Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  One result of the fizzling out of her intimate life – her arrival at a time of lovelessness – was a compelling energy to be occupied by her work, and she broadened the places where she could give her attention, her drive, outside her two liaison committees. Some around Parliament House called it meddling, but she had learned the tricks of seeming to be expected at the meeting (no one ever asked expected by whom?) and to be offering specialised help, of being seen as something of what might be called a consultant.

  But there was another thing about this time of life: never had she so much wanted night to fall. After a day of good work, she wanted to be folded in the darkness of the closing of the day. She found the evenings of Canberra summer were everlastingly alive, but without the long-fading summer light of Europe. She sometimes found herself yearning for the almost unnaturally long daylight evenings on the lake at Geneva or in the French countryside, when the world seemed to stop for an hour or more – like a movie film image, frozen, soundless, motionless.

  To be blunt, she sometimes impatiently wanted the darkness of evening to arrive so that she could have her first sherry. Preferably, with a work friend or reporters or, best of all, some of the couples who had remained close to her after the departure of Ambrose and her new marriage. Who had incorporated Richard and her into their dinner-party round and had forgiven her for leaving Ambrose. These couples were not really to Richard’s taste, nor he to theirs, and he either arrived late or left earlier or both. Sadly, the conversation always changed for the better after he left.

  When the darkness arrived, failing an invitation to socialise, she would leave her shoebox office and trawl the other offices for late-stayers, or telephone people she knew at the embassies who might like to join her in the non-members’ bar or who might invite her to their little national clubs inside the legations.

  Sometimes she drank too much with these intelligent people. Ambrose once said that the Foreign Office warned young officers that the most pleasurable and hazardous thing about diplomacy was having many chances to drink with intelligent, well-read, charming drunks – ‘but it can cost you the next day. And, if the charming drunks liked you, they will forever seek you out to drink at inappropriate times.’

  Now and then – not often; in fact, rarely – she went to bed with some of these charming drunks, but she never stayed the night. They were usually lonely embassy staff. It was frequently more for the pleasure of giving sexual pleasure than it was of grand sexual passion for her. It was also an affirmation that she still had a sexual self.

  Most of all, she enjoyed the company of Amelia, and sometimes resented competing with the demands of Amelia’s children.

  And then a dreadful complication crashed in on them like a meteor. Something that she could never have foreseen.

  One afternoon, they were seated together at Amelia’s house when Amelia took both her hands and said, ‘Edith, I have some news that may hurt you. Hurt us.’

  Edith’s mind desperately ran through her files of fears, trying to prepare her. Another affair? That would not be a problem. Were Amelia and Theodor moving to live abroad?

  ‘What could possibly hurt us?’ Her voice showed her fear. They had survived Amelia’s year of absence in Geneva and her former affair.

  Amelia held her hands tightly and stared directly at her. She said that she had been offered a position in External Affairs.

  Edith had never felt a pain like the one that now hit her heart. She was sure her hands went cold – died – and that Amelia could feel the coldness. There was an actual pain in her chest.

  ‘External Affairs?’ Her voice was drained by shock.

  She was sure she had turned pale.

  Amelia was ten years younger than she, but had no special qualifications, had nothing like Edith’s experience in foreign affairs. She was married.

  How could this be?

  ‘You’ve been offered a position in External Affairs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  How?

  ‘But how?’

  ‘It’s just a small job.’

  ‘But how . . . ?’

  She wanted to withdraw her hands, but Amelia continued to grip them. Amelia explained that it was to teach the young diplomats report-writing. ‘It’s a temporary position. Nothing.’

  It was not a diplomatic appointment, but the envious pain was still bunched in her stomach.

  Amelia was now in there – she was part of the diplomatic life.

  She knew Amelia would have hopes of rising higher, of somehow working her way into diplomacy. Amelia would love that. And Dobson would help her.

  If she had such a position, she would certainly work to make her way up.

  She was tight, immobilised, with an unjustified and debasing ill-feeling towards Amelia – ill-feeling and self-despair.

  She was also humiliated. Demeaned.

  She found herself thinking that Amelia should have refused the position, should have said that her friend Edith was more suited.

  Again, when she spoke, her voice was weak. ‘It wasn’t advertised? I didn’t see it advertised.’

  Why hadn’t someone told her there was such a position?

  She thought that Theodor had probably helped her get the job, using his brilliant reputation. He was closer to the conservatives these days.

  Edith knew that, as a friend, she had to conceal the envious hurt, to somehow deal with this anguish secretly, the pain of having not been considered for the position, no matter how junior it was. The pain of her friend getting it.

  ‘It wasn’t advertised. They thought it was something I could do. It’s just a little job. Because of my teaching. I know you must feel bad about it, but it’s really a job that would be beneath you. You’re too senior, too experienced for this sort of work. You could never have accepted it.’

  How would Amelia know?

  Amelia said that she was sure the public service was opening up to married women and that Edith would surely get a position now. ‘Something will be offered. Dobson has made the way.’

  Dobson now had reached Second Secretary, but she was not married, and she, too, was younger. Edith met her from time to time socially, and envy made it difficult for her to be friendly, though she tried.

  Even if things were opening up for women, she would not be offered a position and nor, now, would she ever apply. She had missed the boat. She felt too old to apply for positions. She could not face the loss of dignity or risk another rejection by the Department of External Affairs. To apply and be rejected would be a humiliation too great to bear.

  Anyhow, Dobson had been somewhat sidelined with this secondment to Government House, Yarralumla, as private secretary to Lady Casey. Hardly a diplomat’s position – more the work of a private secretary.

  Edith wished fiercely that she had never had anything to do with marrying men. She had a flash of insight: when younger, she had in fact been with Ambrose as a way of not marrying. But that was all in the past. She had gone ahead and married – three times; all wrong.

  But Amelia was married and had now found a position.

  The Department had humiliated her by giving this position to Amelia without even approaching her.

  Sitting there with Amelia, her palms now sweating – a cold sweat – she pulled her hands away and used her handkerchief to wipe them. She tried to console herself by arguing weakly in her mind that a position such as Amelia’s would be less fulfilling than the work Edith was doing at present with uranium – her somewhat irregular position with no title, the committees, the advisory work.

  But it was not fair.

  She felt something approaching bilious spite for both Amelia and Dobson.

  Edith struggled with her anguish and leaned over and kissed Amelia on the cheek. ‘Well done, you.’

  ‘Thank you, dear Edith.’

  Edith then sobbed.

  ‘Oh, Edith.’ Amelia put her arms around her and held her. ‘I’m so sorry that this has happened.’

  ‘I’m happy for
you,’ she lied, through her sobbing. ‘You’re still young. I’ve missed the boat.’

  ‘Something will come up. Their attitude to women, married or not, is changing. Something will be found for you.’

  Edith forced herself to stop sobbing and wiped her eyes, but they were still wet. She shook her head and, staring at the floor, said, ‘I’ve missed the boat.’

  She forced herself to put on a more cheerful face and to ask for details.

  ‘The job’s just a teaching job – report-writing. Nothing.’ But she could detect pride and maybe smugness in Amelia’s voice.

  ‘Will you have an office?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. Maybe a desk in the corner.’

  There was some smugness in her.

  She was so crushed by Amelia’s appointment that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it with Richard. She wondered if he had known of the position and not told her. No. He was not like that. And he had little if anything to do with External Affairs.

  She couldn’t talk about it to anyone.

  For a week or more she would lie sleepless in her bedroom with the soreness of Amelia’s appointment churning through her.

  In the next weeks, she resolved as hard as she could to somehow stomach what had happened and to try to conceal her resentment of Amelia.

  The most acidic, false glass of champagne that she had ever drunk was at Dobson’s drinks for Amelia’s appointment – the second woman in the Department to be appointed above the level of clerk.

  Dobson then began inviting her to meet with them after work quite frequently, and the three of them began to get together as a little gang with an interest in foreign affairs. They bad-mouthed and whinged. They considered marching together against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, but Amelia did not want to put her position at risk – she now had a clerk position in the Economic Relations Division, but still had not been given a permanent posting – even though she was disgruntled with the department. Edith said she hated marching. They were disgusted with themselves, but argued that they could be more effective working from within.

  They both encouraged her to talk about the League days, probably out of some form of kindness, but both Dobson and Amelia did treat her as their superior, as a mentor, when she told her stories of Geneva. They seemed to like her League stories, treated her as a woman of the world and asked her advice, which eased the ever-present, but now small, diminishing pain of exclusion.

  She told of her first days as a naive young woman, and her meeting with an American showman who had ideas for the uniform for League officers, insignia and a flag. How she had joined in a street procession that he had organised in Geneva to celebrate the League. ‘I took part dressed as a cowgirl, and quite rightly I was reprimanded by my Head of Section. I am embarrassed even now. Back then, at the beginning, the League was approached by all sorts of people who sent in designs for a world flag, coats of arms, uniforms for staff and so on.’

  She said that this American showman had a colour chart showing how, by combining all the colours of the world, you achieve a result of a single world colour for the League army uniform and for its officers.

  After the laughing had finished, Dobson said she had a similar story to tell about the Department of External Affairs.

  ‘There was a plan to have a diplomatic uniform in the early days of the new department after the war. The uniform was to be a dark-green army-style tunic with a high collar trimmed with oak leaves.’

  ‘No!’ Amelia said.

  ‘Yes, this really happened. It was to be our diplomats’ uniform for ceremonial occasions,’ Dobson said. ‘There was an argument about whether the oak leaves on the collar should be wattle blossoms. Epaulettes were to be braided with insignia indicating rank; they were to wear narrow trousers with broad satin side-stripes, and a dress sword. I don’t know what women diplomats would have done with the sword once we were ever admitted into the corps.’

  She said that Evatt had vetoed the uniform, saying that lounge suits would do. ‘He didn’t say what would do for a woman were she to become a diplomat.’

  Edith privately saw herself in the diplomatic uniform, perhaps with a longish black skirt. Not too full. She could do without the sword. But she would rather like to wear the diplomatic uniform.

  She did not mention this.

  Part of her suppression of her envy came from realising that her position on the uranium committees and her small office in Parliament House gave her much better gossip and insider information than Amelia or Dobson could bring from External Affairs, especially now Dobson was stuck out at Yarralumla. Sometimes, Edith even knew things about External Affairs that they didn’t know.

  A trivial but curative solace.

  There were still days when she hated them both.

  Becoming a Diplomat

  And then her world came to another end.

  The cosiness of her shoebox office and her cosiness in the corridors of power, the non-members bar, the members’ guest dining room, all disappeared. She had survived the retirement of Menzies, the death of her two old patrons, Latham and Bruce. She had gone to their funerals. She was made happy that Bruce had requested that his ashes be scattered over Canberra and that in his will he had generously endowed the National University. As the memorial service for him was conducted at All Saints, Ainslie, an air-force plane scattered the ashes. She had left the service to watch the plane fly over, but it was too high for her to see the ashes.

  She was disappointed that Latham, who remained an atheist to the end, had a memorial service at the Wesley Church in Melbourne conducted by the Rev. Sir Irving Benson. She asked around about the church service and was told it was the decision of his son, Peter, an officer in the army. This surprised her because Peter had been estranged from the family. Even she knew, though, that it was not the time to raise it with Peter and she let it drop.

  Alan Watt had gone from External Affairs, and although they had remained friendly he had never really helped her.

  After Menzies retired, she was never close to the prime ministers who came after him. She survived the drowning of Harold Holt, the successor to Menzies, who had not seemed to hold it against her that she had supported Menzies in his tossing of Holt’s decision to abandon the lake. With each change of prime minister, she held her breath about what would happen to her, but always went on as if it were understood that she would continue in the posts as liaison officer on the AAEC Scientific Committee and on the Advisory Committee on Uranium Mining and Safety. She had also ended up on the Consultative Committee. But each time there was a change, she always felt she was only just holding on to her positions and her shoebox office. She argued against Holt moving towards what he called ‘nuclear self-sufficiency’, which meant Australia making its own bomb. While she had supported planning for peaceful use of nuclear energy – a nuclear power station – she did not think it should be built at Jervis Bay, one of the playgrounds of her childhood. Of course, no one wanted it built near them. McMahon, her fifth Prime Minister, abandoned the power-station scheme. But she liked to think she had convinced him to change the temperature measurement from Fahrenheit to Celsius.

  And then her time came to an end. She had never before faced a change of political party in government.

  A Labor government was elected – the first in twenty-three years – and new people arrived. Drums of victory were beaten, while documents were burned or removed to safekeeping. She was reminded of the expected German invasion of Switzerland during the war and the feared takeover of the League by the Nazis. Back then, there had been burning in the Court of Honour of documents that would have endangered citizens in Germany and in countries invaded by the Germans.

  The rules and procedures on the changeover of government had to be found and dusted off.

  The Liberal Party had been in power for so long – ever since she had returned to Australia in 1950 – that no one could now remember what earlier embarrassing documents needed to be burned or spi
rited away. She was told that vital files from the small top-secret series on the British atomic tests in Australia, which had been held in the Prime Minister’s Department, were heavily culled.

  In the flurry, her remarks of concern about the destruction of archives were not heard. She had mumbled something about the files belonging to history, not to the Liberal Party. After all, it wasn’t as if the Nazis were invading the country. Australians were legally replacing Australians in government.

  The change of government was not believed. At least two senior public servants had said that calling Gough Whitlam ‘Prime Minister’ did not seem right and did not come easily to their lips. They had come to her office to check if she had copies of some worrisome files; without looking, she said, flatly, ‘No.’

  Resignations from advisory committees were requested or expected. She formally resigned her positions after having trouble finding to whom it was she should tender her resignation.

  As something of a protest about the destruction of archives, she retrieved from her own files at home Ambrose’s memorandum on the British atomic testing dishonesty and opened an official file. She registered it, put it in its appropriate cabinet and flagged it in a memo for the incoming minister, whoever that might be. A gift for the new government.

  She wondered who it was who would occupy her position, if it was ever really considered a position. There were rather boisterous parties of farewell among staff, and some silly pranks played to annoy and discomfort the incoming Labor government, but she had been unable to head these off. She saw them as uncivil.

  On the last day, she packed up her personal memorabilia – the photograph of Latham and her after his election, when she’d had her first taste of politics; her knives; and a few ornaments to which the Manager of Premises had not, in her case, objected when she had moved in years back.