Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I was asked why I had let him remain in my employment in the Attorney-General’s department, and I replied that I had not removed Mackenzie from the department because his offences consisted only of, firstly, living with a woman not his wife, which might happen to anyone, and, secondly, failure to pay his creditors, which was common to the greater part of the New Guinea service.’

  He laughed at his own laxness in public life and his self-indulgence. Leaving aside the question of the woman, about which she had no judgement, he seemed to think this a worldly display of his views of life, but she found it a weak sort of worldliness, a surprising display of cynicism, which he thought would be taken as sophistication.

  She avoided humouring the story with a smile.

  She thought that perhaps his earlier life in party politics had coarsened Latham’s sensibilities, as politics also caused some intelligent people to come to enjoy playing the debate, fudging the facts, posturing conviction where there was no conclusion and thus gradually abandoning the rigors of intellectual life.

  She considered whether she would say anything. Perhaps they had tumbled about in argument long enough. No, she would say it. Tonight was the night when anything she should say to John should be said. ‘I would have preferred, John, that you would have argued that sometimes excellent minds that had become financially corrupt in the service of the public should not be dismissed and be granted amnesty, so that their exceptional skills are kept in the service of the public and not lost. A public servant who has been so exposed and shamed would return to work knowing that they would forever be under surveillance and thus kept honest.’

  He gave a nod, which carried no meaning, and looked around at the other diners, as if wishing he were somewhere else.

  She forced herself to wait out the one hour after the serving of poor coffee, which they took in the lounge. He ordered two cognacs and rambled on, seemingly oblivious to their estrangement. Or, perhaps, they were each too good at concealing it. He said he was retiring from the court next year, but would keep on with the board of Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the Amateur Athletic Association. ‘I will probably take up a few directorships.’

  As he talked, she studied his face and remembered some verse that had been written about him:

  My cheek with thought is lined and pale;

  My cold grey eye makes bishops quail.

  She thought that it could well be the last time she saw that cold grey eye. She hoped that the cold grey eye would continue to make bishops quail. At least, she thought with grim humour, they both still hated God.

  He suggested that he ask the night manager to call her a taxicab, but she said that she would walk to the Windsor and take the night air.

  A top-hatted doorman wearing a frock-coat held open the door for her.

  She was glad that she did not have to wait with Latham for a taxicab to arrive.

  Latham turned up the collar of her coat in a way that implied, she thought, some ownership of her, and, having shaken his hand and said goodnight, she walked off, turning to see him going back inside the club to drink further cognacs.

  On the long train trip back to Canberra, Ambrose, Frederick and Janice as usual discussed the future of the world, while indulging in a pique-nique en train from a hamper of continental and other delicacies bought from the wonderful Melbourne shops and not available in Canberra. Ambrose and she had found some seasoned sausages also not available in Canberra.

  Frederick had chosen the cheeses. Under tutoring from Ambrose and her, Frederick was becoming a person who cared about food as well as about the revolution.

  Ambrose said that while at the Melbourne consulate, he had heard that it was not over yet for Frederick and Janice. ‘The government does not accept this setback – dramatic as it was. I hear that Menzies intends to convene a special premiers’ conference to seek from the state those powers he now needs to ban the Party. Failing that, he will go to a referendum.’

  Frederick said, sententiously, ‘The struggle, then, is not over yet.’

  Did that mean that the wretched Communist Party propaganda and other material would remain in their tack room? She hoped not.

  The train trip back was long, the hamper was fine, and she entertained them with a comic account of the Melbourne Club argument with Latham. But under the humour, she nursed her loss of Latham. Her break with him meant she had lost an anchor, even if it were about time in her life that she let go of wise men. Perhaps she had now made the life move to being a wise woman. If only there were someone who wanted a wise woman.

  She dreamily recalled the train that took her from Paris to Geneva as a young woman to take up her position with the League, and on which she had met Ambrose. On that train, her breasts had picked up the vibrations of the track against the silk of her bra, the clack of the track, and it had pleasured her. It did so now, but not as strongly as it once had.

  She dozed off.

  Intensity of Observation

  Formally dressed, Ambrose and she went to the ball in Parliament House to celebrate the fiftieth year of federation. Parliament House was festooned and lit from the outside. Inside, the food – suckling pigs, fowls, fish, shellfish and other delicacies – was arranged in turrets and towers in the dining room. There was a complete dance band in King’s Hall.

  It was around midnight that the Prime Minister went up the steps to the band and gestured to the band leader to stop the music. The music stopped mid-dance.

  Dancing couples stood as if frozen in place and looked to the Prime Minister, who seemed near to tears.

  He gathered himself and said into the microphone, ‘It is my very, very sorrowful duty to tell you tonight during these celebrations that Mr Chifley, former Prime Minister, and Leader of the Opposition, is dead. I do not want to try even to talk about him, because although we were political opponents . . .’ He paused. ‘He was a friend of mine and of yours.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘He was a fine Australian.’

  There were some gasps of shock, but the crowd stood mostly in silence. She saw that some – including men – were now wiping away tears.

  The Prime Minister spoke to the band leader, who gestured to the band and they began to pack away their instruments. The dancers stood for a while on the dance floor, whispering among themselves, and then drifted from the floor.

  Ambrose and she had met Chifley at one or two small events, but she had not really known him. She had been in Europe during his career as Labor leader. She was moved by the way some of the crowd and the Prime Minister were distressed by the news.

  ‘Should we go?’ she asked Ambrose.

  Ambrose looked around. Some of the people were going to the cloakroom for their coats, but most seemed to be staying on, moving out to the bar and the refreshments.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps we should go,’ he said, and they left.

  In the days that followed, Edith observed that Chifley’s death affected many people on both sides of politics, but many had not forgiven him for trying to nationalise the banks – the first step towards a socialist Australia.

  The referendum campaign began the next month.

  She linked up with the campaign organised by some of the professors and others at the new National University and at the University College, including Richter, the new professor of anthropology at the university, and Clark, who was professor of history at the college. Even in these so-called non-communist groupings she detected leanings sympathetic to communism that made her uncomfortable, particularly the sort of clubby inclusion of her in these leanings by those who knew that her brother was a prominent communist.

  But she also found that while she was not a scholar, she was granted a type of diplomatic status because of her League and UNRRA days, and her opinion was sought. She was invited to speak at one public meeting.

  As far as the campaign for freedom of expression went, it looked hopeless. The newspapers, most of the labour movement and most of the churches, except the World Council of Churches, we
re all for banning the Party.

  A Gallup poll of public opinion showed that eighty per cent of Australians were for banning the Communist Party. In her speech, she had tried to counter this sense of inevitable defeat, saying, ‘It is good to argue the reasons for freedom of expression even in a hopeless situation. We must affirm it – some of it sticks. Some hear these arguments for the first time. Some need to be reminded. And then next time we might win because of these planted seeds.’

  Ambrose was not only barred from this activity by his diplomatic status, he was also increasingly distant from Australian political life – Australian life generally. But because he was required to report on it, and perhaps because of the dispatches he read and wrote, he was, paradoxically, the best informed of all of them. Nevertheless, he was infuriatingly close-lipped. His discretion became a wall between him and their group. And a wall between him and Edith.

  On the night of the referendum vote, she organised a small party at Arthur Circle for her little group, including Mr T, Janice, Frederick and Ambrose, and they listened without hope to the results on their new radiogram.

  The no vote had taken the lead quite early, but no one dared believe it. Yet by 11 pm they realised they had won.

  The result was astounding.

  They had won. Freedom had won – just. But this was more a decision about freedom of political expression than the High Court judgement had been.

  She had contributed to the freedom campaign. It was her first real achievement in Australia, intertwined as it was with her first important loss – the loss of the friendship of Latham. She and Latham had not been in touch since their discussion at the Melbourne Club.

  After all their cheering and toasting of the win, even dancing around and hugging, she took Janice aside and said, ‘Tomorrow, come and take those wretched papers from our tack room.’

  The papers were taken away next day.

  Nearly a year was to pass before Ambrose casually commented to her, apropos of something, that he had discovered the Communist Party papers in the tack room, and had read them. ‘Not much there of interest, but I included some of it in my dispatches. I did not share the observations with the Australians – thought that would be poor form.’

  She looked at him with quiet surprise. She wondered if he were lying when he said he had not informed the Australian Security Intelligence people. But more, she wondered why he had not remarked on his finding of the storage of the papers in his house without his knowledge. What he had made of this breach of their relationship? She had put him at risk, and she could hardly blame him for indulging in his own little skulduggery.

  She now felt truly sick that she had done that behind his back and probably endangered him. She couldn’t forgive herself, no matter how lightly he had taken the discovery. He had been spying on Frederick and Janice in his own way, as he suspected Janice had spied on him when they lived at the Hotel Canberra. Payback.

  ‘What did you think when you found the stored material?’

  ‘I guessed.’

  And that was all he said. She decided not to pursue it.

  She observed yet again how the anti-communism campaign had eroded trust among people; how she had become suspicious of the world. And when she looked at her own devious behaviour and applied that behaviour as a template of how people probably behaved, she saw every reason to be suspicious – as when we praise someone dishonestly, we undermine our own trust in any praise that we ourselves receive. And how, ultimately, our trust of the world was undermined, even our trust in our marriage, including any pledge or promise of truthfulness between the most intimate of humans, no matter how sweet and kind and intelligent that intimacy was.

  Looking at Ambrose, her companion of many years, while he fiddled with a screwdriver and a broken electric bread toaster, she observed that in life you were spared this sad truth about love until it didn’t seem to matter too much.

  Trying for unabridged honesty might be the best we could hope for.

  She also observed that until they had moved into this house she had never seen Ambrose fixing things about the house. Maybe at the orchard in Wiltshire he had tinkered with things.

  She saw, too, that increasingly he lived in a world of the HC and British newspapers. His reading of British novels by forgotten authors and his fantasy identity as a woman, which itself was a reclusive thing, were also cutting him off. Although they both read The Spectator – they knew its editor, Henry Harris, who had been a supporter of the League – she also read the New Statesman. They disdained Punch.

  She worried that it all meant that Ambrose would never fit in, that he would never be part of this Australian world and, as a consequence, she would be held away from it too, in part.

  Was she losing him?

  The obdurate Department of External Affairs, which had not found her a position, also contributed to her sense of exclusion, but strangely the world of Canberra did form a sort of cosmopolitan colony. The intellectuals and the former British and new arrivals – Fabian socialists, Bloomsbury types, even homosexuals – together with people from the diplomatic and journalistic world and the public service had all washed up in Canberra. None had been born there. Although outsiders might laugh at it, their circle was cosmopolitan with a distinctive Australian flavour – or more, a distinctive Canberra flavour. She did begin to feel cosmopolitan in the half-built city that was not a city, in its temporary buildings and streets to nowhere, street lights burning in streets empty of houses. And the isolation from the world, and even isolation from Australia at large, gave them an intense observer status about the wider world. Most of them, including her, were very active in this observing.

  Sometimes she thought of Canberra as a giant telescope looking at all the issues facing the nation and the world – in some ways like the observatory on Mount Stromlo – and she even imagined that the giant telescope there in its dome was in fact examining the people of the world.

  The communists, too, gave an international dimension to their thinking, tangled as it was in their strange language and bizarre interpretations.

  On the larger issue of how to achieve peace and avoid war, she still had a commitment to negotiation and to international diplomacy, but she listened with interest to the swirling of ideas about Gandhi and non-violence and unilateral disarmament.

  The Korean War seemed to have reached a turning point in favour of the UN forces, after the successful defence of Wonju. But they had heard of turning points in this war many times before. Seoul had for a time been captured by the communists. The French were losing against the communists in Vietnam. Communist rebels were fighting in Malaya, and Australia was involved.

  The talk was very much of a Third World War, sooner rather than later. Most people were frightened, and schools and offices were learning air-raid drill. Air-raid shelters against nuclear attack were being built.

  Apart from the fear of communism, she found discussion was increasingly preoccupied with questions of the place of atomic energy and nuclear weapons in their lives. She dug out some of her old textbooks and bought some of the more up-to-date books, reviving her scientific education as she began to understand the nature and future of uranium.

  Frederick was always trying to frighten them with fear of radiation. He forgot that she had studied radiation at university and that she knew more than he about these matters. When she had been at university there had been some excitement about radiation and what it offered the world. Somewhere, she had a photograph of her as a student in a lead apron and protective gloves holding a tablet of silvery-grey uranium.

  Since Hiroshima, uranium had become something of an ambiguous element, although in science an element such as uranium could not be anything but morally neutral. After all, iron became bullets and yet iron was not considered dangerous.

  But yes, the human species had made radioactivity sinisterly different; the crazy species – the inhuman race – which could change anything into the sinister and which went about inventing weapons
that could irrevocably disturb and alter the universe, even though she, herself, tended to say that it was not the weapons she opposed but war itself.

  She had signed the Stockholm Ban the Bomb petition. It was allegedly signed by 500 million people, but who did the counting?

  In the streets of Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, she saw the eighteen-year-old conscripted soldiers in their national service army uniforms – berets, shoulder flashes, gaiters, sometimes with rifles slung over their shoulders – and was chilled.

  It was as if the country were at war again.

  Anything Goes. No.

  Edith and Ambrose were seated in their drawing room, listening to the evening news broadcast on the radio and having a sherry, when Emily came to the door and announced that the evening meal – which she persisted in calling ‘tea’ – was ready for serving. ‘Is there anything else?’ she asked, in a tone that dared them to say yes. Edith told her, ‘No, that will be all, Emily,’ and sent her off home. Edith had tried to train Emily to say ‘dinner’ and to ask, ‘What are my instructions for tomorrow?’ but Emily resisted saying either. Every morning she had to write a note for Emily outlining the plan of the day and the things to be done. Emily would not use a fresh tea towel every day, preferring, she said, to ‘use up’ the one she had.

  Edith felt that with some training Emily could one day get a position with one of the legations, if need be.

  But she had her strengths. She did the baking. She knew people at the abattoirs, and also knew a farmer who shot and butchered, so Edith allowed her to arrange the meats, which were usually very good. They even had the occasional hare and some quail. If Emily got a forequarter they shared it with her. Ambrose once asked her if she could find a boar’s head, and she simply went on dusting, shaking her head, muttering, ‘Oh, Major Westwood . . .’

  Emily urged them to begin a vegetable garden so that they could swap the vegetables they didn’t want with neighbours. Edith thought it was highly unlikely that there would be a vegetable garden. They had a man come to do the lawns.