Cold Light (88 page)

She hated to agree with him on this, but she knew that, ultimately, he was right. Nevertheless, humane rules of war worked for some of the time, in some places, with some armies. ‘I’m afraid that is right – there is something in military doctrine called double effect, which allows one to do what is otherwise not allowable if it is unavoidable.’

She could see that he was loving this sort of talk. ‘An army can go ahead with an attack upon the enemy even when this means the foreseeable deaths of civilians – as long as this consequence is not the desired effect. But it tells us something that we try to have rules. It tells us something about the human race that we even have such a discussion. It tells us something about . . .’ She petered out.

‘Did you really work on all this sort of thing with the League?’

‘Yes. And healthy breakfast menus.’

She thought she might as well round off with some instruction. ‘We should avoid transferring the behaviour and methods of warfare into civic life, our political life. We should avoid the language of war.’

‘But what if your opponents in this so-called civic life use the rules of warfare?’

‘I suppose we wage war as humanely as we can because we know we have to live with it after the war. Or, these days, we may have to face an international tribunal.’

‘Fighting with our hands tied behind our backs.’

‘Inhumane warfare is not demonstrably effective.’

He took the banana from the fruit bowl after it arrived. She would have liked the banana.

She toyed with the idea of claiming it. She had begun to sense that she could, if she wished, boss him about.

He had begun examining the delegates who were still breakfasting, and she could see that he’d had enough of this.

She took the peach. She had been told never to eat a peach at High Table, where you were likely to be nervous. Too messy. ‘You haven’t shown me your paper. I gave you the privilege of talking at the plenary on the condition you showed me what you intended to say.’ Giving him the privilege of summing up at the plenary session had been an act of affection or forlorn seduction. And she felt it was good for him at this point in his career. Perhaps there was a faintly erotic pleasure in mentoring.

Anyhow, everyone at the conference who mattered was aware of her past, her thinking. It was his turn to take centre stage.

She wanted him to love her, but gratitude was a thousand miles from love.

She had the authority to change or veto his paper.

He turned back to her.

‘Still working on it,’ he said. She knew he would avoid showing it to her until the last possible moment, when nothing much could be changed. Fear of correction. ‘I don’t want Australia to come out of the conference looking like dupes,’ he said.

‘Don’t leave it until the last moment to show me what you’re going to say. After all, my name is going on it. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

He again reached over and gave her hand a squeeze, spontaneously this time.

‘As co-conspirator, Edith, your timing will be everything.’

‘Don’t care for the expression co-conspirator.’

‘Adventuress, then. You are a bit of an adventuress, Edith.’

Adventuress – that was the one word that would win her. ‘And remember,’ she said, ‘I’m indulging you. I don’t want Australia to be censured. Remember, also, to prepare what you will say if you are found out.’

On the night of the plenary, they rehearsed. ‘I shall feel very silly,’ she said, ‘if I begin to giggle.’

He stared at her, perhaps imagining her on the platform with a piece of paper in her hand, giggling in front of the commissioners.

‘You’re a good actress, Edith. When you faked that call to Australia for the telephone number, you were perfect.’

Perhaps these political games were his way of keeping his mind off the girl. Or perhaps – who knows – he enjoyed playing with her?

As planned, Edith absented herself from the horseshoe of commissioners as he sat apart with seven other rapporteurs.

In the conference room, the delegates wore headphones for simultaneous translation, which always gave them the appearance of each being off in a private world.

She remained in the anteroom off to the left, standing with a bored security officer, listening for her cue. It was approaching the time when she should come forward with the note. Number four – Dr Lenrie Peters of Gambia – was rising to speak. She got along well with Lenrie – they had both published one small book of poems; he had published his when he was at Oxford. They had promised to exchange books, if she could ever find a copy from those youthful days.

She cautiously looked into the conference room and she showed herself again. He gave her the nod.

She sidled in to the room, slightly crouched to avoid crossing the line of sight.

She passed him without a glance and handed the sealed note addressed to him to the woman chair. She then turned in a calculated way, controlled in her pacing like a fashion model, and left the dais. She glanced to the nearly all-male audience and was conscious that they were looking at her or, at least, her expensive and beautifully made clothing.

The chairwoman read the name on the embassy envelope and passed it across to Ian. He broke the adhesive security-tape from the back of the envelope, and made as if to read it. He frowned and put the note in his pocket.

She had written on the note, ‘You and your boyish games!’

Back in the anteroom, she watched it play out. Ian looked at his watch, took off his headphones, stood up and went across to the chairwoman, who also removed her headphones. He spoke to her and she looked at her watch, nodding in an irritated way. Ian then left the stage. It had so far worked.

He came to where she was waiting in the anteroom.

He whispered, ‘Well done, Edith. Well done.’

‘I was rather good, I thought.’

‘You were.’

From where they stood, Edith could see that the chairwoman had indicated to Ulyanov that he was to speak next. Ulyanov was not happy. She reported to Ian, who was keeping away from the sight of the chairwoman and the others on stage, that Ulyanov had risen to speak. ‘He’s annoyed.’

‘Good.’

They listened to him begin his report, waited a few minutes and then Ian leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

He returned to the conference room and she followed him, seating herself in the body of the room.

When Ulyanov finished, the unsmiling chairwoman called upon Australia to make the final report.

His report – which he had showed her and to which she had made some changes – was an adroit summing up of the directions they had agreed were best. It skewed the conference off the Soviet agenda and got in a foreshadowing of Synroc with a mention of fellow Australian Dr Ted Ringwood. It also contained a slighting mention of those who put themselves forward as more-realist-than-thou. As she had said to Ian, ‘Those who use the expression “unrealistic” are claiming an authority about the nature and assessment of realism not necessarily granted to them by others.’ It was one of those terms like ‘national interest’, the use of which was intended to give the user the proprietorial rights to any interpretation of it.

In his concluding remarks, he said, ‘If we are smart enough to make these weapons, surely we are smart enough to control them? If we are smart enough to create this form of energy, surely we are smart enough to do so safely?’ She had wanted him to say that while the human race invented horrendous weapons, it also invented the Red Cross and the World Health Organisation and so on.

He ended by saying, ‘Above all, we in the IAEA have to live in a world where all negotiation for nuclear disarmament has to be based on
distrust
.’

There was some stirring of attention at this statement. ‘The IAEA is a body founded on distrust. It exists to create regimes that do not depend on trusting people. It validates its existence by developing techniques for verification and inspection and detection – by being smarter than any one of its members.’

These were her words. She had given them to him to say. She wanted him to shine. It was her gift; a gift of age to youth – or something murkier than that.

Tough talk. He used the expression ‘to practise unremitting suspicion in a diplomatic and urbane way’. It was taken from Galbraith. Actually, they had checked on this quote and found that Galbraith had been talking about what government and public attitudes should be towards corporate business: the market could never be trusted to do the right thing because its motives were mostly unrelated to doing the right thing. It would only do the right thing if it coincided with profitability or expansion.

It was well applied to nuclear diplomacy. And to negotiating with the gods and within all personal pacts made in bed. She had told him, too, that sometimes to mislead the enemy – as a
ruse de guerre
– it was necessary to also mislead one’s allies for a time and to mislead the public for a time.

They had decided not to argue that the IAEA should have its own spy network, but in a way it already did. Through its member states who spied on each other, and who sometimes informally – for their own purposes – fed their intelligence to the secretariat. With nuclear weaponry, however, effective intelligence was the ultimate answer to international safety.

Sooner or later, she thought, electronics would make it possible to eavesdrop on everything of importance that was happening with uranium and weapon-making. The old League of Nations dream had been for open diplomacy. The end to secret agreements among nations, and secret scheming, would come true. But it seemed to her now that there would always be a need for the darker arts. The world was still out of control.

As Ian wound up, she looked about her at the delegates.

The world – life – was based on unremitting suspicion, right down to children and parents, husbands and wives. Parents spied constantly on their children and vice versa – the reading of correspondence and journals, keyhole listening. Respite came only from establishing that suspicion was unfounded. And respite was temporary, but enough to make life liveable. We spend our lives seeking someone we can trust.

She heard him say, ‘The technology of detection will replace treaties.’ Her line.

She thought the most innovative evolution of governance now was the development of strong regulation regimes of distrust, cunning oversight practices, monitoring, clever watchdogs and accountancy forensics.

Consequently, it followed that we were only free and safe when we were not afraid of what others knew about us. As long as we conceal ourselves from some sense of shame or guilt we must be unsafe. Safety lay in candour – the open personality in an open society. She wished they had been able to get this into the summary speech.

Poor Ulysses tried to find it with Circe, whom he begged to give him ‘a binding oath’ that she would ‘never plot some new intrigue to harm me’.

Poor Ulysses.

The saddest of truths.

For now, there was no stopping the spread of the weapons or the threat of their use. It could only be slowed, impeded, believing that there was some evidence in the human story that promised that with intelligent innovations of diplomacy or science or technique, the subversion and unknitting of protocols and treaties would be kept sufficiently under control to prevent collapse, and so permit us to go about our daily lives with some expectation of safety and fairness.

Ambrose had introduced her to what he called ‘the politics of distrust’. He had been a
friend she could not trust
– at least, in some parts of his life. She could trust him to care for her in a crisis, but after the early days of his spying, and what she had seen as his betrayal of the League, and then in his sexual wandering with young men, they had made a grand alliance based on acceptable distrust – an etiquette of distrust, a respectful way of distrusting. They had found the joys of domestic intimacy within this etiquette. Their distrust had become almost a style of humour within their love. Distrust could be witty, respectful. She had found that there could be a loving distrust. She had known he had spied and probably had continued to spy, and that he could not tell her. And, of course, she knew from very early in their relationship that he led a double life within his sexuality. He and she had discovered that the biblical betrayals of adultery could be turned into erotic intimacy by candour. Diplomacy was distrust within civilised urbanity – hearty laughter, charming conviviality and stiff face. It was like a masked ball, but it served a purpose and made good things happen.