Cold Light (10 page)

She wanted to be out of living in the hotel so that a proper distance could exist between Janice and her, and proper social relationships unfold. If that was what was happening.

She then felt an irresistible impulse. She dialled to reception and asked that the chambermaid Janice be sent to her room.

The man who answered asked if there was anything amiss with housekeeping.

She assured him that there was not.

She waited and then there was a knock on the door. She opened it and Janice was there, a quizzical expression on her face. Wordlessly, without thinking, she took both Janice’s hands and drew her into the room. Janice closed the door behind her with her foot and Edith lightly embraced her, affectionately, although the boldness of the embrace overwhelmed any flashing thoughts about what the embrace meant. Her mother had schooled her in the subtleties of embracing and hugging as something to be used rarely – farewells at long-term separations and returns among relatives and lovers – and judiciously. Her mother had come from a time of bowing and hat-raising, which was now disappearing along with hats.

But this hug came from no place in her social training.

Janice pulled back slightly – but not in a perturbed way, more to an apprising distance – and remained holding Edith’s hands.

Edith said rapidly, ‘Sorry, I know that wasn’t very decorous. The hug.’

‘It was quite proper. Quite. Comradely.’

Edith trembled a little. ‘No, Janice, it was not really comradely.’ Was she flirting with a young woman or was she flirting with hazard, imperilment, to spice up the dullness of her present life? The embrace was on the edge of excessive, no matter what Janice said.

‘I called you back because I forgot to give you something. Hold on.’ Edith went to her clothing drawers and took out a new pair of black silk stockings still in their wrapping. She held them out to Janice. ‘They’re new, and they’re silk.’

Janice reddened a little. ‘Why?’

‘You said the ones they supply you with here for your uniform itch. And I know silk is still impossible to find in the shops.’

Janice laughed. ‘Why, thank you, Edith. I feel like . . . well, it’s the sort of gift an American soldier would give to an Australian girl.’

They both laughed to cover whatever disorderly intimacy there was about the gift.

‘I can’t bear to think of your itching all day in those dreadful stockings.’ There was ambiguity there, too. ‘Not that I think of you all day in your stockings.’

‘They may be too good for work. Or maybe I’ll wear them under my other stockings. To stop the itch.’

Edith said, ‘Go now.’ Although her voice was not brusque, it was a tone used to return the situation to conventional shape.

Janice kissed her on the cheek and left with her new stockings.

By the embrace and the gift of the stockings she had joined herself with Janice in womanly complicity. Perhaps as a sister-in-law, albeit a de facto sister-in-law. No, that term did not fit. It was an alliance slightly exclusive of Ambrose, and she thought that the exclusivity also moved Janice slightly apart from Frederick.

Alone again in the empty room, she allowed the flashing thoughts to have their say. Was she just hungry for a confidante? On Janice’s part, was it a way of recruiting her? Did she, in fact, desperately want to be recruited by Janice?

Whichever it was, it felt good and it felt risky, and it could be somehow, just somehow, a little aberrant, somewhat Bloomsbury.

Then, sitting there and thinking of what she’d just done, Edith was engulfed in embarrassment.

While reporting the conversation to Ambrose, she felt her mind pulling at her sleeve and saying,
Excuse me, Edith, that isn’t the
whole
story
. Her description to Ambrose did not convey the current that had flowed through that chat in the room with Janice in chambermaid uniform, but she put this down to her own difficulty in defining these currents. And there were the restraints, too, of womanly confidentiality, which Janice had invoked and into which she’d become complicit.

Nor did she tell Ambrose that she had called to have Janice sent back to her room or about the ambiguity of their hug.

It was not that she was hiding things from him – it was that she did not have the form of words that would capture what had happened. To attempt the description just yet would create a tumbling misconception.

Conversational discretion was inherently devious, but it should be granted that, in some cases, it was also a form of care.

Ambrose was pleased about the invitation to drinks.

‘Do you think they will only be interested in us as long as there is a chance that I will speak at the Peace Congress?’

‘Most likely.’

‘Am I the bait, then, on your fishing line?’

‘You are, perhaps, the grub on two fishing lines.’

E
dith called in a loud voice to Ambrose, who was still in his sitting room. She sounded like a cranky child. Because of their restless night, they’d had breakfast sent to their rooms rather than facing the dining room, and it lay there unbegun. ‘I once knew who my brother was; I do not know him now; I do not know who I am. Yes I do – I am
nothing much at all
. The more I think about it, even as a child I did not know my brother – a sister does not know or care what is going on in her little brother’s rushing-about body and head, any more than he knows what is going on in his sister’s head. Female and male children cannot know each other. My brother appears – and is unknown to me. And is perhaps my mortal enemy.’

She picked up the toast and put it down again. ‘And his appearance makes me unknown to myself.’ She would be theatrical if she wished to be. ‘And the toast is cooling.’

Ambrose, in his pale yellow silk dressing-gown with lace edging at the sleeve cuffs and neck, silk nightdress underneath, and slippers, came in from his sitting room to join her for breakfast. They had begun the night sleeping together in the double bed but had both had a wretched night of fitful sleep – she with another of her wide-eyed wilfulness fits, of which the sleeping Ambrose sometimes instinctively became aware and awoke, making her, in turn, concerned for his lost sleep. He had finally retreated to his sitting room, where they had a folding bed.

He leaned to her, kissed the top of her head and sat down.

She poured him tea. ‘My brother at least has a cause.’

She was High Commissioner of the Hotel Canberra, where she could lift the telephone and order assorted sandwiches and a bottle of wine or freshly cut flowers. She had once run the world.

Was she becoming a ninny? Was it her hormones?

It was all very unsatisfactory.

‘Knew it would be difficult,’ he said, turning his way through the out-of-date
Manchester Guardian
, which he brought home from the High Commission. This was a worn-out reply that gave no comfort.

Even the annual report from Firestone, which had arrived in the morning post, was disheartening. She had invested some of her mother’s inheritance in Firestone back in the 1930s. She read out to Ambrose, whether he was listening or not, ‘ “Firestone has been given the defence contract for the first 200 MGM-5 Corporal missile. This missile is known as the Embryo of the Army, and is a surface-to-surface guided missile that can deliver a high-explosive warhead up to 75 nautical miles (139 km).” That’s a good use of my pacifist mother’s money. I should sell. I could give the annual dividend to my brother’s Peace Congress.’

‘You will not,’ Ambrose said, not looking up from his newspaper.

She might well. She found the use of the term embryo distasteful – it jabbed her in a way that was almost physical.

Her well-meaning investment back then had moved a long way from Firestone’s model workers’ village and rubber plantation in the new state of Liberia, established for former American slaves. It had been her first idealistic investment. Her puppy had become a serpent. What was a tyre company doing selling military missiles?

‘We’ve been here months,’ she said, querulously.

He had heard this tiresome moaning at many breakfasts and she knew he no longer had sincerely encouraging answers to give her. The time of encouraging answers was over.

She knew he was being stoical, she knew he was dissatisfied with the High Commission, with the city – town, capital, outpost – whatever Canberra was.
City
e
mergent
. He never moaned in reply that he was doing all this for her, that she was why they were here. It irritated her this morning, this stoicism, his silent self-sacrifice.

She kept talking, although she knew he was only half-listening. ‘I cannot sit around these rooms studying the wide world from such a distance, writing letters of sage advice to my friends at the United Nations in Queens who barely remember who I am. I am becoming a ridiculous Nobody and could very easily become seen as a Busybody.’

She hoped that saying it out loud would somehow disable the truth of what she had said. Those old League friends who had managed to get positions with the UNO kept her informed, but the sad thing was that she had so little to give them in return. Anthony Eden’s visit to Canberra had been a bounty of gossip. Dear Anthony had given her a morning tea. The only highlight of these months of return.

She yearned to go to an office. She wanted the duties and burdens of office.

It was all very unsatisfactory.

She watched him sip his tea and asked, ‘Do we really wish to meet my brother again? And his Bolshevik hussy. I rather like her.’

‘He is handsome enough – runs in the family.’

‘It’s all a bit much.’

She wondered if she were becoming more like her mother, retiring to her room when the world became all a bit much. Or, in her case, when the world became
not enough
.

‘He seemed to be suggesting you work on the roads,’ Ambrose said, taking the butter and the marmalade to the very edges of the slice, dressing his toast methodically as always, and then taking up his newspaper again, still paying her attention but holding the paper as if he were wanting to get back to it.

She had bought a toaster for their rooms, to make what she called off-the-fire toast, finger-hot and semi-crisp, with a bit of burnt crust; not the English toast, hard and cold or soft and cold, which, of course, all toast was when sent to the room from the hotel or club kitchen. She couldn’t be bothered making another round.

She almost smiled. ‘I would work on the grand roads of the city emergent if they offered it.’ She reached over to him. ‘By bringing us here, I’ve made a great misreckoning with our lives – that’s the long and the short of it.’

He didn’t contradict her. He was supposed to.

‘Despite the rules, I thought that just by my landing here they would snap me up. Even Latham and Bruce thought someone would snap me up. I was so full of myself.’

She had even written to their old friend from the Australian Paris legation, the painter Sam Atyeo, asking him to help her, but he had said the public-servant diplomats ignored him because he was a bohemian interloper in their midst. ‘You would be better off not mentioning my name or you will find you are seen as an interloper too. And anyhow, Evatt and my people are no longer in power. Come back to France, Edith.’