Cold Light (2 page)

1950

‘I’m your brother,’ he said, holding his cap in both hands.

He stood there in the lobby of the Hotel Canberra on a Sunday afternoon in summer, dressed something like a Welsh miner on his way to chapel: a woollen suit, a nondescript tie, and boots not shoes. The only anomaly, a briefcase held between his legs.

When a message had come from the hotel reception saying that there was someone to see her, she had put on lipstick and given her hair a quick brush and, with curiosity, come to the lobby. She had not expected it to be her lost brother. She had expected, well, she did not quite know what she expected – Someone with Good News. A Message from On High.

And then she decided that he was dressed as a civilian from during the war. He was dated – he had the austerity look of turned collars and patching and ‘make do and mend’. Something everyone was now trying to leave behind.

‘I know who you are,’ Edith said, moving towards him.

He looked down at his cap with a laugh, as if it were part of a costume, and pushed it into his side pocket. Then he held out his hand to shake hers, but she continued, without hesitation, bypassing his hand, into the embrace of a sister for a brother, an embrace she had never used, an embrace-in-waiting, and she felt her body unbending from the shoulders, down to her waist, and, as this was her brother, she found her body permitting itself to then be lightly against his. The hold of the embrace, though shaky, felt natural enough. They both yielded to their shaky embrace, his arms enfolding her loosely, with some masculine pressure. ‘I know who you are.’

She calculated his age – he was five years younger than she. She had last seen him when he was seventeen or so. Oh God – how old was she? She had changed her age so many times. She put her age up for her application for a position at the League, put it down on her marriage certificate with Dole, put it down again on her marriage certificate with Ambrose. She had, well, decided to shed another two years on her return to Australia – if anyone were to ask – to make herself less forbidding to the men who might offer her a position; but whatever permissible subterfuge about her age, past or present, she was still, inescapably, five years older than her brother.

His woollen suit smelled newly dry-cleaned. Perchloroethylene. He must be hot. He felt hot.

She held to the embrace, knowing that when she came out from it she would need words that she had not yet found.

He too held to her. She felt the broken breathing in his chest. He began slightly to pull from the embrace, but she held him.

Then, almost simultaneously, they pulled back from each other and she opened her eyes, wiping them with the side of her hand.

‘Do you have a handkerchief?’ she asked, with something of a laugh. She continued to hold one of his hands.

He remained awkwardly anchored by the briefcase between his legs. From a trouser pocket he pulled out what seemed to be a folded, unused handkerchief and handed it to her.

‘Perfectly clean,’ he said.

‘Thank you for the assurance,’ she tried to joke, dabbing her eyes. She tried to find her brother in the face of this man.

‘Thought you might not have recognised me. Thought I might have changed beyond recognition.’

‘Would you have recognised me?’

He nodded. They stood looking into each other’s face.

‘Or
do
I know who you are?’ she then said. ‘After all these years, I perhaps don’t know who you are.’

‘I know who you are – you’re a notable.’ There was brotherly sarcasm around the word notable, but also some deference.

‘Not at present.’ She went to hand back the handkerchief and then stopped, saying, ‘I think I’ll hold on to this. I may, I suspect, need it again. I’m a nobody at present.’

She sniffed and wiped her nose lightly. ‘Let’s sit down. We’ll go to my rooms, but first let’s gather ourselves.’ She gave out a laugh for no good reason.

They sat down at an afternoon-tea table in the lobby and she let go of his hand. They stared at one another and then away.

She said then that she should send a note to Ambrose to let him know that they had a visitor. ‘Ambrose, my husband.’ So many questions to be asked. ‘Are you married?’

‘Not married. I know about your husband.’

‘You do?’

‘Information comes my way.’ He didn’t smile.

Mystery man. She reached out to touch his cheek with the back of her hand. He nodded in silent acceptance of the touch, a way of returning it. She said, ‘You disappeared from our lives. Tell me about you. How was your war?’

He shrugged. ‘I was overseas for a time just after the war ended. Prague. I know about you – official of the League of Nations.’

‘Not me. Tell me about the things
you’ve
done. One at a time.’

She somehow had to order this conversation.

‘In the army during the war. On
Salt
, the army newspaper.’

‘A reporter? And you say you were in Prague?’

‘I came back only last year. I worked there for Telepress – the Czech government news service.’

This made no immediate sense to her. She’d had a reporter in her life, married him, divorced him, now dead.

‘I had a husband who was a reporter; I seem to remember he talked of a Madam Kotatkova of Telepress.’ That was a weird thing to say, but Frederick brightened.

‘I worked with her. What was your husband’s name?’

How remarkable that they could have met. ‘Robert Dole –
The London Telegraph
.’

Frederick shook his head.

‘How did you end up in Prague?’

‘The Party sent me. A few of us went there for training. To see how a new communist state worked.’

The Party. She would leave that for now.

‘And here?’ She was in a rush and did not leave him time to answer. ‘Did you come to Canberra to find me?’

‘I work here.’

She gestured around at the hotel.

He laughed. ‘No, not
here.
’

‘How did you find me?’

‘Finding someone in Canberra isn’t hard. Read about you in the paper.’

‘Oh, that – a few weeks ago – when we arrived from London. The reporter promoted me somewhat – up a level or two in the League.’

She had a feeling that she may have promoted herself up a few levels in the exuberance of the newspaper interview. ‘What are you doing in Canberra?’

‘I’m in politics.’

‘As is everyone in Canberra.’

‘As you were.’

‘I was never really in politics. As members of the League secretariat we thought of ourselves as above politics.’

‘No one is above politics.’

‘That sounded to me like an admonition. Are you running for parliament?’

‘I’m not in politics like that,’ he said, mimicking her, teasing her.

‘How, precisely, then, are you
in politics
?’

‘I’m an organiser with the Communist Party.’

He said it as if it were a rather unexceptional part of everyday life. She looked anew at him, as if to spot the communistic characteristics that might, somehow, be displayed in his being. Perhaps his suit might be something a communist organiser would wear, or was that a rather mad thing to think?

‘Rather an unpopular thing to be right now. I would keep it under my hat. Or cap. And what, or who, pray, do you organise?’ She tried to be jocular.

He moved his head as if shaking off her jocularity but did not answer.

She asked if it were a full-time job. ‘Or is it a secret job?’

He considered this. ‘I judge the situation. Sometimes I am discreet; sometimes I am not; sometimes I am something else.’

In her mind, she heard the words of communist colleague Noel Field, from the League days, from before the war, which she kept in her memory as a warning about those who worked for revolutions. ‘To say the truth and not to say the truth, to be helpful and unhelpful, to keep a promise and break a promise, to go into danger and to avoid danger, to be known and to be unknown . . .’ She said the last bit out loud: ‘He who fights for communism has, of all the virtues, only one – that he fights for communism.’ She laughed to lighten it up. To laugh and not to laugh.

‘That amuses you?’

She shook her head, squeezing his hand by way of apology for making light of his world. ‘A flash from the past. Your invitation to Ambrose and my wedding came back unanswered. And the invitation to my first wedding, also. I seemed to have some old PO address for you. I’m married to a man named Ambrose Westwood. I mentioned that. Formerly Major. Formerly a medical doctor. He’s Counsellor with the British High Commission.’

How remote the résumé sounded. As if seeing Ambrose and her through the wrong end of a telescope. My husband. She was used to him being so described in social situations and by law. But for her he was not a husband. She’d had a husband. Robert had been a husband. She wanted no more of husbands. She had done with
husbands
. And the word husband, she knew, was a lid, which, with Ambrose, did not screw on properly. A lavender marriage as she had heard FO types describe the marriage of Harold Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West. And probably that was how they described Ambrose and her marriage. Or something like that. Maybe there was no description for what they had. She should find another flower with which to describe it. Ambrose described himself sometimes as Something More or Less than a Husband.

How would a brother deal with all that? Wouldn’t have to.

‘What
exactly
is your work?’ she asked.

‘I’ve told you.’

‘Is that a job as such?’

‘They pay me a labourer’s wage. Yes, a job.’

She let go of his hand, not meaning it as a distancing gesture but because her palms were sweating. Though it might seem like a distancing. She wiped her palms on his handkerchief and took back one of his hands and smiled to him. The Communist Party revelation was throwing her. For all her travels, all her diplomatic experience, communists were still somewhat alien to her. There had even been communists who had visited their home when Frederick and she had been growing up. She had dealt with Russian communists in Vienna, when she was working with refugees for UNRRA after the war, after the League had collapsed. Knew some around the League. Knew Noel Field. And now she came to think about it, she knew some in Spain during the civil war. But she had not known an
Australian
communist. She had not known a
brother
who was a communist.

She was not yet ready to go ahead with the conversation in that direction. ‘All I know about you is that you sent Father a card once a year on his birthday – but never to Mother on her birthday. And that you once worked in a circus.’

He laughed. ‘A circus and many other places. I think “circus” was my description of capitalism. I did all sorts of work during the Depression – I was involved in strikes and lockouts in hot towns, long arguments in cool bars. The Party was my university.’

The last bit sounded to her like a set piece he had used before in conversations and speeches. She restrained her smile. He was giving a very controlled picture of himself.

And then he said, or quoted, ‘I no longer contain within myself a multitude of contradictions. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself for a purpose; I am large – I contain multitudes. But I no longer contain contradictions.’

Ye gods, he sounded like a demented speaker at Hyde Park corner. Perhaps her brother was demented. ‘That must be hard?’

‘What must be hard?’

‘Keeping yourself free of contradictions. I would find that hard.’ Living with Ambrose was a daily contradiction in her life.

‘Forgive the Whitman, but he came to mind. I permit myself some Whitman.’

She was having a little trouble following him.

Frederick had disappeared sometime when she had been at university. Was he, then, still a brother? What was a brother? And what, in this state of affairs, was a sister? Lost brother. Found brother. Communist brother. Stranger.

How to shape up this eruption of gawky kinship, which had come to her and which had become, indeed, an embrace, and a hand-holding. She tried to avoid becoming flustered – worse, emotional.

She had not had to be a sister, since, well, perhaps university vacations during his childhood. Both of them had gone to boarding schools. They had always been somewhat distanced by age.

‘You had training as a reporter?’ she asked, not knowing what information she needed from him to make him whole, to make him into a brother – as if she were dressing a brother doll. ‘You kept reading? You were a big reader as a boy.’

‘Books were my companions.’

Another set-piece reply. Was that what he said to the workers? ‘Father said,
always carry a book
.’

‘I carried a book. I learned to write pamphlets in the Party. Wrote for
Workers’ Weekly
. Then on
Salt.
’

‘And no wife?’ She had asked that.

‘At present I have a friend. The Party’s enough.’

A
friend.
She thought that he probably wanted to say lover. She did not know what expression would be correct in his vocabulary.

There was no way around it; they were face-to-face with the communist thing. ‘And when did you join the Communist Party?’