Cold Light (22 page)

‘Can you eat them?’ he asked, picking one and smelling it.

She thought she should demonstrate, and got up and picked a cumquat for him and for herself.

‘Open up.’ She put it in his mouth.

He pulled back up.

‘You eat it whole, skin and all.’ She nearly said, as you would an ortolan, and recalled how, as a young woman, she had been instructed to eat the tiny bird, bones and all, as a cat would.

‘You see, Mr Thomas, you do not have to peel it. The sweetness is in the rind. It is a Meiwa cumquat. Some cumquat should be cooked, but this one you can eat.’

He smiled from his chewing mouth.

For want of something to say, she said, ‘My mother’s maiden name was Thomas.’

He smiled. There was nothing he could say in return, she thought. She sensed he was reluctant to leave, but she shooed him away, saying she had to get to work.

He left, waving to her from the corridor, saying again, ‘It’s super . . .’ He hesitated and then said, ‘Campbell Berry.’

‘Oh, call me Edith.’

That afternoon, she went to the storage area at the hotel and found her box labelled ‘office’ from the League days, and by taxi- cab brought it to her office. There was a bunch of flowers in one of her office vases with a note from Mr Thomas, thanking her for introducing him to the cumquat.

She smiled – she had an ally. The flowers were artfully arranged; he was a sensitive soul.

From the box she unpacked her office handtowels, but found them now covered with mould. She threw them away into her new cane paper bin. She unpacked a desk photograph of her parents; a photograph of Frederick and her from childhood; and a photograph of herself and Latham on the steps outside the Parliament in Melbourne, when she had been his assistant on the Independent Liberal Union campaign, which had got him into Parliament. There was also a framed
Punch
cartoon she had, showing a hotel called League of Nations whose advertisement read: ‘The League of Nations Hotel. Healing Air. A Peaceful Outlook from every Window. No Hot Water.’ The framed cartoon had been given to her by Latham and the others in the office when she had left Australia all those years ago. She thought it now inappropriate. Perhaps not. It was about failure in many people’s eyes, and it dated her. She put it back in the box.

She had her framed bachelor’s degree in science. That dated her too, but they would have to study it closely to find the date. There were some desk ornaments, including an antique brass microscope from the late eighteenth century, which her mother had bought for her as a graduation present. She also had a silver envelope knife, which her father had given her when she first went to work with Latham, and a fruit knife he had given her when she had left for Europe. She smiled. Had both her father’s gifts been his way of arming her with daggers against the dangers of life? What would Dr Vittoz back in Geneva say about daggers? She knew exactly what he would say: her father was also equipping her for the skirmishes of a male world by giving her symbolic maleness.

She had never put the microscope on her desk back at the League, but decided now that she would have it. She cleaned the lens with a corner of her cleaning cloth and looked through it at her hand. She saw the crevices of ageing as if looking at a land in drought. Thank God, she thought, that we do not have microscopic vision.

It was tarnished. It needed a polish. Perhaps she should have it lacquered.

Finally, she stood on the desk and removed the globe from the light fitting. From now, any lighting required would be from the desk lamps only. And she positioned her Rolodex of telephone numbers to give it the touch of professional efficiency. The colours of the cards for different categories pleased her. But she had so few numbers and so few categories.

Gibson visited her renovated office the next day. He looked at the old office furniture in the corridor. ‘Campbell Berry, you really take the cake. Can’t wait for McLaren’s reaction when he sees it.’ He was half-laughing. Then he spoke seriously. ‘You’re not supposed to furnish your own office, and I have to stress once again that this is not a permanent position. ’

‘I know. The furniture goes with me when I go.’

And then he added, ‘Oh, by the way, it’s
très chic
.’ And he gave a small grin.

‘I won’t hold you responsible, Mr Gibson. Would you like to sit in the Swan chair?’

He hesitated. ‘Go on, don’t be afraid.’ He tried out the chair.

‘We live out our lives in offices, Mr Gibson, and I intend to live in surroundings that please me. We all need
éclat
in our lives.
Pizzazz
. If I am to help design the ideal city, then that city begins –’ she pointed down to the floor of her office and twirled her finger – ‘here in this room.’

Gibson smiled indulgently.

‘We need a place that greets people and shows them that Canberra people are different, or that those who live here will be changed, and that we are making something brand new here. We will be brand new people.’

‘I doubt that you’ll have time for many visitors, Campbell Berry.’

‘Oh, just call me Edith.’

Maybe she would have visitors; maybe not. More likely a throng.

She went on, ‘Our offices should be the face of the department – and of our National Capital Planning and Development Committee. The face of the capitol. The physicals contain the philosophical.’

Gibson then surprised her by quoting Blake, a poet her father had detested. Mr Gibson put on something of a mock poetic voice: ‘ “What are those Golden Builders doing? . . . The stones are Pity, and the bricks well-wrought Affections / . . . Prepare the furniture –” ’ Here Gibson raised his voice and looked pointedly at Edith – ‘ “The curtains, woven tears and sighs, wrought into lovely forms. / For Comfort; there the secret furniture of Jerusalem’s chamber / Is wrought . . . / Go on, Builders in hope! tho’ Jerusalem wanders far away / . . . among the dark Satanic wheels.” ’

He was very pleased with himself.

Edith clapped. ‘Bravo, Gibson, I am so impressed. I had a dear friend from the League days who was fond of Blake. My father less so.’

‘I used to know it all,’ he said. ‘Had a school teacher who drummed the poem into us. I use the lines in speeches I have to give – goes over well.’

‘It has been a poetic morning. I was quoting Shaw Neilson to myself and to Mr Thomas.’ She pointed to the cumquat tree. ‘ “A light, she said, not of the sky / Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.” ’

Gibson ate a cumquat and left, shaking his head and chuckling. He turned back and said, ‘I will arrange for them to take away the old furniture. And, Campbell Berry, you send along any of the brand new people you come across.’ He still seemed to be having trouble taking her in.

During the day, people working in their section of the Department of Interior came by to look in at her office and admire it (or not, but if not, they kept it to themselves), mostly standing at the door, which she had left open. They stood as if looking at an exhibit in a show. She would look up at them – draughtsmen, girls who worked adding machines and others – and wave, invite them in, but mostly they shook their head and said, ‘Very nice,’ and then scampered off.

She would have liked to have painted the walls, but that would have been disruptive and definitely
going too far
. Instead, she would hunt down some tapestries or woven wall hangings to cover it.

Her major desk was for her secretarial work and the minor desk for her studying of the plans of the city, which she returned to again and again, although, as it turned out, she found she did most of her work at the minor desk. After a while she bowed to her true status and switched the desk functions.

She thought again about Gibson. She liked that he could quote Blake. But they were not one about the lake and she saw other disagreements arising about the city – ‘a city the like of which has never existed before’.

A few days later, Edith met Gibson on the steps as they were leaving work and he told her that McLaren had called the previous day to ask if she had left for the day. When Gibson had told him that she had, McLaren had then driven over to look at her office, sat in her chair and, without a comment, left. ‘He did swivel himself.’

‘Is that a good sign – the swivelling? Or is he going to toss me?’

‘No, he won’t toss you, but he may appropriate the furniture for himself.’

‘I’ve had some illuminations,’ she said. ‘A capitol is the memory of a nation. It’s made up of records, photographs, books, paintings, films, relics, scientific specimens, its botany, its street names, its architecture, building names, photographs, minutes of meetings, monuments and all those sacred relics, as Charles Bean calls them up there at the War Memorial. It’s our desire not to be forgotten. To have our existence recorded and recognised by others. It is a way of eternal life – the only way – in my theological opinion. Not only soldiers. The city will be our Chartres Cathedral, only more – Chartres tells only the Bible stories. This capitol tells everyone’s story. Everyone’s name is here. Everyone’s life experience will be here.’

‘Enough, Campbell Berry, enough.’

Enough of educating Mr Gibson. ‘So there,’ she said, giving him a big smile.

He frowned. ‘Are you saying “capi
tol
” ’

‘Oh, it’s just my preference – my affectation. I take the word from
capitolium
. From the Roman days. Just for the stateliness of its sound. Maybe it will catch on.’

‘We all call it the capi
tal
. Griffin used the word capitol to describe a building he had in mind for Capital Hill – a sort of people’s palace. Another thing that will not happen.’

‘You’re the only one who’s noticed.’

He shrugged. ‘Have it your own way, which, I suppose, you will. Have a good evening.’ He went off, further perplexed perhaps, but not, she thought, unhappily so.

The incoming mail, dictation and files delivered daily to her desk gradually took her away from questions of grand planning, and pushed her down to the secretarial detail of her actual work there in Gibson’s empire. She had to go to Albert Hall to check on the condition of the seating and to count the cups and saucers. All sparkling because of the Jubilee. Brand new seating. She did put in a report on the condition of the velvet curtains and their gold tassels. Pity they had not been replaced with the Jubilee refurbishing. She could perhaps chase up someone to do that, get Interior to pay. While there, she thought about banners that might be hung for the Congress. It took her back to her work at the League Pavilion at the World’s Fair Exhibition just before the war, where she had been the boss, or, she smiled, had made herself the boss.

Between counting cups and typing up dictation, Edith studied the original Griffin plans and the changes that had been made to them and the submissions made over the years. She could see that as the planning committees and others had wandered from the original, they had done so with very little vision and with much dullness and awkwardness. She could see that some of the changes were obvious, could not have been foreseen by Griffin, and should have been made. She marvelled at the fluency of the Griffin Plan. They seemed in many cases to have sacrificed distinction for pragmatics. The job of creating a distinctive city had been too big for them. Although, she conceded,
distinction
without pragmatic merit was empty, just as a pragmatic solution without distinction was a lost aesthetic opportunity. She hoped that the talked-about Senate Select Committee on Canberra would correct the errors. If she had anything to do with the committee it would.

She was happy that the street-naming was by theme – explorers, scientists, literary greats.

She saw that Griffin’s geometric design would identify Canberra as a distinctive place – that the streets and roads that broke away from the old grid pattern were themselves a work of some art and reminded people that they were in a special city.

She had expressed the opinion that Gibson was wrong for wanting to reduce some of the Griffin 200-yard-wide roads to 100 yards.

Gibson had said that the roads were eating up too much land.

‘I thought we had plenty of land.’