Cold Light (80 page)

A
nd 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 spirited 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.

She patted her desk, running her hand over it in a farewell caress, screwed up her face to stop the tears, and left, closing the door behind her. She deposited the key with the Key Clerk.

After a few handshakes and expressions of best wishes with the tearful staff, she walked out of Parliament House with a cardboard IXL jam box and her Rolodex, choosing to exit down the front steps of Parliament House to her waiting car and Theo, now her personal driver.

Against Theo’s objection, she placed the box on the back seat and moved herself to the front next to him – he had always insisted she ride in the back seat. He said, without looking away from the road, ‘Momentous times, Ma’am. Epoch making.’ She reached over and patted his shoulder. ‘We’ll survive, Theo.’

They drove in silence and then he said, ‘Should we discuss future employment? At your convenience, of course.’

‘Time enough for that. But you will certainly not be required at 8 am tomorrow, that’s for sure. Take the week off, Theo. I will probably go on an overseas trip.’

For the last few years she had employed the retired Theo on an irregular basis, giving him a weekly timetable of when he would be needed. She sometimes called him for additional duties if it wasn’t later than 10 pm. She had long ago decided against driving herself, fearing that after a couple of drinks she might crash. She had lent him the money to buy the HC’s Bentley, which they had retired along with Theo. In his free time he hired it out to weddings and funerals, with himself as driver in leather cap and leggings.

Her friends were always impressed when, after dining out, she could take them home in a chauffeured Bentley, even if it were quite old. Or perhaps they laughed at her. She told them that it perplexed those senior public servants, who thought she had no right to an office in the building, let alone a Bentley, and who had never been quite sure of her status.

She thought that she would probably let him go. She went home to ‘consider her options’, as McMahon, the outgoing Prime Minister, had said to her in his high-pitched way.

She was out in the cold again.

On her first day of unemployment, she sat alone in the back garden of Arthur Circle and drank a precious bottle of Puligny-Montrachet as consolation. This was, truly, without rhetorical flourish, the end of another era. She had been fortunate enough – if fortunate was the word – to live through at least six auspicious and turbulent and dangerous eras. As a child she had been very aware of the Great War, then there had been the Great Depression, the formation and collapse of the League, the Second World War, her time in the rubble of Vienna with the UNRRA, and then Post-War Reconstruction. And she had helped build ‘a city like no other’.

She felt a panic. She had been retired against her will. She was no longer needed. She was truly redundant.

She had finished her working life without recognition. On her leaving, there had been no presentation, no speeches, no drums, no trumpets. There was an expression being used at present – ‘the scrapheap of history’. That was where she was.

As she sipped the beautiful wine, she felt miserable and abandoned.

In this new historical era, she could not see any place for herself.

She had, she suspected, run her course in the affairs of the world. She did not know the incoming senior people from the Labor Party and they did not know her. When they had been in opposition she had talked with some of those interested in uranium, but they had their own ideas and treated uranium as the Devil’s work, pushing her away with a stick.

On what could they conceivably need her advice? By accident of history, her patrons had all been on the other side of politics. Rationalism had brought her into Latham’s life as a young woman, and back then she had not foreseen that he would go in the direction of conservative politics and, in a way, pull her in his rip current. Privately, on the level of national interest, she thought the change would be good – she liked the new government’s attitude to the UN.

She visited her parents’ graves again, alone, driven by Theo. He leaned against the car, smoking while she moved through the tombstones engraved with the names of the pioneers, of children who had died young, of the young killed in accidents. She wallowed in morbidness. That was what she was – morbid. She was mourning herself.

In her situation, she could see no way of falling from life that was in any way elegant or valorous. She considered suicide. She had nothing against suicide after a certain age. She said the words of her parents’ gravestone: ‘At rest – life’s journey o’er’. It sounded attractive. She pondered the Japanese idea that suicide was always meant to kill two people. To punish. She had no one to punish. She could see that her suicide might be read as a retaliation against an unappreciative world. So what? How we crave appreciation and specialness: we claim a famous relative, a successful son or daughter, an escape from serious illness; we display our wealth, our important friends, we name-drop, we seek awards and trophies. We wear badges that say we are superior, that we are special.

She thought about her will. To whom would she leave her money? Not to Richard, who would be well looked after by his pension on retirement. Ambrose was well looked after. He would have little use for additional money. She could create a foundation in her own name for scholarship or the arts. There, that was another form of recognition-seeking. She would probably give it to a university, endow a chair. Even that made her feel exhausted. So did the search for a painless method of suicide that did not run the risk of leaving her alive and maimed. She knew that shooting oneself was a tricky business. ‘At rest – life’s journey o’er.’

She had few friends left in Jasper’s Brush or Berry and decided against calling in on T. George at this time of her fall from grace.

She and Theo found a sandwich and a cup of tea in Berry, and motored back to the capital in a silence broken by the occasional passing remark.

She began to plan to flee to London to see Ambrose and her friends – without Richard – but the thought of travel also exhausted her. Travel was not a plan.

She painted the house herself and sorted her papers. She shopped and dined alone in Melbourne.

Amelia and Theodor urged her to join some local committee – perhaps to run for a place on the ACT Advisory Council – but she had no heart for that. Theodor quoted Richard III to her: ‘When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal how you fall.’ She wondered if that quotation had comforted him during Amelia’s affair and the fall from grace of their marriage.