What the Light Reveals Read online

  ‘I’d prefer to walk,’ he replied. ‘Thanks for the offer, though.’ Conrad turned once more to follow his lawyer.

  ‘So you’re still at your guesthouse, then?’

  ‘No,’ Conrad said, after a short pause. ‘I’m not.’ Having reached the corner, he checked back over his shoulder while waiting for a break in the traffic. Marcus French was watching him from the courthouse steps.

  ‘Let me send someone around there for your belongings,’ Powell said as they crossed the street. ‘God knows what that prick will do if you show up.’

  ‘I’ll go later.’

  ‘Conrad, you’re one naive comrade,’ Powell said. ‘I’ll tell you one more time, then it’s up to you. Don’t even think of going back to that guesthouse, or that muckraker will have you for dinner.’

  * * *

  ‘Get out of here,’ Claire Lacey said as Conrad opened the guesthouse’s front door. She stood behind the reception counter, arms tight across her chest. How long had she been standing there, coiled up?

  His suitcase rested on the floor and to his left Conrad saw Marcus French leaning in the sitting-room doorway. No matter how much he’d protested otherwise to Frank Powell, Conrad had wanted to believe the reporter would just drop it.

  ‘Hello, Mr French,’ Conrad said. ‘You’ve introduced yourself to Mrs Lacey?’

  French didn’t move.

  ‘Have you packed for me?’ he asked, but Mrs Lacey gave no reply. After hearing whatever Marcus French had had to say, she would see him as a liar. Someone who’d received special treatment on the back of deception.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll pay you and be off.’

  ‘I don’t want your filthy money,’ Mrs Lacey said. ‘I don’t want your type in here and I don’t want your money.’

  Conrad pulled out his wallet and withdrew enough to cover his room fee plus the previous evening’s phone calls. He placed the notes on the counter. Mrs Lacey snatched up the money and flung it back at him, the notes falling to the carpet at Conrad’s feet. He bent down to retrieve his suitcase.

  ‘Take it!’ The landlady came out from behind the counter. ‘You lied to me and I’d wager you’re all the things they say you are. And more.’

  Conrad stood at the open doorway, allowing her to sound off.

  ‘Your type don’t belong,’ she said, standing among the litter of bank notes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Conrad said as he pulled the door closed.

  He set off along Bellevue Street, wondering whether there was a night train. After thirty yards, at the corner of Albion Street, he stopped. Marcus French was skipping down Claire Lacey’s front steps. When the reporter recognised Conrad he waved at him, with what could have been money in his hand. Instead of the train station, Conrad headed towards the darkening city.

  RUBY

  ‘You’ll never guess where I slept last night.’

  Ruby yawned. ‘You’re right. I’ll never guess.’

  ‘Did I wake you?’ Conrad asked. ‘It’s seven o’clock.’

  In the background she could hear the wide-open breezy clank and thrum of a city rousing itself. ‘No.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have called you last night. I shouldn’t have told you so much about my day.’

  ‘Oh, Connie – would you rather I learned about it from the papers?’

  ‘At least you’d have woken from a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘It’s my own fault. It really has nothing to do with you. Your son is a little restless, that’s all.’

  After talking to Conrad the night before, Ruby could have read, or played something on the Radiola, or sat on the back step and listened to the night grow weary. But instead she crawled into bed and imagined Justice Roth and Xavier Cringely, Marcus French and Claire Lacey, a whole cast of people she’d never met or even heard of before yesterday. She gave them faces, bloated or sharp, sweating or withered; heard their voices, plummy or wrung tight, put words in their mouths. Ignorant, bigoted, insidious words. She invited them to haunt her, and the bedsheets grew clammy and strangled long before she dropped into sleep. With the morning’s first light beginning to slip around the edges of the blind Alex’s cries eventually pried open her stinging eyes. He’d been demanding her attention for long enough that he needed a nappy change and a bottle of warmed milk before he would settle.

  ‘Is he sick?’

  ‘Oh … he’s okay,’ Ruby said, pausing to listen. ‘He’s quiet now. He misses his father.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be home soon,’ Conrad said. ‘Give him a kiss from me. And one for yourself.’

  Ruby smiled at the thought of her husband standing at a phone box in a near-deserted train station early on a Saturday morning where people couldn’t hear him being sentimental. ‘So are you going to tell me where you slept?’

  ‘You’ll never guess,’ he repeated.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The Lord Mountbatten Hotel,’ he said, doing his best to imitate the polished tones of a blueblood. ‘Nowhere near as grand as you might expect.’

  ‘Why did you stay there?’

  ‘First place I found with a bed. Anyway, inside that dingy room with only my rebellious thoughts for company, a small part of me felt like the undercover spy they want me to be. Very Graham Greene.’ His fingers drummed against the payphone. ‘What do you think of that?’

  ‘I think you’re in a lot better mood than last night.’ She hoped it wasn’t just a show.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen the paper yet?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. What’s in there?’

  ‘Well, up here there’s two stories,’ he said, punctuated by clicks as coins dropped into the payphone’s slot.

  ‘Don’t go getting a big head now.’

  ‘I’m in the bloody editorial!’

  ‘My God! What does it say?’

  ‘I don’t really want to read it out to you,’ he said.

  ‘Conrad, tell me.’

  ‘It says I’m a liar, Rube, if you must know. A liar and a traitor.’

  Ruby dragged a chair across from the kitchen table, but no sooner had she slumped onto it than she was on her feet again. ‘Is there anything we can do?’ she asked. ‘Can the lawyer make some kind of complaint?’

  ‘No, that won’t help. The best thing I can do is come home. My train leaves in forty minutes and it can’t come soon enough.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about all of this.’

  ‘You’ve got no reason to be sorry, Rube.’

  ‘I can’t think of what else to say. What else can I say?’

  ‘Don’t say a word. If I’ve learned anything from the last twenty-four hours, that would be it.’

  ‘I’ll take Alex for a walk to the newsagent,’ she said.

  ‘At least it’s over.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it, Connie.’

  Ruby’s politics were more pragmatic than Conrad’s. She left school early to help her mother, Ivy, run Brownlie’s Guesthouse in Noorinbee, a one street town deep in East Gippsland, boasting a mechanics’ institute, general store, twelve-pew Methodist church and single-room schoolhouse. Shearers, drovers and rabbit trappers – Ruby’s father, Tom, among them – stayed just long enough under Ivy Brownlie's roof for the acid stench of hardship to leach into the bedclothes.

  Her ticket out was Herb Clearwater, an unemployed teacher who’d come to the district with the government’s Depression relief program. Herb wasn’t suited to manual work and appeared at the guesthouse asking for a cup of tea and a slice of bread and dripping. Ivy offered him full board in return for educating her eldest daughter.

  Herb landed the vacant teaching role at the school, but stayed on at the guesthouse tutoring Ruby, his sharpest student. And while she qualified for a nursing course in Melbourne, it was the lessons of the less fortunate who tramped the roads, too often whose only payment for board and lodging was their good character, that impressed her most.

  ‘Wait till you get back home before you open the paper,’ Conrad said. ‘Do
n’t read it in the shop.’

  ‘I’m going to put Alex in the pram and go straight away. Is that all right?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s fine. I’m out of coins, anyway.’

  ‘Thanks for calling. I love you, Connie.’

  The line went dead. Ruby guessed he’d still be yacking away so she continued to listen, as if hanging up was a betrayal. Only when the silence grew too loud did she put down the receiver.

  Alex didn’t complain about being woken or the walk down the street, but as soon as she wheeled him into the newsagent and the pram’s trundle and sway were stilled, his lungs filled. She bent to pick up The Age, found coins with one hand while she held her purse and rocked the pram with the other. She put the paper on the counter and the money on top.

  ‘Thank you, David,’ she said.

  The lack of his usual friendly response as she tucked her purse inside the pram caused her to glance up at the shopkeeper’s watery stare. He may as well have said, I know why you can’t look me in the eye this morning, Ruby Murphy. You’ve lied to me, kept secrets all these years.

  She lifted the paper and let the coins slide onto the counter. ‘Come on, Alex,’ she said, ‘let’s go back home.’

  By the time she reached her front gate, Alex was asleep again. In the kitchen she laid the newspaper on the table and filled the kettle. The front page gave nothing away. She scanned down from masthead to foot, then picked up the top corner and peeled it back, spreading the broadsheet across the table as delicately as if it were crepe paper.

  RED DENIES SEEKING INFORMATION

  ABOUT TROOP MOVES

  She stared at the bold type for a minute or more before rising from her chair. She retrieved the pot from the draining board and added two scoops of leaf tea. She didn’t bother to warm the pot.

  The headline seemed to watch her. At the kitchen sink she turned, but the newspaper was lying inert on the table. She moved closer, her pounding heart causing the words to jump.

  RED DENIES SEEKING INFORMATION

  ABOUT TROOP MOVES

  SYDNEY, THURSDAY

  Conrad John Murphy, an ex-Army officer from Victoria being investigated through the Espionage Royal Commission currently sitting in Sydney, claimed that while simultaneously a Communist and intimately involved with top-secret military research for the Allied Forces during WWII, he had not sought top-secret information on troop movements.

  Mr Murphy, of Type Street, Richmond, is now a senior engineer with the State Electricity Commission.

  Mr Murphy’s name is contained in a letter secured by ASIO and addressed to Soviet defector Vladimir Petrov’s predecessor at the Russian embassy in Canberra, Nikolai Sadovnikov. Sadovnikov has been confirmed by ASIO as an undercover agent of the KGB.

  Mr Xavier Cringely, QC, (assisting the Commission) produced a translation of the letter which proves that code was used to conceal Major Murphy’s undercover status within the Communist Party while on active duty in England during the war.

  There was more, much more. Her trembling fingers traced down to the end of the article, which referred to an editorial. She left the remainder of the news story for later and flicked to the middle pages.

  REDS AMONG US EVERYWHERE

  Reprinted from The Sydney Morning Herald

  On a day when the Prime Minister, Mr Robert Menzies, re-affirmed his conviction to ‘thrash the reds’, came a graphic but chillingly mundane illustration from our own streets of the insidious threat such traitors pose to ordinary Australians and the way of life we hold dear.

  Nearly 4000 people cheered in enthusiastic support at Hurstville yesterday afternoon when the Prime Minister reaffirmed that “we will continue to wage war on these Communists and God willing, we are going to give them a thrashing.”

  Communists are rebels, said Mr Menzies. They have done everything within their power to inflict trouble on the people of Australia. That, he told the crowd confidently, was something only a Menzies government could put to an end.

  Yet at the very moment when Mr Menzies was delivering his impassioned plea to uphold the security and sanctity of our homes, one ordinary Australian was the victim of a callous deceit in her own home, perpetrated by a man who had that day been revealed as an undercover member of the Communist Party and an alleged spy for the Soviet Union.

  Mrs Claire Lacey is the proprietor of the Bellevue guesthouse in Surry Hills. Two days ago she welcomed a new lodger, Conrad Murphy, outwardly no different from any other honest traveller who sought her kind hospitality. Yet, in Mr Murphy’s case, it was the shallow rest of the guilty, the night before being compelled to answer to the evidence against him at the Espionage Royal Commission.

  ‘He came into my home claiming he was a war hero. He told me that Mr Menzies had asked him to help out with the Royal Commission,’ said an ob-viously distressed Mrs Lacey.

  Her guest’s real identity was belatedly brought to her attention, only after our reporter had witnessed the cool evasiveness of Mr Murphy during his testimony, which stretched the length of the day due to his intransigence.

  ‘I feel defiled by that man,’ Mrs Lacey said. ‘He stole my faith in ordinary Australians from me.’

  It is the opinion of this newspaper that Conrad Murphy’s malicious falsehoods represent the clearest example yet to be unearthed of the great need for the Espionage Royal Commission. The very ordinariness of the circumstances in this case clearly underscores how inescapably the insidious poison of communism can infect us all. This is the perfect vindication for Mr Menzies’ unyielding stance against communists within our shores.

  Communists are rebels, Mr Menzies, that is certain. any doubt about the truth of the They have done everything in Prime Minister’s words, a short their growing power to inflict conversation with Mrs Claire trouble on the people of Aus-Lacey of Bellevue Street, Sur-tralia. You are right about that, ry Hills, should be more than too. If one Australian is left in enough to set them straight.

  Ruby refolded the newspaper. She rose from her chair and walked to the stove, where she pulled the shrieking kettle off the flame.

  * * *

  ‘Shall we say grace?’ Ryan said after she left the room. She heard him from the kitchen, as he would’ve intended. In her brother’s mind you couldn’t barrack for God and Marx.

  Conrad pulled a bottle of champagne from the fridge. As Ruby headed for the door he stepped in front of her. ‘Don’t take the bait, Rube.’

  Even with two serving plates heavy with roast turkey and potatoes, parsnip and greens, she sidestepped him like a sober welterweight in a bar fight. In the dining room she focused on her younger brother, Curtis, sitting across the table from Ryan, his hands already up in surrender. She wished her sisters were there. They weren’t so gutless.

  ‘I see you want things your way as usual, Ryan,’ she said, waving a tea towel at the spread on the table before bustling back to the kitchen. ‘Serve yourselves and start eating. Don’t wait for me.’

  ‘We most certainly will wait,’ Ryan said. ‘It’s Christmas, after all, and tradition demands we say grace.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Conrad said, standing at the door with the champagne in one hand and a jug of gravy in the other.

  Ruby appeared behind him, shooing him into the room as if he were one of her chickens. He allowed her to bustle past him and take her seat at the head of the table, only then stepping forward to fill her glass. Once he’d been around the table he took his place at the far end.

  ‘Are we ready, then?’ Ryan asked, the great cost of his minute of patience clear in his voice. He reached out to his neighbours, Ruby clasping one hand without complaint while Elaine, Curtis’s wife, took the other.

  ‘Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts, which through Thy bounty we are about to receive, through Christ our Lord. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ the family mumbled, as if their mouths were already full.

  Curtis smiled at Conrad, who hadn’t bothered to mumble. ‘There’s a pagan up each end,’ he said. ‘Silent a
s the grave, they were.’

  ‘I didn’t notice much from you either, little brother,’ Ryan said, reaching for the gravy jug. ‘Since this is your first Christmas with us, Elaine, let me apologise for your new husband’s behaviour. I assure you it is entirely typical.’

  In many ways Elaine was like Conrad. When she and Curtis began keeping company, Ruby had mistaken her well-presented good looks for too much self-regard, but she quickly grew to see she was wrong. For one, she had the wisdom not to reply to comments like that from Ryan. By contrast, Maggie, Ryan’s wife, wore her substance plainly. That she’d tolerated Ruby’s big brother as long as she had spoke volumes.

  ‘Did any of you go to church this morning?’ Ryan said.

  Rachael and Edi both lived in Queensland. Curtis was the only sibling she saw regularly, even though Ryan lived close by. Yet with both parents gone, Ruby felt some familial drive to bring everyone together for Christmas lunch, even if a year had passed since they last spoke. No matter what, it was better to gather family than to deny them. But after the royal commission and the media attention, it wasn’t a usual Christmas.

  ‘Conrad, Alex and I did,’ Ruby said.

  ‘Did you? And how did you find the sermon, Conrad?’

  Conrad cleared his throat. ‘We go for the community and the ceremony of it all – you know that.’

  Ryan scratched turkey meat off his drumstick, spiked it with his fork and then mashed peas against it. ‘But what did you think of the prayers that were offered? And the hymns? Did you join in?’

  Ruby picked up her glass and emptied it past halfway in one mouthful.

  Maggie squared up to her husband. ‘Don’t you get on your soapbox.’

  Ryan pushed his chin towards Conrad. ‘Is there a better time to sing?’

  Ruby snorted. ‘Parties, birthdays, rallies. In the bloody shower.’ She drained her glass and scanned around for the bottle.

  ‘I’m not one for singing at the best of times,’ Conrad said.

  As she retrieved the champagne from the sideboard, Ruby stared at her brother’s salt-and-pepper hair, his broad forehead and green eyes, all of which she shared, along with his love of a stoush. In her, though, they were attractive traits, or so Conrad said.