Cold Light (77 page)

They served each other socially, too, and looked rather good as a couple. She knew the unfair discomfort of being a lone woman at a dinner party, and had on occasion, when Richard was not available, recruited Mr T as her companion. She had seen how hard it was to be a woman alone in such situations, to feel pitied.

Now the recurring domestic vexations between Richard and her were never expressed except by grunt or frown or the leaving of the room, and neither of them any longer made an effort to resolve the vexations permanently.

Living with Ambrose had been more like living with a girlfriend. She often marvelled, in retrospect, that after he came home and changed
en femme
he had never appeared to her as just a man dressed as a woman, and while he did not become a woman, he did become, mercurially, another pleasing creature altogether. And he was never a
husband.

There was still something of the domestic closeness that came from reporting of their day to each other, which, she supposed, would look like love to an outsider. But there was no real sharing of their work distresses, except when the distress had passed and it could be reported retrospectively in a comical or victorious way. Never was the distress exposed when it was causing painful havoc in their souls. They kept up a façade of personal invulnerability.

After a while, she resisted his attempts to involve her in bile – he sometimes viciously derided and mocked his work companions, wanted to see any disagreement or disappointment in his life as the work of fools who could not see his merit. She would let him talk, but would not confirm him in any of his false superiority. She did not want to be part of any self-deluding
folie à deux
, where a couple lived within their carapace of mutually confirming social superiority, a false superiority achieved by the putting down of acquaintances and workplace colleagues, justified or not.

He desperately wanted an OBE, but she knew he would probably receive only an MBE. She privately thought that she stood a chance of an MBE, too.

She had to admit that she also had a need to bag her colleagues, and she did it over drinks sometimes with the Richters, with Mr T, and others, but always looked to see who was in the circle and whether her gossip might not come back to bite her.

Regardless of this failure to achieve the higher reaches of what she imagined traditional married love to be – and which she had at the beginning been sure she needed and had found – there was one thing of which she was certain: to break with him would be to proclaim her failure as a wife, and even as a mother – stepmother – or, in a word, her failure as a woman. More, it would be a public admission of poor judgement in personal matters, which could then be applied to her judgement generally.

She was going to stick with this marriage. She was going to stick it out, come hell or high water. She had used up all her conjugal options – had, in fact, played rather fast and loose with respectability, including her socialising with Janice and Frederick. Moreover, she could never, in all good faith, publicly and sincerely commit herself yet again to another man. She could not just move on from one man to another like a film star. There would be, too, the loss of face by having failed – publicly – in two – well, three – marriages. She could imagine living alone – she did live alone. She lived alone in her marriage.

The marriage was a punishment for her having betrayed her Bloomsbury ideals and her Rationalist upbringing, with its disregard of convention. And having failed Ambrose – but, again, that was a catastrophic emotional error too enormous for her to face, and because nothing could be done about it, she had to refuse it a presence in her consciousness or it would gnaw her apart.

With Ambrose she had led a risky private life, the risk of which had become fearfully apparent in Australia. It was clear that if ever her secret personal life with Ambrose had come out in Australia, she would have been lost. Professionally and personally lost. They would have had to flee.

She still felt shame at having failed, in spirit, the test of the burlesque. Without showing it, she had quaked with fear after the burlesque episode – fear that some gossips or someone in the High Commission would have put two and two together or had heard something from London and said, ‘Hello? What’s been going on there behind closed doors between these two?’ She was disappointed by her fear, but there was nothing she could do to curb it. At least the burlesque had gone on.

As she now knew, the gossip had gone in another direction – that Ambrose and she were, in fact,
not married
, or married only as a cover for some sort of joint espionage mission for the British. Or maybe this meant that something told the gossips that her marriage to Ambrose was somehow fishy, but their imagination had not been rich enough to guess at what sort of aberrant marriage it had, in fact, been.

She would add the words ‘irreverence’ and ‘candid intimacy’ to the list of things missing from her marriage. She’d had this kind of spicy intimacy with Ambrose. Nearly anything could be said and laughed about, regardless of morality. Ambrose and she had this, in its own sometimes perplexing nature, give or take some things she suspected that he withheld for good or not so good professional reasons. It could be said that Richard and she had a rather brusque intimacy of very limited spice.

If the marriage was a failure as a marriage, it need not be a publicly visible failure. She doubted that even the children saw the marriage for what it was. They leaned on and took for granted what they saw as its solidity and routines. So much was hidden from children. She, herself, did have confidence about the love her parents had, from the evidence that they had remained married for nearly forty years and had talked to each other at every meal. Maybe for some people marriage was a guarantee of constant company, a guarantee against a fear of being alone.

Given Richard and she both travelled separately in their work, the marriage was not, for her, in any way household captivity. She had in life escaped all the pitfalls of being the wife locked in a house as outlined in the Friedan book, which she thought was terribly good.

At least Richard was not a fraud in the way her first husband, Robert the reporter, had been – offering himself as something of a free-thinker and even something of scholar, and turning out to be lazy in his reading, an intellectual cheat. Only after marriage had he revealed that he wanted a conventional wife to service his life, to be evidence of his manhood. She could have given Friedan some material about this type of fraudulent man. And she had known women who were the same sort of fraud – presenting themselves as mentally vigorous and civically alive and then, when in marriage, slumping into dependency, triviality, self-indulgence and self-neglect, to a life of boxes of chocolates, radio serials and glossy magazines. If love meant anything for her, it was a pact to engage with the world and the mind as much as your partner engaged with the world and the mind.

Her marriage was something like a base camp, as her marriage to Ambrose had been a unique fort in no-man’s-land. What she had with Richard was preferable to her life with Robert, which had so quickly become a bitter disappointment and which, while not quite breaking her heart, had inflicted her with a bitterly disappointed heart.

It had to be said that if she defined her life as one of
petits plaisirs
, she may, indeed, have a real marriage. A real marriage made of half-love, a pedestrian love. The marriage did have some small fun. Anniversaries were remembered in small gestures, if not celebrated with any sense of achievement, although some sentimentality was generated by reminiscence. It was not bleak, though she at times could see Mount Bleakness through the mist in the distance, not so far away. Some day she might look out the window and find it in her garden.

Marriage was exhausting in another way, because it required of the wife that she use patience and a will-power – against her true feelings – in endless acts of compromise and forgiveness and acceptance of the habits and ignorances of the man; to meet the demands of the man for tenderness and sympathy. And then there were all those permissions required from a husband: the negotiated absences; the negotiated solitude; white lies; pretended gratitude; the constant demand for explanations of her whereabouts, of the company she kept in his absence. Heaps of pretending. She had done this for Richard. Why hadn’t he seen it as unfelt? Faked tenderness, as with faked love, it seemed, worked just as well as the real thing.

But how much of oneself did this charade cost?

She did not think she ran the risk of bitterness. She even entertained notions of having an affair. A young man from the Canadian High Commission took her fancy – in fact, he was the second young man from the Canadian High Commission who had taken her fancy. She still speculated about living the life of the Bloomsbury world of special friendships separate from that which one had with one’s husband. She wondered if she would ever have what Vita had called a ‘trinity’, for example, as in the case of Vita, Violet and Denys, where two people sexually adored the third; not sexual trios as now understood – that is, not all in the bed at the same time – but each having sex separately with the adored one. Theodor had suggested this when Amelia had her affair with the carpenter, and had tried to embrace the affair to include him. It had not worked. She couldn’t see it happening with Richard. She was not even sure now that he adored her. Of course, the adored one didn’t suffer.

She was glad that, when younger, she’d had the pluck to venture into the delicious murkiness of male and female dilemma with Ambrose; that she had not shied away. That had been very Bloomsbury. She wished all those famous Bloomsbury people were still alive and she could write to them – say, to Virginia Woolf – and tell them of how she had lived with Ambrose. She could have found herself in a marriage like Carrington had had with Strachey, and then with Carrington’s husband – working things out among the three of them. Ambrose was certain that Carrington was the tomboy and that Strachey was definitely homosexual. For all her fears of being exposed around the time of Ambrose and the burlesque, Canberra was probably the safest of the smaller places for sexual unorthodoxy among politicians and public servants. Even if people such as reporters knew about their private lives, they didn’t write about them in their newspapers. She had heard rumours of Chifley’s affair with two sisters while still married, one of whom had been his private secretary. Perhaps Chifley had been a Bloomsbury man. She hadn’t got that impression. She had heard, but had seen no evidence, that the Prime Minister had a mistress. From what she knew of him she doubted it, though. Even so, she did not think this elite tolerance would have stretched as far as Ambrose’s predilections. A blind eye was turned to mistresses and to even the discreet homosexual, but not to the scandalous.

There was no safe moat, there was no safe love – even the fear that there was no safe love allowed in the demons of suspicion, which could destroy love. The only safe time was in that madness of passion at the beginning of an affair, but then still the fear of losing such joy could wreck things. It could be argued that passionate, anxious love often did us as much harm as it did good.

After all this rationalising of her life and the oh-so-mature acceptance of her situation in life, there had come to her another rather frightening realisation. With something of a big jolt, she had realised that she was now
living without love
and was, in a way, very much alone in this family, although no longer embattled. Just alone.

She would see how the children, when younger, lit up and ran to their grandparents and embraced them, plying them with questions, holding their hands. They had not done that with her. In adolescence, they were even further from her – off in their lairs, snuffling away or giggling or skylarking with each other and their friends.

The sting in the tail-end of this startling realisation – that, although married, she was without love – was that she had to, for the first time in her life, consider whether she was, in fact, unlovable or unable to love. They could be similar conditions. Or was she loved and did not feel loved, or did not want the love that was being offered?

Of course, even if one or other of these statements were true, being inside a marriage meant that no one else knew this.

She realised that people in the married world wanted to see the alone, unloved person as seriously deficient, deserving of pity expressed or not expressed. Behind the back of this pity for the spinster and the old maid, married people paraded the superiority of those who possessed love, or who, at least, appeared to possess love by the act of marriage, the acting out of marriage.

And there was the pity for women who had had no children. Had she also joined this ersatz family as a way of deflecting the biting sympathy that women often expressed for those women who had not had children? She found herself pleased to have people assume that the boys were hers, an assumption she sometimes quite happily left uncorrected – but not with single men.

In her life before stepmotherhood, as a woman without children, she had sometimes suspected that the sympathy some mothers expressed towards women who had not had children also concealed a resentfulness – that women without children had been able to get on with another life, had not had to put up with the tedium and thanklessness of child-raising, with its fleeting, small rewards. These two feelings were sometimes concealed in mothers who jokingly pretended to whinge about the burden of children, the pretence of envy of the childless and their freedom, the laughing pretence that having children was all a big mistake. The joking, in some cases, she knew, was the truth.

Didn’t the climbing divorce rate since the war mean that a lot of people didn’t know how to love – at least, on the first attempt? Was it ever a ‘how’ matter? Was sexual passion just nature’s incentive to ensure breeding of the species? And then the churches and conventions went to work to keep the parents together. Perhaps it reflected the dissatisfaction of women with the sort of men who had returned from the war, or the dissatisfaction of men for the women they had found when they returned?