Cold Light (83 page)

This conversation had returned to her again and again over the years.

It returned to her now and her appetite was no longer so good.

But perhaps the good appetite she was having in Vienna came from having at last faced the possibility of the end of her marriage back in Canberra – an end in a very practical sense, because she did not want, she realised with some surprise, to physically return to it. At the end of this mission as an eminent person, she wondered if she might meander off into the world. Or into a job at the IAEA. Somewhere. She could send her report by diplomatic bag. Richard Victor Hall would wonder why she had disappeared like that. Maybe they would come looking for her.

She toyed with the idea of not returning to the domestic smells and habits of her life back there. A dishevelled newspaper spread out somewhere. A male sock under the bed. Something spilled and not properly mopped up. The marmalade a rather paltry ring of orange at the bottom of a jar, barely enough for a full piece of toast and sometimes specked with butter from the boys – at least in the early days when the boys had lived at home – and Richard using their bread-and-butter knives to take the marmalade out, regardless of how many times over the years she had complained, had told them to use the jam spoon and the butter knife, and to put the marmalade out of the jar into a dish. They had resisted – obstreperously, vexatiously. It was a relief to think that she might never again seek a domestic arrangement with another person and its crushing load of trivial dispute – spoken and unspoken. She might very well go back to living in a hotel. She could live in Vienna. She had spoken to Eklund at a cocktail party and he had seemed receptive to finding her a place at the IAEA.

She had said, ‘Surely the IAEA could use someone such as me – someone who has seen it all?’ She liked the Swedish approach to international issues. She had good friends who were Swedes in the League and now the IAEA.

He had said, ‘I thought, Edith, you’d be considering retirement? Those Australian beaches.’

She had replied, ‘I’m not
that
old. I’m not finished yet. I don’t think I believe in retirement.’

He said, ‘I certainly do.’

She said, ‘But, Sigvard, the job’s not done yet.’

She could not yet see herself withdrawing from public life to her books and her animals and her crops.

She had always felt at ease in hotels – white tablecloths, meals served. Not having to search in cupboards for breakfast or to smell the milk for freshness. Emily had long gone and they had not replaced her. Richard had blocked her from hiring someone else to run the house. ‘Expense.’ She had said that she certainly was not going to do housework and they had agreed on a cleaner twice a week.

No. The reason that her appetite had returned was that she was
home.
This was her home: Vienna – or the meaning of Vienna. Big issues, an international conference, meetings that could have results. The whole daily wheel of hotel breakfast with delegates, with sub-committees, with background papers, with the world at stake. She was at last
home.
The work of the world. It was as if her appetite, her stomach, had been cramped all these years. She would become what H. G. Wells had called ‘the floating people’. She remembered that the book had been important to her as a young person. It had been in her parents’ library. It talked of a new class of people, ‘denationalised, with wide interests and wide views, developing, no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a morality of its own, a philosophy of its own’. Internationalists.

Ian asked her why it was that in Austria he enjoyed the Austrian breakfast, in America the American breakfast, in France the French breakfast, yet back home he didn’t eat breakfast. ‘Do you have a theory about that, Edith? About breakfasts?’

‘No . . .’ she said, wary of his teasing. He seemed to like to tease. ‘No, I have no theory on that.’ And then she added, ‘That I recall.’

‘That you “recall”.’ He laughed. ‘I like that.’

She looked at Mr Aide-de-camp.

He did not realise that in life there was quite a bit of forgetting and relearning, even the forgetting of what one’s opinions were.

And she found that at times she had surplus conversation.

He prattled on in his almost charming way. ‘Changes of habitat require different diets. Maybe we’re symbolically eating the prey of the country we’re in.’

‘Cheese?’

He smiled. ‘Touché.’

She felt herself slipping into his slippery, jokey style. How foolish she was with this man. Although she felt herself his intellectual equal – and definitely his superior in experience; and even his equal in wit – she did not like the competitive edge to his banter. That irritating male trait. She was tiring of males, but then, she had tired of males before. And she had always let them drift back into her intimate life.

‘Sleep well, Edith?’

Who admired experience? Experience and wisdom were pieces of the past, always subtly in combat with the young and the new. Handsome bodies, animation, clever glamour, smart new ideas – or what they thought were new ideas. These were the seductive things.

‘I had a restless night – I could hear strange water noises,’ she said, taking a mouthful of freshly baked roll and a sour berry jam she could not identify. The European berries were in season, but the jam would have been last season’s berries. ‘Yourself?’

‘I slept well – I’m a bushman. A few cognacs and all noises sound friendly.’

What sort of bushman could he possibly be, or consider himself to be?

She had known real bushmen and workmen and gardeners from her childhood, employed by her mother and father. Bushmen who did not wear polished R. M. Williams elastic-sided boots, although maybe their boots were dubbined. Nor did they wear hats carefully shaped in front of a mirror. Yes, they smelled of dubbin – those boots, those men. And the real bushmen smelled of horses and hay and work sweat and burned wood, yet were not dirty. They sometimes had something to say about the nature of things that was wisely correct. And would take you down for five shillings – her mother said – if they saw the chance. And who, if encouraged, would speak overlong and become too cocky and were always, in the end, short of sound information. They could be full of bush hokum. Usually were.

‘You would be the first bushman I have known who drank cognac. I might ask for a different room – would they mind?’

‘Of course not, but the hotel is probably full.’

Why did she play to him? She would have no hesitation in asking for another room. She had stayed at all the fine hotels of the world and she felt in control of any hotel in which she stayed. Why, with him, did she pretend to naivety? Some wretched lapse into dotty, outdated womanliness. Yet, she had to remind herself, it was also a female way of commanding him to serve her. What a foolish business it all was. Glad to be out of it. Was she out of it?

‘Quite a few delegations staying here,’ he said, speaking with a full mouth.

‘I think I shall, though,’ she said, jettisoning the humble voice.

‘See Frau Schmidt.’

‘I think I shall. Or do you think I should see someone from the consulate?’ There she went again – pretending to be deferring to him, granting to him worldliness, which she suspected he only barely had.

‘No, see Frau Schmidt.’

He spoke with the confidence of a husband. Ah, but perhaps this was what she was bringing out in him – the role of the ascendant husband. For her own passing amusement and benefit? For the flirting frisson of it? She refused to think of it as a mother-and-son playlet. That had no appeal.

She spread more sour berry jam on her roll, taking his share of the sachets. She hated these new sachets. She preferred hotels that put both the butter and the jam in appropriate dishes with appropriate cutlery. But then, why not demand what pleased one, or, failing the availability of what pleased one, why not, at least, wish for it and remark it.

Remark it to whom?

‘You don’t think I should also inform the consulate?’

‘No.’ He now seemed to be impatient with her. ‘There’s no need. We don’t answer to the consulate.’

She enjoyed pushing him to petty exasperation.

She watched him scrounge another mouthful from the dwindling breakfast food on their table, ignoring replenishment from the laden buffet over near the window in the breakfast room, and she came up with another request that would, she knew, playfully prod his exasperation.

She said, ‘Would you mind dreadfully asking Frau Schmidt for me? Your German is so much better than mine.’

She watched him – he with his coquette somewhere in London; probably adorable, young and bright; although he was a little old now to be playing with young girls. But then, why not? Why not take with both hands all the erotic beauty life had happily offered? She had nearly had her share of that when she was his age, but not quite enough. The war, and just after it, had been good for that sort of thing. Handsome officers in clean uniforms washed, ironed, sponged with cleaning fluid – or with petrol or kerosene – by Viennese valets, who less than a year before, had sponged German uniforms. Looking back, all things considered, she did feel she had been given her share of erotic pleasure and of beauty. And then she’d had Ambrose for those good years – a most rare and exotic creature, whom she now missed dreadfully. In dreams in which he appeared she was psychologically punished. Justly, perhaps. An exotic creature and also a sage beacon. Dear Ambrose. And, leafing through the faulty, flattering, lying calendar of her mind, she had also to acknowledge that she had not had a lover, or sex, for some time. The rare sex with Richard no longer counted.

‘Edith, you know I have very little German. And Frau Schmidt’s English is fine. But yes, I’ll ask her for you.’

His German was hopeless. Her German was much better. ‘Thanks awfully, I can’t cope with that sort of thing. I know I’m being silly . . . These days women should, I know, try.’

She did perhaps act it too well. She should be careful. The wind might change. She took the last of the coffee in the heavy, silvered pot.

She saw him again studying her, while they sat in the auditorium listening to simultaneous translation of the French-speaking African speaker through headphones. The African was stating that nuclear war fears were ‘Western hysteria’ – if this nuclear power was so wonderful, why not allow all countries to have it? She found she could not fully understand his thick French pronunciation without the earphone translation.

They could have it – with IAEA supervision. They did not like supervision. Who did? Pride, false nationalism.

Yes, Ian was again gazing at her. Men and their gazing at women. Her vanity sprang to life as she felt his gaze. Her figure was in good shape and she had the kind of skin that aged well. The fish-and-salad diet of her upbringing had been nutritious and reasonably scientific. Her mother had been a supporter of Philip Muskett and his diets – his
Art of Living in Australia
had been something of a textbook for her. They had been the only family she had known who had eaten olives. She had been taught to always thoroughly wash off the soap from the face and neck. Her neck was not bad at all, and she had missed most of the cruelty of ageing – wrinkling. But she was not going to think about her hands. She was so sorry that gloves were on their way out.

She fancied she looked something like Klimt’s
Judith I
. ‘Oil and gold on canvas.’ No, she saw herself more as Klimt’s
Frau Fritza Riedler
.

She had gone alone to see them again on this visit and had again marvelled tearfully once more at
The Kiss
, which she had seen before the war but which had not been on show the last few times she had been in Vienna. She had not taken Ian because of some crass remark he had made about
The Kiss
now being the property of advertising companies and embarrassingly over-the-top. She had remarked that one had to have the aesthetic strength and penetration to disregard such banal impediments to the seeing of the paintings, to be able to see back to the original blinding emotion of the work. To reclaim the painting from pedestrian familiarity and banalisation. He had shrugged, but she suspected that her remarks had hit home.

Would she ever again kiss passionately? Would she make a pact with Mephistopheles if it were offered? Her recall of the opera was dim. She must borrow one of the
Faust
plays he was reading. To be honest, she had lived the last few years still half-expecting something romantic to arrive in her life.

Ian was squinting again and pulling the skin near his eyes with his fingers. His behaviour no longer flattered nor amused. He was being ridiculous.

As she listened to the speakers, she found she was almost wallowing in the madness of the human species, in its capacity to apply its scientific intelligence to these dangerous elements lying in the ground for billions of years; to dig them up and then use them to shape a weapon that could make the planet uninhabitable. A weapon with ‘no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained’, according to Oppenheimer. ‘Death on a hitherto unimaginable scale.’ She had always trusted him. And Waltz. But not Teller.