Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘How bloody awful,’ Allan said, as he took his cup of hot chocolate from the tray. And then, mustering a smile, he said to Ambrose, ‘But blood-red does suit you. Try it on the nails rather than the nose.’

  Ambrose stretched out his hands with their painted nails. ‘You could be right, dear.’

  ‘The HC was far from happy,’ Edith said.

  Ambrose turned to her. ‘With the oaf – or with me?’

  ‘I’ll handle Sir Stephen,’ Allan said.

  ‘I nearly used jujitsu on the oaf,’ Ambrose said. Coming from his en femme self, it sounded so out of character. She had never heard him refer to jujitsu or his knowledge of it before in her life.

  ‘Jujitsu?’ she said, looking at him as if at a stranger on a train.

  ‘Jujitsu,’ he said. ‘I learned it in the army. At sniper school – First Army School of Sniping and Scouting.’ He had never mentioned the sniper school.

  She raised her eyebrows at Allan. He shook his head at her.

  She then said to Ambrose, ‘Are you in shock? You are sounding like you’re in shock. I thought you were with the Medical Regiment.’

  ‘I was in the Medical Regiment – Divisional Sanitary Section, to be precise . . .’

  There was always laughter when he mentioned this. She hated him playing down his war record.

  She interjected, saying, ‘He saved hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives for his work reducing trench fever and cerebro-spinal fever. Five mentions in dispatches.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Edith, for blowing my trumpet. I was also at the First Army Sniping School. I had things medical to teach them, and in return they taught me unarmed combat. They have to know a bit more about medical matters than the average man in the trench – the snipers work in twos detached from their unit, well away from medical assistance. If one of them takes a wound the other has to be able to deal with it.’

  ‘The world should disarm and learn unarmed combat. And, of course, you should have used jujitsu in the men’s toilet. In a dress. You could have made mincemeat of them all. That would have been a fine spectacle.’ She said it kindly, humorously. ‘A lavatory brawl in a frock. Always protect your frock first.’

  She wondered if Allan would handle Sir Stephen. In a few days Allan would be gone from all this, back to the important busyness of London. He would probably joke about it among his friends, would say how achingly funny the concert and their world here was.

  She then said to Ambrose, ‘Did you really tell the HC what you were going to do on stage this evening?’

  Ambrose looked up at her. ‘I told him the song we intended singing. He wasn’t too familiar with Cole Porter’s work.’

  ‘And?’

  Ambrose again stretched his perfectly manicured hand and admired his nails. ‘In my last chat with Sir Stephen in the days before the concert, I told him that we had not finalised our costuming.’

  ‘In other words, you did not tell him you intended to sing with Allan and Mr T – David – dressed in female clothing? With painted nails and lipstick?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not in so many words, no.’

  ‘Not in any words. What you mean is that you told him the names of the songs and allowed him to think you and Allan would sing the song on stage in your Homburgs and furled umbrellas?’

  ‘I did mention the word burlesque.’

  ‘And why didn’t you tell him what you intended to do?’

  ‘He would have put the kybosh on it.’

  She shook her head. ‘Dear God.’

  Mr T then said, ‘I didn’t tell McLaren about the act either.’ He was like a second naughty schoolboy honourably telling the truth to a headmistress. They had suggested to Mr T that he use a stage name in the printed programme. Courageously, he had said no, he would use his own name.

  ‘Mr T, it was not your responsibility. It was not a requirement. I doubt that McLaren or others from the department recognised you.’

  She turned back to Ambrose, holding him in her gaze. ‘Hopeless,’ she said. ‘Hopeless. And, Mr T, you are recklessly brave, but brave nonetheless.’

  ‘I felt neither brave nor fearful when I was on stage. I feel brave now; foolishly brave. I shouldn’t have changed back for the party.’

  ‘You are brave, Mr T,’ Allan said. ‘I intend to propose you for the Queen’s Honours List.’

  Mr T chuckled. ‘A queen honoured by a Queen.’

  They laughed.

  Edith said, ‘I’m the only coward here. I was wrong to want to veto it. I apologise. I was wrong. You are all brave, brave girls. And beautiful.’

  The Richters said, ‘Hear, hear,’ and lightly clapped.

  Edith said, shamefacedly, ‘And I should have let you do the can-can.’

  Amelia said, ‘You are all heroes and I propose a toast.’ They clinked glasses and drank ‘to Bloomsbury on the Molonglo’.

  Ambrose, head back on the sofa, sang ‘Anything Goes’.

  Edith saw that she had gone from the oldest cities of the world to the newest – the smallest capital city in the world. She was inside one of the smallest nations in the world, now sitting with two men dressed as women, without their wigs, and tired make-up, one singing Cole Porter songs, reluctant to change back to their male beings, clinging to their in-between world even for these last hours. Both of these men had spent their lives using their intelligence and education in open ways and in devious ways to struggle against the coarse and indecent as best they could.

  It could be Bloomsbury. Had Bloomsbury come to live in Canberra? She doubted it. This scene did not yet belong in Canberra. Perhaps now it belonged nowhere. Bloomsbury had gone with the war.

  She looked across at Ambrose, momentarily caught by a mad notion that from tonight he would never change back to being the Homburg-hatted diplomat. He would stay en femme forever.

  And she looked at Mr T, some make-up now still visible. She wondered if he was not the bravest of the three. How would he fit into the regulated public service after tonight?

  Her life now seemed to be echoes of fading echoes; events resembling, but not repeating, earlier events of her life. As Bishop Butler once said, everything was what it was and was not a repetition. Everything was in some small way always unique; more a swirling, circular current coming around again. Not the same as it was when it left, not as strong as when it swirled away from her or stronger, but fearfully similar, carrying its own new debris, and then moving away along the stream, never to return.

  And as she recalled the moment the man called out his abuse and Ambrose, blood-stained toilet paper to his face, came to her through the crowd, dressed as a womanly night-club singer, she saw the faces of the grim High Commissioner, the Prime Minister and the Governor-General. But she also saw the face of loyal Emily coming to their aid; she saw the defiant faces of the Richters, who had dealt with worse than this in Germany, but who, perhaps, saw that same human worst in seedling form tonight.

  The Man with Two Children

  Although it was now some time back, the hand-on-the-leg incident at the Prime Minister’s dinner did cross her mind from time to time. She had seen the man at one reception and was tempted to go across to him, but thought she should allow him to approach her. He didn’t. She assumed that whatever attraction he had felt on the night of the dinner no longer moved him. And, of course, he was a married man. Still, at receptions at the legations she always looked for his face. She had discovered that he was a middle-ranking public servant, somehow connected to uranium and the beginning of mining at Rum Jungle, but left it at that. Perhaps he was away at the mine much of the time.

  However, his face did appear one morning at breakfast in the garden at Arthur Circle, rising up from the pages of the Canberra Times, from a news story of a tragedy.

  His wife had been killed in a car accident, but he and his two children – two young boys – had survived with minor injury.

  She did not bring this to Ambrose’s attention as he sat reading a week-old London Telegraph. She did
not know why she didn’t. No, she did know. This now tragic man was handsome to her and he had begun something, or at least ventured something, at the dinner, which was not yet finished and which, in her, called out for something more. Now, today, at breakfast, seeing his photograph, she felt a quiver pass through her. And it was something she did not, at this very moment, wish to share with Ambrose; she did not know how to share it with herself, except to follow its tantalisation and to invite the quiver to stay, for a moment or two, in a small, flashing fantasy.

  She now assumed that it had been his family that had restrained him from pursuing her further, whatever his impulses had been that night at the Prime Minister’s dinner. Or she chose to so assume. He had not behaved as a family man on the night in question. Perhaps honour had corrected his behaviour after that night, and the hand on the knee had been just a man’s tipsy divertissement.

  She saw from the newspaper that he was attached to the new Atomic Energy Commission, and she remembered that he had mentioned this on the night of the dinner party. Recently, she had discovered a renewed interest in the science of it all, spurred by Frederick and Janice, who seemed enthused that the Soviets had an electricity plant powered by uranium, skiting that it was further evidence of the superiority of the Soviet economy, which they claimed was producing over five times that of the USA. Ambrose doubted the Soviet figure – all Soviet statistics – but even if one halved it, it was still twice that of the USA.

  She still found that there was something glamorously modern about a man who worked with a substance of such power, potential and danger.

  She decided to send him a condolence card. That was itself a guilty move, because it would not be a condolence card: it would be an overture, and an overture of unforeseeable consequences. Which a hand on the knee also was. One overture of unforeseeable – well, to be honest, of reasonably foreseeable – consequence must not be surprised by a like overture, even if some time had passed since that first overture.

  Although it had to be admitted that, given the timing, it was a rather ghoulish use of the tragedy, she brushed aside questions of taste and etiquette, something of which until now she would have thought herself incapable. It would be obvious to him that she did not know him well enough to send condolences, and that the condolence could only mean something else.

  Her libido was unconcerned with such matters, seeing only the cleverness of an overture to seduction concealed within a card of condolence.

  If she’d had any certain expectations about his response, it was to expect an unnaturally quick reply or no reply. The reply came unnaturally fast. She had used her work address as the return address – more evidence of her feminine slyness – and the response suggested a meeting over lunch at the new Commonwealth Club, which was now in the former High Commission residency, just up from where she worked. She knew it well – Ambrose and she had been at the opening night of the club, but she did not recollect seeing him on that night. The venue was a clever choice for a recently widowed man and a married woman to meet. It was a place where they would certainly be seen by people who knew them both, but by being so open about the meeting it proved their innocence. Nevertheless, she made sure that Ambrose, who had Diplomatic Membership at the club, would not be lunching there, without revealing that she would be.

  Richard greeted her at reception and they entered the dining room together. He stopped at one table to accept condolences, and she to acknowledge acquaintances from her Canberra social life. They both brazenly introduced each other at the respective tables.

  For the lunch – well, assignation – she had brightened her eyes with cosmetic drops she had seen advertised in a magazine. She wore her newest clothes: a simple day dress made of fine wool with a slim skirt; a stylised bowler with a satin band and bow; and her favourite lingerie – those items that pleased her most against her skin and in the mirror.

  She believed that lingerie changed the way one moved – especially a well-fitted corset – and she always had clear, definite views when dressing as to which underwear the occasion required, or even the mood of the day required, or which her spirits required. And, who knows? Perhaps today the errant spirit of her lingerie de jour would communicate itself to him.

  As he pulled out her chair and she sat down, she felt her lingerie against her body and liked the way the low-waisted corset held her. In reality, she had not much hope that the lunch itself would evolve into an erotic assignation during which he might get to view her in her lingerie, but one never knew. His state of mind would play a part, along with the severe limitations on such a thing happening easily in Canberra. She had placed in her handbag her diaphragm, renewed after the war but unused since Vienna, where she had indulged in a couple of amourettes. She had kept it in its Bakelite container, talcum-powdered, unneeded with the unfertile Ambrose.

  Bringing the diaphragm was a rather sad, fanciful little challenge to age, to physiology; a wry, mocking denial of nature. It was a piece of play-acting by her psyche. The possibility of conception had passed from her life. She’d had none of the medical book symptoms. No hot flushing. She did not seem to be less sexual with Ambrose. She still became wet during sex. She knew that not all women had the same symptoms when they reached the climacteric.

  While not unbecoming, he seemed rather nervously cheerier than he should for a man in mourning, but she knew enough about death to know that mourning was a convention and that people met the death of their intimates with many responses that were not outwardly mournful, and that she thought sometimes included unexpressed feelings of relief.

  ‘The children are making sense, in their own ways, of something that has no sense,’ he said, talking quickly as they sipped their gin and tonics. She had followed his choice of drink. ‘They’re with their grandparents in Sydney – my parents. Their mother’s parents are in the west. Quite elderly. Osborne’s arm is out of plaster now. An arm in plaster made him something of a hero at school. He’s the youngest.’

  Then he said, or blurted, ‘You do not feel that I behaved like a reprobate on that night of the dinner? I couldn’t believe I did what I did.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe I let you.’

  ‘And I couldn’t believe you let it happen. Came from your having been so long in Europe, I assumed. Used to that sort of thing.’

  Did this imply that he thought her easy or wicked? Or that she was somehow responsible for it happening? ‘And at a PM’s dinner,’ she said, not betraying her slight pulling-back from him.

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply anything when I said that about your being, well, European.’

  Good.

  ‘Then I will take it as a compliment.’

  They smiled at each other: a smile to calm and reassure. So often in situations of grief and gravity, humour seemed to find a way to slip in, to jostle with the solemnity we granted death.

  She said, ‘I suppose if anyone had observed it they would not have believed their eyes and could not anyhow have said anything.’

  ‘Who was on your right?’ he asked.

  ‘Gibson, the city planner. I work with him at Interior.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Of course, you replied to me at my office address.’

  ‘I kept track of you, but could do nothing . . . about you.’ He looked to her for understanding. ‘I saw you at that reception, but did not know what to do or say if I were to approach you.’

  Her eyes went down to the table as her breathing quickened, and then rose to meet his eyes, which were waiting for hers.

  He reached for her hand, which she gave to him – then both hands, held for a few quick seconds, and then released in the interests of decorum and of subterfuge. If observed, she thought, it would be interpreted by onlookers as an act of consolation.

  She looked for his age in his face and fancied he was younger by a couple of years. On closer view, she thought maybe ten years younger, which was quite flattering, although it was also a caution. What psychological need was she expected to fulfi
l for a younger man? But he was not a youth. She doubted that this was a rash impulse. He must have begun his family late. She had once told Ambrose to act his age, and he had answered, ‘And which age would you like me to be?’ At the League, she had ‘played old’, and also with Ambrose’s friends so as to align herself with Ambrose’s age. But with Janice, she had been given a chance to act young, even dress younger, and she had changed her age again. For no reason, she blushed.

  He queried her blush with a raised eyebrow. She said saucily, ‘Hands are so expressive.’ She then leaned across and whispered, ‘Especially when placed on a lady’s leg.’

  He smiled, enjoying being released from his guilt by her. He seemed so less brash than she remembered.

  ‘So,’ she said, trying to correct her breathing.

  ‘So,’ he said, heightened.

  It was a word both asserting and securely sealing their seductive intentions.

  He said, softly, ‘You must think me cold-hearted, given the circumstances.’

  ‘I’ve known intimate loss and observed intimate loss. I think we sometimes display conventional feelings as a way of reflecting the expectations of the person who, say, comes bearing condolence.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  Without consideration, regardless that they had not had lunch, almost as a cry of need but also as something of a command, she said, ‘Where should we go?’

  He looked at her and this time he flushed. ‘What about the Major?’

  He didn’t use the rank in the teasing way Janice used it. It was more a respectful use. Oddly, it was Janice’s reaction to all this that sprang to her mind and pricked her in a small way. What was it with her and women? Why worry about Janice? The intrusion did not linger. Their mood was so heady, she realised, that it excluded nearly all other considerations.

  She shrugged.

  He said, ‘Maybe we should eat lunch? For appearances?’