Cold Light (55 page)

‘Yes.’

She looked back at the man in the chair. Perhaps, she was misreading this situation; perhaps, it was simply sexual solace that this man wanted, a form of grieving. He smiled at her, and by the smile she knew that he was as entangled as she.

Someone had to hurt. ‘I am going now,’ she said. ‘We will talk more about everything.’

‘Yes, go now. We do not have to talk about it. If you so wish.’

She held the receiver, waiting for him to put it down at his end, but he didn’t. Biting her lip for decisiveness, she gently put it down.

Wearing the bracelet of the dead wife, she went then to the man in the armchair, allowing the kimono to fall open to show her lace pants and her breasts, feeling the dampness of her pants. She was proud that her breasts had not dropped.

She could again feel lewd, and she thought,
Oh, I love it so
. Even if someone, a dear one, had to hurt.

‘How did he take it?’

She made a movement with her mouth, her shoulder, and gave a resigned smile. She knew Ambrose was frightened and hurting and that no insouciance could deal with that special fear of rejection.

The man held his arms to her and she saw he was erect, and she pulled apart his robe, going onto him in the chair. She knelt on him, lowering herself onto his penis, which slipped up into her wetness, and she felt youthfully lithe. As she wrapped her arms around his head, the bracelet bit into his neck and her wrist. She had the strange physical sensation that the penis was hers.

The next two days unfolded in a fog of lasciviousness and they did not go to their places of work.

She did not contact Ambrose.

She observed how ready she had been for something to envelope her like this, to arouse her to her full dormant womanhood, to engulf her, to smash up what had been her private life, which she saw now in all its aberrance and which, since returning to Australia, had become edged now and then with the fear of being exposed.

Although she was now in one sense being aberrant in another way, she felt unthreatened by her recklessness and she delighted in it.

They ate eggs in all their ways, and tinned food on toast, and they drank alcohol and played music, but did not seem to become very drunk and nor did they have hangovers.

They talked science, uranium, the attempted banning of the communists. They even discussed the Kinsey reports on male sexual behaviour and on female behaviour, which, of course, no one had really read apart from the conclusions. She mentioned to Richard that she had combed the report on male behaviour and found no reference to cross-dressing. She said she did not know what to make of this omission. Was cross-dressing beyond the pale, even for Kinsey? She had raised this as a sophisticated and objective observation, but had watched him to see what he might say or do, to perhaps see if she had not ended up catching the same sort of fish. He said nothing, made no joke. Richard had been at the Legacy concert and remembered Ambrose’s act. His only comment was, ‘He was very good, very convincing.’ Not that the act had, for most people, anything to do with Ambrose’s personal life.

He was something of a free-thinker, but inclined more towards the bonds of life, and a life woven around kinship and public service. He liked the customs and unfolding intricacies of being a father and of having children growing around him. He was not a bohemian. He was not another Robert, who had pretended to the bohemian life but had turned out to be something else. A
poseur
. He always talked to win, never to learn. This was not like her marriage with Robert at all.

She told him of the problem of her brother, the communist, and he said that it did not matter; there would be no trouble as long as political good sense was maintained. He would manage all that. He spoke with the voice of a giant, promising her everything she desired and needed, and she smiled. She believed he was a giant and she believed she was a giantess, too. She felt powerful again, as if she could ask and get what she wanted from the world. For herself, for them.

For her, this would include a family. It was a thought that had arrived and introduced itself. The children were metaphorically playing in the wings of their passion. It appealed to her mightily.

‘There will have to be a decent time pass before anything formal or public about us can occur,’ he said. ‘It’s a bugger.’

He wanted to parade her, yet he was also perhaps glad of the legal obstacle, giving them both a time to cool off.

‘I understand that. I know that divorce takes time.’

She had said the word. He didn’t flinch.

‘Quite a few de facto relationships around the town. Even in the public service. Modern times. Menzies has Barwick looking at making divorce easier. But it’s about the children, the loss of their mother – time will have to pass. ’

She nodded. ‘Of course.’

He said, ‘There’ll have to be a time before I introduce you to the kids.’

‘Of course.’

‘Everything will go well. They’ll love you.’

‘We’ll take it slowly.’ She did not want to take it slowly, but she saw that it would have to be a slow thing.

‘You will go back to your house?’ he asked.

Of course, this would make Richard uneasy. Ambrose would go on as if nothing was to change permanently.

The big empty house. Ambrose and she had never filled it; they had never occupied it. They had rattled around in it. They never
wore
their house, in the Greek sense of a house being a frame for oneself; a stage on which we are supposed to act out the eternal drama of intimacy and procreation. Life and death.

He said, ‘When the time is right, I would rather we moved there. Would that be too hard for you?’

This surprised her. She had supposed that they would find a new house, a place of their own, although that was still nigh impossible in the city. A clean start.

‘Will the children wish to leave their home?’

‘Children take what comes. They have no comparisons, no measure.’

‘The HC pays for the house at Arthur Circle at present, but I think that it is registered in my name at Interior. A bureaucratic hiccup.’

The giant spoke. ‘I can fix all that.’

She knew she could not live in his house. She could desecrate it, but could not live in it. But she thought they could truly occupy Arthur Circle.

She was breathless at how they had moved from their errant lovemaking in such a short space of life, to talk on such an ultimate scale; how the unorthodox had so easily found itself the shapes and costumes of convention.

Back at Arthur Circle alone – Ambrose was at his office – she opened the window and looked over the street and the gardens and saw everything anew. Canberra in its silver December afternoon light. Her life had turned over; freshness had filled it. She felt great invulnerability. She had no dread at the idea of facing Ambrose and making it clear that this was not a fling. This was something far, far more serious. But she would choose the time to bring this home to him.

As she imagined the man and his children there in the house, she had inklings of what it felt to be the woman of the house of a family, the children running noisily up the stairs, a ball repeatedly bouncing off the outside wall.

Now, two children would come to live and play in this house and she would have a husband who was a father. She was to be a stepmother, a wife.

During the lost days at his house, she had worn a dress of the wife, but had rejected sensible wifely underwear, choosing instead to wear none while hers dried after washing.

She had also continued to wear the bracelet, which he had recognised and acknowledged, and to which he had not objected, tangling it into their perversity. Maybe it was a ceremonial bracelet – a seal of office – marking her ascendancy to the role of his wife and the passing of his former wife from his life. Maybe it represented continuity of the dead wife’s life. Maybe, as he had said, it would please her to see the family re-formed.

She was impatient to take on the new roles.

She cupped her breasts with both her hands, the breasts of a stepmother, mother. A motherly breast, a motherly bosom; she tried out the words, and wondered how it would feel to have the heads of children resting on her covered breast. Would they lay their heads on her breast?

Would they come to her? Would they obey her? Would they laugh with her? Why did she think that the love and passion she felt for their father would engulf them also? She knew it would.

Richard told her that he felt himself recreated as a young man. She had smiled at that – he was still rather young in her eyes. She was uncertain whether he saw her as a woman being ‘around his age’ or whether he preferred to see her as the Older Woman. They were different parts; perhaps she could play both. She was sure that another part of her attraction for him was that she was a Woman From Abroad. The problem with feminine mystiques was to know how to fulfil them for the lover in all their sensual detail at the appropriate mood, and yet still be the true person one was. Yes, surely they were also part of the
true person
. One must not lose the mystiques in the mire of the everyday.

And she had unleashed within herself yet another woman. A woman she hardly remembered had awoken the sleeping hormones of her fertility, even if only as poetry of her mind. At least for a time, she wanted the poetry of procreation to be part of their romance.

And what of her brother? Of Janice? Of the Richters? Of their other friends? His friends? How would they receive this change?

She did not know what had happened about Emily. She would telephone her. Some explanation would be needed. The house seemed to be spick and span. Ambrose must have spoken to her. They would have to get their story straight.

And Ambrose – how to fit him into her life? This was the second time they had parted ways, and she knew she could not help him through this time. Others would have to do that.

It was a pity that Allan had returned to London.

She had not told Richard about her earlier marriage to Robert. She would erase her first marriage, expunge it. Two marriages were socially possible; three tipped one over into another category, perhaps into being a scarlet woman, a foolish woman, an unstable woman. A film star could have three marriages, not she. And she thought it was definitely time to drop her age a little.

Something also warned her. Not a shrill warning, hardly even detectable. It was a warning that at some point in the foggy future she would have to pay something for all this that had been granted to her. It would not be straightforward. And even if Ambrose now passed from her life, she would have to live with the truth that Ambrose, in an unfathomable way, was her: he was she. It was the implications of this that she did not understand, but sensed that it was now part of her past, not her future; perhaps there had been some final subtle amalgamation of herself.

Would she still follow Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson’s view of marriage? Independence of movement; independent friendships; separate rooms – no bedroom squalor; separate finances.

She fancied that he would be a man who would wish to continue with a solid, old-fashioned marriage. She thought she could manage that. Perhaps it was a mature thing to find herself with a man who was not a mirror image of herself.