Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  It had to be said that if she defined her life as one of petits plaisirs, she may, indeed, have a real marriage. A real marriage made of half-love, a pedestrian love. The marriage did have some small fun. Anniversaries were remembered in small gestures, if not celebrated with any sense of achievement, although some sentimentality was generated by reminiscence. It was not bleak, though she at times could see Mount Bleakness through the mist in the distance, not so far away. Some day she might look out the window and find it in her garden.

  Marriage was exhausting in another way, because it required of the wife that she use patience and a will-power – against her true feelings – in endless acts of compromise and forgiveness and acceptance of the habits and ignorances of the man; to meet the demands of the man for tenderness and sympathy. And then there were all those permissions required from a husband: the negotiated absences; the negotiated solitude; white lies; pretended gratitude; the constant demand for explanations of her whereabouts, of the company she kept in his absence. Heaps of pretending. She had done this for Richard. Why hadn’t he seen it as unfelt? Faked tenderness, as with faked love, it seemed, worked just as well as the real thing.

  But how much of oneself did this charade cost?

  She did not think she ran the risk of bitterness. She even entertained notions of having an affair. A young man from the Canadian High Commission took her fancy – in fact, he was the second young man from the Canadian High Commission who had taken her fancy. She still speculated about living the life of the Bloomsbury world of special friendships separate from that which one had with one’s husband. She wondered if she would ever have what Vita had called a ‘trinity’, for example, as in the case of Vita, Violet and Denys, where two people sexually adored the third; not sexual trios as now understood – that is, not all in the bed at the same time – but each having sex separately with the adored one. Theodor had suggested this when Amelia had her affair with the carpenter, and had tried to embrace the affair to include him. It had not worked. She couldn’t see it happening with Richard. She was not even sure now that he adored her. Of course, the adored one didn’t suffer.

  She was glad that, when younger, she’d had the pluck to venture into the delicious murkiness of male and female dilemma with Ambrose; that she had not shied away. That had been very Bloomsbury. She wished all those famous Bloomsbury people were still alive and she could write to them – say, to Virginia Woolf – and tell them of how she had lived with Ambrose. She could have found herself in a marriage like Carrington had had with Strachey, and then with Carrington’s husband – working things out among the three of them. Ambrose was certain that Carrington was the tomboy and that Strachey was definitely homosexual. For all her fears of being exposed around the time of Ambrose and the burlesque, Canberra was probably the safest of the smaller places for sexual unorthodoxy among politicians and public servants. Even if people such as reporters knew about their private lives, they didn’t write about them in their newspapers. She had heard rumours of Chifley’s affair with two sisters while still married, one of whom had been his private secretary. Perhaps Chifley had been a Bloomsbury man. She hadn’t got that impression. She had heard, but had seen no evidence, that the Prime Minister had a mistress. From what she knew of him she doubted it, though. Even so, she did not think this elite tolerance would have stretched as far as Ambrose’s predilections. A blind eye was turned to mistresses and to even the discreet homosexual, but not to the scandalous.

  There was no safe moat, there was no safe love – even the fear that there was no safe love allowed in the demons of suspicion, which could destroy love. The only safe time was in that madness of passion at the beginning of an affair, but then still the fear of losing such joy could wreck things. It could be argued that passionate, anxious love often did us as much harm as it did good.

  After all this rationalising of her life and the oh-so-mature acceptance of her situation in life, there had come to her another rather frightening realisation. With something of a big jolt, she had realised that she was now living without love and was, in a way, very much alone in this family, although no longer embattled. Just alone.

  She would see how the children, when younger, lit up and ran to their grandparents and embraced them, plying them with questions, holding their hands. They had not done that with her. In adolescence, they were even further from her – off in their lairs, snuffling away or giggling or skylarking with each other and their friends.

  The sting in the tail-end of this startling realisation – that, although married, she was without love – was that she had to, for the first time in her life, consider whether she was, in fact, unlovable or unable to love. They could be similar conditions. Or was she loved and did not feel loved, or did not want the love that was being offered?

  Of course, even if one or other of these statements were true, being inside a marriage meant that no one else knew this.

  She realised that people in the married world wanted to see the alone, unloved person as seriously deficient, deserving of pity expressed or not expressed. Behind the back of this pity for the spinster and the old maid, married people paraded the superiority of those who possessed love, or who, at least, appeared to possess love by the act of marriage, the acting out of marriage.

  And there was the pity for women who had had no children. Had she also joined this ersatz family as a way of deflecting the biting sympathy that women often expressed for those women who had not had children? She found herself pleased to have people assume that the boys were hers, an assumption she sometimes quite happily left uncorrected – but not with single men.

  In her life before stepmotherhood, as a woman without children, she had sometimes suspected that the sympathy some mothers expressed towards women who had not had children also concealed a resentfulness – that women without children had been able to get on with another life, had not had to put up with the tedium and thanklessness of child-raising, with its fleeting, small rewards. These two feelings were sometimes concealed in mothers who jokingly pretended to whinge about the burden of children, the pretence of envy of the childless and their freedom, the laughing pretence that having children was all a big mistake. The joking, in some cases, she knew, was the truth.

  Didn’t the climbing divorce rate since the war mean that a lot of people didn’t know how to love – at least, on the first attempt? Was it ever a ‘how’ matter? Was sexual passion just nature’s incentive to ensure breeding of the species? And then the churches and conventions went to work to keep the parents together. Perhaps it reflected the dissatisfaction of women with the sort of men who had returned from the war, or the dissatisfaction of men for the women they had found when they returned?

  The numbers seemed to suggest that even second-time marriages were failing alarmingly, and the divorce rate did not reveal the full picture – she was sure there were many unannounced divorces within the shell of marriage.

  Maybe marriage and living together wasn’t the test of loving: was it more a test of something else? Proof that one had a talent for married life or a talent for child-raising?

  As for her failure with the children – which she sometimes talked about – women would say to her that there were children who were difficult to love; that they loved one child more than the others. But she knew that mothers could never, ever admit that they did not love their children or did not love one of their children, and nor should they. It was unsayable because of the damage that this admission would do if the child were to know. She puzzled when she heard someone say, ‘He loved his son, but could not show it,’ or ‘His son died never knowing how much his father loved him.’ How could that be? How could that be love? The notion of unrecognised love or love never shown. That sort of talk was sophistry.

  There could be unspoken love. No one in her family had ever said they loved each other. Families back then didn’t do that, except in American films. Or in the customary salutation at the end of letters. Love was assumed, unless the evidence was t
o the contrary. But she had to remind herself that stepmothering was an experience all of its own, something only related in a twisted way to true mothering. As with Mount Bleakness, she could only say she had observed motherhood and experienced it from a prickly closeness.

  She wanted it put down on her record that she had always been the first to wake in the night if a child cried out, and she could tell whether it was George or Osborne.

  Along with the uneasy realisation that she was now living without love, she also felt, at the same time, released from the exhausting nature of man–woman loving: all the energy that went into waiting for love; the realising that one had lost love; recovering from lost love; seeking love; offering oneself on the marketplace of love; disengaging from unwanted love; loving and not having that love returned; being loved and not being able to love back; and, worst of all, pretending to love for domestic peace or for appearances.

  Or were all people – including her – always looking for it, regardless of age, situation in life or physical limitations? Was she only pretending that all that stuff was behind her now?

  Perhaps, all we can do is try to love. She rather felt that love should be easy, should be the one thing in life that was easy. She watched other married couples like a detective, trying to find their flaws, their pretences, their private regrets concealed within the public front of their marriages. So much pride was invested in the notion of finding married bliss. Most people would find it hard to say they did not like their marriage, as they would find it hard to say they did not like their children.

  Maybe all the Hollywood films, the popular songs, poems, homilies and church pronouncements, urging and promoting and shoring up love and promoting love, showed how fragile and elusive and confusing and unreliable it was as an aspiration, as a raison d’être. As the most important purpose for someone’s existence.

  She was distressed by the way the churches and newspapers spread the fear of loneliness. If one was a lonely person, could one ever decide not to be lonely, just like that? And if someone says that they are lonely, is there anything one can do about it? Likewise, one could not decide to love a person; could not make themselves loveable by will power.

  Although Richard was not religious, his parents had given them as a wedding present the verses from 1 Corinthians 13:1–13, lettered in gold in a framed wall hanging:

  If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

  If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing . . .

  And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

  Richard and she had had a friendly tussle over the hanging of it, but she had accepted that, given that it was a wedding gift from his parents, there was no way it could not be hung. Her objection back then had not been over the sentiments, but over the aesthetics. In fact, at first she had hugged the verses to herself as she had hugged Richard, and had tried to hug the children to herself.

  One night, after one of her French dinners, Manning Clark had pointed out to her that the verses were not about carnal love or even married love: it was about what he called charity; that the verses were urging us to love the human race. He said that the greeting-card industry and wooing lovers had stolen it from its context and applied it to the carnal. The Catholics talked more about charity than love. Caritas. Love of humankind. It implied an act of giving by the ‘haves to the have-nots – out of the goodness of their hearts’.

  He talked of the three Greek forms of love: agape, which is their caritas, and philia and eros.

  He enjoyed saying the word eros.

  She said, ‘I used to say, “Be careful how you love your country.” I might add, “Be careful how you love humankind.” ’

  ‘We must be careful about how we love.’ His face darkened.

  She thought she had devoted herself to that way of loving in her own secular way. Although she wondered again about all those people in the world who could not love, even in this generalised way; who could not feel any responsibility for the suffering of the race and for working to eliminate the avoidable disharmony of it, the violence of it. She supposed you could no more will or instruct yourself to love the human race than you could will or instruct yourself to love a person. And we all knew that we could not demand or bribe another person into loving us.

  And then there were the dangerous forms of this species love: her brother and Janice and their commitment to revolution.

  In so far as she understood philia – love of parents – it perhaps extended to love of siblings. She had found that with Frederick, to a degree, in a crippled way, and missed his prickly company.

  She began to see the modern interpretation of Corinthians: the reading of it as meaning romantic love – eros – as people did, as churchmen seemed to, made it one of the cruellest pieces of poetry ever written. It more than diminished those who failed in love or did not find love – it was viciously condemning.

  She had talked about this with Amelia Richter, who had replied with a laugh that the dancer Gypsy Rose Lee had said, ‘God is love, but get it in writing.’ There was something of a sardonic hardness in Amelia since her affair had concluded. It was now never mentioned.

  She and Amelia had agreed that passionate love was a splendid thing when it came along, and that for however long love lasted one should lap it up, but that a good and happy life was possible without it. It was not necessary for a good life and one could replace a good thing lost from life – or never found in life – with other good things, perhaps milder forms of love. Ambrose sometimes said there were other things in life as good as love. Other grand gratifications.

  She feared that life would eventually tell her she was wrong about this, and, contrarily, she feared also that she was right, that passionate love and the soulmate were a thing of wonder if they came into one’s life, but not, ultimately, necessary for the good life. Perhaps there were soul companions – kindred spirits – which one wrapped around oneself in place of the missing soulmate.

  The Mastering of Envy

  She valued the companionship of Amelia, who was now central to her life. She had the pleasure of Amelia both as a twosome and, when in the company of Theodor, a threesome. And she also attended family occasions.

  Friendships, however, were not really love: they were friendly. There could be sexual friendships as distinct from love affairs, but she had found the one or two she’d had to be difficult to keep in their proper boxes. They had both wanted more from her than she had ever intended to give, and she became disconcerted when they spoke of leaving their spouses or running away to another place with her.

  A friend always had other friends, and these friendships were held in some secret hierarchy – a hierarchy that could change, sometimes hurtfully. Married love was for you alone, supposedly.

  In place of her insufficient marriage, if insufficient it was, what did she have? She had once defined the goods of her earlier life: something like, a great cause, a life of the mind, the arts, a métier or vocation, and motley friends – what she now thought of as soul companions. Was that enough? One should have a great love or a great family, although she suspected that a great family was not enough – we lived too long now. Maybe one needed any two of these? Or any three.

  She now had her cause, but she had realised over the years that she needed an institution as well as a cause. She was not a lone crusader who had a personal cause. She could not thrive without an institution within which to work. Her two committees – she was now liaising on the Advisory Committee on Uranium Mining and Safety as well, but had an office in Parliament House and some ex officio presence at other meetings – almost filled the bill. She was almost an important insider.

  The Campaign for Uni
lateral Nuclear Disarmament was a fashionable cause, but it was a cause at the level she wished to work; it was not within an institution, it was outside the power structure.

  Amelia had convinced her to join the CND Easter march and to wear a black CND smock, but she had refused an invitation to serve on the committee. She was not comfortable marching or ‘demonstrating’ – what the French would call a manifestation – and was careful about which CND people she told of her work, for fear she might have been seen as working for the enemy. She could not bring herself to join in the chanting, although she did join in the singing when she knew the words, and found the song ‘We Shall Overcome’ moving, especially when she saw it sung on television footage by blacks in the civil-rights movement in the US. She stopped short of buying a duffle coat with a hood, which seemed to be the other piece of the CND uniform, although it was a sensible item of clothing for a Canberra winter and she was drawn to the youthfulness of its look. She stuck with her three-quarter-length polo coat with a fox-fur collar. Unilateral nuclear disarmament seemed an innovative move, which, in theory, would negate the need for either of the blocs to use the weapons – unless one bloc was expansionist. But who would ever believe that the other side had really disarmed? All the big powers were chary about allowing enemy inspection teams into their secrets.

  In reply to her query, Ambrose had written to her that the clever talk in MI5 was that the CND was ‘communist-penetrated but not communist-controlled’.

  Her pathway to the nuclear problems was, she thought, through the new spheres of diplomacy – technical and scientific diplomacy – such as the International Atomic Energy Commission. It was similar to the other specialised agencies – the UNRRA, the International Organisation for Migration and the World Food Program – which were multinational organisations outside the UN dealing with single problems. This was the way forward. And the IAEA had a great mission: to create plenty for the destitute of the world through nuclear power and, at the same time, to save the planet from nuclear destruction. It was there she would find a niche.