Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘That would interest me greatly.’

  ‘Have you read Hampson on the depletion of what I think is called “the ozone shield” ’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Good, good.’ He then winked at her. ‘And we won’t be discussing proliferation by proxy.’

  She knew what he meant. There was discussion about the proxy proliferation of nuclear weapons by the US whenever the US guaranteed, say, Japan, a nuclear defence as long it did not itself manufacture nuclear weapons. Australia sheltered under the same nuclear umbrella. She assumed that the new government did not wish to raise this at this time.

  There in King’s Hall he then plied her with questions about Sam Atyeo and Evatt. ‘Were his paintings ever any good?’

  ‘I thought so. He did wonderful posters for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, I smuggled some into Spain for him while travelling on my League lettres de mission.’

  ‘I would kill for one of those.’

  ‘Perhaps I could track one down for you. If I get to visit Sam again in Vence.’

  ‘Would you do that for me?’

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘You will then get to visit Vence.’

  She told him that Churchill had once said to her that Atyeo was the most foul-mouthed diplomat he had ever met. She wondered if Churchill had any standing these days with this new government.

  He laughed. ‘I’m glad that someone from here swore at Churchill. What do you think of our new PM?’

  A difficult question. ‘He seems to enjoy speaking French.’ She wouldn’t mention his slip. Even the French make mistakes in their French.

  ‘And?’

  ‘As a rather tall man, he is probably like de Gaulle . . .’ She hesitated. Hall was listening. ‘As a tall man, he knows what it is like to look down on people. I mean to be above people.’ She wasn’t making much sense. She let it go.

  Hall didn’t seem to need to pursue it.

  ‘One other thing,’ she said.

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Would I be travelling on a diplomatic passport?’

  ‘I should think so. You deserve a red passport and all its privileges.’ He then paraphrased from Othello, ‘You have done the state some service and we know it.’

  She looked down modestly; she was touched. She was stunned that a young person from another time and place should know of her and have sought her out – whatever his role.

  He put a hand on her arm and lowered his voice. ‘By the way, there was a delicious report from one of our own that back in the fifties you gave Latham a dressing-down in the Melbourne Club after his High Court vote.’

  How could that have reached the ears of this young man? Richard Victor Hall was chuckling to himself. She could tell he was a man who liked to surprise people with what arcane information he knew. She wondered if it might have been reported by the waiter that night.

  ‘John was something of a mentor,’ she said neutrally.

  ‘We don’t choose our mentors in life,’ he said sententiously. ‘Latham supported Chifley’s attempt to nationalise the banks.’ And then, with a soft handshake, Richard Victor Hall said, apropos of nothing, ‘We are the masters now.’ He trotted off urgently into the bowels of the parliament.

  He wasn’t quite right about Latham’s position, but she wouldn’t bother with that.

  When he was out of sight, she doubled back to her old office – the shoebox. She had not wanted him to know how small she had been in the old government. It was unoccupied and full of stored files, as if she had been like Lot’s wife, turned not to salt but to a pile of unwanted files.

  She wondered where, if anywhere, this new government would put her.

  On the steps, she pulled on her gloves.

  She was elated. Good old Sam.

  They were all so young, and they wanted her.

  She had not been offered tea. It was a government in a hurry and they wanted her to dance in their revolution. She would get to head a cable with the line, ‘Most immediate. Clear the line.’

  What luck.

  What luck.

  Richard took the appointment graciously. In fact, she felt that he took it as a final confirmation of their respective roles in their relationship. He bought her a remarkable star-like diamond brooch, which from a distance looked somewhat like an official honour, an award. On the night of her appointment there was a small reception, and he seemed to enjoy being the consort.

  The Richters, the Clarks, the Gollans, the Arndts, the Karmels, Mr T, Ruth Dobson and Richard Victor Hall were there, along with some politicians from both sides and some dignitaries from the legations, but the Prime Minister was unable to attend and sent his apology, which contained some words of praise.

  She carried her new red diplomatic passport in her handbag and showed it discreetly to a few of her circle.

  Privately, she felt tearfully proud.

  Did Eros Remember Her Name?

  It was at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that Edith noticed Ian was behaving in a curious way, bending down as if looking at the showcase of liturgical objects when in fact, she realised, he was looking at her through the showcase.

  He was her secretary of mission at the IAEA Conference on Inspection and Verification Regimes. ‘Aide-de-camp’ was the term he used, either comically or pompously, she wasn’t sure – or as a way of balking at his subordinate role.

  She entertained the illusion that his odd behaviour was perhaps a way of showing a carnal interest in her in some perverse way, although he had talked about having some girl in London.

  Given the age difference between her and her aide-de-camp – she put him at around forty – it had to be a wishful illusion on her part.

  ‘Go back around the other side of the case, Edith.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, doing his bidding. ‘Here?’

  He bent down again and squinted at her through the double glass. ‘Now crouch down.’

  She obeyed. ‘How long must I remain here?’ she asked, smugly pleased that she could hold the crouch without showing any strain.

  ‘It’s alright, that’s it,’ he said, standing up.

  ‘What was that about?’ she asked, as she also stood up, brushing her skirt, and went around to where he was.

  ‘There was an optical distortion,’ he said. ‘It pleased me. I could see you as a young girl – you looked very girlish.’

  She did not quite know how to take this. She knew he had not been drinking. ‘Would that one could always move, then, in a glass showcase.’

  He did not smile.

  ‘I think it was the magic coming off –’ he glanced at the label in the showcase – ‘this second-century glass liturgical vessel.’

  She thought, but did not say, that she sometimes felt like a second-century liturgical vessel.

  They moved listlessly through the museum.

  Ian was charming enough, not uncultured and was physically well turned-out. They had a science background in common and a sense of the absurd. They had both spontaneously laughed at the letter that President Gerald Ford sent to be read at the opening of the conference. In the letter, Ford said the United States would permit the IAEA to apply its safeguards to all nuclear activities in the United States – ‘excluding only those with national security significance’. Every country wanted to inspect; no country wanted to be inspected.

  She had seen that Ian had Goethe’s Faust as his travel reading. That was encouraging. Her travel reading was an old collection of von Heyse short stories from her childhood.

  ‘You seem glum,’ Edith said.

  ‘Too much history. Human race too old,’ he said.

  She liked his reply, but he was too young to be saying it. ‘Indeed, too old,’ she said.

  At breakfast in the hotel next day, he again seemed to be staring at her as she sat down.

  She allowed his gaze to warm her face, but she did not comment. Probably, another of his games. Or was he assessing her age?

  H
ere in Vienna, she found she had quite an appetite. Perhaps even a youthful appetite. It could be from the stimulation of being back in Vienna and the swirl of an international conference, back in the diplomatic orbit.

  Apart from her visits to two General Conferences and a special forum under the former government, her strongest memories of Vienna were just after the war with the UNRRA. On each occasion that she had walked the streets the buildings whispered sullen secrets to her. Back in the late 1940s, she remembered going to work in her smart UNRRA uniform, made for her by a Viennese tailor, and although they had not been issued with side arms, she carried her personal pistol from the League days, loaded and holstered in her regulation black leather shoulder bag, picking her way along tracks through the rubble. Allied air raids had brought down the roofs of St Stephen’s Cathedral and of the Opera. Rubble still blocked Kärntner Strasse.

  The slow trams had clanged along some of the streets. She had commandeered a German army bike – a woman’s bike – which was superior to the others and had a large rack, and she was given a wonderful tin whistle with a snail-like wind chamber and a plaited black lanyard. Even though the bicycle had a bell, she would blow her whistle and the Viennese pedestrians would scurry out of her way. She had boiled the whistle and the lanyard before using it. De-nazification. She had use of a jeep, but the bicycle was faster and less fuss.

  In those days, you lugged the bike up the stairs into the office, otherwise it would have disappeared.

  Their work at the UNRRA had been relocating brutalised prisoners, forced labourers – those whom an American reporter, Leonard someone, back then had described as people who ‘pushed, screamed, clawed for food, smelled bad, who couldn’t and didn’t want to obey orders, who sat with dull faces and vacant staring eyes in a cellar, or in a concentration-camp barrack’.

  It was in the UNRRA days that she had done her best work. Got her hands dirty. She had enjoyed the uniform and, although it was not regulation, she had worn a black Sam Browne belt she had ordered from a naval and military outfitter in London. The belt gave her an assurance and a sense of vulnerability. It was a Hippolyta’s girdle: stamina and resistance to injury. There was something in mythology about the girdle making Hippolyta desirable, too. Still, she had to constantly remind herself that you could fight the good fight with an office desk as base headquarters.

  As the memories streamed through her mind, she heard herself make a sound she had never made before. Nearly a sigh. She knew instantly what it was – a sound from the creaking timbers of age. The sounds of old people were like those made by sleeping dogs as they remember forgotten bones and bad fights and times when they should have barked but did not.

  She had never made that sound ever before, and she had no intention of making it again.

  That Leonard someone was the same reporter who had said drunkenly one night at Café Mozart that when he and his fellow reporters wrote ‘was beaten and tortured by the SS’ or ‘brutalised’, they never wrote about the medical outcomes of those beatings – that someone lost an eye or lost sight in both eyes and could never read a book again, or lost hearing in both ears and never went to a concert again, or had permanent damage to his kidneys requiring him to piss fifty times a day, or had both testicles crushed so that he could never father a child or screw again, or was a carpenter who could never use his right hand again because all the bones had been broken into small pieces, or was a musician and could never play again.

  Someone had intervened and said, ‘Have a drink, Len, we get your point.’

  Len had turned with an angry face and said, ‘You do not get the point. The point is that the list has no end. No reporter ever goes out and finds what happened after the “beatings”. Or about what happens to women who have been “repeatedly raped” – they never report on permanently torn vaginas, holes from vagina to anus that will not heal.’

  Someone said, ‘That’s enough – don’t spoil my drink. Anyhow, we write for family newspapers.’

  ‘I will spoil your drink, Hal,’ Len had said. ‘We never write that someone cannot speak because his tongue was ripped out and his eardrums pierced with a nail driven in with a hammer. Do you see any of this in the movies? In the New York Times? And it’s about time these dream families we write for faced reality.’

  This conversation had returned to her again and again over the years.

  It returned to her now and her appetite was no longer so good.

  But perhaps the good appetite she was having in Vienna came from having at last faced the possibility of the end of her marriage back in Canberra – an end in a very practical sense, because she did not want, she realised with some surprise, to physically return to it. At the end of this mission as an eminent person, she wondered if she might meander off into the world. Or into a job at the IAEA. Somewhere. She could send her report by diplomatic bag. Richard Victor Hall would wonder why she had disappeared like that. Maybe they would come looking for her.

  She toyed with the idea of not returning to the domestic smells and habits of her life back there. A dishevelled newspaper spread out somewhere. A male sock under the bed. Something spilled and not properly mopped up. The marmalade a rather paltry ring of orange at the bottom of a jar, barely enough for a full piece of toast and sometimes specked with butter from the boys – at least in the early days when the boys had lived at home – and Richard using their bread-and-butter knives to take the marmalade out, regardless of how many times over the years she had complained, had told them to use the jam spoon and the butter knife, and to put the marmalade out of the jar into a dish. They had resisted – obstreperously, vexatiously. It was a relief to think that she might never again seek a domestic arrangement with another person and its crushing load of trivial dispute – spoken and unspoken. She might very well go back to living in a hotel. She could live in Vienna. She had spoken to Eklund at a cocktail party and he had seemed receptive to finding her a place at the IAEA.

  She had said, ‘Surely the IAEA could use someone such as me – someone who has seen it all?’ She liked the Swedish approach to international issues. She had good friends who were Swedes in the League and now the IAEA.

  He had said, ‘I thought, Edith, you’d be considering retirement? Those Australian beaches.’

  She had replied, ‘I’m not that old. I’m not finished yet. I don’t think I believe in retirement.’

  He said, ‘I certainly do.’

  She said, ‘But, Sigvard, the job’s not done yet.’

  She could not yet see herself withdrawing from public life to her books and her animals and her crops.

  She had always felt at ease in hotels – white tablecloths, meals served. Not having to search in cupboards for breakfast or to smell the milk for freshness. Emily had long gone and they had not replaced her. Richard had blocked her from hiring someone else to run the house. ‘Expense.’ She had said that she certainly was not going to do housework and they had agreed on a cleaner twice a week.

  No. The reason that her appetite had returned was that she was home. This was her home: Vienna – or the meaning of Vienna. Big issues, an international conference, meetings that could have results. The whole daily wheel of hotel breakfast with delegates, with sub-committees, with background papers, with the world at stake. She was at last home. The work of the world. It was as if her appetite, her stomach, had been cramped all these years. She would become what H. G. Wells had called ‘the floating people’. She remembered that the book had been important to her as a young person. It had been in her parents’ library. It talked of a new class of people, ‘denationalised, with wide interests and wide views, developing, no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a morality of its own, a philosophy of its own’. Internationalists.

  Ian asked her why it was that in Austria he enjoyed the Austrian breakfast, in America the American breakfast, in France the French breakfast, yet back home he didn’t eat breakfast. ‘Do you have a theory about that, Edith? About breakfasts?’

  ‘No .
. .’ she said, wary of his teasing. He seemed to like to tease. ‘No, I have no theory on that.’ And then she added, ‘That I recall.’

  ‘That you “recall”.’ He laughed. ‘I like that.’

  She looked at Mr Aide-de-camp.

  He did not realise that in life there was quite a bit of forgetting and relearning, even the forgetting of what one’s opinions were.

  And she found that at times she had surplus conversation.

  He prattled on in his almost charming way. ‘Changes of habitat require different diets. Maybe we’re symbolically eating the prey of the country we’re in.’

  ‘Cheese?’

  He smiled. ‘Touché.’

  She felt herself slipping into his slippery, jokey style. How foolish she was with this man. Although she felt herself his intellectual equal – and definitely his superior in experience; and even his equal in wit – she did not like the competitive edge to his banter. That irritating male trait. She was tiring of males, but then, she had tired of males before. And she had always let them drift back into her intimate life.

  ‘Sleep well, Edith?’

  Who admired experience? Experience and wisdom were pieces of the past, always subtly in combat with the young and the new. Handsome bodies, animation, clever glamour, smart new ideas – or what they thought were new ideas. These were the seductive things.

  ‘I had a restless night – I could hear strange water noises,’ she said, taking a mouthful of freshly baked roll and a sour berry jam she could not identify. The European berries were in season, but the jam would have been last season’s berries. ‘Yourself?’

  ‘I slept well – I’m a bushman. A few cognacs and all noises sound friendly.’

  What sort of bushman could he possibly be, or consider himself to be?

  She had known real bushmen and workmen and gardeners from her childhood, employed by her mother and father. Bushmen who did not wear polished R. M. Williams elastic-sided boots, although maybe their boots were dubbined. Nor did they wear hats carefully shaped in front of a mirror. Yes, they smelled of dubbin – those boots, those men. And the real bushmen smelled of horses and hay and work sweat and burned wood, yet were not dirty. They sometimes had something to say about the nature of things that was wisely correct. And would take you down for five shillings – her mother said – if they saw the chance. And who, if encouraged, would speak overlong and become too cocky and were always, in the end, short of sound information. They could be full of bush hokum. Usually were.