Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I would expect nothing less.’

  ‘I felt a need to restore my . . . valour. And another thing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Remember the story about the lampshade shop, the nancy-boys in Adelaide?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I am ashamed that I allowed myself to be frightened.’

  ‘It is, in a way, a frightening thing.’

  ‘If the police ever come we will simply brazen it out.’

  ‘Brazen it out?’

  ‘Brazen it out. Nonchalance will save us. Insouciance will save us.’

  ‘Very good. You do the brazening while I simper in the corner.’

  ‘You will not simper. You will flaunt yourself. There are some magnificent drawings I wish to show you of how the capitol will look. They were lying in a box over in a hut at the Department of Works. At last I feel some elation, some way forward. As Gerty – remember Gerty, my personal assistant from the League? – would say, “I now have the world spinning on my thumb” – or, at least, the capitol of the nation spinning on my thumb.’

  ‘You are a marvel,’ he said. ‘And a whim-wham.’

  ‘I don’t like that expression “whim-wham”.’

  ‘You cannot control the English language.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  After she hung up, she sat and thought about the exchange with Ambrose. She should be careful with him. She was enthused but he was not happy.

  Furnishing the Capitol

  Ambrose had eventually taken her decision to stay on in Canberra with his usual grace – or was it the compliance of defeat? In fact, he seemed to have accepted it too readily. He insisted they celebrate her appointment at the Gloucester, which was as high as you could go in high living. She found the Australian diet still relied too heavily on condiments, and not enough on stock, sauces and marinades.

  They drank a superb French claret from the HC cellar, which seemed not to have suffered from the voyage. The glasses at the Gloucester left something to be desired. She said, ‘We must remember to bring our own wine glasses. I said that last time.’

  She described to him her awakening to the possibilities of a noble capitol. ‘At last I see.’

  ‘I was blind but now I see.’

  ‘Is that from a hymn? “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” And I am going to keep calling it the capitol until someone stops me.’

  Ambrose smiled. ‘I think the line comes from the Book of John. And they wouldn’t dare.’

  Ambrose was tipsy and not really in a celebratory mood.

  ‘A capitol serves human society in two grand ways –’

  He cut across her. ‘Except that this capitol is in a country that is ninety per cent uninhabited . . . and mostly desert.’ He poured wine into their glasses, even though they were still rather full.

  She ignored him. ‘A capitol is not only the place of governance – a place where how we are to live our lives is decided, as if that isn’t dramatic enough.’ She put a hand on his. ‘I’ve realised that a capitol is also the place of communal memory. Hence the old capitols and their museums and monuments and so on, their spoils of war. Memorials. The national memory. In a capitol we are inside the living memory of the nation.’

  She was proud of her revelation. She had read every file on the forthcoming Congress – and more. She had begun reading the National Capital Planning and Development Committee minutes and memoranda, and had ordered books from the library.

  Ambrose said, ‘If there is anything worthwhile to be remembered. There is no history. The “city” is being built before the country has a history. This capitol has planted more trees than it has inhabitants.’

  ‘Shush. Trees are monuments too. This is another amazing thing – we plant them to mark occasions; we put plaques on them; we see them grow, remembering the time that they were planted; we marvel at their age. One day people will say, “These trees were planted when parliament opened.” Or, I remember when this avenue was planted. So there . . .’ She trailed off.

  Ambrose was shaking his head, not from disagreement but as a way of showing his refusal to join with her in the fever of her discoveries. He did not want to be excited about Canberra. Nothing as dulling as a dutiful celebrant, even if he were an affectionate one. It was unlike him to not join with the occasion. He was a master of conviviality.

  She had read far into the night on all that she could find on the planning of cities. At least she had something to be passionate about. It would stop her being a whim-wham. ‘Do you think I was becoming what you call a whim-wham because I had no position in life? Because I was stuck in those rooms? Or because I am becoming an “older woman” ’

  ‘I do not see you as an “older woman”.’

  ‘As a one-time doctor you must know about hormones?’

  He thought. ‘Studied Starling – he had much to say on hormones. We all studied Starling – Principles of Human Physiology.’

  ‘So did I! It was one of our texts in physiology. But I recall nothing very much about hormones.’

  Ambrose’s interest stirred a little. ‘Chemical messengers. That’s all I remember.’

  ‘Age comes into it. For women.’

  ‘In the study of medicine in my day, we learned very little about women. Cannot explain that.’

  She must talk to someone about chemical messengers. Another woman. A woman doctor would be good. ‘Talking of physiology – a subject I am now about to leave – I am glad we have begun the city with an Institute of Anatomy museum. And an observatory. The body and the stars. For God’s sake, Ambrose, the capitol is also about inquiring into all that matters. The study and investigation of the species.’

  She still savoured with pleasure her summary of her new thinking. She had another burst of thoughts. ‘But just as interesting – and perhaps paradoxically – one day everyone in the nation will be a student of Canberra, and come again and again to study it. And they will come to hear their stories told. We will all sit at the feet of the city in awe and wonder.’

  She could tell that Ambrose was drinking to be numbed. It was a while now since she had seen him exuberant. Perhaps it had to do with the absence of a Molly Club life. She collaborated with him – with delight – within the confines of sitting room and bed. What more could they do with his predilections? The Lampshade story still niggled her. At times it scared her.

  He had joked one day that she should work to have his sexual predilections included in the Declaration of Human Rights, and she had laughed and said, ‘Somehow, I don’t see that happening, my darling.’

  She would stop talking about her town planning study. She would have to dedicate herself not to celebration but to cheering him up. She knew that he had seriously hoped they would leave and return to Europe or New York. It was no use pretending otherwise.

  ‘Let’s dance to the white piano,’ she said, rising to her feet, taking his hand and pulling him to the small dance floor.

  The dancing worked and the sun came out in his good soul.

  ‘You have cheered up,’ she said as he began to jig.

  ‘It’s the white piano,’ he said. ‘However, there are no black faces to go with it.’

  She looked across at it. He was right. At nightclubs they had known, the white piano was played by black men, and the musicians were black men. Jerome and the times of the Ad Lib Club in Paris and many other nightclubs drifted across her memory.

  At her first proper day at work, Edith rang Brian Lewis – a friend of Bruce’s who was designing University House – to find the name of the best furniture maker. She had, in fact, met Lewis at an HC function.

  She wrote immediately to his recommendation, Fred Ward, in Melbourne, asking him to quote on design and making of an office chair; two desks – a major and a minor desk; two visitor chairs and a bookcase. In her notes to him she suggested designs that she had seen in the Sydney magazines. Best to be Australian, she thought – say, something like the webbing over a wooden fr
ame by Douglas Snelling, as visitor chairs; and if possible the Jacobsen Swan chair, ‘which I believe was based on a tractor seat’, as her business chair; and a moderne hat stand. She thought it would be useful to have a butler’s table as well, from which to serve afternoon tea. From Frances Burke, on recommendation of Ward, she ordered a Bakelite glass and metal table lamp, which had style but which would say sternly, ‘Serious late-night tasks and serious thinking are done here.’ And she ordered a narrow-mouthed vase and a wide-mouthed vase.

  When he telephoned, accepting the order, she asked him if he knew the painter-diplomat Sam Atyeo and his first wife, Moya, with whom she’d had long conversations about furniture design in Vence before the war. She said, ‘Sam was a great champion of natural light, brighter interiors, but unfortunately my office has no window to speak of. Sam said the windowsills had to be painted white to reflect light into the room. If he were here I would get him to paint a trompe l’oeil window onto the wall.’ They laughed. He said that, yes, he had known Atyeo very well; they had both been involved in Cynthia Reed’s interior-design business but had lost touch. She promised to send him Sam’s address.

  The furniture was not only for this office, but was to serve her in all the offices that lay ahead in her life, and in which she would live out her life.

  After the telephone call, she took picture hooks from her handbag, and on the picture railing hung her two new Margaret Preston lithographs, which she had bought since coming back to Australia – Flying over the Shoalhaven and Red Rooves. She hated being disloyal to Laurencin, but she felt that the Laurencins would be too . . . unbusinesslike. And too European. When they had talked about Laurencin, which Ambrose also loved, Ambrose always quoted Apollinaire’s opinion of Laurencin: ‘She is happy, she is good . . . She is a little sun; she is me in feminine form.’

  She thought that she would really like some of Mrs Griffin’s drawings of her vision of Canberra. She went to the planning office and took away the drawings – Gibson said something like, ‘Take them wherever you want to take them . . .’ and waved her away with his hand – wondering who in the town would be able to copy them and frame them.

  Back in her own office, she propped them up along the wall and examined them. They were knocked about and she thought that they probably should come off their particleboard backings.

  She was far from convinced that they represented yesterday’s ideas. She sensed magic in them.

  Her cumquat tree arrived that afternoon, free from the government nursery, bright with fruit. She ate one with relish. Her first thought as she tasted the cumquat was to share one with Janice. It was a wayward thought, but she did not care.

  The young girl stood beside me.

  I saw not what her young eyes could see:

  A light, she said, not of the sky

  Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.

  She remembered from then on only one part of the poem:

  Listen! the young girl said. For all

  Your hapless talk you fail to see

  There is a light, a step, a call

  This evening on the Orange Tree.

  That was another thing she had to thank Latham for – giving her this poem. She found John Shaw Neilson’s other poems hypnotic, even when she didn’t quite fathom them. She remembered receiving the volume of Neilson’s poems in the mail in Vienna from Latham after he had given the oration at Neilson’s funeral. Latham was the only person who remembered that she once thought of herself as something of a poet. I am not a poetic person, she thought, despite all my young efforts to be one. She had not written a poem for many years. Where did it go, that way of seeing life as an unfolding set of poetic fragments? As you became older, life sped up, became too fast for poetry; the problems of the world too entangling. She could recite poetry learned in childhood and found learning poems easy. The poets were also to blame. Poetry did not capture the rapid life of her time, say, at the League. The poets were never at the meetings, did not agonise over bureaucratic bungles or see the triumphs of diplomacy as worth celebrating. The poets weren’t dreaming Canberra. They were off, off, off somewhere else. Sometimes she yearned to be in that dreamy land of birds and plants and clouds, river rocks and gypsy wagons.

  She telephoned the printery and asked about her business cards.

  The manager pointed out that she had ordered only the day before. She said, ‘It is urgent and I am sure you can jump me up the queue.’

  She must stop urging people to jump her up the queue. The queue was one of the foundation stones of civilised behaviour – it and turn-taking embodied fairness, egalitarianism.

  And she must stop pondering every little thing. Her blood was racing.

  The quote for the furniture came back promptly, and was expensive but not as expensive as she would have expected. She accepted it. Three weeks later, on the day the furniture was to arrive from Myer in Melbourne, she rang the Department of Works and asked them to take away the furniture that they had supplied in her office. They were perplexed and doubted that the furniture could be removed on her instruction. She said she would send them a form.

  She went down the hall and grabbed Mr Thomas, the clerk – ‘May I borrow your hands?’ – and together they moved out the DoW furniture into the corridor and she put down her new, wide light-grey wool rug over the brown linoleum. There wasn’t much else she could do about the linoleum.

  An hour later, the pantechnicon arrived from Melbourne and the furniture was carried into her office.

  She and Mr Thomas uncrated it and then organised it, trying out different arrangements. He had ideas and she listened.

  As she stood back and viewed the furniture in place, the word sturdy crossed over her mind, but not masculine. Sturdy was not a word from her aesthetic. It came from her earlier life, from her parents’ aesthetic, and she had picked it up again since coming home. It was serviceable – the other word from her parents’ aesthetic. But it was more than sturdy or serviceable – it was office furniture, but it had an urbane elegance.

  She was pleased.

  ‘Mr Thomas, would you describe the furniture as urbane or refined? Or sturdy and serviceable?’

  Sturdy and serviceable belonged with the limiting Australian aesthetic, which valued that which was neat, matching, good value, durable, always fashionable, unostentatious, inextravagant, easy to clean – ideas she did not wish to rule her taste. Cosy, neat and tidy. There was no splendour in the Australian aesthetic – yet. She smiled. The furniture brought a touch of sobriety to the room, which, because of the Swan office chair, was at risk of falling towards the showy. Overdoing it, flash and swank were offences in the Australian aesthetic. But she felt that she had done things handsomely, which might pass the Australian test.

  He hesitated, seeming to take her question seriously, studying the furniture, finger to his lips. Perhaps also considering what it was she wished to hear. ‘You would never mistake it for DoW furniture. I would be very happy to have it in my home.’ He went out to the corridor and looked into the room. ‘It’s a triumph.’

  ‘We are, after all, a section concerned with the planning and shaping of the world.’

  ‘We are?’

  And yes, she had overdone it.

  ‘Have I overdone it, Mr Thomas?’

  ‘Has the renovation been cleared and authorised?’ Mr Thomas asked, tentatively.

  ‘I cleared it,’ she said, ‘and I authorised it.’ She gave him a pinch on the arm. He was startled by the pinch. He almost giggled.

  ‘Then you have certainly overdone it,’ he said, ‘and I am very pleased that you have. I suppose it will have to be somehow numbered and entered into the furniture register so we don’t lose track of it.’ He looked worried and added, guiltily, ‘Shouldn’t it?’

  ‘I own it. I will keep track of it, believe me.’

  Mr Thomas went into silent quandary for a moment or two.

  ‘It looks really super,’ he said, and then, with a certain boldness, ‘Wish we all had stuf
f like this.’

  She looked at him. ‘You should ask for it, demand it. If they don’t give it to you then buy it yourself and ask them to reimburse you. And if they don’t, well, too bad, pay for it yourself. We have to live out most of our daily hours in our offices, and they should be as we want them. They should give lustre to our lives. Éclat. What we surround ourselves with describes what we are. Or worse, we become it. Éclat is perhaps the word we are searching for – the new furniture has a certain éclat. You agree?’

  ‘That is just the word,’ Mr Thomas said. He beamed at her. ‘I can’t wait for Gibson to see this. Or better, McLaren when he visits.’

  ‘Try it out,’ she urged him.

  He sat in the Swan chair and then he sat in the webbed visitor’s chair. He nodded approval of both.

  ‘Have a cumquat, Mr Thomas.’

  She recited:

  The young girl stood beside me.

  I saw not what her young eyes could see:

  A light, she said, not of the sky

  Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.

  ‘Can you eat them?’ he asked, picking one and smelling it.

  She thought she should demonstrate, and got up and picked a cumquat for him and for herself.

  ‘Open up.’ She put it in his mouth.

  He pulled back up.

  ‘You eat it whole, skin and all.’ She nearly said, as you would an ortolan, and recalled how, as a young woman, she had been instructed to eat the tiny bird, bones and all, as a cat would.

  ‘You see, Mr Thomas, you do not have to peel it. The sweetness is in the rind. It is a Meiwa cumquat. Some cumquat should be cooked, but this one you can eat.’

  He smiled from his chewing mouth.

  For want of something to say, she said, ‘My mother’s maiden name was Thomas.’

  He smiled. There was nothing he could say in return, she thought. She sensed he was reluctant to leave, but she shooed him away, saying she had to get to work.