Cold Light (71 page)

Yet as she walked to the bus stop she realised that this Janice frightened her, and she wondered if she could face her again tomorrow. She would.

On the bus she pondered the change in Janice. Nervous tension from Frederick’s collapse? The collapse of the Party? Or had she always been thus? Had the friendly – and in the past, the almost intimate – Janice been only some attempt to seduce her into the Party? To use her in some way? Had this Janice been there all along, concealed for whatever reason? Or had this crisis in the Party evolved her, hatched her?

It was a repudiation of her brother and it was a repudiation of Edith. More, the venom probably contained Janice’s last repudiation of her own family.

Back at Arthur Circle, she pondered whether she was a drunk. She never lost control of her body when she drank. And rarely of her tongue. Sometimes, perhaps, of her vocabulary. She did not see her drinking life as wasted. It had been the accompaniment to some of the most memorably pleasant and educative of times. These days, she stopped well before drinking too much, and she rarely had a hangover. She feared at times that it was doing harm to her body, but then it anaesthetised her angst, though it was not as good at doing that as it had once been.

She was often pleased with the poise of her intoxication and considered that, when she was drinking, she was nearly always perfectly drunk. And she did not go to sleep in her clothes or fail to remove her make-up. But she had also learned that there were knots in one’s life that alcohol did not loosen, no matter how long those knots were soaked or how often. In fact, some knots when soaked in alcohol became tighter over time.

And, from what she had seen and heard, there was much heavy drinking done among the leadership of the Party, which was far from perfect.

As for being bourgeois, she was certainly rich. She had not planned to be rich. And she used very little of her money on herself. She still sent money to the International School in Geneva, to the Humanist Society and other social causes, and often tried to think of productive ways of using it.

As for being a snob, that also hurt. She knew she had picked up European ways, but she no longer considered these as superior – except for gastronomy. She knew too much about human frailty to feel superior. She had a personal taste and aesthetics, but had long accepted that there were many such personal aesthetics. And her upbringing had been very egalitarian. To hell with Janice.

She was inclined to excuse Janice because she was having her own inner crisis, but unlike Frederick, she was rushing to the other side of the ship, hoping to stop it tipping over. She was in another disarray, but disarray all the same.

Then another realisation arrived: Janice was dumping Frederick on her, and dumping her as a friend.

F
or some months, Frederick remained withdrawn – what a doctor friend of hers described as neurotic inertia – but he then began to pot plants. Edith visited him frequently, each time girding herself to face down Janice. She rehearsed her replies to Janice: sometimes conciliatory; sometimes abrasive. She also wrote a letter to her, but did not post it. Edith saw that she was reluctant to try to regain affection because it put her at risk of being rejected a second time.

However, it turned out that Janice discreetly absented herself on her visits, which Edith took as a kind of victory in their war of moral nerves. And then one day she entered the house, calling out both their names, and as she looked around she deduced that Janice had left the house entirely. Frederick confirmed that she had left for good: gone to Melbourne.

She understood that those who remained in the Party were not to talk with those who had left or been expelled, but she would have expected that wives and husbands were somehow exempt from that.

Although she knew that the Canberra branch took Party discipline more lightly, she had, last week in Manuka, seen a Party member cross the road to avoid someone she knew to be one of the defectors.

She was left to deal with her wreck of a brother. She brought books or magazines and food delicacies, but he could barely converse, giving off only broken lines of inner thoughts, coughed from his mouth in disgust or in bewilderment. He would not see a doctor, saying, ‘Can a psychiatrist change the Party leadership? Can a psychiatrist change the economic system?’

During her visits, he kept at work on his ever-expanding potted garden, as if building a terracotta wall around himself, working robotically while she followed him around, chatting on as best she could.

He said, ‘They come free from the government nursery – socialist plants. But they’re not members of the Party.’ He made his joke without laughter.

When Frederick became more talkative, he seemed mostly still to interrogate himself for his errors, as if answering to some ghostly tribunal.

Once, he turned from his potting and said, ‘Remember I said I wasn’t a proper revolutionary?’ He went back to his potting and then said, ‘Jan’s the revolutionary. I wavered. A revolutionary does not waver.’

She took to bringing him money. He would take the money, shoving it carelessly in the back pocket of his trousers. Men and their pockets.

The only time Frederick laughed during these visits was when she had suggested that he get his inheritance back from the Party.

Their situation reminded her very much of the League people and their low days after its collapse – the mental illness, the suicides – and then again after the newly formed United Nations, which, while continuing to pay the pensions and money due, refused to employ or at least honour the old League staff.

One day she arrived and he had packed up – his possessions fitted into two suitcases that were sitting there in the kitchen. He said with a light laugh he was going to get a job in Sydney ‘cleaning railway carriages’. But he added that he would look into the possibility of studying economics and government at Sydney University as an evening student under Wheelwright and Buckley, whom she knew to be left-wing economists. She said he might have more to learn from the right wing, given he knew so much about the left.

‘I want to look at the link between analysis and theory, and then theory and political organisation, and then organisational discipline and power.’

‘Any one of those might do. You should know a bit about all that already.’

‘I should, but I don’t. We knew how dangerous capitalism was, but we didn’t know how dangerous communism could be.’

‘What do you think Wheelwright and Buckley will know that you don’t? Did they leave or were they expelled?’

He shrugged. ‘Buckley’s out. They might know something. I want to think it through from the beginning.’

She went with him in a taxicab to the railway.

They shook hands at the station. ‘Stay in touch,’ she said, and kissed his cheek. He nodded and said, ‘Let me know when you’re made an ambassador.’

She smiled. ‘Afraid that is not going to happen.’

‘Say hello to the Major when you write to him.’

The mention of Ambrose moved her. ‘I will.’ Her voice cracked a little.

She had not heard from Janice. All that Frederick knew was that she had stayed in the Party and was in Melbourne, presumably siding with the Melbourne leadership. When Edith had said that as it turned out it was Janice who was the Stalinist, Frederick had said, without smiling, ‘No – Stalin was a Janicist.’ Frederick said the Party was falling apart. He had heard some of the former members were turning to Scientology. The Party was having to sell its assets to keep afloat. He snorted. ‘They’ll have to go to the Russians for more money.’

This was the first time he had said that the Party took money from the Soviet Union – ‘Moscow gold’. He and Janice had always denied that money for the Party had come from Russia, always counter-posing that the CIA funded Australian organisations such as the Association for Cultural Freedom and paid for university professors, trade unionists and politicians to travel to America.

‘Were the leaders corrupt?’ she asked. ‘Who looked after the petty-cash box?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Some of it would’ve gone on the horses and Chinese dinners, but they lacked any imagination for corruption. And they were pretty much dedicated.’ He thought again. ‘Perhaps there were private bank accounts. I don’t know. But I think the bookies probably got a fair share of the Moscow gold.’ She sensed he was pushing this notion away, already overwhelmed by the larger collapse of his ideals.

She stood with others on the platform, waving until the train had completely left the platform. She liked the way people stayed to wave, even for such a small journey.

She sensed that her brother had again left her life.

Edith had a political dilemma of her own. Again it came from Ambrose via the diplomatic bag – Ambrose’s gifts from the heart of the Empire, and from his own poor heart.

It contained a parcel for her, which was a copy of an American novel entitled
Giovanni’s Room
by James Baldwin. Ambrose had attached a memo saying that it was very likely that the book would be banned in Australia because it dealt with nancy-boys – a black nancy-boy, at that. ‘The other item will, likewise, not be read by Australians.’

When she opened the book, she found the other item glued over a blank page at the back. It was a half-page TOP SECRET memorandum.

She cut out the page and the memorandum, which was a British report about their atomic tests in Western Australia.

Ambrose had drawn a circle around the ‘Yield: 98 kt’.

She could see why he had circled the figure. The yield of ninety-eight kilotons seemed very high. It would make it the highest test yield conducted in Australia, and she suspected that it was way above the agreed yield limit.

She did not know what to make of this. It was the kind of information that would have usually come across her desk, and that even if withheld from her would have reached her ears in the to and fro of the corridors.

She called Pam, her friend on the staff of the AAEC at Lucas Heights, to see if her memory was right about the yield limit.

Pam said, yes, from memory the agreed limit was that the yield would not exceed two-and-a-half times that of the Hurricane tests. ‘That would be about sixty-two kilotons.’

‘I assume that the Brits are using the same definition of kiloton as we are? Or is this confusion over metric versus American measurement versus imperial measurements?’

‘The Brits and we use the same measurements, although the standardisation of the cap K hasn’t been adopted yet.’

‘I am thankful that I am not on that sub-committee.’

Pam laughed. ‘God, yes.’

Pam said that there was no universal standard measure of an atomic blast. ‘The energy release is affected by such things as charge density, degree of confinement, temperature. Things like that.’

She said to Pam, ‘What would you make of the measurement of ninety-eight kilotons?’