Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  Back in her office, she laboriously rewrote the minutes of the meeting into a new notebook, this time deleting the word Zembla which she had written down beside Liverright’s name, redrawing her map of the meeting, in case anyone should ever, at any time in history, look into her notebook and find the word Zembla there. She put the first notebook in her handbag to be disposed of somewhere far from the Palais. Or maybe she would keep it as a memento of her first day. She would see.

  At 6.36 Ambrose collected her from her office and together they walked across the lake to the Bavaria Brasserie where he said most of the younger set and quite a few journalists gathered in the evenings. Delegates also dropped in during Assembly, he said.

  She wanted to blurt out her question about whether the jape had been preplanned by them all but held back, waiting for the time to be right.

  Ambrose said hello to people and introduced her to some, but it was all a blur. Through her mind kept going the phrases, here I am in Geneva, at the League. Here I am in the famous Bavaria. Here I am. But the jape had spoiled something of her arrival by making her feel guarded towards all the new faces. It was spoiling her feelings about Ambrose.

  They settled down at a table on their own.

  He asked her what she liked to drink.

  ‘What should I be expected to drink?’ She looked around her at what others were drinking.

  ‘What should you drink now you are a lady of Geneva?’

  ‘Yes.’ She wondered if she would become a woman who drank cocktails.

  ‘What would you have drunk back in Australia?’

  ‘Sherry usually.’

  ‘Quite acceptable here in Geneva.’

  ‘But what would the French order? It is, after all, part of the French civilisation.’

  ‘Oh, the French? They aren’t like us. The Frenchman would order a port as an apéritif. They drink other vile things made from artichokes and meadow weeds. Stick to sherry and you’ll come through all right.’

  She was about to take his advice but instead when the waiter came she remembered Dubonnet which she had never tasted, and she asked Ambrose to order her a Dubonnet.

  Ambrose raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I have to explore my new world,’ she said. ‘All my life I’ve seen advertisements for Dubonnet in French magazines. I always dreamed of trying it.’

  She sipped her Dubonnet and to her surprise, could not tell whether she liked it or not. The glamour of it and her new surroundings overwhelmed her taste.

  ‘How is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I really can’t say.’ She gave a helpless laugh.

  ‘You don’t know whether you like it or not?’

  ‘No.’

  He laughed with her. Raising his Scotch, Ambrose proposed a toast. ‘To your career as an international diplomat. To your first day.’ They clinked glasses. ‘And your first Dubonnet.’ He made it rhyme.

  ‘Thank you. But I still feel something of a fool on this my first day.’ She would edge into the matter now.

  ‘You handled yourself very well. Liverright’s awfully plausible — when sober — but you fielded it well. I would’ve stopped it sooner but he slipped it through. You don’t know the story of Zembla?’

  She shook her head. By implication he had attributed the jape all to Liverright.

  ‘It’s rather an old joke. Vare, an Italian diplomat, started it. An Italian of the old school.’ Ambrose made a regretful face.

  ‘As distinct from the new school of Italians in black shirts?’

  ‘Correct. Back in the early days, Vare and some others invented this mythical state of Zembla and put a nameplate on an empty desk at the Assembly. Some of the Italian delegation sat at this desk and made a contribution to the debate — as delegates of the mythical state of Zembla. I believe Zembla can be found in the minutes of the second or third Assembly. I haven’t looked. Ever since then, people around here have fantasies about Zembla. It’s cited as the perfect member state. Never makes trouble. Pays up its dues on time. Doesn’t expect us to find hotel rooms or “companions of the night” for delegates. Doesn’t leave unpaid bills around Geneva. That sort of thing. Zembla is the only perfectly well-behaved nation state.’

  ‘What a charming idea.’ She would write to John about that.

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘But you were all in on the jape this morning?’

  ‘Well, we all knew about Zembla, yes.’

  ‘Is it used as a test for all newcomers?’

  ‘Test?’

  ‘Do you always put newcomers through the Zembla game?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘But you knew that Liverright would be testing me?’

  ‘Heavens, no. That was his idea. Spur of the moment. Thought of it as he came in the door, I would imagine.’

  She looked at him. She decided to trust him. She relaxed and felt warm towards all those around her in the café. ‘You talk about the “early days” of the League. It’s only a matter of a few years.’

  ‘I suppose it is. Seems a long time ago.’

  She again glimpsed an immense tiredness in Ambrose which he quickly wiped away with his smile.

  Relaxing into the atmosphere and to the taste of Dubonnet, Edith decided she liked being the friend of someone who knew the ropes. Though, she thought, it would be nice also to have a friend who was just beginning. At Parliament House she’d had a first-day twin who’d begun on the same day as herself.

  Ambrose said, ‘I thought we made a good team.’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘You colonials are so good at cutting through to the issue.’

  ‘Oh? We think of you British and Europeans as the supreme schemers. I suppose we are always fearful that something is “going on” behind our backs.’

  ‘That’s why we’ll make a good team. You can see through the scheming for me and I can teach you how to scheme.’

  ‘Agreed,’ He seemed genuine about wanting her companionship.

  ‘How’s the Pension Levant?’

  ‘I haven’t seen much of it yet!’

  ‘Your trunk arrive safely?’

  ‘It was there waiting for me. No breakages. One room looks out on a courtyard.’

  ‘It was an acceptable lunch we had on the train, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I thought it marvellous.’

  He seemed already to be moving their couple of shared experiences into an album of memories. That was fine by her. She was sure now that he was wooing her. But she was more nervous about handling a romance on the Continent than she would be back home. She imagined that the rules of the game were vastly different.

  After they had finished their aperitif, he suggested they dine at the Hôtel des Bergues to celebrate her arrival.

  ‘But,’ she looked down at herself, ‘I’m not dressed for that kind of dinner.’ She looked at him. ‘We aren’t dressed.’

  ‘You’ll pass muster. I like your outfit — for something in grey,’ he said. ‘As for me, I see lounge suits at dinner these days. They’ll admit me with a frown.’

  ‘I would prefer to go home and change.’

  ‘Won’t hear of it. We’ll simply go. The French stay at the Bergues when they come to Geneva.’

  She wasn’t at all sure about it. ‘The chef must be good.’

  ‘Knowing the French, I would imagine they’d bring their own chef.’

  Oh, was that so? ‘Can we sit at the table where Aristide Briand sits when in Geneva?’

  Without answering, Ambrose got up, went to another table and came back with a cigarette. He then put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, drooped the corners of his mouth, mussed his hair, stooped forward and said in French, ‘Madame, may I have the pleasure — Aristide Briand.’ He gave a French half-bow.

  She laughed.

  Still impersonating Briand, he said, ‘They say those who believe in peace are goats.’ He paused, doing a Briand impersonation with the cigarette. ‘If that is so, Baaaaah. I am a goat. Baaaaah.’

 
She laughed and clapped him.

  As they left the Bavaria she noticed that it had two entrances. ‘I see that the Bavaria, like the Palais, has two entrances.’

  ‘It’s the answer to the dreadful wind here. The Bise. You’ll see why when the Bise hits. They close one entrance and open the other.’

  She laughed. ‘The Queen would like that.’

  ‘The Queen?’

  ‘The Queen from Alice in Wonderland would say that in a nasty world it is better that you have two fronts and no back.’

  ‘Indeed she would,’ he said.

  They walked from the Bavaria back across the lake to the dining room of the Hôtel des Bergues. At the hotel it became clear that sometime during the day Ambrose had reserved a table for dinner. She liked that.

  Ambrose took the head waiter aside and spoke to him in fast French.

  The head waiter then took them to a corner table saying, ‘In my opinion, Briand is France’s finest statesman.’ As he pulled back the chairs for them he said, ‘Monsieur, Madame, the table of Monsieur Briand.’

  Her first day at the League and here she was, seated at Briand’s table. She leaned over and put her hand on Ambrose’s. ‘Thank you.’

  Ambrose said, ‘We will not, I repeat not, tell anecdotes concerning each course of the meal.’

  ‘That was fun,’ she said. ‘But yes, no encore.’

  ‘We are now in Geneva. In Geneva we make gossip.’

  She was about to ask for gossip about Liverright but, given what she sensed was Liverright’s flirtatious interest, she thought it tactful to refrain.

  But Ambrose and she were thinking on the same track. Perhaps Ambrose wanted to eliminate Liverright immediately and absolutely.

  ‘Don’t worry about Liverright. He’s part of the flotsam and jetsam of Europe.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Flotsam or jetsam?’

  ‘Oh, you’re out to test me. See whether I went to a good school?’

  ‘One person is rarely both flotsam and jetsam.’

  ‘He’s jetsam — I believe he was flung out of Austria. When he was talking of the desert chaps eating flies I thought of the Austrians eating rats, eating their zoo after the War. Until the League pulled them out of trouble. Put them back on their feet.’

  Returning to the business of the afternoon, she asked Ambrose why the committee meeting had been called when it must have been obvious that it could not reach any decision.

  ‘Consultation sometimes must be seen to have been done,’ he said.

  She didn’t like that approach. ‘I think that wastes everyone’s time.’

  ‘Oh?’ He stared at her. ‘How would you have done it?’

  ‘Perhaps we could have looked more closely at which sections really need to be close to the Council room and to the day-to-day business of the Secretariat — statistically.’

  ‘You would consult the crystal ball of numbers?’

  She coloured a little. She’d been teased about this back in Australia.

  ‘Government by numbers?’ he persisted.

  ‘For some questions I think they’re the only escape from the guess and the false claim.’

  ‘What about political intuition and the wise insight?’

  ‘In the absence of those rare capacities, I opt for statistics.’ She felt then that she’d asserted enough for one day. She thought she’d better shrink back to being more charming and womanly, as befitted a young woman new to the Continent spending the evening with a debonair older Englishman at the Hôtel des Bergues in Geneva, seated at Briand’s table. She said, in a soft voice, ‘I’m here to learn. I am a bemused and lost colonial lass.’

  He looked across at her. ‘Not so bemused it seems to me. Not so lost.’

  She could see that she had soothed him somewhat. But she couldn’t resist another remark about the meeting. ‘It might have helped if we’d changed the name of the Annex. Called it the Petit Palais. Something like that.’

  He smiled widely. ‘I do believe you’re right,’ he nodded with regard, ‘and that is not a statistical solution.’

  They had what was perhaps the finest dinner that Edith had eaten in her life. It was not the sort of dinner that a chap bought for a girl if he were not seriously establishing something.

  In his company, her conversation seemed much funnier than it usually was, and she found that her knowledge of the affairs of the world, while still limited, flowed readily to her mind. As good manners were a means of putting people at ease, he practised good conversation which was the skill of making others perform well at conversation.

  After dinner they had a cognac in the lounge and listened to piano music. He walked her to her pension and, still standing, they kissed quite passionately in the empty parlour and held each other in a full embrace, their breathing rapid.

  But they kissed only once and he then drew back, as if observing some sort of courtesy, and began to take his leave in an awkward way, as if the passionate kiss were enough to handle just now, or as if he were uncertain about traveling further in the direction that other kisses might go.

  She wondered whether the rules of romance on the Continent might require her to be more forward than she would be usually, back home, or even according to her nature. As she understood her nature.

  As he made noises rather than words and pulled on his gloves and coat and took up his hat, it occurred to her that he was also unable to conclude the evening in such a way as to set up a momentum which would lead to happy developments in the weeks to follow. It was not shyness that she felt in him. It was an incapacity to take the romantic leadership. She could see that he would be able to propose drinks and dinners where the rules were unequivocal, but that he was nervously reluctant to initiate any more intricate intimacy. She decided that she wanted things to unfold. She wanted to hold on to him. She also wanted to leap into the experience of being on the Continent. She wanted it all to happen to her. She wanted to be experienced as a woman, fully and finally, and this man would help her do that, just nicely.

  As she was about to let him out of the pension, she followed her grandmother’s advice that one should begin as one intended to continue, and this being her first day, she began as she, at least, hoped to continue. ‘Perhaps we could do something together at the weekend?’ she suggested, crossing her fingers, hoping that she had not committed a social gaffe, seeing that it was a breathtaking proposal that she’d made. She had spoken in a worldly voice, which she hoped didn’t sound more worldly than she could eventually carry off.

  ‘I’d like that,’ he rushed to say.

  She pushed on. ‘We could perhaps hire a motor-car. We shan’t need a driver. I can drive. If motor-cars can be hired.’

  ‘You can drive? Excellent. We could go touring. Motor-cars can be hired. Leave that part to me.’

  She immediately regretted her boast as unwomanly, but moved quickly to undercut it, ‘However, I have never driven in snow. If it should snow we would have to abandon the idea.’

  ‘I am sure you could drive in snow, or through anything.’

  ‘Thank you for your expression of confidence. Perhaps we could stay at a village inn in the Alps? Or is that a cliché for you?’

  ‘Not a cliché at all, on the contrary, an enchanting proposal. Excellent. Take in the Alpine air.’

  She realised that it was now some months since she’d driven and that the rules of the road were different — indeed, here they drove on the other side of the road. She said this as they stood there at the door, her hand in his.

  ‘Oh, not much traffic around the countryside. As a foreigner, you’ll be forgiven if you hit a cow. Show them your carte de légitimation; they’ll salute and tell you to drive on.’

  The hand-holding then became a shaking of hands, they said good night, and this time they kissed lightly and he ducked out of the door and away into the cold night.

  In her rooms, brushing her hair at the dressing table, she imagined the Alpine v
illage inn, and imagined Ambrose, in a very Continental way, creeping to her room after they’d retired for the night. Or would she have to do the creeping? In a very Continental way? She sang, ‘“Your love belongs to me, At night when you are asleep, Into your tent I’ll creep”.’

  On their first night in the Alps, after eating fondue, drinking kirsch — for her, another First Time — and after two or three glasses of champagne beside the fire in the parlour with the only other two guests, they retired up the stairs hand in hand.

  Although she did not want another drink, on the landing she said she would come to his room for a nightcap from his regimental hip flask but would first go to her room.

  ‘Splendid,’ he whispered on the stairs.

  In her room she examined her make-up, decided not to remove it, brushed her hair, poured water from the jug into the hand basin and washed her hands. She opened the window and the shutters and breathed deeply of the freezing Alpine air, cooling her face. She found it curious that she had no qualms about what she was now intending to happen. She wondered whether to take her nightgown with her to his room and decided that was too brazen.

  She closed the window and the shutters and gave the fire a poke and then she crept to his room along the corridors of the chilly, dark chalet.

  In his room she also opened the shutters so they could look out at the Alpine landscape, the room lit by the glow of the fire and the moon. They held hands, heads touching, and fell into a shy, tentative but arousing embrace and kissing.

  The embracing led them to lie still fully clothed on the large Swiss bed where they confided that it was not the first time for either of them. But she emphasised, a little breathlessly and shyly, but firmly, that nor was it by any means a customary thing for her. They talked of a close affinity between them, that it seemed ‘right’ for them to sleep together in the bed.

  ‘It does feel quite correct, doesn’t it? For you too?’ she said, needing that assurance.

  ‘Dear Edith, it feels very correct, very much the natural thing to do.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, ‘but I have no nightgown. I could go back and get it.’

  He thought that a good idea. He would warm the bed.

  Back in her room, she changed into her nightgown and robe and slippers, hung and folded her clothing, quickly removed her make-up, but refreshed her lipstick, and again crept back to his room. He had removed his clothing and was ‘warming the bed’. She could see his pyjama top.