Cold Light (12 page)

The invitation lifted her spirits. Who knew what would come of such a dinner? But she remembered her brother. What would she say to the question, ‘Do you have family in Australia?’ Damn him. He was socially unspeakable in the literal sense of the word.

It was not so much cowardly, she told herself, as
shrewd
.

Did she wish to be a shrewd person?

But on the bright side, would a whispered offer of a position be made in her ear at the dinner?

She went to the bedroom and dressed herself, choosing her favourite day dress – even choosing her underwear – with thought. She made up her face. Put on her rings.

She then put through a telephone call to Ambrose, and told him of the invitation. ‘Someone might whisper in my ear,’ she said to him.

‘Indeed they might,’ he said. ‘How did it arrive?’

‘Delivered by two footmen in crimson livery with powdered wigs, carried on a silken cushion.’

‘Naturally. You see – you are not forgotten.’

‘The invitation is for me – “and husband”,’ she said.

‘It is a husband, then, that I must be.’

‘Indeed, you must. It’s semi-formal. I think it is what we used to call Late Afternoon. I thought I would wear that new
la ligne Corolla
, which I got in Paris last year. You know it. It’s an afternoon dress – black wool, a large silk velvet bow and a square neckline? Haven’t had occasion to wear it since returning to Australia. Would that do?’

‘The Dior.’

‘I think last year’s Paris style will pass muster on the night.’

‘At least it’s an original.’

As she spoke, she placed the invitation in pride of place upright on the telephone table.

She put down the telephone. She could tell he was relieved by the rising of her spirits.

Janice would see the displayed invitation. Let her make of it what she would.

And she also marvelled that Voltaire, or whoever, was right when he said that if you sit on your porch the whole world will eventually pass by. In a sense, the whole world had found its way to her here in her hotel rooms in an outpost of the Empire – the looming Third World War had come in the door with her brother and with guided missiles from Firestone, and now the Prime Minister, his most important enemy, had also entered. More disconcertingly, the Adelaide business – the vice squad – had also come through the door. Yet another menacing reality.

Enough reality for one morning, to be sure.

On second thought, she removed the invitation from display. It was immature boasting and it was provocative. It was an argument she did not wish to have. Do not start fights you do not need.

As unworldly as it was to take the invitation as a sign, it did restore some confidence to her. That week she arranged afternoon tea with Alan Watt, with whom she had stayed before the war when she had been on home leave from the League. He had been new to the Department then. Formerly a lawyer, he had been recruited in his late thirties under regulation S.47, which allowed recruitment of mature people into the public service. Although Watt and she were hardly close friends, here he was, returning now from being Australia’s ambassador to Moscow as she was returned from the UNRRA and Europe. So in a sense, they were both returning. She thought that this minor coincidence of mutual return, together with his original mature recruitment into External Affairs, might make him sympathetic to her predicament. Ambrose said that the rumour was that he would be made Head of the Department of External Affairs. John Burton, the current head, had mysteriously taken leave of absence since the election of Menzies. Some said Burton was incompatible with Menzies because of his leftish views. She had got nowhere with Burton. Neither her experience nor her patrons – Bruce and Latham – impressed him. Regardless of their pairing in a slim coincidence, she would not be too pushy with Watt.

At afternoon tea, Watt surprised her by saying that the Russians felt encircled by capitalist nations and feared their aggression. But he said that they had stopped him from visiting the important inland industrial cities. ‘I don’t know why,’ he said.

He did not think there would be war in the near future.

She was interested that his position was in contradiction to his Prime Minister.

She did not mention that she had been invited to the Prime Minister’s for dinner, in case he had not been invited and expected to have been. She very much hoped he would be there, that the dinner would cement something, lead to something.

He did not mention his brother, Ray, and she did not mention him either. She had been told they did not get along. She had known Ray as the former secretary of the League of Nations Union in Australia. The last she had heard about him was that he had fallen on hard times, following the collapse of the League, and was selling encyclopaedias door-to-door after unsuccessfully running for a seat in the federal elections. Ray had been a great apostle for the League and a friend of Latham.

Watt and she skirted around the question of appointment of the new department head – Watt from some sort of professional reticence and good form; she because she did not wish to be seen as blatantly self-promoting and trying to ride on his back. She simply stressed she was back in Australia and would be staying, and that she felt it would be good to be ‘put back in harness in the diplomatic sphere’.

She even made some inquiries about regulation S.47, using a tone of voice that made it sound as if she were professionally curious about it as ‘a recruitment method generally in the public service’. He said that, after a rocky start, the idea of diplomatic cadets recruited from university graduates was working well. He said that Ruth Dobson was a curious case in point. He said that last year in London, where Dobson worked as a clerk with the Australian High Commission, she was appointed as temporary third secretary, and her work led to her selection for the Geneva office of the Australian UN Delegation. Watt said that Dobson was always trying to be appointed full-time to the Australian diplomatic corps but didn’t stand much of a chance. ‘Age, and so on.’

Edith wondered if this was a signal to her that her case, too, was hopeless.

He told her he regretted not having met Stalin while he was ambassador. He said, ‘confidentially’, that they had found listening devices or what he called ‘bugs’ in the embassy building, but the discovery had to be kept quiet because of other political considerations. The bugs were removed discreetly during the
remont
of the building. She had not heard the word
remont
before, but did not ask. He said all food had to be locked up because the Russian servants stole it.

She felt his Russia anecdotes were a way of pushing the conversation away from the possibility of her joining the department if he were to be secretary.

He said one thing that interested her: ‘I find that living in Canberra makes it easier to think about Australia as a whole, than if I lived, say, in Sydney or Melbourne. I’m convinced that building a capital city was the right decision.’

Although he gave no hint or encouragement about her aspirations, or even any hint that she was on his mind in any way at all, she did not abandon all hope. It could be that he was being discreet. Or had she carried off too well the pose of being unambitious, which Bruce had taught her?

Ambrose said that the word
remont
was French. ‘He guessed that it meant, in this context, refurbishing – perhaps refitting – of the building. ‘How odd.’

She realised then that Watt had used the French word to impress her, or to treat her as belonging to his ‘club’ of internationally experienced people. Perhaps that was a hopeful sign.

Ambrose was interested in hearing that Watt had one of the bugs sent back to Canberra in the diplomatic bag for examination.

Although Ambrose and she did not discuss the matter again, Edith also felt somewhat emboldened about the Adelaide business; less oppressed. She felt some of her urbane invulnerability returning. After all, she told herself, Canberra was not like Adelaide or the other cities. Canberra was trying to make itself different, would be different, a city of political people, of diplomatic staff, of public servants, of journalists, of internationally recruited scholars at the new National University. It would be a planned city full of lively people. Maybe Ambrose and she could inspire – or find – some accepting, protective, Bloomsbury-like bohemian spirit in this place.

She had to admit that Bloomsbury still seemed a somewhat wobbly idea in this city of parks and trees, blazing street lights along streets without pedestrians and without houses.

Although, looking at the flow of her life in recent weeks, it could be said that she had already begun something of a Bloomsbury set, what with communists, the ambiguous hugging of a serving girl, an invitation to dinner with the aristocracy of Canberra, and with Ambrose, her own exotic Bloomsbury creature.

Yes. Even if Bloomsbury was a somewhat wobbly idea in the life of her mind, in her way she had, she thought, tried to be brave and unconventional in her public face, and had often boldly displayed a taste for the
outré
, even if she was not, in her brother and Janice’s terms, in any way a revolutionary.

A
t pre-dinner drinks there were martinis for the men, and sherry – not Spanish – for the women. There was much talk of Bradman’s retirement and his knighthood and the future of Australian cricket. She supposed the knighthood was for being clever at hitting a ball with a bat, but no one seemed to find this odd.

She had hoped that Spender, the minister of External Affairs, or Watt would be there, but they weren’t. She recognised no one except Bruce, who she assumed had put her up for the Lodge dinner.

To all present, the Prime Minister launched into a story about being at Neville Chamberlain’s house for dinner on his last visit to London, and having what he called ‘a set to’ with the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘who put forward as a claim to my regard that he’d helped secure approval for a bust of Adam Lindsay Gordon in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey’. The Prime Minister paused, with a twinkle of a smile, an index finger raised. ‘I took the war to his camp by saying that no good purpose was ever served by elevating the third-rate to the company of the great. He was bitterly disappointed. I told him nothing could be worse for young poets than to be told that the works of Gordon represented the
summum bonum .
. .’ He chuckled to himself and added, ‘I think the Archbishop felt me a thoroughly ungrateful fellow.’