Cold Light (48 page)

Ambrose said, ‘The American show trials.’

It was typical political banter that went on between them. Ambrose said the US was copying the Soviet Union’s phoney pre-war trials of dissidents known as the show trials. Frederick routinely claimed that the Soviet trials revealed real conspiracies against the Soviet Union while the American trials were political persecution.

Edith privately rolled her eyes to Janice and turned around to ask Frederick, ‘Is that the line from the Cominform? Does Moscow send out instructions about which film you are supposed to see every week?’

Frederick ignored her. She pointed out that the Cominform obviously didn’t stop Frederick and Janice accepting invitations to sit in the High Commission’s reserved seats. Ambrose had been worried about it at first, but decided that – given the Communist Party was not illegal – there could be no objection. ‘And,’ he said, ‘we sit in the dark.’ He did ask them to forgo their beliefs and stand for the Queen when the anthem was played at the beginning of the session, ‘After all, Edith forgoes her beliefs – she never wants to stand.’ And then he said, ‘As for me, it’s part of my job to stand for the Queen. I’m a courtier.’

She sensed that as two couples who were technically – and passionately – opponents, they all enjoyed the frisson of sitting together in the HC seats.

At the Arthur Circle house for coffee and drinks, they laughed about the theatre cat, which during the film had clawed its way up the curtain beside the screen.

Frederick claimed the film was about ordinary American communists standing up against the injustice of the American system despite the desertion of their so-called friends.

She said that the film was simpler than that. ‘It was a Greek tragedy – kill or be killed. For his own peace of mind and safety, Gary Cooper, the retired sheriff, had no option but to kill the baddies who were out to take revenge on him; otherwise, his and his wife’s lives would be under an unliveable threat. The town was right to see it as a private matter for Cooper: he was no longer the sheriff and the baddies were after
him
, not the town. In the code of the west, it was Cooper’s problem, not theirs – the law had collapsed; the judge had left town; the legal force of the citizen posse had collapsed; and so on. It was really Cooper’s problem. I fail to see where the House Un-American Activities Committee comes in to it.’

She was down on Cooper’s Quaker bride, played by Grace Kelly, for deserting her husband because of her religious beliefs against violence; for not seeing there was no option for them but to use violence and that her Quaker non-violent approach was inadequate in the face of perilous reality.

Ambrose tried to defend the Quaker wife, more for the sake of analysis, she suspected, than any belief in it. ‘As I understand it, the Quaker would argue that you used reason and goodwill to extinguish violence; if that fails, you use avoidance, you flee. Under the law in most places the citizen has a duty to
avoid
violence when it is offered – except in parts of America, where they feel it is a duty to defend oneself; and if that fails, you suffer the violence but do not offer violence in return. I suppose the Quakers would argue that their submitting to the fatal outcome of the violence at least minimises the violence by limiting it to one side. Something like that.’

‘Duty to flee seems an endorsement of cowardice. Sometimes we stand and fight,’ said Frederick.

‘Or it could be seen as a higher bravery, a harder wisdom,’ she said, and then turned to Ambrose. ‘Is that the teachings of your Quaker aunt? The aunt who always wore brown? As I recall, at our wedding she wore a severely simple but attractive light-brown dress, almost ankle length, gathered at the waist.’

In some ways, she would have liked for them to have had a simple Quaker wedding. It was the only religion she respected. She wasn’t a pacifist, but perhaps she was drifting towards that. If she was, she certainly wasn’t ready to talk about it.

Ambrose laughed. ‘My Quaker aunt would have stared the killers down. That might be the fierce Quaker way. Or talked them down.’

Janice came in, ‘So if the Quaker solution failed, Cooper and his Quaker wife should’ve offered themselves as sacrificial victims?’

‘Can’t see Gary Cooper doing that,’ Frederick said.

‘Would have made a more galvanising film, perhaps,’ Ambrose said. ‘I wonder if the Quakers send out instructions to their members about which films depict them. I supposed they will have quiet and gentle discussions around this film.’

There was a knock on the door.

Edith looked at her watch. She stood and went over to stop the record that was playing and then went to the window and looked out.

‘The ASIO,’ Frederick said.

Edith glanced at Ambrose. ‘I can’t see who it is. Will I answer?’

‘Better,’ Ambrose said. ‘Could be Chauffeur Geoff from the HC with a cable telling us that we are at war.’

She went to the door and opened it. It was Theodor and Amelia Richter. ‘Oh,’ she said, with some relief.

Amelia said, ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’

‘No, no, come in.’

‘We saw the lights on and thought we’d poke our head in. We were driving about – we’re having a free night. The kids are being looked after by the Herberts’ older girl. We saw another Anglia parked outside.’

‘We went to see
High Noon
,’ Theodor said.

‘So did we. We didn’t see you there. We were high and mighty in the loge – the HC seats.’ Ambrose and she had shared a number of dinners, picnics and drinks with the Richters. They were somewhat Bloomsbury – in fact, they had actually known Strachey’s nephew and some of Ambrose’s connections with the Bloomsbury crowd before the Second World War. When at Oxford, Richter had been a friend of Lowes Dickinson, and Richter said that he had travelled a lot in Spain, Morocco and Istanbul with the philosopher Harold Cox, who was, Richter said, a ‘repressed’ homosexual but had never made an approach to him. Ambrose told her later that Cox was very far from being a repressed homosexual and that Spain, Morocco and Istanbul were well-known pleasure grounds for those Englishmen who fancied exotic young men as lovers.

They were one of the couples that Ambrose and she now had in their circle – that is, after Ambrose had dowsed his reactions to their German origin. Actually, they had dowsed it themselves. One night they had laughed and said, ‘Think of us as Danish – we do. When we arrived here after the war we posed as Danes so that we could rent accommodation.’ Edith had told them that when she had first met Ambrose in Geneva, he wouldn’t drink German beer because of the First World War. Amelia had said, ‘I’ve noticed that when he comes to our house for dinner he’s more than happy to eat my apfelstrudel. But I should say that with most people we are always careful not to serve German dishes. We want nothing to do with Germany. Apfelstrudel is as far as we go.’

In the entry hall, Edith took their coats and scarves while they, as always, looked around admiringly.

‘We really came to punish ourselves with envy about your house. You’ve seen our fibro shack. And we were trying to stretch out our night of freedom from the children. Actually, we came looking for fun and thought of you and Ambrose.’

She knew it was unfair, more than unfair. It was a small, secret corruption. The Richters had four kids and were living in a prefabricated sort of house, formerly from an air-force base or somewhere. ‘You’ll soon rise to the top of the housing queue.’

‘Oh,’ Amelia said, going over to the newly painted rocking horse, now an ornament in the entrance hall. ‘You’ve finished painting the horse. He is resplendent!’ She gave the horse a push, something all visitors were inclined to do, and the horse came to life and rocked.

‘Ned. We call him Ned after a horse I had as a child. Ambrose did most of the painting. I cleaned up his drips.’

‘Good evening, Ned,’ Amelia said.

‘And we found him his missing glass eye.’

She ushered them into the drawing room and said, ‘You’ve met my brother Frederick, and Janice.’

The two couples shook hands. They had become more relaxed socially on the two occasions they had all been together, although Frederick and Theodor sparred rather tetchily at times – they had an ongoing argument about Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
. Frederick said it was flawed ‘both historically and artistically’, and took the position of a whining and wishful old-guard Menshevik. Theodor said he trusted the account of the brutal interrogation techniques and general repression of Stalin’s Russia, and said it had caused him to leave communism behind. Frederick said Koestler hadn’t been there, he didn’t know. Theodor had said, ‘Nor were you.’ Frederick had come back, ‘I was there. I was there in the Soviet Union before the war, at the time of the trials.’ Frederick was somewhat insecurely combative with a professor of bourgeois anthropology who had been a communist himself and knew his Marx. Theodor described himself publicly as the first socialist professor of anthropology in Australia, but for Frederick it was the wrong brand of socialism. Theodor and Amelia had both publicly opposed the banning of the Communist Party, and because the Party had also changed its line to one of cooperation with non-communist allies – what Frederick grandly called a popular front and she mockingly called the
front impopulaire
– they got along.

By coincidence, Frederick and Amelia knew each other. Amelia was part of the Canberra Snowy Book Bus with Celia, which took books, magazines and gramophone records to the workers on the Snowy Mountain scheme. Frederick liked the idea and had suggested some books that should be on the bus.

Ambrose and she and the Richters were closer politically, and she had discovered that they – she and Theodor – had both refused invitations to speak at communist activities in the last couple of years: she at the Peace Congress and he at the Democratic Rights Council. Theodor said he had done it because the communist organisations ‘exploited liberal principles for illiberal ends’. She had agreed. And later, she had said to him about her brother Frederick and Russia in the 1930s, ‘There are some very different ways of being
there
.’

He had said, ‘Yes, there are many ways of being there when you are there.’

As they settled down with drinks, the discussion went to the case of the British SIS agent, Philby, who was suspected of being a double-agent and pensioned off last year, but not prosecuted.

Ambrose said he had no doubt that Philby had sold out to the Soviet Union, along with two other British SIS agents, Burgess and Maclean, who had defected a short time back. ‘They all hung out together at Cambridge. I dined with Burgess just before we came out here. Before his defection. His constant heavy drinking was showing. The guy used to have one of the most rapid and acute minds I knew. Now he’s just an imitation – and a pretty bad one – of what he once was.’

Frederick said that the American and British secret services were falling apart because of defections to the Soviet Union. ‘I also think that homosexuality made them unreliable in a secret service. Blackmail and so on.’

Amelia brought up the report
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, by an American, Doctor Kinsey. She said that for the first time we had an idea of how many people were homosexual.

To Edith’s surprise, Janice said that Kinsey put the number of homosexuals at about ten per cent.

A surprised Frederick turned to Janice, and said in an interrogating voice, ‘You’ve read the Kinsey report?’

‘I dipped into it.’

‘You didn’t mention it to me.’

‘Dipped into it – not
read
it. It’s not really a reading book; there are pages and pages of statistics. But yes, I read the conclusions.’ Janice was uneasy, as if guilty of some Party infringement. ‘I suppose it says something about the sickness of America. But Turner had a copy – I looked at it when we were last in Melbourne.’

Frederick continued with his interrogation. ‘You never mentioned it.’

‘For God’s sake, it was lying around at their place in Glen Iris.’

‘I would consider it something to be mentioned. Anyhow, it applies only to America.’

Edith intervened, laughing. ‘You think sexual behaviour would be so different in other countries?’

‘I do,’ Frederick said. ‘I suspect that the Trobriand Islands would give different answers. I suspect that people in the Soviet Union would give different answers. Obviously, if you radically change the economic system you will change human nature, and these sorts of sexual deviations would fade away. Lysenko. It’s science.’

‘
Lysenko
!’ She laughed. They’d had this argument about genetics on another occasion. But she could see that her question was silly.

Amelia said, ‘I suspect that the Russian revolution stopped at the bedroom door.’

Edith said, ‘I wonder if the Kinsey Report will stop at the bedroom door in most countries.’

Ambrose said, ‘Which side of the bedroom door?’

Edith said, ‘I suppose we all got the gist of the Kinsey Report from the newspapers – in so far as they said anything in detail. I’ve ordered a copy from Hatchards. I’ll pass it on when we’ve finished.’

Amelia said she had already ordered a copy. ‘Not from the local bookshop – from Sydney.’ She blushed.

Frederick pursued Janice, still unsettled that she had actually seen a copy and he hadn’t. Looking directly at her, he said, ‘And what did you learn that you didn’t know?’

‘Quite a deal,’ Janice said.

‘Name something,’ Frederick said loudly.

Janice was uncomfortable, but tried to laugh it off. ‘For example, I’d never seen a book refer calmly to “animal contacts” in sex.’

‘That says something about America,’ Frederick said.

Edith said, ‘Oh, I suppose that sort of thing never happens on the farms of the Soviet Union.’

Theodor said, ‘And in ancient Greece – and probably in Greece this very day. Even in Australia.’

‘Many more sheep to choose from here,’ Ambrose said.

They laughed. Edith realised it was the first discussion they had all had about sexual matters.

‘I seriously doubt that it still happens in the Soviet Union,’ Frederick said, and turned to Janice, still pursuing her. ‘What else?’