Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  The Weight of the Stone

  As she let go from Ambrose, Edith began to see that what they’d shared as a couple was a covert dependency but that their initial meeting could probably still be seen as an auspicious encounter, regardless of what had happened. She recalled how inflexible her personality had been then as she faced the ordeal of proving herself at the League and yet, for all the rules of the League and all her own rules of inner management, she recalled also how unguided she’d been. But, looking back, she’d quickly learned how to turn her gullibility into an unclosed approach to the world. How to turn her naïvety in the direction of original reflection. At first, she’d tried to make Going Against the Rules a personal rule until she’d realised that it was just inflexibility wearing a different uniform.

  She also saw that in her initial isolation she had been too quick to befriend Ambrose, or as it turned out, perhaps he’d been forcing the relationship along for his private reasons as a mask for all kinds of concealments. Yet she tried not to believe that of him. He himself had quite early in their friendship told her of the advice of Lord Malmesbury to be cautious of those who, on your first arrival, appear the most eager to make your acquaintance. But then, someone contriving a relationship would say that. It was not knowable. She was learning to clear her mind both of those things which were unknowable and of those things which were unchangeable. Anyhow, she had gripped on to him as a companion and because, with his Foreign Office background, he’d been able to tutor her, so that from another point of view it could be seen as a contriving on her part. To a degree, perhaps both of them had been contriving a relationship.

  One’s first friends usually showed you how you saw yourself at the time. Perhaps how others saw you. Or was friendship more accidental than that? A surrounding of haphazardly formed contracts. And was life always too short to allow you to ever sort them out?

  No. There had been real attraction between them, and in that first year it was only when in bed with Ambrose or when making banter over drinks with him that she had ever been able to slacken from her rule—bound self. She saw now how unthreatening he’d been because of his illusive maleness and how this had been a respite for her, both from the burdens of work and from the claims of womanhood. He himself had been escaping from the worldly part of himself into his silken fantasies of Woman and resting in, and relishing, the feminine aura which she could provide. He had never seriously offered himself as husband. His last-minute declaration had been more of an attempt to hold on to her as a comfortable friend — or maybe simply to turn her into an accomplice — than to win her as wife, and he had, over the years, made only the most diffident claims as a lover. She, for her part, had never offered herself as a wife. But had she succeeded in being an accomplished mistress? Perhaps she too had been pretending and hiding — pretending to the world that she had a proper man and pretending to her friends that she was a proper mistress. No, she believed that it had been an authentic coupling with its own character, but still, authentic.

  While being a safe and temporary man, Ambrose had, at the same time, opened her to ‘experience’ in the most graphic meaning of the word. He had emboldened her, had been an exuberant leader and companion in escapade. She suspected that she would have become a grey person sequestered in her pension and her work had it not been for his leading her on excursions into his own and Geneva’s few dark secrets. This companionship had also been a meeting with some peculiar traits within herself, although nothing, that she could yet discern, which caused her to question or deviate in any dire way from the natural drives of womanhood. Despite what Florence had once said.

  From Ambrose she had also learned about the codes men lived by, of avocation and protocol and also about the hidden rules, known as good form and bad form, by which men also lived. She’d learned about the aptitude some people had for concealing parts of themselves in sovereign compartments, so that at any given time you were never seeing a reliably complete person at all.

  And he’d taught her yet another lesson: the presence of the third level of existence. This was not the existence of the institutional self which often involved a precautionary concealment of one’s true opinion, an understanding that there was no social obligation to always express disagreement when one disagreed. Nor was it casual duplicity, which she knew about now only too well. Nor was it the contradictory nature of the murkier self which appeared sometimes in the passions of the night. This third level was the life of methodical subterfuge — which meant that apparently good men like Ambrose could be spies. It was by this unintended and final lesson that he had tutored himself out of true friendship with her.

  She suspected that Ambrose and she would have only a pale professional acquaintanceship. This gave her pain of loss. They had lost the friendship in which everything was possible, without the constraint of righteousness or self-regard. She was learning that this was a rare thing, of the highest value, and she was fearful that she would not find it again with anyone. But she could see another lesson in this which she hadn’t quite seen before. That candour could be divisible.

  She sometimes wondered whether if she hadn’t been an officer of the League, and knowing that he spied, she could have gone on being Ambrose’s intimate friend. She thought it feasible, but then, if she did not work for the League she would perhaps be a different person. We become what we do. She would have become, in Caroline’s words, Someone Who Had Spies as Friends, whatever that sort of person was.

  She hoped that his final lesson to her hadn’t been to teach her permanent and universal mistrust.

  Her working with Bartou was a tutoring too, a form of higher study. Bartou practised wisdom, including what she called dark wisdom. Ambrose had a good background in diplomacy from the FO but she wouldn’t say that he had wisdom. To know the doorways of minor decadence was perhaps a fascinating lore, and a knowledge of the mysterious self and its pleasure, but it was not really a wisdom.

  One other thing had to be faced. Although she now had a Wise Man as her superior in her professional life — her own chef du protocole — she had no Lover, both in its carnal sense and in its other meanings. Having had a Lover, she felt its absence more tangibly than the way she might have felt it as a girl, when it had been a romantic abstract. It was, she found, another conscious incompleteness about her life. It was something she saw clearly and unhappily expressed in Victoria. Victoria had dreams of being with a man but could not seem to form a crossing of the boundary between men and women. Victoria caused men to be uncomfortable about passion yet they liked her as a pal, as if refusing to see her as a woman. Edith’s private theory was that Victoria was a victim of her name. Her name came from another generation and another time and from royalty. Men perhaps thought she was from the world of their mothers.

  Was she now destined, like Victoria, to give herself more and more to the League?

  During her breakdown over it all, she’d kept up the practice of disappearing from the pension at the week-ends. It had served as an opportunity to go away by herself into the countryside for solitary walks, to stay by herself and read in country inns. But finally, on the advice of worried friends, she had begun a round of social activities as a way of overcoming not only the loss of Ambrose from her life but the shock which had come from the nature of that parting. So had been the new clothes, the new style of hair — not quite Louise Brooks, but similar — and even a change of cosmetics. She found that she could not tolerate the thought that some of her toiletry had been used by her and Ambrose in their weird former affair. She had gone about removing any object in her life that had come out of that companionship while, curiously, still having erotically charged recollections about their time together.

  She had a sense of loss but she did not have a broken heart. She had talked with Caroline about it before she’d left. She’d asked Caroline about her own heart. Caroline had become immediately tearful — the only time she’d seen Caroline cry. Caroline said that once your heart had been broken you could never aga
in believe in a merciful God. She said that once your heart was broken all the fine and happy times spent with that person were brutally effaced. Every time you saw the lover’s name or something triggered a recollection of your time together it scratched your heart. She said she feared that people with broken hearts went on to break other hearts because, emotionally, they were blinded and were simply stumbling through life bumping into people. If you did not withdraw from life, you could hurt others in your ruthless search for solace.

  She’d asked Caroline about Liverright. Caroline said that Liverright did not have a broken heart but that life had taken away from under him the ground on which he’d stood. ‘The secure ground disappeared from under his feet. It seems to give a similar result to having your heart broken. He and I are both broken dolls.’

  She’d held Caroline in an embrace while she sobbed.

  Edith had never heard Caroline speak with such bitter fervency. At least Caroline had had the experience of great love. And at the time that she’d had it, those hours and days could not be taken from her. Surely only the memories were effaced? But she could not ask this.

  Edith was spending more time dancing at the Restaurant des Eaux Vives or Maxim’s and going to every new motion picture. She even went to see The Sunny Side of the War. She usually went as an invited companion of one or other of the polite young men about the place, invitations which she accepted almost without discrimination, as a personal tenet — yet another personal tenet! — because she felt, and Joshi and Jeanne also advised, that she should expose herself more to men in more customary ways. At the same time, she was watching for a sign of that relaxing candour she had lost when she broke from Ambrose — although she sometimes despaired that she would ever find it in these polite promenades, suspecting that it might flourish only in the irregular byways. None of these companions became lovers in the carnal sense. As she’d said to herself a few times now, she had no intention of becoming a loose woman, and she considered that perhaps a few experiences before marriage was modern but that there was a boundary line and she was approaching it. She had no intention of becoming like Iris in The Green Hat.

  Without regret, she was spending less time in the Bavaria, the place where she was more likely to run into Ambrose.

  She somehow hoped that the laying of the foundation stone for the new Palais des Nations might mark all manner of things both for the League and for herself. And she so decreed that the occasion of the laying of the stone would mark the end of her time of sadness and deadness.

  She accepted a minor task there as Bartou’s consort.

  She was standing near the canvas awning erected for the dignitaries, after having made sure that all the dignitaries were properly acknowledged and seated. She was, she thought, almost the hostess of the occasion, certainly more so than Lady Drummond. She couldn’t see Ambrose anywhere in the crowd. Nor Florence and her crowd. Robert Dole was there with the press and she could see McGeachy fussing around them. Victoria was there with some of the Registry people. A group of children from the League school, led by the exuberant Zilliacus girl, was barely behaving itself.

  The President of Council, M. Foroughi of Persia, stood in the parc de l’Ariana, and tapped the foundation stone of the Palais des Nations with the silver trowel and began to speak, but the loudspeaker still wasn’t working and it was difficult to hear his words unless you were as close as Edith. She finally went over to the man working the loudspeaker and, while not shaking him, told him what it was that he was doing wrong. He didn’t take kindly to her advice but the sound did improve.

  She waved and smiled to Victoria. She had nearly lost that friendship too. Victoria had come to her after the crisis with Ambrose and said that she wanted to know what had happened between her and Ambrose and why Ambrose had been demoted. She said that she felt she had a right to know. She’d heard all sorts of gossip. She realised then that Victoria saw herself as a closer friend to her than she had seen herself to Victoria. This had saddened her and she wished that she could be a close friend to Victoria. It had been easier when there’d been the three of them but now that Florence was no longer her friend it had become harder being just with Victoria. The ‘Dominion Sisters’ no longer existed. She acknowledged Victoria’s right to know and told Victoria most of it, although not the carnally irregular parts of her and Ambrose’s story. She told of Ambrose misusing League documents, showing them to people outside the League and how she felt Ambrose had used her.

  Surprisingly, Victoria had said that she felt she, too, had been used — by Edith. Edith had been stunned by this. Victoria said that often over the years, Edith had requested things of her, sometimes asking her to bend the rules, yet had rarely ever explained the reason. Had rarely brought her into the secret. More surprisingly, Victoria said she’d suspected Edith of perhaps betraying the League by misusing documents. Edith had spent time assuring Victoria of her loyalty as a friend and colleague and to the League and apologising for her thoughtlessness. Against her personal inclination, she had gone out of her way then to invite Victoria places. She couldn’t bear the loss of someone else, however meagre that friendship might be.

  In the special cavity in the foundation stone, the President placed the casket containing a document describing the event in thirty languages and including coins from all member states. Well, nearly all — South Africa had missed out. And as for languages, Sir Eric had said no to Esperanto, and for India they’d had to settle on English. New Zealand nearly missed out with their coins because the letter asking for it, as usual, got to New Zealand too late. Poor old New Zealand. Sir James Parr had saved the day and sent some New Zealand coins over from England.

  The President sealed the cavity with the silver trowel but his words were still distorted. The wretched loudspeaker man.

  Edith was watching so intently that she had trouble realising that it was done and over. She was striving to exact something emotional and historical from the placing of the casket, from the foundation stone, from the occasion. To make herself feel something, to stir her deadness. And now it was over.

  This strange, so immediate vanishing of ‘the occasion’ reminded her of a day from her childhood when the first aeroplane had landed in the town, in a paddock, and she, together with the whole town, had been there to watch. She had strained to watch as the plane circled and then approached, and then bumped down and across the grass and stopped. She’d been as close as was allowed and as close also to Uncle Fred, the Shire President, closer than any of the other children, even back then, intent on approaching the experience as closely as possible. But after the plane had bumped to a halt, and its engine had died and its propeller had stopped, the leather-clad pilot had hoisted himself out of the cockpit and had a cup of tea from a Thermos flask. And that was it. Nothing more ‘happened’. The shock she recalled was in realising that the experience was over and done. The aeroplane had landed and stopped.

  She’d expected so much more from her first landing of an aeroplane.

  Here in Geneva, she felt she was back in the paddock watching the plane land. There were even a few dogs, as there had been back then. The men all wore frock coats which helped. She’d heard that during the planning Lloyd had argued for having a brass band but Sir Eric had opposed it. A band might have helped. If she’d been back in Internal, she would’ve convinced Sir Eric to have a band.

  Now it was over. Just like that.

  And she had wanted a sign that she was over the loss of her Lover and his betrayal. There was no sign.

  Oh well, the fact was that the stone was laid and that the Palais would be built. Miss Dickinson’s chair would be in it, though the drama of the chair all seemed a long time ago. When she passed it in the Council room now, the chair didn’t look as glorious as it once had. It was beginning to be, well, part of the furniture.

  In his speech, the President of the Swiss Confederation had said that the League had become for all mankind a definite path, a meeting place, a common workshop, a bond, a wa
y of life. She had felt almost moved by this. However he had gone on to say too much, and the power of these words was smothered out.

  She’d liked best President Foroughi saying that in monuments and buildings the lessons of civilisation were preserved. They were the common patrimony of mankind. He said that while some famous buildings and magical towns seemed to belong to all of us in our minds, the Palais des Nations, for the first time in history, was to be a building erected as the common property of all peoples united in brotherhood. That was a new idea in the world — that the world should construct buildings.

  But when she looked at the event, apart from these sentiments and this new thought, she was left with very little.

  After some uncertain clapping, the crowd broke up, unsure whether that was all there was and without having a sense of much having happened, or a sense of conclusion. She wiped away a small tear of disappointment about the ceremony. She saw that Mr Zumeta from Venezuela, whose idea it had been to have a grand ceremony, was not happy either. His country had also missed out on having a coin in the capsule. She wanted to go over to him and say something kind but she had nothing to say.

  She watched Robert Dole go over and touch the foundation stone, as if testing that it was truly stone and not a fake. She resisted going over and talking to him.

  After checking with Bartou that she wasn’t needed, she too strolled away across the park, and fell in with some of the British delegation as they walked over to the motor-cars. Not that she felt that much at home with them. Over the years she’d had trouble with Mrs Swanwick, especially.