Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  Frederick, in a low voice meant only for Janice and her, said, ‘We should remember that commodities appear to be simple objects, but they are, in fact, bundles of social relationships with a life of their own, abounding in metaphysical niceties . . .’

  She glanced at him. He almost seemed to be making fun of Marx as well as T. George and their father. Janice poked him on the arm. She too had a smile on her face.

  Edith wondered about the many long arguments into the dark of night in the small country towns by men such as her father and George. She did admire the small company, the inventors, the innovators, the geniuses. But they needed the oversight of social control. They had to have red tape, whether they liked it or not. Red tape protected people, protected the land, made sure products were safe.

  ‘I saw fit to include the lines Robert G. Ingersoll spoke at the funeral of Walt Whitman, which seemed to describe your father. It is about an aspect of his character, which when spoken glibly seems to be of little note, but when considered, and when practised fearlessly, is perhaps as monumental as it is rare – that is, your father was a candid man. As Ingersoll said of Whitman, “He had frankness and courage, and he was as candid as light. He was willing that all the sons of men should be absolutely acquainted with his heart and brain. He had nothing to conceal. Candid, pure, serene, noble, and yet for years he was maligned and slandered, simply because he had the candour of nature.” ’

  Edith was surprised, even hurt, to hear that her father was disliked, let alone slandered. She wondered what the maligning and slandering had been about and how it had been expressed. She knew that there was gossip about her parents’ atheism, but perhaps there had been more. She should talk with T. George about it.

  T. George stopped, looked up and said, ‘Other people then talked about the lives of your mother and father. I have notes about what they said. Some are quite funny. Your parents liked to laugh.’

  ‘No,’ Edith said, before even glancing at her brother. ‘That’s enough.’ She then looked at Frederick. ‘You agree?’

  He nodded. She saw he was moved. ‘The loveable old fool,’ he said, putting on a tough voice. ‘I hadn’t realised that he was such a fool or so loveable.’

  She said, ‘I have not helped anyone to find water.’

  Frederick put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Nor have I.’

  Edith thought their father had waged hopeless campaigns, but in his daily work he had done something dependably and demonstrably good. Unquestionably good. Universally good.

  Janice filled both their glasses with wine. ‘You had wonderful parents.’

  ‘Thank you, Janice. I know they were just tinkering with injustice.’

  Janice and Frederick argued that there had to be a theory and a grand plan. But she thought that there was always a vision behind all the tinkering.

  ‘In Geneva, I sometimes yearned to go to an African village, to sink a well, see the pump draw the first pure water and taste it, seeing the black children drink it and smile,’ she said. Her father could actually drink and taste his work. ‘I remember my French friend, Jeanne, saying, “You make the ideas flow, Edith.” ’

  ‘You never thought that the answer to give the African villagers was to throw out the colonialists?’ Janice said.

  ‘I thought about installing the pumps first.’

  T. George was still on the box. She turned from Janice and said, ‘George, step down. Join us for a drink and a sandwich.’

  ‘Why, thank you, Edith. I don’t mind if I do.’ He got down and picked up the box and took it and his papers and attaché case to his car.

  He returned. He had removed the mayoral chain of office.

  T. George had once been keen on her and had made an advance to her in his own home with his wife present in another room one night during her visit in the 1930s.

  He was portly now. She did not want to become carnal with him. Perhaps people you had met in the bloom of youth could never be approached again, sexually, in mid-life. The lost youthfulness always mocked ageing. You could only have a sexual feeling for someone you met at around the same age, when physical decline could be accepted.

  Janice shook out a blanket and settled it on the grass. ‘Let’s sit.’

  T. George took a sandwich – crusts removed – and paper napkin from Janice, and ate it delicately, as if at a public function, dabbing his chin with the napkin. ‘Very nice,’ he said.

  She was glad that Janice was playing hostess and making sure that food and drinks were on hand. Edith felt somewhat paralysed. It had been a more potent thing than she had foreseen. She felt personal and public history crushing her. She saw again how she had been floundering since the League and the UNRRA.

  T. George reminisced about their parents and did not ask Frederick or Janice any probing questions. She wondered how much George knew of Frederick.

  She saw that the replay of her parents’ funerals was also a replay of her and Frederick’s own lives; the passion spent on great causes.

  ‘Do you think less of us, George,’ she asked, ‘because we were not at the funerals of our parents?’

  He looked to the clouds and spoke without looking at them, slipping into his oratorical voice. ‘Your parents believed in not making a great fuss around death and its mysteries. No, not mysteries – your parents never spoke of mysteries – they always spoke of those things we do not yet know. He brought his eyes away from the clouds and looked at her, and his voice became conversational. ‘Frederick troubled them –’ he turned to Frederick – ‘when you disappeared from their lives, but they assumed that you led a good life even if there had been . . . may I presume to say . . . a breach?’ He seemed to require a response from Frederick.

  Frederick stared at T. George and then nodded. ‘There was a breach.’

  Edith was then overcome with images of her parents, and all her writing and arguing and persuading and meeting-going – the movements and the causes. She felt sickened by it, and now felt that it had ground her to a halt, amid a hot, sad bunch of people sitting on the grass in a cemetery, brushing away the flies.

  It was all too hot. They were surrounded by gravestones. The world was too much for her. She suddenly remembered once going to her mother’s bedroom to find out if her mother was sick, given that it was nearly midday and she was still in bed. Her mother had said to her, ‘If you can tell me something worth getting up for, I will.’ As a young girl – maybe eight years old – she had no answer. She had stood there thinking and thinking. She knew it had to be better than anything that first came to mind. She said what the family had once chanted on Tom Paine’s birthday: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ She wondered if that would work. Her mother rolled her head and looked at her, shook her head with surprise, smiled, and then said, ‘Come here and help me up. I hope you’re right.’ Now she might say that Saint-Simon ordered his valet to wake him every morning with, ‘Remember, monsieur le Comte, that you have great things to do.’ That might have been a better thing to say.

  The turgid memories of her life were coming up from the hot ground in suffocating waves, and she heard herself say loudly, ‘Fuck.’

  She had never sworn publicly like that before – had never used the word out loud.

  Without looking up, she said, ‘This is all too morbid, too hot. I want to go to a cool hotel lounge. With no flies.’

  Frederick and Janice, cups of milky coffee from the thermos still in their hands, stared at her.

  She stood up abruptly and, in a dazed way, gathered up a few of the picnic things.

  T. George looked at her, somewhat stunned, but he too scrambled to his feet.

  Janice threw away her coffee and stood up.

  Edith was about to pour on the ground the warm wine left in the bottle, but thought that maybe her parents would like it. They had always enjoyed wine – it arrived at their house in cases monthly from the Hunter Valley. She thought, How inelegant to pour the wine from the bottle onto the grave. Instead, she filled
two glasses, walked to the graves and poured one on each, carefully and slowly. Strange thoughts strayed like dark clouds across her mind.

  When she turned, she saw the others were watching her. She saw herself and thought that she must appear to be a little queer. T. George was waiting at his car to say goodbye.

  She went to him. ‘Sorry about that little outburst,’ she said. ‘A little out of character.’

  ‘This was, I imagine, a rather demanding visit.’

  He took her hand. ‘Perhaps you and I should have time together. Alone. Something of a rendezvous – I could drive to Canberra.’

  She looked at him, leaned and kissed his cheek. ‘I don’t think so, George. Too much water under the bridge.’ She did not have the energy to tell him she was about to remarry. And she had no energy or inclination for his coital ambitions.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There is one thing. Remember that my mother employed an Aboriginal girl in the house? Belle.’

  He nodded.

  ‘What became of her? Do you ever hear anything about her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you hear anything, let me know. I’d like to know that she’s alright.’

  ‘I will.’

  He got into his car and started it. Head out the window, he backed it to the road, then put it into forward gear, waved and drove away.

  She returned to Janice and Frederick. They had packed away the picnic things.

  ‘Sorry about that small outburst,’ she said. ‘A little out of character.’

  Janice squeezed her arm. ‘A strange day.’

  Briefly, they visited their uncle’s grave – her mother’s brother – a bachelor and a loner, but he had been shire president and had run unsuccessfully for state parliament as an independent. It was completely overgrown.

  In the car, she and Frederick agreed to arrange to have the graves looked after.

  ‘I have never in my life said that word aloud before,’ she said. And then she smiled. ‘And I would never, ever say it in front of my mother and father.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Janice said. ‘I don’t think they heard.’

  Becoming a Mother of Sorts

  The time of discretion required by good taste faded, and Richard and she gradually revealed themselves as a couple.

  In some ways the time of discretion had had the glamour of a clandestine romance. It had pretty much excluded, of course, the children, and delayed the combination of their domestic lives. For most of the time it even excluded spending the whole night together. It was a long picnic.

  With the loss of her protectors, first Latham and then Bruce, who spent most of his time in London these days, and now Ambrose, she felt both freed and at the same time vulnerable. She was not yet sure whether Richard was a giant or a protector or neither. She did not know which of these she wished for, if either.

  The Richters took the news of their engagement in their stride, while expressing affection for Ambrose.

  Frederick and Janice were bowled over, but congratulated her on her ‘descent into bourgeois marriage’. To her surprise, though, she realised that they had been happier with Ambrose despite their designation of him as a class enemy and his happy acceptance of that designation. Somehow, they had taken to him for his humour and for his eccentricity. Perhaps, they also hoped that he would on occasion drop some secret detail that would be of use to the Party, or, indeed, that he might come across to the Party, as Burgess and Maclean had.

  On his return to London, Ambrose saw that their divorce went through, and Richard and she had a low-key wedding in a registry office. She managed not to reveal that she had now been married three times. She herself had trouble believing it. She was not unaware that she had gone down this path before with Robert in her attempt to find a proper life for herself as a woman, albeit a still dreamy Bloomsbury woman – she hoped – but she was allowed one mistake, surely. And her marriage to Ambrose had been more a marriage of convenience and a dear, sweet intimacy, the nature of which had perhaps no name. So, if one discounted the marriage of error and the marriage-for-which-there-was-no-name, she could be considered almost a virginal bride. Almost. Tell that to the judge. She wore the ring for the sake of the ceremony, but then told Richard she would rather wear it on a chain around her neck, and told him about her mother. He was happy with that, but within a month she had become aware of people looking to her finger in search of a ring. She didn’t care. She did put the ring on when Richard’s parents visited.

  After the formalities, she was certain of one thing: the moving of Richard and the children into Arthur Circle and her appointment as stepmother had to go off with a bang.

  She had been raised with strict rules about gift-giving for children – only birthdays and Christmas, except for those two years when her father had abolished Christmas, when those gifts had been given on Voltaire’s Birthday, which she still remembered: 21 November. It meant you got your presents a month earlier and it felt all wrong. They had also marked Tom Paine’s birthday – without gifts. She remembered that, too: 29 January. Frederick and she had to chant, ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ You could receive gifts if you were sick or when her mother and father returned from a long trip.

  She decided that she would adhere to only birthday and Christmas gift-giving for the children, but would make an exception for this important occasion – of her becoming a stepmother and their gaining a new mother.

  She would not introduce celebrations of Voltaire and Thomas Paine.

  She and Amelia decided the boys should have Meccano sets, and that they would each have one that was aligned with their ages – seven and eight.

  As an additional treat, she cabled Caroline Bailey, a friend from the League days who was now a reporter living in London, and asked her to buy the smart British sets and to send them out to her post-haste.

  She was able to announce to Caroline that she was to be a married woman with family, though ‘still a Bloomsbury girl at heart’. She knew the marriage would send the radical Caroline into a rage. It didn’t. Caroline wrote back saying she envied her. She wrote again saying that Caroline could be an honorary aunt.

  As an ice-breaking gift, Richard had suggested Dinky Toy models of the Corporal missile – ‘the rocket you can launch’ – timed to coincide with the British test firing. She knew the boys wanted them.

  She had been able to tell the boys about this missile from the Firestone annual report, and they were interested that she ‘owned’ the company that made it. She had told them that she wished that the company did not make the missiles. She told them that she had invested in Firestone back in the 1920s because they were building a model workers’ village on their rubber plantation in Liberia, as part of the great experiment to repatriate American Negroes back to Africa. They were not interested in that information.

  She supposed that the most that could be said for the Corporal was that missiles were smaller and more accurate than the gravity bombs, which were so indiscriminate. And Firestone sponsored classical music broadcasts in the United States. Sooner or later, she had to get advice about rearranging her share portfolio and decide what to do about Firestone, which had changed its nature so much since she bought the shares.

  Anyhow, she felt pressured into buying the missiles as well as the Meccano sets, but the Meccano was to be the centrepiece to balance the Corporal missiles.

  Having studied the catalogues, she learned that accessory sets were available – that would provide gifts for birthdays and Christmases for a couple of years. As she understood it, the accessory set 6A would convert a No. 6 set to a No. 7 set, and so on.

  To her consternation, Caroline came back saying that because of the Korean War, which had caused a steel shortage, the manufacture of Meccano had temporarily stopped, but she would hunt around for any sets that might still be in the shops.

  She organised her first children’s party with tentative advice from Amelia, who advised that there should perhaps just
be the four of them – if there were other children, those children too might have to have gifts, and they agreed that it was too sensitive an occasion to risk anything elaborate. They settled on sandwiches without crusts in small triangles, cocktail sausages and tomato sauce, and an ice-cream cake eaten in the drawing room, not the dining room.

  ‘Different from the everyday,’ was Amelia’s advice, ‘but simple.’

  To Edith’s disappointment, Amelia suggested that the boys were too old and too boyish for hundreds-and-thousands on buttered bread – fairy bread – which came from Edith’s childhood.

  By that rule, they decided against the presence of grandparents at this point. That was still ahead of her. And, of course, where did Frederick fit – as a step-uncle? She thought she would leave Frederick out at this point. He did joke that he had now been a brother-in-law three times. She asked him not to make the joke in front of Richard.

  She and Richard discussed the rules of child-raising. She did not want to clash with rules already in place and, given her inexperience, she was willing to be guided. He said that she had to make the home according to those rules with which she was comfortable.

  Amelia gave her a copy of a book on child-raising by an American paediatrician, Doctor Benjamin Spock.

  She had asked for a book on stepmothering, but Amelia shook her head – ‘With stepmothering there is, I suspect, no safe advice.’ She then looked at Edith and said wryly, ‘And I would be careful which fairytales I read to them.’

  Another cable came from Caroline, saying she had found unsold sets and they were on their way airmail.

  On the day of Richard and the boys’ moving-in party, the first coming together of the family in its new home setting of Arthur Circle, Amelia was present as backup. They suggested that, at first, she remain fairly much in the kitchen – unless there was a crisis. They had decided that Emily would add to their nervousness, and they had not involved her. When Edith had explained to Emily that she would not be following the Major to London and that to replace him she was bringing in an unknown man and two boys, Emily had expressed her feelings completely by saying, ‘It’s none of my business, Mrs Westwood.’ She agreed to stay on and Edith suggested she now call her either Edith or by her new married name. Emily said she would think about it.