Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  He laughed. ‘Beware the embrace of the Russian bear.’

  She told him that there was really no international agreement on even this matter. She was trying to impress him by showing the sort of things she heard and talked about here in Geneva.

  She said that confusions such as this made her sympathise with those who tried to govern. She said she was more and more amazed that government was possible. She said she was impatient with those people who scorned politicians.

  ‘I am amused by the League talk of electing “semi-permanent” members of Council. It all sounds very much like our talk about a “temporary permanent” parliament house at Canberra, don’t you think?’

  She told him Ambrose’s joke about semi-virgins. He liked that.

  ‘I worry about the League speeches sometimes,’ he said. ‘I was talking with one of the British delegates, Mrs Swanwick, after Count Apponyi’s speech …’

  Edith made a gesture of dislike at the mention of Mrs Swanwick’s name.

  ‘Mrs Swanwick not to your taste?’

  ‘Not at all. I agree with her on most things but I can’t abide the woman.’

  ‘I think I know what you mean. Anyhow, I said that in his speech Apponyi had been brave by withholding nothing and Mrs Swanwick came back at me saying how sad it was that to tell the truth in Geneva was considered “brave”.’

  A typical Swanwick remark. She leapt to find a position away from that of Mrs Swanwick. She no longer believed that ‘empty rhetoric’ was empty She had come around to seeing that rhetoric was useful, even if unfelt by the speaker, because it contained within it the expression of what was ‘acknowledged’ as being desirable. That a hypocrite was affirming virtue by paying ‘lip service’. Next time the virtue might be harder to disregard. Rhetoric contributed to the formation of a future consensus.

  He kept talking and she listened as she went over her thoughts, wondering whether she should say them to John. She decided she might as well speak and see what he thought.

  She said, ‘Even if the speaker doesn’t believe it, and even if the country has no intention of doing it, the important thing is that they feel compelled to say it and to say it in those words to the international community.’

  She felt she was perhaps overstating her position and she threw in something light. ‘I do admit that I’ve heard too many speeches which begin with the words, “When mankind first emerged from the primeval mud …”’

  He laughed. ‘But that’s quite an observation,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it reduce the weight of your praise for my plain speaking? Aren’t you saying that there is more than one way to “speak” diplomatically? Are you becoming a diplomat, Edith?’

  She detected in his voice a tone which began as teasing and then turned into bemusement as he realised that he’d been pulled up.

  She was unprepared for the impact of his interest. She was flummoxed too, by his observation of the contradiction and her devaluation of her earlier praise of him.

  Suddenly she saw that maybe John was wrong about courteous inertia. The French were perhaps wiser on this. There was nuance and that was what she had to learn. The blank ballot was a courtesy containing a comment, a nuance. A yes vote which was cast without conviction was perhaps the true hypocrisy. The courteous inertia created a third type of vote.

  It crossed her mind then that there were perhaps other ways of voting than yes and no. The League needed more ways of voting than yes, no and abstention. Inertie courtoise was already one. She remembered now that at a League conference she’d attended, someone had wanted to be counted as absent when they were present in the hall. They wanted to be listed as absent during the vote. They did not want to abstain, nor vote yes or no, nor put in a blank vote. Being technically absent was more than avoiding making a decision at that time — it was saying that you were not ready even to confront or acknowledge the issue at that time. Intellectual absence.

  There was also the French use of the word ‘voeu’ — an expression of a wish rather than a decision.

  Within conversation, too, she realised there were many ways of ‘voting’.

  She felt this was a personal breakthrough in her thinking, une prise de conscience. She felt she had to digest it before putting it out into conversation, especially with John who was now in her mind clearly wrong. Simple plain speaking was not always the scrupulous way. It tried to pretend that everything could be expressed. But the greater fault in politics and discussion was careless imprecision. Diplomacy was closer to the truth because by creating honest silence it tried to avoid saying things which were untrue through imprecision. Diplomacy could create the ‘semi-silence’.

  Or it avoided saying things at that time, before anyone was ready to say something. It was a way of maintaining verbal relationships while at the same time holding off superfluous statement and unneeded position-taking. The raisings of unnecessary disagreement. Which, she guessed, was also the value of card-playing.

  As she registered her thinking, she realised that she was changing her position on something rather important. She felt nicely nervous.

  ‘I liked what Briand once said about it all,’ John went on. ‘He said that at the end of all diplomatic proceedings, all tedious speeches, and all the consecutive and simultaneous translations of dusty communiqués there are people in anguish.’

  She could agree with that wholeheartedly. ‘Briand is my hero,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’ He gave a wry smile.

  ‘After you, of course.’

  ‘You don’t have to place me ahead of Briand.’

  She did not want to be a challenge to John. Deference and affection, nicely blended, stepped between them. Disagreement, if it existed between friends, did not always have to be expressed or pursued. It could be left forever peripheral to the friendship or even in silence. Everything didn’t have to be said. She turned the conversation and sought his advice on the stock market but he seemed to be unacquainted with its workings. He said that some of his friends were making large amounts of money on the share market. He advised her to buy property. He said that owning property was good for the personality ‘simply by the span and variety of responsibilities which it brought’ — legal questions, maintenance, improvements of it. He said that owning property also involved you in a community, questions of governance at a local level, belonging in a neighbourhood. ‘Moneymaking isn’t bad for the character,’ he said. ‘It’s perhaps the most harmless employment there is. Compared with politics.’

  He did tell her to beware, though, of stock market ‘pools’ and so on. When she questioned him further about these stock market pools he retreated and was uncomfortable, having been caught going conversationally slightly too far on too little knowledge. He was usually cautious about stepping too far from the path of his certitudes.

  She again changed the subject to avoid discomforting him. She realised that she was manipulating the conversation to protect his pride. For the first time she was having trouble achieving a conversational ease with him. She thought of something soft and unthreatening to say. ‘Do you remember your advice to me about ordering soup on trains?’ she said smiling, her voice turning back through the years to that of the girl she had been then when he had given her this advice in Australia. Her voice again had a girlish lightness.

  ‘I do remember. Never order soup on trains,’ he said with mock judicial certitude.

  ‘I broke your rule. On the PLM train from Paris to Geneva, I ordered soup.’

  ‘And you spilled your soup?’

  ‘No! There was no spilling. I think trains have improved.’

  ‘Perhaps the soup is thicker?’

  ‘The suspension of the trains is smoother, I think. Or the tracks are more even.’

  Ye gods, here she was contradicting him again. She was finding it difficult to play the younger person. ‘I learned a new rule for eating on trains which I will pass on to you. In return for your advice to me, even though I disregarded it.’

  ‘What’s your advic
e to me?’

  ‘When dining on a train, order all courses.’

  ‘Why so?’

  She summoned up her girlish voice. ‘As an antidote to boredom!’

  ‘I am rarely bored,’ he said, somewhat ponderously.

  She told John about her first meal on a train coming up from Paris with Ambrose Westwood.

  John smiled. ‘I can see you are learning the rules of a more opulent world than mine. You’ve left behind my sober colonial precautions about eating soup.’

  Oh dear. She glanced at him to be sure that he was joking but sensed that maybe there was vulnerability there, maybe he regretted not being part of the cosmopolitan world. He was part of it, of course, though not as fully as she was, perhaps, living in Geneva.

  ‘Geneva is hardly opulent,’ she said. ‘It can be rather cheerless.’

  ‘It’s opulent compared with dusty Canberra, I can assure you.’

  ‘When do you move there?’

  ‘Next year, it seems.’

  She wanted to flatter him. ‘Please, John, don’t get me wrong. You gave me much good advice and not only on the eating of soup. And you could never be described as colonial.’ She took his hand and smiled at him. ‘Maybe a little out of date in your knowledge of the suspension of trains.’

  Here she was bringing him up to date on trains. She wanted him to be the wiser one. She wanted to be girl to his man. She then found herself asking how much older he was than she, and whether she should be taking his hand. She let it go. He was a married man and there had never been any suggestion of impropriety. Until now, though, he had seemed to be almost of another genus to her, a mentor, not a man as such. He had become a man as such.

  He asked her to do the ordering — ‘My French is rusty’ — and complimented her on her French and her ‘aplomb’ and also on her accented English. She said it was because her mouth had to make French sounds every day. They drank their tea and ate their cakes and talked of the health and fortunes, of the births, deaths, and marriages of mutual acquaintances back home.

  He asked her whether she read much in French. She said she tried to.

  He told her that when he was in Paris for the Peace Conference one of his jobs had been to read the Paris newspapers each day.

  ‘Not a bad job,’ she said.

  ‘There were forty-three daily newspapers in Paris then,’ he said wryly.

  The Australian substitute delegate, Freda Bage, came into the salon then and joined them.

  Two days later a message came to her to telephone John at the Hôtel de la Paix. She did and he said he wanted her to meet James Jackson Forstall, an American who could answer all her questions about the stock market.

  She went again to the Hôtel de la Paix for tea, this time in the suite of James Jackson Forstall, a hearty American in his forties.

  ‘You will probably not know this,’ John said, smiling in the direction of Forstall but talking to Edith. ‘This man is buying La Pelouse for the Secretary-General’s residence. As a gift to the League.’

  She didn’t know that. La Pelouse was a fine mansion in which Sir Eric lived and she’d been there for League receptions. It impressed and warmed her that this American should be buying La Pelouse for the League.

  John said that he sometimes believed that the United States had two foreign policies. ‘The one that comes from Washington and the one that comes from people like James and Rockefeller and Carnegie.’

  Mr Forstall liked that.

  John told Forstall that he’d mentioned the skulduggery of pools. ‘But I’m afraid I don’t really know the ins and outs of it all. I said you could enlighten us, Jim.’

  ‘I hope, young lady, you’re not contemplating setting up a stock market pool?’ Forstall smiled at her. She said it was about time she understood something about the stock market. Everyone else seemed to be talking about it these days.

  Forstall said, ‘If you do set up a pool, you must include me. That’s all I ask.’

  ‘I will when I know what one is and if I like the sound of it.’

  The men laughed.

  Forstall said that people could manipulate the stock market by forming a pool — which was really a group of share buyers getting together to distort things.

  ‘They buy and sell shares in a company with no apparent pattern — for no reason, you see. Their pattern of selling is based on nothing. What it does is that it makes that particular stock “active and higher” and so makes people interested in the stock. Speculators outside the pool then begin to buy up the stock because of this activity. They believe that someone somewhere knows something about this stock that they don’t. The stock continues to attract more speculators and the price continues to rise. Then comes “pulling the plug”.’

  Edith wrote down in her notebook the expression ‘pulling the plug’.

  ‘At a carefully judged moment, the pool manager feeds the stock held by the pool back onto the market. They unload their shares in that company at a profit and then the price collapses. That’s called pulling the plug.’

  ‘Isn’t there a law against it?’ she asked. ‘This pulling the plug?’

  ‘If the Democrats ever get their way, there will be.’

  ‘How could you tell whether a stock was being manipulated?’ John asked.

  ‘You can’t. Unless you knew the company being manipulated, and knew that any active trading in their shares was without reason.’

  ‘Or unless I were part of the pool.’ She smiled at him.

  Mr Forstall chuckled. ‘I like this girl, John.’

  At this point John excused himself. ‘I want to chase up an Assembly medallion for myself. You stay on, Edith.’

  She did not particularly like the idea of staying on alone in the suite with Forstall and said she must go as well. It was more that she felt a little intimidated by him; he was not from her milieu. It was easier to appear bright in a threesome than in a couple. Forstall looked at his watch and suggested that they move down to the lounge.

  She agreed to that.

  In the lift he said to her, ‘Put your notebook away. Learn to let the mind take notes. Don’t try so hard to remember. The mind will retain what it needs to remember to survive. Never took a note in my life. Never wrote down a damned thing.’

  He placed her hand under his arm in a friendly way as they walked into the bar.

  Over drinks — Mr Forstall having a Coca-Cola, she having a gin fizz — he told her not to be scared about pools and other talk of traps and pitfalls. He said that they were excuses for the faint-hearted. ‘The reality of it all is that people invent things, people still get companies going, people want to make things and do things, and to do this they need money. In the end, as haphazard as it may seem, people with money exercise judgement to find people with good ideas. Good things are made and people find reward.’ He said that most money was still to be made by venturing in small companies.

  Stocks, he said, were influenced by rises in the interest rates charged by banks on money, by foreign wars, by domestic upheaval, by apprehension in a country and by rumour. ‘Remember that Nathan Rothschild said that the time to buy is when blood is running in the streets.’

  ‘How then do you get to the stock exchange?’ she quipped.

  ‘By telephone,’ he replied, joining her playfulness. ‘Stay off the streets. The great mystery is judgement — something which I seem to have.’

  He told her that if everyone knew as much as everyone else and was equally smart, you could never have a chance of making money on the market. ‘Everyone would invest only in those shares which would yield the greatest return, that is, the same shares. But people are not equally informed or equally wise. So it is always in a state of play. The secret is to be able to identify the overvalued share and the undervalued share.’

  He had given her too many ‘secrets’ to keep in her mind. She tried to follow his advice about memory, but every time he mentioned the word ‘secret’, she tried too hard to remember it. She realised Mr For
stall had a love of secrets and mysteries.

  ‘Any analysis of stocks is always incomplete. Except mine.’ He laughed. ‘No, I too have taken some whippings. What I mean is that you can never know all there is to be known. And there is never an equality of knowledge.’ He told her that it came down to two rules which were mutually contradictory.

  He was also, she noticed, fond of reducing the world to one or two rules.

  He said she could choose either of these rules. ‘I give you these with my blessing. May you prosper whichever path you ride along. The first fork is this: take more trouble than the other investors in gathering information. This is one approach. It means working like the devil day and night to find out. You listen, you read, you prowl around and you poke about. It then becomes a vocation. It means you study the world and all its madness every waking moment.’

  She thought that maybe she did that already.

  He took a sip of his Coca-Cola. ‘Or you can do another thing, you can ride along another trail. You can put together a collection of shares bought pretty much unaimed, you understand? You close your eyes and fire. Then open and see what you hit. Sit back and see how they go. You’ll probably make money just as well this way. Maybe never as much as the first way.’

  ‘My father favoured new companies.’

  ‘Is he rich?’

  She thought about this and was fazed by the question. She didn’t really know. ‘He isn’t poor.’

  Forstall enjoyed the answer. ‘He isn’t poor. I like it! We call that “venture capital”. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Sure you can get big returns on that. But you meet some fancy talkers, some big dreamers, some impractical asses. Brilliant but hopeless people. But you can also meet the young geniuses. My advice: if venture capital is your inclination — mix them. That’s James Forstall’s advice: mix them. Old and new, big and small, north and south, dreamers and mechanics.’

  Edith decided there and then to buy an unaimed bunch but she didn’t know whether or not to wait for blood to be running in the streets.