Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  He was a brusque man. He had abrasive tastes. If there was snobbery in her attitude, then so be it.

  And, make note of this: he had been always thus. It was she who had misled herself.

  She made herself take another note: she herself was not free from the crass fascination with upheaval and with the macabre. She knew that this mania lived and prowled in all humans. The difference was that she was not driven by that mania, that craving. She took her deepest pleasure in human intricacy, not in human destructiveness. She did not live with a wish to pull the house down. Or in Robert’s case, to have someone else pull the house down so that he could watch.

  ‘Edith?’ Robert was speaking to her. ‘Are we dining out tonight? The Lyrique?’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Another vermouth, dear?’

  ‘You do not say “another”, you say “Would you like a vermouth?” To say “another” draws attention to the count. Thank you, Robert, dear. This time, I would like a gin, a large gin. A very large gin.’

  ‘Gin?’

  ‘Yes, gin.’

  He seemed oblivious to her rebuke of his manners and pushed off through the thronging bar to get the drinks.

  ‘I put out a supplementary international press statement,’ Sweetser told her.

  ‘Good, Arthur.’

  ‘I thought it all went very well, today.’

  ‘It did go very well.’

  She marvelled that, despite the personal revelations and shifts which had just struck like lightning through her very being, her voice remained its own throaty, hearty, public self.

  Their marriage was not at all as she had perceived it as recently as yesterday—a marriage of her own designing. It was a marriage that had befallen her, it was not of her making, it was something which had unfolded beyond her prediction, and beyond her fervent wish.

  She struggled to control a welling sense of panic. She must remember that marriage was a play of many acts: more unpredictability must therefore lie ahead.

  And there was nothing in the scheme of things which said that the outcome of that unpredictability ahead had always to be bad.

  It could come out good as well as bad.

  Say it’s true! Say it’s true.

  She wanted then to crawl back into her mother’s boudoir and to rest there in the tulle and the warmth and the scents. One of those childhood smells from her mother’s room had been the sweet smell of the juniper berry, from the dear, sweet smell of what she knew now only too well as the dear, sweet smell of gin, and she took the glass which Robert handed her, and put it to her nose and inhaled that dear sweet smell from childhood.

  She would get on with the creation of her own separate bedroom domain. Robert would no longer be any more than an occasional visitor there, as was his right.

  ‘Darling, let’s go after this drink,’ she said.

  She drank some of her gin, soothingly, back, momentarily, in her mother’s bedroom, and then it was gone and she was crashingly back in the noise of the bar.

  Robert drank deeply from his drink. ‘Yes, let’s go now. I am fagged. And famished.’

  She kissed Sweetser on both cheeks. ‘Well done, dear Arthur. This must be your grandest hour.’

  ‘It is, it is. And, well done, Edith,’ he said, saluting her.

  She finished off her drink and she took Robert’s arm and they left the boisterous bar, the very picture of a young, debonair, thoroughly modern couple.

  The Doctrine of Non-recognition

  It was a Genevan winter evening before dinner. Snow fell silently against the window panes of her ‘parlour’ as Edith now called the third bedroom, and she was reading the minutes of the latest meeting of the World Disarmament Preparatory Commission, a glass of sherry beside her. And the bottle. It was more a nervous exhilaration which made her feel that a second sherry would be needed at the end of this day.

  The age-old dream of world disarmament was to become a living reality.

  The Preparatory Commission had worked for seven years to get ready for it and she’d been in and out of various subcommittees during that time. The aim had been to make sure that much of the hard thinking had been done before the conference.

  Towards this end, a Draft Convention for World Disarmament had been prepared before the conference began. The nations had only to make their obligatory minor changes, to leave their mark as a matter of national pride, and then sign their names.

  Despite its flirtation during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, America had not joined the League but it was coming to the Disarmament Conference.

  Edith and Arthur had drunk some long, sorrowful drinks of deep disappointment over the failure of America to join the League, with Arthur at times near tears.

  America had, however, joined the Commission of Inquiry into the Japanese invasion and the report was also due soon. She knew the contents—Japan had been condemned—which she was keeping from Robert. Sir Eric had placed armed guards at the printery where the report was being run off.

  Maybe she owed it to Robert.

  No. No, that was not true. She had to protect the integrity of her position even when it went against his interests.

  But despite the condemnation of Japan, she knew there would be no military attempt to stop the Japanese aggression.

  Personally, she wanted the League to try the new idea of ‘sanctions’ against Japan but knew that there were not enough warships to impose the naval blockade which would be needed to impose the sanctions, although sanctions were supposed to be imposed in the marketplace, not on the high seas.

  Deep in her heart, she also knew that Manchuria was, for Europe and the Americans, a problem too far. Robert had been right. All too far away from the busy life of the world’s capitals.

  Because it was militarily impossible, she did not really consider Manchuria a fair test of the League.

  And America had also taken a stand against Japan with its new Doctrine of Non-recognition by which it withdrew diplomatic recognition of Japan—the first time any country had done such a thing.

  She was interested in the Doctrine of Non-recognition as a diplomatic punishment and the Council had taken it up and endorsed it. Although in the case of the US she feared that it was more a doctrine of pretending a problem did not exist so it would go away.

  Nothing serious seemed to flow from the Doctrine which would hurt Japan.

  Robert was in his room. She was comfortably conscious of his rustlings and occasional typing.

  The gramophone was playing ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’—her choice.

  As the sherry relaxed her, she had to admit that she felt a certain repose. It was a repose which in part came from her acceptance now of the settled, rather mundane workings of their marriage.

  Which was not to be sniffed at. The marriage did offer these times of repose. Nothing had arisen in their lives together since that Night of Devastating Insight to change her mind. That she did not love Robert no longer panicked her. A sense of descent remained—she refused to use the word failure—a descent from the lofty heights of a vision of marriage, but it was encased more and more in what she saw as a best-face acceptance, a stoical reading of her life.

  The reading was that she’d made a less than perfect marriage.

  Or had she found some new form of marriage—something with its own perfection?

  She supposed that was yet to be determined.

  She was rather tickled by the idea.

  She had ceased to declare that she ‘loved’ him and he did not seem to notice, or if he did, he did not comment on it. He, likewise, had at some time—she couldn’t recall when—let go making the intimate declaration, except for the perfunctory endearments.

  She still found other minor endearments to say to him which had a sincerity to them. She still gave herself to him when he required but rarely now did she ever approach him. Paradoxically, this distancing of herself from him sexually had enlivened him.

  ‘You do not give yourself a
s a woman should,’ he said to her one night after finishing.

  ‘I am here for you. You can have my body whenever you need it. You do not have to ask. Isn’t that enough?’

  As she said these words she was surprised to find that he’d become aroused and took her again.

  But there was nothing really passionate in it for her. It was for her a minor pleasure. She had such needs, but she knew they could not be met fully by him now that the intimacy wasn’t there, although she’d noticed there was a certain pleasure—even if an incomplete pleasure—in even these mostly routine acts. She would have to let those stronger needs subside, although she prayed that her self-pleasuring would keep the flame alive. Alive for whom?

  There was an austerity to this. She could not deny it. Especially when she looked in the mirror and was able still to see the vigour of youth in her body, her attractiveness as a physical woman.

  The austerity threatened her at times, so much so that she found herself looking away from her body in the mirror, its wasting allurements, unable to bear the thought of the waste. She did not want to consign this carnal vitality to ‘good works’ as some sort of secular nun.

  A lover? She hardly had the time in her life.

  It was imperative that she not permit this renunciation, or descent, to be bitter.

  Robert now almost always took the second bedroom but this had been arranged on the basis of his working late and her working early. Their lives sometimes barely crossed paths for days on end.

  But tonight she appreciated the marriage and the repose it gave her. She was nearly at peace. She liked Robert being in the other room. She liked their sharing of the music.

  She liked that he, too, had a sherry beside him. She had at least got him to change to sherry before dinner instead of his usual ales—about the only thing he had yielded.

  She still read things out to him from her reports and he still loved to share with her gossip from his daily rounds.

  She loved their large apartment. They had a non-live-in housekeeper and they ate out often either through work or through the tiredness of their day ends. They did not need a cook. The café downstairs in the Place du Bourg-de-Four was very adequate and they sometimes had meals sent up.

  She did not know if he loved her still. She would not ask. He was a deeply preoccupied man. He was a rough and ready man.

  Her acceptance of the lower-order love—or whatever it was they now had—left the rest of her life with him yawning ahead. She could not face the question of divorce because she did not want to be a quitter and nor did she wish to admit her failure of judgement to the whole world. She did not fancy being a divorced woman with its overtones of rather salacious availability, of being a sexually experienced woman no longer bound by marriage.

  She could not quite look at all that now in her life. She buried herself in her day-to-day life at the League.

  And she religiously cared for her body without objective.

  Another thing: she was aspiring and he was not. At the time of their marriage, she had thought that Robert did aspire. His detective book set at the League was funny and middlingly successful, although nowhere as fine as her friend Caroline’s book. She had hoped that he might write serious literature. He was writing his second book but she sensed it would never be finished. He was respected at his paper and among the newspaper crowd and that was all he seemed to want now from aspiration.

  She stumbled then across another realisation which had been hiding there like a fox in the underbrush. She felt superior to Robert. It didn’t seem to have to do with class, especially since being an Australian she was supposed to be above that sort of thing. Class was, after all, rather passé, somewhat comical. Even the films made fun of it. She did not wish to feel socially superior and derived no joy from the feeling.

  Professionally, being an important subordinate was her natural disposition and within it she could flourish. At least at this point in her life. To be the younger person with the wiser older person, as she was with Bartou, was an association she relished. Although as Bartou aged and became increasingly inattentive to things, she felt more his equal. And she had enjoyed the role of important subordinate for some time in the old days with Ambrose.

  She would be happy, she felt, to be junior partner in a marriage with a fine and superior man.

  She’d married Robert believing him stronger than he subsequently turned out, and she married him because she believed he would eventually be distinguished. It was not going to happen.

  She supposed that Robert and she would see each other through life, each pretty much alone within the marriage. It could be worse. They did not scrap with each other as such. They still disagreed strongly on some great issues, but they were not a bickering couple. But nor did they intellectually engage each other the way they had in the beginning.

  She supposed that she needed to turn now more to her friends for emotional sustenance. She wished Caroline were living in Geneva.

  Ambrose still wrote now and then. He seemed perfectly well again, living some independent existence in the clublands of London. He wrote to say that he’d even practised a little medicine again but that it wasn’t really his game.

  It was a different League now from the one he’d known in the old days. So much bigger.

  No mascot dogs now in the Sections.

  Robert came to the door and she jumped as if her thoughts were spread out before her on the table like playing cards. She was conscious too, that the music had finished.

  He stood with a copy of People in his hand.

  She looked at him questioningly, seeing in his way of standing something unsettling which she could not quite identify. He wanted, she could tell, to read to her from People. Not her favourite publication.

  When he was further into the light, she could see that he was both edgy and perversely pleased by something.

  ‘Your book is mentioned?’ she asked, making a stab at it, trying to forestall surprise.

  He held the newspaper before her, the reading lamp caught it in its glare.

  ‘What is it?’ She leaned over to read from the newspaper, and saw the headline: ‘Society Shaken by Terrible Scandal’.

  The article went on ‘… It concerns one of the leading hostesses in the country, a woman highly connected and immensely rich. Association with a coloured man became so marked that they were the talk of the West End. Then one day the couple were caught in compromising circumstances …’

  She kept staring at the newspaper long after she had finished reading it, blushing and queasy. For a peculiar moment, she even thought it referred to her.

  She took the newspaper from his hand to read again. The West End Society Scandal resonated with an incident from her earlier life, an incident she’d confided to Robert before they married.

  Before their marriage she had told Robert of her exotic, unrepeated, out-of-character encounter with the Negro musician, Jerome, in a nightclub in Paris. She had involved herself, just that one night, for brief moments in time, in what People would call a ‘compromising circumstance’ with the Negro.

  Robert and she had tried to be honest with each other on that night of ‘telling’, but she’d felt, even back then, that she had overwhelmed him with the outlandish nature of her confession and it had never again been mentioned. She’d thought that they’d tacitly agreed to allow some things such as this to be shoved into the attic of their marriage.

  ‘Have you heard who it is?’ she asked, her voice falsely steady. Her repose now dissipated, his obvious edginess breaking into her mood.

  ‘There’s been talk. Some time back, I heard talk in the Club de la Presse about Edwina Mountbatten. I never thought Odhams would permit it to be published—even in People. I think I can guess who wrote it.’ His voice was unnaturally neutral, constrained.

  She had, she realised when asking the question, been interested in who the black man was, not the woman. She wondered if it were Jerome. It couldn’t be. She said, ‘Edwina Mountbatten!?
And who is the coloured man? Do we know that?’ She shouldn’t have asked—it led the conversation the wrong way.

  ‘I hear that it is either Paul Robeson the actor, or a musician called Leslie Hutchinson.’

  Was Jerome one of that crowd? Where was he?

  She wondered what Robert’s next move would be.

  He gave a small sour laugh.

  Her confession from before their marriage must be in his mind. She prepared herself.

  She could tell that he was in pain from whatever it was that men felt about their women and other men—however far back in life the other men might be—but this tender masculine pride in Robert had always seemed cemented over with a hardiness.

  He wasn’t saying anything but nor was he leaving.

  She wanted once again to reassure him that it was not something for him to tear himself apart about after all this time, but she also felt from the report some strange backhanded endorsement of her own peccadillo.

  She did not want to raise the matter again either. Surely, he didn’t?

  She cherished her peccadillo in the bosom of her memories—well, ‘scandal’ might be a more honest word than peccadillo—cherished it as one of her early attempts to be intrepid—and for the special, flamboyant, exciting nature of it. It was a pressed flower in her life diary. A rare pressed flower from a high mountain. A black blossom. Whatever stigma she felt surrounded the incident with the Negro, she was more than willing to endure it—at least, as long as it wasn’t in the newspapers—in return for the oodles of other enchantments which remained vividly associated with that night and which returned to her again and again, and physically excited her.

  Now, queerly, it was somehow endorsed by the conduct of Edwina and her High Society friends. If not endorsed, identified as an exotic pleasure which other women pursued. She was not bizarrely alone.

  She kept her silence. She read the piece again.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, curtly.

  ‘What will happen to her? Will she really have to leave England as the paper suggests? Will the Palace make her do that?’