Cold Light (57 page)

For a time, Ambrose moved back to Arthur Circle to avoid tricky questions, occupying the guest room. Richard was made uneasy by it and she had to work to reassure him.

She began to reveal, in confidence, the change in her life to their close circle, but officially Ambrose and she remained a married couple and she would be following him at some point back to London.

She felt a great fondness for him, and tried not to allow their living together to fall back into its former intimacies or to create a pattern. Cruelly, she wanted him out of her immediate life. Emily knew that something was wrong but did not comment.

It wasn’t working. She was self-conscious when Richard and she made love at Arthur Circle. She spent time at Richard’s house, but he was uneasy about overnight stays because of the children and neighbours.

There was, then, another turn of events. As it turned out, Ambrose wasn’t sent back immediately. It seemed that he was required to observe and, in some backroom way, to service a royal commission following the defection of Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy, whom they’d known socially.

It was a very dramatic time both diplomatically and politically.

The Royal Commission was set up to investigate claims by the Petrovs that there was an espionage ring in Australia. Ambrose was required at the Commission hearings every day. She met him now and then for a drink at the Canberra, never more than two.

The findings were that the Petrovs were truthful witnesses, that the Soviet Embassy in Canberra had been used for espionage in Australia, and that the only Australians who spied for the Soviet Union were Australian communists. But no one was put on trial.

When she questioned Frederick and Janice about the spying, they said they didn’t believe it. ‘What was there in Australia to be spied on?’ They had added, ‘If there were spies in the Party, why was it that no one was arrested for espionage?’

Ambrose’s only comment was that the British SIS knew more than the Royal Commission, and more than the Communist Party knew about itself. ‘This Royal Commission is not the time for the story to be told.’

He did not elaborate and she did not push him.

There was a farewell garden party at the High Commission, and the High Commissioner in his speech said with great hypocrisy how sorry the Commission would be to lose them both. She had to accept the farewells and good wishes. It was like experiencing something that could very well have happened in the natural course of things, but that wasn’t going to happen. It was as if one were attending one’s own funeral.

Some guests said that they would miss Ambrose’s burlesque next year at the Legacy concert. The High Commissioner, however, didn’t refer to the concert in his speech or in any of his conversations with her. Maybe it loomed larger in her mind as a scandal than it really was. Was she becoming intimidated by Australia? Fear of the ASIO? Fear of transgressing the moral conventions? Her insecurity came in part from her professional insecurity. She had no proper title or position; she was impotent and vulnerable. She was clinging to Gibson, who had suggested three days a week of office work, but there was so little to do there. Her identity was that of being Major Westwood’s wife.

Ambrose was urbanely good at the farewells and she knew that he harboured a hope that she would follow him to London at some point – that their social deceit would transform into the reality.

In hard-headed moments, she also realised that the deceit also gave her a safety net if the unthinkable happened and Richard recoiled from her because of gossip. She could, then, in all good grace, go to London.

The tension of these false farewells gave her dull headaches and she was taking too much aspirin.

In the dividing up of Ambrose’s and her small possessions, the rocking horse was not mentioned and remained in the hallway, dusted daily by Emily.

She saw Ambrose off at the aerodrome, standing with him at the edge of the runway with his travelling rug and on-board kit. His trunk would follow by sea.

On impulse, she wet her finger with saliva and worked her wedding ring off. She had lost weight and it came off easily. He watched her as one might watch a stranger adjusting his watch. She did not look at him. She bit her lip. ‘Hold out your left hand.’

He did so and she pulled off his grey glove.

She worked the ring onto his small finger, avoiding looking into his eyes. ‘Be married to us both – for our old selves. Our old selves will always be married.’ Her voice broke, she lost her breath and fought to get it back, pushing back the incipient tears with the edge of her hand.

He stifled his tears. Looking at the ring, all he said was, ‘Your friends never tell you when you’ve gone mad,’ which seemed to apply to nothing. A non sequitur.

She managed to say, ‘You may be the sanest of us all.’

‘If this is sanity, I’m not sure I want to be sane.’

‘Part of us will always be married,’ she said. ‘Truly.’

He said, sardonically, ‘A living-apart Bloomsbury marriage – on opposite sides of the world. Very chic.’ And then he said, quietly and with painful sincerity, ‘Yes, always married. You and me; the two of me; the three of us.’

She nodded. There was a truth in that.

The two smiling, smartly uniformed, well made-up air hostesses called to him by name from the airliner steps, addressing him as Major. They beckoned to him to join the flight to Sydney.

Stooping to pick up his travelling rug and kit, he started to walk towards the aircraft, but turned back to her and stopped. She let herself look at him, and tried to smile. It was as if he were waiting for her to join him. She stood where she was and gave a small wave, and he turned back and walked like a diplomat and soldier to the airliner. At the top of the steps, the hostesses took his blanket and kit and he moved one of his hands behind his back, and wiggled an old Molly Club fluttering wave before disappearing into the plane.

She began to choke with irregular sobs, which hurt. She went to the ladies toilet, where she regained her composure and repaired her face, and then joined Theo, the High Commission driver, and members of the public who were seeing off friends. They all waved the taxiing plane along to the end of the tarmac, where it turned and roared down the runway, gathering speed and then rising into the sky. The small crowd continued waving until the plane was out of sight and so did she. Theo was the only person from the High Commission.

As she walked back to the High Commission car with Theo, she thought that, yes, she would always be married to Ambrose in some higher sense. A bond higher than marriage. Not that it could ever mean that much in a day-to-day sense. Theo opened the door and she seated herself in the back of the Bentley.

He said, ‘Arthur Circle, Mrs Westwood?’

She said yes. Perhaps it would be the last time he would address her as Mrs Westwood.

‘How long will it take the Major to reach London?’ he asked, making conversation.

‘About fifty hours, plus the time from Canberra to Sydney.’

‘Many stops?’

‘Darwin – Singapore – Calcutta – Karachi – Cairo – Rome. I’d rather not talk, Theo.’

‘Of course, ma’am.’

She felt a low, sad pain from the guilt of having, for the second time, reneged on a pact initiated many years ago with Ambrose, as a young woman on the train from Paris to Geneva. It was a pact she had then sealed when, one night, with him wearing a satin nightdress, she had welcomed him to her bed and into her life, and he had become her errant lover and her audacious guide. It had been for so long a union not of marriage but of spirit and unique carnality, and he, more than anyone, had widely opened for her all the doors of life.

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either Frederick nor she had been at the funerals of their mother and father. She had been in Geneva when her mother died and in Vienna with UNRRA when her father died. God knows where Frederick had been. She convinced Frederick to come with her to the graves in Berry.

‘It’s not just sentimental,’ she had argued.

He seemed unenthusiastic, but agreed and suggested Janice join them.

She invited Richard but was not hurt when he declined, saying, ‘That is your past – you must do it – but the children and I have had enough cemetery-visiting in our lives.’

Ideally, she thought it would be both very proper and even necessary for him to be acquainted with her family, even if a dead family. But all that could happen later.

She didn’t debate it.

On the drive, she finally asked Frederick the question that for years had been persistent in the family: why had he cut himself off from the family after leaving school? Why had he run away from home?

His answer surprised her. ‘Mum and Dad had left me years before I left.’

His voice had a tone he didn’t use much. It was a smaller voice. ‘They left home – with all those meetings and so on, driving to Sydney and leaving me in the big house in Jasper’s Brush. Many nights alone in that house I was scared stiff. I would strap on my sheath knife for protection from the dark. They were the ones who ran away from home.’

She felt for him. There was silence in the car for a while.

They parked outside their childhood home and discussed whether they would knock on the door and ask to see the house. They decided that it would be intrusive, and neither Frederick nor she had a strong impulse to revisit it.

At the Berry cemetery, she met her childhood friend, George McDowell – or T. George, as he wished to be known. He was the Mayor, a Rotarian, formerly a free-thinker – perhaps still a free-thinker – who had given the oration at their father’s funeral. She was unsure who had given the oration at her mother’s funeral.

She had invited T. George to join them and possibly talk about their parents. He suggested that he read out the oration he had given.

He was sitting in his car waiting for them and got out when they arrived. He was dressed in a dark suit, but oddly wore brown shoes and was wearing his mayoral chain. Under the mayoral chain of office, he wore an American Western-style shoestring tie. Indecorously, perhaps, she hugged him and patted his back, and he hugged back too vigorously, the lower half of his body against her, an implication of passion. She pulled herself away and complimented him on his shoestring tie.