Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘You would be the first bushman I have known who drank cognac. I might ask for a different room – would they mind?’

  ‘Of course not, but the hotel is probably full.’

  Why did she play to him? She would have no hesitation in asking for another room. She had stayed at all the fine hotels of the world and she felt in control of any hotel in which she stayed. Why, with him, did she pretend to naivety? Some wretched lapse into dotty, outdated womanliness. Yet, she had to remind herself, it was also a female way of commanding him to serve her. What a foolish business it all was. Glad to be out of it. Was she out of it?

  ‘Quite a few delegations staying here,’ he said, speaking with a full mouth.

  ‘I think I shall, though,’ she said, jettisoning the humble voice.

  ‘See Frau Schmidt.’

  ‘I think I shall. Or do you think I should see someone from the consulate?’ There she went again – pretending to be deferring to him, granting to him worldliness, which she suspected he only barely had.

  ‘No, see Frau Schmidt.’

  He spoke with the confidence of a husband. Ah, but perhaps this was what she was bringing out in him – the role of the ascendant husband. For her own passing amusement and benefit? For the flirting frisson of it? She refused to think of it as a mother-and-son playlet. That had no appeal.

  She spread more sour berry jam on her roll, taking his share of the sachets. She hated these new sachets. She preferred hotels that put both the butter and the jam in appropriate dishes with appropriate cutlery. But then, why not demand what pleased one, or, failing the availability of what pleased one, why not, at least, wish for it and remark it.

  Remark it to whom?

  ‘You don’t think I should also inform the consulate?’

  ‘No.’ He now seemed to be impatient with her. ‘There’s no need. We don’t answer to the consulate.’

  She enjoyed pushing him to petty exasperation.

  She watched him scrounge another mouthful from the dwindling breakfast food on their table, ignoring replenishment from the laden buffet over near the window in the breakfast room, and she came up with another request that would, she knew, playfully prod his exasperation.

  She said, ‘Would you mind dreadfully asking Frau Schmidt for me? Your German is so much better than mine.’

  She watched him – he with his coquette somewhere in London; probably adorable, young and bright; although he was a little old now to be playing with young girls. But then, why not? Why not take with both hands all the erotic beauty life had happily offered? She had nearly had her share of that when she was his age, but not quite enough. The war, and just after it, had been good for that sort of thing. Handsome officers in clean uniforms washed, ironed, sponged with cleaning fluid – or with petrol or kerosene – by Viennese valets, who less than a year before, had sponged German uniforms. Looking back, all things considered, she did feel she had been given her share of erotic pleasure and of beauty. And then she’d had Ambrose for those good years – a most rare and exotic creature, whom she now missed dreadfully. In dreams in which he appeared she was psychologically punished. Justly, perhaps. An exotic creature and also a sage beacon. Dear Ambrose. And, leafing through the faulty, flattering, lying calendar of her mind, she had also to acknowledge that she had not had a lover, or sex, for some time. The rare sex with Richard no longer counted.

  ‘Edith, you know I have very little German. And Frau Schmidt’s English is fine. But yes, I’ll ask her for you.’

  His German was hopeless. Her German was much better. ‘Thanks awfully, I can’t cope with that sort of thing. I know I’m being silly . . . These days women should, I know, try.’

  She did perhaps act it too well. She should be careful. The wind might change. She took the last of the coffee in the heavy, silvered pot.

  She saw him again studying her, while they sat in the auditorium listening to simultaneous translation of the French-speaking African speaker through headphones. The African was stating that nuclear war fears were ‘Western hysteria’ – if this nuclear power was so wonderful, why not allow all countries to have it? She found she could not fully understand his thick French pronunciation without the earphone translation.

  They could have it – with IAEA supervision. They did not like supervision. Who did? Pride, false nationalism.

  Yes, Ian was again gazing at her. Men and their gazing at women. Her vanity sprang to life as she felt his gaze. Her figure was in good shape and she had the kind of skin that aged well. The fish-and-salad diet of her upbringing had been nutritious and reasonably scientific. Her mother had been a supporter of Philip Muskett and his diets – his Art of Living in Australia had been something of a textbook for her. They had been the only family she had known who had eaten olives. She had been taught to always thoroughly wash off the soap from the face and neck. Her neck was not bad at all, and she had missed most of the cruelty of ageing – wrinkling. But she was not going to think about her hands. She was so sorry that gloves were on their way out.

  She fancied she looked something like Klimt’s Judith I. ‘Oil and gold on canvas.’ No, she saw herself more as Klimt’s Frau Fritza Riedler.

  She had gone alone to see them again on this visit and had again marvelled tearfully once more at The Kiss, which she had seen before the war but which had not been on show the last few times she had been in Vienna. She had not taken Ian because of some crass remark he had made about The Kiss now being the property of advertising companies and embarrassingly over-the-top. She had remarked that one had to have the aesthetic strength and penetration to disregard such banal impediments to the seeing of the paintings, to be able to see back to the original blinding emotion of the work. To reclaim the painting from pedestrian familiarity and banalisation. He had shrugged, but she suspected that her remarks had hit home.

  Would she ever again kiss passionately? Would she make a pact with Mephistopheles if it were offered? Her recall of the opera was dim. She must borrow one of the Faust plays he was reading. To be honest, she had lived the last few years still half-expecting something romantic to arrive in her life.

  Ian was squinting again and pulling the skin near his eyes with his fingers. His behaviour no longer flattered nor amused. He was being ridiculous.

  As she listened to the speakers, she found she was almost wallowing in the madness of the human species, in its capacity to apply its scientific intelligence to these dangerous elements lying in the ground for billions of years; to dig them up and then use them to shape a weapon that could make the planet uninhabitable. A weapon with ‘no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained’, according to Oppenheimer. ‘Death on a hitherto unimaginable scale.’ She had always trusted him. And Waltz. But not Teller.

  Uranium and plutonium were the two elements in the soil of the planet that were truly symbolic of the human condition – well, to be precise, plutonium was not really found in the soil. More than all the gold and silver.

  She perversely allowed herself some defeatist despair as she listened to the accounts of the appalling affects of radiation sickness outlined by the second speaker. The ‘creeping dose’ – something, perhaps, we were all now suffering or would soon suffer. Tumours; cancers of the breast; organ tissue damaged from ionising radiation and the stochastic effects of radiation . . . She silently noted that radiation was also used to cure breast cancer.

  Ian stopped fooling around, probably because she was paying no attention to him – at least, not appearing to pay attention to him. He said to her, ‘Stochastic? Stochastic!’

  She leaned towards him, touching his shoulder and whispered, ‘Chance effect. It refers to the random, statistical nature of the damage; having a probability that can be analysed but not predicted precisely.’

  She hoped he was suitably impressed.

  ‘Oh – you mean guesswork.’

  ‘No.’ She turned back to the speaker.

  The speaker said, ‘As an illustration, we know that above-groun
d nuclear tests that occurred in several countries between 1955 and 1963 dramatically increased the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere and subsequently in the biosphere; after the tests ended, the atmospheric concentration of the isotope began to decrease.’

  She again leaned in to him, and said, ‘Did you know that one side-effect of all the carbon-14 in the atmosphere is that it enables us to determine the birth year of a corpse? The amount of carbon-14 in the teeth can be measured. Only works for individuals born after 1943.’ She looked at him and smiled. ‘You might just get in.’

  He saluted her in a silly way. ‘Knew that.’

  She doubted it.

  The speaker went on. ‘These tiny levels of radiation are not any more harmful than sunlight, but just as excessive quantities of sunlight can be dangerous, so too can accumulative levels of radiation.’

  The favourite word at the conference was ‘Armageddon’ and there was much solemn, pious, aggrandising talk at the conference about this Armageddon – this last great battle between good and evil, this last catastrophic conflict.

  Those who used the word had only their piety to show. They did no tough thinking. They made her want to welcome Armageddon. A wish rose up in her for everything in this frustrating and disappointing world to just go in a whomp. But, of course, nuclear war would, for most of us, be a lingering death. A big, obliterating whomp would have to be from another, more powerful source. A meteor would do it.

  She came back to the hotel from the evening session, at which Ian had been absent. As she opened the door of her new room with the enormous key, she glanced at his room down the hall and wondered what he had done with his evening.

  She dumped her conference satchel and handbag and poured herself a cognac from her flask. She then undressed, taking off her bra, leaving on only her satin slip, allowing her not-too-large breasts to hang free inside the slip, finding as always that the satin relaxed her body. She removed her make-up and applied her moisturiser.

  There was a knock on her door.

  ‘Who is it?’ she called.

  She knew it must be him. She looked at her watch.

  His muffled voice said, ‘It’s me.’

  Had her inkling about his desire for her not been an illusion, but, in fact, an astute reading of the situation? And if so, what then? Did she really desire him? She thought desire could be kindled; the sight of a stiff, youngish penis would cause some stirrings. Along with some caressing. Would he be a man who caressed? Did he know about nipples? Ambrose had been the only man she had been to bed with who understood the breasts. How much had she drunk? Foreign Office rules: never lose count. This evening, dining with a couple of the old gang, she had lost count.

  ‘Hold on,’ she called. She went to the wardrobe and took out her clinging dark-blue velvet nightrobe. She put it on, tied the waistband and then looked at herself in the mirror. She undid the waistband, revealing some of her slip. Turned up the collar, turned it down. Was she seeing her real body or her wishful body?

  Leaning closer to the mirror, she checked that the moisturiser had been absorbed. She gave her dyed hair a brush and found a hair loop to pull it back into a ponytail. How long could she go on with the henna-indigo business? She could see damage. She considered lipstick, but that would look . . . too obvious. And if she were wrong about his interest it would make her appear foolish. She put off the overhead light and turned on the bedside light. And then checked the room for tidiness. She left her new silk nightdress laid out on the bed. She called out again for him to wait. ‘Be with you in a tick.’ She went back and put on lipstick. A gesture of happy reception. Really? More a ‘come-on’. Why not. Earrings? Definitely not. She blotted the lipstick to tone it down a little, threw the tissue in the waste bin and then had to retrieve it and flush it.

  ‘Be with you in a minute,’ she called.

  She went back to the mirror. She took off the velvet nightrobe and carefully draped it on the bed. The slip had its own satin charm.

  She put on her travel slippers and then looked at them – too dull. She kicked them off and pushed them under the bed with her foot and went to the door barefooted. She always felt younger barefooted. She had always liked being barefooted with men. She still painted her toenails. And fingernails. Both were in good condition. It still pleasured her to catch sight of her perfectly painted toenails.

  She opened the door. ‘I was preparing for bed. You wanted something?’

  For an instant, their eyes met with what she was absolutely sure was desire – unmistakably desire.

  She looked away, unable to quite handle the fact that her dreamy, dopey fantasies had leapt alive, leeringly, challenging her now to perform. She became timorous. How would he react to her naked, if she were ever to become naked? She might not have to do that. Would she be wet enough for him? Did she have some body oil? Would he stay the night? How would she look to him in the light of day? What if he failed to perform when he saw her body – or because of whatever sometimes happened with men – and, as a consequence, they were both humiliated?

  They stood there at the door – he without a tie and without a jacket, and she in her satin slip with newly reddened lips, breasts shaped suggestively in satin, barefooted.

  He would have to take the initiative, would have to affirm his desire. She could not risk doing anything that might reveal her as being a foolish older woman.

  It would not kill her to be humiliated.

  Yes, it would.

  He spoke. ‘I thought you might have a spare airmail letter form.’ His voice was husky and he cleared his throat. She knew that huskiness. Oh, she knew it too well. She was again thrilled, and she disregarded the lame excuse for the visit.

  He stumbled on, saying, ‘The late-night letter writing – from the darkness of the soul.’

  She liked his attempt to dress up his words with the suggestion of poetry. She waited for him to take her in his arms.

  But he didn’t. His excuse for the visit now pushed them both into an ambiguity: his sophistication was too flimsy and she knew she could not help him. If only he had said something like, ‘I needed company. I wanted to have a drink with you.’

  She had to play along with his invented excuse and said, ‘I think I have one.’ As she turned to go back into her room she felt the moment die, felt the desire founder, leaving him standing at the door while she went to find him his ‘airmail letter form’.

  She stopped halfway across the room and turned. ‘An airmail letter form?’ Hoping that her voice implied there was perhaps something else he had come looking for. It was a last-ditch effort to find a way for the tiny desire to advance itself. Her voice had – she hoped – sauciness to it. She was going to add, ‘Is that really what you desire? Can’t I be of service in some other way?’ or, ‘Perhaps we can be of service to each other in other more satisfying ways?’ But she couldn’t. She didn’t.

  ‘Just one,’ he said.

  She turned away and then turned back again, again trying to keep the possibility alive. ‘Oh, do come in. How rude of me.’ For the first time in her life the words ‘Oh, do come in’ spoke their innuendo. She had never before spotted the innuendo of that female doorstep invitation to a man. Or used it. Or was it just her fevered, lustful mind? Or a fevered mind desiring to experience lust?

  ‘Is the room quieter?’ he asked, as he came in and stood in the middle of the room.

  ‘Thanks awfully, it was decent of you to arrange it all.’

  She saw him glance at the two pharmaceutical bottles beside her bed. She should have put those out of sight. Displaying one’s frailties was never attractive, although they were not serious medications – more futile elixirs of health. No magic aphrodisiacs.

  Having gone to her writing desk and found an airmail letter form, she held it out to him, holding on to it for an instant as his hand took hold of it, as a form of touching, looking into his eyes. But the desire had gone into hiding, and she then let go.

  They said goodnight and she walked
barefoot with him to the door. He left and she closed the door, allowing her breathing to break, as if she had been holding her breath.

  The slip had been wrong, wrong, wrong – too brazen. A woman of her age should not answer the door in a slip, even if it were lace-edged and shaped – ‘Une robe qui épouse les formes du corps, madame,’ the woman had said in Paris when she bought it. It wasn’t a dull housewife’s slip. Younger women would not even wear a slip these days, let alone to the door. Her hips. The robe would have masked her widening hips.

  She calmed. She supposed the episode itself was flattering, even if its promise had collapsed. She poured herself a cognac. She was a little shaky. She should have offered him a drink. Still, in her defence, the slip was vampish – rather sensually forward in its own way. A way of saying she was, well, available, galvanised. She felt hot – the room was overheated – and she decided to sleep naked. She pushed the straps of the slip off her shoulder and let it slither to the floor. Her body had never lost its love of the feel of silk and satin, the second skin.

  Perhaps at the last moment he had backed off so as to be faithful to this girl in London? Perhaps.

  She looked at herself in the mirror, running her hands down her hips and then up to her breasts. Not bad, not bad. Not buxom, she had never been buxom. She had put on weight, but she carried it well and she was still depilating. The hips. She had some weight there. And there was something of a tummy. Some men might like that. She believed that for a sexually alive person all sexually alive bodies can be erotic. She used a loofah religiously and fiercely to remove any scaling. She held out a leg – her ankles were excellent. She had never been a beauty, but she had her attributes. She did not want to be undesirable. She could perhaps now accept that she might not be that good at love in the longer term, but did not want to be undesirable. Out in public, she had studied women of her age, and she especially observed mothers and daughters and saw what age did. The sad contrast created by ageing in a mother and daughter could give her a sharp pain. She tried, as all did, she supposed, to exempt herself from ageing, to think she could just wriggle past the years without them noticing her.