Cold Light (89 page)

This was not, of course, in the report, but it was the dark sea on which it floated.

Ian had delivered his report. There was quite strong applause for it.

The session now concluded, those present formed into groupings of twos and threes, arranging dinner, arranging drinks, making post-mortem remarks.

Another conference had now concluded on the most perplexing of human predicaments. Had she always taken on involvement in questions for which, to date, the human species had been unable to find satisfactory answers? World mediation, disarmament, and now nuclear weaponry and the dangers that prowled within peaceful nuclear power. She had found herself in a life of everlasting perplexity. She saw that both Frederick and she had not lived so much in this world as in some vastly improved version of the world – an imaginary world, which they would fashion and to which the rest of the world would one day move.

She moved out into the mingling crowd. She needed a drink. No more sad wisdom.

At the end-of-conference drinks – held in the marbled halls of a former palace, with fork food that included irradiated shrimp, sanitised by gamma rays – the chairwoman came across to where Ian and she and a couple of others were talking and drinking. She ushered Ian and her aside and said, ‘I cannot understand why you should be called from proceedings at such a time?’

Edith nervously sipped her wine and turned away, enjoying leaving Ian to deal with the chairwoman.

She heard him say, ‘Affairs of state.’ Which she considered a good enough answer.

‘At such a time?’ the chairwoman persisted.

‘Time difference.’ Ian tapped his watch. ‘My minister called from Australia. But apart from that, I thought it all went rather well, didn’t you?’ She thought him almost suave.

He turned briefly to take a canapé and winked at her.

She saw Ulyanov, the suave Russian, pushing his way through the crowd towards him. Ulyanov arrived with a quizzical-eyed smile, implying that he had an inkling of what had happened. After a bow of his head, Ulyanov ignored her and the chairwoman. He swept Ian aside with his arm and at the same time stopped a drinks waiter. He took two drinks and handed one to Ian. The chairwoman also wandered off, leaving her stranded. Ulyanov then seemed to remember her – or his manners – and broke from Ian and came to her. He handed her his drink, bowing. ‘Madam Australia.’ She thanked him. He turned away and took a drink for himself from a passing waiter, and went back to where he had left Ian standing.

She followed him.

Ulyanov said to Ian, ‘Tell me, what went on in there tonight, eh? I, Ulyanov, begin evening as the concluding rapporteur, the
finale
–’ he attempted an Italian accent – ‘but now evening is over and I find myself not
finale
. Australia is
finale
and your cynical message of criticism of ordinary citizen peace workers becomes
finale
. Ulyanov asks: how could that have come about when
finale
was the Soviet’s negotiated place?’ He clinked glasses with them both. ‘How?’

‘These things happen, Commissioner.’

‘Things happen? These things do not just happen!’ Ulyanov then became the
bon vivant
he was known to be, first shooting Ian with a hand shaped as a pistol, and then chuckling away the tone of his complaint. He patted Ian’s back and began to tell a joke about the Russian economy. ‘Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were all in railway carriage when unexpectedly train stop. Stalin put head out window and shout, “Shoot the driver!” But train not start. Khrushchev then shout, “Rehabilitate the driver!” Still not move. Brezhnev then say, “Comrades, comrades, draw curtains, turn on gramophone and pretend we move!” ’

Ian said, ‘I thought Brezhnev said, “Let’s make choo-choo noise and pretend it’s moving.” ’

‘Version incorrect,’ Ulyanov said, irritably.

There was much drinking, and Ian received mostly praise for his tough-mindedness.

Then at some point she felt unsteady on her feet. It unnerved her. She had not been unsteady on her feet from drinking since she was at university.

She put a hand on the wall and gathered herself. She should leave. She must do it without trying to say goodnight to anyone, not even to Ian. He must not see her this way. She feared her voice would be slurred.

The next evening, Ian and she ate caviar together in her room with bone spoons – she had known just the shop in Vienna to buy them, and he said that he was impressed. It was more caviar than she had ever had available to her, and God knows she had eaten quite a lot of caviar in her day. Her mind went to the last time – a reception at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra.

She knew that the eating of caviar would soon have to stop; the communist Russians were overfishing the sturgeon so that the rich of the world could eat the sturgeon to extinction.

The caviar had come through Ulyanov.

She was absolutely and guiltily delighted to be eating caviar with Ian – in her bedroom and drinking icy-cold vodka. He was in a good mood. As they sat there, he recounted the caviar transaction with an impersonation of the voices and with theatrical face and hand movements. ‘Ulyanov took me to the bar of the Bristol and ordered champagne and then said conspiratorially, “Tell me, Australia, you like caviar?” He looked over his shoulder to check that he was not being overheard. I said, “I’ve eaten it – but there’s never ever enough.” ’

She cut in, ‘Until tonight I had never had enough.’ She took another small taste of the wonderful black eggs.

Ian went on with his tale. ‘Ulyanov’s answer was, “That is as it should be, my friend – one should never satisfy oneself with caviar. Russian proverb.” He offered me a kilo of Beluga Prime – evidently, it was brought in by a corrupt Aeroflot flight attendant.’

He mimicked Ulyanov. ‘ “I want to offer you opportunity to take a share of this caviar. It is in half-kilo canisters. Would be nice gift. Or eat it in your hotel room. A feast. It’s, as you say, top of market.” I told him I would take two canisters. And then he says, in an American accent, “Have I got deal for you.” We haggled about the price. I happened to have read in the
Herald-Tribune
this week that caviar was selling at fifteen US dollars at Christmas. And so we did a deal.’

He gestured at their caviar feast spread on the collapsible table she’d had sent up. ‘
Et voilà
.’

She’d had the hotel also send up lemon wedges, sour cream – they did not have any crème fraîche, hard-boiled eggs – yolks and whites chopped separately, minced onion and toast.

He went on, ‘But then a weird thing happened. After a few more glasses of champagne – Moët – Ulyanov looked up and asked me thoughtfully, “Tell me, Australia, if we were at war, could you shoot me?”

‘Without blinking, I said, “Yes.” Ulyanov nodded, pondered, and then said, “But here at the conference I listen to you – you are a man without passion. You are the man who raises clever doubts. How could you act – shoot – while in such doubt?”

‘I said to him that the important thing was to be able to act decisively while in intellectual doubt. He didn’t comment on this.

‘When the bill for the Moët came, Ulyanov, of course, had only roubles. Had overlooked changing some money that day.’

She clapped his recounting of the Great Caviar Negotiation – ‘Well done, you’ – and took another spoon of caviar to her mouth, shutting her eyes as her mouth and the black eggs became her whole being.

Here they were – he and she – eating caviar in a hotel room together. He was not eating it with the girl in London. She was sure that the girl would not have appreciated the caviar.

And then she looked at him, thinking of his bold assertion about acting while in doubt. Yes, she thought, he could. He was not a far cry from her in personality. She felt she knew him. She restrained herself from quoting Orwell about knowing what it’s like to kill a healthy, conscious man.

‘Have you ever killed anyone, Edith?’ he said, laughing to lighten his question.

She said she had not killed, but nor was she a pacifist. ‘I have known men who have killed. I have slept with two men who have killed.’

He seemed to be impressed by this.

She had throughout her life kept a pistol with her, which meant that she was prepared at least to injure. And there was the situation in Lebanon when she had fired shots into the dark at assailants.

‘That was a fair way back,’ she said, ‘the sleeping with those men.’

After she had fired the shots into the dark, she remembered that she and others with her had been breathless with adrenalin and they had all drunk beers and laughed somewhat hysterically, but she had known even while she drank that she had been wrong, that one should fire only at an identified target.

Later, after he had left, she was reluctant to call down and have the table cleared and taken away. She thought she would sleep with the aromas and the happy detritus.

One thing was now plain: that if caviar and vodka couldn’t make it happen, she would not ever sleep with him.

It could be that she may never sleep with a man again.

She sat at the writing desk and wrote postcards to her friends, including Mr T, telling them of the grand hotel-room feast. After hesitating a little, she wrote cards to the boys, the one to Osborne a little longer, a little wittier. She wrote a card to Frederick, who was working for a second-hand bookstore and had become something of a hermit scholar. She wrote one to Richard Victor Hall, but then tore it up, feeling that for him a postcard would be a little too frivolous. Atyeo’s Spanish civil war posters would be more appropriate. She was looking forward to visiting Vence.

I
t was when they arrived in Israel that Edith began to wonder if she had bungled her life. Or at least half her life.

Or was calling it a bungle just another one of those self-lacerating accusations implanted in us by primitive ways of seeing? It was a word that belonged in the category of free-will language fallacies, along with the words ‘personal decision’. But some of these words would have to do for now, as long as one was aware of the imprecision that believing in free will caused. Our life, from birth on, was one set of jostling circumstance after another. In all the tangled meanings of circumstance, those pressures that insistently intrude into our lives and that propel us one way or another towards resolution – propelling us away from their pressures – all presented alternatives that were in some ways bad for us. In so far as some small degree of free will was assumed, it was in her judgement a very small part of anyone’s life circumstances. Free will was what was left after we discounted the accident of our birth in one part of the world rather than another; the role of the unconscious mind in manipulating us; the role of our parents and institutions in manipulating us; our birth-given genetics; the manipulation of political activity and ideologies – not forgetting Frederick’s Marxist belief that economics governed our life and we had little say in the working of the economic systems that pushed us that way like the tides, operating outside our ‘will’. Will was another fallacy. After all this, perhaps we were left with a minuscule degree of free will. Perhaps we could defy genetics by dyeing our hair.