Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  A dramatic life-phase change like that had landed her in her current marriage. But no, she did not want to dismiss what he was doing as foolishness, and it should never be dismissed as foolishness if both of those involved were willing – as long as you accepted the less than perfect result, even the devastation of it. Ah, the devastation. The laying waste of the spirit. All its dangerous pain. No, these affairs between people of very different ages were never foolishness, except, she supposed, if one of those involved was doing it for money. Amelia had taken the risk at the age of forty-four with her twenty-year-old carpenter – had the sweetness and suffered.

  And now, having heard of his defeat, she was still inclined to play with the fantasy of a shipboard romance with him here at the conference. She could, perhaps, play the role of the older lover with a younger man. Buy him gifts. Become – what was the term? – a ‘sugar daddy’. She could become his ‘sugar mam’. Was there such a term? She could buy him an expensive watch. Or a rare volume of one of the Faust stories. Perfect. She did not know upon which laws of eroticism or psychological theory this romance between them could rest. Perhaps it was one of those murky reversals of nature, which carried with it some perverse, scandalous resemblance to passion; some warped erotic asymmetry – she being so much older – while he was pining for someone so much younger. Perhaps she could find and bring into play this erotic chemistry, if it existed; cause it to explode within him. Even if – and she permitted herself to consider this idea for the first time – she came to play the role of the consoling older maternal woman or, maybe, the mother. This was a role that had never entered her erotic experience with any man. Now might be the time to let loose its dark madness, its alchemy.

  She would have to find the words and poetry, the mise-en-scène and ambience that would make such a perverse passion appealing and accomplishable. The right spell.

  She was pulled from her sexual witchcraft by him saying, ‘I don’t see myself as “middle-aged”.’ He was hurt. ‘I don’t think that description has any meaning anymore, and certainly doesn’t carry a programme of behaviour to which we all have to adhere.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend. And I agree with you, I was thinking the same thing.’

  So he, too, was trying to trick age. But if he was seeing himself as somewhat younger than he in fact was, then that would put him even further out of reach. Or would it add yet another perverse piquancy?

  He was so right. She had never believed in that age-determined fixed programme of behaviour. Especially in matters of the bed.

  He became self-pitying, returning again to the girl. ‘I wanted to do a pilgrimage to the Spanish civil war sites with her. And to visit anarchist places. I wanted to fit it in after you and I finished up here. We’d planned it for some time.’

  She ate her cheese and cold cuts, wary of speaking.

  He said, ‘Have you seen the film The Passenger?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘The Antonioni film?’

  She shook her head again. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s about a reporter, played by Jack Nicholson, who’s turning forty and who takes on the identity of a casual acquaintance after the acquaintance dies while they’re together in a remote hotel in North Africa. Nicholson decides to abandon his own life and live out the other man’s diary appointments. In Barcelona, Nicholson meets a young student – Maria Schneider – who involves herself with him on his drive along the Spanish coast from Barcelona through Almeria and Algeciras.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He keeps the final appointment in the Hotel de la Gloria and meets the other man’s destiny – he’s shot dead in that hotel by the man’s enemies.’

  ‘I don’t follow?’

  He moved about in his chair, ill-at-ease.

  ‘The film’s special for me because I was approaching forty when I met this girl.’

  ‘The girl in London?’

  ‘She was seventeen years old. I’d been sent to visit the weapons-testing facility at Salisbury. You know it.’

  ‘The longest rocket range in the Western world.’ She knew it. She had been there.

  He nodded. ‘I was dreadfully attracted to her. And she to me.’ He became silent, as if the story of the girl put him in a bad light with her. Or maybe there was genuine pain. She remained silent.

  He then went on, ‘I had an impulse and asked her to drive with me to Darwin – five thousand kilometres clean across the continent and back again. She said yes. Without hesitation. And we did it. It changed my life forever.’

  She did not mock him for saying ‘changed my life forever’.

  He pushed his breakfast platter across to her. ‘You have that. I’ll just have coffee.’ He said that he had an indifferent appetite.

  She smiled at his little affectation. ‘Thank you, but I couldn’t eat it.’ She examined what he had left, and thought she would probably pick at it.

  She made a move, saying, ‘I’d love to see Spain again. I was there a few years back – well, just before the civil war. I’d like to see Spain again. I knew Ascaso, one of the brilliant minds on the anarchist side. I knew him well.’

  Very well indeed. Ascaso was by far the most dangerous man she had ever slept with, as she had once told Janice. Where was Janice?

  She would steal the trip to Spain from the young girl.

  He seemed to light up, but left her remark about Ascaso untouched. He said, ‘Did you know Durruti, then?’

  ‘I would have liked to have known him, but no.’

  She began to eat his breakfast leftovers, now aware that she had impressed him. She could impress him more if she felt like playing all her cards about Spain. She could show him a great, secret Spain. She could show him where she had watched Ascaso and others dig up buried grenades and pistols. She, in her hooded Spanish cape – a capucha – and her black leather knee boots had observed the digging. She had not helped. She had been, after all, a neutral officer of the League. Daresay, there were still weapons buried at that spot. She could dig up a Russian automatic pistol for him wrapped in its brown waxed paper and oilskin. That might cheer him up; win his love.

  She decided not to tell him that the dint in her flask was made by Ascaso. Ascaso had asked her where she had got her flask and she had told him about Jerome. He had been jealous and taken the flask and bitten it. ‘Now you will remember me – not him.’

  ‘I’ve abandoned the Spanish plans,’ he said, a little irritated. ‘Anyhow, it was sentimental anarchism, a hangover from another part of my life.’

  He changed the subject, saying, ‘I should try to sit in on the consultative committee to stop some of the silliness that will come out.’

  She changed her tone too. ‘You’re hard on the others.’ She was even harder. They both shared a contempt for those who thought it all could be reversed – the uranium put back in the ground; the secrets of science locked away in a safe. To run the film backwards.

  She leaned over and was about to put her hand on his, but instead took his hand and placed it over hers, concealing the faint blemishes of her hand. She joked, ‘So far at this conference, we have yet to hear the expression “History will prove the cynics wrong”.’

  Throughout the conference they had been jokingly compiling a list of Dullard’s Conference Wisdom. He now played along, saying, ‘But we have heard “Only time will tell” and “Crying wolf will lead to dangerous complacency”.’

  She added, ‘ “The biggest danger we face is complacency” and “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and “History will be the judge”.’

  They laughed at the last – nuclear weapons were the one matter on which history might, in fact, not survive to judge.

  He added, ‘ “It will not be accomplished overnight”.’

  They bonded in a smile and then he looked away and lapsed into silence.

  Without looking up, she said, ‘If you change your mind about Spain, I would gladly come. But don’t expect me to help with the driving. I have had a car wi
th a driver for so long I think I’m rather below par. I dare say it’s not that much different from back home, but I do recall many donkeys and flocks of sheep on the roads of Spain.’

  Her proposal was sheer, breathless audacity.

  ‘Thank you, Edith, but as I’ve said, I’ve given up on the Spanish adventure.’ His voice was cold.

  She found her consoling voice. ‘You poor boy, you make it sound so tragic.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said, again showing irritation with her. ‘It’s not tragic at all. It’s just something that’s passed through my life. Abandoned plans. Acceptable losses. Nothing tragic.’

  She wondered if he thought her offer to take the place of the girl was pitiable. Others looking on might think her pitiable. She did not see herself as pitiable. There was a certain steeliness now in her behaviour. It was no longer a time for artful reticence. Having served as a handmaiden to Eros in the pursuit of the young girl for him, she could at least ask Eros for a favour back.

  Did Eros still have her name on his list?

  Did Eros even remember her name?

  Caviar Manoeuvres

  The conference was drawing to an end. The delegates agreed to start a two-year survey to assess the possible use of nuclear power in developing countries using smaller-sized power reactors. She argued for an intensification of the IAEA programmes on the safe management of nuclear waste, and there was a good chance that a convention would be adopted banning sea dumping of wastes. Ian and she would then go on to London, where the International Maritime Organisation was meeting with the IAEA secretariat. Then it would be on to a fact-finding mission in Israel, where they did not hold out great hopes of finding any facts. At least, not from the Israeli officials. In Vienna she had learned unofficially from an old friend that Nixon and Meir had made a secret agreement – Israel could go ahead with its weapons program as long as it didn’t test in a detectable way, didn’t advertise their possession of the weapons, and didn’t threaten any country with them. Mr Whitlam and Richard Victor Hall would be interested in that piece of information. Then, finally, they would go to France, where Edith would see Sam Atyeo and where she would drink French wine and rest.

  Ian explained to her that he wanted to work it so that he spoke last at the plenary session. ‘I don’t want the Russian to speak last.’

  ‘You wish to be the star – to have the final word.’

  ‘I want Australia to have the final word.’

  She laughed at him. ‘You want to have the last word.’

  Frederick had lived with a feeling that any established order of things meant that those things had been pre-manipulated in his absence by individuals known or not known – or by the historical process, or by the distorting hidden hand of ideology – and that the order as he found it had to be forced into another shape that would better serve the Party and, through the Party, the future of the human race.

  Ian was waiting for an answer from her. ‘It’s best to accept these things as they have been agreed,’ she said. She moved the flowers on the breakfast table and straightened her cutlery, staring into the flowers as if she were looking into the foliage of the years of her life.

  She went on, ‘Otherwise, you waste your life on very minor, childish political victories by which advisors and aides and small-minded politicos –’ she refrained from saying lackies – ‘measure their lives while the important world passes them by.’

  She supposed there could be a manipulators’ Rule of Small Advantage. One had to cunningly exploit every small advantage against an enemy until these small advantages came together to overwhelm. That, she supposed, was the political manipulator’s understanding of the world.

  ‘I don’t like petty schemes,’ she said. ‘They lead to squabbles, which deflect you from the matter at hand. They distort priorities.’ She smiled. ‘You have already involved me in some trickery with that girl in London.’ She didn’t say that schemers wasted everyone’s life by dragging those around them to the wrong level of concern. Those people who were forever saying that life was all a game.

  He sat there, probably hunting his mind for a reason that might swing her to his plan.

  Then he sang, ‘Let’s do it for Australia, let’s do it because we’re mates.’

  She squashed her smile. ‘Be careful with nationalism,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Be careful how you love your country.’

  She concealed a wishfulness about their being mates, which would do, she supposed, if nothing more passionate was to happen. Mates – mating. Close. He seemed always to appear to be shifting the boundaries of their bureaucratic relationship slightly into something else with inherently more complicated and interesting emotional flavours, but ultimately, it seemed, just old-fashioned manipulation. So now they were mates; now they were sharing not a bed, but a trench at Gallipoli.

  True, there was her own use of him. She used him as a social companion because she was no longer an enthusiastic mixer. She now found few conversations of any value, and long ago learned that it was strategically more comfortable to enter a crowded room with someone, and to be seated with someone with whom you could have useful side chat. And yes, she had fallen into a dependency on him because it was, officially, a dependency relationship. It was his duty and her due.

  And she liked him a lot.

  She said, ‘I had a brother who was once a professional schemer for the Communist Party.’ She remembered the corruption involved with Frederick and Arthur Circle. Surely it was not of catastrophic magnitude; did not deserve the firing squad? She had not been severely punished. Or had she? Did the big house lead her to try to make a family from the leftover of another family? Was that her punishment?

  ‘Come on, Edith. Treat it as a game – a scam.’

  She knew that ‘it’s just a game’ would come up.

  ‘I can’t really treat the problem of nuclear weaponry as some sort of boyish game,’ she said, with an irritating solemnity. ‘I’m sorry.’

  And then she added, ‘I don’t know what a scam is.’ That voice again, the voice of the older woman. She could guess what a scam was. ‘I mean, I need to be sure what the legal and strategic implications are of any scam, at least before I am involved in it.’

  He reached over to put his hand on hers again. He was fond of that. She liked it too much.

  He went on, ignoring her inquiry about scamming. ‘Who got you a better room here at the hotel? Who got you out of the meeting with the guy from the Netherlands whom you detest?’

  ‘Who chased that girl’s telephone number all across the world for you – which, in all likelihood, you should not have had?’

  It was something like a duet.

  She ate her way through the last of the breakfast food. She should perhaps watch her weight. Not when travelling. Food was a way of keeping one’s equilibrium when travelling. A source of poise and some sort of reward.

  He gestured to the waiter and, in his clumsy German, ordered a fruit bowl.

  ‘You can’t bribe me with food and you shouldn’t encourage me to eat,’ she said, as if to an over-indulgent lover. ‘You know I am eating too much.’

  ‘Maybe Dr Kum’a Ndumbe would do it,’ he pondered aloud, challenging her. His Cameroon Commissioner friend.

  ‘What is your plan, then,’ she asked, in a right-to-know voice, competing with Dr Kum’a Ndumbe for his allegiance.

  ‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘There are seven reports to be given. I’m in number five position. The Soviet guy, Ulyanov, has got last place – he demanded it, for God’s sake, at the housekeeping meeting. I’m going to take it away from him. And that’s where you come in.’

  ‘If I choose to play politics.’ She was, she realised, on another level happy to thwart the Russian. To manipulate a manipulator was no sin.

  He became enlivened. ‘All you have to do is deliver a message to the chair during the fourth report. This message will call me from the dais and, while I’m gone, Ulyanov will be forced to speak in position six. I’ll co
me back and give my report in the last position.’

  She stared at him. She suspected that something remained unsaid. She still thought the victory too trivial; the consequences too unpredictable.

  She had learned that with plots you had to calculate the embarrassment and damage if your deception were to be found out. You had to know what to do if you were found out.

  ‘We get the last say. The last speaker is remembered. Do you think they don’t cheat? What about Ulyanov’s famous news release on Wednesday? It’s just gamesmanship, Edith.’

  ‘You’re corrupting me,’ she said. ‘Again. I suppose it could be seen as a ruse de guerre. I forget all the rules of the ruse de guerre.’

  He was interested. ‘I didn’t know there were rules. I thought that was the whole point of a ruse de guerre.’

  She supposed the manoeuvre with the girl was a ruse de passion. All was fair in love and in war. She didn’t believe that. Why did people keep saying it? It was cruel nonsense.

  She said, ‘I worked with some military people on revising those conventions. Nothing came of it.’

  ‘When was this?’

  She laughed. ‘When I worked with the noble Romans in the third century BC.’

  He was looking to her; he did seem interested. She threw something else in the air to see if the seal jumped for it. ‘For example, it’s a perfectly proper ruse to trick an enemy unit into surrendering by pretending to it that it’s surrounded by a large force, by transmitting misleading radio or telephonic messages. But there was debate over whether wearing the uniform of the enemy is acceptable, or the misleading use of national flags or, obviously, the use of the flag of truce to lure the enemy to expose itself and then to shoot them. That was not an acceptable ruse de guerre.’

  That was enough of that, and that was about all she could remember.

  But she couldn’t resist throwing in another tidbit. ‘I remember that the military men I spoke with about this said that most ruses de guerre weren’t worth the trouble or risk – armies are too clumsy to engage in smart tricks. One officer said that just getting tired men to stand up after they had sat down was about all you could expect of soldiers.’