When she questioned Frederick and Janice about the spying, they said they didn’t believe it. ‘What was there in Australia to be spied on?’ They had added, ‘If there were spies in the Party, why was it that no one was arrested for espionage?’
Ambrose’s only comment was that the British SIS knew more than the Royal Commission, and more than the Communist Party knew about itself. ‘This Royal Commission is not the time for the story to be told.’
He did not elaborate and she did not push him.
There was a farewell garden party at the High Commission, and the High Commissioner in his speech said with great hypocrisy how sorry the Commission would be to lose them both. She had to accept the farewells and good wishes. It was like experiencing something that could very well have happened in the natural course of things, but that wasn’t going to happen. It was as if one were attending one’s own funeral.
Some guests said that they would miss Ambrose’s burlesque next year at the Legacy concert. The High Commissioner, however, didn’t refer to the concert in his speech or in any of his conversations with her. Maybe it loomed larger in her mind as a scandal than it really was. Was she becoming intimidated by Australia? Fear of the ASIO? Fear of transgressing the moral conventions? Her insecurity came in part from her professional insecurity. She had no proper title or position; she was impotent and vulnerable. She was clinging to Gibson, who had suggested three days a week of office work, but there was so little to do there. Her identity was that of being Major Westwood’s wife.
Ambrose was urbanely good at the farewells and she knew that he harboured a hope that she would follow him to London at some point – that their social deceit would transform into the reality.
In hard-headed moments, she also realised that the deceit also gave her a safety net if the unthinkable happened and Richard recoiled from her because of gossip. She could, then, in all good grace, go to London.
The tension of these false farewells gave her dull headaches and she was taking too much aspirin.
In the dividing up of Ambrose’s and her small possessions, the rocking horse was not mentioned and remained in the hallway, dusted daily by Emily.
She saw Ambrose off at the aerodrome, standing with him at the edge of the runway with his travelling rug and on-board kit. His trunk would follow by sea.
On impulse, she wet her finger with saliva and worked her wedding ring off. She had lost weight and it came off easily. He watched her as one might watch a stranger adjusting his watch. She did not look at him. She bit her lip. ‘Hold out your left hand.’
He did so and she pulled off his grey glove.
She worked the ring onto his small finger, avoiding looking into his eyes. ‘Be married to us both – for our old selves. Our old selves will always be married.’ Her voice broke, she lost her breath and fought to get it back, pushing back the incipient tears with the edge of her hand.
He stifled his tears. Looking at the ring, all he said was, ‘Your friends never tell you when you’ve gone mad,’ which seemed to apply to nothing. A non sequitur.
She managed to say, ‘You may be the sanest of us all.’
‘If this is sanity, I’m not sure I want to be sane.’
‘Part of us will always be married,’ she said. ‘Truly.’
He said, sardonically, ‘A living-apart Bloomsbury marriage – on opposite sides of the world. Very chic.’ And then he said, quietly and with painful sincerity, ‘Yes, always married. You and me; the two of me; the three of us.’
She nodded. There was a truth in that.
The two smiling, smartly uniformed, well made-up air hostesses called to him by name from the airliner steps, addressing him as Major. They beckoned to him to join the flight to Sydney.
Stooping to pick up his travelling rug and kit, he started to walk towards the aircraft, but turned back to her and stopped. She let herself look at him, and tried to smile. It was as if he were waiting for her to join him. She stood where she was and gave a small wave, and he turned back and walked like a diplomat and soldier to the airliner. At the top of the steps, the hostesses took his blanket and kit and he moved one of his hands behind his back, and wiggled an old Molly Club fluttering wave before disappearing into the plane.
She began to choke with irregular sobs, which hurt. She went to the ladies toilet, where she regained her composure and repaired her face, and then joined Theo, the High Commission driver, and members of the public who were seeing off friends. They all waved the taxiing plane along to the end of the tarmac, where it turned and roared down the runway, gathering speed and then rising into the sky. The small crowd continued waving until the plane was out of sight and so did she. Theo was the only person from the High Commission.
As she walked back to the High Commission car with Theo, she thought that, yes, she would always be married to Ambrose in some higher sense. A bond higher than marriage. Not that it could ever mean that much in a day-to-day sense. Theo opened the door and she seated herself in the back of the Bentley.
He said, ‘Arthur Circle, Mrs Westwood?’
She said yes. Perhaps it would be the last time he would address her as Mrs Westwood.
‘How long will it take the Major to reach London?’ he asked, making conversation.
‘About fifty hours, plus the time from Canberra to Sydney.’
‘Many stops?’
‘Darwin – Singapore – Calcutta – Karachi – Cairo – Rome. I’d rather not talk, Theo.’
‘Of course, ma’am.’
She felt a low, sad pain from the guilt of having, for the second time, reneged on a pact initiated many years ago with Ambrose, as a young woman on the train from Paris to Geneva. It was a pact she had then sealed when, one night, with him wearing a satin nightdress, she had welcomed him to her bed and into her life, and he had become her errant lover and her audacious guide. It had been for so long a union not of marriage but of spirit and unique carnality, and he, more than anyone, had widely opened for her all the doors of life.
Declaration of the Free
Neither Frederick nor she had been at the funerals of their mother and father. She had been in Geneva when her mother died and in Vienna with UNRRA when her father died. God knows where Frederick had been. She convinced Frederick to come with her to the graves in Berry.
‘It’s not just sentimental,’ she had argued.
He seemed unenthusiastic, but agreed and suggested Janice join them.
She invited Richard but was not hurt when he declined, saying, ‘That is your past – you must do it – but the children and I have had enough cemetery-visiting in our lives.’
Ideally, she thought it would be both very proper and even necessary for him to be acquainted with her family, even if a dead family. But all that could happen later.
She didn’t debate it.
On the drive, she finally asked Frederick the question that for years had been persistent in the family: why had he cut himself off from the family after leaving school? Why had he run away from home?
His answer surprised her. ‘Mum and Dad had left me years before I left.’
His voice had a tone he didn’t use much. It was a smaller voice. ‘They left home – with all those meetings and so on, driving to Sydney and leaving me in the big house in Jasper’s Brush. Many nights alone in that house I was scared stiff. I would strap on my sheath knife for protection from the dark. They were the ones who ran away from home.’
She felt for him. There was silence in the car for a while.
They parked outside their childhood home and discussed whether they would knock on the door and ask to see the house. They decided that it would be intrusive, and neither Frederick nor she had a strong impulse to revisit it.
At the Berry cemetery, she met her childhood friend, George McDowell – or T. George, as he wished to be known. He was the Mayor, a Rotarian, formerly a free-thinker – perhaps still a free-thinker – who had given the oration at their father’s funeral. She was unsure who had given the
oration at her mother’s funeral.
She had invited T. George to join them and possibly talk about their parents. He suggested that he read out the oration he had given.
He was sitting in his car waiting for them and got out when they arrived. He was dressed in a dark suit, but oddly wore brown shoes and was wearing his mayoral chain. Under the mayoral chain of office, he wore an American Western-style shoestring tie. Indecorously, perhaps, she hugged him and patted his back, and he hugged back too vigorously, the lower half of his body against her, an implication of passion. She pulled herself away and complimented him on his shoestring tie.
He corrected her, saying it was a bolo tie, which the Rotary Club of Phoenix, Arizona, had presented to him on his recent visit. ‘Men wear this sort of tie over there. More sensible than our dull English ties. College ties and such.’
‘Looks rather smart.’ She introduced Janice and he shook her hand.
She saw that the graves had been freshly weeded. ‘You weeded the graves?’
‘Had one of my men come out and do it.’
‘That was thoughtful.’
But there was a rebuke in it. The surviving children were responsible for the upkeep of their parents’ graves.
‘You will see that they are in the Old Section. They shouldn’t be there, but there was nowhere else.’
They all looked around and saw that the cemetery was divided into Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist.
‘No Rationalist section.’
He laughed. ‘And there were not a lot of epitaphs that the mason could do. Your father chose “At rest – life’s journey o’er” for your mother, so we chose that for your father, too. He had wanted a longer statement, but it wouldn’t fit and the mason thought it might be controversial. We chose to cover each grave with seashells.
‘I’ve arranged an order of procedure,’ he continued, pulling out some notepapers from his worn attaché case, gold-initialled with the initialling fading into history. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any proper Order of Service that I could find dictating how such a service should be held by close relatives first visiting a burial site so long after the burial.’
‘It had never crossed my mind that there would be,’ Edith said.
‘So I worked one up myself.’
Of course he had. She was amused. He put on his rimless glasses.
Janice suggested that they first open the cooler and have a glass of wine. T. George frowned at the outsider’s amendment to his plan and then approved it with a nod.
Edith watched Janice take control. Janice went about getting the glasses and opening the wine wrapped in a wet tea towel from the auto cooler – they had been unable to get ice. Janice had been somewhat pushed aside by Richard coming into her life. Edith felt less need for her. Perhaps Janice had given up on any expectation that she would join the Party and was also drifting away. She still found Janice – both in her manner and her body – attractive in some uneasy way, but it was a direction from which she had again turned and from which, during her life, she had always turned.
Frederick went off on his own and was standing with one foot on the low brick edging wall that enclosed both graves, staring at the graves. She couldn’t read his expression.
‘I thought I should begin with your mother’s eulogy and then move on to your father’s. That is, in order of decease.’ T. George said this in a raised voice, intending that it reach Frederick.
‘That would be good, George,’ she said, answering for her brother and herself.
Janice handed around the glasses of wine. They were the crystal goblets that Edith had insisted upon, which she had wrapped in muslin for the journey. She left Janice and T. George, and went over to Frederick and put an arm around him. He took the wine but said nothing.
‘Let’s do this,’ she said. She turned and motioned to T. George and Janice.
T. George had a stout box covered in felting, which he carried over to the graves. The felt had been nailed to the box. He drank some more from his wine and then handed the glass to Edith for her to hold, and mounted the box. He stared out into the distance across the paddocks and up to the clouds for a second or three, and then returned his eyes to his papers.
‘I will not read out the list of those present. It would take too long. Suffice it to say that those present represented both the district and the Rationalist Society, and included some notables from interstate, including the now Chief Justice of the High Court, namely John Latham.
‘Both your father and your mother had asked for Rationalist services, and both requested that the poem by Robert Ingersoll entitled “Declaration of the Free” be read. I delivered it at your father’s funeral.’ He looked to Frederick and then to her. ‘I forget who read it at your mother’s funeral. Sorry. No, I remember. It was read at your mother’s funeral by Will Andrade. They both cut lines from the poem before they died. Should I read the lines they wanted cut from the poem?’
Edith and Frederick in unison said, ‘No.’
Edith said, ‘Just read what was read at our father’s funeral. You do not have to read the poem twice.’
T. George had always been a man for detail.
They were both familiar with the poem from childhood. Edith thought she would look at the lines they cut, but at another time.
T. George then paused and looked at Janice. ‘I should apologise to you, Miss Linnett. You may not be familiar with the works of Robert G. Ingersoll. He was a leading American Rationalist, and for a time Attorney General of the state of Illinois. If you were interested, I possess the twelve volumes of his speeches. Walt Whitman said he was the greatest orator of his day. He was a friend of Walt Whitman. In fact, Whitman said of Ingersoll that “Ingersoll is the Leaves of Grass”.’
Edith leaned to Frederick and said, ‘Remember our father reading out from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, which has as the second commandment “No images nor idols make / for Robert Ingersoll to break” ’
Frederick nodded and smiled. ‘I remember that.’
T. George rustled his papers and cleared his throat. ‘Should I commence?’
They both nodded. He adopted a solemn voice. ‘We have assembled to bid a kind and solemn farewell to our dear friends and mother and father of Edith Alison Campbell Berry and Frederick David Campbell Berry . . .’ He paused and said, ‘I will read the poem. There were probably a few more words said before the poem, but I have abbreviated the preamble.
‘We have no falsehoods to defend
We want the facts;
Our force, our thought, we do not spend
In vain attacks.
And we will never meanly try
To save some fair and pleasing lie . . .
We’ve set ourselves the noble task
To find the real.
If all there is naught but dross,
We want to know and bear our loss.
We will not willingly be fooled,
By fables nursed . . .’
Edith wiped her eyes. She vaguely remembered some of the lines of the poem from her adolescence and had been silently agreeing with the verses, although she saw them as now somewhat antiquated in their simplicity. It was this simplicity that described her and Fredrick’s upbringing.
She hoped George was not going to read it all. She glanced at Janice and Frederick, who seemed to be listening.
‘Our hearts, by earnest thought, are schooled
To bear the worst;
And we can stand erect and dare
All things, all facts that really are.
We have no God to serve or fear,No hell to shun,
No devil with malicious leer.
When life is done
An endless sleep may close our eyes.
A sleep with neither dreams nor sighs.
We have no master on the land –
No king in air . . .
When evil comes we do not curse,
Or thank because it is not worse.
When cyclon
es rend – when lightning blights,
’Tis naught but fate;
There is no God of wrath who smites
In heartless hate.
Behind the things that injure man
There is no purpose, thought, or plan . . .
And we are here,
All welcome guests at life’s great feast . . .’
Oh God, he was going to read it all. She wondered if she could stop him. Frederick looked her as if sharing the thought.
‘We need no help from ghost or priest.
Our life is joyous, jocund, free . . .
The jewelled cup of love we drain,
And friendship’s wine . . .’
T. George looked up, gestured to the wine glass and smiled. He repeated the line, ‘The jewelled cup of love we drain, And friendship’s wine.’ Obviously pleased with his linking of the oration to the occasion, his eyes went back to his papers and he continued with the poem.
‘. . . Living flesh . . . With passion’s soft and soulful eyes,
Lips warm and fresh . . .’
‘Living flesh, with passion’s soft and soulful eyes, lips warm and fresh . . .’ She had found these again with Richard.
‘No fear to pass beyond the veil
That hides the dead.
There is no master of the show.’
T. George then paused, looked to the clouds and then at them, and said from memory, slowly enunciating each word with a tone of profundity: ‘We question, we dream, we guess.’
He stopped and stood silent, eyes closed.
Edith said, ‘That was very fine, George. Thank you.’
Frederick spoke. ‘Thank you, George. Well done.’
Janice quietly clapped.
Edith said, ‘Not the greatest poetry.’
T. George looked down at the lines on the page as if this were something he had missed. She suspected that anything that rhymed and carried within it thoughts with which he agreed, was great poetry for him.
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