Cold Light (16 page)

‘There was more than that happening on my side of the table.’

‘You heard the PM say that the CP is to be banned?’

‘If my relationship to Frederick becomes public, they may say solicitously to my face that his beliefs do not blemish me, but it will blemish me . . . for me to seem not to care will be seen as being superior in attitude. I will be suspected as being some sort of effete cosmopolitan who does not care about these matters. Socially, they will use my brother as a pretext to turn on us.’

Ambrose laughed. ‘We are effete cosmopolitans. Only some of that crowd will turn. Not all.’

‘It is the only crowd we have.’

‘Being effete cosmopolitans is our protection.’ He then added, ‘In all matters. They know not what to think of us or, at least, what to think of you. You said that you were offered a position?’

‘The position is temporary and, I suspect, honorary – it has to do with organising a conference. Hardly a blossoming of my grand destiny. Bruce was behind it, although he didn’t say as much.’

The further she was from the small glitter of the dinner party, the less burnished the offered position was.

Her mind kept circling back to the hand on her knee. She was uncharacteristically unsure whether to tell Ambrose about this. In the past they had found that telling all about any
amourette
, in all its salacious detail, could become for them an erotic alchemy, arousing them both, and thus using the outsider. It made the breach of whatever sexual fidelity had occurred theirs in a very special way. Especially Ambrose’s tales for her. She had sometimes, in the past, embroided her
amourettes
– there were not that many – for his erotic delectation. And for her delectation also, she should add. His were, by nature, more exotic.

For the life of her, though, she still could not remember whether she had told him of the night of the Negro musician way back in Paris in their younger days. If it were a case of not-telling back then, it was because of the rupture it had caused with Robert. And because of a wish to keep that beautifully bizarre occurrence now forever her possession alone. Ambrose had never raised it face-to-face, although she seemed to recall a letter asking her about it when he had been living in Wiltshire. But she couldn’t remember what she had replied. In an outburst of loving unreservedness, she had told Robert before their marriage and he had seemed to receive it at the time as the loving gift of candour that it was.

But that telling had been a mistake. Or had it? It had broken apart their marriage – or precipitated the break – but it could be seen as having, thankfully, revealed early in their marriage that they were not the right people to live out their lives together. His seemingly accepting, oh-so-modern, reaction before they married, compared with his reaction after marriage, revealed how fraudulently had been his pose of a Bloomsbury-bohemian and freedom-loving man-of-the-arts-and-of-the-mind. He had accepted her revelation before marriage, she saw now, as a way to gain her approval, but his reaction after marriage showed him to be what he truly was – a boorish, hidebound, unsophisticated male. She thought that the revelation that one’s husband was boorish, hidebound and unsophisticated should be accepted legally as sufficient grounds for divorce.

But that was from the other side of the world, another life. This was the first escapade here, if an escapade it was. And she found herself unsure of how to reveal it to Ambrose – at least, while their lives generally were in such a precarious condition.

She was tipsy.

‘Deep in thought?’ he said. ‘Any old position would keep your hands busy.’

Busy hands might do the devil’s work. ‘I did not come back to Australia to organise a conference of town-planning people – who will talk about whether to put electric and telephonic lines above ground on poles or underground in concrete pipes. I am all for concrete pipes and indoor toilets but, darling, in Geneva we were disarming the world. We came this close to disarming the world in ’32.’ She held her fingers an inch apart. ‘Or perhaps this close.’ She widened her fingers to three inches. ‘In Vienna, with UNRRA, I pulled displaced people from where they hid in sewers shivering with fear. And saved them from the Reds. Organising a conference is not really my destiny. What’s become of me?’ She gave out a histrionic Gallic gust of self-dissatisfaction. And then another.

Ambrose gazed at her, as if taking into himself her dissatisfaction, and then he said, also with dissatisfaction, ‘Tell me again why we came here to this place?’ He said it quietly, without acrimony, but with bafflement. Not so much responding to her, but allowing out from within himself – for the first time – pent-up, sharply-felt disharmony. ‘I utterly do not know what we are doing here.’ The defeat in his voice hurt her heart. He had not spoken like this before.

‘I take it your side of the table was not inspiring.’

She saw that he was close to tears. Very rare.

And then he burst out, ‘Here we are in this diplomatically insignificant country, playing out petty imitations of distant places – the private schools are imitations; the parliament and courts are imitations, with their wigs and robes and maces; the HC pretends he’s an ambassador, and I pretend to be on ambassadorial duties with him. The whole place has insufficient identity or heritage or skills. The PM and his ministers refer to themselves as Ministers of the Crown, for God’s sake. They are role-playing imitations.’

She sat quietly taking this in, finding, to her surprise, that some degree of defensive patriotism rose in her, but she said nothing. And her patriotism was very weak.

Softly, she said, ‘Surely the 40,000 or whatever men who died in the last war, and how many in the other war, weren’t pretending . . .’

‘They were. They were imitating the European armies – trying to pretend they were significant – thinking that their bravery would prove to the Europeans that they were worthy. Nothing would have changed had they stayed at home and farmed the land.’

‘You never know which shot it was that was fired and won the battle.’

‘They didn’t make a difference. If they had stayed out of the war, Australia would have been richer and happier and the war would have ended as it did, give or take a month.’

‘You think Australia could have been the Sweden of the Pacific?’

‘Something like that. Wicked waste.’

Usually she worried that he had become caught up in Canberra life too much, that he was becoming staid and even pompous. Which Ambrose was this speaking? Maybe it was the Superior Englishman. She would once not even have noticed this as a position, she would have naturally gone along with it. Back in Geneva, she had tried to abandon her own nationality, tried not to think ‘Australian’, even to consider herself as one. She had described herself as an internationalist. So, she had thought, had Ambrose. He had never before let slip any vexation about their coming back. He had, she assumed, come back to Australia for her – for what seemed, from that distance, a fresh start for her – or maybe he had fancied, at some point in their conversations beside hissing gas heaters back in London, that it would be an escapade, a retreat from the bickering friction at the hub of the world, to a quieter place. A place where she could heal her wounds from being unwanted by the new United Nations Organisation, for example. That had hurt her, her applications for positions not even earning her an interview. Then, when UNRRA had ceased to be an independent agency and had been swallowed up by the UNO, no place had been found for her. Even Sweetser, who had somehow wriggled his way in, could not help her to find a place. He had let U Thant live in his mansion – his wife’s mansion – that’s how Sweetser had wriggled in. And now that America was in the UNO, they were hiring many Americans.

Her plan had been to return and then somehow magically be swept up into the arms of Australia, and then be sent away on diplomatic missions as a representative of Australia.

Although he had been taken back by the Foreign Office, Ambrose seemed to have little personal ambition. His only interest in life was to study with gay, dark wit the muddle-mindedness of the species. He was probably a spy as well – with nothing much upon which to spy.

She looked at him frowning into his drink. He was more an entomologist than a spy – he studied the human insect.

She looked again at the frown. He was pondering. He was thinking about something he was not disclosing to her. Perhaps he now wanted to be here. Perhaps he had a lover? No. Perhaps he was involved in something nefarious.

Being married was her greatest disqualification. If how she chose to express her love mattered in the selection of diplomatic staff, the British should have appointed her to a position here in the HC, not nancy-boy entomologist Ambrose in his claret satin nightgown. Metaphorically, she wore the pants, as the saying went. And he wore her panties.

She wanted to be part of the making of the world. She wasn’t seeking just any old Byronic desire to always feel the sensation of being flamboyantly alive, to live intensely. That had to come from involvement. She wanted to be about making the world. She wanted that very special sensation of making things happen. The microscopic study of the demented world, to which Ambrose devoted himself, was not enough. Byron had written poetry and fought for the Greeks. He had tried to be a man of action and poetry and passionate love.

But what does one do if the world does not want one’s talents?

She stood up and went to the bookcase – their own bookcase, which they had moved into the rooms – and pulled out her Byron from the small library of their books.

She found the lines:

She moved over and sat on the arm of Ambrose’s chair; put her hand in his hair. She quoted the lines aloud to Ambrose.

Ambrose said, ‘It is not a time to be maudlin; it is a time to be disgusted.’

He was right.

They had been here for months now, and he, it seemed, had been stoically trying hard not to whinge, not to let it become spoken; to move from mood to spoken fact. But tonight they were now at last facing the reality that Ambrose was here for her, and – as it turned out – there was nothing here for her to be here for.

She took his hand and put it to her cheek. ‘We came here for me to be a diplomat and more. I misjudged how much I would be needed, how much rules would be bent.’

Ambrose, his anger dissipated, said, ‘And instead we find ourselves in a rural outpost – on the border with Afghanistan. Let us despair; let us despair awfully and enormously.’

Although he was affirming the decision to leave, his insouciance seemed a little forced. Again, she considered that, secretly, he wanted to stay here. But that was inconceivable.

In their defeat, her mind wandered to another possibility for their lives. ‘We could live the life of the indolent rich and despair enormously at the same time.’

For the first time in her life, she allowed herself to calculate whether they could live the life of the indolent rich. The stock market had been good for her, thanks to the wretched Firestone shares, and if they chose a country with a cheap currency, yes, they could. ‘We have never tried the life of the indolent rich.’

He leaned his forehead in to her. ‘We could return to Geneva and I could work as a cigarette girl at the Molly Club. I wonder if it still exists? I wonder if Follett is still there pretending to be a dissolute old man while doing secret good works in expensive gowns and exquisite earrings. I envy his life. Must drop him a line.’

He had not mentioned the Molly Club for some time.

‘That, too, my darling, we can find again. We can have that again – if that is what you’re missing. Is that what you’re missing? I think you are maybe. Perhaps I am as well. I could buy the Molly Club. You could be lead cancan dancer. A promotion from cigarette girl. Maybe Follett and I could secretly do good works, both of us in fashionable and expensive gowns.’

‘The three of us in fashionable, extravagant gowns.’

‘Of course, darling, you will have your own couturier.’

‘It’s the company of like damned souls I miss, more than the delightful young boy-girls from all over Europe, in their lingerie, giving themselves with laughter and wit. Not that like-souls are frequently to be found – anywhere – let alone damned souls.’

She laughed. ‘Are you sure you do not miss the young boy-girls?’

‘Yes, I lied. I had to lie to myself about the boy-girls in lingerie or I would shrivel into death here in this chair.’

‘We never held out high hopes of finding a flourishing branch of the Molly Club here. We never had any such expectations.’

‘Oh, it’s here, I suspect. I suspect, if we were to stay on here, in time it would show itself somehow, would wink at me some night, show its garter belt. Always does – in whatever godforsaken country. It shyly shows itself, or not so shyly. Have not had a glimpse yet, truth be told.’

She wondered if now was the right time to tell him a man had put his hand on her knee.

She went to the butler’s table and poured each of them another drink.

‘Two nightcaps?’

‘In some ways one has to wash away a dinner party – all those ugly things said, all those misconceptions, all that pomposity, all those errors of fact. All like soiled napkins on the dinner table.’

She handed him his drink and nestled beside him. ‘And I have something risqué to tell – and for the telling we need a night potion,’ she said, using her silky voice, handing him the drink and sitting down again on the arm of his chair, a hand on his neck.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘You do?’

‘I had a lecherous episode tonight.’

‘At the PM’s dinner?’ He simultaneously crossed his legs, pulled his robe across his lap, stared up at her and sipped his port. ‘You had a lecherous episode at the PM’s dinner table?’

‘At the dinner in the PM’s dining room, a man put his hand upon my knee.’

There was a pause and Ambrose then said, ‘Did he do it well?’