Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  Gradually, she found herself invited to talk to schools about uranium.

  In her talks, she put much emphasis on the peaceful uses of radiation and the likely creation of an International Atomic Energy Agency. She wrote to an old friend, Sigvard Eklund, who was helping with the planning of the agency, and sent him a copy of her essay. He had replied, complimenting her on it.

  She was interviewed by the ABC about the Canadians finding a cure for cancer in cobalt radiation. She told the reporter, ‘A patient in a plaster cast is wheeled into a room in Victoria Hospital in Ontario. One end of a large metal cylinder is positioned over her body. Everyone leaves the room. Outside, a technician presses a button. A powerful dose of radiation surges deep into the patient’s body, destroying cancerous cells. The cancer has gone.’

  Because of the essay, she had received an invitation to afternoon tea at the National University from Sir Ernest Titterton, where he now held the chair of Nuclear Physics. It was a great honour and she felt it went well. He was very much for peaceful use of nuclear energy and lent her a book.

  Richard arranged for her to meet with Menzies. He claimed to remember the dinner at which they had met and seemed to have read the essay – or at least a summary – and said something about finding a place for someone ‘with your background’.

  She thanked him and queried whether any such place for her, if it were to be found, would be connected to the new Australian Atomic Energy Commission.

  He raised his eyebrow. ‘I will need someone here in Canberra who can explain it all to me. I want you inside the tent.’

  The Prime Minister had said that things were happening fast with atomic energy – ‘the Russians are ahead of us with nuclear electricity and weaponry. We have the mines.’

  He then looked around conspiratorially and said to her and Richard, ‘We’ve already had a bang or two in the desert north of Adelaide and, just between us, I think we’ll have a permanent testing ground around there soon. And the Rum Jungle mine is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in my life. Whatever we may think about dreadful atomic instruments such as the atomic bombs and their terrible consequences, part of our security in these tremulous conditions depends upon the superiority of the free world. We’re lucky that we should have found, within our own boundaries, deposits of this ore, which will bring power and light and the amenities of life to us all.’

  She felt he was practising a speech.

  Richard said, ‘I couldn’t agree more, Prime Minister.’

  She said that she had read that electricity powered by atomic energy would be so cheap that it would not be worthwhile billing people for it.

  ‘I am not sure I am for giving it away,’ the Prime Minister said, with a laugh.

  Later, she asked Richard what the Prime Minister had meant by ‘in the tent’. He said he didn’t know precisely. ‘On his side, I suppose.’

  She wondered if it meant inside the evangelical tent.

  A month or so after the talk with the Prime Minister, she received an appointment as a public liaison advisor with the AAEC Scientific Advisory group. There would be no salary, but she would receive travelling expenses and a per diem. There were to be meetings with the staff of the commission, which she and a couple of full-time public servants and some outside experts would attend monthly in Coogee, and she was also to report back to the Prime Minister.

  In reply to the offer, she asked if she could have an office.

  Someone got back to her saying that an office for her had been approved and Parliamentary Services had found something for her – nothing grand.

  The smallness of her office – the smallest office she had ever had in her working life; even smaller than her study desk at Women’s College when she was a student – made her vase of roses when in full bloom seem enormous. She had arranged to have the flowers delivered every Monday at her own expense. There was no room for personal ornamentation and she decided that the office desk had room only for her two knives. It barely had room for her Rolodex. Her personal furniture from her office in Interior went to her study at Arthur Circle.

  She determined to come to her office at Parliament House nearly every day. As was the practice at Foreign Affairs and the League, she saw her role as running the Uranium Desk, but she then changed to calling it the Atoms for Peace desk. Richard was the only person she told about the naming. He had laughed, but she was half-serious.

  Because her office was in the Prime Minister’s corridor, she found herself summoned to his office not only on the mysteries of uranium but on anything, from the religion of Walter Burley Griffin – none that she could discover – to where to stay in Geneva. She told him that the Australians who went to the League always stayed at the Hôtel de la Paix.

  Janice urged her to join the World Federation of Scientific Workers, which the left-wing scientists had formed.

  Edith had replied that if she did join, her goose would really be cooked.

  She did seriously worry about her relationship with Frederick and Janice, given her new position, and tried to minimise their place in her life.

  She found that she was privy to some of the dealings about weapons – more by being around than by intention – and she discovered that the Prime Minister had always held information about atomic testing close to his chest, even keeping it away from the Cabinet. He saw Australia’s possession of uranium and the providing of testing sites to the British as a way of giving him ‘a seat at the table’ and, in his words, ‘preserving our ancient structural unity’.

  Only very occasionally – and more by accident of circumstance – was she invited into the Prime Minister’s anteroom for drinks, but when she did she saw that all conversation at this level, no matter how relaxed, was still jockeying and scheming. The Prime Minister and his colleagues were prone to extreme and violent language, although when they apologised to her – usually the only woman present – she simply said, ‘I was in uniform in Vienna after the war – I heard far worse.’

  After a while, she was given a stipend from some special allocation as an ‘advisor’, which got around the problem of the public-service union.

  She had begun following the cricket so that she could understand his jokes and references, although the Prime Minister never asked her advice on the choosing of the Australian team.

  She had come to realise that her status did not really rest on her time at the League or the UNRRA, and that it had more to do with her relationship with the British High Commission, where she was still on the invitation list. She was a frequent visitor there and now sometimes played bridge. She had invited herself into the bridge-playing, feeling that it was better for her to be at the table with men. Menzies had a friendship with the High Commissioner, Sir Stephen Holmes. Her remaining on the invitation list seemed to prove to her that Sir Stephen did not hold her responsible for the burlesque fiasco and that there had not been any damaging gossip about Ambrose and her.

  Menzies was also impressed that she knew Eden personally. At the Commonwealth Prime Ministers conference, Eden had asked after her. This had impressed the Prime Minister. He often asked if she had heard from Eden – perhaps half-jokingly – hoping for some tidbit about things in the British cabinet. Sometimes, she felt she should make contact again with Eden.

  She couldn’t help but notice that the admired skills of Australians at the GATT and SEATO meetings came from diplomatic experience from the League days. But no one mentioned the League, except to disparage it. She yearned to be part of this world again.

  When she had mused one night about her special relationship of trust with the Prime Minister, Richard became impatient with her and said, ‘For God’s sake, stop playing the innocent. Everyone thought – probably still thinks – including myself, that you were working for the British secret service through your husband. Everyone thought that you were using your brother as a way of getting to know things. That Frederick and Janice were a ‘source’. I’ve heard it said – perhaps it was just a rumour – that you
were responsible for the coup of getting the names of those CSIRO scientist members of the Party for the ASIO.’

  He had then noisily banged an ice tray he had taken from the refrigerator – the clatter of ice in the sink being a frustrated conclusion of the matter, about which he did not expect her to say anything revealing.

  He was not really upset but murmured something about ‘all those people in high places with whom you have secretive connections – Latham and Bruce’.

  And then, in another loud clatter of ice, he made himself a drink – she already had a drink. How noisy he always was in a kitchen. Maybe he thought that she should leap to her feet and fetch him a drink.

  He said, ‘I even had you checked before we went too far together as a couple.’

  Oh. ‘I didn’t have you checked.’

  ‘You didn’t have to – I was in the PS.’

  She laughed. ‘Good character and political neutrality.’

  She then remembered that she had checked on him in an indirect way, through Ambrose.

  Richard went on, ‘They didn’t tell me much – just that you were okay with them. I suppose it was against regulation for you to say anything to me about your cloak-and-dagger activities before we met. But I was miffed that you didn’t say anything.’

  He settled down and took a sip of his drink. ‘And impressed.’

  She looked at him and decided to let the errors live on. He would not believe her if she told the truth.

  She had a new rule: Doing Nothing is also Action.

  Until then she had believed that, in part, she had been given her blurry position at Parliament House because of Richard.

  Then he had said, ‘In the early days when you arrived and were living at the Hotel Canberra, it was commonly thought that you and Major Westwood were not really married; that it was an arrangement for the sake of MI6 or whoever. It was said you had separate bedrooms.’

  Did that imply that someone – say, at the ASIO – knew more about Ambrose than they had suspected? Could they have known about his sexual inclinations?

  He went on. ‘There was evidently much laughter, too, when the young man from the ASIO was sent to interview you. He was the laughing stock of the agency, I’m told, because he failed to determine whether you were a British agent, which was the intention of the interview. It was a joke played on the guy they sent. It was a training exercise.’

  All this chatter by Richard probably confirmed that if Ambrose were still a British secret-service officer, it was not known to the ASIO. She had always assumed that at least some sort of light espionage was part of his duties. Once, when she had asked him, he had said that he was more a sleuth than a spy.

  She liked the idea that she was given this murky special status by his reflected ingloriousness. He would like that.

  She considered the twisted nature of all things: the entropy of all observation and of all the painstaking analysis of reality as it spiralled away into misinterpretation and half-error; the clumsiness of communication among people; and the dim understanding of those involved in matters of state. Not to mention their childish possessiveness with information or the intellectual deformations that came from school debating. The way error served us as well as harmed us.

  There was nothing much to be done about the twisted, overgrown lattice through which we all peer.

  She supposed there was irony in it, if one enjoyed irony.

  She said something about the ‘tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive’.

  He had agreed, perhaps not fully knowing what it was to which he had agreed.

  They had then listened to the radio.

  At her work, the public servants saw her as something of an intruder, but knew that she was connected to the Prime Minister and that she moved in high circles. Added to that, she now partly understood that she wore a cloak of mystery. They were all very courteous.

  Richard had transferred to Supply. Howard Beale was Minister for Supply, which covered defence-related issues, including uranium mining. It was a big promotion for Richard and she copied her reports to him. In turn, Beale’s department sent her a great deal of material, and she made it her business also to hang around the department.

  The Australian Atomic Energy Commission had been given approval to build a reactor in the bush outside Sydney at Lucas Heights and to manufacture weapons-grade plutonium. Beale was keen that Australia have nuclear weapons, but this was not a view shared by all in government; Beale also had an uneasy relationship with Menzies.

  She thought her reports were the most detailed and the only reports that made use of everyday language – once, in the anteroom over a martini, Menzies had said as much. But she was saddened that, at this point in her life, his compliment had mattered so much.

  Grooming and Other Lessons

  There came a day, as planned, when she was to be alone with the children while Richard went to work. There was no school and she would stay home from the office.

  Thank God they were old enough to dress themselves. The four of them ate a breakfast, but they directed all their remarks to their father.

  To her relief, they played with their Meccano sets for hours in the designated playroom. The gift had been accepted and the missiles were not of much interest to them. They seemed to have overcome their objections to the colour difference.

  She cut some flowers and put them in their room, but then took them away again, fearing that they would find the flowers too feminine.

  She tried to avoid fussing about them and to avoid intervening in their activities, although when passing she would try to make a merry remark.

  She was passing through when she noticed Osborne picking his nose. She stopped and then went on, deciding that she would have to think about what do about that.

  Her thinking was that she owed it to them to be their guide on how to get on in the world; how to be acceptable in the world. She decided that they needed guidance on these things, and that as the second-ranking adult in their lives she should say something.

  After a while, preparing a small speech, she went to the playroom and said, ‘Osborne, I wish to speak with you, and with George. I want you to listen.’

  They both looked up at her from where they were playing on the floor.

  She stood there.

  They didn’t move.

  ‘Stand up,’ she said softly, ‘so that I can speak with you both – face to face.’

  Osborne looked to George. George looked down at his Meccano and moved a piece.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  George slowly stood up and Osborne followed. George held a piece of Meccano in his hand.

  She had decided to make it a general lesson, not to be seen just as a rebuke of Osborne.

  ‘I saw Osborne picking his nose and I wanted to simply point out to you – George, you probably know this – that it is considered, well, bad form to pick your nose.’

  They said nothing.

  She said, ‘It’s not what gentlemen do in public.’

  George said that Osborne wasn’t in public.

  ‘Anywhere that you are likely to be seen is public, which includes this room – this house.’

  She then worried about what to say about picking of the nose in private, and that George might be technically correct, that their playroom might have a status different to a public place – it was their own place, a place to be alone. She might be wrong about that. Too bad.

  ‘You have probably been told by your mother before she died about what you should and should not do with your bodies in public – when others might be watching. Have you?’

  ‘I suppose so. No. Yes and no,’ George said.

  ‘Yes and no,’ Osborne said.

  ‘Let me give you some simple rules – starting from the top of your head.’

  George said, ‘You’re not our mother.’

  She had been waiting for this. Amelia had warned her about this inevitable, ultimate defiance.

  She crouched down. �
��I can never be your mother, that’s true. You have lost your mother and that is a very sad thing. But from now on in your lives, I will try to take on some of the jobs she would have done. To fill in. And I know I will never be as good or as important to you as your mother, but I will try to be your friend and tell you things that a friend would tell another friend. I will try to be a grown-up friend.’

  They had no reply to this.

  She stood up and tousled their hair. ‘Beginning with the top of the head: you do not scratch your head in public. You should not comb your hair in public – you should go to the bathroom or dressing room to brush or comb your hair. Moving down to your face –’ she touched both their ears – ‘you do not clean your ears or blow your nose in front of people –’ she touched their noses – ‘nor pick your nose. You do wash behind your ears otherwise your ears will smell. You leave the table to blow your nose. You do not pick at your skin. You do not spit. You do not pick at your teeth at table . . .’ She hesitated. What about France? And she had heard that in China and Japan it was acceptable. Better to be on the safe side. ‘If you need to remove something from your teeth during a meal, take the toothpick and go to the . . .’ She hesitated again. What did the boys call the lavatory? The toilet? Arthur Circle had toilets separate from the bathrooms. The boys were staring at her. ‘Oh, you go to where you wash your hands – the bathroom or the toilet. Sometimes you can remove whatever it is that is bothering you with your tongue, but do not be obvious.’ How many times had she more or less broken this rule? ‘You brush your teeth after every meal. Moving down your body –’ She took their hands, examining them back and front – ‘You make sure your nails are cut and clean and your hands clean – washed before and after every meal. You do not bite your knuckles or your nails. Dry yourself in the shower, not outside the shower.’ That was somewhat off the subject.