Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘We went to see High Noon,’ Theodor said.

  ‘So did we. We didn’t see you there. We were high and mighty in the loge – the HC seats.’ Ambrose and she had shared a number of dinners, picnics and drinks with the Richters. They were somewhat Bloomsbury – in fact, they had actually known Strachey’s nephew and some of Ambrose’s connections with the Bloomsbury crowd before the Second World War. When at Oxford, Richter had been a friend of Lowes Dickinson, and Richter said that he had travelled a lot in Spain, Morocco and Istanbul with the philosopher Harold Cox, who was, Richter said, a ‘repressed’ homosexual but had never made an approach to him. Ambrose told her later that Cox was very far from being a repressed homosexual and that Spain, Morocco and Istanbul were well-known pleasure grounds for those Englishmen who fancied exotic young men as lovers.

  They were one of the couples that Ambrose and she now had in their circle – that is, after Ambrose had dowsed his reactions to their German origin. Actually, they had dowsed it themselves. One night they had laughed and said, ‘Think of us as Danish – we do. When we arrived here after the war we posed as Danes so that we could rent accommodation.’ Edith had told them that when she had first met Ambrose in Geneva, he wouldn’t drink German beer because of the First World War. Amelia had said, ‘I’ve noticed that when he comes to our house for dinner he’s more than happy to eat my apfelstrudel. But I should say that with most people we are always careful not to serve German dishes. We want nothing to do with Germany. Apfelstrudel is as far as we go.’

  In the entry hall, Edith took their coats and scarves while they, as always, looked around admiringly.

  ‘We really came to punish ourselves with envy about your house. You’ve seen our fibro shack. And we were trying to stretch out our night of freedom from the children. Actually, we came looking for fun and thought of you and Ambrose.’

  She knew it was unfair, more than unfair. It was a small, secret corruption. The Richters had four kids and were living in a prefabricated sort of house, formerly from an air-force base or somewhere. ‘You’ll soon rise to the top of the housing queue.’

  ‘Oh,’ Amelia said, going over to the newly painted rocking horse, now an ornament in the entrance hall. ‘You’ve finished painting the horse. He is resplendent!’ She gave the horse a push, something all visitors were inclined to do, and the horse came to life and rocked.

  ‘Ned. We call him Ned after a horse I had as a child. Ambrose did most of the painting. I cleaned up his drips.’

  ‘Good evening, Ned,’ Amelia said.

  ‘And we found him his missing glass eye.’

  She ushered them into the drawing room and said, ‘You’ve met my brother Frederick, and Janice.’

  The two couples shook hands. They had become more relaxed socially on the two occasions they had all been together, although Frederick and Theodor sparred rather tetchily at times – they had an ongoing argument about Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Frederick said it was flawed ‘both historically and artistically’, and took the position of a whining and wishful old-guard Menshevik. Theodor said he trusted the account of the brutal interrogation techniques and general repression of Stalin’s Russia, and said it had caused him to leave communism behind. Frederick said Koestler hadn’t been there, he didn’t know. Theodor had said, ‘Nor were you.’ Frederick had come back, ‘I was there. I was there in the Soviet Union before the war, at the time of the trials.’ Frederick was somewhat insecurely combative with a professor of bourgeois anthropology who had been a communist himself and knew his Marx. Theodor described himself publicly as the first socialist professor of anthropology in Australia, but for Frederick it was the wrong brand of socialism. Theodor and Amelia had both publicly opposed the banning of the Communist Party, and because the Party had also changed its line to one of cooperation with non-communist allies – what Frederick grandly called a popular front and she mockingly called the front impopulaire – they got along.

  By coincidence, Frederick and Amelia knew each other. Amelia was part of the Canberra Snowy Book Bus with Celia, which took books, magazines and gramophone records to the workers on the Snowy Mountain scheme. Frederick liked the idea and had suggested some books that should be on the bus.

  Ambrose and she and the Richters were closer politically, and she had discovered that they – she and Theodor – had both refused invitations to speak at communist activities in the last couple of years: she at the Peace Congress and he at the Democratic Rights Council. Theodor said he had done it because the communist organisations ‘exploited liberal principles for illiberal ends’. She had agreed. And later, she had said to him about her brother Frederick and Russia in the 1930s, ‘There are some very different ways of being there.’

  He had said, ‘Yes, there are many ways of being there when you are there.’

  As they settled down with drinks, the discussion went to the case of the British SIS agent, Philby, who was suspected of being a double-agent and pensioned off last year, but not prosecuted.

  Ambrose said he had no doubt that Philby had sold out to the Soviet Union, along with two other British SIS agents, Burgess and Maclean, who had defected a short time back. ‘They all hung out together at Cambridge. I dined with Burgess just before we came out here. Before his defection. His constant heavy drinking was showing. The guy used to have one of the most rapid and acute minds I knew. Now he’s just an imitation – and a pretty bad one – of what he once was.’

  Frederick said that the American and British secret services were falling apart because of defections to the Soviet Union. ‘I also think that homosexuality made them unreliable in a secret service. Blackmail and so on.’

  Amelia brought up the report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by an American, Doctor Kinsey. She said that for the first time we had an idea of how many people were homosexual.

  To Edith’s surprise, Janice said that Kinsey put the number of homosexuals at about ten per cent.

  A surprised Frederick turned to Janice, and said in an interrogating voice, ‘You’ve read the Kinsey report?’

  ‘I dipped into it.’

  ‘You didn’t mention it to me.’

  ‘Dipped into it – not read it. It’s not really a reading book; there are pages and pages of statistics. But yes, I read the conclusions.’ Janice was uneasy, as if guilty of some Party infringement. ‘I suppose it says something about the sickness of America. But Turner had a copy – I looked at it when we were last in Melbourne.’

  Frederick continued with his interrogation. ‘You never mentioned it.’

  ‘For God’s sake, it was lying around at their place in Glen Iris.’

  ‘I would consider it something to be mentioned. Anyhow, it applies only to America.’

  Edith intervened, laughing. ‘You think sexual behaviour would be so different in other countries?’

  ‘I do,’ Frederick said. ‘I suspect that the Trobriand Islands would give different answers. I suspect that people in the Soviet Union would give different answers. Obviously, if you radically change the economic system you will change human nature, and these sorts of sexual deviations would fade away. Lysenko. It’s science.’

  ‘Lysenko!’ She laughed. They’d had this argument about genetics on another occasion. But she could see that her question was silly.

  Amelia said, ‘I suspect that the Russian revolution stopped at the bedroom door.’

  Edith said, ‘I wonder if the Kinsey Report will stop at the bedroom door in most countries.’

  Ambrose said, ‘Which side of the bedroom door?’

  Edith said, ‘I suppose we all got the gist of the Kinsey Report from the newspapers – in so far as they said anything in detail. I’ve ordered a copy from Hatchards. I’ll pass it on when we’ve finished.’

  Amelia said she had already ordered a copy. ‘Not from the local bookshop – from Sydney.’ She blushed.

  Frederick pursued Janice, still unsettled that she had actually seen a copy and he hadn’t. Looking directly at her, he sa
id, ‘And what did you learn that you didn’t know?’

  ‘Quite a deal,’ Janice said.

  ‘Name something,’ Frederick said loudly.

  Janice was uncomfortable, but tried to laugh it off. ‘For example, I’d never seen a book refer calmly to “animal contacts” in sex.’

  ‘That says something about America,’ Frederick said.

  Edith said, ‘Oh, I suppose that sort of thing never happens on the farms of the Soviet Union.’

  Theodor said, ‘And in ancient Greece – and probably in Greece this very day. Even in Australia.’

  ‘Many more sheep to choose from here,’ Ambrose said.

  They laughed. Edith realised it was the first discussion they had all had about sexual matters.

  ‘I seriously doubt that it still happens in the Soviet Union,’ Frederick said, and turned to Janice, still pursuing her. ‘What else?’

  Edith and the others now sat following this domestic exchange.

  ‘There is so much stuff in the book – about the use of prostitutes, masturbation, even position in bed and whether the lights are on or off. All that. I’d never, for example, thought about the possibility of bisexuality.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It didn’t persuade me to try it, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  He continued to show discomfort. ‘Oh, and how many bisexuals are there?’

  ‘The book’s about America, remember. I seem to recall that it was about thirty-something per cent of men had tried both – had sex with men and with women – but only ten per cent preferred only homosexual sex. And there were statistics about how many sexual partners people had in their life – more than you would think.’

  Frederick said, ‘On the question of promiscuity, Lenin said that it was like drinking from a dirty glass.’ He began saying this as a serious pronouncement, and then made a face that seemed to disown it. ‘Now I come to think about it, it sounds rather too . . . prissy.’

  ‘Yes,’ Amelia said, ‘it does.’

  ‘Look, to a degree I don’t care what people do outside the Party. I just don’t want them doing it inside the Party. The Party has to be above reproach.’

  Janice looked at Frederick. ‘I’ve never heard you challenge anything Lenin said before in your life. I might bring you before a comrades’ court.’

  Frederick tamped his pipe. He now seemed to relax, and smiled his hugely charming smile. Perhaps he had learned that when you smile rarely, your smile has more effect. There was, too, that contradictory change of tone she had often observed in him, as if he had caught sight of himself forcing communist theory down their throats, and perhaps also realising that he was revealing his own insecurities. ‘I do remember when Jean Devanny came back from a cadre course in the Soviet Union – this was in the thirties – she said that sex was different under socialism. Devanny had strong views on sex life. Not necessarily Party views.’

  Janice giggled. ‘Devanny was always talking about big and little men, and that socialists were generally big men. I heard her talk at the Kings Cross branch in Sydney about this Russian man in the wheat fields with rippling muscles and how magnificent he was. I presume she meant in bed. That night, Jean argued that women had the right to enjoy sex as much as men did. I can tell you that the comrades at the meeting were like stunned mullets.’

  Even Frederick laughed and told his own Devanny story – that at a Waterside Workers’ Federation meeting, Devanny became quite carried away, announcing to the wharfies and others, ‘In the Soviet Union, sexual intercourse is wonderful!’ A wharfie called out politely, ‘It’s not too bloody bad here, either, lady.’

  They all laughed.

  ‘Everyone in the Party has a Devanny story,’ Frederick said. ‘But we had to kick her out.’

  ‘Why?’ Amelia asked.

  ‘The Party is not a bohemian club.’

  Janice said softly, ‘There’s a little more to it than that.’

  A glance passed between her and Frederick, which closed the matter.

  Edith said she wondered whether the publication of the statistics on sex in Kinsey would mean that those who wanted to do something sexually colourful, but who had been frightened that their feelings were horribly abnormal, would now feel free to express their feelings, knowing that many others had the same feelings. ‘The book could bring about great changes in behaviour, because people will feel released from their private inhibitions.’

  Amelia mentioned the recent newspaper reports about Chris Jorgensen, a man who had gone to Denmark and had a sex-change operation.

  Frederick said that it was a form of madness.

  Janice said she thought it raised many questions. ‘Some of which I am not sure I am bold enough to ask.’

  Theodor said he had heard a joke at the university common room ‘that Christine Jorgensen went abroad, and came back a broad’.

  Edith was now unsure about this conversation. She and Ambrose had read the newspaper reports and she had asked him how it made him feel. He had raised his eyebrows. ‘I doubt that I will dash off to Denmark.’ He had then become serious. ‘Berry, you know as no other person in the world knows that I do not believe that in a thousand years, or by any medical drama or any amount of make-up, I could become a woman. All I qualify for is membership of the Molly Club. The club for those in happy confusion. All I ask of the world is that when dressed as a gal I be lavishly praised, treated extravagantly well and kindly. And may I add, Berry, you do that for me, you do that. I am not a Christine Jorgensen. I am another kind of exotic creature, and not at all woebegone.’

  He was, though, at times, woebegone.

  Janice and Frederick decided to leave, but the Richters stayed.

  When Janice and Frederick had gone, Edith said that perhaps the conversation had become too risqué for the communists.

  And too close to home for her comfort.

  The conversation turned, as Amelia admired the furnishings.

  Edith said, ‘It’s the Scandinavian look. I like the clean lines. More Fred Ward; he did my office.’

  The four of them quickly became tipsy – perhaps because they were released from combative wariness.

  Ambrose said he had wanted to do a song and dance act for the Legacy concert. ‘Edith vetoed it.’

  Amelia said, ‘No!’ And, turning to Edith, said, ‘But why, Edith?’

  Edith felt bad. She saw her veto of the burlesque as some sort of cowardice, but still thought it was right strategically. In a rather small voice, she said, ‘Ambrose wanted to do it with his friend from the Commonwealth Office, Allan. En femme.’

  There was a silence.

  She added, ‘The idea was just too outrageous for Canberra and for Legacy, and don’t you encourage him, Amelia.’

  Amelia ignored her. ‘It would certainly liven things up. Help push Canberra into maturity as a city. We’ve never seen anything like that here. Do you agree, Theodor?’

  ‘Certainly, yes. Ambrose should do his act.’

  Amelia then said, ‘Well, if you can’t do it for Legacy, do it for us here.’

  Edith said, ‘Please, Amelia. Stop.’

  ‘Would you really like to see it?’ Ambrose said, brightening up.

  Edith said, ‘Ambrose, no – really – it’s far too late.’

  ‘Not that late,’ Amelia said. ‘It’s Friday night, after all.’

  Edith said no.

  Amelia said, ‘Ambrose, please give us a show.’

  ‘It’ll all take too long – getting dressed and all,’ Edith said. And then, in case they had hadn’t understood, again said, ‘It is en femme.’

  ‘Just the song and dance would be fun,’ Amelia said. ‘It doesn’t have to be a full-dressed rehearsal.’

  ‘It is not a rehearsal. There’s not going to be a performance,’ Edith said.

  Ambrose said, ‘It was to be a burlesque – a decadent Berlin burlesque.’

  Amelia asked where he was going to get their outfits. She looked Ambrose up and down. ‘Edi
th’s clothes?’

  ‘He isn’t,’ Edith rushed to say. ‘It isn’t going ahead.’

  Ambrose dissembled. ‘The Canberra Rep wardrobe department, perhaps.’

  Amelia was now insistent. ‘Everyone tends to be so straitlaced at these concerts. Ambrose, do put on your act for us.’

  Edith did not want to be seen as straitlaced by the Richters, and she was suddenly too tired to try to stop it. She gave way. ‘What the hell, do it.’ She waved her hand in permission. ‘I must stop myself becoming so starchy. But just the song and dance.’

  ‘Do the whole thing. Dress up,’ Amelia urged.

  Ambrose looked across at Edith. She nodded with resignation.

  How would she feel about it tomorrow, sober? She looked at Ambrose, at the vibrancy in his manner, which she had not seen for some time. ‘Go on, dear, you know where to find everything. Do a performance for us.’

  She turned to the Richters, worried that they would catch on that Ambrose already possessed a costume or costumes to wear. ‘You can wear something from my wardrobe,’ she said, hating the dissembling.

  Ambrose was already rising to his feet. ‘Is everyone sure?’ He looked around, getting nods of approval, his gaze coming back to her for final approval. Then she looked at the anticipation in Ambrose’s face. ‘Yes, do it,’ she said again. ‘Don’t take too long or we will lose interest.’

  Amelia said to him, ‘Do you need a hand? A lady-in-waiting?’

  ‘Oh, I think I can manage,’ he said. ‘May need someone to button me up at the back.’

  ‘Just call,’ Edith said, ‘and I’ll come up.’ Edith thought that anyone with an ounce of perception would realise that Ambrose was at home with the idea of dressing en femme, but now, tonight, with the Richters, she couldn’t be bothered caring. They were all tipsy. The Richters were sophisticates.

  Ambrose went off up the stairs to the bedroom. She refilled the drinks and found some salted biscuits and cheese. ‘You shouldn’t have encouraged him.’