Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  They did not mention the Edwina Mountbatten affair again.

  In moments of reverie, her heart and mind were now more and more retreating into the world of her past to those times when she felt intrepid and free. Not trammelled in spirit, as now she felt.

  She did not have the energy or time, though, to confront either her needs, nor the deceit of allowing routine and appearances to run her life.

  Inevitably, Robert came to her bed again, and she pulled back the covers to let him in, and while in the bathroom inserting the diaphragm, she liberally applied the lubricating cream inside herself to compensate for her lack of arousal.

  A reply came from Ambrose. ‘… I hear there was a gold cigarette case indiscreetly engraved by Edwina and given to the Black, known in some circles as ‘Hutch’ (as in ‘rabbit’? Breeding as?) which he has shown to everyone in the world who can read. Discretion is not, evidently, in the character of the Black. Nor, now that I think about it, in the character of any colour I have known (and I’ve known at least three of the colours—how many are there???!!).’

  He was hearing much of the case by being rather close to Peter Murphy who was very much in the Mountbatten entourage, ‘… but that is a story in itself …’ Ambrose wrote.

  He told her that Edwina had so offended the Palace that she was now persona non grata despite the Very Public Luncheon on the day after the case.

  The other story was that London’s coloured artistic community, especially the opera singer, Paul Robeson, was outraged by Edwina’s denial of knowing them when they had, in fact, been at Brook House many times by her invitation. So there were convulsions of temper among the artistic and black crowd, as well.

  He’d heard that Dickie’s naval half-stripe was in doubt. ‘Of course, he has always closed his eyes to his wife’s “social” life but now he has had his nose rubbed in it. But that is all very well, after all, he prefers to mix with sailors. Don’t we all? The word is: They May Not Last As a Couple.’

  Edith could not help but feel the queer coincidence that now further identified her with Edwina. They both had marriages which were strained because of their relations with black men.

  She laughed. She might write to Edwina. A girl from Jasper’s Brush writes a personal letter about shared Scandalous Things and about Marriage, to a woman out of the top drawer of English high society.

  ‘… There is a wonderful story going around. Following the scandale, Dickie whisked her off to Malta where he’s based. The story is that there was a command ball, well, you see, it was ALL SAILORS—no women—what can I say? There was a long line of sailors formed to take part in the Palais Glide and Edwina, the only woman there, leapt into the dance. Dickie was not amused at having his wife, already the talk of London, now frolicking with 50 SAILORS. In a ballroom (how aptly named). Well. After Brook House and its “Fétes Pour les Sauvages”, and Wild West Parties, and Circus Parties, and Almost Naked Parties in St John’s Wood … what is left for a girl to try? We hear she’s planning to go to the US—alone—and for a long time. The best joke around London is that Edwina is going through “a very black time”—well, it sounds better after a few gins. A Prince Obolensky is also mentioned in connection with Edwina. Of course, George and Mary have a little problem with the heir—and a woman named Mrs Simpson—yes, Mrs Simpson. Of that More Later. Dear, sweet Edith, it is so good to be talking to you again even if by mail, and talking about Things That Really Matter. And you must tell me all the delicious details of that outrageous escapade of yours those years ago in Paris. Whatever I might have said or not said at the time, I was filled with admiration at your absolute audacity. Yours as ever, Ambrose.’

  The letter charged Edith with loving delight and deeper longing for his company. She cried for it. She forgave him everything. She would forgive him murder. She needed a Rotten Friend like Ambrose, in her life, desperately.

  Best of all—best, best, best of all—the letter told her that Ambrose had forgiven her for her hopelessly misdirected behaviour those years ago.

  As she was pouring herself a port in her parlour one evening, Robert came to the door.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘did you get your copy off?’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘Did you write up the League’s radio station?’

  ‘With photographs. Including one of Sweetser broadcasting to the world. How was your day?’

  ‘The Disarmament Conference seating plan. Final draft.’

  They no longer touched, no longer kissed. She did not offer him a drink.

  He no longer fitted into her room, her parlour, or the way she had rearranged it.

  ‘I have news,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ She felt on guard with him most of the time. Although his voice was not threatening, she prepared herself. In fact, if anything, he seemed sheepish.

  It came out. ‘I am going to China. To cover the war.’

  She avoided showing any emotion.

  Thank the gods.

  Oh, thank the gods.

  She concealed welling pleasure. ‘Have you missed war so badly that you have to go all the way to China?’

  ‘I may have. It’s the best war we have at present.’

  ‘When do you sail?’

  ‘Still finding a ship. Matter of days, with any luck.’

  ‘For how long?’

  He did not answer immediately. ‘For as long as it lasts, I suppose.’

  She turned to fully face him and probed further. ‘Indefinitely, that is?’

  He looked away from her and cleared his throat, ‘I suppose that’s the word—indefinitely.’

  She found herself nearly trembling. She was confused now in her emotions. Including her sheer guilty pleasure at the news. However, she could hardly hope for a long war.

  ‘Is the paper sending you?’ Her voice was firm, but it lied.

  ‘I asked them to send me.’

  There was something odd about his reply.

  ‘They’re paying you?’

  ‘By the line.’

  She took a deep breath. There had been no hint, and no discussion. And if they were paying by the line it meant that they had not sent him but that he had chosen to go freelance.

  Then, they’d not been discussing much of anything at all.

  She reminded herself that it was all for the good, regardless of how abruptly it was being presented. ‘You’ll join up with Potato?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who’s taking over the bureau here?’

  ‘James’s coming up from Paris.’

  ‘Until you return?’ She wanted this confirmed again.

  ‘James is permanently replacing me.’

  ‘I see.’

  She sipped her port.

  So. This was something of a resolution of things.

  He remained standing, as if he were just telling her about some household matter. ‘Of course, I’ll send rent money.’

  She heard this and found the ground between them again unsure.

  ‘Oh, no need—I can manage the rent. The League allowance …’ Which did not, however, cover the rent of an apartment this size.

  His ‘paying the rent’—an expression of his husbandly role—had been something of a farce. He had borrowed from her in a frequent, haphazard and unrecorded way. Borrowed more than the rent. She had subsidised his life indulgences, limited as they were to betting on horses and losses at all-night card-games with his reporter mates—moderate but frequent losses.

  ‘Better that I keep my end up,’ he said.

  What did that mean?

  ‘Oh, you’ll have expenses while travelling. I can look after the rent.’

  ‘My responsibility.’ He said this without conviction and as if it were still required of him to say it. ‘Should send you something.’

  He was trying to have a place in her life, a toehold.

  ‘The rent is not going to worry me financially,’ she said. She wanted that connection, at least, stopped. She wanted secure command of the apartment. />
  This did not sound like the beginning of a discussion about divorce. A task for which she had no heart or time.

  ‘Will we have then a marriage such as that of Edwina and Dickie?’ she said, trying to quip like a Modern Woman.

  How she hated the nickname ‘Dickie’. And, inadvertently, she’d raised the dreaded subject.

  She didn’t care anymore.

  He cleared his throat again, and said, ‘And how is that?’

  ‘They seem always to be in different parts of the world. With different people.’

  Edith liked the sound of that.

  ‘I suppose it might be a bit like that.’

  ‘You don’t have to send money.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem quite right.’

  ‘It’s quite all right.’

  ‘Will leave some stuff here.’ His tone was halfway between asking her and telling her.

  ‘I can arrange to store anything you have to leave.’

  She was sure he didn’t have storage in mind.

  Leave it murky? Or have done with it?

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good to have a base.’ He seemed to have ignored her reference to storage.

  A ‘base’? Was that the way a husband talked?

  Yet something now stopped her from clarifying everything. Although she knew she was happy to have him away from her life, she was uncertain of how she wanted him gone. She could not clarify that to herself just now. To not clarify was best for her sense of self and to her advantage for the time. As it was, perhaps, for him.

  It might be best clarified in writing at another time.

  ‘And you’ll be gone indefinitely?’ she said, wanting to have that confirmed again.

  ‘Difficult to say how long.’

  He was fudging it.

  Best done in writing.

  ‘Good night, Edith.’

  ‘Good night, Robert.’

  He hesitated and then came over and kissed her cheek and took her hand. ‘Think it’s the best plan,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘For now,’ he said.

  She nodded.

  She heard him go to his bedroom, heard him pour a drink and prepare for bed.

  She could turn his room into a guests’ room? Or should it remain there for as long as he wanted?

  She would become by default now the lessee of the apartment. That, too, would suit her fine. She would have the contract changed. If she were, as a woman, permitted to sign a lease under Swiss law.

  She found herself gasping, trembling. It was over, this uncomfortable domesticity with its disfigured sexuality. For the indefinite future, at least.

  She was released. Or partly released.

  She felt an urgent burning need to unburden herself to Ambrose.

  To tell him that she’d flunked her marriage.

  There was another nice parallel in her life, in a time of parallels.

  She was present as an official witness at the small ceremony, representing Under Secretary Bartou, together with Under Secretary Marquis Paulucci di Calboli Barone and a few others to see the foundation stone of the new Palais des Nations relaid.

  It had been wrongly placed back in 1929. The architects had made a mistake back then and now it had to be moved to its proper place.

  The foundations of her life had also now to be repositioned.

  Wrongly laid.

  But where and how to relay her foundations?

  Fare-thee-well

  Edith stood at the window in the Palais Woodrow Wilson in the office of her friend Jeanne and looked out across the lake. In the office fireplace behind her the coal fire burned while the dreaded Geneva wind, the bise, swept the lake.

  She rested her forehead on the chilled window glass and moaned to Jeanne, who lounged on the office settee.

  She said that she dreamed for a year of having a ‘Peace Picnic’ but that would be out of the question in the bitter Geneva February they were experiencing. And with no break in the weather predicted.

  ‘Have a pique-nique en hiver,’ Jeanne said. ‘In Paris we had winter picnics. I had a winter picnic on the floor of my Paris office once. One winter picnic I had in the back of a horse and carriage. Which was altogether too delightful.’

  ‘And about which you will now talk—a picnic for two?’

  ‘Mais oui, a rug over your,’ she looked at Edith, deadpan, ‘… laps?’

  ‘And you needed gloves?’

  ‘It was cold but we kept warm.’

  ‘One glove each?’

  ‘Each of us wore one glove, yes,’ Jeanne said, still straightfaced.

  They both giggled.

  ‘Edith! Sometimes you embarrass even me! You are becoming more bawdy than we French.’

  Edith tried to picture herself as bawdy. No, she didn’t think that was part of her picture of herself. That was more a word to describe a barmaid. The French word risqué sounded much better.

  ‘I think I would rather be described as risqué, Jeanne.’

  There was a time when she would have wished to be truly risqué. In fact, there was a time when she fancied she might become the Wickedest Woman in Europe. ‘I want to have a winter picnic for one hundred.’

  ‘For the delegates!?’

  ‘Not for the official delegates. It’ll be a picnic for all those people who come to Geneva to make sure the leaders of the world keep their promises. The citizens, Jeanne. Les citoyens.’

  ‘Edith, those people are not les citoyens. They are in politics also, just waiting for their turn in power. And so dull! And you do not like them. Mrs Swanwick will be there. And Mary Dingman. Edith, you do not like them. A risqué person does not belong with these people, Edith.’

  ‘I want the Disarmament Conference to be … more embracing. It’s time for involvement of all the people. It is more than a diplomatic thing.’

  ‘Ah Edith, you are scheming. You are playing the crafty diplomat. You want to orchestrate these people?’

  Not quite right. Edith wanted to channel the fervour of these well-meaning people who would be coming to Geneva. She wanted them to lose their tone of moral incontestability. And she wanted them to stop shouting. They were mostly ardent pacifists and, while she was drawn to pacifism, as a dreamy magnetic north to her politics, she had reluctantly accepted that pacifism was not a doctrine for this century. She wanted these well-meaning people to formulate more astute tactics and more intricate positions. She wanted them to concede that there were times for taking up arms against evil, albeit only collective arms through the League. Knowing when to fight with all thy might. She wanted them to come to accept an armed League. She wanted them to adjust to the conditions of ever-present peril. To learn machtpolitik.

  ‘I want to draw a larger box around their small boxes. To make yet another unit of persuasion. At present they are either in their own little box talking to each other or pretending that they are really the only box.’

  ‘Edith, whatever you have in mind for your Pique-nique du Désarmement, let us—our crowd—have a picnic in a four-in-hand—’

  She saw Jeanne stop herself, registering that given the situation between Edith and Robert, picnics might not be the right thing just now. Picnics were for lovers and the happy-hearted. Robert and she had forfeited the right to picnic. For now. Jeanne knew it.

  ‘Will Robert still be here?’ Jeanne asked, tentatively, as if asking about an ailing elderly parent, and without waiting for a reply, ‘Just you and me, if you like, that too would be good. Yes? Or another couple? Or bring that nice young man who seems to dote on you. And I will bring … mmmmm?’

  Jeanne went through the act of considering a long list.

  In her case, Jeanne was referring to a nice young man who seemed to be an admirer of Edith. He was not a young man who wished to romance married ladies—he was, she suspected, a young man who wished to have an older woman friend. She seemed to attract them, these nice young men who wanted older women friends.

  Edith’s mind was now drifting t
o the arrival of Ambrose. ‘You know that Ambrose will be here for the conference?’

  ‘He will? Well, that’s good, Edith.’ Jeanne searched her face, ‘Or is it not good for you?’

  ‘I don’t know if it will be good for me.’

  ‘Robert and Ambrose on a picnic? Possible?’

  It had been three years since Ambrose had his breakdown and returned to England, and he and she had gone their separate ways.

  She’d seen him off on the train back then and that had been the last time she’d seen him. He hadn’t come across to Geneva for her wedding, and she’d been secretly glad.

  The Edwina affair had brought them back into a more intimate letter exchange, the letters more frequent.

  He was working in London for Fred Pickard at the Federation of International Institutions.

  How would it be to see him again? Would there be physical attraction? She was still at ease with the idea of his errant nature and, musing in retrospect, she felt she had handled it rather well at the time.

  Maybe she could regard it with ease only because it was far, far away.

  Regardless of all that, she did want Ambrose to visit her life even if she did not need that part of his nature back in her life. She suspected that it may have gone now from his life, that the treatment he’d had back then may have worked and that he was cured of all that.

  More importantly, how stable was he now? Obviously stable enough to hold a job and write merry letters. And he had said he went back to medical practice for a time.

  ‘Yes, Jeanne. A farewell picnic with Robert would be a fine thing. But not with Ambrose. We may have to have two picnics: a picnic for him who goes and one for him who returns—returns, at least, on a visit.’

  ‘How sad it is. When one of the old gang leaves I cannot bear it. First Caroline, then Ambrose and now Robert. Even if he and I were not always sympathetique.’

  ‘Only for a time.’

  ‘Yes, with Robert—just for a time.’ Jeanne said, but Edith detected that Jeanne was just agreeing with her. In Jeanne’s voice was a hint that she thought Robert was going for good. And she knew for Jeanne that the hint was also something of a wish.