Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  She was, however, against the use of natural objects such as sea shells and stones as decoration, feeling that they should be appreciated only in their natural location, although she enjoyed the temporary arrangements of fruit and vegetables in kitchens and flowers on tables. The rage for dwarf plants was also a deforming of nature. She wasn’t interested in les jardins de salon.

  The Aesthetic of Dress was too complicated for this list. She had known since she was a young woman that her underwear was meant to be seen at some time in one’s life by a man and should be chosen with that in mind and be very fine but that it should first please her. She should every day be pleased and pleasured as she put her underwear against her body. Much of her taste in jewellery, clothing, and cosmetics had, though, come unquestioned from her mother, changed here and there by the demands of fashion.

  The Aesthetic of Play Within Unequivocal Boundaries. She believed in the formal occasion, where all the rules were known to all. The casual was too demanding, the rules too ambiguous for relaxed pleasure. The casual required blatant behaviour to ensure that understanding had occurred. The formal allowed subtlety to play within its firm boundaries.

  The Aesthetic of Ancestry. The old contained within itself a history and was, thus, another connection with the life of one’s personal lineage or the lineage of the race. She found also that design and buildings and things from other times calmed her in these days of change. She liked to be surrounded with objects from other times — maybe they reminded her that the world had survived crisis and upheaval before, parts of it, at least. Although she had much reservation about cathedrals, about which so much was made. She had never said it, but she believed as a Rationalist that they were a wicked waste of human effort and she always avoided entering them.

  The Aesthetic of Many Shapes and Spaces. She was for large rooms with high ceilings, as well as for nooks, for alcoves, attics, terraces, balconies, pergolas, and cellars.

  The Aesthetic of Proper Reticence. The work of one’s hand — objects knitted, sewn, carved or written — had to be left to speak for itself and should not be paraded, although there was a special pleasure in showing what one had made at fairs and so on.

  The Aesthetic of Touch Within an Object. She was for the craft-made against the factory-made because, in the handmade, you could find the touch of the person who made it. To touch the object was to touch another person, not a machine, and each thing was different.

  The Aesthetic of Rarity. She was for the rare rather than the readily available in all things. That might be snobbish but it was more that the possession of the rare object was an accomplishment. It could be achieved by identifying what it was you wanted and then having the money to buy it, or by searching for it, or by having it made. And rare possessions were a way of expressing one’s sense of specialness but not superiority. Of reminding oneself that one was different in some ways from other people, even if only in minor ways.

  The Aesthetic of Insignia and Bonds. She supposed, also, that some things that one had around one were to express bonding with others of the tribe. Chosen and collected things did both — expressed one’s difference and one’s sameness. She liked badges, medals, decorations, emblems, regimental ties, and even regimental pyjamas. This was related to the Aesthetic of Ancestry.

  The Aesthetic of the Earned Memento and Trophy. Jerome’s flask. She laughed aloud about that. Oh dear. She laughed again when she remembered the stationery stands.

  The Aesthetic of the Outside of the Inside. She liked sometimes in a restaurant to be seated at the window at night and to see the reflection of the restaurant in the window ‘outside’ as it were. She had not resolved, though, in her own mind whether, in choosing a place to live, you had to ‘accept’ the view from the window or whether you searched for a ‘good view’. She believed that if you thought about it there was a relationship between outside and inside. It should be harmonious although she had doubts about the value of looking out on a major scenic attraction such as Mont Blanc. She feared that people who dwelt on major scenic attractions were either searching for the sensational or engaged in private worship of the Lord’s work. Neither of these motives served her.

  She thought that one should be able to look at an objet d’art and know the material from which it was made, and something of the properties of that material, be it brass or bronze or copper or whatever. If wood, which wood and the properties of different woods. She thought that one should be able to identify and know the history of its decorative motifs. Should be able to determine at least which century, if not which half-century, it came from. Whether it was a replica or an original. Which culture produced it. Who, in some cases, designed it.

  With a quiet, comic despair, she acknowledged that she could rarely do all of these things. Finding the time for attention to detail was her difficulty.

  She heard Robert Dole’s voice in her head. Of course, while in general, her list was, she acknowledged to him, the more expensive path in life to follow, her preferences were not to do with expense. She could see that some people who made choices to buy something delightful ‘that cost next to nothing’ mentioned price to show that they had taste enough to buy for reasons other than price.

  She put all that aside and turned the page and wrote ‘The Unconsidered Particulars of Life’.

  ‘You should read Erasmus. Read Swift on ordure, that is where you should start,’ Robert Dole had once shouted at her, in the days when he had still been inclined to shout at her. ‘Read about the unconsidered particulars of life, the way we eat and the other unmentionable personal functions.’ She remembered that he’d left that particular conversation in an alcoholic despair. In those days he’d behaved as if he thought that he could break through to her by saying severe things and that once he had ‘broken through to her’, everything would be all right and they would both go to heaven. He had not been attacking her as such, she had come to realise, rather that he’d been trying to reach her on another more intense axis, to take her mentally by the hand and drag her through the curtain, down other passageways. He wanted to win her over. To win her?

  She would not let him break through the hedges of her temperament just yet, but she knew why he wanted to break through and why he believed it mattered to both of them. Maybe one day she’d be strong enough to do that. To go to his wiser but not happier place. In the meantime, it was important for her to have restrictions or she would lose her poise. She then recalled, with a smile, that she had once shouted back — only once? — at Robert Dole after he had gone on about ‘what she should read’. She’d had enough of being told what she should read. She had shouted at him that while he was reading Aristotle or whoever, she had been doing ‘something else’ maybe just as valuable to her. Maybe looking at an insect under a microscope. Or helping her uncle with his electioneering on muddy roads, listening to disgruntled farmers. Or sitting on a stump in the hot bush, eating a sandwich of corned meat, looking at the ants and lizards which gathered, as if from nowhere, to eat with them. Every use of time required a forgoing of something else.

  Anyhow, she’d also told him that she found that people who’d read Aristotle didn’t seem to behave any more wisely than those who hadn’t. He’d said, ‘How do you know who’s read Aristotle?’ She’d said that she had a pretty good idea. They had both laughed.

  She remembered also at Caroline’s farewell party. She’d been the last to leave and had sat with Caroline until sunrise to watch what Caroline called ‘the embarrassing dawn’. Edith had said to Caroline that she often felt that Caroline sounded as if she’d ‘read everything’.

  Caroline had replied, ‘I read too fast, as if I am trying to catch up. But catch up with whom?’

  Edith said she believed the ghosts of philosophers past moved in all conversations and attitudes and also in novels; even if we cannot name the philosophers and even if we have not read them, they are transmitted through the atmosphere of our times. ‘But Bartou says that only the reading of history can save us f
rom political hysteria.’

  ‘Did he say what would save us from people who haven’t read history but who gain power?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, he did say something once about that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said that only superior political cunning and dexterity would save us from dangerous leaders. If you are not interested in making history it is sometimes best to get out of the way of history.’

  ‘Typically Swiss.’

  They had fondly held on to each other and watched the embarrassing dawn and Edith had wished that Caroline was not leaving the League.

  After the exchange with Robert Dole about the unconsidered particulars of life, she’d gone to the American Library and had begun to read Erasmus. He’d lent her his copy of Swift. She’d understood then why he’d shouted that at her and what it was that he wanted everyone to face up to. Robert Dole wanted people to regain their humanity by facing themselves as they were in all their frailty, dirtiness, and primitiveness.

  At some point, she’d told him how she wanted her life, her personality, to be a big house with towers, attics, a conservatory, a gazebo, garden mazes, and yes, of course, a cellar, and to have secret passageways and hide-outs.

  ‘And a WC?’ he’d joked.

  ‘Yes, and a WC,’ she’d replied impatiently.

  He’d said that he’d be interested in visiting the secret passageways and so on, implying that he doubted they existed yet. She couldn’t tell him that she had, indeed, begun such construction in her life.

  But in compliance with his challenge, she began her list of the Unconsidered Particulars of Life. She could see it was a concession to him in her imaginary conversation. What was there to say about her monthly cycle? Or about the business of the morning lavatory, her fleshly blemishes and excrescences? She pondered the morning lavatory, those days when she saw that it floated and on other days that it didn’t float. What did this mean? There were days when it seemed to take a long time for her body to finish, when she was impatient to get on with life and the affairs of the day and simply broke off, as it were, before it was properly finished. She did not like doing this, fearing it would damage her health, but she was sometimes an impatient woman. And when she strained to get it done, she worried about this. Were these the things which Robert Dole wanted her to note in her manual of life? To ‘face up to’? There were the days when, after some effort, she looked in the bowl and saw next to nothing. Why did it sometimes smear the side of the bowl and have to be cleaned off, yet on other days it did not? Was it better to have one long solid piece and if so, how did one accomplish that? What about many scrappy pieces which were not as satisfying or, she felt, as healthy, as the long, solid, single pieces? Did men do it differently? There were days when she was almost shocked at the size of it, when it hurt coming out of her, as childbirth might. When the pleasure of the pain of the size of it would cause her to recall the one time when Ambrose had put his member in there fully, that pleasure and that pain. She had let him do it so that she might know what he felt when such things happened to him. She supposed that she might also do it again, for pleasure. Those mornings when she enjoyed the movement and feel of it coming out of her body — was that perverse? She always washed her anus before the sexual act but that was for fear of bad odours, not as a preparation for any sexual act involving it. How she hated someone knocking on the door of the WC in the pension while she was there. At the toilets at the Palais, she always hoped that she was alone when she had to do it and always wondered who the person was in the next cubicle and whether they were listening and, at the same time, telling herself that, at her age, she shouldn’t worry about these things, but still, it was true, she did wish to be unheard. What about enjoying the bidet’s spray of hot water? What did enjoying that mean? As a little girl, Edith’s mother had taught her to wipe from front to the back away from her other opening. She’d read with interest that in the fourteenth century people did it in any dark corner. That it was thought unacceptable to talk to a person who was so engaged. Only gradually did the examining and discussion of other people’s dung become unacceptable as well.

  Enough. Enough of considering the unconsidered particulars.

  She looked at the page and worried that one day someone might read it. Would Robert Dole be proud of her if he ever read her appraisal of the unconsidered particulars? Was there an aesthetic to be applied to the unconsidered particulars of life? She wasn’t up to doing that.

  Looking back over the pages she saw that she had not gone very far with her list of civilised tenets which she might use to respond to Robert Dole. She reread her poem. It was a failure — a grappling with an idea rather than the charming portrait of an idea.

  But there, thank goodness, was the dinner chime. She could go down and be self-indulgent.

  She washed her hands and did her face. Maybe civilisation was soap. Maybe it was also self-indulgence.

  To hell with Robert Dole.

  Somehow the self-scrutiny had not been the dark night of the soul which she’d felt she needed. Yet she sensed that she’d begun to expel toxins.

  On the stairs she noted that it was snowing, that she was now on holidays, and that she had a good appetite. She would order the menu gastronomique. Wine would dissolve what was left of her anxiety. She would stop making lists and stop making agendas for herself. She would not spend a week harassing herself and her soul. Instead she would give over to sloth and indulgence. She wished that she had brought more books. Light and silly books. The hotel would probably have some in its guests’ library.

  She observed that she was glad to be alone.

  The Nature of Spies

  ‘We’re going as Australians,’ Ambrose said to her in the Secretariat lounge. ‘Edith, you will be my mask. He hates the British — even circulated a fraudulent document claiming the British want to bring America back to the Empire. Fairly amazing, you must admit, seeing we can’t get them into the League.’

  Edith looked Ambrose over, as if ‘going as an Australian’ was somehow a matter of looks. ‘There is a respectable body of opinion that believes the Americans should be back in the Empire.’

  ‘Lord Strabolgi!’

  ‘And Bernard Shaw.’

  ‘Hardly that respectable a body of opinion. Well, I can tell you now, it’s not going to happen.’ He smiled. ‘Of all the diplomatic predictions I might make, this is the one of which I am most sure.’

  Jeanne, sipping her drink, asked the barman for more gin. ‘Too much vermouth.’ She also looked at Ambrose as if to appraise his passing as an Australian. ‘As an Australian, you’ll not do,’ Jeanne said to him. ‘Even for Edith, passing as an Australian is a difficulty these days.’

  Edith made a face at Jeanne.

  ‘I can but try,’ Ambrose said, putting on what he considered an Australian outback accent.

  ‘And if you don’t pass, we’ll all be thrown into Lac Léman by Mr Shearer’s bodyguards,’ Edith said.

  ‘Could say I was a British newspaperman. Could say I was Robert Doleful.’ He looked at her. Ambrose seemed now openly jealous of her and Robert Dole, although nothing romantic had happened between them. Well, she was discussing more with Robert Dole, which could be seen as a ‘romance of the intellect’, she supposed. There was nothing on the horizon and she was still very unsure of Robert Dole. ‘You might find that intriguing,’ he said, looking at Edith.

  Jeanne also looked sideways at Edith to see how she reacted. Jeanne herself was obviously curious about what was developing there.

  She was about to let Ambrose’s innuendo pass, but instead said to him, ‘For you to act as a Robert Dole type of man might be even more intriguing.’ She didn’t know exactly what she meant but it was an unkind wave in the direction of Dole’s obviously surer masculinity. Characteristically, Ambrose ran away from this needling. ‘Whatever the subterfuge, we must get into the party — Sir E. wants a report on this odd American chap and his efforts to make trouble at the conference.’ He ta
sted Jeanne’s drink. ‘That drink really bucks. What is it?’

  ‘A Gin Turin — gin and vermouth.’

  ‘I think it’s what back in London we used to call a Gin and It.’

  ‘I had it for the first time here in Genève. Not in Turin. Never visited Turin.’

  Ambrose savoured it, closing his eyes, focusing his attention on his taste. ‘A multifarious combination — what flavours have we got here? In the gin we have the juniper berry, coriander, maybe licorice, and in the vermouth, I can detect the dried grapes. Have I missed anything?’

  ‘Herbs in the vermouth,’ Edith said.

  ‘Yes, the herbs — plantes aromatiques galore. Very nice. A multifarious combination.’

  Edith enjoyed Ambrose when he talked food and drink. He analysed all the flavours of his meal while she argued for experiencing the whole, in the mouth, unanalysed, although she tried to hold each mouthful until she had captured it as an experience of the palate. But often she forgot to do this.

  There was no problem getting to the party in Shearer’s apartment in Champel, up among the decent dwellings of the better-off part of Geneva. The party was crowded with hangers-on from the Naval Conference and a few press, but naturally no League staff.

  And Edith danced with a woman for the first time.

  A rather beautiful American woman in a green beaded dress with bare shoulders asked Edith to dance. The woman’s invitation was so natural that Edith wondered if women dancing with women was becoming the done thing. The woman then danced very close to her. Body against body. All the more iniquitous because the woman had introduced herself as ‘a merchant of death’. Edith felt her neck at last relaxing, from the gin and the rhythmic movement of her body.

  ‘And you’re an Australian journalist?’ the American woman asked. ‘Would an Australian newspaper send you all the way here to cover this Naval Conference? A woman reporter?’