Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  She hoped that he would relax and stop fussing about her with his bumbling concern.

  She saw that he surreptitiously wiped away another tear.

  The flies gathered around the beer bottle and she kept shooing them away.

  The flies, always a few inside despite the flyscreen. Flies, of course, bred inside the house as well as outside the house. She, the one-time scientist, knew that much about flies.

  ‘Where’s Robert. How’s that all working out? You seem to have gone quiet about him in the letters. And I see you aren’t wearing your wedding ring.’

  Her father did not beat around the bush.

  The wedding ring. ‘You wouldn’t believe it—but I took it off because of some skin problem and in the rush to leave for the ship, forgot it …’

  She wondered if he had appraised her figure, half-expecting her to be with child. Maybe hoping that she’d come home to have her child in Australia.

  She had been vague in the letters. She smiled at him. ‘He’s in Ethiopia, covering the war. What’s left of it.’

  ‘I read that Haile Selassie has fled to England. The Italians seem to have won.’

  ‘We heard the news on the ship. Sanctions came too late.’

  She couldn’t bear to think about it.

  ‘Looks as if I am not going to get a grandchild,’ her father said.

  ‘Come on, Dad, there’s still time. I’m not over the hill yet. But, yes, it doesn’t look promising, I grant you that. Unless brother Fred comes good. Robert and I have no immediate plans.’

  Was there still time?

  She sometimes wondered what would happen if she accidentally fell pregnant to Robert after one of his visits. Diaphragms were not 100 percent.

  ‘I wouldn’t bank my money on Fred. Doesn’t look like we can expect any progeny from your brother.’ And then added, without bitterness now, as a kindly humour, ‘Never have been able to expect anything from him.’

  ‘Do you hear from him?’

  ‘Once a year. As I presume you do.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Seems to drift from town to town.’

  ‘What work does he do now?’

  ‘Whatever he can get. He’s fallen in with the sideshow crowd.’

  ‘Performing?!’ She showed interest.

  ‘Assistant tent master.’

  ‘Is that a good job?’

  ‘Driving the marquee pegs, most likely. He was never a labourer, he was always the assistant surveyor.’

  She laughed. That was true. It sounded as if she wouldn’t see him. Would she ever see him again? The lost other half of her childhood?

  ‘Perhaps he could become a circus magician. Will Andrade taught him a trick or two. How is Will?’

  Her father laughed. ‘Andrade—the name means magic, did you know that?’

  He had told her that many times over the years.

  ‘Does he still run his magic shop in Melbourne?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Still in the Rationalists?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  Why had the lives of both children been childless?

  She’d been meticulous about birth control with Robert. Not so with Ambrose. That she’d not fallen pregnant to Ambrose was a murky mystery which he had only partially explained but he had told her not to worry and she hadn’t and despite the many sexual encounters with him over the years she hadn’t fallen pregnant. Mumps, he said.

  Somehow, sometime, imperceptibly, she’d passed by the yearning for children. But why had she been able to do that? Was it because no man qualified as a father to her children? Or was it that she’d not qualified as a mother? She knew she didn’t have the qualities of a wife. What then was she? Vittoz suggested ‘displacement’ of her maternal drives onto an organisation to care for the world. She was trying to be a Mother to the World.

  She didn’t find that convincing. It surely didn’t feel like mothering.

  Her father moved back to her marriage, absent-mindedly asking the same question he’d asked before. ‘How’s Robert?’

  ‘He’s covering the war for his paper.’

  How he could cover such a thing from one side she didn’t know.

  ‘Looks as if things are blowing up in Spain. Is the League to do anything?’

  ‘No. It’s within the boundary of one country. I suppose he’ll go there.’

  ‘The League’s finished, isn’t it, Edith? That’s why you’ve come home?’

  ‘Some people say so. I came home to see you, Dadda.’

  ‘Will you stay home?’

  ‘I’ll go to Canberra to see if they want me.’

  ‘Could John get you a position?’

  ‘Don’t know what would be available to a married woman. And he’s on the High Court. Out of politics.’

  Should she stay with the League until the bitter end?

  Sometimes it was harder and braver to take the decision to quit than it was to obey the principle of ‘staying to the end’ or not being a quitter. Sometimes the use of these maxims was itself mental cowardice, an avoidance of difficult analysis.

  Instead of being game to get out while the going was good.

  Another rough maxim.

  ‘He travels a lot?’

  ‘Yes.’ She knew he was still gnawing at the bone.

  ‘Didn’t want to see Australia?’

  ‘He thinks Spain could be the beginning of another world war.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘He’s often right.’

  She found that hard to say.

  She could see her father was both curious and restive about her marriage to Robert. He wouldn’t want to know. He had been rather keen on Robert. He liked the idea of having a son-in-law. A replacement for Fred perhaps. But Robert had become a Fred, an absent husband, an absent son. Robert and her father had played golf together in Geneva on the League links. They had gone out together to some burlesque show looking for something risqué in the French style.

  Her father had never met Ambrose. Knew of him only as Edith’s friend.

  He became rather serious. ‘Hasn’t gone bung has it, Edie?’

  He reached over to take one hand in both of his.

  She smiled at her father. ‘Doesn’t go as well as yours and mother’s marriage. But it still goes.’

  She stood up to ease her inner discomfort about her marriage and to deflect her father’s inquiries.

  She wandered along the verandah, her hand trailing along the flyscreen. Her mind found the form of words. She turned back to her father. ‘Our married life suits me fine.’

  She went on to change the subject. ‘I see you still take The Rationalist and Ingersoll’s Magazine.’

  Copies were lying on the verandah table.

  ‘I take them but do I read them?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re drifting away from Rationalism? Fear of what’s on the other side of the dark divide?’

  He laughed. ‘That’ll be the day—the day that I worry about the God business. If there’s something after death then I’ll be happy to be surprised,’ he laughed. ‘I don’t get to read them because the print is too small. They seem to have reduced the size of the print.’

  She laughed and looked again at his physical condition.

  Six years earlier when he’d come to Geneva for the wedding he’d seemed sprightly, unintimidated by Europe. Now she could tell by his face, his movements, his excuses, his inability to get to the ship, that he was declining.

  The loss of his wife, the absence of both children. He would need looking after in the years ahead.

  And during the hour or so of their reunion he had muttered a few times about the ‘collapse of everything’ which ranged from the watertank stand to the international situation.

  He feared Japan. He was fearful in a childlike way.

  He thought the weather was changing.

  But she was happy to hear his spirit still bridling at the idea of him becoming religious.

  ‘Speak
ing of the Rationalists, the Melbourne lot and the Sydney lot are fighting among themselves,’ he said. ‘You’d think they’d have a few clues about how to talk and how to resolve their differences. Think they’re the brightest people in the world but they’re at each other’s throats like a bloody political party.’

  She felt that her father’s way of speaking had become more countrified and broader since her mother had died. At least it was broader than she remembered. Her mother had been the educated one in the family, although her father was a reader.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

  ‘Some want to go with Japan and Germany, and the other lot want to be Russians.’

  ‘At least the communists are atheists.’

  ‘Atheists are only right about one thing—about God. They’re not necessarily correct about anything else. I see Stalin has permitted Christmas this year.’

  ‘I saw that. Hitler’s pulling the churches into line too. At least he’s doing that. Telling the Roman Catholics to get out of politics.’

  He laughed darkly. ‘Great people to have on our side.’

  Her father’s face darkened then with memory. They were both remembering the family fight over Christmas. As a Rationalist he had decided that the family wouldn’t celebrate Christmas. She and her mother had argued for it: her father and her brother had been against it.

  For two years there had been no Christmas, which made Christmas Day one of the most dismal days of the year, with the family divided and gloomy.

  Voltaire’s birthday celebrations did not make up for it.

  After two years, the family began to follow the Christmas Day traditions and to enjoy the day.

  ‘I was a bit of a Stalin,’ her father said, bitter with himself. ‘About Christmas Day. Do you remember that?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ she lied, trying to help him over his memory.

  ‘I was a bit of a fanatic. I feel sorry about that.’

  ‘It’s all right. I remember we eventually agreed it was great to celebrate. We didn’t believe in Christmas but we believed in celebration.’ She laughed.

  He laughed with her.

  ‘A man can be a bloody fool about big ideas.’

  She went to his side and gave him a hug. ‘Ideas have always been your treasures. You had a huge treasure chest for us.’ He had often delivered ideas to them—not as arguments—but as small discoveries, as if he’d found them in the garden and was handing them around to be examined with curiosity. ‘So the Rationalists are becoming political?’

  ‘Isn’t the whole world?’

  ‘I suppose so. But the Rationalists?! I thought they’d have a larger view of things.’

  ‘You’d think so.’

  ‘Langely? Is he caught up in it?

  ‘Oh yes. In the thick of it. They’ll be tossing him out before long.’

  ‘Really?’

  Langely had been the powerhouse and the leader, the first General-Secretary and full-time lecturer for the Association in Melbourne.

  ‘And John?’

  ‘Being a High Court judge, he’s not in public life but he’s very much in the Melbourne end in a behind-the-scenes way. Miles is bringing out his own magazine. Australia First. I’ve washed my hands of them.’

  How sad that the good old Rationalists were at each other’s throats. That her father had lost that too, the merry, wine-loving, forever-talking bohemians. Her father, often the whole family, had gone weekly to Sydney to attend the meeting and the picnics. They were his clan. What did it say about the supremacy of reason? Where was the safe-track of the intellect which supposedly led through the shallow misunderstandings of politics?

  Her days in Sydney and then in Melbourne with the Rationalists had been her happy days. After graduation, especially when she’d gone to Melbourne, the Rationalists had been her club and her family. Working with John Latham on his political career, helping to organise the visit of the great English Rationalist, Joseph McCabe. Attending WEA lectures. Free love. Well, free love in theory. She had been too reserved for free love. Then.

  And now? She had put it into practice for a time, she supposed. Supposed? And what did she have now in her life—a ménage à trois? And with a man who was not quite a man.

  ‘I told you in my letters that I’ve been analysed.’

  ‘Was he taught by Freud?’

  She laughed. ‘They all claim to be colleagues of Freud. A Doctor Vittoz in Geneva.’

  ‘What did he find out?’

  ‘Oh—that I was too sane.’

  ‘Doubt that.’

  Her father looked at her, knowing that the analysis was evidence of something ‘being wrong’. ‘What was up?’

  ‘I did it as a bit of a lark.’

  ‘It’s all the rage, isn’t it?’

  ‘Americans and others come to Switzerland and to Vienna to be analysed.’

  ‘You’re older and wiser, Edith,’ he said, perhaps for want of anything left to say to her.

  ‘Older and wilder, perhaps.’ She laughed to herself and with Ambrose whom she heard in her head saying ‘as in Oscar Wilder’. Her father might appreciate the joke. Might not. Might lead to places she did not want to talk about.

  ‘I think we’ve always known deep down that reason is the weaker of the faculties,’ he said. ‘There was a problem in the design of the human species.’

  He then seemed to go back to her humorous remark and said, ‘You were never a wild girl.’

  And she supposed that she was not a wild woman. Yet she’d been punished for it back in Geneva. She’d had her fun. Her wonky marriage. Her teaming up with Ambrose. She supposed that was Wilde enough.

  She was wild at heart. But she preferred the company of dispassionate people.

  ‘How’s the new Palace of Nations?’

  ‘Our offices are fine. The Council room is a bit of a disaster.’

  ‘Why so.’

  ‘They’ve done away with the horseshoe and set up the Council on a type of stage facing the audience. Everyone is inclined now to make pompous statements—less discussion—less real argument. It’s all too stagey.’

  ‘You still think the right table might change the course of things,’ her father teased. ‘Like your mother. She thought furniture changed the way we felt.’

  Edith smiled too. ‘The right setting does help. But like reasoning, aesthetics too is one of the weaker human attributes.’

  She became conscious of her bedroom door opening and her father standing at the door as she unpacked.

  She turned away from him, a little embarrassed that she had taken off her travelling dress and was only in her short black satin petticoat which was gathered under the breasts and showed her figure.

  ‘You make a pretty picture,’ he said.

  She moved to find a robe to put on, but delayed putting on the robe, allowing herself to move around in her satin petticoat, her cleavage very obvious, allowing her father to watch a little longer, feeling that it was a pleasure for him, and wondering if there was necessarily anything wrong with a father enjoying the sight of the body of his grown daughter in lingerie. She must remind him of her mother at her age in some way. She pulled on her robe, smiling at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t expect to find you half-undressed.’

  ‘That’s not an embarrassment.’

  He was particularly interested in her new travelling writing box.

  She showed him the stationery holders, the screwtop ink-wells, the pencil case.

  ‘It even has a secret compartment,’ she said. ‘It opens if you push this divider.’ She showed him.

  He laughed with boyish pleasure. ‘Very nice piece of woodwork.’

  She stopped her unpacking when she came across a drawer of her childhood things.

  She held up some of her wooden animals, made by her father. He was something of a woodcraftsman.

  ‘Want me to throw away any of that junk?’ her father asked ‘While you’re here, you’d best sort out what you want to keep.
’

  ‘These are not to be thrown out. Not these—not ever. I might throw some of the other stuff away.’

  ‘Keep some of it for your own kids.’

  How much did parents feel the absence of grandchildren?

  How to choose what to keep? Well-chosen memories—was that possible? Perhaps in what we chose to remind ourselves of about ourselves. Much like the facts of history. Who chooses what is to be remembered?

  Be careful about which memories you surround yourself with.

  At the graveside, she wept a little while her father pulled at stray weeds which were encroaching onto the stone slab.

  He stopped and put an affectionate hand on his wife’s tombstone which read, with perfectly chosen words,

  Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

  It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

  Seeing that death, a necessary end,

  Will come when it will come.

  Her mother had decided the words.

  ‘They are the right words for her,’ she said.

  ‘Your mother became more atheistic as she approached death. You know, she was very strong.’

  ‘She wasn’t that much of a Rationalist when she was alive, was she?’

  ‘She was a bit like Ella Latham. She came to it gradually. She began as a secularist, thinking that, even if there were a spirit world, then the material world, as we know it, demanded our whole attention and service. Then she became an agnostic, feeling that the human mind would never understand the origin of the universe so there was no point in worrying about it, except as a rather early part of a long scientific inquiry. And then she realised that religion was a story people told to keep fear at bay and not a very interesting story at that. And that she didn’t need it. She was an atheist in the end.’

  She laughed out loud. Her father had always placed people in his many divisions of free-thinking, each with their attendant definitions, each held in different esteem, all graded. The Rationalists were like Believers, they had their categories, heresies, and hierarchy of righteousness. She’d forgotten that. ‘I’m laughing at your wonderfully endless definitions of people’s positions,’ she said, as her father showed surprise at her laughter.

  ‘Differences exist. Why not know them? Helps to find your true friends and enemies.’