Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘We’re sent over from London, not from Australia.’

  ‘How interesting.’ The American woman weighed this lie and stowed it. ‘You don’t seem to mind dancing with a woman?’

  ‘I did it a lot back in Australia,’ Edith said, with a foxy smile.

  ‘You have such clubs — in Australia?’

  Edith doubted it, but thought of her experiences with the Molly Club. She laughed. ‘Those sorts of clubs in Australia are called “boarding schools”. I danced with other girls at dancing classes at boarding school.’

  ‘How charming.’

  ‘We had to take either the man’s part and lead or the woman’s part and follow. Actually, never with a woman before.’ She was aware that the American woman was ‘leading’.

  She smiled at Edith’s playful answer. ‘You don’t mind me taking the man’s part then?’

  Edith caught the innuendo in this question.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said softly, not sure, as she made her pliable reply, whether it was the real her or the spying Edith who was accepting the misty invitation, feeling safe from it at that moment in a crowded party in an apartment in Champel. ‘Tell me about Mr Shearer,’ Edith urged the attractive American woman. ‘Mr Shearer is the talk of the town this week.’

  ‘As a reporter, I thought you might know all about Mr Shearer.’

  ‘Never enough is known about someone like Mr Shearer.’

  The American was amused by this reply. Edith was pleased with it.

  Edith said, ‘I heard he’d run a nightclub in London before he became spokesman for the arms-makers.’

  ‘You think he’s a spokesman for the armaments people?’

  ‘For the American naval interests, yes.’

  ‘Mr Shearer did — “promote”, I think might be the right word — the first nightclub in London and I worked there — the Lotus Club.’

  ‘How interesting.’ Edith was pleased that she had turned that phrase back on the woman. ‘You say you “worked” at the nightclub?’

  ‘I was an entertainer.’

  ‘“Entertainer”?’

  ‘I can be very entertaining,’ the attractive American woman said. Having said that, she led Edith by the hand away from the dancing couples into another room and out to the balcony among the geraniums. Edith had not expected to be led away like that.

  The American sat Edith on a balcony settee in the summer air and sat beside her, still holding Edith’s hand. Edith felt that it was all right for this familiarity to develop because, she reminded herself, she was there as a spy and was licensed to pretend to be anything which she needed to pretend. It would perhaps lead to her finding out a thing or two about this man Shearer to give to Ambrose to give to Sir Eric to give to the man who lived in the house that Jack built. ‘All in a good cause’ were the words that formed in Edith’s mind, in case she needed them. She thought also of the owl and the colourful ruff of its neck. The ruff, she recalled, was for acoustics, and increased the ability of the owl to hear by ten times. Tonight her body was serving as her ruff.

  The woman had taken Edith’s other hand and placed it on her breast. Edith allowed her fingers to move a little and felt the fullness of the woman’s breast and the breathing of the woman through the beaded satin. The fullness was unexpected because it was fashionably disguised by the dress. She felt then the woman’s hand on her breast and felt her own breathing quicken.

  ‘Is Mr Shearer your lover?’ By asking this, Edith surprised herself but felt that the woman’s fondling of her breasts earned her the right to boldness, earned her one searching question in return.

  ‘Oh no,’ the woman said.

  ‘Are you then, perhaps, a lover of women?’ Edith impressed herself with her audacity.

  ‘I have loved women and I have loved men,’ the attractive American woman said, nonchalantly.

  Edith had a mental compendium now on ways of loving which she’d observed, one way or another, in Europe. But she had never experienced such a woman. I could, she thought to herself, also put this down to Continental experience as well as to the good of the cause. Edith felt she might need an additional moral justification for what she felt was happening, or what she vaguely felt was on the way to happening. Although she also reminded herself that she had decreed that such irregular ‘experiencing’ was now over for her. That she had done enough experiencing to last a lifetime.

  The attractive American woman was fondling her breast and had leaned towards her, her lips approaching Edith’s. Their lips met and they kissed, Edith being reminded momentarily of kissing Ambrose’s lips when he wore lipstick. They kissed lightly and then the American woman urged the kiss towards intensity, towards passion. The touching of their velvet headbands was also sensuous; their pearls swung out from their necks and clicked together like dice. The meeting of their lips, the smoothness of the lipstick on their lips and the powdered smoothness of their faces was calming to Edith, although without thrill, and mild in sentiment. But although mild, there was a strong proposal in the kissing, a proposal of an alien voluptuousness. I now know what that feels like, Edith thought, to kiss a woman fully, trying to use her mental notetaking as a way of remaining composed. But she found she could not hold herself in complete indifference, and her breathing was hurried.

  As their lips parted, the woman said, ‘Mr Shearer is a happily married man who is devoted to his ships,’ as if the words were formed during the kiss and could only come out when the kiss ceased and her mouth was free.

  ‘Warships?’

  ‘All ships.’

  The woman continued to fondle her, and Edith gave herself to snuggling up to the other woman, indulging in small kisses.

  ‘Why does he want to wreck the Naval Conference?’

  ‘Does he want to wreck the Naval Conference?’

  ‘It would seem so.’

  Edith found her hand was making play with the woman’s breast as some cover or consideration for being rudely inquisitive and Edith was surprised by the knowingness of her hand which seemed to know what it was that it wanted to do, and to enjoy the doing of it.

  ‘Because, my darling nosy Australian,’ she said, moving again to kiss, maybe feeling that Edith’s pointed question had earned her another, ‘he wants to build ships and wholesale disarmament would be bad for that business. Very bad.’

  They kissed and Edith met the American woman almost halfway this time, moving her breasts against the American woman’s breasts, meeting her lips and encountering again a proposal to voluptuousness. From perhaps a truly evil woman.

  When they came out of the kiss it was Edith who spoke first. ‘He’s a shipbuilder?’

  ‘He is a friend of those who build ships.’

  ‘And they pay him to come to Geneva to make this trouble?’

  ‘They pay him well and he pays me well,’ she laughed, ‘and that is a secret. And does he make trouble?’

  Edith was aware that she was going father and faster than a careful spy should and that she would have to pay for this information, now so readily dangled before her by the attractive American woman in the beaded dress, although maybe it was the American woman who was being extravagant with her information as a way to hurry what Edith assumed was her seduction.

  She was aware that the American woman had put her hand into her dress and freed one of Edith’s breasts from the brassière of her corset and was moving her tongue languidly around her nipple, and suckling, then nibbling with her teeth to give the nipple exquisite twinges which she felt all the way through her body to her crotch.

  It felt exotic and off-course but Edith stroked the American woman’s hair, breathing her perfume, cradling her head.

  Edith was aware that she was becoming aroused throughout her entire body but that she had no idea of how and where this arousal, this playing each with the other, was leading nor what to do about it.

  It was then that she heard shouting from the next room.

  The American woman’s head moved away from her nipp
le, leaving it wetly cold to the air, as she turned towards the shouting. They were both abruptly returned to the wider reality. And Edith used this distraction to put her breast back inside its brassière cup in the dress, turning things back to normal.

  They heard Ambrose’s voice and another voice that was almost certainly that of Shearer.

  The music stopped. Someone had stopped the gramophone.

  Edith registered that Ambrose’s voice had given up any pretence at being ‘Australian’ and that he was being his indignant British self. Surprisingly, it sounded as if the argument was about Boy Scouts and Girl Guides but she decided that she must have missed some of the exchange.

  ‘I think we’d better go back,’ Edith said to the attractive American woman, using the shouting as an excuse for running away. ‘My friend seems to be in trouble with your Mr Shearer.’

  The American woman, although seemingly disappointed, rose also, perhaps feeling the pull of the situation and perhaps also a duty to the party and to Mr Shearer. But scared of decadence, no, she did not seem at all scared of decadence. ‘Promise that we will see each other again — soon?’ the American whispered, taking her hands and kissing Edith’s ear.

  ‘Yes,’ said Edith knowing that when she left the party, she would dissolve into the night and slip back into her identity and be gone from this woman’s reach, although at the same time she secreted away the option of seeing the woman again, if the urge should ever come to her.

  ‘Check my face,’ the woman said to Edith, doing the same for her, cleaning off some lipstick with a handkerchief she moistened with her mouth. They then returned to the party.

  In the diffuse purple light of the party, Ambrose and Mr Shearer were indeed in dispute, standing aggressively close to each other, surrounded by spectators.

  Edith was relieved that no one paid attention to her return or her absence.

  ‘I am saying,’ Mr Shearer said, his finger pointing his remarks into Ambrose, ‘that you British have enrolled one million of our American boys in this British Boy Scout thing and nearly sixty thousand of our girls in the Girl Scout thing. And who’s the head of these movements? I will tell you who is the head of these movements. A Lord and a Lady from England. We have put the cream of our youth in the hands of the British.’

  ‘What arrant nonsense,’ was all that Ambrose came out with, as Edith reached his side.

  Mr Shearer turned on her. ‘And you, I suppose, are also British. I will not have the British here in this house — you are in conspiracy to weaken our navy, our youth, our nation. Furthermore, I can prove that the YMCA and the YWCA have Directors who are also in the British Scout movement. What other country would permit the forming of a foreign legion of the young, pledged to a British Lord and Lady?!’

  ‘What nonsense,’ said Ambrose.

  Edith was bemused, having never heard of anyone fearing the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides but then she saw them the way that Shearer saw them, as something like the Action Civique, or like Mussolini’s youth squads.

  ‘They are being turned into colonists for England and, as a patriotic American, I have, sir, to ask you to leave, for having abused my hospitality by posing as something you were not. Australians you are clearly not.’

  The attractive American woman hadn’t gone to Shearer’s side but was over at the drinks cabinet pouring drinks. Edith thought that she would bring a drink to her and wondered how she could distance herself from the woman, but instead, to Edith’s relief, the woman took the drink to Mr Shearer, linking her arm and his, maybe in a move meant to calm him but by doing so, placing herself clearly apart from Edith, and then she smiled at her surreptitiously. Edith flashed a quick surreptitious smile back, wondering what tangled allegiance she was accepting by the exchange of smiles.

  Edith then went to find her and Ambrose’s coats.

  As they left, watched by the intrigued crowd, the attractive American woman blew a small quick kiss to her but did not come to her to say goodbye, clearly having to stay clear of the Britishers. Edith realised that she’d been searching for the woman’s eyes, to have one last exchanged glance.

  Out in chemin de Miremont she and Ambrose walked for a while, arm-in-arm.

  ‘We weren’t very good spies,’ she said to Ambrose.

  ‘How do you mean good spies?’ Ambrose said crossly, still disconcerted by it all.

  ‘Spies for Sir Eric — we were unmasked.’

  ‘Oh yes, that business. I have enough from the newspaper people to put something together.’

  ‘I found out things.’

  ‘You did?’ He looked at her.

  ‘I had to trade with my body to get the information.’

  ‘You did what with your body?’

  ‘Traded with my body.’

  ‘With Shearer?’

  ‘With a woman friend of Shearer.’

  Ambrose turned to her with closer attention. ‘Go on!’

  She told him what had happened and gave him her scraps of information.

  They walked for a while and then Ambrose burst out, ‘The fool — it’s not only about how many sixteen-inch guns and fourteen-inch guns each country has. We’re quite happy to ban submarines. The others say, of course, that would leave England master of the seas.’

  ‘I traded my body with a merchant of death and you don’t even thank me?’ And, Edith thought, it would indeed leave England master of the seas, even though she was for the banning of submarines.

  ‘Sorry.’ He gave her a small hug. ‘Bad manners. Thank you, Edith. I hope it was pleasurable, this trading with your body.’

  Edith thought that, yes, she’d found small unusual pleasures with the female voluptuary, the merchant of death, that she would like to follow the woman’s overtures into further voluptuousness. If she had another life to lead. If she were still ‘seeking experience on the Continent’. But really she was also relieved that there were so many obstacles to her following the woman into voluptuousness, and was glad of the barriers.

  ‘I was not sure how pleasurable it was,’ she told him. ‘Boy Scouts and Girl Guides interrupted my Sapphic adventure.’

  ‘Again, thank you, Edith — how very Weimar of you.’ He squeezed her arm with his. ‘You are a wizard spy.’

  That Sunday, Edith was at Ambrose’s apartment and she happened to glance at what he’d been writing in his typewriter. She saw that it was about the man Shearer. The word ‘Sapphist’ attracted her eye, standing out on the page, and reading it, she was alarmed to find that the happenings at the party, while without naming her, made it obvious to those in the Secretariat that she was Ambrose’s woman ‘sub-agent’. She had begun to read the whole document when Ambrose came into the room and, joking about ‘matters of state’, rolled the page out of the typewriter, gathered the other pages and put the document away.

  She was astonished by his action. Earlier that day, they’d spent time together while she recounted in detail what she’d learned from the attractive American woman and consequently she felt she knew already much of what was in the document — had herself contributed to it. ‘Come on, Ambrose, we’ve never concealed things!’ she said, her sense of offence growing.

  ‘It is a confidential report to the Old Man.’

  ‘So? Can’t you see that it pretty much identifies me? And can’t a fellow member of the Secretariat be trusted?’ She felt she had stumbled on an echelon of secrecy within the League of which she had not been aware and it unsettled her.

  ‘You aren’t in the haute direction,’ he said.

  ‘But I’m mentioned in the report!’

  ‘I’ll remove anything that could identify you. I promise.’

  ‘You link me to that Sapphist!’

  ‘You told me that he employed one. You seemed to be happy in her company that night.’

  On that night, she had not been herself — she’d been acting someone else. ‘I didn’t quite say that. And anyhow, what are you? The League employs you and you’re hardly a paragon of purity.’

>   It was a harsh thing to say. They stood in heated silence. She had obviously hurt him.

  He said in an injured voice, ‘I said I would delete anything which could identify you.’

  ‘Good.’ Her anger was still high.

  ‘I can’t let you read it.’

  ‘That’s your business,’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid that it is.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  They looked away from each other and moved about the room in high tension.

  She decided to trust that he would delete the references and not to pursue it. She left the room to sit out on the balcony until she’d regained her composure. She later apologised for her ugly personal retort. Of course she was not in the haute direction of the League and she supposed the League had to have confidentiality on some matters.

  In her office the following Monday, her curiosity and her fear about the report drove her to call Registry and ask Victoria if she could see Ambrose’s report on Shearer. Victoria hated these irregular requests but always gave in.

  She called Edith back later on the inter-office telephone. ‘There is no such report.’

  Edith pondered this. ‘Thank you, Victoria.’

  Maybe the report had gone straight to Sir Eric and had not been filed. But that would be irregular.

  After thinking about it, something about the report occurred to her and she rang Victoria again. ‘Victoria, as a Registry person, what do the letters “MI-c Attn: NO” mean to you?’

  ‘It is not a League file number.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Victoria asked her to repeat it and then said, ‘MI would mean, to me, Military Intelligence.’

  ‘Whose military intelligence?’ Edith was confused, although the League did have a permanent miltary commission. Maybe that was where the report had gone. ‘You mean the military commission?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean the military commission, not unless they are playing soldiers or doing something against regulations. I would say English intelligence. And it’s directed for attention of the Naval Office — the letters NO.’