Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  In her mind, she had technically abandoned her marriage as a living expression of deep feeling or as a growing and enriching intimacy. It was now something else – perhaps what the Americans would call a deal. Had a deal been struck? When? Could there be a silently struck deal? Yes.

  Or, worse, it might not be a deal but something that existed simply from an emotional inertia – accidie.

  Whatever it had become, there had been no defining moment when it had changed its nature. It just did. As, perhaps, all long-term relationships did.

  ‘Living flesh, with passion’s soft and soulful eyes, lips warm and fresh . . .’ She was in a marriage that had started with these and then dried up, but it was probably romantic to think that the sexual part of marriage should continue with its original vigour. Perhaps that belonged to a few years of life and then other preoccupations took over, although this was not quite true of her own sexuality outside the marriage, which – to be coldly scientific – still responded to stimuli.

  The children, as they were still described, although they were now young men and at university, had long accepted her presence in their lives and had become even deferential. At times, they joked with her in a warm way, and she found she was still disproportionately happy whenever they asked her a question on any matter. She found she still gave over-elaborate answers, tried to shower them with gifts of her knowledge and smother them with her interest in their lives.

  As young men, they obeyed the rules of adult politeness and no longer moved away before she had finished talking. When they were younger, she would be left mid-sentence as they ran off, banging the screen door as they dived out into the garden, not from rudeness, but from a fading of attention because she was going too far in her answers, was using up more than her proper share of space in their brooding, smouldering or, at other times, hyperactive lives.

  The grandparents had taken a continuous interest in the children and were civilised, if not warm, towards her. Emily had become full-time in the household, and for years her wage had been more than Richard believed he paid because Edith had added on a levy from her own money.

  Time had erased her fantasy of assuming management of a ready-made family midstream in her life, and through it the finding of what she had falsely fantasised as some sort of womanly completeness. By marrying Richard, she had tried to hurry back to some earlier, unfinished phase of her womanhood, but she had found no completeness. Even though she had known she had missed her chance biologically to have a child, she had hoped to be able to have a family. It turned out, however, that she had gained not a family but a life-interest – and her collaboration was only as an enthusiastic side-liner to Richard and to the children’s grandparents.

  She thought a lot about the boarding-school system and whether something like the Israeli kibbutzim would be better for family life. Perhaps it should be introduced to Australia, but she was not expert enough nor experienced enough to engage in advocacy of it.

  To this day, neither of the boys had mentioned the bathroom incident, and she wondered if they had repressed it. She was still uncomfortable about the ethics of it, but was fairly sure that it had done no harm.

  For all her talk of sociology, she had very certainly been buffeted by the emotional engagement with the family: tempers lost, voices raised, tears cried, sicknesses in the night, the nosebleeds – why did children’s noses seem to be always bleeding? – the broken bones, those bushfires of tempers and will-power struggles where she was not sociological at all. She had admitted early on that she did not have the aptitude for finding her way through the brambles of the almost constant domestic squabbles: she, too, had at times lost her temper. She admired those mothers who could turn tension into laughter.

  She thought that she’d had indirect influence on the children behind the scenes – in aesthetics and simply by her being a woman in their household who had a profession of sorts.

  The children had at some point stopped saying, ‘You’re not our mum’, and had settled on calling her Mam. And although for a time they had said it in such a way as to make it sound as far away from the words Mother and Mum as they could, giving their relationship something of a foreign quality she didn’t mind, now the term had come to seem rather refined, respectful. Even affectionate. It had begun to sound more like Mum. Now, as an adult, George sometimes called her Edith.

  Although she was still not in the public service and was paid a stipend for her committee and report work, she knew she earned more from her investments than Richard did from his salary, and her personal fortune had continued to compound. She was, she supposed, from many points of view, a wealthy woman, although there was little for which she needed money. For a time, she found it difficult even to give it to the boys, who still maintained some sort of resistance of male pride, but she had noticed that now they were at university they were more open to gifts of money. After she sent them a card with a cheque, she always looked at her bank statement and was happily gratified when she saw they had cashed it. From the beginning, Richard and she had agreed to keep their finances separate. She felt it best for his self-esteem that he not know her wealth. When the house at Arthur Circle had become available for purchase, she tried to buy it privately to avoid more injury to his male pride, but found out that, as a married woman, she needed her husband’s permission to buy a house and dropped the idea. It would have been the first substantial possession she had ever owned and, of course, would have gone to Richard and the boys after her death.

  Because Emily had been there in the house before Richard and the children, not a week would go by that Emily didn’t recall something from ‘before the children’, which reaffirmed her special links with Edith. Curiously, Emily had assumed – rightly, as it turned out – that Edith kept in touch with Ambrose after the divorce, and made inquiries now and then as to his health. Ambrose and Emily exchanged cards each Christmas.

  In this slap-dash country of such unhappy food, of little gastronomic finesse, of no élan vital, Edith had gradually let go of some of her Continental expectations and practices – and affectations. She no longer served cheese before dessert – whatever cheese of quality she could find other than cheddar and Leicestershire. In the old days, she had tried to train Emily in Frenchified cooking by buying her books and reading recipes to her as they sat together in the kitchen, even copying them out for her in everyday language. Occasionally, Emily and she managed to bring the suggestion of flair to their cuisine, but Richard and the children when younger had stuck doggedly to their conventional tastes. Only Osborne, at times, showed curiosity about food and cooking, and for a time she’d had hopes of winning him over somehow to what she supposed was her style of life. Perhaps it was a wish to have a child who took after her. A sad, hopeless wish.

  She had kept on with her monthly French-style dinners, which she cooked with Emily’s help. Richard went along with these. The Richters and Mr T were regulars, and Mr T loved to play the butler. Although he was lower down the PS ladder than Richard and did not move in her usual social circle, he had become a dear friend and, if the coast was clear on the guest list, he sometimes came with Timothy, the young man with whom he lived. Richard enjoyed their company and accepted their way of life, although after a while he went upstairs soon after the meal was eaten, leaving the others to play records and laugh a lot. If Richard had left the party, Mr T would sometimes recall the burlesque and the rehearsals at Arthur Circle. ‘The best times of my life,’ he would say. ‘Very uninhibited.’ She would nod. Once, he suggested that she put on the Frances Day record, but she refused, saying, ‘I would weep and never stop.’

  Richard and she sometimes had sex, but it was for some sort of physical relief – at least, when she could get it right. It also served to affirm, each to the other, and to themselves, that this was still there as a healthy part of their life. Perhaps that was its purpose. No, that wasn’t fully true. Sometimes, it had an unexpected excitement to it, although usually only in her head. She supposed that Richard
had his fantasies also. It was as if they lent their bodies to each other. Sometimes, it almost achieved the frisson that came from sex with a stranger, the cool pleasure of impersonal sex, which she had first experienced during the war in London and in Vienna in hotel rooms with officers she would never see again. The uniforms, the leather belting they wore, the cleanliness of military life, an aliveness that came from the casualness, and the successful, if compulsive, search for an evening of gaiety and abandon. But regretfully, she could never really reach this sensation of being in bed with a stranger strongly enough with Richard, no matter how tightly she closed her eyes.

  Where was the man who had once dared to put his hand on her knee?

  Her dream life was often sexual, and allowed her to enjoy her sexual past again and to be with Ambrose again, and even with women – some unknown to her, without names.

  If she had been drinking and he had not, he found the odour of alcohol unpleasant, so after the boys went to university in Sydney, Richard and she gradually began to sleep in separate rooms.

  She sometimes still found herself tearful at Arthur Circle as a certain afternoon light, or a song on the wireless, or some personal object or piece of clothing, brought Ambrose flooding to her heart. Many times, she called upon the sensual memories of her life with Ambrose while having sex with Richard, more times than was perhaps safe for calmness of mind, suggesting as it did that she was with the wrong person.

  Sexually, there was a brief uncomfortable time when Richard seemed to have taken advice about lovemaking and women, or perhaps had read an article in a magazine, and he introduced hitherto uncustomary lovemaking techniques. It even crossed her mind that he was having an affair and importing these techniques into their bedroom. At least it showed her that their sexual relationship was on his mind and that he was trying.

  But these techniques, she realised, would only work when passion was somewhat alive. They could not themselves pull the rabbit of passion from the hat. She did her best to be encouraging and receptive, but was relieved when he allowed them to fade away. Sex could be informed but could not be pedantic. They had their two well-tried ways in bed, which could do the trick, and fell into staying with them.

  There were small acts of intimacy that came from living together with another. She did ask him at times to look, say, at a lump on her back. He had asked her about his thinning hair. Things like that. They sometimes gave the other a neck massage after a hard day.

  There had been a small crisis with the removal of that lump, but everything seemed okay now. There had also been a breast scare, but that turned out to be fine.

  Perhaps marriage could be defined as two solitary people who look after each other? Was this what most people called love? Someone to check the parts of your body you could not see in the mirror?

  They served each other socially, too, and looked rather good as a couple. She knew the unfair discomfort of being a lone woman at a dinner party, and had on occasion, when Richard was not available, recruited Mr T as her companion. She had seen how hard it was to be a woman alone in such situations, to feel pitied.

  Now the recurring domestic vexations between Richard and her were never expressed except by grunt or frown or the leaving of the room, and neither of them any longer made an effort to resolve the vexations permanently.

  Living with Ambrose had been more like living with a girlfriend. She often marvelled, in retrospect, that after he came home and changed en femme he had never appeared to her as just a man dressed as a woman, and while he did not become a woman, he did become, mercurially, another pleasing creature altogether. And he was never a husband.

  There was still something of the domestic closeness that came from reporting of their day to each other, which, she supposed, would look like love to an outsider. But there was no real sharing of their work distresses, except when the distress had passed and it could be reported retrospectively in a comical or victorious way. Never was the distress exposed when it was causing painful havoc in their souls. They kept up a façade of personal invulnerability.

  After a while, she resisted his attempts to involve her in bile – he sometimes viciously derided and mocked his work companions, wanted to see any disagreement or disappointment in his life as the work of fools who could not see his merit. She would let him talk, but would not confirm him in any of his false superiority. She did not want to be part of any self-deluding folie à deux, where a couple lived within their carapace of mutually confirming social superiority, a false superiority achieved by the putting down of acquaintances and workplace colleagues, justified or not.

  He desperately wanted an OBE, but she knew he would probably receive only an MBE. She privately thought that she stood a chance of an MBE, too.

  She had to admit that she also had a need to bag her colleagues, and she did it over drinks sometimes with the Richters, with Mr T, and others, but always looked to see who was in the circle and whether her gossip might not come back to bite her.

  Regardless of this failure to achieve the higher reaches of what she imagined traditional married love to be – and which she had at the beginning been sure she needed and had found – there was one thing of which she was certain: to break with him would be to proclaim her failure as a wife, and even as a mother – stepmother – or, in a word, her failure as a woman. More, it would be a public admission of poor judgement in personal matters, which could then be applied to her judgement generally.

  She was going to stick with this marriage. She was going to stick it out, come hell or high water. She had used up all her conjugal options – had, in fact, played rather fast and loose with respectability, including her socialising with Janice and Frederick. Moreover, she could never, in all good faith, publicly and sincerely commit herself yet again to another man. She could not just move on from one man to another like a film star. There would be, too, the loss of face by having failed – publicly – in two – well, three – marriages. She could imagine living alone – she did live alone. She lived alone in her marriage.

  The marriage was a punishment for her having betrayed her Bloomsbury ideals and her Rationalist upbringing, with its disregard of convention. And having failed Ambrose – but, again, that was a catastrophic emotional error too enormous for her to face, and because nothing could be done about it, she had to refuse it a presence in her consciousness or it would gnaw her apart.

  With Ambrose she had led a risky private life, the risk of which had become fearfully apparent in Australia. It was clear that if ever her secret personal life with Ambrose had come out in Australia, she would have been lost. Professionally and personally lost. They would have had to flee.

  She still felt shame at having failed, in spirit, the test of the burlesque. Without showing it, she had quaked with fear after the burlesque episode – fear that some gossips or someone in the High Commission would have put two and two together or had heard something from London and said, ‘Hello? What’s been going on there behind closed doors between these two?’ She was disappointed by her fear, but there was nothing she could do to curb it. At least the burlesque had gone on.

  As she now knew, the gossip had gone in another direction – that Ambrose and she were, in fact, not married, or married only as a cover for some sort of joint espionage mission for the British. Or maybe this meant that something told the gossips that her marriage to Ambrose was somehow fishy, but their imagination had not been rich enough to guess at what sort of aberrant marriage it had, in fact, been.

  She would add the words ‘irreverence’ and ‘candid intimacy’ to the list of things missing from her marriage. She’d had this kind of spicy intimacy with Ambrose. Nearly anything could be said and laughed about, regardless of morality. Ambrose and she had this, in its own sometimes perplexing nature, give or take some things she suspected that he withheld for good or not so good professional reasons. It could be said that Richard and she had a rather brusque intimacy of very limited spice.

  If the marriage was a failure as a
marriage, it need not be a publicly visible failure. She doubted that even the children saw the marriage for what it was. They leaned on and took for granted what they saw as its solidity and routines. So much was hidden from children. She, herself, did have confidence about the love her parents had, from the evidence that they had remained married for nearly forty years and had talked to each other at every meal. Maybe for some people marriage was a guarantee of constant company, a guarantee against a fear of being alone.

  Given Richard and she both travelled separately in their work, the marriage was not, for her, in any way household captivity. She had in life escaped all the pitfalls of being the wife locked in a house as outlined in the Friedan book, which she thought was terribly good.

  At least Richard was not a fraud in the way her first husband, Robert the reporter, had been – offering himself as something of a free-thinker and even something of scholar, and turning out to be lazy in his reading, an intellectual cheat. Only after marriage had he revealed that he wanted a conventional wife to service his life, to be evidence of his manhood. She could have given Friedan some material about this type of fraudulent man. And she had known women who were the same sort of fraud – presenting themselves as mentally vigorous and civically alive and then, when in marriage, slumping into dependency, triviality, self-indulgence and self-neglect, to a life of boxes of chocolates, radio serials and glossy magazines. If love meant anything for her, it was a pact to engage with the world and the mind as much as your partner engaged with the world and the mind.

  Her marriage was something like a base camp, as her marriage to Ambrose had been a unique fort in no-man’s-land. What she had with Richard was preferable to her life with Robert, which had so quickly become a bitter disappointment and which, while not quite breaking her heart, had inflicted her with a bitterly disappointed heart.