Cold Light (26 page)

Someone threw the filthy rag ball to Frederick, calling out ‘bomb’. Frederick did not catch it, but stepped back fastidiously, letting it fall to the floor.

It was what she would have done.

And then Frederick realised that he had to pick it up. And he did so by a string end dangling from it, carrying the home-made ball gingerly to the stage and placing it at the end of the table.

Frederick looked at his papers on the table, and then again took control of the meeting, thanking ‘Comrade Hardy for his powerful address’, and asked for a motion. A man rose to his feet with a written motion, which he read. ‘Those present at a meeting of more than one hundred people representing the citizens and workers of Canberra oppose any attempt to ban political freedom in this country . . .’

As the speaker went on with his rather long motion, she got up and went to the edge of the stage and beckoned Frederick over.

He left his chair and came over to her, somewhat distracted by her emergence from the audience. He crouched down. ‘What is it, Edith?’

She said, ‘We should buy a proper ball for the boys who kicked the ball through the window. As a gesture.’

He looked at her with bafflement, and then took the idea onboard, saying, ‘Good thinking, I’ll do just that,’ and went back to his seat, where he called for a vote on the man’s motion.

It was unanimous.

Edith did not put up her hand during the vote, but Janice took it and pushed it up.

At the old League, she remembered something M. Loucheur had called blank voting –
inertie courtoise –
where blank votes were cast to avoid the discourtesy of voting against a motion. She remembered that there was also the French idea of the
voeu
– a vote that was an expression of a wish rather than a decision. And the French
appel nomina
– the voting by personal statement, which would be attached to the final decision as a personally tuned vote with reservations. She remembered how at a League conference someone had wanted to be counted as absent when they were present in the hall. They wanted to be listed as absent during the vote. They did not want to abstain, nor vote yes or no, or to put in a blank vote. Being technically absent was more than avoiding making a decision at that time – it was saying that you were not ready to even confront or acknowledge the issue at that time. Intellectual absence.

She laughed to herself; she would not bring all this up now.

Frederick then said to the audience, ‘My big sister says we should buy the Causeway kids a proper ball courtesy of the CPA, as we now call ourselves after the 16th Congress last year. Not Australian Communist Party – we are now the Communist Party of Australia.’

He added, ‘It would be a good move tactically.’

As she made her way back to her seat, Edith realised that she had made herself highly visible and Frederick had identified her. She thought of the secret agent who was lurking there. But then, there was nowhere that you weren’t spied upon by someone for some reason or another.

And she had not meant it to be a tactical move on behalf of the CPA. She had seen it more as an act of
noblesse oblige
.

After she had sat down, Janice whispered, ‘Good move,’ and others along the row leaned forward and nodded and smiled at her. She was pretty sure that they were doing it because they liked the idea of helping poor kids rather than as a Party tactic.

The meeting was concluding and she would not now get a chance to make a short speech on the Universal Declaration. Frederick had not given out an invitation to those present to speak. Instead, she thought she would move an amendment, and rose to her feet. ‘I move that the number of those present be recorded as “about sixty”, which is what it was at my last count,’ she said. She did not raise the issue that at least two car-loads came from Melbourne and probably some from Sydney, and were not, therefore, Canberra residents.

There were some chuckles, but she thought she heard someone from a few rows back say, ‘Oh, sit down – it’s only propaganda for the newspapers.’

She rose to her feet again. ‘I make the correction simply so the motion of tonight’s meeting reflects true actuality and so that we cannot be attacked for faking the figures.’

As she sat down, she turned to Janice and said that she had learned one thing: it seemed that communists couldn’t count.

Janice whispered, ‘You’ve only just learned that?’

Frederick seemed irritated by her pedantry and said something about doing a count and adjusting the figure accordingly. ‘I will adjust the wording of the motion,’ he said.

It then occurred to Edith that the newspapers or the other reporters in the city had not been invited to the meeting. It further occurred to her that all those present were
invited
. Probably all Party members. Or at least fellow travellers. And she. It was not a public meeting.

From the stage, Frederick said that he would send around a couple of hats and ask all those present to throw in to buy the local kids a football and to pay for the broken window. There were noises of general assent.

But then one man dissented, saying that the kids could have been put up to it by the groupers.

‘Alright, then,’ her brother said patiently, as an organiser should be, ‘I’ll send around the hat for a ball and the window. If you don’t want to put in, that’s okay. Whatever’s over will go to the fighting fund.’

He then said, ‘There being no further business, I declare this public meeting closed.’

They all stood up, moving from their seats to mill about at the sides and back of the hall. As Edith rose she said to Janice, ‘I think Frederick should have mentioned the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’

Janice reminded her that the Soviet Union had not voted for it.

Edith replied, with a little irritation, ‘However, Australia did.’

A hand touched Edith from behind and she turned to see a badly scarred man, grinning a deformed grin. With disgust and resignation, she recognised him and held out her hand. ‘Hello, Scraper – Warren.’ He was someone from her student days who had been badly wounded in World War I.

‘Edith,
enchanté
.’ He held out his hand. It was so cold, no blood seemed to circulate in it. It was like holding the foot of a rooster. He raised her hand to his lips, which were also as cold as a coffin. ‘The last time I met you, Edith – quite a few years ago – you were living in Geneva, but were back in Australia briefly to sniff out a new job in Canberra – and here you are again in Canberra. Still sniffing?’ He said it with the smugness of someone with the sort of memory that could come up with remarkable personal details from a long way back.

He had a WWI Returned Soldier badge on his jacket. She remembered him coming up to her in a café in Sydney in ’36 during her home-leave visit, and his face then had struck her as that of a mummy. His whole body still seemed the result of much clumsy rebuilding with surgery, and his every movement seemed restricted by pain. He still had much of his commanding height left, though he leaned on two sticks. He had been a giant at university.

He had no eyebrows or eyelashes.

‘You have a great memory, Scraper,’ she said, removing her hand from his, having to force herself to say this, knowing that he was waiting for the compliment.

‘The shrapnel didn’t get my memory,’ he said. ‘Sometimes wish it had.’

She knew he was thinking, as she was, of the bizarre sex experience that had followed their meeting on her last visit. She remembered describing it to Ambrose as her ‘war work’ in an effort to joke it away, and which, in retrospect, she had trouble believing – believing that she had actually done what she had done for him with her hand.

He said, ‘And what, Edith, are you doing here at a –’ he waved his stick at the gathering – ‘a Communist Party rally in Canberra.’

‘I was here to support the Declaration of Universal Rights. And you?’

He grunted with what was probably disdain. ‘I came for amusement. Anyone who says they want to stop war amuses me. Universal Declaration?’ He nodded his head at the crowd. ‘This lot do not believe in the Universal Declaration, and you know it.’

‘I assume then, Scraper, that you are mightily amused tonight. All the anti-war talk.’ The rally was not about peace and war, but there had been many references to peace.

‘I am, dear Edith. Indeed, I am amused. After the League failed in such a spectacular way I would’ve hoped you’d given up trying to stop war. The moral health of nations is maintained thanks to war: “Just as the wind saves the sea from stagnation.” He laughed at his heresy. ‘Peace is the continuation of war by other means. In a war, God says he is on both sides because God believes in war.’

‘You live here?’ she asked.

‘No.’

Thank God.

‘I see you have another badge.’ She leaned in to read it aloud. ‘TPI?’

‘Totally and Permanently Incapacitated. That’s me. Though, as I recall, you found a part of me that was still non-incapacitated.’ He gave a private, lost laugh, enjoying the embarrassment for her that would follow from it.

She was embarrassed, but hoped it didn’t show. ‘You’re still the conversational bomb-thrower you were from uni days.’

‘The badge gets me a seat on trams and buses and such like, which, in turn, further humiliates me. Or they don’t stand up and I stand with hot irons going up into my groin, which also humiliates me. I have become a connoisseur of humiliation. And if you think the last two wars were tough, you should see the wars that go on in the TPI Association. They’ve been fighting each other since the first war. Apart from a seat on the tram, I stay a member because I enjoy watching the cripples fight each other to death. Literally.’

She introduced him to Janice. ‘Warren Smith – an old friend from university days.’

In his cracked voice he said, ‘Call me Scraper. Everyone else does. As Lytton Strachey said of Ottoline Morrell, “She was like the Eiffel tower – looked silly but provided excellent views.” Likewise, I am called Scraper, as in skyscraper . . .’ He petered out, waving his stick with his paw-like hand. ‘A ridiculous height and now a ridiculous appearance, but good views on all matters . . . at least, I enjoy them.’

She was privately amused by this and wondered if Janice and Frederick knew who Strachey was. She guessed they had read
Eminent Victorians
at some time in their lives.

Frederick wandered over and she introduced him, too. ‘My brother, Frederick, is an organiser for the Communist Party,’ she said, wondering if she should say that. Scraper did not hold out a hand.

‘A magistrate called me Scraper in court recently.’

‘Scraper – Warren – is a lawyer,’ she added.

‘I was the defendant in this particular situation.’

She remembered that Scraper loved pedantry and contradicting and correcting.

‘I was before the court on a minor matter.’ He smiled to himself and looked Frederick up and down in a theatrical way. ‘Well, well, well – a leader of the workers.’

Edith resisted imagining what it was that might have brought him before the court. She took Janice aside and whispered, ‘Get me out of here.’

Janice said she would, but first she had to help tidy things away.

‘Please, let’s go. I cannot be in Scraper’s company for another minute.’

‘Because of the deformity?’

‘Not because of that. Please?’

Scraper was at her elbow again, perhaps having heard. If so, she didn’t give a damn. ‘You don’t go running out on old mates,’ he said holding her elbow. ‘And anyhow, the world owes me the time of day.’

‘I am off, Scraper.’ She released herself from his bony grip, but he still stood too close to her, his boozed breath, together with the breath of ill-health, puffing over her, a dragon’s breath. No, a dragon’s breath, however foul, would have the innocence of nature.

Scraper turned away to again concentrate on Frederick. ‘I can see you need political legitimacy, but I wish you’d all stop pretending you care about freedom.’ Scraper gave the word ‘freedom’ a particular tone, which showed that he felt it was, anyhow, something of a doubtful condition.

She watched to see how Frederick would handle it.

Frederick said, ‘Just as you lawyers do not have to argue the case for the rule of law, as you call it, before every court case – that is, it’s taken for granted – so communists do not feel they have to re-argue the case against capitalism and the lessons of Marxist-Leninism on every occasion within the Party. Or among educated intellectuals. These are now taken as a given. The argument has moved on. The argument now is how to dismantle capitalism. Do away with it.’

‘Only death is democratic,’ Scraper said, falling back on a stale wisdom without relevance. Perhaps he felt outflanked in the argument.

She was pleased to see Scraper slapped down. ‘Good night, Scraper,’ she said. ‘Good to see you out and about.’

Scraper turned to her. ‘I have a bottle stashed in the bushes somewhere – I’ll come out with you. Share a drink. I believe we’re going back to someone’s house for what they call a party.’

‘Scraper, I said I’m going home.’

‘One for the road with a war hero before you go,’ he said, again taking her elbow tightly, and propelling her towards the door.

Janice followed.

Edith again undid his hand from her elbow. Her mouth was dry. She felt no sympathy for him tonight. His deformity did not excuse aggressive bad manners.

‘Scraper, good night.’

‘I depend on people like you, Edith, to bring us no more nonsense. No more nonsense is what we expect, ask, demand of you. You have seen it all. False Peacemakers. Of course, there will be war and war and war.’

‘The place of war has been renegotiated and will continue to be renegotiated – it is being arbitrated out of our lives,’ she said curtly. ‘For more than a hundred years.’

She didn’t care to argue against Scraper, but wanted to talk about anything that would avoid telling him she lived in Canberra.

He read her mind. ‘Oh, I’ll find you, E. I’ll find you. Think I still have your gloves. Give a digger a hand, love.’ He laughed a crippled laugh.

She winced at his coarseness. She and Janice went out in the cool air, which calmed her cheeks. She looked back to the hall to see that Scraper hadn’t followed, and saw Frederick talking to him, perhaps remonstrating with him.