Cold Light (27 page)

Janice told Edith to wait at the car while she spoke with Frederick. She went back into the hall.

Edith hovered around the car, hiding as best she could, and saw Scraper come to the door of the hall and peer around and then limp to the bushes to find his bottle.

Janice and Frederick came out. Frederick still held the ball by a piece of its string. He kicked it into the night and then came over and said goodnight. ‘I will call here tomorrow with a new ball and ask around about fixing the window.’

He was about to go back to the hall, but turned to her. ‘Edith, please don’t come over and talk to me when I am chairing a meeting.’

She didn’t know if he were joking.

He went back to the hall.

‘Just drive away,’ she said to Janice.

As the car started, she saw the Peace Congress communist Turner come out of the hall with Frederick beside him. Frederick pointed at the car, and Turner came over before they drove off. He leaned in Janice’s window, but talked across her at Edith.

‘That was clever – buying the new ball.’

‘Thank you. I didn’t see it as a stratagem. I saw it as
noblesse oblige
.’

She suspected he would get the irony.

He said, ‘Different interpretation; same result. At the League, Briand was sound, I thought.’

‘I thought so, too.’

‘The League was wrong about Finland.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘We will argue it through at the drinks. You’ll be there?’

‘I have to excuse myself.’

‘Too bad.’

Then he looked at Janice. ‘You’ll be there?’

‘Yes.’

He pulled his head out and waved them off.

Janice drove away, and after they were out of the sight of the hall, Edith took out the flask and offered it to Janice, who waved it way. Edith drank deeply.

Without looking away from the road, Janice said, ‘You seem to have attracted our dazzling Mr Turner.’

Edith had not yet seen it that way, but yes, perhaps she had. How flattering – a man so young. Then she let go of the fantasy, flattering as it was. Janice, she suspected, was wrong in her reading. What would a dazzling married man with two accents and two degrees want with her? ‘I think I was a cover for his interest in you, Janice.’

‘He was something of a mentor for Fred.’

More interesting was that it was somehow less momentous for her to harbour confused yearnings towards a young woman such as Janice than it was to entertain a dalliance with a young man. She felt she should be perplexed by this, but was not.

‘Oh, no,’ Janice said. ‘It was you. But I will fight you for him.’ She laughed. ‘I will tell him you are a bourgeois enemy of the people. The Melbourne people all seem so impressive to us. Very serious.’

‘If he is truly interested in the League, he’d be the first person I’d met who was.’

‘Who in horror’s name was the crippled man?’

‘A ghost from university and from another life. As much as I find him detestable for personal reasons, that generation haunts all of us women.’ She felt tears coming from her eyes and wiped them away with her glove. ‘He is the living representative of all those boys who died never having had a woman.’ Was that really why she had succumbed to his sex needs back then?

‘I might be too young to have those feelings. Will you come to the party?’ Janice asked.

‘Scraper is going.’

‘We could ask him to leave.’

‘You can’t get Scraper to do anything he doesn’t want to do. He is authorised to do as he pleases by his wounds of war.’

‘I thought he must be an agent from Security and Intelligence. But some of the others from Sydney seem to know him.’

Edith wound down the window to let in cool air, and thought about this. ‘It’s a possibility – that he’s a spy.’

‘No one would ever question him, crippled and all.’

‘It’s highly likely that he’s an agent.’ She saw the punitive impulse behind her words.

They sat outside the hotel with the engine running for warmth.

‘I didn’t make my speech on the Universal Declaration.’

Janice thought for a while and said, ‘You understand, don’t you, that we’re fighting for the existence of the party, not for the Universal Declaration? They just so happen, in a small way, to coincide.’

Edith had only half-faced this. ‘I suppose, then, it’s like the war – we are allies with the Soviet Union because we have a common enemy. Not for any other reason.’ She wondered if they were talking also of their affection for each other. Why did she keep reducing things to her relations with Janice? She had never had an affair with a woman, even though it had been offered, and in some ways had wanted it in a Bloomsbury sort of way. Perhaps now she wanted it. Perhaps she had it with Ambrose, dear God. But she was unsure of Janice’s attitudes.

Edith switched off that subject. ‘The communist is, at least, committed firstly to freedom from want, which is in the Declaration.’

‘Yes. Frederick would say that declarations will not secure freedom from want. Only revolution will do that.’

‘You often attribute your thinking to Frederick.’

‘He likes to believe that he is the thinker in our affair.’

‘And I suspect that a lot of this thinking comes from you.’

Janice laughed. ‘I only attribute the doubtful stuff to him. But he’s very good on theory.’ She then turned fully to face Edith. ‘If you aren’t convinced that something is dreadfully wrong with our society you have only to look at the working-class streets of Sydney and Melbourne – and see the kids playing in the dirty streets – and then remember the manicured playing fields of the schools you and I and Frederick attended. The rich have their own schools, their own doctors, their own hospitals and their own lawyers and judges, for God’s sake.’

Edith shrugged at Janice. ‘I’m with you on that.’ She couldn’t stop herself adding, ‘And we have all benefited from that.’ Meaning Frederick, Janice and she. And, of course, Ambrose. Janice gave a wry smile. ‘We have. And now is the time for us to correct that injustice.’

They kissed goodnight lightly and Janice drove off with a flourish of gravel.

As Edith walked towards her room, she changed her mind again about the charismatic man, Turner. He was perhaps interested in her, too, because he sensed she was someone he had not yet won over. She decided that when Ambrose asked her how it all went, she would say, ‘It was more a football game than politics.’

It had been in many ways a farce. And her contribution had also been farcical. Accurate counting of the attendance; a charity football. She flushed as she recalled it.

H
er
cartes de visite
had not arrived from the government printery. After inquiring again to no avail, she had assumed that it had been stopped by whoever approved
cartes de visite
and so had them done privately at her own expense. So far, however, she had found that she had very little call for their use. She had given one to Janice.

She cried about the
carte.
Oh, why did she pretend? Who was she fooling? Or was she simply trying to regain her lost ground in life. She cried because she did not know if she was being foolish or courageous.

She had ordered some woven woollen wall hangings from Melbourne, to break the blandness of the walls. She had abandoned the idea of coming in one weekend and painting the walls red. She removed the blackout blind from the small opaque glass panel, which resembled a window but did not open, although it did cross her mind that if World War III was imminent, as some thought, they might again be needed. Her second thought was that the atomic bomb might make blackout blinds somewhat redundant.

Those working in her building still occasionally stopped, looked in and waved to her. Sometimes she saw strangers looking in at her office, whispering among themselves. She suspected that they were visitors from other government departments or even from Sydney or Melbourne.

Maybe she had gone too far with the office. Oh well. McLaren hadn’t said anything. Probably didn’t dare.

Although she did not understand the how and why of it, her presence, she sensed, discomposed the men by whom she was surrounded – architects, draughtsmen, surveyors. They were unused to having a woman of a certain age in their midst who was something of an equal. Blue funk might be a better description. She tried not to behave thus, trying to maintain a degree of deference to them all. Perhaps her background with the League also threw a large shadow, a mystique, although she thought that, in the eyes of some, it would seem as if she had been miserably reduced in life by its collapse – that she had come down in the world. Some might not be quite sure where her authority reached and ended.

Twice she had broken down and wept in her office, rising from her swivel chair and pulling down the Holland blinds to the windows onto the corridor. Blinds she had paid for herself. All that work – all those long night meetings, all those reports, all those files, all that argument – had changed nothing, nothing. She wept for that grand failure, but also wept in self-pity for her own plight, for having lost her status, lost her place in the administration of the world, to be doing work beneath her age and talents.

She had also once looked around at her efforts to make a fine office, and had wept with embarrassment at the hopeless bravado of it all. The hopeless bravado of the furnishings.

Sometimes, when feeling stronger, she made an effort around the tea trolley to assert that the lasting value of the League was that it had been a college for the world. A time when the species began to learn how to live together on the planet. A beginning.

Mr Thomas was her only supporter.

Occasionally, a clerk, in confusion, would mistakenly bring her a document for signature. At first she sent them to the appropriate section head, but then stopped doing that and, more for her own amusement, would use her ink stamp saying ‘Recommendation’. She would write her opinion, initial it and then tell the clerk to take it to whoever had the authority to approve it.

This was all make-believe. Truth be told, most of her days were spent taking notes from Gibson, typing up letters, chasing addresses and sealing envelopes. Sometimes she was close to breaking point, of walking out, of going to the hotel, packing, collecting Ambrose from the High Commission in a taxicab, going to the train station and fleeing. Anywhere. Taking the taxicab to Paris.

She had that afternoon decided to write to Holford and send him copies of all the plans for the capital to date, for him to mull over for his talk.

She had written to a few people without going through Gibson or Rogers, and now began typing a note to Holford with a few of her ideas, together with views she had heard expressed by outsiders. She typed:

She paused at this claim, having not seen Adelaide or Perth or Brisbane, but she let it stand, having heard others say it.

She had wondered about her reference to frogs, but left it in for his amusement.

She had done well with frogs at university. Women were supposed to do botany, but she had got them to let her go on with zoology. She had got to know about snails as well. Did not mind snails. She had let them climb over her hand. She had also eaten them in France; you could study and you could admire a creature, and eat it as well. That was the human species for you. Or at least, the French version of the human species.