Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  She stopped. She realised that there were things boys should not do with their privates and anus, but she thought that was not perhaps stepmother business. Best left to their father. Or was she dodging the hard things?

  ‘And, George, take off your cub top – uniforms are worn for the appropriate occasion, not for play or as clothing for playing sport. Nor do you wear school sports clothing when playing in the garden. The cub uniform is an honourable uniform, to be worn only on cub business. Alright, that’s enough of life lessons today.’ She smiled at them and patted them.

  She was no good at this.

  ‘Did you know my mother when she was alive?’ George asked.

  That could be a searching question.

  He added, ‘Did you know my dad when my mother was alive?’

  ‘I got to know your father because we are . . . work friends. I met your mother once – at a dinner party at the Lodge, which is where the Prime Minister lives.’

  ‘You are not our mother,’ George repeated. ‘We do not have to do what you say.’

  ‘But you would be foolish not to listen to what I say. And you would be foolish to disregard good advice from a good friend.’

  They had no response and she left them to their play, feeling that she had made a serious contribution to their lives.

  That evening, when their father came home, they rushed to him and held on to him. He ruffled their hair and asked how their day had been.

  She went off to leave them alone, rather touched by the affectionate tableau, although, as yet, there had been no hugs for her.

  Later, as she had a whisky with Richard while the boys were listening to a serial on the wireless, he said that the boys had said that there had been a scene during the day.

  ‘How did they mean – a scene?’

  ‘About noses.’

  She laughed. ‘I gave them a lesson in grooming.’

  He did not look at her, but said, ‘I think that sort of thing is best left to me.’

  ‘Simple matters – things they might or might not have been told. And deportment. I agree, though, there were a few things only a father could tell them about their public demeanour and the lower body.’ She laughed and touched his arm.

  ‘I think there are things the boys would rather hear from me.’

  ‘I agree, and I have left those things for you.’

  ‘I mean grooming.’

  ‘Oh? These were rather basic matters.’

  ‘I still think they are best left to me.’

  ‘How, then, should I know what is best left to you and what are those matters I should take in hand?’

  ‘I am sure it will become clear.’

  She looked at him. He did not look at her, but stared into his whisky.

  ‘Should I not teach them manners?’

  ‘They will take their lessons more easily from me, for a time.’

  She realised that she had jumped into another woman’s nest. He would be teaching them what he and their dead mother would have wanted. Her wishes, her standards, did not apply.

  She felt hurt that he did not trust her in these matters, yet relieved also of what she saw stretching ahead – relentless disobedience by the children; the never-ending training of children; and the question of discipline.

  She would find uncontentious things to teach them – things that were equally of value in their lives. She would like to think she could teach them whimsy, urbanity. But how did you do that? And had she, herself, forgotten how to do whimsy?

  She agreed with Doctor Spock about the harshness of the old-style, detached, no-picking-up and no over-cuddling motherhood, which had been the way of her childhood. In her parents’ day, children were raised to be reliant, and parents did not seek physical love from their children. But she also knew that boys could become over-attached to their mothers. She sometimes thought that her mother would have said that to say ‘I love you’ in a family situation placed a demand on the other member of the family to echo this love. Her mother would probably have analysed this as requiring an obligatory echo, which could not be trusted and should not be forced. Had she now become her mother’s voice? There seemed to be no chance of that happening in her new family. The boys practised no-touch childhood with her.

  With the children, time passed and their school routine took over. Emily had dropped her not-my-business attitude, and more and more handled the children after school while she was at work. She had them washed when Richard and she arrived home. She had a firm but comical way with them, which Edith could never imitate.

  When she could find herself a perch as an observer, she was sometimes impressed by the will and the strength of the boys’ preferences and foolishness. When she was able to study them, she was able to enjoy them. But too many times she found it impossible to hold to the role of observer and was sucked into being emotionally combative. She found herself in a difficult emotional struggle with them. She could not always be the patient sociologist – she found herself reacting, willy-nilly, as a living human being who wanted them to behave in a certain way, to be more open to all she had to give them. But they were two wilful human beings determined to defy her as strongly as she wished, perhaps wilfully, to shape them.

  Her absences on AAEC business in Coogee were a relief from the low-level combat of the household and its meals. That tension existed between Richard and the boys as well – he had his own struggle with wilfulness.

  She sometimes artificially extended her absences to give herself a couple of days free of tension and to enjoy Sydney and its concerts and plays and movies and shops.

  One Tuesday afternoon at Arthur Circle during the school holidays, preparing for Richard’s arrival after work, she was luxuriating in the bath with bath salts when the two boys burst in.

  Led by George, they stood and stared, and she turned, taken in fright. She crossed her arms over her breasts, and said, rather too firmly – in fact, loudly, with an angry edge – ‘Out!’

  They held their ground under her glare for a second or so, and then fled.

  She stayed there in the bath, and thought, No, no, no. I was wrong, that was the wrong tone. I should not have frightened them. They had to be banished, true, and that was unavoidable, but I should have found a softer way. And they had, sooner or later, to see the naked female body, if they hadn’t already found images in books – art books – or the native women in National Geographic or had peeked at their mother. Though they certainly had never seen the naked body of a stepmother.

  For God’s sake, why was she embarrassed, and why did she now pass this embarrassment about the human body on to them?

  Her head drooped. She had sounded like a prude rather than a Bloomsbury sophisticate. Perhaps she had now left Bloomsbury and was simply what Frederick would call bourgeois.

  Dripping, she left the bath, dried herself, and then wrapped a towel around her body from breasts to knees. Going to the door, she called to the boys. At first they didn’t come, and then, after repeated calling, softening her tone to something of a plea or a tone that promised that they were not in trouble, they appeared.

  She apologised for shouting at them and then said, ‘We should not be ashamed of our bodies, or of our nakedness. Most of all, we should not be ashamed of our curiosity about life. I apologise for rousing on you about it. Would you like to see my body?’

  George did not reply, but Osborne nodded.

  ‘George?’

  Nervously, he said, ‘Yes.’

  She undid the towel and showed them the front of her body. ‘You see I have breasts – when a girl becomes a woman her breasts grow. You will not have breasts like these, but you do have nipples. And you see I have no penis. Women have a vagina, which is inside here –’ She pointed to her pubic hair.

  ‘Why do boys have nipples?’ George asked.

  ‘That’s a very good question, George. I am afraid I’ve never read a satisfactory answer. They are left over in our evolution and have no use – say, like the appendix. But really
, no one has an answer.’

  Her first real conversation with them and she had failed to have an answer. ‘I’m sorry. I wish I did have an answer.’

  She covered herself up. ‘Go outside and play.’

  They would remember this day forever – and so would she – but for different reasons: she had failed to have an answer to their first serious question.

  When she talked about the incident with Richard, she did so jokingly, and did not mention the anatomy lesson. He said, ‘Why didn’t you, for Christ’s sake, lock the door?’

  ‘I usually do and I had taught them to knock.’

  ‘Had not taught them successfully.’

  She realised that there was no way she could explore the idea of embarrassment and nakedness with Richard, nor discuss the horrible, fearful prudery that existed in all their lives.

  She looked at him and thought that there was so much she could not discuss with him.

  Over the next few days, she heard nothing from Richard about the anatomy lesson. It was her first conspiratorial connection with the boys that excluded their father.

  She did not know whether to count this as a victory – maybe just an advance.

  The boys went with Richard every Sunday to their mother’s grave. She accepted that.

  One night, not long after the bathroom episode, Richard announced that next year he thought the boys should go to boarding school – to his old school, King’s.

  And with this decision, to a large extent, the boys left her life.

  Secret Sessions

  When the Duke of Edinburgh was to visit Rum Jungle, Richard suggested that she accompany him again. All the VIPs from around the world were being taken there to see a working uranium mine. She declined. She had seen the mine and she would get to meet the Duke at the High Commission – if she made the list.

  As their marriage trundled on, Richard was beginning to shrink and no longer presented himself to her as a male giant. She recalled how at the beginning he had postured about his influence, promising everything. Now just about everything was too difficult for him – ‘too many problems higher up’ – and he was always shelving and postponing. She began to see him as the sort of public servant who avoided action as long as he could because he did not want to generate difficulty.

  One night, she found she could not bear the smell of his dirty watchband. She didn’t raise this, but instead bought him a new one as a gift. He was mildly pleased, but she sensed that he didn’t care for her making personal changes in matters so close to his skin.

  And there had been the incident of the pistol. That had changed things too. One day, when the boys were out, Richard had come across her cleaning her pistol.

  ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ he said, with a nervous laugh.

  She had not wanted him to see her with the pistol. It was one of those inexplicable things from her past life, one that might have been more customary in Europe in wartime but was rather bizarre in an Australian setting.

  ‘It came into my life when I was a junior officer at the League. A gift. I learned to fire it and kept it. As the last war approached, it seemed that it might come in handy. I clean it now and oil it, as I was instructed.’

  She smiled to somehow bolster the strangeness of the disassembled pistol in her hand and her incomplete explanation. ‘I have a licence.’ She reassembled it and held it out to him. He shook his head and wouldn’t touch it.

  ‘Don’t let the boys see it.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘And keep it where they won’t find it. Lock it away.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was about to leave the room, but said to her, ‘Have you ever fired it “in anger” ’

  She considered telling him about Lebanon but decided that that would only faze him more.

  Nothing more was said about it.

  Without telling Richard, she resumed correspondence with Ambrose. She had also done this when married to Robert, but she did not take this as evidence that her personal history was repeating itself. For a while, she had assumed that the break with Ambrose would be all or nothing for him, and she raised this with him in the first letter. He had replied saying that, given he had never been able to offer her a proper man nor a proper marriage with children, he, himself, had been unable to offer all. ‘So, from you I do not at this point in our lives ask for all – but nor do I want nothing.’ As an afterthought, he had written in the margin of his letter that it could be argued, from another view point, that he had offered ‘more than all’.

  What she had never said to Ambrose was that, despite the comfort of the marriage she was now in, she could not imagine living without him somewhere in her life.

  Although Ambrose never made any accusation, she found herself conscious that she had done him a wrong and had no right to ask friendship of him. No right to take from him those parts of his personality she liked, or to ignore those parts that did not fit with her life – the more outré parts – which, she recalled, at times had fitted her only too well. But wasn’t that always how friendships worked? She reminded herself that he, too, had done wrong to her over the years, and that they may be somewhat even in score.

  The undisclosed correspondence was not some sort of betrayal of her commitment to Richard, more an assertion of the possibility of something of a life outside her marriage and exclusive of it. But she did not think she could explain this to Richard. She had Ambrose send his mail to her at the office and then, after a while, rented a post-office box.

  It was from Ambrose in London that she first heard of a secret session of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – their first since the death of Stalin three years before. The death of Stalin had relaxed the world, and the fear of a Third World War had receded.

  The secret report of the congress came in a personal delivery to her through the High Commission’s diplomatic bag. Although she was still persona grata there and still invited to their receptions, it was a surprise to be telephoned by the First Secretary and told of the arrival of a package for her in the diplomatic bag. She trudged to what she still thought of as the new High Commission building and picked it up, signing for it in front of the First Secretary. She saw that it was from Ambrose.

  She opened the package back at her office and found it contained a roneoed document titled ‘Secret Speech 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR’. She saw that it had originally had a compartmentalised security clearance, AUSCANNZUK, which now had a slash through it with an initial next to it. On a separate piece of paper, Ambrose had also written, ‘Will be of great interest to F and J – BBC will be doing news item on it soon.’

  It was what he would call, she guessed, in diplomatic jargon, a bout de papier.

  As she skimmed through the document, she was amazed to read that it was an admission by Nikita Khrushchev, who had taken over after Stalin’s death, that things had gone horribly wrong in the Soviet Union under Stalin, who had for thirty years carried out ghastly repression seemingly without any effective resistance from the Party as a whole.

  How extraordinary. She had never once in her life read a high-level communist criticising the Soviet Union, let alone from within the very Party itself. It was unheard of, literally. It was a confirmation of everything bad that had ever been said about the Soviet Union in the West – in fact, worse than Western commentators had said.

  Many thousands of honest and innocent communists have died as a result of this monstrous falsification . . . as a result of the practice of forcing accusations against oneself and others . . . In the same vein, let us take for instance our historical and military films and some of our literary works. They make us feel sick. Their true objective is propagating the theme of praising Stalin as a military genius . . . The same fate met not only Central Committee members, but also the majority of the delegates to the 17th Party Congress of 1966 delegates, 1108 persons were arrested on charges of anti-revolutionary crimes . . . this very fact shows how absurd, wild and contrar
y to common sense were the charges of counter-revolutionary crimes made, as we now see, against a majority of participants at the 17th Party Congress . . . the NKVD would send these execution lists to Stalin personally for his approval . . . such lists containing the names of many thousands of Party, Soviet, Komsomol, Army, and economic workers. He approved these lists . . .

  She couldn’t imagine how Frederick and Janice would take the report.

  She looked again at the cover note for the original source of the document, and it said that it had been translated by American security people in West Germany, but there was no explanation of how it had found its way there. She vaguely wondered if it was, perhaps, a manufactured piece of anti-communist material – what had been called during the war ‘black propaganda’, as distinct from real reporting – but because of the often convoluted language, which gave it a strange verisimilitude, she dismissed this.

  After some thought, she telephoned Frederick and said that he and Janice should meet her. ‘I think it is rather urgent. I think you should see a report that has come into my hands. From Ambrose.’

  They met at their café in Manuka and she showed the report to them. When Frederick saw the cover sheet and title, he held it as he might a dead rat. But he studied the cover sheet. ‘Who is Orlov?’ He showed it to Janice. She shook her head.

  Edith took the report back and saw that the name or word Orlov had been written on the cover sheet. It meant nothing to her.

  He leafed through it as if looking at something that did not really concern him, or something he should not be reading.

  Janice looked over his shoulder. ‘Not so fast. Stop.’

  Janice put a finger on a passage and read out that under Stalin there had been ‘repression of the majority of Old Bolsheviks, most of whom were workers and had joined the Communist Party before 1920 . . . 1108 were declared “counter-revolutionaries”, 848 were arrested and shot, and 98 of 139 members and candidates to the Central Committee were declared “enemies of the people”.’ She looked at Frederick. ‘Can that be correct? Eight hundred and forty-eight of the old comrades executed? Wouldn’t you have met some of these on your visit before the war?’