Cold Light (6 page)

He was forced to join her humour and he held up two fingers very close together. ‘This close.’

She wondered if his view of the revolutionary included the will to violence. She found this pose of ruthlessness so difficult to believe, yet this . . . commissar voice, which he slipped in and out of, was also compelling, causing her momentarily to forget that he was her brother. She understood, even appreciated, his attitudes. More than she expected. Probably more than he suspected. An organiser, she could see, was some sort of dedicated teacher, or campaigner. She had been a bit like that when she had been with the League.

‘But we are not in a revolution, at least that I can see. Nor likely to be. I suppose we are more likely to be at war with the communist nations. And I suppose you would then be on their side? What does a revolutionary do in a non-revolutionary situation?’

She could see the animation again, his love of being the answerer of questions. ‘We are always in a nascent revolutionary situation. Every argument, every tedious meeting, every strike is moving us towards revolution – there are things to be done to bring about a revolutionary situation. And as for the next war, I suspect that it’ll not only be the communists who will be on the other side, I suspect that much of the Australian workforce will fight with the communist side. And the intelligentsia. I suspect that many doctors and nurses and teachers and so on will go over to the communist side if there’s a war. Remember, 89,000 Australians voted communist at the last election. In every capitalist country, large parts of the working class and intelligentsia will go over to the communist side.’

She found this a surprising view. She realised that she did not really
know
the Australian people, had been away too long. She decided to let this issue pass as being too complicated for conversation. She suspected that much of what he was saying might be too complicated for this conversation, would require her to do some reading.

He went on, ‘Did you know that Secretary Lance Sharkey was gaoled for saying what I have just said?’

‘Here in Australia?’

‘For three years.’

‘I hadn’t heard about that.’

‘He was gaoled by a so-called Labor government. Lance was a fierce man. He’s something of a hero to me. I learned a lot from him – how to talk theory to the workers. He got three years. Just been released.’

‘I didn’t think we gaoled people for speaking their mind.’

He shook his head as if contemplating her naivety. ‘The Australian Irish working class would’ve fought with the Germans against the British in the First World War if they’d had a chance.’

She decided to leave politics, where she felt she was at a disadvantage, and said, with a soft uncertainty, ‘Isn’t there something, just by blood, and the shared childhood, which binds us in some way? We do have some . . . I suppose it could be called
spontaneous
affection.’

He nodded. ‘The spontaneous element represents nothing more or less than an emerging consciousness in an
embryonic form
. Not necessarily a trustworthy consciousness.’

She then again conceded her confusion as a way of breaking out of the rhetoric. ‘I don’t pretend to understand kinship. Never had to. Nor do I pretend to understand fully what you are saying.’ She felt, if not defeated, then hopelessly
incapacitated
in the conversation.

‘And perhaps we are no longer a brother or a sister,’ he said, with his short family laugh. The laugh, his tone, she thought, showed some uncertainty to his part. But she had nothing much to add to the kinship question beyond recognising that, yes, if they were serious – deadly serious – political enemies, how would that allow them to relate as brother and sister? He could jeopardise her chances with External Affairs.

The conversation rambled on and he continued to refer to anything she said only when it seemed to serve his line of political thought. He was trying to win her into his mental framework. She admitted to being unclear about the word ideology.

‘Conservative democratic ideology is a sort of mesh on our brains made up of so-called political wisdom, appeals to tradition and eternal truths, so-called human nature, which is supposed to give indisputable answers to all political questions and is used to suppress the opposition and block change. I suppose you could say that the communist uses hard experience and scientific analysis to get to the bedrock reality underneath all this. But it is easy for the workers to be overwhelmed by the propaganda in newspapers and put out by the churches and to lapse again into the fog of this ideology. Lapse back into false consciousness. The conservatives themselves are in this fog, this false consciousness, never facing its cruel reality as long as it returns a profit.’

He gave her a grin, as if realising he was playing the teacher role too hard, beyond the natural course of conversation. She also gained the impression he was now trying to avoid the communist jargon.

‘I’m not sure I grasped “false consciousness”.’

‘Were you in the London blitz?’

‘Yes.’

‘Remember Churchill and the rest praising the so-called patriotic resilience of the workers who were bombed out, how they dusted themselves off and went to work?’

She nodded.

‘The workers had no other option but to dust themselves off and go to work – they needed the money. And if they had decided not to return to work – say, demanded evacuation to the countryside – they would’ve been forced to work at bayonet point. Churchill was sowing false consciousness into their minds to get them to work.’

She nodded. ‘What if, as a sister, I’m your opponent?’

‘Why would you be?’ He became impatient. ‘Why would you be? You are an intelligent woman. You are experienced in the affairs of the world. You lived through the Depression. You have seen the cruelty of capitalism. Why would you be an opponent?’

‘Let us assume that I am. What then?’

He nodded. ‘Then we would be political opponents. And I would’ve failed to recruit you.’ He looked at her, obviously not ready to accept her as an opponent. But he left the matter for now and said, ‘The oysters were good. Remember eating the oysters off the rocks at Jerry Bailey?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Why was she so pleased when he showed ordinary pleasantness, showed his brother self? ‘I suppose they come from our part of the coast. When we eat them we are tasting our childhood.’

He smiled and nodded. ‘Do you fear that I might incriminate you?’ he asked.

‘If the Communist Party is made illegal, there’s that possibility, I suppose. You and those associated with you would be, I imagine, rounded up. Even sisters.’

‘They will need a mighty big prison. The Menzies government has a list of seven hundred people for immediate arrest when the legislation is passed. You may not have heard of Operation Alien?’

She shook her head.

‘There are plans for internment camps. For Russians living here and for Party members and, I suppose, also for members of the New Housewives’ Association and what they call “communist fronts”.’

‘Are you preparing to go to prison?’

He shrugged and said, in his Party voice, ‘They can gaol a communist, but they can never gaol the historical truths on which communism is based – one man can die, but the Party cannot be shot.’

‘That’s rather melodramatic, Frederick.’

‘I will be even more melodramatic,
Edith –
governments build the prisons they need; prisons define the society. Tolstoy said that nothing tells us more about a society than its prisons.’

What sprang to the front of her mind were the stories about GULag, which ran the prison camps of the Soviet Union. ‘What about the camps in the Soviet Union?’

‘Exaggeration. Most of it’s propaganda. And a revolution requires that you remove saboteurs and disrupters from the general population.’

She had a realisation that even democracies adopted the methods of authoritarian states – had inclinations in that direction. She didn’t say it.

The second course arrived.

They fell into another uncomfortable silence as Janice moved the dishes from the tray to the table.

Edith lifted the dish covers and checked the dishes. As usual, she did not hold high hopes. The cooking at the hotel only approximated the French dishes after which they had been named.

Again she was made conscious that, over the last months, Janice would have been observing Ambrose and her more closely than did your usual servant. Day-to-day silent scrutiny of nosey servants was something one could adapt to, but to have someone observing you politically was something else. In the everyday conversations between Janice and her, as Janice cleaned the rooms, there had been no hint that Janice was political. Looking back, she realised that she should have detected that Janice’s accent was not working-class. It also occurred to her that it could have been Janice who had alerted Frederick to her presence in the hotel.

Discomfort hovered everywhere.

Janice apologised that the dishes weren’t hot enough and again left the room. Again she and Frederick did not exchange any conversation.

After she had left, Edith said, ‘For God’s sake, Frederick, you and Janice don’t have to play this stupid game. I am discomforted.’

‘It’s easier this way. What would you have us do? Invite her to join us?’

‘That would be preferable.’

She let it go. So did he.

He ploughed on. ‘Ultimately – soon – you must decide which side you are on, Edith. We are coming to that historical point where the world has to decide.’

‘And you and I must decide what weight we give to being brother and sister in your scheme of things.’

Neither of them seemed to have any way of advancing this question.

They ate. She said, ‘The snapper comes from our coast.’

‘It’s good.’

She sensed that he did not pay much attention to the art of the table. She said, ‘With the sauce tartare they’ve got the mayonnaise, chopped onions and gherkins right, but I can’t find the capers.’

He shrugged.

‘What did you feel,’ she asked Frederick, ‘at the time of our parents’ deaths?’

‘Morris contacted me. They knew where I was most of the time. How did I feel? Mother and Father were dead. There was nothing to do. As I said earlier, it freed me.’

She saw herself in the League days as dedicated – in the League they were all finding their way to a new order of things. She was now severed from her cause – call it internationalism, world government. Would she ever find her way back to the cause? Any cause? ‘Did you feel sad?’

‘Did you?’

‘Not in the way I imagine people are supposed to mourn. In my own undemonstrative way, yes. I gave time to some contemplation of their lives – perhaps that’s not mourning. No, I was not sad.’

They left that subject and he remarked that he was enjoying the change of fare here at the lunch – perhaps a concession to her generosity. He said, ‘I’m enjoying this relapse back into the aristocratic life.’

‘Perhaps it’s time for you to return to the bourgeoisie?’ she joked, not feeling at all relaxed or witty.

He said, ‘Did you hear what Janice said about our dinner order?’

She noted that he used the word dinner in the Australian way, meaning lunch – their family hadn’t used it that way. ‘She said something like, “Nothing is too good for the working classes.” The art of gastronomy is hardly decadent. Peasants practise it.’

‘The Party leadership think a Chinese meal is living it up.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve lived the proletarian life – not much fine dining – although we did live it up in Prague: French wines, banquets in palaces. But here I have done my share of manual labour. Feel my hands.’ He held them out to her, and he looked at them himself, pinching one with the other. ‘They’ve become rather soft since I took on organising. In revolutionary situations it was how it was decided who should be shot – by the roughness of the hands. Aristocrats were identified by their soft hands.’

She resisted touching his hands, but said, ‘Be careful – you could be shot.’ It reminded her of Frederick as a small boy asking their mother and her to feel his biceps.

He said he wanted his life to rise – or fall – with the lowest rung of the economic system. He wanted to share their fate.

She found that admirable. But she felt that as adults they were now very much apart, and sooner or later that had to be said.

She was in danger of ignoring one of her rules – learned the hard way – that you do not sever a relationship during a meal. It left you with the rest of the meal to get through, sitting together in the mess and distress of the severance. And it ruined the appetite. Although she hadn’t invited Frederick to this lunch with a decision to formally end the relationship, she had it as an option. Maybe she had to find, if not a filial bond, some urbane
modus vivendi
for their relationship. She was now inclined to see that ending it may be the only way of managing it – they were incompatible in sundry ways and, more seriously, he was likely to pull her down, even if, in some strangely twisted way, they had both given their lives to what they saw as making a better world. But for comfort, if there was to be a severance today, then it should not be done until coffee and after at least another drink.

They were both drinkers. Her mother had been a person who drank perhaps too much, although that allegation of drinking too much had once been levelled at her back in the days of the League. Unjustly. She had worked harder and more thoughtfully at the League than most of the others, including those who did not drink alcohol. She had, though, become aware that she drank more than other women of her milieu. Ambrose drank less than she.

She also now accepted that those who drank deeply often had some disharmony to their lives, but there were also those who were, well, just perplexed by existential matters and needed the comfort of the glass. She put herself in the second category, although, unwillingly, she forced herself to consider the possibility, just the possibility, that she might also have some deep-seated neurotic demon reflected by her marriage to Ambrose. Dr Vittoz, back in Geneva, would certainly wish to talk about that. She was glad he was a long way away. She had no wish to visit that.