Cold Light (31 page)

T
hey walked through the hollow rooms of the house, empty of all furniture, except, in one room – a nursery room, perhaps – a rocking horse. Ambrose rocked it and turned to her. ‘Suggests a sad story.’

She nodded. ‘Perhaps outgrown?’

‘I never outgrew my rocking horse.’

She held the cold keys in her hand. She disliked the odour of keys. Perhaps it was the odour of human use. Or was it a metallic odour? Of key alloy and brass. She would wash the keys at first opportunity.

She caught sight of herself. Next I will be washing the money.

She turned to Ambrose. ‘I have not lived in a house since leaving home. First college, then
apartements
. I am not sure I know what to do with a house. Did I tell you that I was talking with Charles Bean at a CSIRO reception last week and he said that he disliked flats? No place for children. Cramped their growth. He said he feared that flat dwellers would not have the Anzac spirit.’

‘The war-history man?’

‘That man. He said he was opposed to flats in Canberra. Flats lowered the birth rate. I asked him if it were acceptable for a couple without children to live in a flat. He said it was bad for the health and the morals. I said I was unsure about health, but he could be right about morals.’

She saw that she was avoiding the word home to describe this house in Forrest. She found the word awkward to her spirit. It belonged with her family and the past. It no longer had a place in her adult life. Home life. Since leaving her parental home, she had never had a home life. She was inclined to think that when two people merged together in a home, their personalities turned to mush.

To be fair, in her early years in Europe, having come from a country where everything was new, she had wallowed in the sensations of being surrounded by the old; of complicated ancient alleys and lanes and steps and twists and turns. Of old houses with old furniture with odd-shaped rooms. Of the practice of old crafts. She then remembered how, as a young woman, she had gone to Chamonix to sort out her life attitudes. Her aesthetics. Oh dear, she had forgotten so much. Forgotten her Life Rules. The Aesthetic of Many Shapes and Spaces: high doors, high ceilings, turrets, nooks, alcoves, attics, terraces, balconies, pergolas and cellars. Somewhere in all this wallowing and cogitation there had been a notion of home. Home lost. Home found.

This FCC 15 did meet some of those fancies. It had two storeys and attic-like rooms; eye-browed windows.

When she had finally seen herself and Robert as separated – though still sharing her apartment in Geneva – she had told him that it was no longer ‘his home’. She must have had some idea of home back then.

Now they were taking over a house that might very well become a home.

Surprisingly, if not charmingly, the word
home
came alive to her, like a magical child who had slipped off the rocking horse and taken her hand. She was not sure where this magical child – or was it an animal, a wombat, perhaps? – wanted to lead her. It seemed a cosy word, and a cosy hand, fraught with demands for which she was not prepared. A home imp. How very odd. She was going barmy.

She shook off the apparition and said to Ambrose, ‘Don’t you dare say “home is where the heart is”.’ She realised he had not been part of her musings about home.

‘I was going to say that it is a rather fine dwelling.’ He ran his hand along the wainscoting. By his movement through the house, this way and that, he seemed to be taking occupation of the rooms as he prowled ahead of her. Was
he
transforming into a homebody?

She trailed behind Ambrose, who was opening cupboards, smelling the place, as if he were an animal suspecting the presence of another animal.

She caught up with him and took his arm. ‘Sniffing it out?’

‘Occupants leave their smell. And houses themselves have smells of their own, regardless of the owners. Wood, mould, paint and so on.’

He had let go now of the complications of how they had been given the house. She had gone to the Housing Officer half-intending to reject the house, but had discovered that while they had been moved up the priority list it was by only one – they had been eligible for the next house. And she saw from an attached note that the HC had been inquiring, pushing. She was not sure that this information excused the moral breach of the egalitarian code. But anyhow, what was this idea of a priority list? She did not delve into the role of her brother, and nor did the Housing Officer mention it.

She had signed for the house on the spot. It had then passed into a clerical procedure and she was instructed that the confirming letter had to be re-sent to the HC, which she assumed would now simply transfer the money paid for temporary hotel accommodation to a housing allowance, to which Ambrose was entitled.

Getting a house of such size had caused comment. While they were entitled to a good house because of Ambrose’s status at the HC alone, the allocation of a house of that size was somewhat unusual since they had no children.

As she stood in the empty room, which they would call the drawing room, Edith recalled her UNRRA team going into Vienna just after the war. In their district, the army had a Town Major who controlled housing. He had told them to find a house they wanted to use as accommodation and to let him know. By regulation the occupants would have to leave, taking only bedding and cutlery. They also had the right to pick and take anything growing in the garden. She had found a fine house formerly occupied by the Nazi Gauleiter and thought that would do, but the original occupants from before the war had moved back in. She had sent a dispatch rider back who told the Major, and he had sent two armed soldiers to requisition the house. At first, Edith had felt sick about throwing the people out again, but someone would have to be thrown out if her team was to do its work as the occupiers of the city. The Austrians also deserved some punishment for having welcomed Hitler. She had hit on the idea of asking the woman who owned the house to be their housekeeper, and her husband their gardener. Although these roles were below the social status of the original occupants, they did not complain and the arrangement worked well. Edith and her team were very comfortable there – there was always clean linen and food cooked well, if you liked Austrian cooking – because the woman who owned the house maintained it and kept it spick and span.

Now, again, they had bumped some family out of this house.

Edith didn’t like political fiddling, but she couldn’t see that jumping the queue was a hanging offence. And it was a situation into which she had been pushed by Frederick. It would be a sin of high rectitude to rebuff him. Churlish, even. She argued to herself that sometimes small privileges and gifts were extended to us by circumstances of birth. To make a fuss about such things was a form of moral vanity.

If it really had been simply a brotherly act, then that left her with confusions of another order. Did the house become some part of her family domain? Frederick and Janice had already suggested coming over for house-warming drinks and inviting a few friends. She would have to be clear to them about rights regarding the house, including unannounced visiting.

She would deal with that if it arose. Firmly. Her mind returned to the brooding physical presence of the house. ‘Hanging the Pot Hook – isn’t that what the French call it?’ she said. ‘I forget the French word for those hooks on which you hang the pots next to the stove – the last thing the builders construct before the house is ready for occupation.’

She held Ambrose’s arm. She wanted the Decadent Ambrose to lead her into this house, not the imp child who she felt still hovered. An apartment seemed to exclude the outside world more firmly than a house. Even the hotel rooms, while remaining impersonal, enclosed their relationship and perhaps
hid them
. A house was different – it was part of a suburb with fences over which people looked and, she guessed, over which they would talk to her. Their laundry would be exposed on a clothes-drying line in the back garden, or what the official plan and contract called a backyard. Houses were personal display cases open to the view of visitors: personal artefacts, books, paintings, style of furnishing. Although, houses were also a set of secret sliding panels of concealment.

She would have to make sure the front garden was kept up to scratch. She would need a gardener, especially now that McLaren had stopped free hedge-clipping for Canberra houses.

She would need a cleaner. She did not see herself with a scarf around her hair pushing a vacuum cleaner. Of course, Janice did this work to be close to the working class and so that she could agitate, a word she associated with clothes-washing machines.

And who would cook? She and Ambrose had such limited talents. In Europe, they had taken in prepared meals from the local charcuterie after work and had eaten out so much, both officially and informally.

‘I will have to have a butcher, a baker. I will have to deal with a milkman. I don’t know how much a pint of milk costs. And we will have to buy electrical appliances.’

‘My dear, you are like the Queen, who has never handled money and never carries money and believes streets are always bedecked with flags.’

‘Beatrice Webb said that to lead an intellectual life, one needed eight servants. We could continue to dine at the hotel.’

‘Have a spacious house and dine at a hotel? Questions may be asked in the parliament.’

‘I suppose I’ll become one of those women who goes to the shops in their best shoes, wearing lipstick and carrying a string bag and basket. I’ll come back with newspaper-wrapped parcels and the
Women’s Weekly
magazine. And swap recipes and knitting patterns over the fence. I’ll swap the surplus vegetables and fruit we can’t use with the neighbours. I might have to bottle things. There will be fetes for which I will have to cook cakes that require a dozen eggs. Do you want to run fowls, darling? And the house will smell of floor polish, starch and baked dinners, and baked apples, vanilla and cinnamon.’

She finished her picture of domesticity and was unsure whether it was attractive or whether it was infested with dreads.

They went out through the flyscreen door to the backyard.

They stood arm in arm in the yard and she turned to him. ‘Are we going to be able to handle a proper house?’

‘Always remember to pull the blinds. As you know, with my cottage in Wiltshire the nearest neighbour was a mile away. We had no prying neighbours.’

That was another house in their lives. She had visited that house many times, but it had not really been a place where they had lived. ‘I want
you
always to remember to pull the blinds.’

She realised that she was beginning to feel safer about all this now that they were moving from the hotel. Since the lampshade shop incident, she had found that in their rooms when Ambrose was
en femme
she nearly always had a small tension in her stomach, a fear of someone bursting in, of their being caught, exposed, humiliated. Her nonchalance had been very much a display, a mask, an effort to make Ambrose feel safe and accepted. There would be more security in a house.

‘We will be able to entertain.’

‘And do we have to entertain?’

‘With all the legations now moving to Canberra, it means that at least there may be someone to entertain or to entertain us. I am sure we can use the Commission kitchen staff.’

She clutched at this description of their life in the house, because it took her away from the idea of home and towards the house being a High Commission annex. She was more comfortable with that.

She looked around the rather unkempt yard, which she decided to call the back garden. She looked at the sheets of information about the house. ‘It says on the inventory that we are to be supplied with four jarrah clothes posts to hold up the clothes line, which they also supply.’ She looked down the contract inventory. ‘A clothes line of galvanised wire.’ She looked for the four jarrah clothes posts and saw them propped in the corner.

Ambrose said, ‘There’s a gate in the fence to the next-door neighbour.’

‘I believe in Forrest they are called friendship gates.’

‘Shouldn’t one be very sure about the friendship before putting in a gate?’

‘We could, I suppose, lock it. It would then be a Keep Out gate. I have never managed any land larger than a window box,’ she said. ‘And nor have you.’

‘You forget I was once an orchardist.’

It brought to mind his breakdown in the 1930s when he left the League and returned to England to live on what he called a farm in Wiltshire. It was four acres with some apple trees leaning this way and that. They tasted more like pears. Typical of Ambrose – nothing tasted as it was meant to taste. She doubted that he would have qualified as an agriculturalist. Most of the time, he would have been dashing off to London clubs and dives and neglecting the fruit trees.

‘Ah yes, Major Doctor Ambrose Westwood and his proposal for a world revolution by harvester.’

‘Hay sweep, not harvester. I still sometimes think that revolutions in agriculture are what will save the world. And I still believe in the New Century Hay Sweep.’