Cold Light (19 page)

Edith smiled. Janice’s French, while not bad, was so much that of an Australian schoolgirl.

She had not been for such an interview since she joined the League in 1926, putting her age up to get the position. She’d been tapped for UNRRA work after the war and now here she was again applying for a position.

She did not like it. She should not have to do this.

At the door, she took a small, encouraging hug from Janice.

As Gibson and she sat there in McLaren’s office, she could tell that McLaren did not like women of her age dressed in berets in his office. He was strangely brusque, on the edge of rudeness.

‘I think we have met in another life,’ she said.

McLaren looked at her. ‘At university?’

‘Science. I was behind you, but we met at the Science Society.’

‘I didn’t finish because of illness. I recall you, vaguely. Not vaguely, now that I think about it. You had a lot to say.’

Women should never get in the way.

‘And you joined the public service.’

‘After I recovered I did not return to university. I joined the public service.’

This recognition did not change the atmosphere, although she relaxed somewhat, knowing that they did not come from different planets.

Inside herself, she found two conflicting reactions – one was to be aloof, a little contemptuous at the offer of a position she did not want, did not care for; the other was, despite her decision to quit Canberra, a desire to win this position, however minor. She felt strong enough to duel with McLaren. If she did not get the position, at least she would not have allowed him to walk over her, and she might come away with his respect. He might mark her up for her insouciance. She had met too many men such as him. Too many. She doubted, however, that he was going to poke his finger into this lowly appointment. Anyhow, her understanding was that it was a position outside the public service.

‘Have you ever organised a conference?’ he asked, as if that was highly unlikely.

McLaren hadn’t bothered to read her résumé, which she had sent over to both of them.
Sans âge.

‘Many. And picnics, too.’

He looked at her but did not remark on her flippancy. Perhaps he thought a ‘picnic’ was some sort of European diplomatic event. In her hands, it could be a diplomatic event.

Gibson said, ‘Mrs Westwood worked with the League of Nations involved in international conferencing.’

‘We invented international conferencing, as it is understood.’

McLaren grunted. ‘I know about the success story of the League of Nations.’ He looked down at her résumé.

She moved her gloves from one hand to another. But did not bite.

McLaren looked at her and said, ‘What do you think of this damned lake?’

She was unsure of his meaning, and then took it that he meant the lake for Canberra, which everyone talked of as something that would never happen. He, at least, was treating her as a person who might, just might, have an opinion. ‘Having lived in Geneva –’ She threw that in – ‘Woodrow Wilson thought a lake calming to negotiation. And it puts ozone in the air.’ She wondered if this were true; she’d heard it so often back there in Geneva, but had never looked at the scientific premise behind it.

‘Ozone?’ McLaren said. He grunted some distaste. ‘Tasmania wants Canberra closed down for a hundred years until we can afford it and are ready for it.’ He seemed to agree with Tasmania. ‘Isn’t all that water in Lake George enough for you?’

She said, ‘The lake is in the original plan for the city. Finish what you start.’ She might as well go on. ‘ “He who commences many things finishes few.” I suspect that this is the quandary of your department with its multifarious functions – agriculture, immigrants, defence things, electoral matters, forestry regulations, Aboriginal affairs, motor-vehicle licences, meteorology, passports, shipping, surveying and mapping, war memorials and Canberra works. Have I missed any?’

She was smug at her remembering the list; something like a girl tested on her homework.

She thought McLaren smiled.

She went on about the lake, ‘I think Wilson meant the lake brought placidity – mutual concession, and so on. I am not sure that it does. I am not sure about the ozone, either. I meant in the British sense, invigorating – not the scientific sense of being a pungent, toxic form of oxygen.’

Throw in some science to a man who did not complete his scientific studies. She kept on, ‘Lakes, more so perhaps than, say, surf. I would not build a house of parliament near surf or a volcano. Or a waterfall. Or rapids.’ She chuckled, more to herself. Neither of the men chuckled.

McLaren said, ‘I would think that the river channel might be sufficient. A river with a bit of flow to it, something like that. Which we have and which costs us nothing. Forget the lake.’

McLaren then nodded at Gibson, who rose. She rose with him and together they left to go to Gibson’s office. There was no shaking of hands.

Walking along the corridor, Gibson said, ‘Haven’t heard anyone play verbal table tennis with McLaren.’

‘I don’t really remember him.’

Gibson said, ‘Mrs Westwood, you understand that you will not be a public servant. You will be employed by the Congress, working in our offices at Interior. For an honorarium. The visit to McLaren was a courtesy.’

So. She was being offered the position. ‘Of course.’

‘You’ll be attached to my office to liaise with Peter Harrison in Sydney, who’s the official Secretary of the Congress. But you will represent the Department, in a sense, by delegation from me. Know anything about town planning?’

She shook her head.

‘Doesn’t matter. I’m afraid the position will be that you take dictation – I see that you have done that – file documents; telephone people; book rooms. Nothing grand, sorry.’ He had said all this before the meeting.

Gibson didn’t worry her.

It was the vagueness of the ‘liaise’ and the ‘represent’ part of the description of this position that enticed her. She had learned that she could fashion and elevate a position through the doorways of those two words. In Geneva, Bartou had once told her that ill-defined positions carried a secret power. Those around such a person could never be sure where that person’s authority ended.

But nor was authority always
granted.

The apology was also a way of keeping her down to size. He kept on, ‘It’s just a job for a glorified office assistant. Feel bad about it. Anyhow, would you like to see where you would work if you joined us?’

‘Yes.’

They drove to Acton, where Gibson and his team had their offices in rather simple weatherboard buildings with stage-set porticos.

Gibson said the weatherboard buildings were the first erected at the start of the building of the city to house surveyors, engineers, draughtsmen and so on. ‘After they moved out of tents. This was a village.’

‘The Griffins worked in these buildings?’

‘Yes.’

In his office she went over to a draughtsman’s desk. ‘What are these drawings, these illustrations? These grey-greens work?’ And the ochres, golds, browns and russets.

‘They are illustrations of Griffin’s idea of Canberra – drawn by his wife, we think. She was an architect too. I got them over from the Department of Works. They’re a bit dusty. I wanted to have a quick look at them. Not much use.’

She looked at them one by one, mounted on chipboard backings. ‘They’re rather magnificent.’

With her fingers, she touched them carefully. They seemed to ask to be respectfully touched in the same way that they had been so assiduously created.

He came and stood behind, and looked at them as if for the first time. ‘I suppose they are rather good in a dreamy sort of way. I see them just as architectural sketches. There are more in a drawer over in one of the Nissan huts.’

‘I must see them. Would you get them out for me? Please? And these are Griffin’s plans too?’

‘Griffin’s plans – surpassed now. Remember, they were done before air travel, before everyone could own the motorcar, before the
autobahn
or the super highway. Although you’d think from the plans that we all flew like birds and that was how we would always look at the city – from a bird’s-eye view or from an aeroplane.’ And he added with a kind of distrust, ‘And all that statutory pattern.’

She continued to look at the drawings done by Mrs Griffin. ‘These say more than they depict.’

Gibson didn’t respond.

She then turned to the plans. ‘And we will see the city from above – from Red Hill, from Mount Ainslie. From “lookouts”. And we will pretty soon all be flying in and out of Canberra. Thankfully, no American skyscrapers.’ She said that the plans were a sort of geometric artistry. ‘Griffin would say “severe simplicity”. The city should be like a fine sculpture – it should be pleasing when looked at from any angle.’

Gibson then adopted a professional, lecturing tone. ‘Griffin believed in what he called “the order of the site” – that the plan should respond to the nature of the site; hills and so on. And then he talked about “the complementary order of function” – some bending of the natural setting to human requirement.’

Severe simplicity. She turned over the sheets. ‘The free-flowing along with the severely shaped.’ If she were to describe her own aesthetic, it might be that. And she also knew that simplicity and severe shaping in life were always undermined by the urge to add, the urge to accumulate, which led then to clutter. That always had to be resisted. ‘Look at the lake.’

‘As McLaren said, the lake won’t happen.’

She nearly said, ‘We’ll see.’

She was surprised how awed she felt by these original drawings and plans done by the fingers of the Griffins. This Marion, this Maid Marion – she visualised them back there in a snow-bound Chicago office studying the contour maps and photographs of the proposed city site, dreaming up a city.

She even had a small vision of her own – about the lucerne. Why not have a working farm in the heart of the city? With cows and sheep and haystacks. Didn’t Marie Antoinette have her farm – the
petit hameau
? Edith’s
petit hameau
– her
laiterie d’agrément
; her pleasure dairy.

She might not mention the idea at this moment.

He said, ‘What we need are more verticals, more variation of skyline, blocks of flats, spires.’

She thought not. Gibson did not have the awe of the plans there in his office; maybe he was past that.

Gibson said, ‘Griffin didn’t want skyscrapers because he wanted low, large buildings so that light and air could play their parts. Now we have too bloody much of both. Pardon my French. We have too much light and too much air and too many trees and too little else.’

She smiled to put him at ease.

He said, ‘We’re not used to having a lady on site.’

‘Your French is very good.’

They both laughed.

‘We are left with the job of making the bloody things work.’

‘Is that what the Congress will be about?’

‘Holford is coming to sort it all out. At least, that seems to be what everyone thinks. The messiah.’

She didn’t know much yet about Holford.

In the last week, she had realised that at the League and so on she had in fact read a little about town planning and was for it. ‘I know something about the Garden City philosophy. I remember my father talking about those ideas.’

‘An architect?’

‘A water specialist. He found water, he drilled bores, he was a maker of water tanks and dams – but he was also a thinker.’

She had not thought about all this – the Garden City – for years, and now the conversations and lectures at the Rationalists’ Association in Sydney and in Melbourne she had attended as a girl came trickling back to her. And there had been committees and reports about planning at the League, which had not been in her purview but of which she had been aware, especially plans for the
Palais des Nations.
Le Corbusier.

Somewhat against her wishes, she felt that this position being offered to her was falling into place in her life. Formulate the ethos through structures. Destine the nation.

As she stood there, this idea was like a large, friendly animal, which had leapt into her arms and was grasping her. A large, friendly cat, licking her face, whose befriending she could not escape or reject.

She said, ‘A planner of the city deserves a special assistant.’

‘Special assistant, is it?’ He laughed nervously.

She turned to him and said, ‘I accept the appointment and I would like to begin on my work today. Now.’

He laughed. ‘I suspect there are forms to be filled before you can do that.’

‘I will begin and the forms can catch me up.’

She said it so firmly that he looked away, stymied, and then, shrugging his shoulders, he said, ‘We’ll find you a desk. You’ll have to share.’ He gestured down the corridor and began to walk. He glanced at her, as if deciding what nature of woman he had brought into his life. ‘You’ll be paid from the conference budget. I think. We will have to sort that out,’ he said nervously.

‘As long as I am on someone’s budget.’ She could forgo payment, but payment, she felt, was a matter of honour. As she walked beside him, she said, ‘I work better in an office of my own. I am a deep concentrator.’