Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  She was overtaken with a desire to know how her brother behaved in bed with Janice, for what it might tell her about herself. Was he a male version of her? Was he a version of her father? And would it reveal something about her father and mother? Did her behaviour in bed reveal something about her mother? At least their mother and father owned a copy of the Karma Sutra and had shared it with Frederick and her when they were ready for it, in a happily casual sort of way. She had found it much earlier as a child and had puzzled over it. Frederick probably found it, too. Where had the book ended up? In the offices of the solicitor, she suspected. Or with George McDowell, the executor. George was welcome to it – may it be his and Thelma’s salvation. She had to explain to herself, though, why she had been ultimately so strongly attracted to Ambrose. She wanted to take Janice back to the café and talk to her about all this, rather than going to this meeting. But she could not talk about herself to any woman really. She could not expose Ambrose. She was truly locked into a secret life.

  They arrived at the hall entrance and Edith braced herself. She stopped in the half-light, checked her face in her hand mirror and freshened her lipstick. Janice borrowed the mirror, fluffed her hair at the back, and then they went into the lighted hall.

  There was a smell of candle wax and sawdust, which took her back to the School of Arts halls of her youth in Berry and Nowra. The Lancers Barracks in Berry. The floor still had patches of wax polish from the Saturday dance.

  There were a few women and about fifty or so men, some with trimmed beards. Quite a few had moustaches and wore red ties. Some had undone the neck button of their shirts and pulled their ties down. A few of the men were drinking beer from bottles, standing at the back and at the sides of the seating, which were in rows like cinema seating with the seats tilted up.

  ‘They shouldn’t be drinking inside the hall,’ Janice said.

  There was an Order of Dances still up from the previous Saturday night. She knew all the dances – Veleta, Two-step, La Bomba, Barn Dance, Gypsy Tap, Pride of Erin, Three Step, Luck Spot and the Last Waltz.

  There was an honour roll of names of those who had served in the First World War, and crosses beside the names of those who had died. The Second World War roll was simpler and freshly painted. She could see that they were still adding names.

  She saw that a poster of Stalin had been put up behind a trestle table carrying pamphlets, books and magazines for sale. She and Janice drifted over to the table, and when she looked more closely at the Stalin poster she saw it was an enlargement of a magazine cover – a Women’s Weekly cover – probably from during the war when the communists and the Soviets were our friends.

  There were posters advertising the Peace Congress in Melbourne. Ambrose had been right about her not speaking at it – it was too soon for her to be speaking at controversial events. The newspapers were attacking it fiercely as a communist activity. She had to feel her way. He had also warned her that if she went to the Congress she would never work in External Affairs.

  She saw the Hardy book on sale and bought a copy.

  ‘They shouldn’t have grog in the hall,’ Janice said again, worriedly. ‘We’ll be in trouble for that.’

  ‘At least they should have glasses.’

  Frederick came over to them and Janice said, ‘They shouldn’t be drinking in the hall.’

  They didn’t kiss hello. Maybe communists didn’t do that kind of thing. Maybe Frederick had to maintain his leadership role and show no emotion.

  ‘I know, but I can’t stop them. I’ll make an announcement.’

  ‘So much for discipline,’ Janice said.

  Frederick had the fluster of an organiser, eyes roving, looking for undone details, even as he took her hand and squeezed it, saying, ‘Good of you to come, Edi. Are you coming down to the Congress? We could all go down together in Janice’s new car. The Party is commandeering it – appropriating it.’

  Janice said, ‘My fat arse, it is.’

  Before tonight, Edith had not heard Janice swear, and again felt a small shock, but said to them, ‘Ambrose said to watch out for the secret agent from the Security Service.’

  Janice laughed. ‘We never know who it is.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why they’re called secret agents.’

  Frederick didn’t like them saying this. ‘We have a fair idea who it is.’ He went off to attend to some duty, saying over his shoulder, ‘Introduce Edith to Frank Hardy.’

  ‘Come over and meet author Frank Hardy.’ Janice steered her over to a group of men.

  The author, in his thirties, was obviously a star among the crowd because of his new book. Although she was clutching a copy of it, Hardy did not shake hands – too bourgeois, she supposed – and said he had met her brother on Salt. When Janice mentioned the League, Hardy paid no further attention to her. She had intended to mention meeting James Joyce in Switzerland during the war, but the opportunity didn’t arise.

  She decided not to ask him to sign the book. Instead, she listened to him tell a story.

  ‘In 1942, the Party meat workers out at the Homebush abattoirs thought that things looked grim for the Soviet Union and decided that the allies had to open a second front to take the heat off the valiant Russian army. They met and passed a motion – unanimously – calling on Churchill and Roosevelt to open a second front. The secretary suggested also that they send a copy of the letter to Stalin.

  ‘When the secretary of the branch had laboriously typed up the letter he put in a PS, which read, “Please note: no action should be taken on this matter until this has been endorsed by the annual meeting of the union in September.” ’

  They all laughed louder than natural.

  She thought that the story was quite funny, making a good-hearted joke of the sincerity of the unionists.

  She then heard Hardy say to the others that he was ‘in Sydney last week cleaning out the last nests of revisionism among the party writers.’ She wondered what it was, exactly, that he meant.

  Janice introduced her to another in the circle around Hardy – Ian Turner, a man in his late twenties. She said that he was secretary of the Peace Congress. He seemed a very ardent, handsome and genial man, and he asked a few courteous questions about her time at the League and UNRRA, trying to make conversation. He said he knew that Latham had been strong on the League and had heard the oration he had given at the grave of John Shaw Neilson and it had been ‘quite good’. That was generous, she thought, for a communist talking about a Chief Justice of the High Court and a conservative. She heard his private-school accent hiding in his roughened-up voice. She liked him. He introduced his wife, Amirah.

  Turner said, ‘Neilsen and I were both born in Nhill.’

  ‘Nhill?’

  ‘North-west of Melbourne. First town after Melbourne to have electricity.’

  Edith laughed. ‘I grew up near Berry in New South Wales. Berry nearly voted not to have electricity in 1925.’

  He seemed to like that piece of history.

  He was one of those men, she thought, who sought the approval of the room. If they found someone who was resistant, they put in more effort on them until charm won them over. He had probably sensed that she was someone he had to ‘win over’.

  After the circle broke up, Janice confided that Turner had two degrees and was a star in the Party.

  His wife, Amirah, seemed talkative and informed.

  Apart from Turner, these men were so difficult in conversation, always closing in on their circle, worried by an older woman in a Tam o’ Shanter. If they included Janice and her, it was because of Janice, the younger woman, and then they became flirtatious, suggestive, and talked like chirpy parrots, saying nothing too serious.

  Another official was urging people to take their seats and she saw Frederick collecting the bottles from the drinkers – who first guzzled what remained in the bottles and then handed the empty bottle to Frederick. They seemed to accept Frederick’s authority or, at least, his service at taking away
their empties. He soon had his arms full and she resisted going over to help him.

  Janice and she took their seats.

  Frederick opened the meeting with words about ‘Menzies wanting to create a war society – a national-security state and a milk-bar economy . . . of Menzies predicting world war again within three years . . . and now he wants to ban the Australian Communist Party.’

  He looked down at his notes. ‘It is necessary to show that the Communist Party Dissolution Act is aimed at clamping down on the only genuine opposition to capitalism and its criminal policy, and is meant to destroy the ability of the working class and democratic peoples to organise and fight against war and exploitation . . .’

  Someone shouted, ‘Why is Menzies like a duck?’ And the same person answered, ‘He can shove his red bill up his arse.’

  The interjection received strong laughter. A crowd always liked to laugh.

  Frederick smiled, but raised a quieting hand and said, ‘Keep the language down.’

  Edith smiled – that is what she would have said.

  As he went on introducing the business of the night, she saw him as a man whose words were chosen to show his command of the communist world view. To show he knew the line. He also roughened up his voice somewhat.

  She was quite lost, she realised. All this was a million miles from UNRRA days in Vienna – the windowless shells of buildings; the city full of uniforms of four nations, five if you included left-over pieces of German uniforms; and the sort of politics she knew. A different altitude. A different language. She knew this language, of course, from student days and the League. Even at university the Russian revolution had not stirred them much; not her circle. They had been all about the ravages of the Great War, about finding ways of making the world safe, the war to end wars, and she had gone in the direction of diplomacy, the League, international mediation, not revolution. Yet in another way, the politics aside, it was all so familiar – the hall, discussion of matters of concern, the beer bottles – it all seemed to come to her from a steamer trunk of her life growing up on the coast. The Rationalist talks and parties in the city to which her parents had taken her, the children trying to understand what was being said, slipping away with the other kids to muck about outside the hall in the dark. This is what she had come back to.

  She was again restless because the language of the speakers was so dense and repetitious, like a mantra. But she was interested to hear Frederick speak in public, to know more about his world. After his opening remarks, he introduced Hardy.

  Hardy spoke for some time and seemed to be difficult to stop. He ignored Frederick’s polite gesturing and the tapping of his wristwatch. ‘If capitalism could adapt, using production and the maximum of profit –’ Her mind tried to decipher his words but again she could not quite find her way into it – ‘to the systematic improvement of the material conditions of the mass of the people. If it could employ its profits, not in satisfying the whims of the parasitic classes, not in perfecting methods of exploitation, not in exporting capital, but in systematic improvement of the material conditions of the workers, then there would be no crisis . . .’

  She was not sure to which crisis he was referring.

  She retired her mind from the words and watched Hardy. He paused and leaned forward on the rostrum, then said, with a knowing smile and heavy emphasis, ‘But then, capitalism would not be capitalism. In order to abolish crisis, capitalism must be abolished.’

  Clapping.

  ‘Go back to Russia, Frank,’ someone shouted from the back, and heads turned with some consternation, but the consternation went when they recognised who had called it out – obviously, a joker who was a comrade. The hall laughed.

  Hardy took the remark as if it had been planted, and said earnestly, ‘Someday I would love to go home to mother Russia.’ He then turned to the issue of the night. ‘Here, the fascist government through its Gestapo is compiling internment lists and has already reached 10,000, including all members of the New Theatre and the Housewives’ Association.’

  Laughter. She assumed the men’s laughter was at the mention of the Housewives’ Association, as though it were a little comical for housewives to be forming associations – which, she supposed, it was. In one sense. Unusual, perhaps, but not really that comical.

  She recalled that Frederick in conversation had made a similar reference. It also, she thought, implied that a Housewives’ Association could never be a danger to anyone. She did not know what to make of that.

  Hardy then surprised her by finishing his speech with some lines from the French poet Louis Aragon: ‘ “My party gave me memory and sight / I had forgotten things a young child knows . . .” And remember to buy a copy of my bloody book at the table over there.’

  Laughter.

  Then a window shattered and a projectile crashed into the centre of the hall, hitting someone on the head, who shouted out, ‘Bloody hell.’

  Edith slipped down to the floor on her knees, and Janice, who had grabbed her arm, did likewise. Some of the men, probably from army experience, had gone fully onto the floor. Frederick leapt from the stage, not using the steps, and was joined by a couple of hefty men who seemed to have been pre-selected for such emergencies. Together, they ran to the back door and out into the darkness after the culprits.

  As he leapt into action and ran past her, she saw his well-shaped body and had a flash of memory of him as a youth – measuring his upper-arm muscles, measuring his chest, and working for a time with dumbbells, testing pain endurance, holding his breath under water, testing his masculinity. As a boy, he had tried hard to be a man, to show he was a real man. And now here he was – a man of action. She was impressed.

  In the hall, the man who had been hit held up the projectile – a dirty football-shaped object made from string and paper and rag – and shouted, ‘It’s a kid’s football.’

  There was a sprinkling of laughter. Frederick and his men came back into the hall and Frederick shouted, ‘Calm down. Just kids.’

  Someone threw the filthy rag ball to Frederick, calling out ‘bomb’. Frederick did not catch it, but stepped back fastidiously, letting it fall to the floor.

  It was what she would have done.

  And then Frederick realised that he had to pick it up. And he did so by a string end dangling from it, carrying the home-made ball gingerly to the stage and placing it at the end of the table.

  Frederick looked at his papers on the table, and then again took control of the meeting, thanking ‘Comrade Hardy for his powerful address’, and asked for a motion. A man rose to his feet with a written motion, which he read. ‘Those present at a meeting of more than one hundred people representing the citizens and workers of Canberra oppose any attempt to ban political freedom in this country . . .’

  As the speaker went on with his rather long motion, she got up and went to the edge of the stage and beckoned Frederick over.

  He left his chair and came over to her, somewhat distracted by her emergence from the audience. He crouched down. ‘What is it, Edith?’

  She said, ‘We should buy a proper ball for the boys who kicked the ball through the window. As a gesture.’

  He looked at her with bafflement, and then took the idea onboard, saying, ‘Good thinking, I’ll do just that,’ and went back to his seat, where he called for a vote on the man’s motion.

  It was unanimous.

  Edith did not put up her hand during the vote, but Janice took it and pushed it up.

  At the old League, she remembered something M. Loucheur had called blank voting – inertie courtoise – where blank votes were cast to avoid the discourtesy of voting against a motion. She remembered that there was also the French idea of the voeu – a vote that was an expression of a wish rather than a decision. And the French appel nomina – the voting by personal statement, which would be attached to the final decision as a personally tuned vote with reservations. She remembered how at a League conference someone had wanted to be counted as abse
nt when they were present in the hall. They wanted to be listed as absent during the vote. They did not want to abstain, nor vote yes or no, or to put in a blank vote. Being technically absent was more than avoiding making a decision at that time – it was saying that you were not ready to even confront or acknowledge the issue at that time. Intellectual absence.

  She laughed to herself; she would not bring all this up now.

  Frederick then said to the audience, ‘My big sister says we should buy the Causeway kids a proper ball courtesy of the CPA, as we now call ourselves after the 16th Congress last year. Not Australian Communist Party – we are now the Communist Party of Australia.’

  He added, ‘It would be a good move tactically.’

  As she made her way back to her seat, Edith realised that she had made herself highly visible and Frederick had identified her. She thought of the secret agent who was lurking there. But then, there was nowhere that you weren’t spied upon by someone for some reason or another.

  And she had not meant it to be a tactical move on behalf of the CPA. She had seen it more as an act of noblesse oblige.

  After she had sat down, Janice whispered, ‘Good move,’ and others along the row leaned forward and nodded and smiled at her. She was pretty sure that they were doing it because they liked the idea of helping poor kids rather than as a Party tactic.

  The meeting was concluding and she would not now get a chance to make a short speech on the Universal Declaration. Frederick had not given out an invitation to those present to speak. Instead, she thought she would move an amendment, and rose to her feet. ‘I move that the number of those present be recorded as “about sixty”, which is what it was at my last count,’ she said. She did not raise the issue that at least two car-loads came from Melbourne and probably some from Sydney, and were not, therefore, Canberra residents.

  There were some chuckles, but she thought she heard someone from a few rows back say, ‘Oh, sit down – it’s only propaganda for the newspapers.’

  She rose to her feet again. ‘I make the correction simply so the motion of tonight’s meeting reflects true actuality and so that we cannot be attacked for faking the figures.’