He was giving her an insight into his nature, which did not seem to her to be brutish at all, and she could see that it was hard for him to say it, and her tenderness towards him returned and went out to him. ‘My jokes are pain,’ he said, grimacing.
Edith suspended her speech of non-acceptance of romantic proposals, and again thought fleetingly about birth control.
He seemed bent on continuing with confession. ‘You’ll be curious to know, Edith, that I have now, these recent minutes, concluded a negotiation within myself, a change of position. A not altogether painless change of position.’
She looked at him, indeed with curiosity. ‘I hope,’ she said smiling, picking up the reference to the negotiations at lunch earlier in the day, ‘that I can make it easy for you to negotiate this change, whatever it might be — as long as it is, of course,’ smiling encouragingly at him, ‘a change of stance which I favour.’
‘I do not see — if I ever did see — the League as a wastepaper basket.’ He looked down at the table in thought.
‘That pleases me.’
‘To change the metaphor, I see the League as our fire station.’
Edith had never heard the League referred to as a fire station.
He went on, ‘I have this feeling, new to me, and it came to me tonight — I’ll explain — that the League will need all the firemen it can get.’
On hearing Robert Dole commit himself to the League, she said, ‘Surely it hasn’t been the pleasure of my company that has changed you? My company could’ve been had for a lesser concession.’ Not true.
He shook his head. ‘You haven’t told me what changed your attitude to me,’ he said, parrying her question, ‘your reappraisal of me?’
‘I have reappraised my attitudes to you, Robert Dole,’ she said lightly, ‘but I should warn you that the reappraisal continues.’
She hoped her tone was emotionally reassuring to him.
He said that the telephone call from Miriam was about news from Berlin. In the elections the National Socialist party had 107 deputies elected. ‘They’d only twelve in the old Reischstag.’
‘And this has changed your stand on the League?’
She did not quite see the connection.
Robert Dole said he was opting for the bureaucratic wizardry of the League, however lumbering it was, against the diseased magic which he saw happening in Germany and Austria. ‘I sense magicians at work to summon up the dark forces. Democracy is no safeguard. It can allow civilised behaviour but it does not guarantee it. Democracy can endorse evil. Only a guardian of the ethos can save us. The League. If only it can make a powerful military combination to defend the Covenant.’
She thought he was probably over-alarmed by the Berlin election result. The British ambassador in Berlin, Lord d’Abernon, had told Bartou and her privately that the National Socialists were not the problem. She wouldn’t say anything about Lord d’Abernon just now. She’d tell him at some other more useful time. Maybe she’d tell him ‘in the morning’ — she savoured the expression and all it meant.
She thought of the night when he had argued that France was an enemy of peace, and a danger, and she hadn’t understood. ‘I feel embarrassed.’
‘About what?’
‘About that time you argued with me about the danger of France. I was naïve. I’ve been embarrassed ever since. France is a danger. I know that now. I was bewitched by Briand.’
‘I don’t really remember. I know that for a while I went on about France. I was frightened by France.’
‘You don’t remember the night we … tussled … we argued? You wrote me a note of apology?’
‘We’ve had a few disagreements, Edith. I remember the note but not the argument.’
He said her name in a way she had not heard him say it before and it warmly alerted her to the changes happening between them.
It was mollifying to realise that events which we recalled in embarrassment were often forgotten by those who witnessed them. Of course — those who witnessed such embarrassment never felt the embarrassment.
She sat there enjoying the release from that embarrassing night when she’d argued against him. She was released from her naïvety. He remembered nothing of it.
‘And to think I nearly wrote you a note apologising for my naïvety,’ she laughed.
He smiled back. ‘Naïve is the last thing I would see you as.’
How extraordinary.
He then said, ‘Why don’t we stay here at the Bergues?’
‘Stay?’ The proposal, of a kind, had arrived, perhaps more decisively than she had fantasised. ‘Book into the hotel, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Without bags, without being married, without a reservation?’ Was she now about to reveal her naïvety?
‘Without all those things.’
‘With the staff knowing?’
‘I am afraid I can’t arrange for us to stay without the staff knowing,’ he said smiling at her, taking her hand. ‘Of course, if you prefer … I realise that it is rather impulsive. Inconsiderate?’
She had vowed to cease being Bohemian. Prefer what? What had she expected to happen? She supposed they might have gone to his apartment. If anything was going to happen. She’d never taken a man to her rooms, which would be embarrassing, facing the inquisitive eyes of the other residents the next morning. She had managed to avoid that so far in her life and had kept, at least, her rooms chaste. His place? She had no idea where he lived. He seemed to be forever in bars and cafés.
‘I hadn’t anticipated staying, well, staying here at the Bergues,’ she said, and as she listened to herself, she realised that it implied that she had intended staying somewhere else, with him. ‘It is difficult. The arrangements.’ She had trouble imagining the ‘staying’ without luggage, without proper attention to her personal details.
‘You remain here at the table and I will arrange everything.’
‘Isn’t it scandalous?’ she said half-seriously, and wondering how he would take care of everything which included her personal necessities.
‘I don’t think that we can do anything that the Hôtel des Bergues hasn’t seen before. And we are, for the present time of our lives, in the rank just below where our behaviour becomes public scandal. And it is, after all, the hotel of the French delegations and we know about the conduct of the French.’
She looked directly at him. ‘I know this sounds unmodern — but I really haven’t done this sort of thing before.’ There was Ambrose but that was another sort of thing, too. She remembered Ambrose in her first week and the Alpine inn.
‘I haven’t done this sort of thing very often either. In fact, I have never done this sort of thing,’ he said.
She wondered whether he was also making exceptions and special exclusions.
‘I want things between us to be — serious,’ she said.
‘They are serious.’
‘Good.’
‘Will I make arrangements then?’
She took a breath. ‘Yes, make arrangements.’
He stood and came around to her, taking her hand. ‘I am very serious, Edith.’
She lightly, and quickly, kissed his hand.
‘We are, after all, part of l’aristocratie internationale. We can do as we wish,’ he said.
She then managed to sound lightly accepting by saying, ‘Perhaps we could stay in Briand’s suite.’
He laughed. ‘I’ll see.’
She realised that she was making a private joke back to her beginnings at the League and therefore the Time of Ambrose. She didn’t seem to feel any guilt.
He then excused himself and went to arrange things with that authority which she’d seen before in men who’d been at the War. They behaved as if they’d earned the right to ask anything, to break any rule. He’d earned this while she’d been working with her mother in the Red Cross to preserve 327½ dozen eggs to send to Number Four hospital and making 1,194 pounds of jam—what privileges had that earned her? She re
alised curiously that she envied the men their war. She sat at the table nervously avoiding the eyes of the waiters who, she felt, must know what was going on, as Emery Kelen had known at the luncheon, as the whole of the luncheon must have known. As the whole of Geneva would ultimately know. Probably, eventually, also the Journal de Genève.
And tomorrow morning? Tomorrow they would have to leave the hotel in daylight, go into the street in evening clothes, clearly from the night before. She didn’t have to go to the office but still, they did have to go out into the daylight of the street. She had no toiletries with her. In the morning, she would have to face him, and face the staff of the hotel. It all seemed too much. To say no now would also require a huge exertion of will. As Machiavelli would say, regard all courses of action as risky. Never imagine there was such a thing as a safe course. When one tried to avoid one danger, one encountered others. The danger in saying no at this point would be to upset his planning and his desires, and her desires too, perhaps, and to present herself as some other sort of woman. No, they were embarked but it would be her farewell to Bohemia.
Robert Dole returned and sat down. She looked at him. He gave her an embracing smile the like of which she had never had from him. She returned the smile in kind and looked down, thinking, this is ridiculous, I am nearly thirty, and my knees should not have turned to jelly.
‘They are very willing to have us as guests. I talked with the night manager, not with the desk clerk. At first, I said something about “lost luggage and missed trains”. It was all unnecessary. He is a man of the world, he seemed to know who I was, remembered from some event.’
‘They’ll want to see our passports?’
‘I think the formalities will be overlooked. But not the niceties.’
She felt he was securely in charge of the evening and she was quietly happy for that. She would just let it all happen.
‘Good,’ she said, not feeling it yet. ‘Bad. Really, I’m nervous.’
‘That will pass.’
She was relieved to find that they were not expected to leave the table that minute and go to The Room. They went on, in an urbane manner, to have their desserts, with the nervous, but beckoning, thought of The Room sitting, somehow, on the table with them, like an oversized gift box. With further urbanity, they then had their cognacs and coffee in the lounge and were just finishing when a porter came to their table in his smart brass-buttoned uniform and said, in a discreet, whispered announcement, ‘Your room is prepared, Monsieur, Madame, when you are ready.’
Robert Dole thanked him, and turned to her: ‘Shall we go up?’
Just like that? ‘I suppose so.’
‘You’ve finished? Do you want anything else?’
‘I would like a glass of something.’
‘There will be a glass of something in the room. Courtesy of our bon host.’
She could think of nothing further to arrest the moment, although it was not delay that she wanted really, what she wanted was to be magically whisked from the comfortable seat in the calm lounge to The Room, without any intervening movements. Avoiding any other eyes, she stood, took Robert’s arm and they went from the lounge and its calm, murmuring conversation and its ordered service, and, clutching the rolled caricature, she was led by him and the silent, uniformed porter to the lift and its too noisy door, and staring liftboy, up the three floors, along the wide corridor, to The Room, a journey taking at least a month. To The Room, where nothing would be methodical or calm and nothing quite certain.
The porter fumbled with the key and took another week to unlock the door.
‘How very Weimar,’ she whispered to Robert Dole, striving for urbanity.
He chuckled. ‘Very.’
How ruthless new love was. Yet she decided not to do it again. She decided that new love had to have its own language and its own sayings.
There was, indeed, a bottle of champagne. Champagne, at least, was a certainty in life. So were their hats, gloves, and coats, also there in the room.
‘Shall I open the champagne for you, sir?’ the porter said.
‘Thank you, porter, no. I will do it myself.’
He was a man who opened his own champagne. After glancing around, but not taking in much of the luxury of the room, seeing at first only the large turned-down bed, she went to what she took to be the door of a bathroom, and, seeing from the corner of her eye Robert tip the porter, she went in to the bathroom for temporary respite more than for any bodily need.
She refreshed her make-up and tried to garner strength from the coolness of the tiled bathroom and its new efficient taps and sumptuous towels, leaning her cheek momentarily against the cool tiles. Should she bathe? She did not want to go to him with the light but inescapable dampness of body. Nor did she have the boldness to do such a definitive thing even if it would give her more time. But she used the bidet to make sure that her private parts were fresh and clean.
When she came back into the bedroom, he was opening the champagne.
They drank to their future, and to authorship, and to the League, linking arms for the toast in the European way.
As if to take command of the room, she turned on the bedside lamp and turned off the overhead light. She checked that the blinds were drawn. She unrolled the caricature and held it to the wall, then went to the bathroom and returned with a wet cake of soap and used the soap to fix the caricature to the mirror in the room.
‘Where did you learn that?’ he asked.
‘Boarding school.’
He reached out to her, and stopped her nervous busyness about the room, pulling her to him. They kissed for the first time, champagne glasses in hand.
Coming out of the kiss, their faces close together, she saw closely his male skin, smelled his shaving soap. Her heart was excited.
‘Still nervous?’ he asked.
‘Yes. In a different way now.’
‘What way now?’
‘The happy kind. Not the anxious kind.’
They kissed again, following that timing which kissing sets in motion, where all is naturally urged and fashioned by the body’s impetuosity, advancing but without haste. And so, amid the kissing, they gradually undressed. She liked the gradual inevitability of their undressing, and relaxed. She liked both the gradualness of it and the inevitability of it, the way he watched while she removed her evening dress, leaving on her white pearls, to stand before him in her underwear.
The way he removed his studs and bow tie and shirt and singlet, showing eventually his naked, almost hairless, chest. The muscles of his stomach, the way he removed his trousers and hung them over a chair, then she almost gasped. His back had a single bad scar. She knew that it must have been from the War. Were all the men scarred? He turned to her in his undershorts and took her into an embrace, kissing again, their bodies clothed only in their underwear. The underwear no longer a barrier as such, but an enticing setting of their bodies, a display of their physical differences and their allures as a man and a woman. She was at first frightened to let her fingers come to rest on the scar, but then she did, and she caressed it.
She knew he was aware of her cognisance of the scar but he didn’t say anything. They parted and she was pleased by the way he watched her release her stockings from her suspenders, the way she eased down her lace-edged corset, as she wriggled out of it, to reveal her favourite short petticoat with lace inserts and edging, shrugging it off to show to him, at last, her breasts. And then she took down her satin knickers and stepped out of them. Showing him at last, her full nakedness, fully pleased by the way she had done it, by the artfulness of her revealing of herself. She always dressed carefully for sleep, always with her appearance in mind, her appearance to herself as much as to anyone. Now, intuitively, she left on only her earrings and her necklace. Her apprehension of him was of a different kind now, it was the apprehensive anticipation of the marvel of their bodies meeting, naked, although she found she had no doubts that what she was and how she was, would please him.
And then they were lying on the turned-down bed and she felt that it had happened by wishing, rather than by effort or decision, again, a flowing inevitability.
He quietly asked her about the hazard of her falling pregnant. She remained silent as if having not heard his query, thinking now that the wonderful flow of it all had halted, was lost now.
He again said quietly, ‘Edith?’
He was waiting for an answer, bending over her. He kissed her lightly. ‘Well?’ He smiled at her. ‘You have a personal method?’
‘Not exactly.’
He laughed at her. Not his hard laugh, a soft and caressing laugh. ‘You either have a method, Edith, or you do not. There really isn’t any halfway.’
She was shamed and she felt foolish. She said in a small defensive voice, ‘I really didn’t think that tonight was a night when I should be prepared for such eventualities.’ What made it all worse was that she had studied science, that she did know about it vaguely but had never quite got around to facing it. As a science student she’d been considered by the other students as ‘worldly’ in the way that medical students and nurses were thought of as worldly. Reproduction, asexual and sexual — although at this very moment her mind seemed to recall more about asexual reproduction of cells and such. And before, because of Ambrose’s infertility, there’d been no need. She told him this in a small voice.
He said, his voice soft and reassuring, ‘I have to worry — the male line in my family are all perfectly potent.’
She liked him saying the word potent, it was fleshly and forthright. It was then that she realised that she didn’t give a heck about birth control, this night, with him, but knew that was not correct either and should not be said. That it was romantically delinquent to feel that way. Or was it an observance of a higher order of biological being?
Then she said it. ‘I really don’t care.’ Without looking at him. ‘I am happy for you to take me.’
He kissed her and said quietly, ‘That’s a beautiful thing for a woman to say to a man. Thank you, Edith. But we have to be careful, for now.’ She detected in his voice and body an urging to accept her submission to him, that he was struggling with control.
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