He left, waving to her from the corridor, saying again, ‘It’s super . . .’ He hesitated and then said, ‘Campbell Berry.’
‘Oh, call me Edith.’
That afternoon, she went to the storage area at the hotel and found her box labelled ‘office’ from the League days, and by taxi- cab brought it to her office. There was a bunch of flowers in one of her office vases with a note from Mr Thomas, thanking her for introducing him to the cumquat.
She smiled – she had an ally. The flowers were artfully arranged; he was a sensitive soul.
From the box she unpacked her office handtowels, but found them now covered with mould. She threw them away into her new cane paper bin. She unpacked a desk photograph of her parents; a photograph of Frederick and her from childhood; and a photograph of herself and Latham on the steps outside the Parliament in Melbourne, when she had been his assistant on the Independent Liberal Union campaign, which had got him into Parliament. There was also a framed Punch cartoon she had, showing a hotel called League of Nations whose advertisement read: ‘The League of Nations Hotel. Healing Air. A Peaceful Outlook from every Window. No Hot Water.’ The framed cartoon had been given to her by Latham and the others in the office when she had left Australia all those years ago. She thought it now inappropriate. Perhaps not. It was about failure in many people’s eyes, and it dated her. She put it back in the box.
She had her framed bachelor’s degree in science. That dated her too, but they would have to study it closely to find the date. There were some desk ornaments, including an antique brass microscope from the late eighteenth century, which her mother had bought for her as a graduation present. She also had a silver envelope knife, which her father had given her when she first went to work with Latham, and a fruit knife he had given her when she had left for Europe. She smiled. Had both her father’s gifts been his way of arming her with daggers against the dangers of life? What would Dr Vittoz back in Geneva say about daggers? She knew exactly what he would say: her father was also equipping her for the skirmishes of a male world by giving her symbolic maleness.
She had never put the microscope on her desk back at the League, but decided now that she would have it. She cleaned the lens with a corner of her cleaning cloth and looked through it at her hand. She saw the crevices of ageing as if looking at a land in drought. Thank God, she thought, that we do not have microscopic vision.
It was tarnished. It needed a polish. Perhaps she should have it lacquered.
Finally, she stood on the desk and removed the globe from the light fitting. From now, any lighting required would be from the desk lamps only. And she positioned her Rolodex of telephone numbers to give it the touch of professional efficiency. The colours of the cards for different categories pleased her. But she had so few numbers and so few categories.
Gibson visited her renovated office the next day. He looked at the old office furniture in the corridor. ‘Campbell Berry, you really take the cake. Can’t wait for McLaren’s reaction when he sees it.’ He was half-laughing. Then he spoke seriously. ‘You’re not supposed to furnish your own office, and I have to stress once again that this is not a permanent position. ’
‘I know. The furniture goes with me when I go.’
And then he added, ‘Oh, by the way, it’s très chic.’ And he gave a small grin.
‘I won’t hold you responsible, Mr Gibson. Would you like to sit in the Swan chair?’
He hesitated. ‘Go on, don’t be afraid.’ He tried out the chair.
‘We live out our lives in offices, Mr Gibson, and I intend to live in surroundings that please me. We all need éclat in our lives. Pizzazz. If I am to help design the ideal city, then that city begins –’ she pointed down to the floor of her office and twirled her finger – ‘here in this room.’
Gibson smiled indulgently.
‘We need a place that greets people and shows them that Canberra people are different, or that those who live here will be changed, and that we are making something brand new here. We will be brand new people.’
‘I doubt that you’ll have time for many visitors, Campbell Berry.’
‘Oh, just call me Edith.’
Maybe she would have visitors; maybe not. More likely a throng.
She went on, ‘Our offices should be the face of the department – and of our National Capital Planning and Development Committee. The face of the capitol. The physicals contain the philosophical.’
Gibson then surprised her by quoting Blake, a poet her father had detested. Mr Gibson put on something of a mock poetic voice: ‘ “What are those Golden Builders doing? . . . The stones are Pity, and the bricks well-wrought Affections / . . . Prepare the furniture –” ’ Here Gibson raised his voice and looked pointedly at Edith – ‘ “The curtains, woven tears and sighs, wrought into lovely forms. / For Comfort; there the secret furniture of Jerusalem’s chamber / Is wrought . . . / Go on, Builders in hope! tho’ Jerusalem wanders far away / . . . among the dark Satanic wheels.” ’
He was very pleased with himself.
Edith clapped. ‘Bravo, Gibson, I am so impressed. I had a dear friend from the League days who was fond of Blake. My father less so.’
‘I used to know it all,’ he said. ‘Had a school teacher who drummed the poem into us. I use the lines in speeches I have to give – goes over well.’
‘It has been a poetic morning. I was quoting Shaw Neilson to myself and to Mr Thomas.’ She pointed to the cumquat tree. ‘ “A light, she said, not of the sky / Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.” ’
Gibson ate a cumquat and left, shaking his head and chuckling. He turned back and said, ‘I will arrange for them to take away the old furniture. And, Campbell Berry, you send along any of the brand new people you come across.’ He still seemed to be having trouble taking her in.
During the day, people working in their section of the Department of Interior came by to look in at her office and admire it (or not, but if not, they kept it to themselves), mostly standing at the door, which she had left open. They stood as if looking at an exhibit in a show. She would look up at them – draughtsmen, girls who worked adding machines and others – and wave, invite them in, but mostly they shook their head and said, ‘Very nice,’ and then scampered off.
She would have liked to have painted the walls, but that would have been disruptive and definitely going too far. Instead, she would hunt down some tapestries or woven wall hangings to cover it.
Her major desk was for her secretarial work and the minor desk for her studying of the plans of the city, which she returned to again and again, although, as it turned out, she found she did most of her work at the minor desk. After a while she bowed to her true status and switched the desk functions.
She thought again about Gibson. She liked that he could quote Blake. But they were not one about the lake and she saw other disagreements arising about the city – ‘a city the like of which has never existed before’.
A few days later, Edith met Gibson on the steps as they were leaving work and he told her that McLaren had called the previous day to ask if she had left for the day. When Gibson had told him that she had, McLaren had then driven over to look at her office, sat in her chair and, without a comment, left. ‘He did swivel himself.’
‘Is that a good sign – the swivelling? Or is he going to toss me?’
‘No, he won’t toss you, but he may appropriate the furniture for himself.’
‘I’ve had some illuminations,’ she said. ‘A capitol is the memory of a nation. It’s made up of records, photographs, books, paintings, films, relics, scientific specimens, its botany, its street names, its architecture, building names, photographs, minutes of meetings, monuments and all those sacred relics, as Charles Bean calls them up there at the War Memorial. It’s our desire not to be forgotten. To have our existence recorded and recognised by others. It is a way of eternal life – the only way – in my theological opinion. Not only soldiers. The city will be our Chartres Cathedral, only more – C
hartres tells only the Bible stories. This capitol tells everyone’s story. Everyone’s name is here. Everyone’s life experience will be here.’
‘Enough, Campbell Berry, enough.’
Enough of educating Mr Gibson. ‘So there,’ she said, giving him a big smile.
He frowned. ‘Are you saying “capitol” ’
‘Oh, it’s just my preference – my affectation. I take the word from capitolium. From the Roman days. Just for the stateliness of its sound. Maybe it will catch on.’
‘We all call it the capital. Griffin used the word capitol to describe a building he had in mind for Capital Hill – a sort of people’s palace. Another thing that will not happen.’
‘You’re the only one who’s noticed.’
He shrugged. ‘Have it your own way, which, I suppose, you will. Have a good evening.’ He went off, further perplexed perhaps, but not, she thought, unhappily so.
The incoming mail, dictation and files delivered daily to her desk gradually took her away from questions of grand planning, and pushed her down to the secretarial detail of her actual work there in Gibson’s empire. She had to go to Albert Hall to check on the condition of the seating and to count the cups and saucers. All sparkling because of the Jubilee. Brand new seating. She did put in a report on the condition of the velvet curtains and their gold tassels. Pity they had not been replaced with the Jubilee refurbishing. She could perhaps chase up someone to do that, get Interior to pay. While there, she thought about banners that might be hung for the Congress. It took her back to her work at the League Pavilion at the World’s Fair Exhibition just before the war, where she had been the boss, or, she smiled, had made herself the boss.
Between counting cups and typing up dictation, Edith studied the original Griffin plans and the changes that had been made to them and the submissions made over the years. She could see that as the planning committees and others had wandered from the original, they had done so with very little vision and with much dullness and awkwardness. She could see that some of the changes were obvious, could not have been foreseen by Griffin, and should have been made. She marvelled at the fluency of the Griffin Plan. They seemed in many cases to have sacrificed distinction for pragmatics. The job of creating a distinctive city had been too big for them. Although, she conceded, distinction without pragmatic merit was empty, just as a pragmatic solution without distinction was a lost aesthetic opportunity. She hoped that the talked-about Senate Select Committee on Canberra would correct the errors. If she had anything to do with the committee it would.
She was happy that the street-naming was by theme – explorers, scientists, literary greats.
She saw that Griffin’s geometric design would identify Canberra as a distinctive place – that the streets and roads that broke away from the old grid pattern were themselves a work of some art and reminded people that they were in a special city.
She had expressed the opinion that Gibson was wrong for wanting to reduce some of the Griffin 200-yard-wide roads to 100 yards.
Gibson had said that the roads were eating up too much land.
‘I thought we had plenty of land.’
He didn’t reply and she had left the room.
The lake was important, if only to bring placidity to the capitol – although she had stopped saying that, saying instead that large bodies of water did seem to affect us, that it was perhaps always a reconnection with our evolutionary past, when we had been nothing more than shellfish. That didn’t seem to convince anyone.
However, for whatever reason, she usually found agreement that people like to live near expanses of water.
She could see where the residential centres were to be as the city grew, and that they would inevitably be examples of the best architecture and planning practice of their decade. She debated with herself and Gibson (when he would give her his attention) whether they should be designed according to grades of income and status. She thought that people did tend to gather like with like for social comfort and security – look at the bohemian arts districts in any great city. There should be a bohemian arts community, but these would just happen, she guessed, without surrendering to the delusion of ‘organic’ development. Even the bohemian life could be planned and assisted. Perhaps secretly. But she also feared that it could create a community of castes. She could not see how that could be avoided. During the war everyone knew their rank. But within the same rank there were castes – majors who fought, majors who had desk jobs, majors who came from the regular army, majors who were from civilian life and so on. Maybe after the revolution, when all incomes were pretty much the same, people would learn not to look down on some occupations, although Frederick said that the Soviet Union was no longer following that policy.
And the nature of the neighbourhoods was that they would make their own civic arrangements and pursue their own ideas and schemes, and even their own architecture, when the time came for them to be built. People could resist and argue with the planning – the Causeway seemed to be an example. And people would do things with their homes – their gardens and their yards, their letterboxes, their doorknobs.
She shared Gibson’s and the other planners’ fears of vociferous, visionless and banal constituencies, which could be led astray by persistent and energetic ratbags and tricked by uninspired commercial interests. They should have their say, but should be convinced that they needed to be guided and led, if breathtaking things were to be achieved.
When she was not listened to, she calmed herself by saying that, after all, errors in planning and architecture could nearly always be erased and corrected. For God’s sake, things could be pulled down. Roads could be redirected. Trees moved.
She agreed that every child should be able to walk or ride, bike or horse, to school.
The population of the city was endlessly discussed, but who would ever know what the eventual population or ideal size the city should be? How could that be calculated? There might be a formula somewhere.
She could see there was the triangular cluster of the government buildings – the temples. When they were built, they would be the symbolic relationship of the nation-state – the university temple of learning; the library, literature; the art gallery; the law, the high court; a temple of science; the temple of the warrior, the remembrance of war and its relics at the War Memorial and of evolution of the culture; and of course a national museum.
She thought it rightful that the military and the new War Memorial should have a symbolic but distanced relationship – to be remembered and called on when needed but not to be too close to the administration and legislature.
As Mr Griffin had demonstrated, the city should serve and celebrate and demonstrate these civic connections.
And then the inner circle of hills should play a part, as Mr Griffin had foreseen, making the city into an enclosed and safe domain, perhaps a naturally walled city – no, not a fort; it was a gentler enclosure, more like good spirits linking arms around the city. Enfolding. Maybe the hills were like sleeping dogs, always alert for danger, one eye open, one ear up.
And the relationship to nature – the Garden City – to see a tree when you awoke and to see trees during your working day. To work among trees. Of the value of this she had no doubt. It must be a Garden City to serve clean air and health.
Perhaps, there was no need for a ‘centre’ – rather, many small centres in neighbourhoods. The idea of the city centre was an idea from older times, when the citizens needed to gather to hear oratory – to receive commands or warnings, and information. We now had radio for that.
There were some culs-de-sac and looped streets. She liked culs-de-sac – they were safe compounds offering security. She would have liked more. The planned lake looked physiological. It was intestinal. It was, to put it crudely, the guts of the city. The boundary lines of the city and neighbourhoods were the skin. The streets were the bones, the skeletons. Or the nervous systems. Yes. She could see it.
People were the blood circulatin
g through the street veins.
Now that Edith was no longer hanging around her rooms at the hotel, she did not see Janice in the daily cycle of the hotel and had not talked with her for a while, except briefly on occasion when Janice waited table. The four of them had not come together yet, although Ambrose was still keen to get together for his own nefarious reasons. One afternoon, after finishing work, she walked home along the track across the dry riverbed and found Janice waiting for her in the gardens of the hotel, in hotel uniform.
Coming face to face with Janice again boosted her, and they cheek-kissed French-style there among the shrubs. They were both overflowing with things to tell.
Janice had an invitation. The invitation was to a public meeting – a rally – where those worried about the threat to freedom from the new anti-communist legislation could plan their opposition.
‘I’ve been to many sorts of meetings, but I don’t think I’ve been to a rally,’ Edith said.
‘It’s really a meeting. There’ll be all sorts there, not just us coms. Perhaps Doctor Evatt will be there.’
‘I’ll come,’ Edith said impulsively. She saw that she held both Janice’s hands. They were both full of smiles. ‘I’ve so much to tell – and I want you to see my new office. You will think it posh. It is posh.’
‘Love to.’
‘On the night of the rally, I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to that café in Manuka, the Liberty –’
‘Very appropriate.’
‘Yes – at, say, sixish. I take it that Major W. will not be with us?’
‘I don’t think it falls within his duties.’ It occurred to her that he might wish to spy on this one but would also stand out, and his presence would probably be seen as suspect.
Janice refused an invitation to a G and T and, in her words, had to ‘race off’.
Edith went to her rooms. Since the aborted lunch, she hadn’t had contact with Frederick and thought that maybe he had faded out of her life, something that she would not altogether resist. Perhaps he had also seen what he needed to see and then disappeared again.
Cold Light Page 16
