Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  As she sat down, she turned to Janice and said that she had learned one thing: it seemed that communists couldn’t count.

  Janice whispered, ‘You’ve only just learned that?’

  Frederick seemed irritated by her pedantry and said something about doing a count and adjusting the figure accordingly. ‘I will adjust the wording of the motion,’ he said.

  It then occurred to Edith that the newspapers or the other reporters in the city had not been invited to the meeting. It further occurred to her that all those present were invited. Probably all Party members. Or at least fellow travellers. And she. It was not a public meeting.

  From the stage, Frederick said that he would send around a couple of hats and ask all those present to throw in to buy the local kids a football and to pay for the broken window. There were noises of general assent.

  But then one man dissented, saying that the kids could have been put up to it by the groupers.

  ‘Alright, then,’ her brother said patiently, as an organiser should be, ‘I’ll send around the hat for a ball and the window. If you don’t want to put in, that’s okay. Whatever’s over will go to the fighting fund.’

  He then said, ‘There being no further business, I declare this public meeting closed.’

  They all stood up, moving from their seats to mill about at the sides and back of the hall. As Edith rose she said to Janice, ‘I think Frederick should have mentioned the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’

  Janice reminded her that the Soviet Union had not voted for it.

  Edith replied, with a little irritation, ‘However, Australia did.’

  A hand touched Edith from behind and she turned to see a badly scarred man, grinning a deformed grin. With disgust and resignation, she recognised him and held out her hand. ‘Hello, Scraper – Warren.’ He was someone from her student days who had been badly wounded in World War I.

  ‘Edith, enchanté.’ He held out his hand. It was so cold, no blood seemed to circulate in it. It was like holding the foot of a rooster. He raised her hand to his lips, which were also as cold as a coffin. ‘The last time I met you, Edith – quite a few years ago – you were living in Geneva, but were back in Australia briefly to sniff out a new job in Canberra – and here you are again in Canberra. Still sniffing?’ He said it with the smugness of someone with the sort of memory that could come up with remarkable personal details from a long way back.

  He had a WWI Returned Soldier badge on his jacket. She remembered him coming up to her in a café in Sydney in ’36 during her home-leave visit, and his face then had struck her as that of a mummy. His whole body still seemed the result of much clumsy rebuilding with surgery, and his every movement seemed restricted by pain. He still had much of his commanding height left, though he leaned on two sticks. He had been a giant at university.

  He had no eyebrows or eyelashes.

  ‘You have a great memory, Scraper,’ she said, removing her hand from his, having to force herself to say this, knowing that he was waiting for the compliment.

  ‘The shrapnel didn’t get my memory,’ he said. ‘Sometimes wish it had.’

  She knew he was thinking, as she was, of the bizarre sex experience that had followed their meeting on her last visit. She remembered describing it to Ambrose as her ‘war work’ in an effort to joke it away, and which, in retrospect, she had trouble believing – believing that she had actually done what she had done for him with her hand.

  He said, ‘And what, Edith, are you doing here at a –’ he waved his stick at the gathering – ‘a Communist Party rally in Canberra.’

  ‘I was here to support the Declaration of Universal Rights. And you?’

  He grunted with what was probably disdain. ‘I came for amusement. Anyone who says they want to stop war amuses me. Universal Declaration?’ He nodded his head at the crowd. ‘This lot do not believe in the Universal Declaration, and you know it.’

  ‘I assume then, Scraper, that you are mightily amused tonight. All the anti-war talk.’ The rally was not about peace and war, but there had been many references to peace.

  ‘I am, dear Edith. Indeed, I am amused. After the League failed in such a spectacular way I would’ve hoped you’d given up trying to stop war. The moral health of nations is maintained thanks to war: “Just as the wind saves the sea from stagnation.” He laughed at his heresy. ‘Peace is the continuation of war by other means. In a war, God says he is on both sides because God believes in war.’

  ‘You live here?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  Thank God.

  ‘I see you have another badge.’ She leaned in to read it aloud. ‘TPI?’

  ‘Totally and Permanently Incapacitated. That’s me. Though, as I recall, you found a part of me that was still non-incapacitated.’ He gave a private, lost laugh, enjoying the embarrassment for her that would follow from it.

  She was embarrassed, but hoped it didn’t show. ‘You’re still the conversational bomb-thrower you were from uni days.’

  ‘The badge gets me a seat on trams and buses and such like, which, in turn, further humiliates me. Or they don’t stand up and I stand with hot irons going up into my groin, which also humiliates me. I have become a connoisseur of humiliation. And if you think the last two wars were tough, you should see the wars that go on in the TPI Association. They’ve been fighting each other since the first war. Apart from a seat on the tram, I stay a member because I enjoy watching the cripples fight each other to death. Literally.’

  She introduced him to Janice. ‘Warren Smith – an old friend from university days.’

  In his cracked voice he said, ‘Call me Scraper. Everyone else does. As Lytton Strachey said of Ottoline Morrell, “She was like the Eiffel tower – looked silly but provided excellent views.” Likewise, I am called Scraper, as in skyscraper . . .’ He petered out, waving his stick with his paw-like hand. ‘A ridiculous height and now a ridiculous appearance, but good views on all matters . . . at least, I enjoy them.’

  She was privately amused by this and wondered if Janice and Frederick knew who Strachey was. She guessed they had read Eminent Victorians at some time in their lives.

  Frederick wandered over and she introduced him, too. ‘My brother, Frederick, is an organiser for the Communist Party,’ she said, wondering if she should say that. Scraper did not hold out a hand.

  ‘A magistrate called me Scraper in court recently.’

  ‘Scraper – Warren – is a lawyer,’ she added.

  ‘I was the defendant in this particular situation.’

  She remembered that Scraper loved pedantry and contradicting and correcting.

  ‘I was before the court on a minor matter.’ He smiled to himself and looked Frederick up and down in a theatrical way. ‘Well, well, well – a leader of the workers.’

  Edith resisted imagining what it was that might have brought him before the court. She took Janice aside and whispered, ‘Get me out of here.’

  Janice said she would, but first she had to help tidy things away.

  ‘Please, let’s go. I cannot be in Scraper’s company for another minute.’

  ‘Because of the deformity?’

  ‘Not because of that. Please?’

  Scraper was at her elbow again, perhaps having heard. If so, she didn’t give a damn. ‘You don’t go running out on old mates,’ he said holding her elbow. ‘And anyhow, the world owes me the time of day.’

  ‘I am off, Scraper.’ She released herself from his bony grip, but he still stood too close to her, his boozed breath, together with the breath of ill-health, puffing over her, a dragon’s breath. No, a dragon’s breath, however foul, would have the innocence of nature.

  Scraper turned away to again concentrate on Frederick. ‘I can see you need political legitimacy, but I wish you’d all stop pretending you care about freedom.’ Scraper gave the word ‘freedom’ a particular tone, which showed that he felt it was, anyhow, something of a doubtful condition.

  She watched to see how
Frederick would handle it.

  Frederick said, ‘Just as you lawyers do not have to argue the case for the rule of law, as you call it, before every court case – that is, it’s taken for granted – so communists do not feel they have to re-argue the case against capitalism and the lessons of Marxist-Leninism on every occasion within the Party. Or among educated intellectuals. These are now taken as a given. The argument has moved on. The argument now is how to dismantle capitalism. Do away with it.’

  ‘Only death is democratic,’ Scraper said, falling back on a stale wisdom without relevance. Perhaps he felt outflanked in the argument.

  She was pleased to see Scraper slapped down. ‘Good night, Scraper,’ she said. ‘Good to see you out and about.’

  Scraper turned to her. ‘I have a bottle stashed in the bushes somewhere – I’ll come out with you. Share a drink. I believe we’re going back to someone’s house for what they call a party.’

  ‘Scraper, I said I’m going home.’

  ‘One for the road with a war hero before you go,’ he said, again taking her elbow tightly, and propelling her towards the door.

  Janice followed.

  Edith again undid his hand from her elbow. Her mouth was dry. She felt no sympathy for him tonight. His deformity did not excuse aggressive bad manners.

  ‘Scraper, good night.’

  ‘I depend on people like you, Edith, to bring us no more nonsense. No more nonsense is what we expect, ask, demand of you. You have seen it all. False Peacemakers. Of course, there will be war and war and war.’

  ‘The place of war has been renegotiated and will continue to be renegotiated – it is being arbitrated out of our lives,’ she said curtly. ‘For more than a hundred years.’

  She didn’t care to argue against Scraper, but wanted to talk about anything that would avoid telling him she lived in Canberra.

  He read her mind. ‘Oh, I’ll find you, E. I’ll find you. Think I still have your gloves. Give a digger a hand, love.’ He laughed a crippled laugh.

  She winced at his coarseness. She and Janice went out in the cool air, which calmed her cheeks. She looked back to the hall to see that Scraper hadn’t followed, and saw Frederick talking to him, perhaps remonstrating with him.

  Janice told Edith to wait at the car while she spoke with Frederick. She went back into the hall.

  Edith hovered around the car, hiding as best she could, and saw Scraper come to the door of the hall and peer around and then limp to the bushes to find his bottle.

  Janice and Frederick came out. Frederick still held the ball by a piece of its string. He kicked it into the night and then came over and said goodnight. ‘I will call here tomorrow with a new ball and ask around about fixing the window.’

  He was about to go back to the hall, but turned to her. ‘Edith, please don’t come over and talk to me when I am chairing a meeting.’

  She didn’t know if he were joking.

  He went back to the hall.

  ‘Just drive away,’ she said to Janice.

  As the car started, she saw the Peace Congress communist Turner come out of the hall with Frederick beside him. Frederick pointed at the car, and Turner came over before they drove off. He leaned in Janice’s window, but talked across her at Edith.

  ‘That was clever – buying the new ball.’

  ‘Thank you. I didn’t see it as a stratagem. I saw it as noblesse oblige.’

  She suspected he would get the irony.

  He said, ‘Different interpretation; same result. At the League, Briand was sound, I thought.’

  ‘I thought so, too.’

  ‘The League was wrong about Finland.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘We will argue it through at the drinks. You’ll be there?’

  ‘I have to excuse myself.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  Then he looked at Janice. ‘You’ll be there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He pulled his head out and waved them off.

  Janice drove away, and after they were out of the sight of the hall, Edith took out the flask and offered it to Janice, who waved it way. Edith drank deeply.

  Without looking away from the road, Janice said, ‘You seem to have attracted our dazzling Mr Turner.’

  Edith had not yet seen it that way, but yes, perhaps she had. How flattering – a man so young. Then she let go of the fantasy, flattering as it was. Janice, she suspected, was wrong in her reading. What would a dazzling married man with two accents and two degrees want with her? ‘I think I was a cover for his interest in you, Janice.’

  ‘He was something of a mentor for Fred.’

  More interesting was that it was somehow less momentous for her to harbour confused yearnings towards a young woman such as Janice than it was to entertain a dalliance with a young man. She felt she should be perplexed by this, but was not.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Janice said. ‘It was you. But I will fight you for him.’ She laughed. ‘I will tell him you are a bourgeois enemy of the people. The Melbourne people all seem so impressive to us. Very serious.’

  ‘If he is truly interested in the League, he’d be the first person I’d met who was.’

  ‘Who in horror’s name was the crippled man?’

  ‘A ghost from university and from another life. As much as I find him detestable for personal reasons, that generation haunts all of us women.’ She felt tears coming from her eyes and wiped them away with her glove. ‘He is the living representative of all those boys who died never having had a woman.’ Was that really why she had succumbed to his sex needs back then?

  ‘I might be too young to have those feelings. Will you come to the party?’ Janice asked.

  ‘Scraper is going.’

  ‘We could ask him to leave.’

  ‘You can’t get Scraper to do anything he doesn’t want to do. He is authorised to do as he pleases by his wounds of war.’

  ‘I thought he must be an agent from Security and Intelligence. But some of the others from Sydney seem to know him.’

  Edith wound down the window to let in cool air, and thought about this. ‘It’s a possibility – that he’s a spy.’

  ‘No one would ever question him, crippled and all.’

  ‘It’s highly likely that he’s an agent.’ She saw the punitive impulse behind her words.

  They sat outside the hotel with the engine running for warmth.

  ‘I didn’t make my speech on the Universal Declaration.’

  Janice thought for a while and said, ‘You understand, don’t you, that we’re fighting for the existence of the party, not for the Universal Declaration? They just so happen, in a small way, to coincide.’

  Edith had only half-faced this. ‘I suppose, then, it’s like the war – we are allies with the Soviet Union because we have a common enemy. Not for any other reason.’ She wondered if they were talking also of their affection for each other. Why did she keep reducing things to her relations with Janice? She had never had an affair with a woman, even though it had been offered, and in some ways had wanted it in a Bloomsbury sort of way. Perhaps now she wanted it. Perhaps she had it with Ambrose, dear God. But she was unsure of Janice’s attitudes.

  Edith switched off that subject. ‘The communist is, at least, committed firstly to freedom from want, which is in the Declaration.’

  ‘Yes. Frederick would say that declarations will not secure freedom from want. Only revolution will do that.’

  ‘You often attribute your thinking to Frederick.’

  ‘He likes to believe that he is the thinker in our affair.’

  ‘And I suspect that a lot of this thinking comes from you.’

  Janice laughed. ‘I only attribute the doubtful stuff to him. But he’s very good on theory.’ She then turned fully to face Edith. ‘If you aren’t convinced that something is dreadfully wrong with our society you have only to look at the working-class streets of Sydney and Melbourne – and see the kids playing in the dirty streets – and then remember the manicu
red playing fields of the schools you and I and Frederick attended. The rich have their own schools, their own doctors, their own hospitals and their own lawyers and judges, for God’s sake.’

  Edith shrugged at Janice. ‘I’m with you on that.’ She couldn’t stop herself adding, ‘And we have all benefited from that.’ Meaning Frederick, Janice and she. And, of course, Ambrose. Janice gave a wry smile. ‘We have. And now is the time for us to correct that injustice.’

  They kissed goodnight lightly and Janice drove off with a flourish of gravel.

  As Edith walked towards her room, she changed her mind again about the charismatic man, Turner. He was perhaps interested in her, too, because he sensed she was someone he had not yet won over. She decided that when Ambrose asked her how it all went, she would say, ‘It was more a football game than politics.’

  It had been in many ways a farce. And her contribution had also been farcical. Accurate counting of the attendance; a charity football. She flushed as she recalled it.

  Geomancy Loose in the Capitol

  Her cartes de visite had not arrived from the government printery. After inquiring again to no avail, she had assumed that it had been stopped by whoever approved cartes de visite and so had them done privately at her own expense. So far, however, she had found that she had very little call for their use. She had given one to Janice.

  She cried about the carte. Oh, why did she pretend? Who was she fooling? Or was she simply trying to regain her lost ground in life. She cried because she did not know if she was being foolish or courageous.

  She had ordered some woven woollen wall hangings from Melbourne, to break the blandness of the walls. She had abandoned the idea of coming in one weekend and painting the walls red. She removed the blackout blind from the small opaque glass panel, which resembled a window but did not open, although it did cross her mind that if World War III was imminent, as some thought, they might again be needed. Her second thought was that the atomic bomb might make blackout blinds somewhat redundant.

  Those working in her building still occasionally stopped, looked in and waved to her. Sometimes she saw strangers looking in at her office, whispering among themselves. She suspected that they were visitors from other government departments or even from Sydney or Melbourne.