Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  It brought to mind his breakdown in the 1930s when he left the League and returned to England to live on what he called a farm in Wiltshire. It was four acres with some apple trees leaning this way and that. They tasted more like pears. Typical of Ambrose – nothing tasted as it was meant to taste. She doubted that he would have qualified as an agriculturalist. Most of the time, he would have been dashing off to London clubs and dives and neglecting the fruit trees.

  ‘Ah yes, Major Doctor Ambrose Westwood and his proposal for a world revolution by harvester.’

  ‘Hay sweep, not harvester. I still sometimes think that revolutions in agriculture are what will save the world. And I still believe in the New Century Hay Sweep.’

  She could see him now standing so confidently and suavely groomed before the directors’ meeting at the League before the war, all present paying close attention.

  She could recall the confidence and exuberance of his voice.

  ‘With my haversack and birch staff, here I was, on a walking trip through Wiltshire in the sunshine, listening to the birds, smelling the flowers, smelling the hay, and I stopped to watch the haymakers at work. For anyone wanting to refresh their spirits, I would recommend Wiltshire at the end of summer – I have some inns, some addresses if anyone is interested. It was here in Wiltshire and in a field of hay that I saw the answer to all to which we have dedicated our lives – the simple invention that will revolutionise all our lives. Gentlemen, ladies, this invention is called the New Century Hay Sweep. I know what some of you are thinking. You are thinking, some of you, that I have a financial interest in the New Century Hay Sweep or that I am connected by family or something like that to the inventor. Not true. Not true at all. No fiduciary connection exists at all. I simply believe it is an answer to the world’s quest for food.’

  Edith sideways hugged him, the hug saying, Please don’t ever become crazy again. Stay my sagacious diplomat and my nancy-boy.

  He hugged her back with a hug that said, Do not fear: I am no longer crazy; those dark days are behind us.

  She looked into his eyes. ‘You’re still well, aren’t you?’

  He laughed. ‘The new Ferguson tractor system seems to be the revolutionary way forward today. I may take up advocacy for the Ferguson tractor system.’

  ‘I hope for both our sakes that you have not mentioned it to anyone and never will.’

  After that meeting, Ambrose had cracked up completely and gone into a clinic, never to return to the League. That was years ago and he had shown no signs of craziness since then – leaving aside his penchant, that is, which she now very rarely saw as a form of craziness.

  ‘I am well,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s go inside and look upstairs at the bedrooms.’

  Back in the house, she said that they should replace the carpet. ‘We must have our own new carpet underfoot. Underfoot, it must be our world.’

  ‘Our turf. I agree. Would you like me to choose it? Would you like me to put the house together?’

  She had not seen Ambrose as a house-maker. Perhaps he was being captured by the idea of it. ‘We could do it together. The shops here are limited, but we already own some things in storage. And this man Fred Ward in Melbourne, who helped me with the office, would be useful.’

  ‘Should we make it très moderne?’

  She pondered this. The house was from the late 1920s. ‘I think we would need a refrigerator and all those new electrical appliances. Means we will need fewer servants. Or that’s what the advertisements say. The house does not quite meet the unpretentiousness requirements of the Australian way of life.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘You know, that Australians fear being seen as ostentatious, must have no airs. Nothing lavish, extravagant or excessive. You should, as an Australian, be very much down-to-earth and your house should say that. This house does not say that. It is more the house of a doctor in a country town.’

  She heard herself and instructed herself to be careful of suffering from the expatriate deformation – of having to find fault with one’s homeland to justify having left it; to justify having found oneself too good for it.

  They went upstairs. ‘Oh, I do like the sloping ceiling. Loft rooms.’ She opened the gabled windows and looked out across the park-like roads to the scattered houses and empty spaces of the city.

  ‘It’s very nearly Arts and Crafts. I like it being too large for us.’

  He put an arm across her shoulder. ‘Will we cope?’

  She nodded.

  ‘We have become householders,’ he said.

  ‘Householders. But let us not become homebodies.’

  Ambrose led her to one of the gable windows and gently pushed her head out the window. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Trees, an empty street.’

  ‘An empty street. We are about as far from the centre of the modern world as you can get without being in a desert.’

  In the Room of the Geomancer

  As she left her office at the Department of Interior, she pondered in the chilly air that at the League she had worked in internal affairs and here she was in pretty much the same sort of department.

  Her old Freudian analyst in Geneva, Dr Vittoz, would love the idea of an interior affairs department. She was tempted to drop him a note. Maybe they had made that joke back during her time with him?

  And what would the sending of the note itself say to him? It would say, Look at me, dear doctor, am I not a Good and Clever Patient? No, it would say, Am I not the most clever and most diligent and most insightful of your patients? No notes to Dr Vittoz.

  A hand seized her arm from behind and stopped her. Turning, she faced Scraper grinning from his mask-like, deformed face.

  No. She had thought Scraper had returned to Sydney and had relaxed about him.

  From politeness she had to make a small smile of greeting.

  Damn.

  His gravel voice said, ‘Time for a drink. End of the working day.’

  She was riled by the implication in his invitation that she was always ready to drink, and to drink with someone like him. Or perhaps there was the implication that she was a person who would pretty much drink with anyone. She told him that she was in a hurry to get to her new house, where much remained to be done, and as she did she bit her tongue – she should not have revealed the existence of a new residence.

  He said, ‘Ah, the house.’

  What did he mean by ‘Ah, the house’?

  It unsettled her, but she would not inquire. That would be a mistake. It would show a concern, which Scraper would seize upon and interrogate.

  Damn him.

  He steered her towards a car he had at the kerb and opened the door. She felt she was being abducted. She wondered how with his disabilities he could possibly have a driver’s licence.

  She pulled free. ‘No, Scraper.’ She moved out of his grip and away from the car. She felt like swinging her briefcase at him.

  They stared at each other, he still grinning. ‘I thought you might want to know more about the geomantic plans for this city. Might want to know how it is they’re manipulating you.’

  They stood stubbornly apart.

  ‘You don’t believe that there is such a thing as geomancy and nor do I.’

  ‘It is not what we believe, but what others believe. Just one hour of your time. Show some curiosity at least. It’s my last day in the capital. I have some files.’

  His devious appeal to her curiosity was, of course, somehow compelling.

  ‘Where are these files?’

  ‘At my hotel room.’

  ‘Not in a hundred years.’

  ‘We can talk in the ladies’ lounge.’

  That was, at least, a public place, although she detested hotel ladies’ lounges.

  ‘Scraper, I do not have the time to worry about this nonsense.’

  She looked across to her bus stop.

  ‘Give the cripple at least sixty minutes of your oh-so-important life.’

&n
bsp; She had given Scraper precious moments of her life on that one evening in the distant past. Infuriatingly, she found that because of his appeals she had to dismiss her repugnance at his deformed body and face, feeling that it was unfair to hold anything against him.

  She shook her head at him. ‘Do not appeal to my sympathy, Scraper. You have used up my sympathy. You have abused my sympathy.’ She added in a rather small, hard voice, ‘And more.’

  And more.

  She looked at her watch and then got into his car – to be done with him seemed inescapably to mean she should see his files. The floor of the car and its dashboard was extraordinarily filthy. She again appreciated the protectiveness of her gloves as she had many times, given the dirty nature of the world. Why did men not wear gloves more often? It wasn’t microbes that scared her; it was the grime and greasiness of so much of daily life. She thought the trend away from gloves would reverse once girls realised what the real world felt like to the bare skin of their hands. Scraper’s car was precisely the reason why women wore gloves, but the dirtiness of the car was not how she remembered Scraper. Her recollections of her ill-fated visit to his flat in Sydney were that he was fastidious. The car was a suggestion of some deterioration of his life. Or maybe it was not his car.

  He started the car clumsily and it chugged off.

  This was not a good idea. She reasserted herself. ‘Stop. Let me out. I really can’t afford the time.’

  He ignored her, driving on. ‘You believe that the way you design a city can change the people even if the people do not know it. Why, then, would secret geomantic plans not also change people even if they do not know it?’

  ‘For God’s sake. When I think of cities changing people, I am thinking more of the practical ways a designed city can change the health of people. Slums versus a garden city; good toilets; comfortable, colourful buses; clean air coming from being surrounded by green trees, gardens and lawns.’ She calculated whether she could open the door and jump out when he slowed.

  Actually, she believed that the built world with which people surrounded themselves could also ennoble, but she wasn’t going to reveal that; it would only encourage his destructive mind. She felt that Scraper, for all his wild intelligence, was not truly interested in the making of the capitol. His intention was to undermine her, to undermine anyone who thought they could do good for the world, find a better outcome. But democratic wisdom meant that you had to find ways of accommodating Scraper – the irrational, the troublesome, the distasteful. Or was Scraper right? In the end, over all things serious, did the human species ultimately have to fight it out?

  ‘Where is all this planning leading us, and who is leading us? Study the vesica of Rome, the orifice formed by the interpenetration of two equal circles. The orifice.’ He repeated the word salaciously. He put a hand on her knee and she roughly removed it.

  ‘Let me out, Scraper.’

  He drove on, saying, ‘Will not happen again. It’s a vulva – a source of creation. The Griffins and the planners fear randomness. Everything has to be manipulated. To what end are all these pagan symbols being planted in this city?’ He waved a hand at the world outside the car. ‘Orifice, vulva, vulva.’ As he said the words his eyes left the road and he looked at her like an impudent schoolboy.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Scraper. Keep your eyes on the road.’

  They jerked to a stop outside the Kurrajong Hotel. Sensing that she was about to again flee, which was indeed in her head, he said, ‘Come in for just one hour. There’ll be no funny business. I’ll show you that there’s buried paganism at work.’

  She remained seated, fuming about having been lured to the hotel.

  He said, ‘There’s talk of theosophy and anthroposophy.’

  ‘Make up your mind – first you said it was the scheming of the Masons.’

  He hobbled out of the car and came around to her side and opened the door. ‘Sixty minutes. I want your opinion. You’ll know when I show you. Anthroposophy. Steiner.’

  Edith found that people who sought your opinion were, usually, simply wanting you to pay attention to them.

  Reluctantly, she swung her legs out of the car and went with him into the hotel where he tried to steer her up to his room. ‘No, Scraper. Stop this.’ She insisted on going to the smoking room, which she knew.

  She had been to the Kurrajong before for small political parties with some of the parliamentarians who lived there, mainly Labor.

  The alcoholic drinks – beer for Scraper and Scotch for her – were brought on a rather battered metal tray carrying the brand name of a Scotch. She sat there angry with herself for even being there. The serving man, who seemed to know Scraper, said, ‘Sorry, no ice,’ and put down a thick ceramic jug of water.

  ‘You have to read the journal Archaeologica.’

  ‘I have enough to read.’ She perfunctorily toasted him, at the same time detesting him. ‘This Scotch is rather large.’

  ‘Old army mate runs the place. Read Claude Bragdon?’

  She didn’t answer.

  He drew in the beer circles, which the bottom of his glass had made on the table, and said, ‘See this symbol – the vesica; the vulva.’ He was referring to the almond shape he had created. He looked at her as he said the word.

  ‘It doesn’t mean that. It means bladder, if I remember correctly.’

  He made another symbol with the moisture left by the beer glass on the table. ‘And this symbol means “The Messenger is Near”.’ He laughed to himself.

  He was talking nonsense.

  ‘You do not believe all this.’

  ‘To thwart it, you have to understand it. You have to find out who in Interior is plotting this way.’

  That, at least, made some sense.

  ‘I have copies of Archaeologica in my room. And some charts you should see.’

  He gestured up the stairs.

  ‘In no way am I going to your room, Scraper.’

  He drew again in the moisture of the beer on the glass-topped table. ‘These circles, see them? “The Enemy Desires Peace”.’ Again, he laughed and watched her, reaching over and grasping her hand.

  ‘Spare me, Scraper,’ she said derisively, and pulled her hand away.

  ‘You know that the basic pagan cross of Canberra – I told you about crosses in your office that day – is made by connecting five mountains. It’s the principle of the Five Sacred Mountains in Chinese geomancy.’ His fingernails, she noticed, were too long and were brown and furrowed. Everything about him was repugnant.

  She kept her hat and gloves on her lap as a way of saying that she was unrelaxed and the visit short. She sipped her Scotch.

  He leered at her. ‘Edi, you must avoid the Abyss of Self-Conceit.’ Again, he laughed to himself. ‘Come up to the room and I’ll show you diagrams and maps. Ten minutes is all I ask.’

  ‘Where did you get these maps and so on? And don’t call me Edi.’

  ‘On special loan.’

  From where? She couldn’t be bothered to ask.

  ‘I’ve been researching after I saw those plans in your office. Ten minutes. You will be fascinated – the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  To her embarrassed surprise, he looked around and then put his hand on his crotch, and said, ‘What about this grave mound? And where is the supplicant who is to sit upon it?’

  ‘You’re being coarse.’ He took his hand away. She coldly examined his deformed face, noting the scarring, the indentations made by shrapnel or whatever happened when he was blown up. For the first time, she saw the knotted tissue of his scars, the topography of his ugliness.

  His grim, mesmerising voice went on and on. ‘The Griffins – ah, how curious is their name – I see two stony creatures with wings looking down from the corners of buildings. They believed all human thought and actions could be vitalised by the manipulation of what, at first glance, is the mundane – avenues, streets and lanes and circles and so on – but whic
h they saw as containing the forces of higher nature. As well, they believed in the power of angle, length, height and number, when employed in symbolic arrangement.’

  She half-listened to this. She could follow the sense of what he was saying.

  ‘Ancient man started civilisation with known physical facts – the tree, the mountain, the cave. And then ancient man began to use these ordinary known facts to explain the unknown. Created an unknown order of the cosmos. Thus, “known facts”, such as the tree, were transformed by ancient man into the “imagined” – a tree was transformed into the “tree of life”, a fact that had no validity but in the imagination of the human. These imagined facts of the “tree of life” and the “tree of wisdom”, in turn, provided the foundation for complete cosmological schemes. Explanations of being.’

  While maintaining her resistance to him, Edith found this mildly interesting.

  Scraper said that he was for natural cities, which just grew.

  ‘That’s fanciful nonsense,’ Edith said. ‘I hear it all the time – about human planning being an abomination before the lord. Silly talk about the higgledy-piggledy European cities and villages. They idealise the filthy and smoggy industrial cities of England. It’s really a secret theological attitude – that it’s better for some “invisible hand” to put everything together for us. What’s wrong with humans sitting down and thinking through how to build a city? Anyhow, even in the higgledy-piggledy village, people had to decide how close to build to each other; where to make a street and how wide it should be; where to put the church; how to dispose of sewage; how to avoid blocking each other’s sunlight.’

  She didn’t know why she bothered arguing with his crazy mind, but she wondered if in all this verbiage there was evidence that there was some plot. The world was full of plotting men. She was surrounded by plots. As ever. The way the house had been given to them. A plot. Ah, the house.

  She looked at Scraper, now barely listening to the burblings from his twisted mouth. Was he, too, a plot?

  He said, ‘We forget that roads, however ordinary, link places of great activity, of buying and selling, inventing and making and studying. The road has no energy. It is a pipe, as is the street. Only the place where the road goes has energy. And energy will flow to the more powerful of these forkings and interchanges – the cities, these vertexes, the market place, the forum. Much of what I say is outlined in issues of the Archaeologica and the books up in my room. Come on, Edi. Once you were among the brightest – the relentless sceptic.’