Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  It was, she recorded to herself, the first time she’d seen a castrated man.

  She continued to feel queasy about it but began writing her report. She had second thoughts about whether Gerty should see them.

  But Gerty was hard to stop.

  In the afternoon, the meeting was addressed by Gaston Jèze, Professor of International Law at the Sorbonne, who had been employed by the Ethiopians to present their case.

  The Italians walked out of the room as he rose to speak.

  Sadly, Edith felt that Jèze did not do a good job for the Ethiopians. They were a shaky little nation—the Italians were right about that—but Emperor Haile Selassie was trying to modernise it, and to bring it up to the European standards. It couldn’t be treated as land up for grabs.

  She was surprised to hear Eden ask Laval, the French Prime Minister, outright in front of the others, whether the French would join with the British in enforcing sanctions on the Italians. Perhaps he was taking advantage of the absence of the Italians.

  Never walk out of a meeting. She remembered the saying she’d learned early in her days at the League: ‘The League never walks out.’

  She suspected that it was the first time a member of League Council had seriously proposed the use of this new economic weapon.

  ‘This is clearly a case for Anglo-French collaboration,’ Eden said. ‘If we fail to stand together now, the consequences will be calamitous for the League.’

  It placed France on the spot.

  Laval agreed. ‘I have a divided Cabinet, as you are well aware, but I will ask for a mandate to apply sanctions, yes.’

  ‘They should be substantial sanctions.’

  ‘I agree.’

  Edith regretted the absence of the Italians. She would’ve liked them to hear this.

  Someone here would be reporting to them.

  They must have known that they would learn what was said or they wouldn’t have walked out.

  Edith then felt she should both recover her position and enlarge it by speaking.

  At first a question: men enjoyed answering questions from a lady. They would all rush to answer. ‘Will Mussolini formally declare war? Or simply walk into Ethiopia?’

  The men made comments which assumed that Italy would follow the convention of declaring war.

  ‘I ask,’ she said, ‘because Italy, if she declares, would be then entitled to belligerent rights.’

  Laval was astonished. ‘I have never heard of such a thing. Belligerent rights—what are these?’ Laval didn’t address the question to her, but to Eden.

  Eden thought for a moment and said, ‘Berry has a point. If war is declared, for example, under international law Italy could stop French ships if she thought they were aiding Italy’s enemy.’

  ‘No one stops a French ship,’ Laval said. ‘Least of all, Mussolini.’

  Edith cut in. ‘If war is “declared” the belligerent also is supposed to adhere to the international rules of warfare.’

  She continued, ‘But I do not believe that a nation which has breached the League Covenant can legitimately exercise any belligerent rights.’

  And she would say one more thing. ‘Until now, technically, war didn’t exist until “declared”. We have a new situation where we, the League, can deem a conflict to be a “war”—and by so describing it we declare a war, in that sense.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ Léger said. ‘Yes. You are probably right.’

  She said lightly, though without smiling, ‘Curiously, we have legalised war—in the broadest sense.’

  Thank you, Robert.

  Ah, but Robert, there is more to be said. ‘I suppose that international law tries to ensure that nations do as much good as possible in peace and as little harm in war as possible.’

  She stopped. The men were still looking at her, including Professor Jèze.

  Léger said he agreed with her, but pointed out that the ‘law of war’ had really begun with the Geneva and Hague Conventions, before the League.

  Professor Jèze rushed to display his historical knowledge by agreeing with Léger.

  Edith kept her stiff face but inwardly beamed. The acknowledged master of French foreign policy had agreed with her, even if his agreement had contained a correction.

  ‘True,’ she said. ‘It did begin with the Geneva and Hague Conventions in the nineteenth century, but what has changed is that with the existence of the League, we have for the first time a referee, as it were.’

  She realised that the exchange was taking place between the bureaucrats—Léger and her—not among the delegates. This was that other level of participation at a committee—where the experts were expected to supply such material to the lay people. She liked the role.

  But she realised with slight embarrassment that she had answered her own question.

  Laval excused himself to return to Paris, leaving Léger to represent France. Laval turned to Edith and said, ‘Thank you Madame for your lesson.’

  The meeting continued its discussion until Eden intervened and suggested that a report be prepared now.

  That day.

  ‘We must act with speed,’ Eden told the Committee, ‘or we will lose the moment.’

  Eden looked at Léger seeking advice, by his look, on whether that was now possible without Laval.

  ‘I agree,’ Léger said.

  Eden looked around the table and received the agreement of the other members of the Committee of Five and their advisers.

  Eden was behaving as if he were chairing the session, not Madariaga.

  ‘We will consider the doors locked until we have completed our report to Council,’ Madariaga said, as if reminding people that he was the chairman. ‘No one will leave.’

  Edith had Gerty ring for an additional stenographer and paper and afternoon tea.

  Night fell on the Committee. Sandwiches, cheese, and fruit and coffee arrived.

  After several more hours a draft was ready.

  Edith’s contribution was for her the most exciting sentence she had ever written or perhaps that anyone had ever written—at least in the history of the League.

  Edith’s sentence was: ‘The Committee has come to the conclusion that the Italian Government has resorted to war in disregard of its obligations under Article 12 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.’

  She read it and looked around at the members of the Committee.

  There was silence.

  Madariaga said, ‘Agreed?’

  They made noises of agreement.

  After all the hours of negotiation they had no more to say.

  Eden again pointed out that if the League as a whole adopted this report Article 16 of the Covenant would be automatically invoked. ‘It may be best if we heard Article 16. Would you kindly read it for us, Edith.’

  ‘I don’t have to read it: I know it by heart,’ she said. ‘ “Should any member of the League resort to war in disregard of its obligation under Articles 12, 13, or 15 it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed a war against all other members of the League.” That’s the relevant part,’ she said.

  Léger asked for the rest. ‘If you also remember that …’

  She obliged, again reciting from memory, ‘ “the severance of all trade or financial relations, the prohibition of all intercourse between their nations and the nationals of the Covenant-breaking States, and the prevention of all financial, commercial, or personal intercourse …” ’

  Her memory did not fail her and she went on with it. ‘ “… It shall be the duty of the Council in such case to recommend to the several Governments concerned what effective military, naval, or air force the Members of the League shall severally contribute to the armed forces to be used to protect the covenants of the League.” ’

  She went on to the end of the Article.

  This time they lightly clapped her. The Committee was relaxing into tired jocularity.

  ‘Well done,’ Eden said.

  ‘Encore,’ Léger said, laughing.


  ‘Really?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no. I joke. With a memory such as that, and such a voice, you could have been a stage actress.’

  ‘Thank you, M. Léger. But is that really a compliment to pay to a lady?’

  ‘In France it is—maybe not in England. I meant it as a compliment. I have friends who are actresses.’

  Eden gave a small laugh. ‘Don’t we all?’

  Madariaga asked whether the Committee were clear on the consequences of their report.

  They all nodded.

  She nodded.

  The meeting then adjourned for the day and only Léger, Madariaga, Eden and she remained.

  Edith hung about, giving some instructions to Gerty and the stenographer and arranging for a car to take them home.

  She hovered, and then sat back down, joining in the tail-end chat of the meeting.

  She loved the tail-endings of a good committee, the unceremonious comradeship of those who hang around after a meeting.

  It was always the winners who stayed, the real inner committee.

  Léger said that their report was unequivocal. ‘In my experience, no international dispute has ever been the subject of a clearer verdict.’

  ‘You know, we are letting loose stupendous forces, hurricane forces. This will be the League’s finest hour. This is the test of the will to collective action,’ Eden said. ‘I hate the expression—but history was made here tonight.’

  ‘You seem to have confidence in the League,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘What I like about the League, as it is evolving, is that it ensures that negotiation is always used to its utmost limit.’

  Outside, on the steps with Eden, waiting for their cars, now the even smaller last committee, the committee of two, Edith said, ‘Will everyone hold together?’

  ‘Laval is the risky one. But yes. I think the time has come for the world to pull together against the dictators. We can stop them in their tracks.’

  ‘This is not pie in the sky—this is realpolitik?’

  ‘Yes. I speak as an experienced politician privy to the thinking of even more hardened politicians. This can be done. And this is the moment of trial.’

  The next day she went with Eden to meet with Laval, who had arrived back from Paris overnight. Eden wanted to clear the report with Laval face to face. Edith had had a copy sent to the Hôtel des Bergues so that Laval would have it on arrival.

  In the lobby of the hotel Léger met them, kissing her hand as usual.

  He looked worried.

  ‘Could I speak with you privately?’ he said to Eden.

  ‘Of course,’ Eden said.

  ‘I shall wait in the lobby,’ Edith said, hating herself for saying it. She should be present. She had the right to be present. But again, the old habits of diffidence died hard.

  ‘Berry, I have known you longer than I have known Monsieur Eden. I would like you to be with us.’

  ‘As you wish, sir.’

  She was hugely gratified.

  ‘I feel it is best we go to the privacy of my room,’ Léger said.

  He sounded grave.

  They took the lift to his floor and went into his bedroom suite which had not yet been attended to by the maid.

  He apologised. ‘Hotel maids seem to come at unpredictable times. They seem to work to a clock from another zone of time.’

  The room had the odour of a man’s presence, the odour of a refined man. Léger’s odour was of fine food, fine wine, fine tobacco, exquisite toiletries. And fresh flowers in vases.

  She tried not to be too obvious as she breathed deeply of it. She felt she was almost pilfering it. To take in another’s odour so deliberately was almost … what? An intimacy of the nose?

  Léger placed a couple of chairs together in the small sitting room and they sat. ‘Thé? Chocolat?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Laval is angry. He feels we went too far last night. Or to be more particular, that I went too far in giving French approval for the resolution.’

  The French were going to back off.

  ‘He will renege?’ said Eden, showing no perturbation.

  ‘I doubt that he will renege. It is more my position which is in jeopardy.’

  ‘You in jeopardy?!’

  ‘He may hold me responsible and if Cabinet rejects the report, the volatile Cabinet may also reject me.’

  ‘That serious?’

  ‘It is that serious.’

  ‘You have been in the Department for years!’

  Transfixed, she listened to this exchange between these men, perhaps two of the three most powerful men in the crisis—Laval being the third.

  Edith admired Léger’s quiet French composure. It seemed to her to be inconceivable that a man as cultivated and powerful as he was could be in jeopardy.

  She’d read his poetry.

  She wondered if Eden had.

  ‘I am not a popular man in France at the moment,’ Léger said. ‘I dislike asking any man to be duplicitous, worse, an Englishman “to boot”, even if that is the common perception of our craft. But I have to beg you, dear fellow, to be so for my sake.’

  ‘Explain to me further your situation,’ Eden said.

  ‘Laval thinks we have gone too far in the report and he thinks that I should’ve restrained you. I should not have committed France. He perceives me as being weak with you and with England. Yet before we met that day he had foreseen the resolution and had wanted to support it.’

  ‘And what do you think is required?’

  Léger now lost poise, he was disconcerted.

  ‘I need for you to convey to Laval that I offered, well … offered opposition to the final report. That I fought against the report …’

  It was so abject a request that Edith had to look away to the flowers in the vase at the desk. Had Léger bought the flowers, requested the flowers? Were they a gift from a woman friend?

  She could not look at him—his abjection could not be further removed from the image of the Léger that the world knew.

  Edith looked back to him and then felt so much empathy for him that she felt tense.

  She had never seen a man lose so much dignity.

  And she felt for him that he should have to do it in front of England. England, the traditional prickly partner in diplomatic competitiveness and distrust.

  Léger went on, ‘Convey, please, to Laval that you were dissatisfied and angered by my “opposition” last night.’

  He was asking Eden to lie.

  In diplomatic reputation, she supposed Eden was junior to Léger—Léger being the older bureaucrat of a great power—but Eden was a Minister of the Crown, Léger a bureaucrat. Politically, Eden had the power.

  She felt no one could refuse to help Léger, yet she was fearful of perversion of the record and of the unorthodoxy of the meeting now taking place.

  ‘Of course, my dear chap,’ Eden said. ‘I will do what you need for you to hold your position. Inconceivable that you could be in jeopardy.’

  Edith wondered if Eden had thought this through.

  And what should she report to Avenol? Had Léger included her in this meeting so that her report to Avenol would also reflect this rewriting of the meeting?

  Léger said, ‘I thank you. These are strange times in French politics. We have left behind the time of grand design, of grand realisation. We are into the time of a political décadence. Sadly.’ He sighed tiredly. ‘In the time of Briand there was never ambiguity in our position. Security for France, first, yes; but in step with the rhythm of the broader vision of collective action. Always.’

  What he was saying may have been close to treason.

  ‘Of course I will consolidate your position with Laval,’ Eden repeated. ‘The world needs your counsel. Politicians such as Laval and myself come and go. But you, you are the continuity of French national decency. And sound intelligence.’

  ‘I thank you,’ Léger said again. He then tried to regain his poise. ‘I fear
the days of international vision are nearly over; yet I feel now that I am a guardian of the guarantees of peace we put into place in the 1920s. The people believed us when we told them that these guarantees would bring lasting peace. We must act, preferably within the League, to prevent—or punish—treaty violations. Treaties must be made inviolate. Treaties are the handshake of world civilisation. Treaties are the walls of the city.’

  He seemed to grow grey-faced.

  He shook Eden’s hand. He again kissed Edith’s hand, saying to her, ‘I have taken you into my confidence, Berry, because of our love for the memory of Aristide Briand. We have to keep the promises he made to the world.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Of course what? She was being encircled by this confidence. She was party to the perversion of the historical record.

  ‘I was at his bedside when he died,’ Léger said.

  ‘It was a sad day for the world,’ she said. He was using Briand as a way of tying her to him.

  Léger held Eden by the arm at the door. He said, ‘You understand, I am sure, that I ask for this unsavoury manoeuvre not because of personal need—it is not for reasons of career.’ He made the French puff of dismissal. ‘I do it because I fear the person who would replace me—I fear on behalf of the world.’

  Eden looked him in the eye. ‘I understand completely. Your position must be defended. In everyone’s interest.’

  ‘Go to Laval, now. I will wait until called.’

  They left Léger in his room.

  In the corridors, on the way to Laval’s suite, Eden turned to her and said, ‘Is it a French ploy?’

  She was flattered and at the same time caught unawares. ‘Léger seemed genuinely upset. I found it upsetting, to see him like that.’

  ‘In your eyes he is not an actor?’

  ‘No. It was genuine distress and dilemma.’

  ‘I agree. I demean myself by suggesting that it may be a ploy. We can, however, use this situation to put iron into Laval.’

  She saw how he might do that.

  ‘You are, of course, off duty, Berry. This is behind the scenes—not for the report to A.’

  Could Eden decide that? How could he decide her duties and where her duty might lie?