Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  He was still nursing a wounded heart from his unsuccessful reunion with his much younger girlfriend in London. Although he had not gone into much detail, he had conveyed to Edith on his return that he had been prepared to invest his life in this girl and she had treated his proposal lightly, even cruelly.

  Ian then said, ‘If the Devil offered her back to me, what would be the exchange? What do I have left that the Devil still wants? And if he gave her back to me, I would have to live in fear of losing her again. I would be back in another hell.’

  She smiled. How clever he could be.

  She had gone to Jerusalem on the day trip without him, and found that she missed his company. But she enjoyed instead the well-informed company of Mark Merrick, the First Secretary from the Embassy.

  As she stared at the presumed tomb of Jesus, she again thought about the stories the human species spun to explain the strange quality of human consciousness. How many of these why-are-we-here stories were there? She seemed to remember that there were more than 30,000 separate, squabbling Christian sects, let alone the thousands of African and other sects. All engaged in make-believe that they were somehow special, and that by being a believer they had gained the attention of an Overseeing Intelligence. Or that through their belief they were superior, were the select – as a tribe or as a nation – with an important designed destiny, who deserved reward after death or even before death. Most contained the vicious notion that they alone would be saved and the rest of the world would be condemned to some sort of agony.

  The hungry-hearted, as that evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson had called them, and as she had exploited them.

  These ideas wandered through her mind as she looked at the tomb where the dead Jesus was supposedly laid, and she felt no piety. She smiled as she remembered Ian’s comments about the minimal pedagogic value of monuments and relics and the wearing of the crucifix.

  And as she pondered Aimee Semple McPherson’s description of the hungry-hearted, her mind tripped her, turning the idea of the hungry heart on her, suggesting that she, herself, was hungry-hearted, and was so because she did not give true evaluation to her marriage. Her cumbersome marriage still said to her heart in a hopeless way that surely, somewhere in this marriage, there must be balm for the heart and nutrition for the personality. But there wasn’t. If she were hungry-hearted, it was because the simulation of the marriage made her heart hungry. And then, as they toured to Mount Scopus, she finally confirmed to herself that she was finished with her husband and the children.

  Throughout this mission, this decision had been passing through her mind with varying magnitudes of conviction. She had now passed from the shivering immensity of her decision to a calm relief, and then to a mild excitement at the idea that, from this day on, she could go anywhere in the world she wished without consultation. She could wander. It was all over. She no longer cared much what people thought of her personal life.

  She would not go back, not even to say goodbye. She would continue to write to the children, but her letters did not seem to matter.

  When she returned to the King David with Mark, Ian was in the lounge reading and, she suspected, a little intoxicated.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked. ‘Let me order you both a drink.’ The First Secretary excused himself, shook hands and left.

  ‘Just as you feared, I suppose,’ she said sitting down. ‘And just as I’d expected.’

  What had she hoped? Had she unconsciously sought resolution from a monument and a mountain, both of which had no personal relevance to her but which, even so, had carried a powerful historical aura she had perversely used as scenery – background – for her decision? In that most perfect of determinist expressions, her mind had made itself up.

  ‘My mind has made itself up.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, carelessly.

  Surely what she had said begged a question? His incuriosity irritated her yet again. ‘I took a decision in the historic city of Jerusalem. I took a personally historic decision.’

  This time his face roused itself to attention and he looked at her, awaiting more.

  ‘I see I have your attention.’ She told him that she had decided to leave her husband while on Mount Scopus, where a Roman legion camped in 66 BC. Where in God’s name did they not camp? They camped everywhere. Every night.

  ‘Why Mount Scopus?’

  She thought about this. ‘Oh, it is the mountain for seeing clearly – scope as in telescope. This is my second marriage.’ It was her third marriage. She was omitting Ambrose. Or was she omitting Robert as a failed trial marriage? She had, in a sense, married Ambrose twice – in Geneva, a de facto thing, and then the London registry-office marriage for the sake of professional convenience – but as it turned out, looking back, it had been her only authentic marriage. How could she have been led by such illusions away from Ambrose into this empty thing with Richard, which after the passion had gone was always drifting somewhere between the discomfort of friction and disappointment or the limited, shaky comfort given by the temporary absence of friction? How could she have treated Ambrose with such inconsideration; treated herself with such inconsideration? Yet she saw that throughout her wondrous life with him, she had tended at times to hold their marriage at arm’s length, as if it were a passing temporary thing, which, however delightful, must finally be discarded and replaced with a real marriage. What she’d had with Ambrose was, as he had at times said, above marriage, superior to marriage. Above decorum. Above romantic love. The tears she should weep about Ambrose. She knew she would cry about the loss of Ambrose on and off for the rest of her life.

  But now, these tears came from her as an exasperated grunt of deep, deep regret. Had she grunted aloud? She looked across at Ian, who seemed not to have given it a thought. The grunt was one of those sounds that expresses a private rumination. She had wrongly evaluated her life with Ambrose, and now it expressed itself as a simple animal noise of remorse – a lament. Yes, a lament. Of course, he had been somewhat deranged in Canberra and much earlier in Geneva. Deranged on and off, perhaps, throughout his life. But he had his times of wisdom and, so often, a steely gaze through to reality. People had not known him for the Byzantine person he was – a richly decorative personality. He had been suffocating there in Canberra: the fish tank had been too small.

  He had read for her. Much of his reading was in her interests rather than his, and he had fed her from his reading. She had read twice as much, thanks to him. And he had given her quotations, the handrails of her life.

  She realised that in answer to questions in conversation about her life, she tended to calculate the length of her married life by bundling all three husbands into one numeral, which covered the time of all her married lives in total. She did not have a reason for doing this, perhaps just to simplify her life story.

  She reached out, took her Scotch and drank it straight down, and then waggled her empty glass at Ian. He, in turn, beckoned the waiter.

  She was so tired. ‘It came about on the telephone last night. My husband said that the last three years had been the happiest of his life. I was dumbfounded. I felt that as a couple we had long ago declined into a lukewarm, very thin soup of a marriage.’ She had realised how much Richard had sunk into illusion. Or maybe he had been making this declaration of happiness in the desperate hope that she would officially stamp it as true and valid, and that it would then be true. Had he tried to turn a dull married life into a heaven by describing it thus?

  We know why we leave a lover, but the lover never knows why they are being left. She remembered the torture that Theodor suffered when Amelia began her affair. He had been happy. He had not seen it coming.

  Of course, a marriage over years of daily, weekly cycles of emotional somnolence, of petits plaisirs or pallid contentment, along with petty recurring irritations, sometimes flaring, sometimes suppressed, could not be accurately summarised. We could only summarise a marriage according to the prevailing mood, or by the illusory, sentimental wishful
ness of the moment, or by some anthology of selected and edited memories. And, she supposed, for some that was enough.

  She returned, though, to something unpalatable: the fact that she had looked down on her husband. That was what had gnawed at her over the years. She had realised it before, but had always suppressed it with sore patience and a false tenderness. She wanted an equal as a partner. That was another hell – the pain of finding yourself with an intimate who could not fully or intensely feel or share one’s experience and one’s thoughts or connections. That was a hell.

  As she spoke to Ian about the marriage, she realised she wanted him to endorse her by saying something swashbucklingly anarchic about her willingness to throw over a long marriage, but from what he had told her of his own life – the business with the young girl – he was hardly awash with happy swashbuckling.

  Or was she again seeking a bond with him through another hatch – the door of shared heartache? Different forms of heartache, in their case. Heartache was never a proper basis for anything except shared crying, the solace of alcohol, and the hopeless, momentary solace of sexual contact, which was not with the person either wanted. Good enough, perhaps, but always falling short from the imagined splendour of the lost love.

  He came out of the silence and said something about her marriage decision being ‘too far outside my jurisdiction’.

  She said something about needing to put the words of her decision out into the world now, this instant, for all too see. To make it a proclamation. To make it irrevocable, in case she slid back into the worn slipper of her marriage.

  She went on to describe the failure of her and her husband to find a shared view of reality. ‘For example, despite his science degree, throughout our life he held to five incorrect understandings of how the body worked; confused the kidneys with the liver . . .’ She tried to stop herself explaining to this man she had known only a month, her husband’s views of anatomy. ‘That’s a poor example. There was something about his mind. He had good degrees, but he always landed a little to the right or left of understanding anything novel and serious that I said. He had a dive for it, but never grasped it and it became too tiresome for me to make for him the magnetic correction every time, so after a while I simply let it pass and lived in a condition of fractional misunderstanding. It is wonderful when one is understood. I think . . .’ She hesitated. ‘. . . we have it from time to time, you and I, on this mission. Unless I am fooling myself?’

  Oh, she was at it again, the hungry heart.

  She didn’t look to him for an answer, but instead looked around the hotel lounge at the young men and women in uniform with their Uzi submachine guns slung over the backs of their chairs.

  She had spent a year or more listening carefully to Richard, giving him a disproportionate time in the conversation, guiding him by her comments towards what she thought was a more relaxed or Bloomsbury way of seeing life, more the way she and Ambrose had seen it. What an arrogant, morally vain mission that had been. After she had realised how useless this effort was, she had gone into internal exile from the marriage, although he, her husband, had not realised that she had departed. And he still did not know.

  They sat silently over the next drink, occasionally pointing out to each other something of interest in the comings and goings of the hotel lounge there in Israel, or recalling incidents of their trip.

  Ambrose was living in retirement with Allan on his place in Wiltshire. In letters, he often invited her to pay a visit, but she had felt that to do this would be a selfish intrusion back into his life, and would for her be full of false hope of reunion. And she was unsure of where Allan fitted into Ambrose’s life. She saw that even when Ambrose and she’d had their two serious separations, she had always tried to keep Ambrose in her life – in reserve. All part of her juggle. And now the balls had fallen. She would live with it. It was not only a sorrowful memory – a lament – it was, she tried to remind herself, also an attic of many remarkable things.

  Ian said, ‘About plans . . .’

  She returned her attention to him. She was so glad to be with him, even if he seemed unimpressed by her huge decision, unable to share the drama of it. It occurred to her that maybe he was cautious, off-hand, because he thought that she was leaving her husband to make the way clear for him in her life. She blushed. How dreadful, if that were true.

  ‘I arranged to take a drive up to Beirut. Guest of the Israeli Defence Force.’

  ‘That’s good. Yes, how clever of you.’ Her voice showed nothing of her deep embarrassment – maybe an imagined embarrassment. This trip was some sort of distraction organised by the Israelis to keep their minds off Israel’s fiddling with nuclear weaponry at the Dimona reactor, which the French had helped them build.

  She said she would love to see Beirut again.

  They had given up on being given permission to visit the Dimona reactor. Even the Americans were no longer allowed to visit it, not that their visits mattered – they always complained about restricted access. Secrecy about their nuclear weapons was part of the Israeli military and diplomatic strategy – to keep their enemies guessing. They still hadn’t joined the IAEA or signed on to the NPT. She and Ian had gained some information informally from Israeli people unhappy about nuclear weapons, and from an old Jewish friend of Edith’s from the League days now living in Israel, and a CIA contact who had told them that they suspected that Israel had developed a variety of atomic weapons.

  They ordered their ritual cognac in the lounge instead of going to one or other of their rooms. He made a simple good-luck toast to her decision about her marriage, and they drank to it. But because of her fear that she had been misunderstood, she again blushed.

  ‘You must be brave, Edith,’ he said, comforting her. And then they went to the lift, rode to their floor silently and parted to their rooms.

  As she inserted the key into the lock of her door, she thought perhaps he privately welcomed the fact that she had now cleared the way for something to develop between them.

  Edith, stop.

  The Passenger

  Next day, at the King David, a young Israeli colonel in uniform came to discuss the Beirut trip. He was probably a public-relations colonel, not a combat colonel. How to tell?

  He seemed to direct his conversation to Ian, but she cut into their conversation, saying, ‘I was in Beirut – the year doesn’t matter – before the last war; the Second World War, that is. I’d really love to see it again.’ She beamed at Colonel Yizhar. ‘Back then, I spent many nights at the Kit Kat Club.’

  What a heavy curtain the Second World War was for the young – a divider of the generations. Yet for her it was part of the continuous flow of her life. There was no great division caused by the war or the Great Depression and the present.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it sightseeing,’ Yizhar said, laughing, a hint of dismissal. But then he looked at her directly for the first time, maybe interested in what she had said, trying to imagine her Beirut.

  Ian tried to put her off and, in his knowing male voice, said, ‘It’s a bit rough up there, Edith. There’s a civil war – and more – going on. One of us should stay alive to make the final report.’

  She dismissed the objection with a glance, which she hoped was withering. ‘I’ve been in tough places and done what would be considered rather dangerous things in my time, Ian,’ she said. ‘In Beirut, I carried a revolver. I had to fire shots, I remember, at some intruder or bandit. A bomb was thrown in the street. A grenade.’

  She should not have used the word bandit.

  This definitely caught the attention of Yizhar, who asked about the pistol.

  ‘It was what was known as a purse pistol – point two five calibre. Silver-plated, an ivory handle.’

  Yizhar nodded, somewhat impressed. ‘And the Kit Kat Club? You were there in the days of glittering Beirut. Paris of the East.’

  She told them she had also been a member of the Club St George and the Colorado. ‘Great days.’


  ‘What were you doing there? Apart from nightclubbing,’ Ian asked, he too showing interest, ‘and shooting at bandits.’

  ‘I was with the League of Nations.’ She played herself down. ‘A humble officer. Counting camels.’ She said the trip would mean a lot to her.

  ‘All care, no responsibility,’ Yizhar said. ‘This trip is officially invisible.’

  ‘Of course.’ She began to babble. ‘I came across from Paris on the old Orient-Taurus Express . . .’ But she saw that she had lost their attention.

  After Yizhar had left, Ian said, ‘We’d better take our hip- flasks, Edith, the Colorado is probably closed.’

  She would indeed take her hip-flask, and if the Colorado was open, maybe Jerome would be there, playing away, staring out, expressionless, into the crowd, looking for a pretty young woman. She would go to him in the break, visit him in the chambre d’artiste, and he would recognise her and show great pleasure, saying, ‘Ah, ma belle vamp australienne.’ Then he would open his arms to her and she would open herself to him.

  Next morning, as they gathered in the lobby, she was amused to see that Ian had his safari-suit pockets stuffed with gear – as far as she could see, maps, binoculars, a camera, a SW radio. And, following the Israeli custom, he also carried a litre plastic bottle of water.

  ‘You are prepared,’ she said. ‘The good boy scout that you are.’

  He was a little embarrassed and said officiously, ‘We are going into a war zone, Edith.’

  She wondered if he had ever been in a war zone. She guessed not. She was dressed for the outdoors: slacks and sturdy shoes. A scarf. A wide-brimmed, rather rakish white hat of woven straw. A tight weave with a red band. In her capacious bag she, too, was the good girl guide – a sweater; water; her pistol in its case with six bullets; toiletries; underwear, if they for whatever reason had to stay overnight; some first aid and her flask. She felt guilty about the pistol – she knew she should have asked Yizhar about taking it. Oh well.