Cold Light (82 page)

Hall didn’t seem to need to pursue it.

‘One other thing,’ she said.

‘Fire away.’

‘Would I be travelling on a diplomatic passport?’

‘I should think so. You deserve a red passport and all its privileges.’ He then paraphrased from
Othello
, ‘You have done the state some service and we know it.’

She looked down modestly; she was touched. She was stunned that a young person from another time and place should know of her and have sought her out – whatever his role.

He put a hand on her arm and lowered his voice. ‘By the way, there was a delicious report from
one of our own
that back in the fifties you gave Latham a dressing-down in the Melbourne Club after his High Court vote.’

How could that have reached the ears of this young man? Richard Victor Hall was chuckling to himself. She could tell he was a man who liked to surprise people with what arcane information he knew. She wondered if it might have been reported by the waiter that night.

‘John was something of a mentor,’ she said neutrally.

‘We don’t choose our mentors in life,’ he said sententiously. ‘Latham supported Chifley’s attempt to nationalise the banks.’ And then, with a soft handshake, Richard Victor Hall said, apropos of nothing, ‘We are the masters now.’ He trotted off urgently into the bowels of the parliament.

He wasn’t quite right about Latham’s position, but she wouldn’t bother with that.

When he was out of sight, she doubled back to her old office – the shoebox. She had not wanted him to know how small she had been in the old government. It was unoccupied and full of stored files, as if she had been like Lot’s wife, turned not to salt but to a pile of unwanted files.

She wondered where, if anywhere, this new government would put her.

On the steps, she pulled on her gloves.

She was elated. Good old Sam.

They were all so young, and they wanted her.

She had not been offered tea. It was a government in a hurry and they wanted her to dance in their revolution. She would get to head a cable with the line, ‘Most immediate. Clear the line.’

What luck.

What luck.

Richard took the appointment graciously. In fact, she felt that he took it as a final confirmation of their respective roles in their relationship. He bought her a remarkable star-like diamond brooch, which from a distance looked somewhat like an official honour, an award. On the night of her appointment there was a small reception, and he seemed to enjoy being the consort.

The Richters, the Clarks, the Gollans, the Arndts, the Karmels, Mr T, Ruth Dobson and Richard Victor Hall were there, along with some politicians from both sides and some dignitaries from the legations, but the Prime Minister was unable to attend and sent his apology, which contained some words of praise.

She carried her new red diplomatic passport in her handbag and showed it discreetly to a few of her circle.

Privately, she felt tearfully proud.

I
t was at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that Edith noticed Ian was behaving in a curious way, bending down as if looking at the showcase of liturgical objects when in fact, she realised, he was looking at her through the showcase.

He was her secretary of mission at the IAEA Conference on Inspection and Verification Regimes. ‘Aide-de-camp’ was the term he used, either comically or pompously, she wasn’t sure – or as a way of balking at his subordinate role.

She entertained the illusion that his odd behaviour was perhaps a way of showing a carnal interest in her in some perverse way, although he had talked about having some girl in London.

Given the age difference between her and her aide-de-camp – she put him at around forty – it had to be a wishful illusion on her part.

‘Go back around the other side of the case, Edith.’

‘Why?’ she asked, doing his bidding. ‘Here?’

He bent down again and squinted at her through the double glass. ‘Now crouch down.’

She obeyed. ‘How long must I remain here?’ she asked, smugly pleased that she could hold the crouch without showing any strain.

‘It’s alright, that’s it,’ he said, standing up.

‘What was that about?’ she asked, as she also stood up, brushing her skirt, and went around to where he was.

‘There was an optical distortion,’ he said. ‘It pleased me. I could see you as a young girl – you looked very girlish.’

She did not quite know how to take this. She knew he had not been drinking. ‘Would that one could always move, then, in a glass showcase.’

He did not smile.

‘I think it was the magic coming off –’ he glanced at the label in the showcase – ‘this second-century glass liturgical vessel.’

She thought, but did not say, that she sometimes felt like a second-century liturgical vessel.

They moved listlessly through the museum.

Ian was charming enough, not uncultured and was physically well turned-out. They had a science background in common and a sense of the absurd. They had both spontaneously laughed at the letter that President Gerald Ford sent to be read at the opening of the conference. In the letter, Ford said the United States would permit the IAEA to apply its safeguards to all nuclear activities in the United States – ‘excluding only those with national security significance’. Every country wanted to inspect; no country wanted to be inspected.

She had seen that Ian had Goethe’s
Faust
as his travel reading. That was encouraging. Her travel reading was an old collection of von Heyse short stories from her childhood.

‘You seem glum,’ Edith said.

‘Too much history. Human race too old,’ he said.

She liked his reply, but he was too young to be saying it. ‘Indeed, too old,’ she said.

At breakfast in the hotel next day, he again seemed to be staring at her as she sat down.

She allowed his gaze to warm her face, but she did not comment. Probably, another of his games. Or was he assessing her age?

Here in Vienna, she found she had quite an appetite. Perhaps even a youthful appetite. It could be from the stimulation of being back in Vienna and the swirl of an international conference, back in the diplomatic orbit.

Apart from her visits to two General Conferences and a special forum under the former government, her strongest memories of Vienna were just after the war with the UNRRA. On each occasion that she had walked the streets the buildings whispered sullen secrets to her. Back in the late 1940s, she remembered going to work in her smart UNRRA uniform, made for her by a Viennese tailor, and although they had not been issued with side arms, she carried her personal pistol from the League days, loaded and holstered in her regulation black leather shoulder bag, picking her way along tracks through the rubble. Allied air raids had brought down the roofs of St Stephen’s Cathedral and of the Opera. Rubble still blocked Kärntner Strasse.

The slow trams had clanged along some of the streets. She had commandeered a German army bike – a woman’s bike – which was superior to the others and had a large rack, and she was given a wonderful tin whistle with a snail-like wind chamber and a plaited black lanyard. Even though the bicycle had a bell, she would blow her whistle and the Viennese pedestrians would scurry out of her way. She had boiled the whistle and the lanyard before using it. De-nazification. She had use of a jeep, but the bicycle was faster and less fuss.

In those days, you lugged the bike up the stairs into the office, otherwise it would have disappeared.

Their work at the UNRRA had been relocating brutalised prisoners, forced labourers – those whom an American reporter, Leonard someone, back then had described as people who ‘pushed, screamed, clawed for food, smelled bad, who couldn’t and didn’t want to obey orders, who sat with dull faces and vacant staring eyes in a cellar, or in a concentration-camp barrack’.

It was in the UNRRA days that she had done her best work. Got her hands dirty. She had enjoyed the uniform and, although it was not regulation, she had worn a black Sam Browne belt she had ordered from a naval and military outfitter in London. The belt gave her an assurance and a sense of vulnerability. It was a Hippolyta’s girdle: stamina and resistance to injury. There was something in mythology about the girdle making Hippolyta desirable, too. Still, she had to constantly remind herself that you could fight the good fight with an office desk as base headquarters.

As the memories streamed through her mind, she heard herself make a sound she had never made before. Nearly a sigh. She knew instantly what it was – a sound from the creaking timbers of age. The sounds of old people were like those made by sleeping dogs as they remember forgotten bones and bad fights and times when they should have barked but did not.

She had never made that sound ever before, and she had no intention of making it again.

That Leonard someone was the same reporter who had said drunkenly one night at Café Mozart that when he and his fellow reporters wrote ‘was beaten and tortured by the SS’ or ‘brutalised’, they never wrote about the medical outcomes of those beatings – that someone lost an eye or lost sight in both eyes and could never read a book again, or lost hearing in both ears and never went to a concert again, or had permanent damage to his kidneys requiring him to piss fifty times a day, or had both testicles crushed so that he could never father a child or screw again, or was a carpenter who could never use his right hand again because all the bones had been broken into small pieces, or was a musician and could never play again.

Someone had intervened and said, ‘Have a drink, Len, we get your point.’

Len had turned with an angry face and said, ‘You do not get the point. The point is that the list has no end. No reporter ever goes out and finds what happened after the “beatings”. Or about what happens to women who have been “repeatedly raped” – they never report on permanently torn vaginas, holes from vagina to anus that will not heal.’

Someone said, ‘That’s enough – don’t spoil my drink. Anyhow, we write for family newspapers.’

‘I will spoil your drink, Hal,’ Len had said. ‘We never write that someone cannot speak because his tongue was ripped out and his eardrums pierced with a nail driven in with a hammer. Do you see any of this in the movies? In the
New York Times
? And it’s about time these dream families we write for faced reality.’