Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I think it does me good as a formerly privileged person to clean toilet bowls. It does me a power of good,’ Janice said. ‘If it helps to put you at ease, I consider my work not to be waiting on tables, cleaning rooms. I am an agitator. I agitate.’

  The thing Edith did not say, and suppressed immediately, was that she was jealous when Janice joked and chatted with other diners. She could see that she had old-world expectations for Janice, and that this was a limited view of Janice’s world.

  Janice continued, ‘Everyone who has worked learns one deep thing: that bosses have a feudal power; that to be kept out of employment or sacked can devastate a family and a future. That to be abused by a so-called superior puts the fear of God into a worker.’ Janice then began quietly to sing:

  ‘When the Union’s inspiration

  Through the worker’s blood shall run,

  There can be no power greater

  Anywhere beneath the sun,

  Yet what force on earth is weaker

  Than the feeble strength of one?’

  Edith broke in, ‘We must talk more about these things.’

  Janice continued to sing:

  ‘But without our brain and muscle

  Not a single wheel can turn.

  We can break their haughty power;

  Gain our freedom, when we learn

  That the Union makes us strong.’

  She finished singing. Janice had the last word. ‘Remember that my work isn’t only doing things for the boss. It’s eight hours – longer – of people together chatting about their families, about money worries, about problems with their husbands, their illnesses, sharing accidents, mishaps, little victories and political things. That is what work is about, too. And at least you say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ – that’s a big leap forward for servants. And twice in the past year I was left a tip. The Party is against tipping but I took it anyhow.’ She giggled. ‘Gave it to the Union strike fund.’

  Janice took both Edith’s hands and then kissed her on the lips, with some suggestion of passion, which moved through Edith like fire and dissolved their discord. Edith hugged her close and tumbled back into the happy chaos of their undefined eddies of swirling affection.

  She stood while Janice drove off, waving to her as she pulled out onto the road, somehow chastised but feeling good about it, recognising that she must settle her views and feelings as a way of self-renewal. As a way of sealing – advancing – her bond with Janice and coming to be an equal in their discussions.

  She went back into the lounge of the hotel, sat down and ordered another drink.

  There was now an employee in the department who was obviously affiliated with Frederick and Janice – a Party member – and who had helped with the getting of the house. This linked her to Frederick. And it meant that Frederick and his sidekick were behaving incorrectly, although she supposed that would be ideologically explained as something else. Appropriating the appropriators. She supposed they would explain it in the pompously authoritative language of the communists. In reality, it was nothing more than nepotism: it wasn’t stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

  Or did Janice and Frederick consider her ‘one of them’? Or, perhaps, a candidate?

  Having picked up a bottle of Scotch from the cellar man, she went back to the rooms, still uncertain about telling Ambrose about Frederick’s role in the house business.

  She was accumulating in her head too much that she was hesitant to share with him, at least until she had her thinking clarified and knew what to do next.

  She hated this loneliness of mind. What was it that now frightened her in Ambrose? Fear that, as so often, his wisdom when summoned forth would be superior to hers? She had been the superior force, the stronger partner, for a few years when he had worked for her as a personal assistant in the last years of the League. Now, again, something had changed. He had the position now – that was part of it. Despite his unorthodox private predilections, he had become more formal. He had become more of a man. The other part of it was that when she brought him into her thinking, she inescapably had also to bring in the High Commission, and with it the whole bloody British Empire and its preoccupations and concerns. Or Commonwealth, as it was now called.

  Surprisingly, Ambrose was of little use in helping her to come to an understanding of Marxism. It was as if he had done with it and come out the other side of it, and that for him the other side was simply defence of the realm and decency, and that any international organisation would inevitably be one of the battlefields. She supposed they both believed in what could be called proceduralism – the egalitarian practices we created that allowed the best possible arrangements for living together.

  She looked in to Ambrose, who was in the second bed, reading. She sat on his bed and stroked his hair. He had decided to sleep alone.

  ‘You took your time,’ he said.

  ‘Will we go to look at the new house tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She could tell he was still unsettled about it.

  He said, ‘I will talk with Marjoribanks about it. Fix up the who’s-paying bit. Straighten the formalities.’

  ‘You do that.’ She leaned in and kissed him goodnight. ‘Straighten the formalities. Light off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She turned off the light and went to their main bedroom, noting that they seemed not to sleep together as much anymore. Perhaps it was Canberra. Perhaps it was a change of life. It did not worry her.

  She did worry that when he straightened the formalities he would stumble on the irregularities and Frederick’s fingerprints. If, indeed, there were irregularities. Perhaps she was making too much of it.

  Arthur Circle – Householders, Homemakers, Homebodies

  They walked through the hollow rooms of the house, empty of all furniture, except, in one room – a nursery room, perhaps – a rocking horse. Ambrose rocked it and turned to her. ‘Suggests a sad story.’

  She nodded. ‘Perhaps outgrown?’

  ‘I never outgrew my rocking horse.’

  She held the cold keys in her hand. She disliked the odour of keys. Perhaps it was the odour of human use. Or was it a metallic odour? Of key alloy and brass. She would wash the keys at first opportunity.

  She caught sight of herself. Next I will be washing the money.

  She turned to Ambrose. ‘I have not lived in a house since leaving home. First college, then apartements. I am not sure I know what to do with a house. Did I tell you that I was talking with Charles Bean at a CSIRO reception last week and he said that he disliked flats? No place for children. Cramped their growth. He said he feared that flat dwellers would not have the Anzac spirit.’

  ‘The war-history man?’

  ‘That man. He said he was opposed to flats in Canberra. Flats lowered the birth rate. I asked him if it were acceptable for a couple without children to live in a flat. He said it was bad for the health and the morals. I said I was unsure about health, but he could be right about morals.’

  She saw that she was avoiding the word home to describe this house in Forrest. She found the word awkward to her spirit. It belonged with her family and the past. It no longer had a place in her adult life. Home life. Since leaving her parental home, she had never had a home life. She was inclined to think that when two people merged together in a home, their personalities turned to mush.

  To be fair, in her early years in Europe, having come from a country where everything was new, she had wallowed in the sensations of being surrounded by the old; of complicated ancient alleys and lanes and steps and twists and turns. Of old houses with old furniture with odd-shaped rooms. Of the practice of old crafts. She then remembered how, as a young woman, she had gone to Chamonix to sort out her life attitudes. Her aesthetics. Oh dear, she had forgotten so much. Forgotten her Life Rules. The Aesthetic of Many Shapes and Spaces: high doors, high ceilings, turrets, nooks, alcoves, attics, terraces, balconies, pergolas and cellars. Somewhere in all this wallowing and
cogitation there had been a notion of home. Home lost. Home found.

  This FCC 15 did meet some of those fancies. It had two storeys and attic-like rooms; eye-browed windows.

  When she had finally seen herself and Robert as separated – though still sharing her apartment in Geneva – she had told him that it was no longer ‘his home’. She must have had some idea of home back then.

  Now they were taking over a house that might very well become a home.

  Surprisingly, if not charmingly, the word home came alive to her, like a magical child who had slipped off the rocking horse and taken her hand. She was not sure where this magical child – or was it an animal, a wombat, perhaps? – wanted to lead her. It seemed a cosy word, and a cosy hand, fraught with demands for which she was not prepared. A home imp. How very odd. She was going barmy.

  She shook off the apparition and said to Ambrose, ‘Don’t you dare say “home is where the heart is”.’ She realised he had not been part of her musings about home.

  ‘I was going to say that it is a rather fine dwelling.’ He ran his hand along the wainscoting. By his movement through the house, this way and that, he seemed to be taking occupation of the rooms as he prowled ahead of her. Was he transforming into a homebody?

  She trailed behind Ambrose, who was opening cupboards, smelling the place, as if he were an animal suspecting the presence of another animal.

  She caught up with him and took his arm. ‘Sniffing it out?’

  ‘Occupants leave their smell. And houses themselves have smells of their own, regardless of the owners. Wood, mould, paint and so on.’

  He had let go now of the complications of how they had been given the house. She had gone to the Housing Officer half-intending to reject the house, but had discovered that while they had been moved up the priority list it was by only one – they had been eligible for the next house. And she saw from an attached note that the HC had been inquiring, pushing. She was not sure that this information excused the moral breach of the egalitarian code. But anyhow, what was this idea of a priority list? She did not delve into the role of her brother, and nor did the Housing Officer mention it.

  She had signed for the house on the spot. It had then passed into a clerical procedure and she was instructed that the confirming letter had to be re-sent to the HC, which she assumed would now simply transfer the money paid for temporary hotel accommodation to a housing allowance, to which Ambrose was entitled.

  Getting a house of such size had caused comment. While they were entitled to a good house because of Ambrose’s status at the HC alone, the allocation of a house of that size was somewhat unusual since they had no children.

  As she stood in the empty room, which they would call the drawing room, Edith recalled her UNRRA team going into Vienna just after the war. In their district, the army had a Town Major who controlled housing. He had told them to find a house they wanted to use as accommodation and to let him know. By regulation the occupants would have to leave, taking only bedding and cutlery. They also had the right to pick and take anything growing in the garden. She had found a fine house formerly occupied by the Nazi Gauleiter and thought that would do, but the original occupants from before the war had moved back in. She had sent a dispatch rider back who told the Major, and he had sent two armed soldiers to requisition the house. At first, Edith had felt sick about throwing the people out again, but someone would have to be thrown out if her team was to do its work as the occupiers of the city. The Austrians also deserved some punishment for having welcomed Hitler. She had hit on the idea of asking the woman who owned the house to be their housekeeper, and her husband their gardener. Although these roles were below the social status of the original occupants, they did not complain and the arrangement worked well. Edith and her team were very comfortable there – there was always clean linen and food cooked well, if you liked Austrian cooking – because the woman who owned the house maintained it and kept it spick and span.

  Now, again, they had bumped some family out of this house.

  Edith didn’t like political fiddling, but she couldn’t see that jumping the queue was a hanging offence. And it was a situation into which she had been pushed by Frederick. It would be a sin of high rectitude to rebuff him. Churlish, even. She argued to herself that sometimes small privileges and gifts were extended to us by circumstances of birth. To make a fuss about such things was a form of moral vanity.

  If it really had been simply a brotherly act, then that left her with confusions of another order. Did the house become some part of her family domain? Frederick and Janice had already suggested coming over for house-warming drinks and inviting a few friends. She would have to be clear to them about rights regarding the house, including unannounced visiting.

  She would deal with that if it arose. Firmly. Her mind returned to the brooding physical presence of the house. ‘Hanging the Pot Hook – isn’t that what the French call it?’ she said. ‘I forget the French word for those hooks on which you hang the pots next to the stove – the last thing the builders construct before the house is ready for occupation.’

  She held Ambrose’s arm. She wanted the Decadent Ambrose to lead her into this house, not the imp child who she felt still hovered. An apartment seemed to exclude the outside world more firmly than a house. Even the hotel rooms, while remaining impersonal, enclosed their relationship and perhaps hid them. A house was different – it was part of a suburb with fences over which people looked and, she guessed, over which they would talk to her. Their laundry would be exposed on a clothes-drying line in the back garden, or what the official plan and contract called a backyard. Houses were personal display cases open to the view of visitors: personal artefacts, books, paintings, style of furnishing. Although, houses were also a set of secret sliding panels of concealment.

  She would have to make sure the front garden was kept up to scratch. She would need a gardener, especially now that McLaren had stopped free hedge-clipping for Canberra houses.

  She would need a cleaner. She did not see herself with a scarf around her hair pushing a vacuum cleaner. Of course, Janice did this work to be close to the working class and so that she could agitate, a word she associated with clothes-washing machines.

  And who would cook? She and Ambrose had such limited talents. In Europe, they had taken in prepared meals from the local charcuterie after work and had eaten out so much, both officially and informally.

  ‘I will have to have a butcher, a baker. I will have to deal with a milkman. I don’t know how much a pint of milk costs. And we will have to buy electrical appliances.’

  ‘My dear, you are like the Queen, who has never handled money and never carries money and believes streets are always bedecked with flags.’

  ‘Beatrice Webb said that to lead an intellectual life, one needed eight servants. We could continue to dine at the hotel.’

  ‘Have a spacious house and dine at a hotel? Questions may be asked in the parliament.’

  ‘I suppose I’ll become one of those women who goes to the shops in their best shoes, wearing lipstick and carrying a string bag and basket. I’ll come back with newspaper-wrapped parcels and the Women’s Weekly magazine. And swap recipes and knitting patterns over the fence. I’ll swap the surplus vegetables and fruit we can’t use with the neighbours. I might have to bottle things. There will be fetes for which I will have to cook cakes that require a dozen eggs. Do you want to run fowls, darling? And the house will smell of floor polish, starch and baked dinners, and baked apples, vanilla and cinnamon.’

  She finished her picture of domesticity and was unsure whether it was attractive or whether it was infested with dreads.

  They went out through the flyscreen door to the backyard.

  They stood arm in arm in the yard and she turned to him. ‘Are we going to be able to handle a proper house?’

  ‘Always remember to pull the blinds. As you know, with my cottage in Wiltshire the nearest neighbour was a mile away. We had no prying neighbours.’
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br />   That was another house in their lives. She had visited that house many times, but it had not really been a place where they had lived. ‘I want you always to remember to pull the blinds.’

  She realised that she was beginning to feel safer about all this now that they were moving from the hotel. Since the lampshade shop incident, she had found that in their rooms when Ambrose was en femme she nearly always had a small tension in her stomach, a fear of someone bursting in, of their being caught, exposed, humiliated. Her nonchalance had been very much a display, a mask, an effort to make Ambrose feel safe and accepted. There would be more security in a house.

  ‘We will be able to entertain.’

  ‘And do we have to entertain?’

  ‘With all the legations now moving to Canberra, it means that at least there may be someone to entertain or to entertain us. I am sure we can use the Commission kitchen staff.’

  She clutched at this description of their life in the house, because it took her away from the idea of home and towards the house being a High Commission annex. She was more comfortable with that.

  She looked around the rather unkempt yard, which she decided to call the back garden. She looked at the sheets of information about the house. ‘It says on the inventory that we are to be supplied with four jarrah clothes posts to hold up the clothes line, which they also supply.’ She looked down the contract inventory. ‘A clothes line of galvanised wire.’ She looked for the four jarrah clothes posts and saw them propped in the corner.

  Ambrose said, ‘There’s a gate in the fence to the next-door neighbour.’

  ‘I believe in Forrest they are called friendship gates.’

  ‘Shouldn’t one be very sure about the friendship before putting in a gate?’

  ‘We could, I suppose, lock it. It would then be a Keep Out gate. I have never managed any land larger than a window box,’ she said. ‘And nor have you.’

  ‘You forget I was once an orchardist.’