Cold Light (74 page)

Partly from the location of her tiny grace-and-favour office, she also gradually developed a special relationship with Menzies. She’d had to fend off two tentative attempts by administratively minded public servants to have her removed from her office, and another attempt to have her share a larger office with others. On one occasion, she had simply looked at them with her woman-of-the-world face and said that for her not to have an office was
unacceptable
. She had gone on with her work at her desk, and they, after standing there for a minute or so, had shrugged and left her alone. She’d had to mention it to the Prime Minister and it was fixed. She was not sure whether the Prime Minister held misconceptions about her relations with the wider, cloudy world of espionage, and there was no point in discussing it. She assumed that, whatever he assumed about her, he also assumed they were on the same side. And in many senses they were.

Probably because of their failure to dislodge her from her office, she eventually overcame this uneasiness between herself and the members of the public service of a certain rank who thought she was an interloper. They must have discussed it among themselves and decided there was some covert mystery surrounding her to which they were not privy. However, she did once get an anonymous memo in the early days. It was an extract from some report and read, ‘The Edith River prospect is simply a uranium occurrence within granite. It is north-west of Katherine and the concentration isn’t commercial or the reserves large enough.’

She didn’t know whether it was malicious or comical, but assumed that if it were meant to be friendly, it would have been signed. She worried about it, and from time to time over the following weeks reread it, pondering the words ‘isn’t commercial nor the reserves large enough’. She finally destroyed it, saying to herself out loud, ‘We shall see about my reserves . . .’

Because of her early connections with the organising of the Town Planning Congress, she had met Holford, who was Menzies’ English planning oracle. This in turn had caused Menzies to send her to sit in on the Senate Select Committee on Canberra in an observer role and to report back. She had, as a consequence, over morning and afternoon biscuits and tea, become friendly with Senator McCallum and Commissioner John Overall at the NCDC. She realised they saw her as a pipeline to the Prime Minister, a go-between. Or maybe they saw her as his plenipotentiary. A cat, a pipeline, a woman of the world, a special agent, a plenipotentiary – she supposed she could play all these parts.

One part she did not feel she’d had pinned to her was as mistress to the Prime Minister. There were rumours about other women, but according to her circle and her press-gallery pals, she was not cast in this role, and Mrs Menzies was always warm towards her. She did not know whether to be relieved or hurt. In her dealings with the Prime Minister, however, the situation had never arisen. Not a whiff. He was very correct.

In the fights for how Canberra should look, she and Overall had joined forces to have the cultural institutions placed within the parliamentary precinct. They both believed that the precinct should architecturally describe the things of importance in Australian life – pretty much conforming to the hierarchy of the original Griffin plan.

She fancied that she had converted the Prime Minister to Griffin’s lake scheme, but Menzies had, anyway, become what he called ‘an apostle of Canberra’.

She had helped the Prime Minister defeat, one by one, the opposition to the lake – the arguments of the opponents that it would create not a lake but mud flats and look like the Thames at low tide, that it would breed mosquitoes, that it would divide the city and so on. She had gathered together the planning specifics to demolish these objections. On her small desk she worked up document-weapons and manufactured turns of phrase.

So, the lake had won. ‘Will a million pounds be enough for you and your lake, Berry?’ he had asked, his back to her, looking out his window after she had told him a few of the problems she was having with the opponents of the lake.

He turned to face her, hands behind his back. She looked at him, considered how to reply, did a calculation in her head. She had studied the estimates many times over the last few years.

He waited for her reply. ‘You’re a deep thinker, Berry. Don’t take too long to accept or I might withdraw the offer.’

She came out with her answer. ‘A million would do it – just. It would cover the marking and preparation of the boundary formation and landscaping. We would need more for excavation.’

‘That answer means you will come back wanting another million. But alright, you have your first million.’

He was in a merry mood.

She was jubilant.

Of course, the money was not hers and would wander off into other hands and committees beyond her reach, but she appreciated the gesture.

The Prime Minister went to England for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, and the day after his return he called for her. She found Holt, the treasurer, in the office – the man who had no smile, only a salesman’s grin.

The Prime Minister turned to her and said, ‘Berry, did you get wind of the elimination of the lake money from the budget while I was away?’

She hated to be caught by surprise; it disclosed a failure of vigilance. ‘I did not. I have heard nothing about that.’

Was this a reprimand?

He said to her, ‘Then you have just learned a lesson about Treasury. Treasury departments move in a mysterious way, their wonders to perform, or, in this case, to obstruct anyone else’s wished-for wonders.’

She was seized with cold fright. ‘The lake has gone?’

A defeat of the first magnitude. She looked to Holt. Was the cat expected to control the mice?

This was somehow a prankish revolt by Treasury or Cabinet. The Treasurer was now wearing his Face of Concerned Responsibility. Ah, he too could be in trouble. Her heart was thumping. She felt, frantically, that she had failed both the Prime Minister and the Griffins, and the destiny of Canberra.

The Prime Minister then turned to Holt and said, ‘So, while I was away, Treasury struck out the million pounds for the lake?’

‘Cabinet agreed, Ming. Done and dusted. No lake.’

The Prime Minister walked to the window and looked out. Without turning, he said, ‘At the next cabinet meeting, can you assure me, Harold, that by unanimous consent of the ministers, the item of the million pounds for the lake will be struck back in?’

Holt laughed in an unreadable way, in case this was a joke or in case it was a dictat. He began a sentence of argument and resistance and then abandoned it mid-air and, instead, said, ‘It shall be so.’

The Prime Minister then turned to her, raising an eyebrow. ‘Happy, Berry?’

‘Happy.’

She was uncomfortable accepting this pat on the head in front of a senior minister who had just been kicked up the pants.

Menzies came back from the window, sat down and turned his attention to papers on his desk, indicating with a finger that they were both dismissed. She followed the Treasurer out of the office, and in the corridor he went one way and she the other without speaking.

She went directly to her office and called Overall. ‘John, get your bulldozers down in the riverbed tomorrow and begin digging the lake,’ she said and described what had happened. He had not heard that the money had been struck out behind their backs. She said, ‘I have learned, today, a lesson: what can be struck out of a budget can then be struck back in; and can also probably be struck out again.’

As she came to work next morning, the roaring bulldozers were at the riverbank.

There was another odd encounter with the Prime Minister over the question of the lake.

It was on one of those rare occasions she was invited in with the boys, who were having a stimulated anteroom conversation – stimulated by the Prime Minister’s famous martinis; she’d had a sherry – when the Minister for Interior suggested, in an obsequious way, that the lake should be named Lake Menzies. Menzies had replied, ‘Gordon, that’s a characteristically pleasing thought on your part, but the lake is not going to be named after me. Remember the designer of this city and creator of the whole dream of the lake?’ The minister had not seemed to be sure to which creator the Prime Minister was referring. Menzies went on, ‘I want the lake to be called Lake Burley Griffin.’

She thought it could be called Lake Marion and Walter, but she held her tongue. In fact, she had rather warmed to the name Lake Marion. Plenty of other things could be named for Walter.

Menzies had often said in her presence that he never wanted a suburb named after him. She sometimes thought this a ploy to be remembered forever as the modest Prime Minister. She privately considered it a futile ploy.

When she had heard the Prime Minister refer to the lake as Lake Burley Griffin, it didn’t sound right. Surely it should be Lake Walter Burley Griffin?

She puzzled quietly about this, and next day rang Judith at the Memorials and Naming Committee and asked what it had recommended. Judith said, ‘Lake Griffin.’

Edith asked whether Griffin had been known as Burley Griffin.

Judith said firmly, ‘No. Burley is his middle name. He was not known by that name. He was called Walt. And he signed W. B. Griffin. To call it Lake Burley Griffin is an anomaly. Or, to put it more bluntly, a foolish error.’

An anomaly. So, there were already anomalies creeping into Canberra, the most carefully planned of cities.

It hadn’t been gazetted. It was not too late for this to be corrected.

She gathered her nerve and grabbed a moment with the Prime Minister in the corridor. She told him that Lake ‘Burley Griffin’ was an anomaly.

With stately irritation, he said, ‘Then we have an anomaly. It is to be called Lake Burley Griffin. It is sonorous, Berry, sonorous. “Upon famous Parnassus, or the sonorous Shore.” ’

He walked on, leaving her stranded in the corridor on a classical quotation.

And that was that. It was to be called Lake Burley Griffin – not Lake Griffin. The anomaly was decreed.

As for ‘famous Parnassus’, she thought only of beloved Paris and the louche cafés of Montparnasse, and for a moment wished she was there writing verse.

She had a chair in the second row at the opening of the lake.

She looked out at the three square miles of water and its two splendid bridges, and in her mind she saw sailing craft, boaters, punters, canoeists and rowers who would eventually enliven the lake with lines of white wake and their rhythmic, muscular bodies.

The city was growing up into a handsome young woman. The lake was her gleaming hair and her smooth skin. And her shapeliness. Edith’s mind suggested another metaphor: the lake was the vase; the city’s handsome buildings, the flowers. The vase and the flower were a unity – neither flower nor vase. They formed a singular ornament. She wished she had passed a note on this to the Prime Minister for his speech.

The filling of the lake had been painfully slow. After the lake was dug, a year passed and it did not fill. Mosquitoes did breed in ugly ponds. And then the drought broke, the rains fell, and the lake filled in days. It was like the creation of the world.