Cold Light (42 page)

Frederick and Janice were obviously surprised and pleased, although maybe, Edith thought, Frederick would have wished for outright conflict with the ‘system’.

She spent the morning of the next day reading the judgement. She needed to understand it, feeling her friendship with Latham had been pushed off-balance. In a low, self-serving way, she also felt, despite the judgement, that she might still need his protection if her relationship with her brother ever became an issue with the Security Intelligence Organisation.

She could see how Latham had argued himself into his position of deferring to the role of parliament in deciding such matters as an ‘enemy in our midst’ and ‘war-time emergency’, and that this role and authority was given to the parliament in the ‘defence powers’ clauses of the Constitution.

In times of war, she understood that the government sometimes had to act quickly. That meant that, in times of emergency, the oversight bodies – such as the High Court – themselves had also to act quickly. And, of course, if the emergency were cataclysmic, resulting in overnight, unforeseeable upheaval, then emergency powers had to be swiftly assumed and action taken for the defence and survival of the polity. In that sort of situation, some safeguards may have to be disregarded. But she could not see that there was any need for rush in the prevailing circumstances, despite the Korean War and the workplace ‘unrest’.

In the evening, the four of them went to celebrate the decision at a party at Turner’s house in Glen Iris, where Frederick and Janice were staying. They had bought drink in the city beforehand because Glen Iris was dry.

At the party were people who had fought against the legislation, but she assumed that they were mostly communists. Again, she felt an odd, secret superiority that she should know the Chief Justice of the High Court and at the same time be having drinks at a party of communists, that her life combined such things.

She did not enjoy the party. She found that most communists had replaced the art of conversation with an unflagging thumping of their line, although Frederick and Janice, at least on most occasions, had passed that stage in their conversations with Ambrose and her back in Canberra. She sometimes thought it might be possible that they would abandon the Party. More likely, Frederick and Janice hoped that, one day, Ambrose and she would come over to their side, especially her.

She met Ian Turner again and Amirah, his wife. They all laughingly recalled the football bomb at the Causeway meeting. She found them both charming, and she sensed that Turner found
her
appealing also.

After a while, Amirah drifted away, and Frederick and Janice, who knew many of the people there, went into zealous huddles in other rooms. She found herself talking one-to-one with Turner. Leaning on one shoulder against the wall, he was drinking from a bottle of beer. She had been given a glass, as had all the women, but her beer was flat and she hated flat beer.

Although Turner was a true communist, she found his conversation a little more flexible than the others. The other curiosity was that Turner had met Latham at the funeral for the poet Shaw Neilson.

She told him she had quoted Neilson to mark her taking-over of her new office.

‘Which lines?’

‘ “The young girl stood beside me. / I saw not what her young eyes could see: / A light, she said, not of the sky / Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.” I won’t tell you the context. Story too long. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

He said, ‘Another time, perhaps?’

She raised her irritation with Party jargon with Turner. ‘I know it’s a kind of shorthand for those in the know, but it is rather difficult for the rest of us. Embarrassing, even,’ she said.

He said to her that he was trying to tone down the jargon in the Party. ‘I want us to say “of majority concern” rather than “broad masses”. I am not winning,’ he joked.

She praised him, but thought privately that ‘majority concern’ was not a huge leap forward in the jargon question.

Turner said he was already coming to believe that there was a necessary and positive dialectic between what is innovative in art and radical politics. ‘I confess to a love of jazz.’

‘Why
confess
?’

‘
American imperialist music
,’ he said, disowning the expression as he said it. ‘The Party has to learn to see it as the music of the oppressed Negroes.’

She queried the connection – the
dialectic
of the arts and communism.

‘They both offer fresh ways of seeing the world and fresh ways of living. Radical art is needed to temper the collectivism of radical politics. I could be shot for saying that.’

She asked Turner why the Soviet Union had not signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ‘Was it because of the private-property clause?’

Turner ran his hand through his hair. ‘Where to start?’ He hesitated, gathering his thoughts. ‘You’re right. It’s the inclusion of a right to private property. The individual gets “property” by selling his life to the boss, who then lets the worker buy a house by lending him money from capitalist banks. The worker spends his life paying for the house. If he loses his job, he can’t pay the mortgage and the house is taken off him. The banks always win. “The vampire will not lose its hold on him so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” ’

Turner grinned, looked at her flat beer and poured some from his bottle into her glass to freshen it. He then took a drink from the bottle himself. ‘I’m dropping back into
the line.
’

She could see that Turner had been struggling to find the words that would make sense of his opposition to the Declaration. She was flattered that he was taking such an effort with her.

She said that Ambrose and she had had problems with the statement that humans ‘are endowed with reason and conscience’. There was not much evidence of that.

Turner laughed. ‘You’re right. Then there’s the problem of the inclusion of the right to private property in the Declaration. The Declaration is really a charter of the rights of the “egotistic individual” rather than the rights of communal man, of socialist man. Of course, before this Declaration there were others, which Marx laughed at as “these pompous catalogues”. The Declaration promises illusory rights – how can you have freedom of expression if you don’t own the newspaper and radio stations?’

She said something about it being the beginning of a set of principles for civilised society, ‘give or take a few propositions’.

Turner laughed.

Edith said, ‘It’s a party. We should be more frivolous.’

‘Just when I was about to explain the “negation of the negation”,’ he said, grinning. He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Which cannot be explained in everyday language.’

Janice rejoined them and raised an eyebrow at Turner’s hand on her shoulder.

Turner withdrew his hand, and Edith smiled at Janice. She said to Turner, ‘Janice and Frederick are my personal tutors. I know about the negation of the negation.’

With a move of his head, indicating that he was impressed, Turner turned his attention to the other party-goers, squeezing Janice’s arm affectionately as he left them.

Edith called out to him, ‘The abolition of individual property is the first negation. It will be followed by a negation of this negation with the restoration of individual property in a higher form of land at once both individual and social.’

Turner looked back at her, nodded to show she was correct and that he was again impressed, and waved goodbye. He wandered off into the throng.

Edith looked at Janice, who also nodded in appreciation of her Marxism. Edith then said, ‘I am not convinced Marx resolved the paradox of property, which is both social and individual.’

Janice whispered, ‘The Party has made him work cleaning railway carriages, to give him proletarian experience. And to knock the Geelong College out of him.’

‘The way you work as a chambermaid – to knock SCEGGS out of you?’

‘Something like that,’ she said, poking out her tongue.

The next day, Ambrose lunched with an old friend from London, Courtenay Young, who had come out from England to help set up the ASIO, which had moved from Sydney to Melbourne. Edith did not like Courtenay Young. Ambrose told an amusing story about them buying a new Chubb safe to which only he and Courtenay Young knew the combination, which irritated the Australians. The buying of the safe seemed to be the only thing Ambrose had to do with the organisation, although she guessed he was privy to its workings in other ways, both clandestine and official. She supposed that the safe story meant that the British were still keeping some things from the Australians.

While Ambrose lunched, Edith and the less zealous Janice secretly shopped in a flagrantly capitalist way. When she was with her, Janice sometimes acted the rebel against the Party and carried on frivolously, although in an intelligent way. As they shopped, Edith tried to incorporate these glimpses of what must have been the pre-communist Janice into the person she had met first as a chambermaid and then as a revolutionary agitator disguised as a chambermaid. But her picture of Janice remained an unsuccessful collage.

The next afternoon, she and Ambrose shopped for Carla, his
en femme
self, at Myer. They had both grown larger in recent years, but he had always been somewhat slimmer than she, in a male way, and now they were about the same size in women’s wear.

While pretending to the shop assistant that she was shopping for herself, he was able to choose from the racks. She held the dresses against herself, modelling them for him.

Even though there was no question of him trying on the clothing – the pleasurable part – he was at least able to bring his wardrobe in line with fashion for the first time since going to Canberra.

He chose seven dresses, seven skirts, a shawl and some tops, and then, while he sat in the tea rooms, she bought him seven camisoles, seven lacy underpants, seven bras, seven silky nightdresses and two robes.

Ambrose had once remarked that lingerie gave one a new, shimmering skin, a skin that was superior to that of nature. ‘Well, superior to my skin,’ he had said. ‘Not superior to the skin of the young.’

She now preferred nylon stockings because they did not stretch, but he enjoyed silk stockings, which were now back on the market. And, of course, he did not have to wear stockings every day for long hours. He never wore out a pair of his women’s shoes.

Edith thought Janice would have been at ease with this particular shopping spree, even if it would surely have come within the Party’s definition of degeneracy.

Edith had Myer mail the boxes to their Canberra address and rejoined Ambrose in the tea rooms. She described to him her lingerie purchases. His eyes opened with delight like those of a schoolgirl.

He said of the assistant who had been helping them with the earlier purchases, ‘I think she suspected it was for me.’ Edith did not think so. Whenever they had shopped together in Europe he had enjoyed that particular illusion – that the shop assistant knew intuitively that the clothing was for him and that they enjoyed the idea of dressing him. Only once had she suspected that it had been true, and that was in Paris. She guessed it was an expression of his
en femme
need to be approved by females.

Ambrose borrowed the Consulate car and they drove around Melbourne so that she could show him the haunts of her youth. As a young graduate and Rationalist, she had come to Melbourne from Sydney in 1922 to work for John Latham, who was connected to her free-thought family. ‘He was running for parliament as an Independent Liberal Union candidate for Kooyong. I think Glen Iris was in his electorate. He won.’ They looked at the Rationalist Hall, the old Temperance Hall, the Trades Hall and the Capitol Theatre, where the Rationalist and other meetings had been held. ‘The Griffins designed the Capitol. A strange hall, but good to be in. Back then we had been working to form the national organisation of the Rationalist Associations of Australia, which interested me more than the political campaign.’

Ambrose questioned whether Latham had been an atheist.

She said he had been and still was, as far as she knew.

‘There must have been an overlap between the Communist Party and the Rationalists?’

‘You can be an atheist without being a communist. Latham was never vaguely near the communist position,’ she said.

‘I can see that,’ Ambrose said.

They laughed.

They stopped at a two-storey building named Liberty Hall. She went on with her tour commentary. ‘The Griffins remodelled those dwellings for the Henry George League. It looks as if they still meet there. Griffin was something of a Henry George follower, believing that all land and its resources are in fact really owned in common, and that those people who think they “own” the land, and who use it for farming and mining minerals and oil and so on, should pay a tax – or rent – to the state for its use. That tax would then pay for the needs of the community.’

‘Sounds acceptable to me,’ Ambrose said. Who owned nothing.

‘Suddenly it sounds acceptable to me also,’ she said. ‘It never did back then.’