Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  Dobson argued that women, when they reached the top, would have to dress more like men. ‘The more you looked like your opponent the less unnerved he was.’

  ‘Maybe there are times to unnerve one’s opponent.’

  Over breakfast, the planning became serious. They discussed returning to London; Ambrose seeking an FO appointment in a European country; Ambrose going back to practising medicine, which he thought was risky – he was too out of touch, would probably have do some sort of additional study; her becoming a ‘doctor’s wife’; them adopting a child; farming an orchard in an English village; going to the Shetlands; her returning to university to read law, if any university would let her in; anything but staying here.

  They had finally decided to live on her dividend money for a time, and to visit New York once more, where they again would try for positions for both Ambrose and her at the UNO.

  Ambrose seemed to be passive in the face of the accepted failure of their Canberra experiment. She guessed that, deep down, he had never had high hopes.

  ‘I may have to stay on here for a bit,’ he said.

  This surprised her. She had seen them just upping and leaving.

  ‘Why so?’ Did he have something keeping him here?

  ‘To tidy up. Wait for a replacement to arrive. That sort of thing.’

  She nodded. Yes, she supposed that was right.

  Her mind was wandering – over the packing and whether they should take an airliner, but she had heard that because cabins were unpressurised the flights were bumpy and noisy, so perhaps they should have their larger possessions sent on by sea – when a concierge came to the table and told Edith that she had a call on the telephone in the lobby. She asked that her lamb’s fry be taken to the kitchen and kept warm. A forlorn expectation.

  It was Bruce calling from the Lodge, where he was staying, inquiring how she had enjoyed the dinner party at the Lodge.

  She suggested that he join them for a late breakfast, but he declined because he needed to return to Melbourne on the afternoon train.

  She thanked him for getting her on the Lodge invitation list and told him how stimulating it had been, smiling to herself about her escapade and her successful conversion of it into a second libidinous escapade with Ambrose. Would she again meet up with Richard, the man with the wandering hands? And did she want to? Why had he not given her his business card? Why not a wink?

  ‘Ambrose and I were intending to drop in on you today before you left for Melbourne. We have some news. Perhaps sad news.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Ambrose and I have pretty much decided to give up. Nothing here for us. Nothing, that is, for me. Throwing in the towel.’

  ‘Edith, you can’t do that. Didn’t Trevor Gibson say anything to you about a position?’

  ‘At the dinner – Gibson, yes – Trevor Gibson was very kind and suggested we talk, but really, I’m not a planner of towns. Or whatever it was he wants from me.’

  ‘The earth is moving beneath our feet. Ming – Menzies – tells me that for him, Canberra is coming back on the national schedule in a very big way. This conference Gibson talked to you about will, I think, crystallise much. For a start, Menzies is going to be pressuring the embassies to move here from Sydney. It will be little Geneva, Edith. You will be back on the diplomatic circuit of canapés and champagne and foreign policy.’

  ‘A little Geneva – our caput mundi? A very small Geneva. Our novum caput mundi?’

  ‘Glad your Latin is still working, Edith. Yes, our caput mundi. You could play a part in the vision, Edith. I remember how you talked about the League’s Palais des Nations – you were an enthusiast for institutions of stone; markers of our march to civilisation; philosophies and aspirations embedded in stone. Stay, Edith. Build Canberra, Edith. Embed it with your philosophies.’

  ‘This offer was just about running a conference.’

  ‘This conference is part of the new line of action – Gibson’s appointment. Great things will happen to Canberra. Sir William Holford will be the big name at the conference. He’s Menzies’ sort of man: a very winning young Englishman, quite a talent for persuasion. And I know that he’s going to have something grand to say about Canberra and where it should go as a city. Stay, Edith. This is a doorway for you. Menzies is toying with setting up a Select Committee. You could easily cross over to that in some role.’

  ‘Ambrose and I have pretty much thrown in the towel.’

  ‘You are just the spirit that Canberra needs. There are others beginning to feel that now is the time for us to have a shining light of a capital, Edith. You could be the spirit of the capital.’

  ‘You’re suggesting I give up on a diplomatic career to be a sprite in a Canberra water fountain?’

  ‘Edith, make an appointment to see Gibson this coming week. Talk with him. Promise me that you’ll do that at least.’

  Through the front door of the hotel, she could see across the lucerne growing in the river flats to the buildings of fibro-cement. She had learned the word prefab. Everything in Canberra seemed prefab.

  ‘Edith, are you still on the line?’

  ‘Just musing as I stare out at the lucerne paddock in the middle of our Capitol.’ She heard herself put an ‘o’ in the word. She remembered that the alphabet argued with itself about which letter came into the world first – a recall from a silly argument at Jasper’s Brush primary school.

  ‘We don’t want to lose you, Edith. As an American writer I once heard say in a talk, “You are at the crossroads of circumstance.” ’

  Consult The Book of Crossroads. ‘From growing up in Jasper’s Brush, I know all there is to know about lucerne.’

  Leaving aside Gibson, who, anyhow, had been pushed, it was the first time anyone had said they needed her since she arrived back. She laughed. ‘How many times in the days of the League did we feel we were at the crossroads of history? Sweetser came out of every meeting believing that it had changed the world. The management of low expectation is what I think my life is about now.’

  ‘Will you see Gibson, just as a courtesy to me?’

  ‘I’ll see this Gibson, but we do feel so . . . marooned here. I will look again in my Book of Crossroads.’

  ‘Book of Crossroads?’

  ‘A joke I have with Ambrose. A book we invented. We had it open this morning.’

  Bruce said he would talk with her again after she talked with Gibson. They chatted on and she also gleaned that Menzies was serious about banning the Communist Party, and that Bruce thought it a good idea. ‘Give my good regards to Ambrose.’

  She went back to Ambrose via the kitchen, where she inspected the lamb’s fry and abandoned it for something eggy. Ambrose was still reading a London Times. He seemed to read every word of the English papers, as if the type could haul him into its pages and then, through the print, to London.

  She sat down. ‘Bruce wants us to stay. Or at least for me to visit with Gibson. He says that we have arrived at a crossroads, and we must stay and take a turn to the south or whatever. I forgot which way at the crossroads we should turn. I think he sees me as a sprite.’

  ‘A sprite.’ Ambrose watched her. ‘Did you tell him that The Book of Crossroads was always wrong? You have to go the opposite way to that advised by the book, but the authors realised this and reversed some of the later advice, which made the book doubly wrong. Or at least difficult to navigate.’

  ‘He says that I should make this place the civilised centre of the nation. Should be a philosophical centre. Should represent the works of genius and art.’

  ‘Tall order. Sounds like too elaborate a conversation for a Sunday morning.’ There was a tone in his words that suggested he was not going along with the fantasy of the philosophical and cultural capitol.

  ‘As well as a place where we meet to make all the great decisions.’

  ‘Gibson was the man on your . . . right?’

  ‘Yes, not the hand-on–the-knee man. He is the planner of the city, I gather, or his
card said “Senior Town Planner”.’

  ‘Is he also a life planner? Is it to him we should entrust our futures?’

  ‘So says Bruce. Perhaps this man, Gibson, is in fact our life planner.’

  ‘No orchard in the village or girlish Albanian youths for me, then?’

  ‘I should talk with this planner of the city. Simply to be respectful to Bruce.’

  ‘And you hope that by taking this crossroad you will become yourself planner of the city?’

  ‘I failed to become planner of the world – perhaps I could try something more modest. I should have had a card back in the League days that said “Senior World Planner”.’

  ‘Controller of the Capitolium.’ Ambrose tasted the expression without enthusiasm. ‘Or, knowing you, the controller of the controller of the capitolium.’

  ‘That has a ring to it. I should want to call it the capitol or the Capitolium. With an “o” not an “a”.’

  ‘I can unpack my bags, then.’ He did not smile. ‘You are a whim-wham. Whatever that is.’ He seemed to be relieved, when he might have just reason to be somewhat angry. They had made a decision to leave. Now they weren’t.

  She now saw that he seemed to have come to no motivation other than that which she wanted from life. Did she want devotion of that nature? He was so pliable. Yet at times he had a certain wisdom, and could be her guiding light. Or, at least, he had been such person; she detected something of a change in him. Other times he was more like some small boat tied to her stern. It had to be said that the Canberra posting was, for a man of his age, in the wider picture, a rotten posting.

  ‘Leave your bags packed; I will be seeing this man Gibson out of respect for Bruce.’

  She put her hand on his and rolled her eyes. ‘Bruce said we could make it a petit Genève. Menzies wants all the embassies to move here. You will have more friends. Maybe even a playmate or two. He also said that the government is serious about banning the communists. Frederick may very well end up in gaol. That would solve that problem.’

  ‘Which problem?’

  ‘The problem of whether to have him to lunch.’

  She was still struggling with the question of the blood bond. It was a bond one could accept or not, or modify – this having of the same blood. And what, anyhow, did ‘same blood’ mean? Where was the register of obligations? No list that she knew of. Siblings rejected each other, ignored each other, did dreadful things to each other. Took each other to court. Nothing followed from blood. She had heard someone say that the blood bond was infrangible – ‘strange and potent and infrangible’. It wasn’t. Yet there was some sort of inescapable bond of birth that meant those of one blood could not, in times of crisis, be indifferent to each other’s fate. She suspected that was true, but perhaps unfair.

  She went on, ‘I am not altogether at ease with having a position found for me.’

  Ambrose sighed. ‘That’s only a problem if the person so appointed has no talent; and there is no true position. You overwhelmingly have a talent with which no one here could compete.’

  ‘Shouldn’t appointments always be advertised?’

  He came to her and took her face in his hands. ‘You are a special person in a special place at a special time.’

  She found his formulation reassuring. It let her off the hook.

  ‘Bruce in a sense was my former employer – as president of the League council – and he simply gave me a good reference. And Latham was my first employer.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ambrose was short with her. He said with some irritation, ‘It is unethical to not help someone with outstanding talents. You should not need me to tell you that you have outstanding talents.’

  She wondered if his irritation was because he was uncertain of the ethics of all this.

  Ambrose then adopted his supportive voice. ‘Go with a provisional attitude. When we decided to come here, you were somewhat taken by the chance to build a capitol.’

  ‘I don’t remember saying that.’ She was slightly irritated by his uncritical devotion. Perhaps she’d had a dreamy sort of idea of playing in the sand tray with a toy city, but living in a sand tray was another matter.

  Ambrose said, ‘To build a nation you must build a capitol; to build a capitol you must first hold a congress.’

  She contemplated that. ‘That’s almost Montaigne. And to hold a conference one must have a plot, a scheme.’ A conference was a battlefield of plots and agendas. ‘You mean that we change the world meeting by meeting?’ She smiled tiredly. ‘I thought I’d earned the right to skip a few meetings.’ The tea was lukewarm. ‘I don’t want to have to change the world. At this point in life, I want to live in a changed world. Changed in a beautiful way.’

  Her poached eggs arrived. She poked them with a fork and, of course, the yolks were hard.

  Ambrose said, ‘No change, even change for the best, is without its inconvenience.’

  Today she was tired of his advice.

  As she prepared for her meeting with Gibson, even though she had stated to herself that it was simply a gesture to Bruce, Edith found herself in her petticoat, trying on clothing before the mirror. She was watched by Janice, in chambermaid uniform, slumped in the armchair, holding a teacup with two hands rather than by the handle, and sipping tea. Like a communist, Edith thought to herself. She wondered about the wearing of jewellery. She turned to Janice, holding her emerald neckpiece to her neck. ‘Necklace?’ Janice shook her head. She felt nervous, despite telling herself that she would not be taking the position, if indeed there was a position, and, indeed, if it was offered to her. She told herself that she would not be happy in such a position – as she at present imagined it. The best thing was for Ambrose and her to pack up and flee. She was doing this only to satisfy Bruce and, in another way, to show that she was not a bolter, a quitter. She discarded the cape-collared outfit impatiently, and went back to the wardrobe.

  Janice said Edith should now join the Federated Clerk’s Union.

  She was unsettled also because she knew that at this meeting she would be meeting the Secretary of the Department of Interior, a William McLaren, who, she had been warned, was something of a martinet. McLaren had wanted to meet her. The oddness of it was that they had been together at university, in the Faculty of Science. She remembered him, but barely.

  She held the knitted wool suit with its knife-pleated skirt in front of her. She looked at herself in the mirror and decided that, yes, it was conservative enough, although the outfit did imply status, which she suspected the appointment did not warrant. She was glad that hemlines were now lower and skirts fuller – no jewellery, except her wedding ring, light make-up, a perky pill-box hat. She turned to Janice. ‘Yes?’ No. Janice shook her head. She took down a straw boater with a green velvet ribbon around the crown, and piece of green veiling along the brim down to the nose. ‘The boater was all the rage when I left London – and I had the veil shortened for France so I could do the cheek kissing.’ It was far too sporty. She tried on the soft beret. Yes. She was happy that berets were back in.

  ‘Does the beret look too young?’ she asked Janice, as she pulled on her gloves. ‘Or, should I say, does it make me “young enough” ’

  Janice shook her head. ‘Chic, Madame.’

  ‘I will not, you think, frighten these men?’

  ‘Why not frighten them?’ Janice put down her tea, then rose and came over to kiss her French-style. Janice squeezed her hand and whispered, ‘Courage –’ she went to the door and held it open – ‘de l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace.’

  Edith smiled. Janice’s French, while not bad, was so much that of an Australian schoolgirl.

  She had not been for such an interview since she joined the League in 1926, putting her age up to get the position. She’d been tapped for UNRRA work after the war and now here she was again applying for a position.

  She did not like it. She should not have to do this.

  At the door, she took a small, encouraging
hug from Janice.

  As Gibson and she sat there in McLaren’s office, she could tell that McLaren did not like women of her age dressed in berets in his office. He was strangely brusque, on the edge of rudeness.

  ‘I think we have met in another life,’ she said.

  McLaren looked at her. ‘At university?’

  ‘Science. I was behind you, but we met at the Science Society.’

  ‘I didn’t finish because of illness. I recall you, vaguely. Not vaguely, now that I think about it. You had a lot to say.’

  Women should never get in the way.

  ‘And you joined the public service.’

  ‘After I recovered I did not return to university. I joined the public service.’

  This recognition did not change the atmosphere, although she relaxed somewhat, knowing that they did not come from different planets.

  Inside herself, she found two conflicting reactions – one was to be aloof, a little contemptuous at the offer of a position she did not want, did not care for; the other was, despite her decision to quit Canberra, a desire to win this position, however minor. She felt strong enough to duel with McLaren. If she did not get the position, at least she would not have allowed him to walk over her, and she might come away with his respect. He might mark her up for her insouciance. She had met too many men such as him. Too many. She doubted, however, that he was going to poke his finger into this lowly appointment. Anyhow, her understanding was that it was a position outside the public service.

  ‘Have you ever organised a conference?’ he asked, as if that was highly unlikely.

  McLaren hadn’t bothered to read her résumé, which she had sent over to both of them. Sans âge.

  ‘Many. And picnics, too.’

  He looked at her but did not remark on her flippancy. Perhaps he thought a ‘picnic’ was some sort of European diplomatic event. In her hands, it could be a diplomatic event.

  Gibson said, ‘Mrs Westwood worked with the League of Nations involved in international conferencing.’

  ‘We invented international conferencing, as it is understood.’