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the Party.’
    She noticed that Frederick, too, drank deeply of his Scotch.
    ‘The workers at the Snowy are paid twice as much as they would be anywhere else – so, no strikes. Workers are being killed and injured.’ Frederick looked directly at them. ‘Upton Sinclair said that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’
    She tried to imagine him arguing Marxism and quoting Upton Sinclair with muddy tunnel workers at the Snowy, and tired shearers in their blue singlets in the shearing sheds.
    Ambrose seated himself and crossed his legs, listening with a warm smile. He chattered with his English conviviality. ‘Quite right. Some time since I’ve met a communist – well, that I know of. We had a few in the FO. Nice enough chaps. And then, of course, we had a few around the League. I suspect we even have a couple still left in the FO.’ He laughed to himself.
    Frederick did not laugh.
    Frederick then said, ‘One strange thing is the shopkeepers in Cooma – they serve the migrant workers last. They have to wait until the local people are served. They call them reffos.’
    ‘How rude,’ she said.
    Frederick said to Ambrose, ‘You were a doctor?’
    ‘In the first war.’ He laughed. ‘Looked after army sanitation.’
    She turned to Frederick. ‘He did a bit more than that – commended for being very clever dealing with trench fever. Five mentions in dispatches. Saved many lives.’
    Ambrose waved a hand, and said deprecatingly, ‘Not really proper medicine.’ He turned to her and said, ‘We had a few communists at the League, did we not? Liverright began wearing a red tie in the thirties. Was collecting signatures for those two executed in Chicago.’
    ‘Sacco and Vanzetti,’ Frederick said. ‘They weren’t communists.’
    ‘The League people weren’t real communists,’ she said, ‘just communism flirts.’ Was that a rather demeaning thing to say? She glanced at her brother, who did not look at her.
    Ambrose chattered on, ‘I suppose you Reds would have seen the League as the Board of Directors of World Capitalism?’
    ‘Something like that,’ Frederick said, this time with a small smile.
    ‘I never received any dividends,’ Ambrose said, ‘from the capitalists.’
    ‘I mocked Liverright and the other leftists at the League – said they were étatistes who too readily trusted the authoritarian state,’ she came in, to show herself a serious conversationalist on things political, not just a sister. ‘Yet with the League, it could be said I trusted an organisation of states .’
    He avoided responding to her indirect jibe, if it was a jibe. Frederick asked her what sort of position she was seeking in Canberra. She said something in External Affairs. ‘And I think that my having worked at the League is itself not seen as a great plus. Having worked for the greatest failure of the century. I have been waiting for the appointment of a new head of External Affairs. It’ll probably be Watt. He’ll find me something to do. Might send me to New York to help with the Australian delegations. Who knows?’ She grimaced. ‘Or could dump me in some godforsaken embassy. There are some formalities to overcome – they don’t seem to like working women, let alone women diplomats.’
    She shrugged her shoulders at him and finished her Scotch with what might have been seen as a gulp.
    ‘In the Soviet Union, women can work,’ Frederick said.
    ‘Women were also considered equal by the covenant of the League, but it didn’t seem to change much, even there,’ she said.
    ‘I’ve seen photographs of women in Russia working on the roads. Equality has its drawbacks,’ Ambrose joked.
    ‘Nothing wrong with building roads,’ Frederick said, without a smile.
    ‘Hard on the hands,’ Ambrose said.
    Edith heard her own tone of voice in Frederick, the same intensity about things that mattered and a tendency to consider that, in conversation, all