‘Don’t make a sonnet of it, Arthur, you’ll be out of it all,’ she said. ‘When do you leave?’
‘May 15. Regrettably. It’s cutting me up. But … the kids.’ He looked at her for approval.
Her resigned smile and touch to his arm gave him the approval he needed.
‘You wouldn’t like to buy Gerig’s car?’ he asked.
She contemplated it. Maybe Ambrose and she would need a car for escape or emergency?
‘I’ll think about it. I’ll let you know.’
She then reminded him, as one of those in on the conspiracy, that he should be cool towards her.
He winked in compliance but said, ‘You’ve had a fall?’, gesturing at her bruised face.
‘Slipped on a banana skin,’ she said, with a tone of womanly mystery.
He nodded as if he understood and went off in his characteristically urgent way.
Further along the endless corridor, she met a worried, bewildered Loveday from Economic Section.
His fear of bombs aroused, he wanted to find a safe place for his card index. ‘I have records of all the trade figures of all the countries of the world since 1920,’ he said. ‘Their value is incalculable. Edith, you must get someone to do something about it.’
She told him to contact Hadyn at the ILO. ‘He has a small cinema machine which can make photographic copies—3000 copies in an afternoon. So I’m told. You could send a copy of it to London or somewhere safe. Put a set of the cards in a Swiss bank.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe not. Maybe even the Swiss banks aren’t that safe anymore.’
Ye gods, what was safe? ‘Maybe Australia or New Zealand would be better,’ she said weakly. She didn’t want to add to his fearfulness.
‘That far away? Do you think so?’
‘Perhaps.’
He thanked her.
She said, ‘Your figures might help us put the world back together again.’ She probably shouldn’t have said it. It sounded too ominous.
Unsettled by her reply, he stared at her as she walked off.
She turned and called to him, ‘Send a copy to New Zealand—that would be my advice.’
He called to her to wait. She stopped and turned while he came back to her.
‘Could I ask your opinion on another matter?’
‘Of course.’
‘If we were captured and tortured—’
‘Really, Loveday, I don’t think that will happen to you. I don’t think it will come to that.’
‘There is always a possibility.’
‘Go on. What is it you want?’
‘Do any of your friends have pharmaceutical knowledge?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I believe there is a tablet which can be concealed about one’s person and swallowed.’
‘Suicide tablets?’
‘Precisely.’
Ambrose and she had discussed it and Bernard had found some for them. She had a duty, she supposed, to help others.
‘I suppose I could ask around.’
‘Thank you. You’re the only person I could come to—on a matter like that.’
Why her? Was her role also to dispense death?
Such grim business now occupied fine minds. ‘I’ll contact you tomorrow about it,’ she said.
He scurried off.
Her corridor manner belied her inner commotion about her move to Avenol’s office. Her inner commotion was not dissimilar to her first day at the League fifteen years before, a day which returned to her again and again, a day of nervous glory.
The new girl.
Avenol was welcoming from the first. Perhaps it was her recently acquired reputation in the haute direction as having pro-Avenol sentiments and her being a friend of Jeanne.
Jeanne and she had never discussed the matter again after the day of their scrap. On the surface, everything was as before with Jeanne—and Jeanne was the only one of her old friends with whom she could openly fraternise.
Both of them preferred to take the surface friendliness as the reality and perhaps hope that what lay underneath that surface friendship would properly heal. And Jeanne had not referred again by word or behaviour to her ‘proposal’ after the fight.
She suspected that Jeanne had planted things in Avenol’s mind which would have given Edith further favour in his eyes.
She simply assumed that Jeanne had not spilled the beans to Avenol.
Avenol asked about her face. She muttered about slipping over and he took no further interest.
As she and her co-conspirators had predicted, the fact that she and Bruce, the chair of Council, were Australians helped.
‘I liked your countryman, Bruce. Bruce and I see eye-to-eye. We agreed that sanctions against Japan would’ve been wrong. We agreed on the need for a Central Controlling Committee for the League. To separate the political and military business of the League from the social and economic business. If we’d done what Bruce had argued earlier many countries would have joined up with the League for the social and economic business who were frightened of the political and military. Even the Americans. Now is the time for un directoire. That is what we need here in the Secretariat. Un directoire to replace all the endless wrangling in the Assembly, the Council, the committees.’ He punched his hand. ‘Un directoire.’
He stood about the outer office where she was to work but did not offer to help her unpack. She would have to get used to not having an assistant. Gerty had remained in Bartou’s office and kept back her tears when Edith had left.
‘I find it interesting that you do not see yourself as British,’ he said.
‘I’ve been here so long now,’ she said drolly. ‘I’m perhaps international, or perhaps Genevan.’ She smiled, charmingly. ‘Aren’t Geneva and Vienna two of the cities which one can claim without having been born there?’
‘I’ve heard that said.’
‘Or perhaps I am one of the new international aristocracy.’
He didn’t respond to that idea.
How well she performed the masquerade and how she hated how well she did it.
As for the Bruce Report, she felt that there was a lot of politics in the ‘social and economic’ and a lot of the social and economic in the ‘political’. But that argument was now buried in history. At least until after the war.
She would oppose turning the League into an international department of social services. She still wanted it to be a police station. But she agreed that the international enforcement of peace was a political art still to be learned.
As Avenol left to go back to his inner office, he said, ‘I ask that you remember only that you work for me now and not for Bartou.’
‘Mais oui.’
During the next week, never had Avenol’s private filing been more meticulously done—nor as slowly done and redone, as she invented excuses to be in and around his office as he talked endlessly on the telephone.
To her advantage, she found that within the first week Avenol began chatting to her casually.
He liked her company.
Over the days, her unceasing use of French, even on the telephone, also began to put him at ease. But more than all this, she sensed there was another affinity between them which came from her having had, for a time, unusual marital arrangements. So both he and she had an absent spouse and another arrangement. Although so strictly conservative in his politics and administrative style, Avenol was not so in his personal life. His wife was in Paris refusing him a divorce and he had, regardless of opinion, installed Vera Lever in La Pelouse as his mistress.
He was curious to know where Robert was and how she and he saw their marriage although he had difficulty approaching the question directly.
The hopelessly vague, indirect questions restricted by decorum allowed her equally vague and indirect replies.
The unsatisfactory nature of the answers only extended his curiosity and it returned at odd times in the form of yet other indirect questions about her life. Avenol had known Ambrose in the old days,
had seen Ambrose crash and leave the League, and had seen Ambrose return to Geneva and had seen them again become a duo.
He was curious about Ambrose and had obviously been party to the gossip that they were a ménage. He had also heard on the grapevine that Ambrose had rather publicly moved out of the ménage to live in a hotel.
He even sympathised with her about this but his sympathy did not go so far as to accept that her working with him might be the cause.
Ambrose and she still saw each other secretly—after dark, as it were. But they had put it around on the gravevine that he’d been furious that she was siding with Avenol’s group and working for him.
In dribs and drabs she let small details of her private life come out, chatting with Avenol although she knew that she was using her very personal life as part of the conspiracy. That she could do this so skilfully somewhat alarmed her.
She had tried at first not to be untrue to herself by her remarks and had then found that this was easier than she would have thought, because she found that she and Avenol actually agreed about much, at least about the stupidity of the conventions for the likes of them and about administrative method, if not about higher policy.
She began to find Avenol quite judicious.
On the day that they heard of Germany’s invasion of the neutral states Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, Avenol called her in to take dictation of a memorandum to staff.
He began the dictation: ‘I have heard from the Staff Committee that some members of the Secretariat are in doubt as to the effect which the latest development of the war might or ought to produce in respect to their course of action. Those who desire to do so are free, both morally and administratively, to ask for the suspension of their contract; or if they so wish, to resign and every possible action has already been taken to provide for the security of the staff pensions fund and staff Provident Fund …’
They were interrupted by a telephone call which Edith handed to Avenol. When he put it down he said, ‘Chamberlain has gone—Churchill is Prime Minister of Britain.’
Her spirits soared. But she did not show her reaction. She looked at Avenol and saw no indication of what his reaction was to this news.
She became cautious, sensing that this could be a crucial test of her position. To cheer, which is what she felt like doing, might be too British.
Perhaps he was watching her.
He did not ask for her reaction.
He then said, ‘With Churchill it will now be total war. I wish to meet with the Permanent Delegates. Arrange that.’
‘Returning now to the memorandum. Add this: The Headquarters of the Secretariat will remain in Geneva. The Administration cannot accept any responsibility as regards the practical possibility of travelling, nor as regards the safety of officials and their families whether in Geneva or elsewhere.’
By not cheering Churchill she had made a silent lie. She observed that she was able to enjoy the success of her dissembling. It had within it a prowess which could be enjoyed for its own sake. The way a criminal, perhaps, enjoyed his skill as a safe-breaker or confidence trickster.
And she was impressed by how cool she was as she took such ominous dictation.
As she typed it up she saw that his memorandum was the beginning of the end.
And the war was moving significantly closer to Switzerland.
The closer the end came the freer she felt from ethical or other restraints.
Out in the general office, the staff were behaving like nurses by not crying and not panicking, going about their business with the appearance of normality—although in a few cases, she knew that relatives and friends were increasingly in the war zone.
Later that morning, Lester came into Avenol’s office without an appointment, passing her by in the outer office without a comment or glance.
There had been no communication between the Secretary-General and his Deputy for months.
It occurred to her that Lester might need a witness, and she went into Avenol’s office on some pretext and was hardly noticed.
Avenol was arguing against Lester’s demand for an evacuation plan for the League.
Lester said that it was time for the Secretariat to have a plan to move to safe ground and to go on working.
As she pulled files from Avenol’s personal cabinet and dawdled, she realised she enjoyed the invisibility of a clerical worker—she came into focus only when he needed her for work or to relax and talk with, but at all other times she was invisible.
Part of the furniture.
She heard Avenol accuse Lester of funk. ‘The French are more disciplined: the safety of families has to be ignored. In France the family and the head of the household go down together. So it will be with the League.’
Emotionally, she found herself rather agreeing with Avenol.
Lester kept saying that a plan for evacuating the families, at least, was necessary.
Avenol refused, ‘For the families of the haute direction to be seen to be scurrying for safe haven is bad for the morale.’
‘All right then,’ Lester, said turning to leave. ‘That is easy then: if there is no plan then I accept no responsibility.’
Edith thought Lester was rather petulant.
Avenol stood and walked with Lester to the door—not, it seemed, from any politeness but from a need to continue to make his point. ‘We must accept the fate of the Swiss people who are our host nation. We accepted their protection in peace: now let us join them in their fate.’
Edith found herself impressed by Avenol’s rhetoric and dissatisfied with Lester, even if the rhetoric made no real sense.
She also knew that rhetoric was something of a sign that the person using it was unsure of what to do.
After Lester had left, Avenol noticed her in the room and said, ‘You heard? You agree?’
‘I do agree,’ she said. ‘For the League to run is to invite all to run.’
‘Lester is a scared dog.’
She didn’t comment.
She looked at him. He was leaning back in his Napoleonic pose.
‘Do you have your haversack packed with chocolate and tinned food?’ he asked her, his voice carrying a note of derision about the idea.
‘I should, I suppose. But I don’t,’ she lied.
Her reply pleased Avenol. ‘All the English have their haversacks of chocolate, clean underwear, wax matches, candles, and soap.’
He laughed to himself.
That evening in their dark banquette at the Molly Club where she and Ambrose were continuing to meet, Ambrose said he believed that by the new offensive against the neutrals, the Germans had begun their decline.
‘Overstretched,’ he said.
She wanted to believe it but so much of what they’d all said over the last few months had turned out to be wrong.
She felt they were sunk in half-information, misinformation, fantasies, and the distortions of fear—and that all their intelligence could not find a way out.
The Molly had lost a few of its regulars, those she’d known only by their party names—‘Madame de Stael’, ‘Maisy’, ‘Delores’ and so on, fluttering about in the dim light in dark flirtations. The one or two South Americans, she knew from accents alone, were still there, protected, they hoped, by neutrality and commerce.
Bernard kept on with the cabarets and their satire became even more grim.
Newcomers continued to arrive—still more refugees—and sometimes they too came in the masks and garb of the anonymous night. How did they come to know of the Molly? How did people from across Europe know of it and its strange ways? Coming down the stairs for the first time, uneasily, warily, until absorbed into the low hubbub and occasional screaming laughter and hysterical humour.
Sometimes, she noticed, Bernard seemed to be expecting the newcomers, or knew them, or had been warned of their coming. How did it all work?
And more often now, Bernard would be found in the Club annex or in one of the small upstairs rooms, deep in serious dis
cussion with people she did not know.
She returned to the war, the never-ending discussion. ‘The taking of the neutral countries has cost them very little militarily,’ she said to Ambrose.
‘But the Germans now have to garrison these countries.’
‘That’s true.’
The exchange was typical of the sort which she and others wanted to believe. She could recognise them now.
Ambrose leaned in and said, with special emphasis, ‘It is not the loss of blood—it is the presence of blood which will undo the Germans now.’
‘Explain, darling,’ she said. ‘No enigmas tonight.’
‘Roosevelt has Belgian and Dutch blood in his family line,’ he said, with a flourish.
She giggled at yet another example of Ambrose’s miscellany of little-known facts. ‘I hope, dear, that you are perfectly correct,’ she said. ‘I keep forgetting that you are an expert on bloodlines.’
Bernard came over, his usual stylish, feminine self. ‘My darlings! What’s the gossip?’
‘Bloodlines, Bernice. But there is no gossip. All gossip has dried up.’
‘Of one thing I am certain in this most uncertain of worlds: there is always gossip. Par example, you are now very close to M. Avenol—mysteriously close to him. And she has already told me of the bloodlines theory. We’ll see.’
She looked at Ambrose.
Ambrose shook his head at her, denying that he had passed on anything about the conspiracy.
Bernard was astute and an ally, but he could not be made one of those in the know.
As usual, she reported to her co-conspirators on the Saturday morning at their prearranged rendezvous in McGeachy’s apartment on the rue Bourg du Four.
They seemed amused but not worried that she found herself somewhat in accord with Avenol.
‘He seems to me to be keeping his nerve,’ she reported.
‘You know, I think he uses artificial aids,’ Lester said.
‘A drug of some sort?’ Bartou asked, surprised.
‘Some serum or other. It’s a feeling I have—his manner, it seems to swing.’
She said she had seen no evidence of this. She found it an unlikely idea.
Lester rather uneasily announced that his wife, Elsie, was packing to leave that night.
Dark Palace Page 43