Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  Until tonight, she would’ve taken the glass from Liverright without a thought.

  She became bothered. ‘Howard, please take it back,’ she said, handing the glass back to Liverright.

  He chose to treat it as a game, ‘No—no,’ he backed away, laughing, ‘It’s your glass. I am not an Indian Giver. It was my gift to you for looking so splendid tonight.’

  There was general agreement on her appearance from the group.

  She then saw Frank Walters making his way over to the Australian party.

  Damn and blast it.

  She drank down the least full glass and then poked the empty glass into Liverright’s dinner jacket pocket. He barely noticed.

  She felt she accomplished the manoeuvre before Walters arrived.

  Then the dreadful thing happened. Edith took it on herself to introduce him to the others in the group and had accomplished the introductions perfectly when her champagne glass slipped from her hand and smashed at her feet.

  She stared down at it, aghast.

  Huneeus on her right and Liverright on her left both went down to pick up the pieces.

  She told them to leave it, and looked around for a waiter.

  ‘Yes, leave it,’ said Walters, also looking about for a waiter.

  Huneeus and Liverright stood up with pieces of glass in their hands.

  The spilled champagne was a small puddle at her feet, and some had splashed on the men’s shoes.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. She could’ve wept.

  ‘We’ve all had it happen,’ Walters said. ‘We have all dropped a glass, at some time or other.’

  He didn’t sound convincing.

  McDougall rushed in to tell of a similar embarrassment which had occurred in his life. ‘It was at a Country Women’s Association function near Hay.’

  The CWA was not the League. Geneva was not Hay. And Frank Walters had not been watching.

  ‘Always curl your little finger under the glass, that’s the trick,’ Bruce said to her, as if she were a debutante.

  More Precepts From Wise Men.

  As a group they moved away from the mess.

  ‘I’ll find a waiter,’ she said.

  She went off and found a waiter and brought him back.

  ‘Some of the gentlemen may have some champagne on their legs,’ she said to him.

  They all demurred, glancing down at their trousers, saying that everything was fine.

  The waiter used a napkin to mop the puddle and then collected the pieces of glass into the napkin.

  She apologised once again, and then detached herself from the group, heading for the toilet.

  In the toilet, she cursed herself.

  She felt ill. She wanted to get out of the reception, to flee.

  She did her face, breathed deeply, and then returned to the reception to seek Ambrose.

  She was close to tears when she found him.

  ‘You look shaken,’ he said, detaching himself from the cluster he was with.

  ‘A dreadful thing has happened.’

  ‘What?’

  She took his arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Tell me what happened?’

  ‘I wish to leave.’

  He did not question her further, turning back to the cluster of people he’d been with to say his farewells, while she stood off to the side of it, not looking to the right or to the left, not wanting to be reconnected to the evening.

  They collected their coats and took one of the waiting taxis.

  ‘Right. Now tell me,’ he said.

  ‘The one thing which I wanted not to happen to me at this time happened tonight.’

  Ambrose waited to be told. ‘Well?’

  ‘I dropped a glass of champagne at the feet of Frank Walters.’

  Ambrose was silent, and then said, ‘Tell me that you’re joking?’

  ‘I dropped a glass at the feet of the Deputy Secretary-General.’

  ‘No.’

  More crushing silence.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ Ambrose asked, in a soft, uncritical voice.

  ‘Let’s go to the Molly.’

  She found the idea of the Molly appealing. A place where few rules existed.

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  Ambrose gave directions to the taxi driver.

  He took both her hands in his and smiled. ‘Oh dear.’

  They reached the Molly Club and went down to the door with its spy-hole, were recognised, and admitted into the dim anonymity of the large cellar with its stage and private rooms.

  The burlesque was finishing and with a display in unison of scantily clad bottoms and silk stockings the ‘girls’ tripped off the stage and the curtain closed, to much applause.

  Ambrose ordered two large Scotches.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said, again touching her glass with his own.

  ‘Yes, “oh dear”.’ She said, looking at him with a small, helpless smile. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Look on the bright side—at least it wasn’t at the feet of the Secretary-General,’ he said, trying for lightness. ‘Just the Deputy Secretary-General.’

  ‘The only saving grace is that it happened in a group of Australians who wouldn’t see anything unusual about a young lady throwing champagne glasses about the hall. But will, nevertheless, find it an amusing story to tell back home.’

  ‘Happens every night there does it?’

  ‘Social custom.’

  ‘You should always crook—’

  ‘—your little finger under the glass. The High Commissioner gave me that advice. Thank you.’

  ‘It’s really all my fault—I forgot to teach you the little finger rule.’

  ‘And by forgetting to tell me the little finger rule you have destroyed my career. I think I’d been taught the rule long ago and thought I was too grown-up to need it anymore. Shoot me.’ She shook her head in self-disgust. ‘And there’s something else …’ she looked at him.

  ‘What!?’

  ‘I told Eden where Avenol stood on Italy. I carried tales. Broke confidences. Took sides. Betrayed my office.’

  ‘Did he ask you where Avenol stood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If Avenol is taking sides against the Council, you were probably justified.’

  ‘Do you think it was a blunder?’

  He looked at her. ‘When you make a move such as you have you must always bear in mind that it may very well change the course of events. Best you know how it will change them before you make your move.’

  Ambrose left the subject at that. He said, ‘And you say that Huneeus was there tonight?’

  ‘Looking like Charlie Chaplin. And Liverright with two glasses of champagne. Looking like … the Michelin man.’

  She buried her head in her hands.

  ‘It sounds as if you were Charlie Chaplin.’

  ‘Oh, Ambrose—it’s a mess, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, it was just an accident. Walters will see it that way. Could happen to any of us.’

  ‘How big a mess?’

  ‘Any situation is not finished until it has run its course. And in the running of the course anything can happen. This Drinking Question has not run its course. It could turn our way yet.’

  She looked at him. ‘Or not.’

  Before he could answer, Bernard came over and greeted them, kissing her on both cheeks, calling her ‘my heroine’, as he always did. ‘Aren’t you the Princess Marvellous tonight! Gold suits you. I want to be fully informed about the Ethiopian situation. I want all the juicy gossip. I once knew an Ethiopian. A Nubian slave. Rather young, and rather handsome. Rather too young and rather too handsome. The eye is more elongated than the Egyptian eye, rather fetching. Rather too fetching.’

  Bernard was dressed in a splendid gown, fully made-up, earrings. But for some reason, no wig.

  He kissed Ambrose. ‘Oh, the medals are out too. How martial.’

  He then went off to have some light food prepared for them.

  He return
ed. ‘Your supper will be here shortly. Now tell me all.’

  Edith forced herself to leave aside her own disaster and to make conversation.

  She told him about the problem the League was having applying the oil sanctions.

  Bernard said, ‘That speech at Assembly by the man with the delicious name, “Hoare”—can that be right? Is that the pronunciation?—it was the strongest position England has ever taken. I nearly stood and applauded.’

  ‘You were there?’ she asked.

  ‘I peeped in.’

  He often surprised her. She always saw him as being from another world.

  ‘And you have been liaising with Anthony? How strange the English are with their names—Hoare and Eden. We have a Whore and an Eden—the Whore and Paradise—oh, what I would give to liaise with the glamorous Anthony, a Cabinet Minister and so young … What does Anthony think?’

  ‘Eden believes he has won over the British Cabinet to collective action.’

  Ambrose came in, ‘Hoare’s speech was the strongest I’ve heard—the stuff about “precise and explicit obligations” and “my country stands for the collective maintenance of the Covenant in its entirety”.’

  Bernard said that the speech demanded a similar commitment now from France and so on through the other powers. England had ruled a line in the sand. ‘He even threatened Japan if she goes on with her naughtiness.’

  ‘Eden thought that was going too far,’ Edith told them. ‘He tried to get that out of the speech but Hoare wanted everything in—boots and all.’

  She concentrated and thought back to Hoare’s afternoon speech. She had a sickening realisation. ‘It was too strong. There was something fishy about the speech.’

  They both looked at Edith for explanation.

  ‘I see it now—Hoare has made the speech a manoeuvre,’ she said. ‘The British are banking on a massively strong speech to do the trick. It is not a commitment to deeds. If the strong words don’t work they’ll walk away from the crisis. I see it now. It’s not a line in the sand as much as a line over which they will not go—the speech is as far as they intend to go. It was too strong.’

  Edith hated to have to say it, because she’d wanted so to believe it. ‘Hoare has never been so strong before. I want to believe it. But, but …’

  ‘Doesn’t Eden believe it?’ Bernard asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. But he’s like me—he wants to believe. Until this moment, I wanted to believe it. I think Hoare hopes that strong words will do in place of strong action.’

  Ambrose said that the speech must have gone to Chamberlain and Cabinet or senior Cabinet members.

  ‘It did. It is just that I suspect suddenly, sad to say, that it’s a bluff. And nothing more than bluff.’ She felt ill.

  ‘If it’s really just a ploy but Eden believes it, that would mean that Eden is out of the decision-making circle,’ Ambrose said. ‘Could that be true?’

  Bernard said, ‘Mussolini is himself a bluffing man—don’t bluff against a bluffing man or you will both end upside down.’

  ‘I know. I know,’ said Edith. ‘The Italians will say what I have said—this is too strong, it is not meant—those references to Japan. They know they are not meant. That means that the first part of the speech is also not meant.’

  Bernard touched her hair, adjusting an unruly strand. ‘Edith, you are becoming too much the Machiavellian. It is this wretch who is turning you into a Machiavellian.’ He pointed to Ambrose. ‘Don’t listen to him. He sees malady everywhere.’

  ‘She is something of a Machiavellian without my help—I’m actually convinced that the British’ll back the Covenant,’ Ambrose said. ‘The Peace Ballot showed that the British public were strongly for it. Backing the League is good politics back home. I think we’ve got a government willing to give collective action a try. I really do.’

  Edith said, ‘I hope I’m wrong. It’s been a dreadful, dreadful day. If Hoare is lying then all is lost.’

  ‘You are becoming so hard, darling,’ Bernard said. ‘Ha, it’s true, though, that the Catholics run the League. Those South Americans are all Catholic; France, Spain. So nothing will be done against the Vatican or Italy. Perhaps that is where the problem lies.’

  Ambrose said in his languid voice, ‘The Vatican is not Italy.’

  In a way, Edith welcomed her suspicions—if the League did not go with sanctions and collective action now, it was lost. And the fact that she herself was lost in disgrace would then be of little consequence.

  Bernard was still gung-ho. ‘I believe Britain could do it alone. It doesn’t need France. Or the League. A British squadron could scoop up any Italian transport ships bound for Ethiopia. Take them back to the wide anchorage at Aden. Impound them. Finito. The Italians wouldn’t risk a naval war with the British.’

  Edith wondered if that were so. And even if it were—it was not collective action.

  The supper arrived but she was too exhausted by events to eat.

  ‘In all international situations, no one person knows what is happening,’ she said. ‘No one knows.’

  Bernard said he must go about his hostess duties and regretted not being able to go on with the discussion. ‘Before I go, I have some literary gossip. I hear that Proust’s Albertine is not, as we thought, a Syrian waiter but, in fact, a beautiful boy from the Lycée Condorcet. So there. And the boy simply delights in driving Marcel insane with jealousy. I hear this on the very best authority by one who has been there.’

  They laughed.

  Bernard left to go about his duties, and Ambrose and she spent the rest of the evening going over and over the evening’s embarrassment and its consequences and the whole stupid situation.

  She did not feel there was much of a way out of the mess. She saw that she had compounded a situation which she now accepted was fraught.

  Ruinous. There would be a reprimand. Perhaps no further promotion.

  ‘Do you know the only high point of the whole day?’ she said, trying to find comedy in the mess.

  He shook his head.

  ‘I pronounced Toptchibacheff’s name right three times.’

  He smiled at her.

  ‘And,’ she said, ‘I think I have a new Precept of Bibulation, for you to add to your list—and it contains a saving grace. May, in fact, save me from this disastrous evening.’

  ‘What is this new Precept?’

  ‘That everyone who has taken drink is a little mad.’

  ‘A very good observation. But where is the saving grace?’

  ‘The saving grace is that as long as everyone in the circle is drinking, the madness is shared and therefore may not seem to be madness to those in that circle. My precept is that the drinkers will think nothing of the madness of the dropped glass.’

  ‘A very intricate precept. Was Walters drinking?’

  ‘That,’ she said, grimly, helplessly, ‘I do not remember.’

  Again and Again

  She waited at Doctor Vittoz’s waiting room with great apprehension but, thankfully, alone.

  She did not like the idea of being seen there by other people waiting, who would speculate about her personal problems.

  She would’ve probably turned on her heel if there’d been others waiting there.

  The appointment itself was terrifying her. What if this Doctor Vittoz saw through to some dark and murky self of which she was unaware? What would he ‘see’ when he scrutinised her and listened to her secrets?

  If she ever revealed her secrets.

  If she had any real secrets.

  She supposed she had.

  Ambrose—for one.

  But then he was no secret to this Doctor Vittoz. Only her bit of the Secret Life of Ambrose was secret. Or was it? And if it was, did that have to come out too?

  She knew bits and pieces about the Freudians and the science of analysis but did not really know its arts.

  She’d gone to the library and read a little.

  It was, from another point of view, quite intrigu
ing and rather, well, chic. It was perhaps chic as long as one did not have what could be considered a serious problem.

  One should have an amusing problem or perhaps a glamorous problem.

  What would be a glamorous problem?

  For a start, it would help to be a ‘creative genius’. If one were a creative genius one could have any number of problems which would be seen as artistic.

  She supposed that the Strain of Momentous International Work might be glamorous enough.

  These doctors, she suspected, had techniques of getting to what Ambrose had called the ‘home truths’. She wondered if the expression home truths in any way connected with the emphasis that analysts were said to place on childhood experiences.

  One would think that childhood was well and truly behind one—hardly of use in helping out as an adult. Things of childhood, she would have thought, belonged with childhood.

  The doctor came to the door and beckoned to her.

  He was without a beard and seemed younger than she’d expected, only slightly older than herself.

  He gestured to her to come but did not smile.

  Nor did he return her anxious smile.

  As she passed him, as he held open the door, she said, ‘Bonjour.’

  He said, ‘Good afternoon’ in English.

  They seated themselves in his office.

  The office was decorated with African masks hanging on the wall alongside otherwise bland paintings of the English countryside.

  There was a couch in the room. Would he make her lie on it?

  And if she were to lie on it, should she take off her shoes? Her hat? Her gloves?

  Apart from the masks, it was a very dull room.

  He suggested that they talk in English and then waited for her to speak, glancing only casually at some notes on his otherwise clear desk.

  She opened by mentioning the African masks.

  ‘You find them curious? They are curious. They are from darkest Africa—from the Côte d’Ivoire. I like them looking over my shoulder.’ She was then relieved to hear him chuckle. ‘We deal with darkest Africa here.’

  The chuckle was reassuring but the reference to ‘darkest Africa’ was not reassuring. Not at all.

  ‘Darkest Africa? Do you mean … the “unconscious” mind?’