‘Nothing much.’ Edith enjoyed, in a joyless way, having her secret to herself. She half-listened to Caroline’s frenzied talk, knowing that Caroline didn’t want answers to the questions she threw out.
‘Ambrose wasn’t mixed up with the typist — the one who died?’ Edith wanted answers.
‘Wasn’t he?’ Caroline was being enigmatic.
‘I’m asking you the question,’ Edith said, keeping an over-friendly smile on her face.
‘Every man in the section was mixed up with her.’ Caroline kept glancing about her at the strangers in the café as if waiting for them to come over and congratulate her. ‘I hate this city. And I hate this café.’
Edith decided to let it pass. Caroline was temperamental and restive and, for a writer, was not a person who seemed to care much about the precision of things.
Edith had to defend the League. ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on everyone.’
‘The Secretariat is a toy shop of broken dolls. Everyone here is busted up somehow. That’s what the book is about.’
Edith held back a sharp answer, remembering what Florence had said about Caroline’s broken heart, which explained other things. And I, for one, she thought, am not a broken doll.
The Scotches came and Caroline threw both hers down, one-two, like a Boer, Edith thought. She watched to see how they affected her. They appeared not to affect her at all, yet.
‘I have no faith,’ Caroline said, and called to the waiter, ‘Monsieur! Encore, s’il vous plait.’ Edith said she didn’t want another.
‘“The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom”,’ Caroline said. ‘Let’s hope Blake’s right — but anyhow, at least you get the excess even if you don’t get to the wisdom.’
Edith stored away this quote from Blake, smiling inwardly as she recognised it as part of Liverright’s repertoire of quotations. Although she didn’t believe excess led to wisdom, she might say it to Florence when she attempted a reconciliation tomorrow. She was finding Caroline objectionable. ‘I think we have to learn to work with perplexity,’ she said to her, wanting to say something much harsher.
‘You think I don’t understand?’
‘I don’t believe we should throw up our hands in horror. I think there are better things to do than that.’
‘It’s about time someone threw up their hands in horror. It’s about time we all threw up our hands in horror. But my book’s about more than that.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of your book so much. We were wondering what you meant by “strange gods”?’
‘Nothing. I just like the expression — “strange gods” — I like the mystery of it. “Strange gods”. Everyone is going to hate me when the book comes out.’
Edith struggled to be civil. ‘You’ll be the toast of quai Woodrow Wilson, although you were hard on Liverright. Don’t you care what he feels?’
She giggled like a bad schoolgirl. ‘I’ve read it out to him and he doesn’t give a damn. He’s not that sort. Anyhow, by the time it comes out, I’ll be back in Bloomsbury, I hope. Or Paris. Out of this bloody place. We must have a talk one day about “older men”.’
Edith doubted that they would. ‘Leonard Woolf owns the publishing company?’
‘Leonard Woolf owns the Hogarth Press. He liked the book because he’s interested in international matters. Don’t know what Virginia thinks of it. Don’t particularly care.’
Apart from Robert Dole, who hadn’t yet published a book either, Caroline Bailey was the first author Edith had known. Though Caroline hadn’t published anything she seemed closer to it than Robert Dole. Yet Robert Dole seemed more ‘like’ a writer. She wondered whether she was a ‘writer’ herself, having written eleven poems. None ever submitted for publication. She hadn’t told anyone except Florence and hadn’t shown anyone, including Florence, and now probably wouldn’t.
‘I’m cynical through and through,’ Caroline said. ‘To the core.’
‘I’m not,’ Edith said, stubbornly. ‘In fact, I’m rather engrossed by it all.’
‘Bully for you.’
‘That’s a little rude.’
‘You said something earlier about me not using my intelligence. I found that rather rude. I think anyone who’s not cynical isn’t using their intelligence.’
Caroline Bailey looked around her in disgust at the café, Geneva, the League, the world. ‘The most boring place on earth. And this café! Why do you all come to this wretched place?’
Edith kept herself in control. She wanted to find out what Caroline knew and didn’t know. ‘You made Geneva sound rather glamorous, with mentions of vice and dark practices and so on.’
‘Oh, every town has maisons closes but this bloody city has them discreetly out of the city on the French border. Did you know that?’ Caroline blew smoke out at Geneva, and said in a voice which sounded full of regret, as if talking about art museums or street markets, ‘This town really doesn’t have any true vice.’
‘Your characters aren’t being truthful then.’
Caroline looked at her with derision. ‘You’re a rather naïve woman for your age. About novels.’
Edith didn’t respond, allowing a formal silence to settle. She did not know whether it was the reference to her age or to her naïvety which nettled her most but still, Caroline’s rudeness was unsuccessful.
Caroline said dismissively, ‘I thought, after the Paris trip, that you might be different from the rest of them. I thought your carry-on about the black woman singer was very astute.’
This came as a surprise to Edith, but she didn’t want to talk with Caroline. ‘I’m rather tired. I think I’ll say good night.’
‘Say good night then. Go along with all the rest. Bye bye.’ Caroline rudely waved her hand in front of her face.
As Edith stood up, Caroline added offensively, ‘Oh, by the way, you should be careful — they say you’re becoming the office vamp, now that June-alias-Rose is dead.’
‘Good night, Caroline.’
Edith gathered her things.
Caroline went on. ‘I observe things. I see you vamping around those people at the top.’ It was as if she would say anything to keep her there as company, did not want to be alone.
What Caroline was saying was astonishing to her but she wasn’t going to stay to hear it.
Aware that she was, in a way, repeating Florence’s behaviour, Edith worked out from the waiter’s tickets how much she owed, took money from her purse, placed it on the table, and left.
At the door she glanced back to see the beturbanned Caroline looking about for the waiter, for another Scotch, no doubt. Edith wondered whether it was true that the road of excess led to the Palace of Wisdom. She hoped, for Caroline’s sake, that it was.
As she walked home through the night, still cold although winter was almost gone, Edith felt miserable and alone. How could she possibly be a vamp? What exactly was a vamp? Is that how people saw her? She vaguely remembered Jerome calling her belle vamp australienne. But that had been friendly. Within the League she hadn’t had intimate relations with anyone but Ambrose and considered that in the office she conducted herself with men in a pally, but correct, manner. Too pally, maybe? What she’d done for Sir Eric during the crisis wasn’t vamping. That was comradeship. But Caroline’s perception couldn’t be trusted.
Together with this disconcerting idea, recklessly thrown at her by Caroline, there was still the earlier alarm from the unreconciled sense of herself, the sense of herself as daring, as having had a strange adventure in human passion, against the sense of her proper womanhood, about which Florence had so strongly reminded her. Somehow those had to be reconciled. Maybe her sense of womanhood was changing. Maybe some episodes which occurred in one’s life could, in fact, be put aside from one’s life, had no bearing on what one really was. Or were we the sum total of all that we allowed to happen to us? Were we made from everything that happened to us?
She arrived at another troubling thought. If her experiences were in fact ‘unt
ellable’ to her friends, she was doomed to being a liar and a sneak with them, having those parts of her which she could not show. Or was there no obligation to tell all? What about if she married? When and how should she explain these things then? She realised that Ambrose was the only person on earth who truly knew her. And, of course, now Florence. Although Florence now ‘knew’ things about her, she didn’t feel that Florence knew her — fairly.
That made her feel very much alone.
She thought of calling in on Ambrose and worming her way into his bed. But she saw herself, once there, beginning a cross-examination in the middle of the night about his connections with the typist who had the mysterious operation and died. That would be a nice way to end the night and anyhow she had the Disarmanent Preparatory Commission beginning tomorrow. At least she would not have to face Florence for a few days.
She used self-control and went home, having lost a friend, although deep in her heart she believed there would be reconciliation in the morning, a friend who had called her a neurasthenic, and on top of that, a silly young writer had called her naïve and also branded her as the office vamp. A top night, a real top night. She tried to smile away her fears with this flippant Ambrose-style expression, but she was, she saw suddenly, at risk in the world.
Pact of Peace
At the preparatory commission, Edith had changed the way the conference papers were placed. Instead of the conference papers being placed on the table blotters, she had them placed in specially carpentered stationery stands made from beech wood of the Jura.
She also instructed that bottled water plat, together with a crown seal bottle-opener, should be placed at each of the delegate seatings along with the usual carafes of water and glasses. As she gave the instructions to the catering officer she observed to herself that it was an instruction she would not have been able to even conjecture back home, where she had grown up knowing only of tap water and soda water. And, at times, safe water and unsafe water. And times of water shortage when the water became muddy. And the clear icy water in the winter creeks of the Pigeon House Range. Now that she thought about it, she smiled, even in Australia she had known of assorted waters. She stood in the winter gloom of the conference room, there in the Salle de la Réformation, her eyes running along the national designations, sure, once again, that little national flags would have been too much like a fête, unbusinesslike. She was pleased with her conference-table livery. Not pleased: triumphant.
‘Why the bottled water? Everyone trusts the water here in Geneva,’ Cooper asked as he came to her side and then quickly said, ‘No, I withdraw that — no, I didn’t ask that,’ showing that he realised too late that Edith would have an answer.
She didn’t look directly at Cooper but decided to give her reasoning to him for the pleasure of hearing it for herself and for the pleasure of rubbing Cooper’s nose in her method.
‘Because, Cooper,’ she said deliberately, ‘some people do have a preference.’
She thought that was the least part of her rationale, though basic to it. So she went on, ‘I want bottled water because it contributes to the gravity of the work.’
She turned to him with a poised smile. Cooper was again, she could see, wary and also admiring of her because he knew she marshalled herself well, although she could see that the relationship of bottled water to the gravity of an agenda required something of a leap in reasoning.
‘And that, dear Cooper, also explains why we have the leather blotters instead of say, leatherette,’ she continued, ‘because the objects that people handle determine how they treat themselves, how they treat each other, and treat the things they are treating. The appropriate objects can cause people to be more contemplative.’ Edith thought that didn’t explain it fully either. ‘Make people more fertile — ’ wrong word; she didn’t falter — ‘more resourceful in themselves than they might otherwise be. To elevate their political emotions, Cooper. Some rooms, some chairs, even, I believe, coarsen political emotion.’
He held up his hands to say stop. ‘All right, Berry, all right. I knew I shouldn’t have asked. Thank you.’
Alcohol came to mind as something that coarsened politics. Especially in smoky hotel rooms. It did not always coarsen other situations. And her silk underwear came to mind, and champagne, champagne spilled onto her silk underwear, the dampness of the champagne showing up the skin of her body at that place, showing fleshly through the champagne dampened silk. She lingered on the effects of alcohol and how it heightened elegance at other times, at other more intimate places but how the drinking of alcohol always needed to be ‘managed’. Then, businesslike, she hurried those thoughts on. It was that time of the month for her, when desire was heightened.
‘It is the “crystal and silver or the brass and glass” principle,’ she said, turning to Cooper, who was going about distributing papers, and who had indeed heard all this argument from her before.
‘Remind me of that principle,’ he called to her with a smile, as he moved away.
She repeated a story told to her by Ambrose of Lord Curzon who, when made Secretary of State, had told Ambrose that he wanted silver and crystal inkstands, not brass and glass. ‘You see,’ she said, reciting lightly to Cooper, ‘for the commission, “My name is George Nathaniel Curzon, I am a most superior person”. And “My name is Edith Campbell Berry, superior but capable also of being rather merry”.’
‘Very amusing,’ he called from across the hall.
‘Do you know what sort of inkstand Sir Eric has?’
‘No.’
‘Ivory and silver.’ And I once used it.
‘Well, of course, you and Sir Eric are special pals.’
This quip flooded her with connections and implications. She assumed he was simply referring to the special work she’d done for him during the admission of Germany. He wasn’t the sort of person who would make a snide implication.
She’d opposed leatherette at the commission pourparlers. She had initiated, and sketched out for the carpenters, the upright stationery stands for each delegate so that a private screen and a working domain, was formed on the table immediately in front of each delegate. The conference papers she ranged within the stands, so that the heading of each document was visible. She put blank stationery there also. She had argued that delegates not only talked at a conference table, they wrote notes to themselves, to others, and sometimes they needed to be able to go on with other work when something was happening which did not occupy them — ‘To write to loved ones, to write to mistresses, and other notes diplomatiques,’ she had said, winning easy laughter from the men at the planning meeting. She had further proposed that the stationery holders also be designed, by her, to act as a temporary filing device for documents not under consideration.
Major Buxton said in opposition that the holders would create a partition between the delegates on each side of the table.
‘Sometimes,’ she had argued, thinking quickly, ‘relief from the meeting of eyes is needed in conference rooms.’ Again she was interested by how in argument her mind came up with an answer to questions which she had not before confronted. As a girl, she had also learned while helping her mother and the maid arrange for dinner parties that if you wished to discourage general conversation at a dinner table among people who may intensely disagree, you placed large flower arrangements in the centre of the table, which confined people to talk in twos and threes to those judiciously seated alongside each other, and not across the table. She believed that she had a surpassing grasp of the psychology of meetings. Why this should be so she could not say, except that her family had been a family of public life — all members of the family had been forever going to meetings, including the children from an early age. She had a surpassing grasp too of the tone of meetings and the gradations of those tones. She knew when and when not to have bottled water or a plain carafe of water. Cooper, unfortunately, might have learned that it was important sometimes to have bottled water. But he would never know when to have b
oth.
Finesse, Cooper, is the word, Finesse,’ she called to him across the hall to where he was distributing papers. That, indeed, was the word. And the Rule of Happy Latency applied. She also had finesse of touch, but you, Cooper, will never discover that of me. Or would he? She looked again at Cooper from this point of view, and confirmed yet again to herself that she would never be touched by him. They got along all right now at work, but no, he would never touch her. How immediately one knew that of another person. Although a vamp wouldn’t know it. The whole world touched, and was touched, by a vamp. Maybe that proved she wasn’t a vamp.
She turned to look afresh at the layout of the commission table and was elated. It was perhaps a masterwork. She had transferred her arts and ceremonies of home life to the League now that she had no real home life.
It was, after all, a preparatory meeting on the long march to disarmament. The import of it was that the preparatory commission involved the United States and also that the United States was now about to ratify the Kellogg—Briand Pact of Peace even though it had not joined the League. If the United States could be yoked by treaty to France it was, de facto, yoked to the League, Anyhow, all nations, League or not, would, she and the others predicted, sign the pact. And thus war as an instrument of international policy would be outlawed, if not ended. She now knew that it had been unsophisticated to believe that the Great War was the War to End All Wars, and this pact also corrected, to an extent, the grave errors of the Treaty of Versailles.
From a possessive loyalty to the League, she was disappointed that everything was not happening within the League but she was now learning to enjoy the craft of political solution: how for any given political predicament a political design and form of words could be found to meet it. She accepted now that the League was a working model for these things, a machine energising the good forces of the world, an example of how the craft could be practised at its highest level. If the Secretariat had no real power, it still had the power of example. Of settting standards. Standards contained values. She loved also the way new idiom evolved for each political situation and for each conference. So now the vogue word was ‘outlaw’ — to put war beyond the law. Even the term ‘preparatory commission’ had been invented. She loved it all and, standing there in the Salle de la Réformation, she prayed that her work would not ever be taken away from her. She feared, in the way she imagined someone in love might fear, that their loved one might be taken away by cruel fate.
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