Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  The High Commission car was waiting. She said to Ambrose that she had not quite analysed all of Menzies’ arguments. ‘For a few minutes afterwards, one is always the prisoner of a strong speech, even if it was embarrassingly amateurish in its oratory, as you say. But it seems that for the legislation to be justified you have first to convince people that the Party is actually doing sabotage and injury to real people, has real guns and explosives and the like, and that a war-like state of affairs really exists. You have to accept the idea that there is such a thing as “cold war”, which requires the same restrictions on citizens as a real war.’

  Ambrose tiredly agreed. He seemed uninterested in talking about it. ‘I am led to believe that Menzies, when last in London, agreed with Atlee that the communists should not “be martyred by special legislation”. He seems to have lost that sound position, seems to have drifted to the American hysteria.’

  ‘I thought it rather dramatic fun,’ she said.

  ‘Amateur dramatics.’ He said that if she liked, they could go again next week to a debate about the possibility of calling a double dissolution, where an election is called for both the Senate and House of Representatives so that the party in power can ask the voters for control of both houses. The Labor Party at present controlled the Senate. ‘The PM is threatening this to get the Labor Party to support the legislation in the Senate. The Labor Party certainly doesn’t want an election on this issue. It doesn’t want to be seen as a friend of the Communist Party.’

  She could see that it would be poison for the Labor people. She replied, ‘Let’s go to it. It’s the best show in town.’

  The car dropped them at the new house. She was still not at home in the house. She still had trouble finding the light switches. She was still not even at home with having a home.

  Inside, they settled down for a nightcap. Ambrose said he had heard there had been a squabble in parliament about the allocation of tickets. ‘I was told that Canberrans – if that’s the word – were refused tickets, so that visitors from afar would have the chance to see their democracy in action.’

  ‘Or was it just to keep Frederick and his people out of parliament?’

  ‘Most likely. I agree with you that we should have permanent seats booked, as the HC does at the cinema.’

  ‘And we have done those things we ought not to have done / And there is no health in us’

  They returned to Parliament to hear the continuation of the hearing of the bill. The gallery crowd was smaller and there were no protesting citizens outside. They were the only people in the diplomatic gallery.

  The atmosphere was not as charged as it had been when the bill had been introduced.

  There was an arcane outlining of the effect of proportional representation changes, which had occurred two years earlier in the Senate. The Prime Minister pondered the possibility of a stalemate in the Senate and the need for uneven numbers in the representation of the states to avoid this.

  The parliament then came alive when a member of the Labor Party, Edward Ward, from the working-class suburb of East Sydney, interjected that the Prime Minister could get rid of the Senate deadlock by ‘declaring’ a couple of the Labor senators. His voice was gravelly, earthy, contemptuous – far from the debaters’ timbre of Menzies’ voice, although Menzies still had a hint of a broader Australian tone, even if he had striven to eliminate it. Perhaps Menzies’ accent was the Australian accent of the future. It was not unpleasant. She hadn’t heard her own voice but thought it was closer to that of Menzies. Some people said it had been shaped by her years of having to speak French.

  The Prime Minister replied, ‘I am obliged to the Honourable member for the suggestion. I can think of at least one Labor Senator who it would be easy to declare.’

  The Liberal members laughed.

  Mr Ward shouted out, ‘The Führer has spoken.’ There was no levity in his voice.

  There was laughter in the chamber and the public gallery.

  The Prime Minister continued in the same vein. ‘I can think of one member of this House who might escape only by the skin of his teeth.’ He pointedly did not look at Ward, but looked down theatrically at his papers, achieving the same effect.

  The Leader of the Opposition, Ben Chifley, then interjected in a serious tone, ‘The Right Honourable Member is on dangerous ground.’

  The Prime Minister said, ‘I agree – on dangerous ground. If this is dangerous ground, I suggest to the Right Honourable gentleman that he might restrain his interjectors . . .’

  Ward shouted, ‘Heil, Menzies.’

  Chifley rose and interjected, ignoring Ward. ‘I suggest that the Prime Minister should not make threats.’

  The Prime Minister said, ‘I never make a threat that I do not carry out.’ This retort came too quickly, defensively.

  More laughter from the Liberals, though this time a little more subdued, perhaps uneasy, as they saw the tone of the exchange was no longer parliamentary banter.

  Edith sensed that this wordplay by the Prime Minister was more revealing in implication than the Liberals realised. The Prime Minister was demonstrating the very dangers to freedom that thinking people were worried about – that under the new legislation he could, by whim, ‘declare’ someone who would then have their property seized and face gaol or other penalties. The Prime Minister seemed to be becoming slowly aware of the line he had crossed in his remarks.

  Ward came in again without levity, ‘The Right Honourable gentleman is drunk.’ And then added, ‘With power.’

  Ambrose whispered to Edith, ‘More than with power, it seems to me. I think the PM has had one or two of his legendary martini drinks.’

  The Prime Minister now realised he had gone too far and pulled himself together. He veered away from the line of the exchange, taking refuge in the arcane, theoretical questions of a double dissolution.

  After a while they left, the subject becoming too mathematical for Ambrose. ‘Too many sums to do,’ he said when they were outside.

  ‘The exchange about the Führer was worth the money,’ she said. ‘I hear that Ward has something of a reputation for impertinence.’

  ‘And Menzies is renowned for lordliness. His love of high office showed through, but you could see he felt he was suddenly in deep water.’

  ‘There was a reckless disregard. I thought he would have been more sensitive to the lines he was crossing.’

  ‘They are fat on their trafficking of fear,’ Ambrose said, somewhat worried. ‘Not a pretty picture. In their first year, all governments think they are in power forever. And they are a newly formed party.’

  Next day, after they had finished work, Ambrose told her that a reporter had said to him that he had never seen Menzies so affected by liquor in parliament. Ambrose thought it showed that Menzies was worried about the legislation.

  They returned to parliament a few days later to hear the Leader of the Opposition, Ben Chifley, talk against the bill. There were fewer diplomats to hear this.

  Chifley began, ‘There is one thing, Mr Speaker, that the Labor Party, the people of this country and the Honourable Members of this parliament have always held very dear, and that is the right of free expression of opinion . . .’

  Edith whispered to Ambrose, ‘Didn’t Labor gaol Sharkey for speaking out when they were in government?’

  Ambrose whispered back, ‘They gaoled Sharkey for sedition. When you don’t want to say it’s a banning of freedom of expression, you call it sedition. Sounds graver. We British taught them that.’

  Chifley said that the government legislation ‘strikes at the very heart of justice. It opens the door for the liar, the perjurer and the pimp to make charges and damn reputations and to do so in secret, without having either to substantiate or prove any charges they might make . . .’

  Then, in a dry voice, he threw salt onto a wound that Menzies had that day taken. ‘I witnessed one of the most pathetic occurrences in this parliament when, after hearing a statement made by the Prime Minister
ten days ago, in which he named certain persons as communists, I found that today he has had to correct the statement. He made statements which, in the course of ten days, have proved to be entirely incorrect in some particulars . . .’

  Chifley was alluding to the huge embarrassment for the Prime Minister when he had found out that details about five of the fifty-three people he had named in Parliament as communists were not correct.

  Menzies had to publicly correct this error in the newspapers, but it was seen as a stunning example of the dangers of a government having the power to declare people enemies of the state.

  There had been worried joking about it. Ambrose had said it was a tremendous blunder by Menzies from which he and the bill might never recover.

  Chifley went on, ‘I was shocked last week when the Prime Minister, speaking as the chief citizen of the country, took it upon himself to besmear and attempt to damn members of the Labor Party. He said afterwards that his remark had been jocular. If so, it was a very grisly sort of jocularity. What appalled me at the time was that supporters of the government, who talk about liberty and freedom, laughed loudly when an accusation was made against a fellow member of this parliament. His remarks seemed to open up the limitless possibility of people being penalised and, indeed, crucified, under this legislation. Most people sincerely believe that something ought to be done about communism, but they will be disillusioned if this legislation is put into effect. Communism cannot be destroyed by legislation of this character. We intend to amend, if possible, provisions that we regard as a complete negation of the principles of human justice and liberty. If charges can be made by the Prime Minister against members of the parliament that besmirch their reputation, how will the humble and innocent citizen fare when some person who does not have to disclose his identity or substantiate his charges gives secret information that may lead to action against the innocent citizen?’

  Edith became agitated at the interruptions to Chifley’s speech by the government parliamentarians. ‘Chifley’s people didn’t interrupt Menzies,’ she whispered.

  Ambrose whispered back, ‘Oh, the government members are all unruly boys from elite schools who think that the Labor Party are all gardeners and carpenters and trades people who have no right being in parliament. And the Labor Party didn’t interrupt the other side because they were trying to show that they know how to behave and are imitating gentlemen. Everyone here is imitating what they imagine is correct behaviour in England.’

  This was his favourite theme at present. It was growing in him, this alienation. He was not settling in. She had noticed it before, but as yet had said nothing.

  The word around the press and diplomats was that the Labor Party, although holding the balance of power in the Senate, would not block the bill for fear of being seen as pro-communist.

  She turned over in her mind the expression used by Menzies in his speech, ‘And there is no health in us.’ She wondered if that revealed something about him. Some said that part of him did not want to make this legislation. Maybe he was a political man in conflict with a lawyerly man inside. ‘And we have done those things we ought not to have done / And there is no health in us.’

  As for the mistakes in the names, Ambrose and she wondered if it were a trap set for the Prime Minister by someone in the ASIO. More likely, sheer incompetence.

  Afterwards, at their house, Arthur Circle, she said, ‘Won’t Menzies and his legislation be disgraced, now that he has made such dreadful mistakes in naming the wrong people?’

  ‘You have to have an accepted public standard of grace to be disgraced.’ Ambrose swirled his drink and became thoughtful. ‘You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Janice turned out to be Frederick’s boss.’

  ‘No . . .’ This had never crossed her mind. ‘She makes fun of him. Of the Party.’ She looked at him inquiringly. ‘Do you know something?’

  He shrugged. ‘Just an idle thought. Women ran the Party during the war while the men were in the army.’

  She considered whether Janice’s joking about Frederick and the Party was a ploy to win her over. Or was this thought just the sort of mistrustful thinking that all the public talk of conspiracy was now inspiring?

  The debate had taken even her mind to distasteful considerations.

  What was more disturbing was that she found it difficult to assess the integrity of Menzies’ description of the international situation, which she suspected had some weight to it. She did not know how she would voice this when she next met Frederick and Janice, and wondered how this might affect their connection. What did not, in her assessment, have integrity was Menzies’ party’s response to the threat of Russian communism, even if real. The abandonment of civil liberty. And what had even less integrity was his handling of the launch of that response.

  That much she could say.

  Why was she guarding her opinions and grading them for those around her? She was doing that because, in the bee-like swarm of opinions about her, she had become irresolute and her moods had become undependable. Was it the hormone thing taking her over? Or was it the magnitude of the situation? Or both? Or neither?

  She did not trust the interpretations of the world made by Frederick and Janice. She did not trust those made by Menzies. And she had had to discount Ambrose because of his increasingly jaded and soured attitude to the world.

  She felt that the way forward for her was to be honest about her irresoluteness with those around her, instead of being jostled by them into strong opinions she did not quite hold.

  At work Mr T was good. He never jostled.

  As Ambrose was fond of saying, ‘Our doubts are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt.’

  He was quoting Shakespeare, she supposed. She might adopt it. That is, when she herself had identified the ‘good we oft might win’.

  Conspiring

  On the day that the bill was to pass the Senate, Janice called Edith and said she and Frederick wanted to speak to her urgently – ‘Best we meet somewhere not in public.’

  She told them that they could come to the house, that she was not yet calling it home, and that Ambrose was still at his office. ‘Best he not be there,’ Janice said.

  Sometime later, she heard Janice’s car pull into the drive and opened the front door to them. ‘Is it about the bill?’ she asked as they came in, and they nodded.

  As they sat down, she was enfolded by the perplexed relationship she still had with them both: her errant affection for Janice; her unconfident feelings of sisterliness towards Frederick. The latter was accompanied by a sense that there was a bemusing male mirroring of herself in his passion for grand schemes for humanity, and in their shared idealistic aspirations for the betterment of the world, though she resisted his revolutionary politics. There was also a frisson from the dangers that Frederick and Janice faced and the jeopardy they introduced into her life; and a growing pleasure in their social company in a place where that was so rare. All this fitted awkwardly around her, like some eighteenth-century hoop skirt.

  When they were all seated and drinking tea, Frederick, self-importantly serious, said, ‘We know it’s going through. It will have to be signed into law by the GG. I suppose he could refer the bill to the King or knock it back . . .’ He laughed. ‘But they will crack down immediately. Then some unions and others will challenge it in the High Court, which takes time. We are trying to injunct.’

  ‘And?’ She looked at them. What fresh hell, as Dorothy Parker would say.

  Janice glanced at Frederick and took over. ‘We have a plan that involves you. We need to store our records and files somewhere, until the matter is resolved one way or another. Just for a short time. It occurred to us that not only are you above suspicion, but Ambrose gives you diplomatic immunity. They could hardly raid the house of an English diplomat, so no one is really at risk.’

  ‘And if they did raid us?’

  They had not considered this. Frederick looked to Janice – interesting
that he should be looking to her for leadership. Perhaps Ambrose’s hunch had been right all along, that it was Janice who was the superior either in the Party hierarchy or in their personal relationship. She thought it had to do with their relationship.

  Frederick said, without much confidence, that it just wouldn’t happen.

  Janice said that it would be a serious breach of Australian and British relations. ‘Menzies licks the boots of England – wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘But if it did happen, I would be arrested and Ambrose would be sent back to England.’

  ‘His diplomatic status would extend to you. They couldn’t arrest anyone,’ Janice said.

  It was a clever move, but she would appreciate the cleverness of the plot more if she were not central to it.

  Edith remembered that since her first marriage to Robert Dole she had been officially British, although she did not think that way and nor had anyone really asked her what her nationality was. As she understood it, Australians were all British subjects, but now also Australian citizens. There had been a time as a young woman when she had tried to feel that she was an international civil servant, a citizen of the world. But that applied only to her League work and fell away during the war, when the League staff began to belong to ‘blocs’.

  Janice said, ‘We thought, anyhow, that this should be between you and us and that Ambrose may not be happy with this arrangement.’

  ‘Indeed, he would not.’

  ‘We understand that,’ Janice said.

  Was Janice doing the talking because they had decided she would have stronger personal influence with her? ‘You mean you’re asking me to conspire with you and with the Party – soon to become illegal – in a way that would ensnare Ambrose and me?’