Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  She wondered what age he would put her at. Sometimes, if ever ungallantly asked, say, by a news reporter, she had sometimes plucked an age from the air: sometimes younger; sometimes rather a little older than she was, especially when younger among senior men. All her personal numbers on official forms had become unreliable even to herself – the years of marriage, years at the League, years at the UNRRA, years living in any given country or city, how long she had worked for Latham after university, for example. Unreliable not only because of evasiveness nor only because of her memory, but simply because she couldn’t be bothered calculating and, for God’s sake, could not, in retrospect, easily calculate. And then, we are for some time – was it from thirty to sixty? – just one blurred age. The wonderfully blurred years.

  Was that really true? True or not, she would be leaving that blurred zone.

  She had made herself older when she joined the League. Coming to Geneva back then, she had rehearsed herself to be older. She had wanted some of the flourish of age. She had been older in her make-up and dress, had kept reminding herself to act older. Now she was older.

  And there was someone at the door.

  She heard the door handle turn and looked with some fright as the door opened.

  He was back in the room. Without looking at him, she went to the robe on the bed, but before she could cover herself, he mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ and went back out the door, closing it behind him. He must have seen her fully naked.

  Should she run after him, take hold of him and say, ‘Come. I know what you want. I know’?

  Instead, she stood there, naked, clutching her robe, paralysed like some frightened animal.

  The next morning, she considered having breakfast in her room so that she would not have to face him at their table with its play of domestic intimacy, which now had been given lubricious shading. But she decided that she would face down the irritating ambiguity of the evening. Face it down.

  It was a rest day from the conference and there had been an arrangement by the organisers for a visit to an art exhibition. She put a little more effort into her appearance than usual and went down to the breakfast room, and again she was there before he was. She picked up the Herald Tribune, sat down and began her breakfast. She liked her newspaper to be untouched, newly minted.

  Without quite looking up, she was intensely aware of him when he entered the breakfast room. She heard him saying good morning to the Canadians, bonjour to the Cameroons, guten Morgen to the waitress, as he made his way to their table. Another display of his thin worldliness.

  ‘The Austrian idea of a rest day,’ he said, with a brightness that was meant to imply that nothing whatever had happened the previous night.

  She, in turn, spoke brightly about the weather to convey to him that from her point of view there was nothing amiss.

  And – sadly – nothing to be said.

  ‘Anything in the Herald Tribune?’ he asked, breaking a bread roll.

  As they ate, she considered whether to separate herself from him during the day’s recreational activities, to let the day form a proper space between them, but when she entered the bus a little later than he their eyes caught; he patted the empty seat beside him and she went skittishly to it.

  At the Orangerie art museum, he tried to disengage from her, but she saw that it was half-hearted and sensed that he desired her company – if not her body – and that almost against his will, and, to a degree, against her fluctuating will also, they seemed to fall together.

  With dismay and self-disapproval she then heard herself say, ‘Would you mind if I clung on to you? I’m not feeling very clever today.’

  Theirs was now, indeed, a very befuddled alliance. Her fault.

  Perhaps, with her request, she was punishing his lack of temerity the night before, taking a compensatory payment for his having begun an advance and then having lacked the passion to carry it through – for whatever reason.

  If that was what had, in fact, happened – an amorous advance. She was no longer sure. Oh, merde.

  It was avant-garde art and, despite her openness to artistic experimentation, some of it aroused her scepticism.

  ‘But is this really art?’ she asked, as they stood before a handwritten page from Homer’s ‘ODYSSEE’.

  He said to her, ‘I suppose art is what you find in art galleries.’

  She had come back, saying that, given this art was displayed in the Orangerie, maybe, then, ‘this isn’t art but oranges we’re looking at’.

  He turned to her, smiling. ‘Very good, Edith.’

  They stopped at photographs of the OM Theatre.

  ‘Art or oranges?’ became a running joke with them.

  ‘Neither. “Orgies and mysteries”,’ he said, reading from the catalogue.

  She went in closer to look at the photographs.

  He read out, ‘According to the catalogue, you’re looking at the entrails of a freshly slaughtered cow.’ He said it in an impudent male way, as little boys try to frighten girls with toads and lizards and by holding dead rats by their tails, to frighten them into trembling submission. And to which little girls gasp, hands raised in pretend horror – signals of their submission.

  She screwed up her face to show puzzlement at what she was seeing. She had seen far worse than the entrails of a cow.

  She stepped back and said, this time mocking herself, ‘Are we now in the Orgierie, perhaps?’

  He grinned.

  She opened her own catalogue and read out from the short introduction to the exhibition by the director, R. H. Luchs, ‘The older artists should not pursue the splendid rashness of youth. To desire only the new and the young was a state of mind which bred nervousness and distorted one’s personal history.’

  That could apply to them both: her fantasies about him – were they fantasies? – and his aspirations with his much younger girlfriend in London.

  Next day, at breakfast he asked her for a favour. ‘Edith, there’s something I want to ask of you – a favour.’

  ‘Of course. You’ve done lots of things for me on this trip. You’ve been really very considerate.’ For God’s sake, he was paid to do errands.

  ‘This is an unusual request. Outside the boundaries of our mission.’

  ‘You can but ask.’

  ‘There is a girl in London – I need her address and telephone number. I’ve lost contact.’

  He seemed to have forgotten he had already told her of the girl; one of the first stratospheric conversations they’d had on the flight. Those conversations often dissolved into the stratosphere.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I want you to help me get the telephone number.’ He looked at her defencelessly.

  ‘Where do I come into it? It’s rather odd – if, indeed, I do come into it.’

  ‘You could telephone her home in Adelaide and ask her parents for it. You could say – as a cover story – that you found her wallet at an airport and wish to return it to her. You could say that’s where you found her home address – in the wallet. Something like that.’

  She sat silently, eating.

  Then she said, ‘By “cover story”, you mean “lie”. I’m not sure I could carry that off – or that I should.’

  ‘Come on, Edith. You’ve been in intrigues before, surely. Lovers’ intrigues.’

  She saw that he hoped that calling it a lovers’ intrigue made it sound more acceptable to her.

  He added, ‘And you’re a poet.’

  ‘One small book many years ago, and what has that to do with anything?’

  She must have told him about her youthful poetry in one of their conversations on the long flight.

  ‘Poets are –’ he made a sweeping gesture – ‘traditionally in alliance with lovers.’

  ‘I suppose there is a small part of me that is still the poet, but aren’t you a little old for these games?’

  He pretended to wince. ‘Point taken – but she’s young and I’m obliged to play them. It’s her world I wish to belo
ng to. At least, to visit.’

  ‘Although it surprises me,’ she said carefully, wiping the crumbs of bread roll from her mouth and frowning, ‘and I don’t know how to say it – and maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I will – I don’t know that I don’t feel a little jealous.’ She then broke her frown into a smile. ‘After all, you are my consort on this trip – in a way of speaking.’

  He raised an eyebrow, caught by this declaration – claim – or whatever.

  She thought, Whatever it is I am saying or meaning, I have not thought it through.

  He leaned across, touched her hand with his oh-so-warm hand and said, theatrically, ‘That’s correct, Edith. I am your consort.’

  They gave a little laugh, which backed both of them away from any sincerity there had been in their mock declarations.

  Declarations of an intimacy without prospect, this widening of the definition of the relationship, which was itself essentially bureaucratic, simply pushed them further into the mud of it or, perhaps, the glue of it.

  ‘Let me think about it, then,’ she said.

  The next morning, he did not sit with her and instead came to the table to tell her that the Cameroons had invited him to breakfast. They had expressed pleasure at the speech he had given at one of the unofficial functions. As he explained this to her, implying that she was not invited to the breakfast, she could see that he felt guilt about this small abandonment of her, which was also, perhaps, a breach of their professional partnership. And perhaps he felt some irritation at having let things between them get to this point where he felt such guilt.

  He stood there, either waiting for permission to go to his Cameroons or for her answer about his request concerning the girl in London.

  Even though she had made up her mind to do it for him, she told him she was still thinking about his intrigue. Punishment. ‘Go,’ she said, taking up her paper.

  He went off to the other table.

  She felt somewhat excluded, especially when, from behind her newspaper, she heard their all-male table break into laughter.

  She was not the only person in the dining room eating breakfast alone. Come to think of it, eating alone had never worried her. Her marriage seemed to have been training for eating alone. She had a flash of her reading the airmail London Times and Richard reading the Canberra Times while they ate, and then wordlessly swapping when they had finished, he or she saying as they stood up, ‘Are you minding the shop with the standing committee on . . . ?’ And one or the other, usually she, saying, ‘Won’t be in for dinner. Go ahead without me.’

  The reading of papers at breakfast had been much livelier, spiced with Ambrose’s sardonic wit. He saw different things in the paper, and somehow she had also seen more in the papers when she read them with him. As some people make us more intelligent, make us better conversationalists, some may make us better readers. He and her parents had taught her respectful conversation.

  She recalled, apropos of nothing, one of his sardonic remarks one morning: ‘Edith, you do not have enough disgust in you.’ Maybe she should be disgusted with her married life.

  She had never really lived alone. It had somehow been unimaginable. She had once considered it unbearable not to be loved, wanted. Yet now being alone did not frighten her. Something had changed.

  Having finished her breakfast, she resolved to leave without giving attention to Ian, but he must have felt some delinquency and left his hearty table to come over to her as she was leaving. He suggested they play truant and see an exhibition of Max Ernst paintings.

  Was this affection? It wasn’t duty. Or did it have a hint of the sometimes irksome constraints of marriage?

  On the way to the Max Ernst exhibition, she told him she would help him with his plot to contact the girl. He became quite merry and thanked her profusely.

  At the exhibition she told him a story she knew about Max Ernst. ‘Ernst’s father – also an artist – painted a picture of his garden and left out the bough of a tree, which he considered spoiled the symmetry of his painting. When he completed the painting, he went and cut the bough from the tree to make the garden conform to the painting.’

  He laughed.

  She said that Max Ernst’s paintings struck terror in her. ‘Too many bad dreams in his paintings.’

  He said that Ernst used what he called ‘optical provocateurs’ to produce his visions.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Ernst manipulated his eyesight and field of vision to cause new images to appear to him.’

  ‘I should have thought the world strange enough as it is without resorting to distortion.’

  ‘. . . by fortunate accident. I found it at the airport. I too am an Australian, which makes it all the more remarkable.’ She thought to herself that this all sounded highly improbable. She told the person in Adelaide that she was at present on government business in Vienna, to reassure them. ‘Instead of taking it to the consulate I thought I would make direct contact. Your name and number are in the back of the passport as next of kin.’

  He sat there in her bedroom, listening to her call to the family of his girlfriend, if indeed she were his girlfriend. She could be committing a crime, aiding an older man to pursue a much younger woman.

  ‘Yes, in the ladies’ room at the airport. Very fortunate. Yes.’

  On a sheet of hotel stationery, Edith wrote down an address and telephone number in the UK, and he silently clapped his hands.

  She read it back to them as a check.

  She finished the call and turned to him, handing him the sheet of paper. ‘I spoke with her brother. I don’t mind saying that I feel guilty about having done this. I don’t feel good about it at all. And they will eventually find you out. And me. Obviously, the girl does not want to communicate with you and perhaps you should respect that. But I suppose it is all too late now.’

  He stared at the address and number.

  She said, ‘It was probably easier because the brother answered. The parents would have been more cautious.’

  ‘Thank you, Edith. You’re a good sport. A messenger of Eros.’ He leaned over and kissed her cheek. ‘You may recall from your youth that pursuit and hiding and being found are part of the sport of love.’

  She made a dismissive noise, but was pleased with herself. ‘I can only hope that it brings you joy.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘I’m so glad that all this sort of thing is behind me.’

  He looked up from the address. ‘Is it really – all behind you?’

  He seemed to be enquiring in a genuine way.

  ‘Almost,’ she said, coyly. ‘Almost. But not yet. Allow me some illusions.’ She wondered if his question was also an attempt to elicit some evidence of her potential for passion. Which may involve him.

  He veered away. ‘I thought that now, at forty, I wouldn’t be vulnerable. But I am. Very vulnerable.’

  ‘Oh, the forties. They are the desperate years.’

  That was not right. They were the years when you knew what you could do and how to do it, and you knew that while everything was not possible, most things still were – at least for a man.

  She went to the window with her back to him and watched the passing parade of strolling people in Stephansplatz. It seemed to be her past in procession. She had then a strange sensation that she was wearing a favourite and flattering dress from many years back, in a slimmer and seductive younger figure, and had to glance down, hoping for an instant that she was in that dress. She wasn’t.

  Without looking back at him, she said, ‘Oh, such things are still glimpsed, but at least the exhausting ardour is gone.’ Would she still wish to put up with that exhausting ardour? Perhaps. But she could not put up with the haunting, insecure fear that the love, once gained, would disintegrate, decay. Rot.

  She turned. ‘I do hope that it brings you some joy.’ Her voice quavered.

  She moved from the window and sat at her writing table. She put on her reading glasses and began to fiddle with papers as a
way of ending his visit.

  ‘You are a splendid consort and travelling companion, Edith.’

  She didn’t say anything at first, staring down at her papers, but she coloured a little and then looked up at him and said, ‘Thank you. Now be off, you silly boy, and play your games.’ She waved him away. She felt like weeping, but instead, looking back to her papers and in a controlled voice, she reminded him of the time difference between London and Vienna.

  After he closed the door behind him, she found herself awash with envy that he should still have the powerful energy for these games of the heart. She wanted something like that in her life, but she could not quite imagine the softer passion that, at her age, she knew it would have to be.

  Was there such a thing as a softer passion?

  Next day, the envy had subsided and she was tickled with curiosity about his call to his girlfriend, though she pointlessly, cruelly half-wished that the girl had spurned him. She waited as long as she could at breakfast before asking him how his call had gone. There was another converse feeling – a vicarious wish for him to succeed with the girl. She pictured them together. Then, like a dazzle ball, the image turned, and now she was the girl. It turned again and she wanted to be him; then wanted to be the lover of either of them; then wanted to steal their youth or to be joined to their youth in some three-way coupling.

  ‘She’s involved with another man. A Parisian.’

  ‘It’s honourable enough to lose out to a Parisian,’ she said, hoping that the pointless relief did not show in her voice. ‘Anyhow, what you had with her sounded very much like a middle-age crisis – one of those sorts of love affairs.’