Maybe she had gone too far with the office. Oh well. McLaren hadn’t said anything. Probably didn’t dare.
Although she did not understand the how and why of it, her presence, she sensed, discomposed the men by whom she was surrounded – architects, draughtsmen, surveyors. They were unused to having a woman of a certain age in their midst who was something of an equal. Blue funk might be a better description. She tried not to behave thus, trying to maintain a degree of deference to them all. Perhaps her background with the League also threw a large shadow, a mystique, although she thought that, in the eyes of some, it would seem as if she had been miserably reduced in life by its collapse – that she had come down in the world. Some might not be quite sure where her authority reached and ended.
Twice she had broken down and wept in her office, rising from her swivel chair and pulling down the Holland blinds to the windows onto the corridor. Blinds she had paid for herself. All that work – all those long night meetings, all those reports, all those files, all that argument – had changed nothing, nothing. She wept for that grand failure, but also wept in self-pity for her own plight, for having lost her status, lost her place in the administration of the world, to be doing work beneath her age and talents.
She had also once looked around at her efforts to make a fine office, and had wept with embarrassment at the hopeless bravado of it all. The hopeless bravado of the furnishings.
Sometimes, when feeling stronger, she made an effort around the tea trolley to assert that the lasting value of the League was that it had been a college for the world. A time when the species began to learn how to live together on the planet. A beginning.
Mr Thomas was her only supporter.
Occasionally, a clerk, in confusion, would mistakenly bring her a document for signature. At first she sent them to the appropriate section head, but then stopped doing that and, more for her own amusement, would use her ink stamp saying ‘Recommendation’. She would write her opinion, initial it and then tell the clerk to take it to whoever had the authority to approve it.
This was all make-believe. Truth be told, most of her days were spent taking notes from Gibson, typing up letters, chasing addresses and sealing envelopes. Sometimes she was close to breaking point, of walking out, of going to the hotel, packing, collecting Ambrose from the High Commission in a taxicab, going to the train station and fleeing. Anywhere. Taking the taxicab to Paris.
She had that afternoon decided to write to Holford and send him copies of all the plans for the capital to date, for him to mull over for his talk.
She had written to a few people without going through Gibson or Rogers, and now began typing a note to Holford with a few of her ideas, together with views she had heard expressed by outsiders. She typed:
Canberra could be a stunningly distinctive city, but also one that engenders civilised values in those who live there by inviting them – through its design and architecture – to participate in great civilising ventures and entertainments and study and deeds.
There are already flowering park drives, parks and sports reserves, and there are some administrative buildings that are good-looking and roomily spaced in parkland.
The Museum of Anatomy, using only a few conventionalised frogs for decorative accents, is the best single-function building ever built in Australia.
She paused at this claim, having not seen Adelaide or Perth or Brisbane, but she let it stand, having heard others say it.
In my humble opinion, Griffin is probably the only man in the world – together with his wife, Marion, herself an architect – who has had the talent to design a continent. If only we had let him.
She had wondered about her reference to frogs, but left it in for his amusement.
She had done well with frogs at university. Women were supposed to do botany, but she had got them to let her go on with zoology. She had got to know about snails as well. Did not mind snails. She had let them climb over her hand. She had also eaten them in France; you could study and you could admire a creature, and eat it as well. That was the human species for you. Or at least, the French version of the human species.
She wondered a lot about who knew how to do it, this city planning. If this new breed – these intelligent planners – could disagree so strongly, it might indicate that there was more than one way to do it. That many of the decisions of planning were matters of preference and aesthetic discernment rather than correctness.
She suspected that urban design was one of those new professions where in the early stage everyone had to pretend to know more than they did and to proclaim stronger views than experience validated. It was in this time, before the practices of a new profession had evolved into conventional wisdom or standard ways, that intuitive geniuses such as the Griffins had most to offer. They were unobstructed by the poor-spirited. But, then, of what did we know enough? She was acutely aware from the days of the League how little the human species knew and how much judgement rested on part-knowledge, hunch, risk and – worst of all – pompous assumption.
Yet there was the danger of people such as her who became excited by grand possibility and wanted to rush in. She mostly felt she saw it all so clearly, with the help of the Griffins. She saw the matching of sites to activities and the need for dramatic design, perhaps at times regardless of function – she had preference for whimsy, which seemed out of fashion except for the frogs on the school of anatomy – and the need for playful design, theatrical design. Yet she saw that there also had to be dignity to a capitol – the use of ennobled power of structures and landscape, by advanced amenity. The other thing she loved about the Griffins was that they saw all human functions as worthy of aesthetic recognition and distinctiveness, be they toilets, garbage-disposal plants or sewers.
She thought that there was an opportunity to use the new city as a model for the world. She was sure it was possible to create an environment, houses and public amenities that would encourage its citizens to live confidently and with mettle, with pride – themselves being shaped by the amenity of the new city into human exemplars of how to live. We must become exemplars.
At times she wondered if she should write to Marian Mahony Griffin for advice, but heard through her American friends that she was poor, disillusioned and living on family charity in obscurity after such a brave, talented and much-honoured beginning to her life.
She was midway through what she described to Holford as a bout de papier when there was a tap on the glass of her door. Looking up, she saw Scraper tapping with the brass knob of his walking stick.
She felt queasy. She sat immobilised for a minute and then stood up and opened the door to him, surprised that, given his characteristic presumption, he had even bothered to knock.
She faced Scraper, who remained standing there at the door. She did not ask him how he had tracked her down, denying him the satisfaction of hearing him tell her. Maybe he was, after all, a secret agent for the government, but surely they wouldn’t employ someone as crazed as he. She reminded herself to ask Ambrose for background information on Scraper, although she had noticed that recently Ambrose had begun to show a certain civil-servant punctiliousness about such information. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of possible nuclear war, of the possible bannings of the communists, the appearance of her brother. Perhaps this was making him more correct in the handling of High Commission information.
Scraper looked around. ‘Swank – savoir-vivre.’
He pushed past her and hobbled into the office, picking himself a cumquat and eating it. He went over to the Griffin plans and other maps on the second desk. ‘Planning Canberra, are we? A comedown from planning the world.’
‘Scraper, please leave me alone. We’ve no business.’
He stared at the plans.
She said, ‘As sad as I am about the way the world may have treated you, I do not wish to have anything further to do with you. I do not wish to be reminded of what happened between us before the war.’
She could never r
eally accept that she had acquiesced. She felt that she had been coerced in a way difficult to define in law – more understood in the world of psychological manipulation with its incapacitating powers, especially destructive among men and women.
‘Between two sophisticated, modern people, no blame attaches to such conduct,’ he said with legal formality.
She did not wish to discuss the matter because she could not muster a rebuttal that would even convince her or explain to herself her abandonment of self back then. ‘If you need financial assistance, I can help you a little,’ she said, trying to soften her attitude. ‘But I do not have the time to parry with you.’
‘I do not need “financial assistance”, which, I take it, is what I would call money. And the acceptance of which would make me, by definition, a beggar.’
‘If you’re being pedantic, I would point out that money can wear a number of costumes – as loan, as gift, as payment for service, as guarantee, as bequest . . . as . . . financial assistance. Yes, money in any of its guises is what I am offering.’
Buying someone off was another costume that money could wear. Blackmail, too.
He stopped her short with a wave of his deformed hand.
He scared her. That was the nub of it. He had been challengingly bright at university, and was, she supposed, in his perverse way, still bright. But now he was, well, something of a bright monster, a bright brute.
He seemed to involve himself with the plans. He had taken up her magnifying eyeglass and was using it for close study of the maps. She reminded herself to wash it when he had gone. There was something unhealthy about him. Not his body – he didn’t smell – it was his mind that had the bad hygiene. He was dressed well enough in a worn, tweedy kind of way: lawyerly, a waistcoat. She wondered if he had trouble dressing himself.
She said, ‘I have work to do, Scraper.’
‘Ignore me.’
She did a laughing shake of her head. Of all the people she had met in the world, Scraper was one who could never be ignored. He ground himself into one’s awareness like the heel of a boot.
She sat down, but was so conscious of him that she found herself unable to do anything. She gave up. ‘What are you doing in Canberra?’
‘I am advising the War Memorial, in so far as they take advice.’ He did not take his eyes from the plans, which he turned over slowly, still leaning on his stick. ‘And meddling in affairs of state. The attractive thing about meddling, Edith, as you probably well know, is that, by definition, you can do it uninvited.’
‘What advice?’ As she said it, she knew she shouldn’t encourage him.
‘I opposed the removal of some blood-stained uniform from display because of complaints from the Japanese. The Japs have to learn to live with their history. The bloody American memorial – 250-foot column surmounted by aluminium eagle – you probably heard about it?’
‘I know that the PM and the RSL are concerned about giving prominence to the American links over our historic ties to the mother country.’
‘Right,’ he said, as a schoolteacher would to an eager child. ‘You know it was to be placed in the middle of the sight line from Parliament House to the War Memorial?’
‘You had a position on this?’ She was mildly curious, but curiosity was how Scraper caught you in his web.
‘They’ve decided to shift it off-centre by two hundred yards – to reduce its prominence. Your man Gibson’s suggestion. Which will fuck everything up.’
Even at university, Scraper swore in front of girls.
‘And your position?’
He screwed up his mouth in what she took to be a sardonic grin. ‘I opposed all monuments to all countries, generals, patriots, politicians, kings and queens. I exempt animals. And maybe explorers.’
She swallowed her smile.
‘The Americans weren’t fighting for us. They were out to punish the Japs for Pearl Harbor.’
He returned his eyes to the desk. He tapped a plan with the head of his cane. ‘Ha. Come over here. Look at this plan for the lake. It’s there – the eye of providence . . .’
He looked over at her, gesturing with his head for her to come and look. She did not move. He returned to the plans and seemed now to talk to himself. ‘It’s the same eye on the American one-dollar note. The all-seeing eye of God. But which god? Eye of Horus . . .’ He looked over to her again. ‘Do you know about the Egyptian mathematical leather roll and the Akhmim wooden tablet?’
She refused to shake her head, but found herself somewhat transfixed by his murmuring. She was rather curious to see what he was seeing.
‘The Egyptian priests marked out the leather roll in fractions, which are codes of secret information. The fractions 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and so on are metaphorically linked to parts of the eye. You know that?’
Again, she restrained herself from shaking her head, but she remained watching him. He looked back to the plans and went on, ‘1/2 is smell, symbolised by the right side of the eye . . . the fire rises and it comes; I cause it to come . . .’
He looked away from the plans to her. ‘Come and look. There is an eye here – at the centre of the city. What we don’t know is whether the Griffins had the evil eye or whether they had the eye of providence. It was believed in all cultures that the evil eye could send out deadly rays, which were supposed to spring up like poisoned darts from the inner recesses of a person possessing the evil eye.’ He now pulled his gaze back from the plan and stood away from it, looking at it as a whole. ‘This Griffin eye is surrounded by a small pyramid – same as the US dollar bill – situated over a larger pyramid. Pyramids are used to align universal energies, yes. But which energies? To what purpose? To what purpose?’
He left the plans and lowered himself into one of the visitor’s chairs.
‘You know that there’s a lot of mystical junk in those plans?’
‘How do you mean “mystical junk” ’
‘I mean mystical junk. Cryptograms.’
She refused to pursue his meaning. She would let him explain, as she knew he would, in his own sweet time. What a nuisance of a man he was. She could grab him by his collar and haul him out of the office and out of the building. Call Mr Thomas. But you could not eject a cripple. Even a meddling cripple. Mr Thomas couldn’t do that.
‘Geomancy is what I mean.’
‘Geomancy?’
‘Geomancy.’
‘In Griffin’s plans?’
He nodded.
Against all the resistance of her being, she found herself asking, ‘How so?’
‘Numbers and ratios and progressions of triangles ever larger. So called magical sequences. Reminds me of the Alhambra Palace.’
She felt nervous because, in a sense, she knew what he meant and had not let it enter her thinking. Had pushed it to one side. But although he was bright, he was, she reminded herself, a little crazed.
‘I think it has a hell of a lot to do with manipulation of the structures as a way of manipulating us. Occult.’
He watched her face as he let out these eruptions of information. He knew about her connections with Rationalism and was teasing her with these ramblings.
He sat then in silence, leaning forwards, two hands on the top of his cane, facing her but with his eyes seemingly shut.
She had an idea what he was talking about. She had heard theosophists speak. She had heard her parents laughing about Freemasons and theosophists. She wanted to go over to look again at the plans from this crazed point of view, but would not give him that satisfaction.
With eyes now closed, he went on with his thinking. ‘Yes, he’s playing with earth, water and air. But where is fire?’
She wondered how long he was going to stay in her office. What could she do?
He erupted again, as a car engine that had decided to start. ‘Ah, all those trees. He deliberately exposes the city to fire by planting a bushfire within it. Trees are really torches of the gods. He is disporting with fire. Ha. “The fire rises and it comes; I
cause it to come.” ’ He chuckled with his weaving of meaning, his connections, speaking mainly to the aether. ‘Planting within the city the source of its own destruction. The fires of ’22, ’39. Fire plays a part in his thinking after all. He’s planning a drama of destruction and renewal. The Great Fire of London was allegedly planned. I think Griffin plans fire as part of the foretold drama of the city. A Great Fire of the Capital – at the right time. The powder is set; the fuse is yet to be lit. These grand planners like to destruct so that they can then be the masters of the regeneration. As children knock down their constructions with a push of their hand so that they can begin again.’
‘Scraper, I do have work to do. I cannot play games with you.’
He seemed to have architectural knowledge and, of course, it had to be a sinister knowledge. His imaginings were of revenge upon the world for what it had done to him.
‘You must question patterns when they are deliberately imposed,’ he said, his eyes opening. ‘Beware of people with strange, unexplained designs, and who wish you to follow them down unrevealed paths. Plans with unspoken intent.’ His body jolted. ‘Yes. The wife. They were theosophists?’
‘I have to go to a meeting now. Let me show you the way out. Why don’t you go and bother McLaren? You know him.’
She had no idea whether Mr and Mrs Griffin were theosophists.
He laughed. ‘McLaren showed me out, too. And you don’t have a meeting. If you do, I will wait. Perhaps we can go for a drink before the hotels close. Or you can come to my room at the Kurrajong.’
That would be the day.
‘Scraper, you must stop using your war injuries to bully me. I am sad for you, but I will not be bullied by you. Please go.’
He rose creakily and came over to where she was sitting. He tried to kiss her. Frogs and snails came back to her as his wet lips touched her face, and she pushed him away, leaning back in her chair as far as it would go, feeling as she did an unexpected male strength in his bony frailty. Perhaps males, however injured, never lost the strength to impose.
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