Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I said that in the talk.’

  ‘And why turn on Italy? Mussolini is a source of hope, surely?’

  Edith recalled Alva’s remarks at lunch. ‘Mussolini? How so?’

  The coffee arrived. Edith, in a conspiratorial way, took her flask from her handbag, and gestured that Alva might like some brandy in her coffee. Alva was flustered. ‘Go on—keep me company—I’m desperate for a drink.’

  Without waiting for an answer from Alva, Edith poured brandy into both their coffees.

  ‘Golly,’ Alva said. ‘You really live the emancipated life.’

  Edith grinned and lifted her coffee cup, ‘Cheers.’

  Alva took up her cup. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘In Geneva we say santé—health.’

  Shouldn’t have flaunted Geneva.

  ‘Santé, then,’ Alva said, lapsing back into a discontented frown. ‘Isn’t Musso a force for order? Vera Brittain said she’d rather fascism than war.’

  ‘I like Vera Brittain but I’m not a pacifist.’

  She wanted to find agreement with Alva—she needed the comfort of friendship now. ‘I went to Italy—I loved it.’

  Alva lit up. ‘Tell me about Italy.’

  Edith felt she had to give something positive to Alva. ‘I was in Italy on League business.’

  Was that big-noting in Alva’s book?

  ‘As you know, it’s not that far from Geneva—it’s really just down the road. Italy is more … well, sanitary now, I’ll grant Musso that. And tipping has been banned.’

  Hell’s bells. Her travelogue would have to be smarter than that.

  ‘A police attendant was attached to me at the border to look after me because I was travelling with a lettre de mission from the Secretary-General. But I felt more under observation than under protection.’

  ‘That sounds so grand, Edith.’

  Edith detected begrudging admiration. How difficult it was to talk while taking into account all these sensitivities.

  ‘Oh, really? Standard practice when you do these sorts of things.’

  Did you meet him?’

  ‘No—I am far too lowly for that. Anthony Eden told me a story about him.’

  ‘Anthony Eden!’

  ‘He’s Minister for the League, so we see a lot of him at Geneva.’

  ‘Gee, that’s fairly grand too—meeting him. Is he as good looking as his photographs?’

  ‘Yes, he certainly is. I was working for him and we became rather close—he told me that Mussolini goes into dinner ahead of the ladies.’

  ‘Well, he is the Ruler of Italy.’

  ‘No excuse for poor manners.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I rather think that the police escort was a spy to see who I talked with and about what.’

  ‘Why do you always think ill of the Italians?’

  ‘I don’t think ill of the Italian people—but I had a bad experience in Geneva a few years ago. Not with Italians but with fascists. Fascists who modelled themselves on the Italians.’

  Edith thought she would leave it at that.

  ‘Sorry to sound querulous,’ Alva said.

  At least Alva was bending a little now.

  ‘Tell me more about Italy,’ Alva said. ‘I really would like to know.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t there doing anything really important. Just delivering a document to their Foreign Office which couldn’t be entrusted to the mails. At Milan the train was delayed for a few hours and my fascist escort called the local police for a car and this long black car arrived to take me sightseeing until the train was ready to depart. The train couldn’t, in fact, depart until we had returned.’

  Everything she said seemed to come out with a boastful ring to it.

  ‘Edith! You live like an ambassador. I suppose you speak Italian?’

  ‘A little—Geneva gives you a smattering of Italian, I suppose. If you want to be smattered.’

  ‘I think I’ll learn Italian,’ Alva said.

  ‘I will say this—if the Italian police hated being servants to a woman, and a woman from the League, at that, they didn’t show it.’

  ‘The Italians respect women.’

  The more Edith thought about it, it was a flirtatious civility which had been shown her. Behind the flirtation there was perhaps a discomfort. They had to hide their servility behind this flirtation so as to be able to stomach the idea of a woman travelling alone and doing a man’s job.

  ‘Oh, there’s a wonderful detail which I forgot. The fascist escort had to ride a push-bike behind the car when we were sightseeing because the District Chief was my official host at this point, and the fascist escort was of too low a rank to travel in the same car. We had the sight of this man pedalling as fast as he could to keep up with us.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound very fair.’

  ‘They have other values—other values than fairness, I suppose. Rank, for a start. They value rank.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘When I’d completed my mission—I had to deliver the document and also to interview some Italians in government departments to collect some figures, so I had an interpreter—I tried to give the escort a gratuity, some lira, because he’d run messages for me and got tickets and all that sort of thing. He refused the money, gave a fascist salute and said …’ Edith put on her actor’s voice, ‘ “It is my duty, signora.” ’

  ‘It sounds like a marvellous country.’

  That was hardly the point of the anecdote. Never mind.

  Edith decided to tell her another story to give Alva what she wanted to hear. She wanted Alva to relax, to be on side. ‘A peddler trying to sell me some trinkets became very insistent and rude as peddlers can be in these countries. My escort was off doing something else but another blackshirt came out of the crowd and told this peddler to return to his stall and to stop pestering me.’

  ‘Surely that sort of thing is good for Italy and an example for the world?’

  Edith had been through a number of arguments in the Bavaria and elsewhere about Mussolini.

  ‘I don’t think so. As I’ve said, you find Mussolini-style fascists even in Geneva. Called the Action Civique. A nasty, nasty gang.’

  She told Alva how she had been at a nightclub when they had burst in and how they pushed around people including herself. Edith felt the painful qualms of that night pass through her as she relived the grim and dirty details in one part of her mind while telling Alva a milder version of the story which she had often used for general telling and to illustrate a political point. ‘I defended an ambassador from Azerbaidjhan from the crowd and suffered an indignity at their hands for my trouble.’

  ‘Perhaps they were provoked?’

  ‘You don’t understand. This was a nightclub where people went to have fun.’

  How to describe to Alva the sort of club the Molly was. Oh dear. All these evasions. Oh well. She must keep it light.

  ‘The outcome was fascinating,’ she laughed. ‘For my efforts to defend him, I have had a river named after me in Azerbaidjhan.’

  ‘A river named after you?’ She did not seem to believe the story. ‘And you go to nightclubs?’

  ‘Not every night,’ she laughed. ‘On some occasions we go to the casinos in France, usually to take visitors—the border isn’t so far, you know—or to nightclubs, yes. But I hate gambling.’

  The conversation was a mess, all the wrong things were coming out. It was out of control.

  ‘Such a life,’ Alva said. A resentful admiration. ‘Europe is so far ahead of us.’

  ‘Oh, the only thing that I think Australia has to learn is to install bidets,’ Edith said, trying to lighten things.

  Alva looked as if she were drowning. ‘What’s a bidet?’

  Edith laughed. ‘Oh, I was frightened you might ask me that.’

  ‘Well?’

  She leaned over to Alva and whispered, ‘It sends a jet of water out to wash the private parts in the lavatory.’

  Alva shook her head. ‘I remember no
w, I’ve heard of it. Don’t see it taking off here, somehow.’

  Edith leaned over and said, ‘Well, apart from hygiene, I rather like it—the bidet—as something of, well, a refreshment. And, let’s face it, paper alone hardly does the trick.’

  They both giggled in their old way.

  ‘Edith! There, you see, you are Continental now.’

  ‘Perhaps only in that way.’

  They laughed again.

  Alva frowned and returned to her fascination with the fascists. ‘I imagine that some of those European clubs could do with a clean-up. Maybe there’s a place for fascists in places like that, surely? We need more self-policing, don’t you think?’

  Edith perceived the dreamy state of admiration for fascists in Alva, something which she’d encountered in others back in Geneva. Even in the League. She felt like shaking her. ‘It’s not the Australian or British way, Alva. Things should be researched, talked out and voted on. Give and take.’

  ‘What about your League of Nations stuff? Isn’t that a faith? Which a gang of countries is trying to impose on the world?’

  She had not expected to find herself so far apart from Alva.

  ‘The League is not a movement. It’s an instrument. A political arrangement.’

  ‘Frankly, Edith, it sounds like a movement to me. I tend to agree with Mussolini—that the League’s only fit for the scrap heap and that nations should clear the table of all illusions and lies. And live with the hard truths of life.’

  Edith poured herself another cognac and put some in Alva’s cup as well. Alva didn’t object.

  Alva went on, ‘How could you ally yourself with people who want to starve Italy into submission? Italy, to whom the world owes some of its greatest achievements, the greatest poets, artists, heroes, saints, navigators, aviators. Marconi—the inventor of radio.’

  ‘Al, is this why you stopped writing to me?’

  Alva looked away with some embarrassment. ‘I think that I felt I hadn’t much to tell that would interest you. My life in Sydney seemed rather dull.’

  Edith stared at her. She thought, Alva, you’ve become childlike in your political faith. As had so many in the world. Believing in political fairy stories.

  Edith said, ‘Oh, Alva—that isn’t right at all. I thought of all of the gang all the time. You’re part of my living memories.’

  ‘I should’ve kept up the correspondence, I know. I felt bad about it. And I was angry about the sanctions.’

  Edith found her mind wandering to the memories of their university days. ‘Alva, remember going to Miss Williams for exemption from college prayers?’

  Alva nodded.

  ‘We bucked against religion then because it was not part of the spirit of inquiry? Nor is fascism. The faith I was talking about was faith in our intelligence. And our political ingenuity. Ingenious democratic solutions.’

  Alva came out with a different tone, close to sarcasm. ‘Good old Edith. Always trying to correct the error of everyone’s ways.’

  Edith was embarrassed. Was that how she’d appeared to others back then?

  ‘Was I always doing that?’

  ‘Correcting the error of other people’s ways? Oh yes. You were always against souping. You were against using the freshers as servants. You were against this: you were against that. The rest of us mostly wanted to fit in. You wanted to rewrite all the rules.’

  Edith was losing the point. ‘What I wanted to say was that, although we never got official exemption from prayers, she did say that we didn’t have to go to prayers, remember? But Williams said it would still be considered to be cutting and we still had to go and apologise to her at the end of each term. Even if it were a formality. I thought that was an ingenious political solution.’

  Williams had created a diplomatic solution to the problem. An example of political ingenuity. Not bad at all.

  Alva also ploughed on. ‘Frankly, Edith, I didn’t think going to prayers was such a big issue. It was all part of college life. Part of our world. All you did was to make our gang into rather ridiculous pariahs.’

  Edith decided to leave the discomfort of this and lifted her coffee cup in a toast, needing the brandy. ‘To the Newtown tarts.’

  ‘Newtown tarts?’ Alva presented a puzzled face, but still raised her cup in the toast.

  ‘Remember? The boys at the Union used to call us Women’s College girls the Newtown tarts?’

  ‘It’s not something I would care to remember.’

  ‘You must remember. After they began calling us the Newtown tarts—a sort of undergraduate joke in bad taste—our gang decided to adopt the name, turn it back on the boys, and called ourselves the Newtown Tarts. Surely you remember that?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I rather liked being called a tart back then,’ Edith said, feeling rather risqué and wanting also to say it as a way of pinching Alva’s arm. ‘And I liked being identified with slummy Newtown which I privately thought of as demimonde, a world of devilish mysteries.’

  ‘Edith! We never went there,’ Alva complained.

  ‘That made it an unexplored place. A metaphorical place.’

  ‘I seem to remember that we weren’t allowed to go there,’ Alva persisted.

  ‘I thought of it as The Underworld,’ Edith said, wondering what Newtown had really been like.

  ‘It all seems long ago. I suspect going away to Europe kept all of that student stuff in aspic for you.’

  ‘Could well have, I suppose.’

  Would nothing succeed in this conversation with Alva?

  ‘The rest of us had to get on with our banal lives,’ Alva said.

  Alva then made an effort—perhaps it was the brandy working at last. ‘I do remember when the No Smoking and No Drinking signs went up in the college rooms we all rebelliously adjourned to your room—the headquarters of rebellion—and had a cigarette and a drink of sherry. For some of us, the putting up of those silly signs was the first time we had a cigarette or a drink. Not for you, Edith. You always claimed that your family had wine with your meals.’

  Edith laughed, remembering that evening of insurrection. ‘We were a very rebellious year.’

  ‘You were.’

  ‘It’s funny hearing you describe my room as the headquarters of rebellion. Some days I used to curl up there in utter confusion and not want to leave the room,’ Edith said. ‘It was sometimes like a hospital room where one had been sick for a long time.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. I used to get jealous if I was passing and heard laughter coming from your room.’

  Alva seemed to be finding her tongue. ‘The human is not strong enough or smart enough for democracy, Edith. That’s what I think.’

  Alva picked up the cup and took a big sip. ‘If we’re honest with ourselves we can’t really rely on the sort of people who have the vote now. Not educated enough.’

  ‘Having the vote forces people to confront their lives. That’s why I was for compulsory voting,’ Edith said.

  ‘Ah, see—you are happy to force some things on people.’

  ‘I don’t mind forcing them to think. No. Not what to think but how to think. At least encouraging them to.’

  ‘H.G. Wells doesn’t think democracy has much of a future,’ Alva continued, as though ignoring Edith. ‘I believe that the world’s population will go on expanding, putting those who rule further and further from the control of the populace. And more self-governing nations will have to be created and the more nations you have, the more conflict you have. I think, deep down, people would rather serve than dissent all the time. Even Australians. That’s where I found your rebellion at college so tiring. You were dissenting all the time. I would rather belong in a great cause than be a lonely spoiler.’

  In confusion, Edith realised that she had the same feeling, the same desire to be part of a Great Cause. ‘But the great cause, Al, has to meet the requirements of our reason.’

  Before Edith could find an extended, more robust position in th
e messy conversation, a strange male voice intruded. ‘Edith, Alva—haven’t seen either of you for years.’ It was like the voice of a gramophone with a worn needle.

  They looked up at a man dressed in a faded, brown corduroy suit and beret, a returned soldier badge on his jacket, and with a face that looked like that of a mummy. It had obviously been surgically rehabilitated. The skin was tightly stretched, emphasising the cheekbones which seemed about to poke through the unnaturally brown skin. The eyes seemed to be glass but he was obviously not blind. He had no eyebrows or eyelashes.

  They both stared at him and then Edith glanced at Alva for help in recognising the man.

  ‘You’re a fine couple of friends—not remembering an old mate.’

  The voice was sardonic.

  Edith remembered the voice, even if a damaged version. But couldn’t find a name for it.

  ‘Scraper Smith,’ he said.

  ‘Scraper!’ Edith said, furiously trying to find the old university friend in this spectre, rising to her feet and shaking his crumpled hand. ‘It’s been so long I didn’t recognise you at first.’

  Alva also rose and shook his hand. ‘Scraper—good to see you.’

  ‘You don’t have to be so polite. I know I look like an Egyptian mummy. It shouldn’t be good to see me.’

  Edith and Alva stood, rendered mute.

  ‘Oh, sit down, sit down, no need for all these Red Cross faces—stop being solicitous.’

  They sat down in a shot, like schoolgirls. He dragged over a chair.

  He seemed to have to close his eyelids more often than normal. His hands were bent and buckled, also reconstructed in some surgical way, looking like hen’s feet.

  Edith’s mind flashed to the mutilés at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva in ’32.

  She couldn’t remember his first name. He’d been nicknamed Scraper because of his height—skyscraper.

  ‘Skyscraper,’ she said to Alva. She caught herself talking about the student boy, Scraper, as if he was unrelated to the form of this disfigured man seated with them.

  ‘Half the students thought it was skyscraper and half thought it was bootscraper,’ he said. ‘Useful. Let me know who were my friends and who were not. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is another way I think of it. Scraping the bottom of life’s barrel.’