Cold Light
Page 36
The cultured Mr T, while being only a middle public-service grade, fitted in and made good company and always brought along a stylish home-cooked dish, often from a Continental cuisine.
They once had a campfire picnic at midnight on Red Hill with kerosene lamps and flares. Hardly a light was on in the city. At night it became an invisible city. The bombers would have trouble finding it.
Allan discovered a common connection with Theodor. As an undergraduate, Allan had mixed with Cox and his crowd and had also holidayed to Morocco and Spain with Cox. He and Theodor swapped stories about Cox, and Allan was surprised when Theodor said Cox had not made a sexual advance on these vacations. Once, when only Ambrose, Mr T and herself were present, Allan questioned Theodor about him.
‘Cox was, of course, quite scandalous about these matters,’ Allan said. ‘He couldn’t wait for the next crop of pretty undergraduates to arrive.’ Then, leaning towards Theodor, Allan narrowed his eyes and said conspiratorially, ‘Are you sure, Theodor, that you didn’t have just a teeny-weeny dalliance with Cox?’
Theodor blushed and laughed. ‘I think, Allan, I would’ve known if such a dalliance occurred – even if teeny-weeny. No, these trips were strictly over-eating, over-sleeping and anthropological. You could call them book camps. What Cox did after dark was his business. There was a little hashish, I seem to recall. Strictly experimental.’
‘Of course,’ Allan said, laughing. ‘Everything at college is strictly “experimental”.’
Ambrose and Mr T laughed, and Ambrose said, ‘Except that some of us continued experimenting well after college – indeed, some of us found we liked the “experimental life” better than real life, or whatever life is called when you leave college.’
Edith luxuriated in these stories, feeling that it added colour and substance to her dream of a Bloomsbury in Canberra.
Allan and Ambrose played ‘friends bridge’ with the High Commission once a fortnight, but their forthcoming Legacy act was mentioned in only the blandest of terms. She usually begged off from bridge unless one of the tables needed a fourth, feeling that it made the men uncomfortable, and instead chatted with the wives, who occasionally played euchre. It was the only time she smoked a cigarette or two.
Card nights at the High Commission were, for Ambrose and her, a way of socialising with people with whom they had little in common by mind or style. She did not like games – her father had always said that card playing was invented to waste time and avoid thinking – but she was rather good at bridge. In her young days in Melbourne, Morris Phillips, a friend of John Latham and a bright member of the Melbourne Rationalists, had taught her bridge, and in Geneva she had been glad of her bridge skills and had accepted any invitation to join the men and learn their ways. In diplomatic life, bridge was known as an acceptable pastime for men of importance who were holders of secrets. It allowed them to socialise together without having to talk about affairs of the day, though she found that inadvertently something was revealed that should not have been revealed or, as Ambrose once told her, some things were advertently let drop at bridge that someone wanted fed into the gossip of official circles.
Although it was discussed, they did not have time to shop in Melbourne for new costumes for the concert. With Emily’s help, they made some adjustments to a French evening dress of Edith’s and some of the other garments. Emily seemed to be quite at ease with Ambrose and Allan dressing in female clothing – ‘All for a good cause’ – and with a mouth full of pins would make the adjustments to their dresses.
Edith, Janice and Amelia had tactfully convinced Ambrose and Allan that they could not be flappers – the time of the flapper had passed – and they had to be more the torch singer. Their routines had also been modified to be more of the times. The truth was, though, that during their dance movements the boys could not achieve unison in the swing and toss of the long beaded necklaces they fancied.
The dress Edith had fixed for Ambrose was green crepe with a fitted bodice, padded shoulders, and sleeves trimmed at the wrists with two bands of gold and silver sequins. Ambrose had begged for more sequins, but had to accept that was the limit to sequins. Emily had raised the floor-length gathered skirt a few inches and let it out, so as to give him a chance to kick his legs, even if he would not be doing a can-can. The can-can was another thing Edith discouraged the boys from attempting as a trio. There had been screeches of disappointment.
There was also a compromise with eyebrows. Edith had to remind them that, as with Cinderella, they would, after the ball, have to return to scrubbing floors. They would have to live in their oh-so-official male worlds, where shaped eyebrows would, well, raise eyebrows.
Finding shoes was difficult, but Ambrose’s wardrobe provided some large enough, if not quite in-style, shoes. That they should be in his possession she chose not to explain to Amelia or Janice, suggesting that some had come from the Rep.
Amelia came up with a name for the trio – The High Heeled Commissioners – and Edith came up with the name for the show – Bloomsbury on the Molonglo.
One afternoon, relaxing in the garden after a rehearsal, Janice said with slightly veiled curiosity, ‘The Major seems very, very much at home in his role as a torch singer.’
Janice had heard the banter and the change of voice pitch among the boys when they transformed from moths into butterflies, and witnessed the playful touching – especially between Ambrose and Allan – but Edith doubted that Janice, for all her family sophistication and travel, could fully imagine what kinds of butterflies they were. Or, at least, had been when younger, or wished still to be. It was more a fishing expedition. Edith sometimes considered that perhaps it was time to tell the truth to Amelia in confidence – but never Janice – about Ambrose’s predilection, but a voice always resounded in her head, saying, Edith Campbell Berry – no, never. It had to be left in the mist of puzzlement, assumption and dissembling. She had long ago decided there was nothing of value to be gained, for her or for Ambrose, in revealing this recherché matter, this division in his person – and her person, she had always to remind herself – to anyone outside the circle of those who belonged in this world. Nothing at all to be gained. Amelia, she felt, might understand it, with her pre-war German background – they’d already confided their atheism and progressive views on women and sex – but when she saw Amelia, the mother of four, on her knees in her Canberra vegetable garden, she could see that it was all now a world too far. Ambrose’s act at Arthur Circle that night was as far as the revelation would ever go, and would, she felt, never be repeated.
Janice seemed to believe the idea that the act was really a tribute to the female impersonators of the POW camps. Edith asked her whether Frederick had decided it was all simply decadent behaviour.
‘Oddly, he’s intrigued and admiring of Ambrose. You know, he’s fond of Ambrose, even if he sees him as well and truly on the other side. And I believe Fred’s glad of a break away from the comrades – glad to be among your bande à part. Bande à part? Is that the French expression? You must always correct my French when it’s atrociously wrong. I must one day get to France. I am owed my grand tour; the war stole it from me. He doesn’t feel he’s working when he’s with your crowd.’ She laughed. ‘We still feel you’re both potential party members – even the Major. Look at Burgess and Maclean.’
Janice sat for a while smoking after the boys had gone through their act again, and then said, ‘Do these sorts of shows take the mickey out of us – as women?’
‘ “Mickey” ’
‘Mocking.’
‘I expect you to keep me up-to-date with my slang. These shows have been going for . . . I don’t know . . . centuries. Perhaps they could be seen as a form of homage to us – to women.’
‘You don’t think they make fun of us?’
‘Never thought of it that way.’ Edith wondered if this was more of Janice’s sniffing around about Ambrose.
‘Perhaps they want to show that they can do without us?’
‘They don’t know the half of it – of being a woman.’
Edith smiled and touched Janice’s hand. ‘They only get to play with the fun bits.’
They laughed in a resigned, in-club way. Edith thought that Ambrose, and those like him she had known over the years, seemed to want to express essences, semblances of womanhood, which they found in themselves. They did not really want to be women, as such. She didn’t fully understand it, though, and, she supposed, had realised that she didn’t need to. She and Ambrose had discussed the sensual difference between the anus and vagina, but she was not ready to talk to Janice – nor anyone she knew – about that. Women alone, having both anus and vagina, could know the difference, but then there was the question of the men’s gland down there in the back passage, which women did not have. Perhaps these deep experiences were knowable only in an approximate way, through language. She sometimes wondered about Strachey when he said that he found women’s genitals ‘désorienté’. She had, at the time, felt the same way about men’s genitals.
Janice pressed on, driven by a curiosity. ‘I hear, though, that there are clubs in Sydney and Melbourne. Illegal clubs.’
Edith told Janice about the boys in Adelaide, which Janice seemed to regard as something worthy of police attention, and somehow distinct from these rehearsals and the planned act. ‘In the Soviet Union, they would be cured of it medically. But you’ve been to places in Geneva where this sort of things goes on?’
Edith considered her answer. ‘I have. There was a club in Geneva – the Molly.’
‘And Ambrose went to these places?’
Again, she saw the answer could give Janice too much information. ‘We had friends there. The Molly was a secret centre for the resistance to the Nazis. There was a spy network operating out of the club – helping people escape from the occupied zones, that sort of thing.’
‘How strange that deviants should do that sort of work.’
‘Deviants, as you call them, have their own grapevine of connections through many countries. And they are clever at subterfuge.’
‘There was nothing like it in Prague when I was living there after the war. At least, nothing that I knew of, or that my circle would’ve known of. Can’t see Murray-Smith going to that sort of club.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe.’
Janice was still fishing. Edith hated this prevarication. Silence was the only answer and sometimes the implication that the silence carried with it.
The night of the Legacy Concert came around.
She and Amelia dressed the boys back at the house. Then, after a few strong drinks, Amelia and Janice, Mr T’s personal guests, in their separate cars drove them to the Albert Hall. Frederick had decided not to come to the concert.
Backstage was hectic.
A compère introduced the items to the full hall. Most of the audience was in evening dress. The programme was made up of musical items of varying standard: an accordionist; a soprano who sang ‘Pack up your Troubles in your Old Kit Bag’ and ‘Danny Boy’; a conjurer doing coin and egg tricks, which were always hopeless in a big hall – the coin and eggs were too small; the Rep, who did a rather good one-act comic sketch; schoolchildren, who sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Minstrel Boy to the Wars has Gone’; the scouts, who did some gymnastics on a wooden-horse apparatus; and a local farmer poet, or more precisely grazier poet and war hero, David Campbell, who read one of his own poems. He enunciated well.
I sat beside the red stock route
And chewed a blade of bitter grass
And saw in mirage on the plain
A bullock wagon pass.
Old Harry Pearce was with his team
‘The flies are bad,’ I said to him.
The High Heeled Commissioners were the hit of the night. The clapping was sustained. Huddled in the wings, the compère, the stage manager, Amelia and she urged them to do their encore.
‘Wait till we hear the word encore,’ Ambrose said, in a high state. Allan and Mr T were peeping out at the audience through the curtains. ‘They loved us,’ Mr T said. ‘They really did.’
From within the continuing clapping there were now cries of ‘More!’ and ‘Encore!’ And with a count of one, two, three they went out onto stage, arms linked, and the stage manager, guided by Edith, put on their encore record, connected to the loud speaker: ‘I Want to Be a Prom Girl’.
At the end of the song, the three of them did perfectly synchronised curtsies and twirling waves of their painted fingers, and tripped off stage, flushed.
‘Say, we were rather good, weren’t we,’ Allan said.
‘You were, you were,’ Amelia said, giving them a hug.
Edith said, ‘Professional and quite attractive,’ and also gave them each a hug.
‘Perhaps we have a new career,’ Mr T said, glowing. Perhaps he truly hoped for a new career.
During the performances, Edith had watched the High Commissioner’s face from the wings. He had not shown amusement, but perhaps that was just the sang froid of rank and Britishness.
There was a party afterwards for performers and VIPs, held at the Hotel Canberra’s Blue Room next door to the hall. Only Mr T took advantage of the male clothing change that Edith, Amelia and Janice had brought along in suitcases for the boys. Allan and Ambrose instead wanted to stay en femme, although Allan, at least, took off his wig, make-up and earrings. Ambrose brushed off suggestions that he remove his. There among the VIPs and curious women, they all stood, the three stars laughing and talking confidently, full of high spirits.
Ambrose had requested tickets to the party for Emily and her husband, and they seemed to socialise famously, chatting to all. Edith did not have to worry about chaperoning them.
In his male clothes, Mr T was rather lost in that crowd, and apart from his own guests most didn’t realise he was one of the performers. Edith tried to stay with him and introduce him around. Once recognised, he received much praise for his performance.
Taking her out of the conversational group, Ambrose said to her that he needed to go to the toilet, but did not know to which toilet he should go.
‘We should have thought of this,’ she said. She felt vexed. ‘You should have changed. That was the plan.’
There was nothing to do about it. At the old Molly Club, the Dames toilets were for lady guests, performers and en femme customers.
‘I suppose, I could go to the gents – use a stall,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps I should go to the ladies. Less likelihood of a commotion.’
‘I suspect either may cause a commotion. You will not go to the ladies – and, anyhow, there is always a queue. Chance it in the gents, and for God’s sake, take off your wig.’
Ambrose took off the wig and gave it to her.
‘And the earrings.’ She held out her hand. He did as he was told and then swished off to the gents.
She shook her head and went back to the conversation.
Theodor joined them and was full of praise. ‘The boys were stunning as girls. I suppose that’s another product of an English public school education.’
‘I wish Ambrose would accept that the show is over,’ she said.
Theodor then recognised Mr T and said, ‘I didn’t recognise you as a male, Mr T, you danced so well. The three of you were fully professional.’
Mr T sighed. ‘Like Ambrose, I am sorry to have left the stage. I am afraid that it may be my finest hour.’
‘Oh no – we must have another show . . . somewhere,’ Amelia said.
The next thing of which Edith was aware was seeing Ambrose coming out of the gents holding toilet paper to his face, through which she saw the stains of blood. She rushed to him.
‘Oh God, what happened?’ She put an arm around him. ‘Show me.’
People were turning to look at him. Mr T came over and asked if he should find a first-aid box. She nodded. The dependable Mr T.
Then, waving at them from the door of the gents and shouting in an educated voice, a man in a dinner suit called, ‘Disgrace to manhood.’
Edith suppressed the irritation she felt with Ambrose for having provoked this trouble by not changing, and she then caught the face of the High Commissioner in the crowd. He seemed far from happy, having witnessed the abusive man.
She turned to Ambrose and said, ‘Did you say anything to the man while you were in there?’
‘I may have nodded and smiled.’
‘That would have been enough.’
‘Or, perhaps, winked. I didn’t blow him a kiss.’
She didn’t laugh.
Theodor and Amelia, and a few from what she called her Bloomsbury Gang, came over to see if everything was okay. Their solid confidence and ease made her feel less distrait. Even Emily came to the rescue.
Allan, concerned, came over, glanced at Ambrose and then to the shouting man, who had gathered a few supporters around him, and said, ‘Let’s leave here now.’
She agreed, and they led Ambrose outside. Janice joined them and they made it to the cars. Mr T had been unable to find a first-aid kit, and Ambrose still held the toilet paper to his nose, now quite stained.
‘Boorish oaf,’ Ambrose said.
She wrapped Ambrose’s black fur American Galloway around him.
Back at the house, the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Ambrose momentarily slipped back into his training as a doctor and carefully felt his nose in front of the bathroom mirror, concluding that it was broken. On his instruction, she brought him some ice wrapped in a bandage. ‘Nothing much to be done with a broken nose,’ he said. ‘My looks, though, will be ruined for life.’
Amelia poured everyone drinks. One of Mr T’s friends had come with them.
For comfort, Edith decided to make them all hot chocolate. It took her back to the ugly incident in Geneva before the war with the Action Civique. They had drunk hot chocolate that night, too.