d use our politics as an excuse to get rid of us.’

  ‘You can leave this room as it is, don’t worry about finishing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Janice looked around. ‘I’ll empty the wastepaper bins.’

  Edith nodded.

  Janice said, ‘Will you come over to meet some Party people at the new National Uni? You’ll like them. Are you going to speak at the Peace Congress in Melbourne? You’d be a star.’

  ‘I don’t know what Party members would think of us ex-League people. We threw Russia out of the League, remember, for invading Finland.’

  ‘I think the Soviet Union forgives you, Edith.’

  Janice did tidy some things, and rinsed the cups in the bathroom sink.

  As she was leaving, she paused at the door of the suite, came back in and gave Edith a kiss on the cheek. ‘Thanks for telling me about Ascaso and the other spicy stuff.’

  ‘Say hello to Frederick. We should plan to all get together – the four of us, perhaps?’ Edith remembered Ambrose’s suggestion. ‘Ambrose and I would like that. Perhaps somewhere to live will have come up by then.’

  ‘Must be hard after all these years – to take him into your life. And remember, whatever I said about the Party and Frederick is a secret between us?’

  ‘I’ll remember. What did he say about our reunion?’

  Janice chose her words. ‘He was curious to meet you and, of course, pleased. But I don’t think he knows where it’s going – you and him.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘Fred has to go away to Wagga and the Snowy for a week or more. I’ll let you know when he’ll be back.’

  Janice went out the door.

  Edith was about to go after her to ask her to take her mail down and have it weighed and stamped, but stopped herself.

  She felt vitalised by the chat and that it had rearranged things between Janice and her. It brought home to her that she did have to get out of her slump; she did need to get out and talk to people.

  But it was more than that. Janice was, after all, her brother’s lover. Almost family.

  She was still trying to understand the brother–sister bond, its frontiers. The brother and sister thing was not only about the heart, it had to do with alliances. Brothers and sisters were, of course, the first people we meet in our life where an alliance was possible and useful and even necessary – usually an alliance against parents or against strangers in the street or bullies in the playground. But she could see that there was nothing obligatory about it. It wasn’t genetic. One had only to look at the bad blood between siblings at times – historically or biblically – to know that it
was not genetic. An emergency could bring siblings back into alliance. If an emergency overtook one or both, siblings could without hesitation turn to each other. Perhaps Frederick was right that it was a politico-economic unit.

  She wanted to be out of living in the hotel so that a proper distance could exist between Janice and her, and proper social relationships unfold. If that was what was happening.

  She then felt an irresistible impulse. She dialled to reception and asked that the chambermaid Janice be sent to her room.

  The man who answered asked if there was anything amiss with housekeeping.

  She assured him that there was not.

  She waited and then there was a knock on the door. She opened it and Janice was there, a quizzical expression on her face. Wordlessly, without thinking, she took both Janice’s hands and drew her into the room. Janice closed the door behind her with her foot and Edith lightly embraced her, affectionately, although the boldness of the embrace overwhelmed any flashing thoughts about what the embrace meant. Her mother had schooled her in the subtleties of embracing and hugging as something to be used rarely – farewells at long-term separations and returns among relatives and lovers – and judiciously. Her mother had come from a time of bowing and hat-raising, which was now disappearing along with hats.

  But this hug came from no place in her social training.

  Janice pulled back slightly – but not in a perturbed way, more to an apprising distance – and remained holding Edith’s hands.

  Edith said rapidly, ‘Sorry, I know that wasn’t very decorous. The hug.’

  ‘It was quite proper. Quite. Comradely.’

  Edith trembled a little. ‘No, Janice, it was not really comradely.’ Was she flirting with a young woman or was she flirting with hazard, imperilment, to spice up the dullness of her present life? The embrace was on the edge of excessive, no matter what Janice said.

  ‘I called you back because I forgot to give you something. Hold on.’ Edith went to her clothing drawers and took out a new pair of black silk stockings still in their wrapping. She held them out to Janice. ‘They’re new, and they’re silk.’

  Janice reddened a little. ‘Why?’

  ‘You said the ones they supply you with here for your uniform itch. And I know silk is still impossible to find in the shops.’

  Janice laughed. ‘Why, thank you, Edith. I feel like . . . well, it’s the sort of gift an American soldier would give to an Australian girl.’

  They both laughed to cover whatever disorderly intimacy there was about the gift.

  ‘I can’t bear to think of your itching all day in those dreadful stockings.’ There was ambiguity there, too. ‘Not that I think of you all day in your stockings.’

  ‘They may be too good for work. Or maybe I’ll wear them under my other stockings. To stop the itch.’

  Edith said, ‘Go now.’ Although her voice was not brusque, it was a tone used to return the situation to conventional shape.

  Janice kissed her on the cheek and left with her new stockings.

  By the embrace and the gift of the stockings she had joined herself with Janice in womanly complicity. Perhaps as a sister-in-law, albeit a de facto sister-in-law. No, that term did not fit. It was an alliance slightly exclusive of Ambrose, and she thought that the exclusivity also moved Janice slightly apart from Frederick.

  Alone again in the empty room, she allowed the flashing thoughts to have their say. Was she just hungry for a confidante? On Janice’s part, was it a way of recruiting her? Did she, in fact, desperately want to be recruited by Janice?

  Whichever it was, it felt good and it felt risky, and it could be somehow, just somehow, a little aberrant, somewhat Bloomsbury.

  Then, sitting there and thinking of what she’d just done, Edith was engulfed in embarrassment.

  While reporting the conversation to Ambrose, she felt her mind pulling at her sleeve and saying, Excuse me, Edith, that isn’t the whole story. Her description to Ambrose did not convey the current that had flowed through that chat in the room with Janice in chambermaid uniform, but she put this down to her own difficulty in defining these currents. And there were the restraints, too, of womanly confidentiality, which Janice had invoked and into which she’d become complicit.

  Nor did she tell Ambrose that she had called to have Janice sent back to her room or about the ambiguity of their hug.

  It was not that she was hiding things from him – it was that she did not have the form of words that would capture what had happened. To attempt the description just yet would create a tumbling misconception.

  Conversational discretion was inherently devious, but it should be granted that, in some cases, it was also a form of care.

  Ambrose was pleased about the invitation to drinks.

  ‘Do you think they will only be interested in us as long as there is a chance that I will speak at the Peace Congress?’

  ‘Most likely.’

  ‘Am I the bait, then, on your fishing line?’

  ‘You are, perhaps, the grub on two fishing lines.’

  Two Footmen in Crimson Livery with Powdered Wigs, Carried on a Silken Cushion

  Edith called in a loud voice to Ambrose, who was still in his sitting room. She sounded like a cranky child. Because of their restless night, they’d had breakfast sent to their rooms rather than facing the dining room, and it lay there unbegun. ‘I once knew who my brother was; I do not know him now; I do not know who I am. Yes I do – I am nothing much at all. The more I think about it, even as a child I did not know my brother – a sister does not know or care what is going on in her little brother’s rushing-about body and head, any more than he knows what is going on in his sister’s head. Female and male children cannot know each other. My brother appears – and is unknown to me. And is perhaps my mortal enemy.’

  She picked up the toast and put it down again. ‘And his appearance makes me unknown to myself.’ She would be theatrical if she wished to be. ‘And the toast is cooling.’

  Ambrose, in his pale yellow silk dressing-gown with lace edging at the sleeve cuffs and neck, silk nightdress underneath, and slippers, came in from his sitting room to join her for breakfast. They had begun the night sleeping together in the double bed but had both had a wretched night of fitful sleep – she with another of her wide-eyed wilfulness fits, of which the sleeping Ambrose sometimes instinctively became aware and awoke, making her, in turn, concerned for his lost sleep. He had finally retreated to his sitting room, where they had a folding bed.

  He leaned to her, kissed the top of her head and sat down.

  She poured him tea. ‘My brother at least has a cause.’

  She was High Commissioner of the Hotel Canberra, where she could lift the telephone and order assorted sandwiches and a bottle of wine or freshly cut flowers. She had once run the world.

  Was she becoming a ninny? Was it her hormones?

  It was all very unsatisfactory.

  ‘Knew it would be difficult,’ he said, turning his way through the out-of-date Manchester Guardian, which he brought home from the High Commission. This was a worn-out reply that gave no comfort.

  Even the annual report from Firestone, which had arrived in the morning post, was disheartening. She had invested some of her mother’s inheritance in Firestone back in the 1930s. She read out to Ambrose, whether he was listening or not, ‘ “Firestone has been given the defence contract for the first 200 MGM-5 Corporal missile. This missile is known as the Embryo of the Army, and is a surface-to-surface guided missile that can deliver a high-explosive warhead up to 75 nautical miles (139 km).” That’s a good use of my pacifist mother’s money. I should sell. I could give the annual dividend to my brother’s Peace Congress.’

  ‘You will not,’ Ambrose said, not looking up from his newspaper.

  She might well. She found the use of the term embryo distasteful – it jabbed her in a way that was almost physical.

  Her well-meaning investment back then had moved a long way from Firestone’s
model workers’ village and rubber plantation in the new state of Liberia, established for former American slaves. It had been her first idealistic investment. Her puppy had become a serpent. What was a tyre company doing selling military missiles?

  ‘We’ve been here months,’ she said, querulously.

  He had heard this tiresome moaning at many breakfasts and she knew he no longer had sincerely encouraging answers to give her. The time of encouraging answers was over.

  She knew he was being stoical, she knew he was dissatisfied with the High Commission, with the city – town, capital, outpost – whatever Canberra was. City emergent. He never moaned in reply that he was doing all this for her, that she was why they were here. It irritated her this morning, this stoicism, his silent self-sacrifice.

  She kept talking, although she knew he was only half-listening. ‘I cannot sit around these rooms studying the wide world from such a distance, writing letters of sage advice to my friends at the United Nations in Queens who barely remember who I am. I am becoming a ridiculous Nobody and could very easily become seen as a Busybody.’

  She hoped that saying it out loud would somehow disable the truth of what she had said. Those old League friends who had managed to get positions with the UNO kept her informed, but the sad thing was that she had so little to give them in return. Anthony Eden’s visit to Canberra had been a bounty of gossip. Dear Anthony had given her a morning tea. The only highlight of these months of return.

  She yearned to go to an office. She wanted the duties and burdens of office.

  It was all very unsatisfactory.

  She watched him sip his tea and asked, ‘Do we really wish to meet my brother again? And his Bolshevik hussy. I rather like her.’

  ‘He is handsome enough – runs in the family.’

  ‘It’s all a bit much.’

  She wondered if she were becoming more like her mother, retiring to her room when the world became all a bit much. Or, in her case, when the world became not enough.

  ‘He seemed to be suggesting you work on the roads,’ Ambrose said, taking the butter and the marmalade to the very edges of the slice, dressing his toast methodically as always, and then taking up his newspaper again, still paying her attention but holding the paper as if he were wanting to get back to it.