Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  George seemed to be remembering. ‘At school we always tried to keep our middle name secret but I ended up being called by my middle name.’ He laughed.

  ‘It was usually a very old-fashioned name, the name of a grandparent, and we were embarrassed by it,’ she said. ‘Maybe it is our name from our former life — the life before we were born. That might frighten us as children.’

  ‘That could be right.’

  The meandering didn’t get her out of George’s analysis of her card, her life. He had taken up the card again.

  ‘I’m still finding out how to make my way. That’s the problem, George.’ Her voice sounded almost discouraged. She felt a gust of deep, deep, fatigue, a feeling new to her.

  The confession seemed to deflect his investigation. He raised his eyes to the sky, lifted his right hand as if conducting an orchestra. ‘I suppose, though, that truly we are a Federation of Selves. There’s the person within us who goes about the daily affairs and there’s the person who goes in to sleep at night alone.’

  She thought to herself that there was also the 3 a.m. person.

  She felt tired and tearful.

  Ambrose had a persona which was in acute and total disarray but it didn’t matter that much to him. He seemed positively to delight in it.

  ‘Should we trust the three a.m. person any more than the other selves, George?’ she said. She knew he would know what she meant.

  His face seemed to cloud, and he said with defiance, ‘The three a.m. person is the least brave self.’

  She thought the 3 a.m. self was the frightened child within. Should it ever have a voice? She saw from George’s reaction that the 3 a.m. self frightened him too.

  ‘Sometimes it might be the most realistic voice?’

  ‘No,’ he said, slapping the table, ‘never take counsel of your fears.’ He then left the platitudes and said quietly, ‘I’m wrong. All our inner voices must be listened to, paid their due. The final action of the whole must be decided after listening to all.’ Then with an effort he said, ‘Even the small nasty voices.’

  There was silence.

  Then in a loud, different tone of voice he said, ‘We have a birthright but we have to honour it and, if required, we have to forgive it in ourselves. I’m thinking of some of the bad things we’ve done as a nation.’

  She was glad and relieved that George was a person who could not stay in one chair, or one room, or one place for long, nor on one subject, and that they’d moved away from talking about her. She ran to catch up to his thinking, and said, ‘But, George, isn’t the possibility of regeneration part of our birthright as Australians — the privilege of being able to fashion ourselves?’

  George nodded; he liked that idea. He smiled shrewdly. He knew she was mustering herself and beginning to meet his earlier case against her. He conveyed by his smile that he knew his limitations in arguments of this sort. ‘We need you to help make the country, Edith. We need people like you. We’re short of people like you.’

  They walked across the garden towards his hotel which was on the other side of the lake. She let herself take his arm.

  ‘I know, Edy — I know. I too am a man refashioning himself. In that refashioning, we take risks. You take your life, and you work on it with your hands.’ He held out his hands, palms upward. ‘It’s as dangerous as self-surgery.’

  George said this as they were opposite Rousseau’s statue. She pointed this out. He insisted on going to view the statue. He looked at it closely, as if examining it for cracks. No one she knew looked at things with quite the scrutiny that George did. ‘Should I read this man’s book?’ he asked her, looking up at Rousseau.

  ‘I don’t think you need to do that, George. I think you’re a Voltairian. We’ll go to Voltaire’s house if you’ve time tomorrow.’

  He was tickled that she tied his name to that of Voltaire. ‘You think so? You see me as a Voltairian? Scribner often mentions the name Voltaire.’

  He asked her for a quote from Voltaire but she didn’t know one.

  ‘I’ll read that man’s books then,’ he said, ‘I’ll need something for the ship. Write down some titles for me.’

  That night, as she removed her make-up, sitting at her three-mirrored dressing table, she saw too clearly three selves at least in the cross reflection of the mirrors. She smiled at each, helplessly.

  Although George said he wasn’t one for sightseeing, she took him up Salève by cable car. She thought he should do at least that. He paid tribute to the view of Geneva, to Mont Blanc, and the Jura. The view did not stop him talking. ‘I want to raise another of the reasons I’m here in Geneva.’

  She wondered when he would get around to talking about his mission. He’d hinted at it, and, in a way, she had not wanted to know about it. She had a foreboding that it might be a proposal of marriage. She knew her answer and had ready an affectionate and careful reply. Obviously, being high above the world on Salève was an appropriately ‘romantic’ locale for a proposal of marriage. She did not want to hurt him. Anyhow, she could never live with a man who didn’t love wine. She braced herself and asked quietly, ‘What’s your mission, George?’

  He gripped the railing with both hands, and spoke out to all of Switzerland, to the whole world. ‘To get the United States into the League.’

  She broke out grinning and only just controlled her laughter, chastising herself for her vanity, but with relief. ‘George — Woodrow Wilson and many others — ’ again laughter caught her throat ‘— sorry, George, but a great many people have tried to get the Americans into the League. How in God’s name do you think you can?’

  He leaned towards her and held his lapel Rotary badge to her. ‘My secret weapon.’

  Over dinner at the Beau-Rivage, George tried both snails and frogs’ legs for the first time, pronouncing them more ordinary than he’d expected, and saying he wasn’t sure that he could taste the snails at all because of the garlic. She said that when you did taste them they tasted of the dankest part of the forest floor.

  He chewed one in silence.

  Then he said, ‘I think I see what you mean.’

  She said, ‘You know, George, apart from my family, you’re the only person from Australia who really writes to me still.’

  He looked away from her and down at his plate.

  ‘Why is that?’ she asked.

  He looked directly at her. ‘People probably think that you’ve become high and mighty. That you no longer need them. Or that you’re silently criticising them by choosing to live away. You aren’t part of their lives any more, Edy. Edith.’ He looked at her sheepishly. ‘To tell the truth, I was a little scared of meeting you myself. Didn’t know what you might have become.’

  She realised that George was frightened of ‘losing her’.

  ‘I don’t want Australia to lose you, Edith, and I don’t want to lose you.’

  ‘It won’t lose me, George; I’ll always be Australian. And you won’t lose me either.’

  He then took his wallet from his jacket pocket, opened it, and brought out an envelope.

  She found herself always worried by his moves. She expected that they would make defeating demands upon her.

  He took from the envelope a eucalyptus leaf from Australia and he handed it across to her for her to smell. She did so but found only the slightest whiff of home.

  ‘It is time for the leaf burning,’ he said.

  He put the leaf in the ashtray, took matches from his pocket, and lit it.

  She glanced around, feeling slightly embarrassed by the performance.

  He pushed the burning leaf over to her. ‘Home,’ he said.

  She leaned over and smelled deeply and, yes, it was home. It was the cooking of chops over the open fire, it was Girl Guide campfires, it was the bush on a hot summer’s day, it was the smell of the bush in pain during bushfires. Most of all it reminded her of a balm used by her mother to relieve congestion of the chest when she was little. She was still embarrassed.

 
‘Thank you, George. You brought that all this way?’

  ‘I brought it for this purpose.’ He was pleased with himself. ‘About the way you talk …’ he said earnestly, preparing, she could see, to make a pronouncement.

  ‘I’ll do something about that, George, when I come back. I’ll make myself speak Australian.’

  ‘That’s not what I was going to say, Edith. I was going to say that I find the way you talk is pretty damned foxy.’

  ‘Why, thank you, George.’

  On the third afternoon, she sat in George’s room at the Angleterre and drank tea while George, in white shorts and white singlet, did his callisthenics with dumbbells and Indian clubs. It had impressed her that he would ask the hotel to get him dumbbells and Indian clubs. She had been impressed, too, that the hotel could find some for him, although there was something of an exercise craze sweeping Switzerland.

  When she asked him why he did the exercises he’d replied, ‘For stamina.’

  She suggested that exercise should also be a way of developing bodily grace. She herself did not care much for exercise. It seemed an artificial use of the body. A straining of the body in directions it did not wish, naturally, to go. She tried not to look at his male member bouncing around in his shorts.

  With his breathing broken by exertion, he said that his life did not have time for grace — just yet — but it did have a need for stamina. Stamina was his objective.

  ‘You, Edith, you can afford the time here in Europe for grace. Australia is a country in a hurry — and for hurrying you need stamina.

  ‘After we get things straightened out,’ he puffed, ‘we’ll go in for grace. And believe me, I need the strength,’ he said, ‘to wrestle down my shyness — or it’ll be death of me.’

  ‘If you don’t take it more slowly, George, those dumbbells will be the death of you.’

  Shy? She didn’t think of him that way at all. It was a very personal thing for him to say. She didn’t want to know about George’s weaknesses. She had a picture of him which she wanted to keep and it was not of a shy man. It was of a go-getter. He was the man in a panama hat sitting in the Studebaker, driven dangerously fast by Scribner in dust coat and goggles.

  ‘I’ve never seen you as shy.’

  He stopped exercising. He said to her, dumbbells in his hands, ‘Edith, sometimes I fall exhausted onto the bed when I get home after a day of running about. It’s a dreadful drain on me, going out in public — going about my business. I’m a dreadfully shy person.’

  ‘I never knew.’ But she had nothing to say either.

  She glanced down again at the documents stamped ‘Confidential’ which George had shown her. They came from the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association Incorporated in New York. There was a letter of introduction to Sir Eric written for George by Charles C. Bauer, executive director. Edith knew of this organisation and knew it was sound. George obviously believed he needed more than a handshake to get to see Sir Eric.

  ‘You know Bauer?’ she asked.

  ‘Bauer and I got along,’ said George, still short of breath.

  She studied the documents to see whether they contained difficulties for her or the League.

  ‘You can see,’ he said, ‘the plan is to get Rotary International to meet here — organised by the League. Once the businessmen of America see that the League is a well-run outfit we can sell those Americans the whole conception.’

  She’d been impressed that George had been guest speaker the night before at the new Rotary Club of Geneva. For a shy man he certainly was a man who made himself known.

  She wondered whether bringing businessmen to Geneva and convincing them might work, so that they, in turn, could convince America. She’d told George that she couldn’t arrange for him to meet Sir Eric — she’d told him she didn’t have that sort of influence in the Secretariat. But the truth was she hadn’t wanted the embarrassment of the meeting between Sir Eric and George. Although she had to admit that George was quite presentable and she’d come to see that he was a smart man. But there was the other indeterminate bond between herself and Sir Eric which she wanted to keep untangled and untarnished, which one day might be of professional significance to her. Or even personal significance but she didn’t know what she meant by that.

  As George washed his face in the room basin, he said, through the splashing, ‘You don’t seem to be put out by being in a hotel room with a man doing his exercises, Edith?’

  ‘You’re someone from home, George. And we are old friends.’

  Privately, though, she assessed George also as being a real man.

  Seated in Sir Eric’s office with George she felt very nervous, but not in the way that she wanted to feel nervous. This was pure dread of what George would come out with.

  She knew that Sir Eric and she were going through that morning again in their memories while listening to George.

  George had brought about the meeting through the good offices of Bauer and the Rotary Club of Geneva and he had invited her to join them at the meeting. She stared out of the window as George propounded his scheme.

  Sir Eric said that the League Council had invited Rotary to send a representative to the Economic Conference and they had. ‘I know that Rotary represents men of the highest standing in their communities. I, and the League, am aware that it stands for some of the same things as the League, and we’re aware also that it’s a growing organisation.’

  ‘Three thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine clubs with 151,574 members worldwide,’ George said.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sir Eric. ‘Impressive numbers.’

  ‘Sir, it is not the number of men in Rotary which counts but the amount of Rotary in men.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  She supposed George got these sayings from some central bureau of Rotary.

  ‘Here, then, is my first manoeuvre,’ said George, and pulled from his briefcase a single sheet of paper.

  To her discomfort, George then got up and went around to Sir Eric’s side of his desk and, leaning in, began to explain. She hardly listened. She wanted to be out of there.

  He said he believed that all sound propositions could be reduced to a single sheet of paper.

  She’d joked to him that some people at the League believed every sound proposition could be extended indefinitely to an infinite number of sheets of paper.

  After the meeting, outside the Palais Wilson, walking towards his hotel, George turned to her, grinned, and said, ‘See what a shy Australian can do if he dedicates his mind to it?’ and then he added, ‘As long as that shy Australian keeps up his callisthenics.’

  On the night before he left they had another grand dinner, and at a point in the meal George said that he had something very serious to say to her.

  He was going to propose. She waited while he stacked his finished dishes to one side in a way that had constantly embarrassed her at restaurant meals during his visit.

  He put his hand over to cover hers and looking into her eyes, he told her that her mother was not well.

  ‘Ill?’

  ‘Very ill, Edith. Your father told me that he believes your mother will not live much longer.’

  His hand held on to her and she gripped his. She was thrown off-balance by the news. Letters came regularly from her mother and father and nothing had been mentioned. ‘No one told me!’

  George had not mentioned or hinted at it when they had talked about her family.

  The money. Her mother had sent the gift of money. She must have been ordering her affairs.

  ‘I think they felt you shouldn’t be worried. In this new job and living so far away and all.’

  She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of such news but your father asked me to break it to you. I kept it till the end of my visit because I didn’t want a pall to be cast. That was their idea as well. That was your mother’s wish. That I should mention it only when I was at the end of my visit.’

  ‘How ill �
� how soon?’

  ‘It’s a tumour, Edith. The doctors think she’s dying. Maybe a few more months. She’s been to Macquarie Street doctors. She’s been treated by the best.’

  Edith put down her spoon and put both her hands into George’s. He held them tightly.

  ‘In his letters my father said nothing.’

  ‘They were being careful about worrying you. You being so far away. There was nothing you could do.’

  In her mind she began to plan a return to Australia, although it couldn’t have come at a worse time for her.

  ‘I guess you’ll be coming home,’ George said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you want me to see if there is a passage on my ship? You could come back with me.’

  ‘Thank you, George — no, I’ll have to arrange things here.’

  ‘I could wait.’

  ‘You must go about your business, George.’

  George left Geneva with his new ideas and his honey spoons on the lake paddle-steamer Italie for Lausanne where he was to join a train for Marseille and home.

  Edith’s last view of him was in the Captain’s cabin, having the controls explained to him, and then waving to her. It seemed to her that he captained the boat out.

  She smiled away a tear of affection for him and for patrie, for her dying mother.

  ‘Let me know your ship,’ George had said as he left. ‘I’ll drive up to Sydney and collect you.’

  Crying, she waved sadly to him. She blew him a kiss.

  That same week, in her office back at the Palais Wilson, Edith happened to see a circular to Under Secretaries-General, Directors and Chiefs of Section. The circular outlined much of what George had told Sir Eric and suggested that members of Secretariat when visiting another country should inform Rotary of their willingness to speak at Rotary meetings, especially in the United States. It said that ‘one of the characteristics of Rotary being the weekly lunch or dinner’.

  George had been taken seriously in his own right although perhaps the secret bond between herself and Sir Eric had helped.