Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  Turner grinned, looked at her flat beer and poured some from his bottle into her glass to freshen it. He then took a drink from the bottle himself. ‘I’m dropping back into the line.’

  She could see that Turner had been struggling to find the words that would make sense of his opposition to the Declaration. She was flattered that he was taking such an effort with her.

  She said that Ambrose and she had had problems with the statement that humans ‘are endowed with reason and conscience’. There was not much evidence of that.

  Turner laughed. ‘You’re right. Then there’s the problem of the inclusion of the right to private property in the Declaration. The Declaration is really a charter of the rights of the “egotistic individual” rather than the rights of communal man, of socialist man. Of course, before this Declaration there were others, which Marx laughed at as “these pompous catalogues”. The Declaration promises illusory rights – how can you have freedom of expression if you don’t own the newspaper and radio stations?’

  She said something about it being the beginning of a set of principles for civilised society, ‘give or take a few propositions’.

  Turner laughed.

  Edith said, ‘It’s a party. We should be more frivolous.’

  ‘Just when I was about to explain the “negation of the negation”,’ he said, grinning. He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Which cannot be explained in everyday language.’

  Janice rejoined them and raised an eyebrow at Turner’s hand on her shoulder.

  Turner withdrew his hand, and Edith smiled at Janice. She said to Turner, ‘Janice and Frederick are my personal tutors. I know about the negation of the negation.’

  With a move of his head, indicating that he was impressed, Turner turned his attention to the other party-goers, squeezing Janice’s arm affectionately as he left them.

  Edith called out to him, ‘The abolition of individual property is the first negation. It will be followed by a negation of this negation with the restoration of individual property in a higher form of land at once both individual and social.’

  Turner looked back at her, nodded to show she was correct and that he was again impressed, and waved goodbye. He wandered off into the throng.

  Edith looked at Janice, who also nodded in appreciation of her Marxism. Edith then said, ‘I am not convinced Marx resolved the paradox of property, which is both social and individual.’

  Janice whispered, ‘The Party has made him work cleaning railway carriages, to give him proletarian experience. And to knock the Geelong College out of him.’

  ‘The way you work as a chambermaid – to knock SCEGGS out of you?’

  ‘Something like that,’ she said, poking out her tongue.

  The next day, Ambrose lunched with an old friend from London, Courtenay Young, who had come out from England to help set up the ASIO, which had moved from Sydney to Melbourne. Edith did not like Courtenay Young. Ambrose told an amusing story about them buying a new Chubb safe to which only he and Courtenay Young knew the combination, which irritated the Australians. The buying of the safe seemed to be the only thing Ambrose had to do with the organisation, although she guessed he was privy to its workings in other ways, both clandestine and official. She supposed that the safe story meant that the British were still keeping some things from the Australians.

  While Ambrose lunched, Edith and the less zealous Janice secretly shopped in a flagrantly capitalist way. When she was with her, Janice sometimes acted the rebel against the Party and carried on frivolously, although in an intelligent way. As they shopped, Edith tried to incorporate these glimpses of what must have been the pre-communist Janice into the person she had met first as a chambermaid and then as a revolutionary agitator disguised as a chambermaid. But her picture of Janice remained an unsuccessful collage.

  The next afternoon, she and Ambrose shopped for Carla, his en femme self, at Myer. They had both grown larger in recent years, but he had always been somewhat slimmer than she, in a male way, and now they were about the same size in women’s wear.

  While pretending to the shop assistant that she was shopping for herself, he was able to choose from the racks. She held the dresses against herself, modelling them for him.

  Even though there was no question of him trying on the clothing – the pleasurable part – he was at least able to bring his wardrobe in line with fashion for the first time since going to Canberra.

  He chose seven dresses, seven skirts, a shawl and some tops, and then, while he sat in the tea rooms, she bought him seven camisoles, seven lacy underpants, seven bras, seven silky nightdresses and two robes.

  Ambrose had once remarked that lingerie gave one a new, shimmering skin, a skin that was superior to that of nature. ‘Well, superior to my skin,’ he had said. ‘Not superior to the skin of the young.’

  She now preferred nylon stockings because they did not stretch, but he enjoyed silk stockings, which were now back on the market. And, of course, he did not have to wear stockings every day for long hours. He never wore out a pair of his women’s shoes.

  Edith thought Janice would have been at ease with this particular shopping spree, even if it would surely have come within the Party’s definition of degeneracy.

  Edith had Myer mail the boxes to their Canberra address and rejoined Ambrose in the tea rooms. She described to him her lingerie purchases. His eyes opened with delight like those of a schoolgirl.

  He said of the assistant who had been helping them with the earlier purchases, ‘I think she suspected it was for me.’ Edith did not think so. Whenever they had shopped together in Europe he had enjoyed that particular illusion – that the shop assistant knew intuitively that the clothing was for him and that they enjoyed the idea of dressing him. Only once had she suspected that it had been true, and that was in Paris. She guessed it was an expression of his en femme need to be approved by females.

  Ambrose borrowed the Consulate car and they drove around Melbourne so that she could show him the haunts of her youth. As a young graduate and Rationalist, she had come to Melbourne from Sydney in 1922 to work for John Latham, who was connected to her free-thought family. ‘He was running for parliament as an Independent Liberal Union candidate for Kooyong. I think Glen Iris was in his electorate. He won.’ They looked at the Rationalist Hall, the old Temperance Hall, the Trades Hall and the Capitol Theatre, where the Rationalist and other meetings had been held. ‘The Griffins designed the Capitol. A strange hall, but good to be in. Back then we had been working to form the national organisation of the Rationalist Associations of Australia, which interested me more than the political campaign.’

  Ambrose questioned whether Latham had been an atheist.

  She said he had been and still was, as far as she knew.

  ‘There must have been an overlap between the Communist Party and the Rationalists?’

  ‘You can be an atheist without being a communist. Latham was never vaguely near the communist position,’ she said.

  ‘I can see that,’ Ambrose said.

  They laughed.

  They stopped at a two-storey building named Liberty Hall. She went on with her tour commentary. ‘The Griffins remodelled those dwellings for the Henry George League. It looks as if they still meet there. Griffin was something of a Henry George follower, believing that all land and its resources are in fact really owned in common, and that those people who think they “own” the land, and who use it for farming and mining minerals and oil and so on, should pay a tax – or rent – to the state for its use. That tax would then pay for the needs of the community.’

  ‘Sounds acceptable to me,’ Ambrose said. Who owned nothing.

  ‘Suddenly it sounds acceptable to me also,’ she said. ‘It never did back then.’

  That night, Ambrose took her to the small new Arrow Theatre, where they saw what could be described as a controversial production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Edith wondered if he had been told about it by deviant consulate people or by his friend Courten
ay Young. She was glad Courtenay didn’t join them.

  It was very much in Ambrose’s taste, but she could have done without the rather too convincing gore. Somehow she could handle real-life blood better than she could theatre gore. A young toga-clad actor, Frank Thring, played Herod in a drawling effeminate way to a very merry young audience. But it felt good to be back again with such a crowd, to be reminded that she and Ambrose were not alone, that regardless of the harsh laws, these Melburnians – the outlandish, the androgynous, the raffish, the flamboyant, and the extraordinarily pretty, but sincere, young boys – were brave enough to make such theatre and to flaunt themselves in public.

  Outside, after the performance, she said, ‘You see, there is something of a Molly Club scene in Australia.’ She linked arms with him.

  ‘Yes,’ Ambrose said. ‘Encouraging.’ He did not seem convinced. In fact, his voice was sad. ‘Encouraging. In its way.’

  She knew that what they had glimpsed in the theatre was probably all there was in Australia, and it was a long way from Canberra. ‘We could visit more.’

  He did not reply and she knew he took no comfort from her suggestion. The consulate car and driver were waiting.

  Loss of a Mentor

  Before coming to Melbourne, she had written to John Latham to arrange for a dinner during her visit. She now wondered how that might work out socially, given the strength of her reaction to his judgement, but it was too late to dodge it.

  Latham had suggested to her that they dine at the Melbourne Club. She did not tell Janice and Frederick, for fear they might decide, as a revolutionary act, to try to ‘just turn up’. And, anyhow, she didn’t want to put up with their jibes.

  She was unsure about including Ambrose and suggested, as a social compromise, that the three of them meet for aperitifs. Ambrose could then withdraw, leaving her to a tête-à-tête dinner with John. John was not inviting his wife, Ella, to the evening. There had always been a little possessive coolness between Ella and her, although she always found Ella admirably convivial to everyone else.

  She had been to the club before the war and found it just as she remembered it, and just as a club should be in its mannish way. There were always questions about its attitude to the Jewish community, which dismayed her. More so since the horrors in Germany during the war. In Sydney, she preferred the Queens Club or the Royal Automobile Club, to which her parents had belonged, where women had always been equals and where she had heard no reference to Jewish exclusion. The RAC had its own more beautiful building, superior to that of the Melbourne Club.

  The sitting room had an honour system for drinks. John poured them sherries without questioning their preference, and an older gentleman stopped to talk with him. He told Edith and Ambrose that his family had been among the founding members of the club, and that the clock in the great hall was given to the club by his great-great-grandfather sometime in the last century – ‘Not that anyone remembers you for having given a clock.’

  Latham politely excused the man from their company, mentioning ‘private matters’.

  The old man said, ‘Of course. Enjoy your tucker.’

  As she had many times observed, Ambrose was very much at home in these gentlemen’s clubs, which was so at odds with his aberrant, clandestine life. She sipped her dry sherry, which she had an urge to drink straight down, wishing she’d had a large Scotch, and listened to Ambrose exchange men’s world gossip with Latham. She realised that, after all these years, she did not know if Ambrose was a happy person. Perhaps it was more that, in life, he successfully contrived his life within glaringly different worlds. The split in his nature must have been at times wearing, making him feel never authentic in either part; or was that where his authenticity lay – in the division of himself, in the split? Was his duality his true self? Not one or the other of his personas? Perhaps his integrity lay in his management of his dilemma. Did Ambrose himself know?

  Latham told a story about Menzies. ‘I remember once meeting old Billy Hughes coming out of Parliament House in Canberra, and he said he’d had an argument in the Liberal party room with Menzies. Hughes said that Menzies argued his case for over an hour. I asked Hughes what point Menzies was making. Hughes, with that great wit he had, said, “He didn’t say.” ’

  Edith wondered whether the point of the anecdote was payback for Menzies occasionally describing Latham as a ‘crashing bore’.

  They avoided the judgement with chit-chat. They then talked about Geneva and the old days of the League. John and Ambrose had British Foreign Office and legation acquaintances in common. After the hour of chit-chat, Ambrose, as arranged, excused himself, and John and she were left together.

  ‘You’re cross,’ Latham said, serving the second sherry. ‘You’re cross about my judgement.’

  ‘I am probably more bemused than cross.’ That was not true, she was very cross. ‘I think I understood your position from the judgement, but, of course, I’m a layperson. I think I am well aware of the way you think from the long time we have known each other – that the court should not put any limit on the parliament as long as the parliament is within its constitutional powers. But I thought that you could have leaned towards, well, the Universal Declaration – that we should lean that way whenever the situation allows us. That we should now take the Declaration as a fundamental, the foundation for any just government. I see it as a higher constitution.’

  She felt she had gone in too hard, too early in the conversation, and softened it. ‘But first, John, I want to congratulate you – not on your High Court decision, we’ll return to that –’

  ‘I’m sure we will, Edith,’ he said, breaking across her. ‘I’m sure we will.’

  She smiled. ‘I want to congratulate you on your stand as Chief Justice in refusing to sign the Call to the People of Australia. I hear that the chief justices of the states signed it. And all the church leaders. All the bigwigs.’

  ‘I thought that, at least, would please you. It isn’t because I’m not patriotic that I didn’t sign it – it was that the wording of the Call was too . . . clerical. The wording worried me. The “Fear God, Honour the King” preamble. And I don’t think the Australian people need finger-wagging warnings by church leaders and judges such as me against alien philosophies, “Which sap the will and darken the understanding and breed evil dissentions.” ’ He made a derisive noise.

  He leaned towards her, perhaps not wanting to be overheard by his fellow Melbourne Club members. ‘You know what is frightening them?’

  ‘I thought it was just fear that Australia will become socialist and atheist.’

  ‘Oh, that too, but what really frightens them is that the women who worked while their men were at the war won’t go back to the home. They fear working women will find earning a wage more interesting than marriage. The Call is for women to stop working and stay at home.’

  ‘Maybe women could learn to do both – work and raise children.’

  ‘I was the only judge who didn’t sign. I’m surprised you know about the Call. It’s not being launched until later this year.’

  ‘We hear things ahead of time in Canberra.’

  She thanked him for having gone to her father’s funeral. ‘Did you give the oration?’

  ‘A local chap gave it.’ He laughed. ‘It was rather odd, but perhaps moving in its own way. He thought that as local mayor he outranked me.’

  ‘George McDowell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Old friend of the family.’

  He nodded. ‘My other news is that I’ve accepted the position of President of the Congress for Cultural Freedom – actually, I think in Australia we call it the Association for Cultural Freedom – but on condition we keep the churches well away from it. That was my first condition of acceptance.’

  ‘What’s this Association for Cultural Freedom?’

  ‘Trying to stop the communists controlling the arts and so on. We’re going to have our own magazine.’

  Latham didn’t go on
about the Association for Cultural Freedom and, instead, bit the bullet about his judgement. He went into his teacherly tone. ‘Edith, the case was about the role of the court. It wasn’t about the Universal Declaration.’

  ‘But surely it was underlying everything that was argued in the case. The Declaration must have been in your mind and the minds of other judges: freedom of expression, free association, peaceful assembly, freedom from want, fear. Even the right to worship must have come into it.’ She laughed. ‘When I find myself supporting freedom of worship, I remember that Jefferson said that freedom of worship meant that no church could ever be the official religion, and that meant that many sects would flourish. The more religious sects there were, the weaker they became. And they would just fight among themselves about who was the true voice of God.’

  Latham smiled and nodded at this. ‘See my judgement in Adelaide Company of Jehovah’s Witnesses Inc v. Commonwealth.’

  She returned to the point. ‘But, John, Australia helped draft the Declaration and we signed up for it three years ago. It must now be taken as pre-existing in the political and legal consciousness of the world, surely? Even the War Memorial’s new main sculpture will symbolise the Four Freedoms.’

  ‘I haven’t heard about the War Memorial sculpture,’ he said with slight acerbity. He was a man who hated not to know everything that was going on.

  ‘Napier Waller and a sculptor named Bowles have been commissioned. It’s for the Hall of Memory.’

  ‘Waller does wonderful work. Haven’t heard of Bowles.’

  ‘He did Monash in Kings Domain.’

  ‘Oh yes. Very good. On horseback.’

  ‘Anyhow, getting back to your judgement. The Communist Party constitution states its opposition to political violence.’

  ‘You believe the Communist Party constitution? Come on, Edith!’

  ‘I’m not foolish enough to think that a constitution of a revolutionary party is to be believed. Of course a document such as a Communist Party constitution may be a ruse de guerre, a smokescreen. But what matters is that those in the Communist Party who drafted it knew that it was in some way a decent code – good values to espouse, even if in the short run they intended to disregard them for tactical reasons.’