She was absolutely and guiltily delighted to be eating caviar with Ian – in her bedroom and drinking icy-cold vodka. He was in a good mood. As they sat there, he recounted the caviar transaction with an impersonation of the voices and with theatrical face and hand movements. ‘Ulyanov took me to the bar of the Bristol and ordered champagne and then said conspiratorially, “Tell me, Australia, you like caviar?” He looked over his shoulder to check that he was not being overheard. I said, “I’ve eaten it – but there’s never ever enough.” ’
She cut in, ‘Until tonight I had never had enough.’ She took another small taste of the wonderful black eggs.
Ian went on with his tale. ‘Ulyanov’s answer was, “That is as it should be, my friend – one should never satisfy oneself with caviar. Russian proverb.” He offered me a kilo of Beluga Prime – evidently, it was brought in by a corrupt Aeroflot flight attendant.’
He mimicked Ulyanov. ‘ “I want to offer you opportunity to take a share of this caviar. It is in half-kilo canisters. Would be nice gift. Or eat it in your hotel room. A feast. It’s, as you say, top of market.” I told him I would take two canisters. And then he says, in an American accent, “Have I got deal for you.” We haggled about the price. I happened to have read in the Herald-Tribune this week that caviar was selling at fifteen US dollars at Christmas. And so we did a deal.’
He gestured at their caviar feast spread on the collapsible table she’d had sent up. ‘Et voilà.’
She’d had the hotel also send up lemon wedges, sour cream – they did not have any crème fraîche, hard-boiled eggs – yolks and whites chopped separately, minced onion and toast.
He went on, ‘But then a weird thing happened. After a few more glasses of champagne – Moët – Ulyanov looked up and asked me thoughtfully, “Tell me, Australia, if we were at war, could you shoot me?”
‘Without blinking, I said, “Yes.” Ulyanov nodded, pondered, and then said, “But here at the conference I listen to you – you are a man without passion. You are the man who raises clever doubts. How could you act – shoot – while in such doubt?”
‘I said to him that the important thing was to be able to act decisively while in intellectual doubt. He didn’t comment on this.
‘When the bill for the Moët came, Ulyanov, of course, had only roubles. Had overlooked changing some money that day.’
She clapped his recounting of the Great Caviar Negotiation – ‘Well done, you’ – and took another spoon of caviar to her mouth, shutting her eyes as her mouth and the black eggs became her whole being.
Here they were – he and she – eating caviar in a hotel room together. He was not eating it with the girl in London. She was sure that the girl would not have appreciated the caviar.
And then she looked at him, thinking of his bold assertion about acting while in doubt. Yes, she thought, he could. He was not a far cry from her in personality. She felt she knew him. She restrained herself from quoting Orwell about knowing what it’s like to kill a healthy, conscious man.
‘Have you ever killed anyone, Edith?’ he said, laughing to lighten his question.
She said she had not killed, but nor was she a pacifist. ‘I have known men who have killed. I have slept with two men who have killed.’
He seemed to be impressed by this.
She had throughout her life kept a pistol with her, which meant that she was prepared at least to injure. And there was the situation in Lebanon when she had fired shots into the dark at assailants.
‘That was a fair way back,’ she said, ‘the sleeping with those men.’
After she had fired the shots into the dark, she remembered that she and others with her had been breathless with adrenalin and they had all drunk beers and laughed somewhat hysterically, but she had known even while she drank that she had been wrong, that one should fire only at an identified target.
Later, after he had left, she was reluctant to call down and have the table cleared and taken away. She thought she would sleep with the aromas and the happy detritus.
One thing was now plain: that if caviar and vodka couldn’t make it happen, she would not ever sleep with him.
It could be that she may never sleep with a man again.
She sat at the writing desk and wrote postcards to her friends, including Mr T, telling them of the grand hotel-room feast. After hesitating a little, she wrote cards to the boys, the one to Osborne a little longer, a little wittier. She wrote a card to Frederick, who was working for a second-hand bookstore and had become something of a hermit scholar. She wrote one to Richard Victor Hall, but then tore it up, feeling that for him a postcard would be a little too frivolous. Atyeo’s Spanish civil war posters would be more appropriate. She was looking forward to visiting Vence.
Bungled?
It was when they arrived in Israel that Edith began to wonder if she had bungled her life. Or at least half her life.
Or was calling it a bungle just another one of those self-lacerating accusations implanted in us by primitive ways of seeing? It was a word that belonged in the category of free-will language fallacies, along with the words ‘personal decision’. But some of these words would have to do for now, as long as one was aware of the imprecision that believing in free will caused. Our life, from birth on, was one set of jostling circumstance after another. In all the tangled meanings of circumstance, those pressures that insistently intrude into our lives and that propel us one way or another towards resolution – propelling us away from their pressures – all presented alternatives that were in some ways bad for us. In so far as some small degree of free will was assumed, it was in her judgement a very small part of anyone’s life circumstances. Free will was what was left after we discounted the accident of our birth in one part of the world rather than another; the role of the unconscious mind in manipulating us; the role of our parents and institutions in manipulating us; our birth-given genetics; the manipulation of political activity and ideologies – not forgetting Frederick’s Marxist belief that economics governed our life and we had little say in the working of the economic systems that pushed us that way like the tides, operating outside our ‘will’. Will was another fallacy. After all this, perhaps we were left with a minuscule degree of free will. Perhaps we could defy genetics by dyeing our hair.
And underneath everything there was accident and luck. We are governed by chance and buffeted one way or another by necessity. ‘There are no accidents,’ Dr Vittoz would say sometimes, in reference to some seemingly embarrassingly stupid mistake she had made. She knew that he was talking about very limited and personal situations. A plane falling on us from the sky was an accident. He gave her a copy of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, but she hadn’t read it very carefully. She thought it was a remarkable hypothesis. If we keep losing our house keys, that says something. If a child is accident-prone, that is saying something. Vittoz once said that if he could see our genetics under a microscope, knew the socio-metrics of your grandparents and parents, knew your IQ and the time and place of birth, and gave a few personality tests, he could tell someone what they would say next in answer to a question.
Perhaps the illusion of free will would fade in human development. After all, it was a relatively new way of seeing the human condition. Most people had once believed in fate and destiny. Perhaps we needed the illusion for now, to allow our flawed systems to work. Perhaps free will was a fiction we needed for now, to coerce desirable behaviour. This line of thought was too labyrinthine for her just at present.
She would refuse to say that she had ‘bungled’ her life. We have to be careful of the words we use about ourselves.
The poet Milton was right that we made for ourselves a hell or a heaven simply by the words we chose to use to punish or judge ourselves. When we had evolved a new vocabulary we would cease to engage in the fallacy of self-recrimination. We would begin to treat criminals humanely, even if some of them had to be separated from the community to ensure safety; we would abandon the notions
of personal guilt and personal failure, and the assumption that poverty, success and failure were voluntary. And that people could be coerced or exhorted into having will-power or courage, or having ‘get up and go’, or having a ‘sense of humour’.
We could reverse some pain by describing it with a poetry of a different order. Instead of a disappointed life, we could see that, in the unsuccessful pursuit of a goal, it had been the journey that mattered – not the goal. In her science studies she had been taught the value of ‘important error’ – the exhaustion of which excluded a false path and showed the way forward.
It was important to get the words right when assessing ourselves and our reality and, sometimes, to find the precise, non-judgemental words that determinism required, rather than the lacerating words. That was also a lesson she had learned from diplomacy: the correct form of words could bring relief to the parties by dissolving the tensions of negotiation, or could finally describe the situation with great precision, thus giving relief from confusion and a way out of the jungle of fears.
Edith thought that there were hells on earth that many of us went in and out of at times. Some people she knew had recurring, tormenting dreams. Ambrose had tormented dreams. Another hell on earth was paranoia – suspecting betrayal in our work-place and/or in our love life, but not having a means of proving it either way. Diseased suspicion. She knew that a broken heart was a hell. Her expectations in love had been betrayed by Robert and had been close to a broken heart – a half-broken heart. Richard had also, to a lesser degree, presented a false self, or she had invested him with a false self.
And excessive conscientiousness was a hell. She had seen that in civil servants – seen them worry themselves haggard over getting everything right, avoiding any possible error or culpability.
When the new vocabulary evolved, many of these self-entrapments and lacerations would dissolve.
What about the possibility that, early in life, when one did not have all the awareness that was needed, we struck a devilish contract – that is, a private contract with oneself, with life – to achieve some great goal, which was gradually revealed to be unachievable? We desperately clung to that tantalising goal, ever promised, beckoning, slowly turning into a torment, until we finally accepted that we had ‘failed’ ourselves, that we could not reach it, and we were left, despite having applied ourselves with diligence and labour to the achieving of the goal, to living a disappointed, soured and disgruntled life. Yes, we did fail but it was not something to flog ourselves about. That was a hell.
As she looked back at the conference and all its scientific arguments, its bickerings, its politicking, she saw that all this raging talk of humans and their disputes and wars could be seen as the wind and weather, the storms and cyclones of our intellectual evolution – the wind and the fury.
Yes, to be sure, a dispute was what it appeared to be and was felt to be at any given time – the heat of the engagement – but in the bigger picture, all this heat was the expression of the storm, and fury of human mental evolution, coming from the clash of the primitive against the pragmatic, part of the move towards accepting determinism and moving towards some new understanding. Evolution towards what? Perhaps she was wrong to assume that evolution was moving towards some humanist paradise. Perhaps it was going in the other direction? Perhaps the monsters would evolve and dominate? Or were the monsters doomed because they built their reality on rotten wood?
She brought her mind back to the lounge of the King David, where Ian was railing on about the mumbo jumbo of religion and about not wanting to go to Jerusalem because it would remind him of ‘the coloured prints of his Sunday school of deserts, donkeys, palm trees, camels, crowns of thorns and the crucifixion . . .’ He was going to refuse an embassy-arranged visit to Jerusalem.
‘I cannot believe you would pass up a visit to the tomb of Jesus,’ she said, teasing him, ‘given that Merrick has so kindly laid it on.’
At his age she would have had a similar resistance to going to Jerusalem. She had mixed feelings herself. She knew exactly the queasy feelings that religious sites gave her: greasy from human touch, and those grotesque images – the crucifixion, for example – which seemed to belong in all the storytelling of the religions of the Middle East.
She smiled to herself. She also knew those church-hall prints, and although she had been taught comparative religion in her Rationalist home and at WEA weekend schools, her friend Jennifer had sometimes dragged her secretly to her Christian Sunday school, not for the good of her soul but for mischief-making. Jennifer and she were good at mischief-making. They had only to glance at each other po-faced and they would burst into giggles and be sent from the room.
How incurious Ian was about the past – her past. Or was that a sign of her being older, of her need to display her past, to show that she had lived so splendidly – well, in parts – and so complexly? More to show she had once been young and fetching. Hoping that this display would magically transmute itself into something very attractive, causing him to see her as seductive. Futile. Yet how surprised he would be to find how much their lives and feelings resembled each other, despite their age difference. Maybe that would cause him to see that she still belonged in that single, vital age span – forty plus – to which we all belonged until old age dragged us, inescapably, down. Turned us into crones.
She continued her tease. ‘I simply fail to see how Sunday-school experiences would prevent you, as a grown man, from sightseeing in an ancient city,’ she said. ‘After all, I’m a humanist myself and I’m not scared.’
He stared at her over his beer – a fancy Czech beer. How were these expenses paid and accounted? That was his business. ‘I think monuments are overrated.’
She smiled. She agreed with him.
‘As a pedagogic experience, that is,’ he added, with his charming wryness. ‘I am up for the macabre and the grotesque, but the crucifix is too familiar to be macabre. Although I find the wearing of it around one’s neck rather macabre.’
Anything might still happen between them. Each morning she dressed with that in mind, paying a little more attention to her make-up, her eyes. They had resumed their ritual nightcap of cognac at the end of their day – his flask or hers. It was another of the nice similarities between them, the carrying of flasks, the using of the flask instead of the bottle. She didn’t know the history of his flask. She thought it was a relic from the First World War, perhaps his grandfather’s. In bed at night, her mind often returned to the airmail-letter night, replaying it, wondering if she had failed the occasion, and then, sometimes, turning it to a solitary, sensuous, pleasurable fantasy.
He had probably gone back to seeing her as an Eminent Person. She had asked him not to use that expression, to use ‘special envoy’. Who could ever sexually approach an eminent person? But eminent or not, they had been able to make mischief together and even giggled together. She also sometimes joined him for the guilty vodka liveners – his word, and also Janice’s word – which he and she would sometimes have before facing the morning business, downing them like Russians, he winking at her and she winking back. The word ‘livener’ brought back thoughts of Janice: the Janice who had become cold-blooded and who was now a stocky lawyer, dealing, she said, mainly with wills and the exchange of real estate – her description of her life. They had met by accident one evening in Melbourne and had two drinks at the Windsor. Janice said that she had made the discovery that wills and real estate were the most important legal matters of most people’s lives. She said she still did some workers’ comp and other union work. Her face now carried a permanent frown. She said she was still a communist.
‘Which Communist Party? I understand there are now three?’
‘The CPA, Marxist/Leninist. We follow the China line,’ she said, matter-of-factly.
On the second drink, Edith raised their last disagreeable, even vicious, exchange in Canberra. She tried to smooth it, revise it to some error, which came from the tensions of their lives ba
ck then, but Janice, looking at her drink, said, ‘There are times when it is appropriate to give offense.’
They left it at that. She wondered if Janice was right.
Age was turning Janice’s face to wood.
They parted without either suggesting another meeting.
But eminence, whatever it was after the cat had finished with it, meant that at last she was travelling in diplomatic style on important business – a diplomatic passport, drivers, interpreters, bodyguards, consulate courtesies – the thing she had most desired when she had returned to Australia at the end of the war. Amusingly, the bits and bobs were not so important to her now. After her mother received some honour – an MBE – and Edith had sent a cable congratulating her, her mother had replied in a letter that every honour came to you when the jewel had turned to a bauble, was of no use to your life and meant nothing. If you ever wore the medal, you became conscious that it said rather too loudly that you were an Important Person, and other people either privately denied that you were worthy of it or envied you for it. Yet some trappings did matter. She remembered how proud she had been back in the 1930s when travelling on a League carte de légitimation with her lettre de mission. Some honours, tangible recognitions, did come when you needed them to sustain your life drive – to reinforce the puny, self-doubting self.
‘You’re drinking more,’ she said to Ian, ‘not that it’s any of my business.’ She had been drinking more too. She didn’t care. She picked up his book, Marlowe’s Faust. He had started with Goethe and now had moved to Marlowe. ‘It’s Marlowe doing this to you,’ she said, moving back to her companionate style. ‘Reading too much about the tragic nature of the life and death of Doktor Faustus. You are frightened you’ll meet the Devil in Jerusalem and be offered an interesting proposal. Offered the return of the love of your young beauty.’
She looked at him. Maybe at some point he had already signed up with the Devil. As she now suspected she had done with her marriage.
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