Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  Tonight, she decided to be somewhat straightforward with this Richard. ‘I’m surprised to find such a struggle going on for the soul of the nation. I suppose that shows there is no settled Australian way of life, even yet.’

  This statement, she knew, would truly be a matter for strong discussion. Perhaps too strong for a Prime Minister’s dinner party. She wished she had not said it.

  ‘There’s an Australian way of life, surely?’ he said, too quickly, not allowing himself time to walk around the question. ‘What are these struggles you think you see for our souls?’ He was somewhat guarded, as if what she had said contained a challenge to the native virtues.

  ‘There wouldn’t be such political struggles if there was a settled Australian way,’ she said, feeling she should back off. She touched his hand lightly. ‘I do not mean it in any derogatory way. Or about the present company.’ He had hairs on the back of his hand. Jungle hairs. Ambrose had no hairs.

  ‘Who, then, is out for our soul – apart from the devil?’ He had calmed. ‘And the communists.’

  ‘We seem to think they’re the same thing.’ She laughed. Which ‘we’ was that?

  ‘For the politicians here,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘there are three menaces – rabbits, Catholics and communists.’ He laughed, too. ‘Hope you’re not any of those.’

  ‘You’re safe. I am not a rabbit, I am not a Catholic and I am not a communist.’ She stopped herself saying, ‘But I have a brother who is a communist.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be at the PM’s table if you were, I suppose.’

  ‘Unless I were a rabbit – but I suppose grand dinner parties do not serve rabbit.’ She almost said ‘in Australia’, but dropped that bit. Maybe she was being served.

  He again laughed loudly but did not share her joke with the table. He lowered his voice and said to her, ‘There are those who want us to be as British as can be, and there are some who think we would be better off aping the Americans with their Rotary Clubs, slang, chewing gum and jitterbug, and so on. And bow ties.’

  He took a drink; his statement judiciously did not take a position on these alternatives. She saw him take another look at her. Perhaps she was being too complicated for a dinner party. Or just downright snooty.

  He put down his glass and said, without looking at her, ‘There are the old bush ways – mateship, pioneering, all that. Banjo Paterson. That, I suppose, is what I mean about the real Australia.’

  ‘Do you let Adam Lindsay Gordon in?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He lowered his voice again. ‘I think the PM is wrong about Adam Lindsay Gordon.’ He whispered, ‘Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave, I may chance to hear them romping overhead.’

  She smiled at him and whispered back, ‘Hold hard, Ned! Lift me down once more, and lay me in the shade . . .’

  But she would not become bland. To hell with it; she was here and she would be pesky if the mood took her or circumstances demanded. This was her debut, and they may as well know her for what she was. ‘From what I’ve seen since I’ve returned, there are still different classes who have different quarrels and different dreams. And live different Australian ways.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be classes if it weren’t for the unions and the communists going on about classes.’

  She let that pass. What he said, if he were correct, was perhaps an example of the Communist Party planting what her brother liked to identify as a ‘false consciousness’ in the workers. Which consciousness was false, and who decided? Her brother and his friends? Sound Marxist analysis? ‘I suppose that with the immigrants flooding in we’ll become something like Europeans.’

  ‘I understand that they are supposed to become like us,’ he said, lightly, ‘not the other way around.’ He was becoming playful now that he had somehow taken her measure and could canter along with her, but she could tell he was increasing his pace to stay up. And what he said was an interesting conundrum that she hadn’t yet explored. She wasn’t at all sure what the migrants were supposed to do now that they were here.

  She said, ‘I’m not really sure what the migrants are supposed to do or what we are supposed to do with them. Eat snails? But going back a bit, at elections we seem to divide equally into three pieces – the country folk, the workers and the business people. And as you say, there are those whose first allegiance is to the Pope in Italy. That’s not the picture of one Australia.’

  ‘That last piece is breeding like rabbits; they will overtake us.’ He wasn’t joking.

  She would continue to play the dinner-party scallywag. ‘I have discovered that there is one agreement between the Liberal Party and the Communist Party.’

  Richard played with his wine. ‘I would love to hear what the agreement is.’

  Perhaps he was treating her with a gentle patronising tone which you might hear from an older man to a clever senior schoolgirl who got some things badly wrong but yet, on the other hand, a schoolgirl who might have a trick up her sleeve and was up for the chase. And who was worth the effort. It was rather flattering, in a way, and she sensed her age going down. Edith, you are not any longer seen as an ingénue.

  ‘I see one very strong similarity.’ She smiled enigmatically, taking a drink.

  The conversation paused as the roast duck à l’orange arrived, and the wine was changed from the dry sherry served with the lobster to what she saw was a Moyston claret.

  He came back to where they had left off. ‘Pray tell.’

  ‘You would both ban the other if in power. You would both put each other in gaol.’ This observation placed him in the Liberal Party and might, she felt, cause him to reveal his allegiance.

  Richard did not look at her, but looked quickly to his left. ‘Very acute. But you know that as a public servant I do not serve any party, only the public.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘As for the Communist Party – and I speak as an independent observer – I think that even the workers see through them.’

  ‘I suppose, then, that there’s no point in the PM worrying about them, let alone banning them.’

  He touched her hand. ‘Touché.’ She could tell he was scoring her up a point or two.

  She pushed on. ‘I’m afraid I tend to agree with Mr Chifley that people should be arrested for the bad things they do, not the wrong things they say.’

  He must have felt that the conversation was now too turbulent for this dinner party, and said, ‘What was your school? I went to King’s.’

  She felt like saying Jasper’s Brush Public but knew what he was after – her ‘proper’ school. She said, ‘Ascham. Dear old Ascham.’

  He then showed a need to connect with her, perhaps to gain her approval. ‘I’ve nothing against Chifley at all. Do you know that Bob –’ He lowered his voice on the name Bob, and nodded to the PM at the head of the table – ‘at end of the parliamentary session went into Chifley’s office and they locked the door and drank a bottle of whisky together?’

  ‘I rather like that,’ she said. ‘Surely not a whole bottle?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ He changed the subject again. ‘I’m not really religious, but the Dean of Canterbury – the Red Dean – who’s out here for this Peace Congress in Melbourne, has been saying silly things. Nevertheless, he should have been treated with more respect by the newspapers, I felt, as a representative of the church.’

  Edith continued to feel a desire to wriggle free of the self-vindicating talk of men around her, fragments of which drifted across to her ears – men parading their opinions like boys in the playground with their wet handkerchiefs wound into coshes. And, at the same time, to separate herself from the rather passive wives. She saw that her perversity with Richard came from a desire to be this man’s playmate at the dinner, not his opponent. And he was shaping up.

  She said, ‘Oh, I have no problem with satirising of the church. They are always telling us how to live; it’s good that they get a taste of it back.’ But she had not talked to his point – the
papers were attacking the Dean because he was aiding and abetting the communists and their peace congress.

  ‘You are mutinous,’ he said with a grin. ‘Downright mutinous.’ He appraised her again, perhaps this time as a filly. Was he going to pull down her lower lip to examine her teeth, lift her tail? ‘I don’t mind a mutinous lass.’ She was flattered to be called a lass by a younger man. As he said it he leaned his shoulder into her, although the chairs were awfully close anyhow, and she felt his hand on her knee.

  She became alert, chary. His hand was not what she would describe as ‘lightly’ on her knee, as if that made any difference.

  And in no conceivable way was it appropriate.

  She’d had hands on her legs under tables over the years and had always gently removed them. To be more accurate she had, once or twice, or thrice, allowed the hand to stay on a couple of occasions in noisy, boozy lounges during the war, with officers, in those dark abandoned times, as the privilege of the warrior. It was not the privilege of a youngish civil servant, even if he did come from the glamorous and dangerous world of uranium.

  ‘It’s a release when I find someone to whom I can say what I think,’ she said, flattering him, surprised at how natural her voice sounded, wondering if he would take that as compliance.

  His fingers gently squeezed her lower thigh. Her body liked it; her body had come alive.

  Their eyes did not meet.

  He lowered his voice again. ‘It’s the best damned conversation I’ve had for years. Suppose it comes from having been on the continent for some time. I was in London before the war.’ He was seeking parity.

  They were now affiliated. Did women become what men expected them to become? Or did she appear to be of such a style of woman that she caused men to behave as she unconsciously suggested they should behave?

  Or perhaps he was one of those younger men who liked to be corrected, instructed, tutored and groomed by a woman. Who liked to be in the company of a woman where, while control was not altogether securely his, he was petted on the way, and granted intimate favours, and where, at the end of it all, he would finally be deferred to and confirmed in his manhood one way. The hand-on-the-knee was his asking to be seen as privileged; allowed by her to be manned. To allow it was to grant him his manhood. Although it had a boldness, it was – whether she imagined it or not – almost virginal, or youthful. There was a youthful temerity in his touch, suggesting it was something he may not have ever done before in his life.

  Her conversation tumbled from her mouth without much attention from her mind. Her attention was now dispersed – to her knee, to the fragments of conversation bouncing around the gathering, and to recollection of her time in the war. ‘Geneva, Portugal – getting League people out before the Germans got them and then with UNRRA after the war. Refugees. Wearing a nifty uniform and riding on a bicycle ringing my bell through the rubble in the streets of Vienna.’

  The hand was still there behind the tablecloth curtain. His hand moved just a little, almost stroking, and the silk lining of her dress moved ever so slightly against the silk of her stockings. His fingers touched the clip of her suspenders and she quivered. She was still a sensual woman. She was still a woman whom men might desire – even a younger man – and her body was still very responsive. She had not felt this since returning to Australia. And she realised that apart from its obvious meaning – no, that was wrong: it had no obvious meaning; it was, after all, a limited sort of gesture – there was nothing much a hand on a knee could do once it was allowed there. There was nothing that either of them could do, here and now, following a hand on a knee.

  The hand on the knee was a rather spontaneous, contained act, requiring no immediate consideration of consequence. But yes, perhaps it implied that there would, at some time in the near future, be a rendezvous. She could, she supposed, put her left hand down to touch his, to link with his, but she wasn’t ready to try that.

  It caused her to wonder how often this went on at dinner parties. Was it why people came to dinner parties; was it a very Australian thing? Men and women must have been doing it for centuries. She guessed Henry VIII and his crowd did it. What about those dresses? How did men find their way? How unsophisticated she really was, deep down, not to have a way of dealing with this. When she was much younger she would have had a way. Or would have pretended to have a Way. The Breaking of All Rules Within a Safe Cantonment.

  She was distracted by hearing one of the men along the table say something about the Jews. ‘Jews are neither by race, standards nor culture European – they owe allegiance to none but their tribe.’

  ‘Who is that?’ she asked, the hand still on her knee.

  ‘Gullett. Jo Gullett.’ His voice was quite normal. ‘Very brave man. Has an MC, I think. Yes, I am sure. Very strong opinions.’

  ‘He might be a little more restrained – sensitive – since what has happened.’

  ‘Yes, well . . . I agree. But that’s Jo.’

  She wasn’t altogether satisfied with that answer, but was now feeling very indulgent towards this Richard.

  The hand-on-the-knee was so different a sexual feeling from that which Ambrose caused in her, which was of a sexual kind but had – over the years they had known each other – become more a calming, comforting thing, more a letting-go of life’s strain, a deep caressing by their wracked bodies. It no longer had the lick of fire that came, perhaps, only from the touch of an unfamiliar man. No. What Ambrose and she had did still have bursts of flame at times.

  She wondered how long she should allow his hand to rest there, and whether it mattered. He would have to take his hand away to continue the meal or when a servant approached to clear or serve. Maybe the hand-on-the-knee signalled nothing more than what it was; this was the full and final thrill of it, and there did not have to be anything that followed from it. The hand, the risqué, secret impropriety, was what he wanted and she was open to sharing it. God knows, his wife was probably there too. She looked around the table for a woman who could be his wife.

  ‘Is your wife here?’ she asked, expecting that this would cause him to take his hand back and restore decorum, not that she wished for that.

  ‘She’s at the end there, silent as a mouse.’ He pointed with his fork. ‘Good listener.’

  Edith examined her. Bejewelled. Younger than she. Pleasant-looking in face, dress and movement. ‘Not mutinous?’

  ‘Not mutinous.’ His hand did not move.

  ‘And he –’ she pointed to Ambrose – ‘is my husband.’

  ‘Very English.’

  ‘Yes, very English.’

  Was that a criticism?

  She added, ‘Very urbane.’ And then that sounded as if she were saying that by being urbane, Ambrose would not object to a strange man placing his hand on her knee. Sometimes what she had with Ambrose appeared to her as an astonishing, secret treasure. An objet de vertu.

  He kept talking and she kept talking, although it was rather light talk now on matters requiring little thought, given that their minds in part were now under the table, so to speak – talk about whether the lake of Canberra would ever be filled, and about what he called Lake Geneva, and her correcting him to Lake Léman, which was the official name. And then withdrawing the correction by saying that trying to insist it be called Lake Léman was probably a lost cause. And the jet d’eau – should Canberra have one? A water spout?

  She put down her knife and fork, dabbed her mouth with the rather stiff white napkin and then sent her left hand to join his. When it arrived, it pressed his, and his hand turned to twine with hers. Their hands held the twining for an instance, and she then withdrew her hand back to above the table and the business of the meal.

  Her left leg now moved to rest against his.

  Her mind considered another move: she could, she thought, edge her skirt up as far as she dared, and allow his hand to feel the tender, smooth flesh of her leg between the top of her silk stockings and her suspenders and her satin corselet. She wore no
knickers with a corselet because of the lavatory nuisance. ‘Paris knickers’, she had heard Jeanne describe no-knickers, a French woman who had been her friend at the League and who still occasionally wrote. She was not going to follow this possibility tonight. Enough was enough. There was no time for anything more.

  She asked Richard his opinion about whether Canberra should have a lake.

  The word lake danced on her tongue.

  Then the man on her right, whom she had unintentionally, and perhaps rather unsociably, ignored, turned his head to her and said, ‘Heard you talking about the lake. Bruce said that you’d like to find a position here in Canberra?’

  She excused herself from Richard with a quick, complicated, convoluted smile, and turned to her other table companion.

  She glanced over to Bruce at the left end of the table. They’d had coffee the week before. While roving the table her eyes met Ambrose’s, and he winked. She smiled to him.

  ‘I would, very much.’ She remembered that he was the new planner of the city. She hoped he would not place a hand on her other knee. Or did she? ‘External Affairs would be good – something to do with our United Nations policy. I thought I might be able to help. Nothing has been offered.’

  ‘You were talking about the lake; I take it you are also interested in the planning of the city?’

  ‘Woodrow Wilson felt that a lake pacified the mind.’

  He said, ‘Not pacifying enough to stop the last war.’

  She nodded and smiled ruefully. ‘Not pacifying for anyone except the Swiss.’

  The main course dishes were being cleared away. Edith noted that among the women she alone seemed to have not left something on the plate.

  Now, as she did her obligatory talk to her right – didn’t the Queen carefully divide her time between the guest on the right and the guest on the left? Did she do it by courses? – her wetness made her feel unusually young. Viscosity. She had noticed with Ambrose that she wasn’t always as wet as she once would have been. She had taken to using a little unscented massage oil, which they both liked. Sometimes more than a little.