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?’
‘In my early twenties.’
Edith recalled that in the communist movement the date of membership was important. Everything was important to them. It was coming back to her. For communists, everything was deliberate. She looked at her brother. Was he to be her Dangerous Brother?
‘And you live in Canberra?’ she asked again, perhaps hoping for a different answer.
‘At the Capital Hill camp.’
‘You live there as a Communist Party organiser?’
‘A silent arrangement there.’
He was sharing secrets.
She then thought of the USSR embassy. He was probably on their guest list. Ambrose and she had been there last week for a reception and to watch a film. Part of the diplomatic round.
She needed Ambrose to help her with her brother. What would Ambrose make of this?
‘You must come to our rooms now and have tea. Meet Ambrose. I’ll send a message and let Ambrose know to expect us. Now that I am composed.’
Her brother nodded. She said, ‘Wait here for a minute; I’ll go myself instead of sending a message. I will come back to collect you.’
She was relieved to have a small separation from him. She went to their rooms and Ambrose let her in. ‘My brother is here. My long-lost brother. My long-lost now-communist brother. Frederick.’
‘A Bolshevik brother?’
‘We’ll get to that. I’ll bring him here for afternoon tea, if that is agreeable to you. Is that agreeable to you?’
‘You’ll order some afternoon tea from the kitchen?’ he asked.
‘We have a bottle of Scotch, don’t we?’
‘Our bottle is rather at half-mast.’
‘We may very well need more than that. I should warn you, he could well be a demented Bolshevik brother.’
‘It is what we might call a turn of events.’
‘Indeed, a turn of events.’
She went back to the lobby, waved to Frederick while she went about ordering tea, scones and a bottle of Scotch to be brought to their rooms. She looked at herself in the wall mirror behind the desk and saw a perplexed woman.
She went back to Frederick, less shaky now from simply knowing that the bottle of Scotch was on its way.
‘Come, Frederick, let’s go to my rooms.’
‘I still call myself Fred.’
‘And I will continue to call you Frederick.’ As they walked, she linked arms with him and felt that it was a self-consciously sisterly thing for her to do.
He smiled. ‘Always ordering things to your own way.’
‘I never called you Fred.’
‘Throughout my life, everyone called me Fred except you.’
‘We have a suite. It’s described as a luxurious suite – two bedrooms, a sitting room in between, an en suite, with communicating doors and a verandah. And we have a powerful short-wave wireless from the HC – the High Commission.’ Which was hardly relevant. Was she boasting to her younger brother? ‘We listen to jazz. We listen to Jo Stafford on Voice of America.’ That would not, she guessed, impress her brother, nor gain his approval. ‘I suppose Ambrose is something of the enemy. To a communist. Now that we are in this cold war.’
He gave a short laugh. ‘I suppose he is.’ And then he said seriously, ‘For some of us, the cold war began in 1917.’
‘Of course.’ The Revolution. ‘The Revolution,’ she said.
Was she also an enemy? She was definitely not a communist. Some might say she was socialistically inclined – she thought capitalism could be changed from within and through the ILO. And in some ways she could be seen as a Socialist Woman, having never worked for profit or commerce, always in the service of the public good – although some of her friends were conservatives. Latham and Bruce, for example. This did not have to be pursued at this point.
‘We were all allies in the war,’ she said. ‘Until the iron curtain came thundering down.’
‘We should all still be allies of the workers,’ he said, giving another short laugh, ‘if you still see yourself as a worker.’
She didn’t know if she saw herself as a worker. ‘I am looking for a position. I am an unemployed worker, if I am what you would call a worker,’ she said with her own laugh, which was very much like his, she observed. It was their family dinner-table laugh. Those years in Europe had not, then, changed her laugh much from her childhood at Jasper’s Brush. Nor had Prague, or wherever, changed his.
They reached the door to the suite.
‘Why didn’t you telephone?’ she asked as it occurred to her, pausing at the door and knocking.
‘Didn’t think a brother had to call and make appointments to see his big sister.’
‘I suppose not.’ She laughed, knocking on the door again. ‘Except to make sure we are in. Or receiving.’
Ambrose, in his velvet gentleman’s smoking jacket and clubbish leather slippers, opened the door with a large welcoming smile, holding out his hand. ‘Surprise, this,’ he said, shaking Frederick’s hand. ‘Frederick, isn’t it?’
‘Fred – people call me Fred.’
‘Fred it is, then.’
‘I prefer Frederick,’ Edith said, guiding Frederick in. She closed the
door behind her.
Ambrose looked to her with a smile and then to Frederick. ‘I should think a chap could decide what he’s to be called.’
‘Not this chap,’ Edith said, playfully pushing her brother’s arm. How easily that came to her, the arm-pushing. ‘Big sisters decide what their brothers are to be called.’
Ambrose gave Frederick a grin of alliance. That was a good sign – when men exchanged agreeable smiles.
‘Scotch all round,’ Ambrose said, looking to Frederick.
‘Scotch is fine by me.’
‘Make mine large – very large,’ Edith said, flopping onto the sofa. ‘Sit down, Frederick.’ She patted the space beside her on the sofa. ‘Make Frederick’s large too.’
‘Yes, large,’ Frederick said.
‘Mine too,’ Ambrose said, laughing.
She was relieved that Frederick took a drink.
‘What makes it all the more satisfying as a drink is that we do not have to pay any duty on the Scotch,’ Ambrose said, making conversation. ‘Yet for reasons that elude reason, we always find we finish our ration of Scotch from the HC and end up purchasing a bottle from the hotel. Hence your first Scotch is first-class: Ballantine’s – Queen Vic’s drop and duty-free – and your second will be from the hotel: White Horse, which is good enough itself.’
She found she kept staring at her brother, this only living kin, glad now of the presence of Ambrose, which gave her time to be silent. His intonation when they had met in the lobby had been broader, but it was now returning to the intonation of their family accent.
‘Soda, Frederick?’ Ambrose asked, waving the soda siphon above their glasses on the butler tray.
‘A fair bit – quite a while since I’ve drunk first-class Scotch.’
The sound of the squirting of the soda filled the room like heavy rain, as Ambrose filled Frederick’s glass and then added her usual amount and his usual amount.
‘And what are you about in the national capital?’ Ambrose asked, serving them their drinks from the tray.
She drank. She wished to be stilled by the alcohol.
‘I work for the Australian Communist Party, although we are about to change our name to the Communist Party of Australia.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
Frederick looked at her. ‘I won’t go into it now.’
There was a knock on the door and Ambrose ushered in the waiter with the tea, scones and bottle of Scotch.
When he had left, Frederick took up where he had left off. ‘I recruit here in Canberra on the building sites, around the hostels and at the Snowy scheme – though the European migrants aren’t actually friendly to the Party. I have only two members there. I go as far out as Wagga – agricultural workers, shearers. Good unionists, but also not that keen on the Party.’
She noticed that Frederick, too, drank deeply of his Scotch.
‘The workers at the Snowy are paid twice as much as they would be anywhere else – so, no strikes. Workers are being killed and injured.’ Frederick looked directly at them. ‘Upton Sinclair said that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’
She tried to imagine him arguing Marxism and quoting Upton Sinclair with muddy tunnel workers at the Snowy, and tired shearers in their blue singlets in the shearing sheds.
Ambrose seated himself and crossed his legs, listening with a warm smile. He chattered with his English conviviality. ‘Quite right. Some time since I’ve met a communist – well, that I know of. We had a few in the FO. Nice enough chaps. And then, of course, we had a few around the League. I suspect we even have a couple still left in the FO.’ He laughed to himself.
Frederick did not laugh.
Frederick then said, ‘One strange thing is the shopkeepers in Cooma – they serve the migrant workers last. They have to wait until the local people are served. They call them reffos.’
‘How rude,’ she said.
Frederick said to Ambrose, ‘You were a doctor?’
‘In the first war.’ He laughed. ‘Looked after army sanitation.’
She turned to Frederick. ‘He did a bit more than that – commended for being very clever dealing with trench fever. Five mentions in dispatches. Saved many lives.’
Ambrose waved a hand, and said deprecatingly, ‘Not really proper medicine.’ He turned to her and said, ‘We had a few communists at the League, did we not? Liverright began wearing a red tie in the thirties. Was collecting signatures for those two executed in Chicago.’
‘Sacco and Vanzetti,’ Frederick said. ‘They weren’t communists.’
‘The League people weren’t real communists,’ she said, ‘just communism flirts.’ Was that a rather demeaning thing to say? She glanced at her brother, who did not look at her.
Ambrose chattered on, ‘I suppose you Reds would have seen the League as the Board of Directors of World Capitalism?’
‘Something like that,’ Frederick said, this time with a small smile.
‘I never received any dividends,’ Ambrose said, ‘from the capitalists.’
‘I mocked Liverright and the other leftists at the League – said they were étatistes who too readily trusted the authoritarian state,’ she came in, to show herself a serious conversationalist on things political, not just a sister. ‘Yet with the League, it could be said I trusted an organisation of states.’
He avoided responding to her indirect jibe, if it was a jibe. Frederick asked her what sort of position she was seeking in Canberra. She said something in External Affairs. ‘And I think that my having worked at the League is itself not seen as a great plus. Having worked for the greatest failure of the century. I have been waiting for the appointment of a new head of External Affairs. It’ll probably be Watt. He’ll find me something to do. Might send me to New York to help with the Australian delegations. Who knows?’ She grimaced. ‘Or could dump me in some godforsaken embassy. There are some formalities to overcome – they don’t seem to like working women, let alone women diplomats.’
She shrugged her shoulders at him and finished her Scotch with what might have been seen as a gulp.
‘In the Soviet Union, women can work,’ Frederick said.
‘Women were also considered equal by the covenant of the League, but it didn’t seem to change much, even there,’ she said.
‘I’ve seen photographs of women in Russia working on the roads. Equality has its drawbacks,’ Ambrose joked.
‘Nothing wrong with building roads,’ Frederick said, without a smile.
‘Hard on the hands,’ Ambrose said.
Edith heard her own tone of voice in Frederick, the same intensity about things that mattered and a tendency to consider that, in conversation, all things had to be critically challenged. It was something she did not like about herself and tried to curb. She thought she was succeeding with the curb.
Although in some ways intrigued, she did not enjoy seeing the very deepest gestures of herself also present in her brother, and to see them serving her brother’s cause – the same chin angles, the fingers to the ear, the occasional squeezing of the nose with two fingers. Over the years she had tried to curb these, too, but not with much success.
Was she still prone to be dully earnest; her conversation cramped inside the corset of her beliefs? Ambrose’s manner was contradiction and paradox. Was she a mirror of her brother, albeit on another side? He also served a grand cause. Her cause had crashed; his was in the ascendant.
Ambrose held up a hand. ‘No criticism intended of the hewers of wood and drawers of water – where would we be without them? A drink, anyone?’ He reached over and picked up the Scotch bottle and waved it. She realised the tea and scones had gone cold.
She held out her glass.
She looked at Frederick. ‘Scones?’ He shook his head.
Sitting in the rather drab hotel in an unfinished city with no position in life, and now confronted by this preachy phantom of a brother, she yearned to be back in her previous
life – in those faithful days of the League before the world lost its nerve and was enveloped in war; to be back then in the wild, dangerous, risky days of the war, ferrying League staff out to safety from Geneva, through Portugal. They had worked in a clandestine way through the Molly Club in Geneva, a refuge for Jews and for ‘dancers’, as they had called the witty, talented, artistic – and not so artistic – outcasts of the world who had fled to the Molly Club from all over Nazi Europe. And then they had worked with the war-damaged refugees.
She stared at her brother. Were there now ‘dancers’ fleeing the USSR to the Molly Club?
Ambrose leaned over and snapped his fingers in front of her face. ‘Dear, you haven’t been with us.’
She said, ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘I was about to say that I read that in the ape house at the Bronx Zoo they have placed a mirror facing the crowd, which has a label saying “Most Dangerous Species Alive”.’
While speaking, he rose and, carrying the soda siphon in one hand and the whisky in the other, loudly splashed soda into her drink as if to refresh her attention. He then recharged Frederick’s drink.
‘It could be considered an anecdote for all occasions,’ he said, going to the liquor tray, putting back the empty Scotch bottle and opening the new bottle.
Maybe they should all get thoroughly tipsy and see what came of it. Tip It All Up.
‘Frederick and I have not spoken a word since he was seventeen . . .’ She looked at her brother. ‘Or was it eighteen? He disappeared.’
She would leave the question of why he had disappeared for another time.
‘But didn’t you do the same, Edith?’ Frederick said. ‘For God’s sake, you ran to the other side of the world to find where you belonged.’
‘I suppose there are parallels between us. I suppose we must be alike. I kept in touch.’ But she did not return for the funeral of her mother, or to see her before she died, or for her father’s funeral.
Now she was back from the oldest cities of the world to live in the newest city of the world – she had moved from trying to make a world capital in Geneva to a dusty town that was trying to become a national capital.
Cold Light Page 2