Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘And you, Edith? Where were you on Armistice Day?’

  ‘Nothing as remarkable as your Armistice Day.’

  ‘Tell me your Armistice Day.’

  ‘By Greenwich Mean Time our 11th of the 11th of the 11th was really in the evening but we celebrated it anyhow at our morning time—perhaps the news was withheld to synchronise with Europe. I was at Sydney University studying science—my second year. We were in the lab and Elkin, a member of the Public Issues Society, came in and said that the war was over. He cried. It’s disconcerting to see a teacher cry. We stood in our places in our white lab coats, test tubes or whatever in hand, until he waved us out of the room, saying something about there being no lectures that day. Oh …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve just remembered who was beside me during the celebrations later down in Martin Place—a student named Arthur Tuckerman.’

  Scraper’s friend.

  ‘You all right?’ Ambrose asked.

  ‘Oh, memories from when I was back in Australia and Armistice Day—all a little too much for me.’

  He put an arm around her.

  She looked at Ambrose. ‘The man Scraper—I told you about the shocking incident. He came back to mind.’

  Scraper had joined the day.

  ‘I suppose we’ve to take whatever memories are handed out to us.’

  ‘It’s sickening. It’s as if he’s still manipulating me.’

  Edith looked around at the people she’d worked with during the war years.

  It would be the last day, really, that she would see them in this setting. After San Francisco everything would be back to normal, everyone out of the Library and back to their offices, some of them gone forever and newcomers arriving.

  She hesitated. ‘Going to the Bavaria will be one of our good memories of this day. I think I should try to control the memories of this day. Maybe do things which will crowd out other parts.’

  Jeanne joined them.

  ‘We were just telling each other about where we were on Armistice Day.’

  ‘I will tell you where I was!’ Jeanne said. ‘But only over drinks.’ She winked.

  ‘Let’s go to the Bavaria,’ Ambrose said.

  Jeanne said. ‘Come on, Edith, it’s our half-holiday. You’re appointed Leader of the Fun Club. Let’s go.’

  Jeanne had hoped to go to San Francisco but wasn’t in the team.

  Having piled into whatever cars were available, they arrived at the Bavaria and were welcomed in by the new owner and the new staff. There were no staff from the old Bavaria. God knows where they’d ended up.

  Everyone exclaimed over the renovations.

  Privately, Edith yearned for the smoky, dingy old Bavaria.

  She was pleased to again see the Derso and Kelen caricatures of League personalities from before the war.

  ‘I met Robert here,’ she said to Ambrose. ‘He pursued and, I suppose, courted me here.’

  Was that a good memory to have today?

  Couldn’t be stopped.

  She smiled as she recalled one time early in her career as a newly arrived young officer at the League. She herself had designed some stationery stands for the delegates’ tables, and had them made and put in place. They’d all been souvenired by the delegates.

  But she’d gone to the Bavaria clutching two of the new stationery stands, to find Ambrose and instead found Robert who was writing at a corner table.

  ‘It is going to happen,’ she called to him as she pushed through the crowd.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ He was deep in self-preoccupation and had, for whatever perverse reason, obviously not been at the concluding meeting of the conference which had renounced war.

  ‘What, Edith Campbell Berry, is going to happen?’

  She tried to bring her voice to a level of diplomatic calm.

  Unpredictably, she felt protective of the worried journalist. She saw him as a person who had a gloomy pessimism about life. She felt sorry that she had to break the news to him and spoil his hopeless view of things. ‘There is going to be a renunciation of war—the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact has been initialled.’

  He smiled at her. ‘Bierce said peace is a period of cheating between wars.’

  ‘Ah, you think nations will cheat on the Pact—I see you are a follower of rebus sic stantibus,’ she said, saying it for the first time. But by saying it to him she had, she thought, neutralised him. She also saw that she was displaying her new diplomatic maxim, seeking his approval.

  She must not sit with him. His gaze was transfixing and his manner always reached out at her.

  ‘Rebus sic stantibus,’ he repeated, looked up at her again, focusing on her, smiling with approval. ‘I am relieved that you know rebus sic stantibus, Edith Berry, very much relieved.’ He returned to his drink. ‘Very much relieved.’

  ‘You miss the importance of all this. For the first time, nations are talking about the end of war. Don’t you see? With this Pact of Peace a change has happened in the psychology of the world. That is what has happened.’

  He did not seem convinced.

  ‘And here—here is a memento of this historic occasion.’ She gave him one of the stationery stands.

  He took it, surprised and pleased. He turned it around admiringly.

  ‘I thank you, Edith Berry.’

  She broke away from his gaze and left him to go over to Ambrose.

  ‘They are going to do it,’ she said to Ambrose, ‘going to renounce war.’

  ‘I heard. It was buzzing all over the Palais an hour ago.’

  ‘Buy some champagne.’

  ‘I will.’

  Edith reminded herself that history was being made and she was where it was being made. She laughed wryly at her contribution to history—stationery stands.

  Tears came to her eyes again, this time for the wasted effort of her marriage to Robert, for her bad treatment of Ambrose back then, for those innocent days of error.

  Was that recollection of Robert going to be part of her memories of this day?

  She turned to Ambrose. ‘You never seemed jealous of Robert?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘To Robert,’ he said.

  ‘To Robert,’ and they touched glasses.

  ‘In the long run, it turned out you didn’t have anything to fear from him.’

  ‘In the long run? In the long run we are all dead, Edith.’

  She hugged Ambrose and then moved off, hugging each of her old friends and colleagues.

  She hugged Jeanne and said, ‘It’s not the same, is it?’

  Jeanne looked at her and said, ‘Between us?’

  She’d meant the Bavaria.

  She held Jeanne’s hand and looked into her eyes. ‘My old university motto is sidere mens eadem mutato: “though the sky be changed our spirit is the same …” We are the same, Jeanne.’

  ‘Are we, Edith?’

  Edith felt cold. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  But as she said it, the words fell to the floor.

  Jeanne looked wistful.

  They hadn’t been the same since Avenol. Despite every effort on both their parts to act as if nothing had happened to them back then.

  Their masks had remained in place during the war years, and now the masks had fallen off.

  Oh hell.

  Oh hell.

  ‘We will make something different now, Jeanne, we will try—you’ll see. New skies above us now, we will …’

  They looked into each other’s eyes and Edith saw that it was not going to happen.

  Another outcome of war. The war had been a time of unfinished business, business buried because of the crisis.

  Everything was going to change. Not only with Jeanne.

  She looked around the outwardly merry crowd.

  Not with Ambrose, that was safe—but perhaps it, too, would be different?

  Some of the crowd began to sing.

  She still held Jeanne’s hand as she looke
d around the crowd, but Jeanne’s hand seemed cold.

  She knew which of those in the crowd would stay on and which would now go home never to return—go away to start their ordinary lives which had been postponed during the war.

  Go to their banal and happy lives.

  Her eyes came back to Jeanne. She’d lost Jeanne.

  That couldn’t be helped.

  They let go of each other’s hands.

  ‘Going back to Paris, Jeanne?’

  ‘As soon as I can.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Go well, Edith.’

  ‘Go well, Jeanne.’

  They were both tearful.

  Edith turned away from her.

  She went back to Ambrose to assure herself that he would not change. There he was in his sardonic, elegant self, chatting with urbanity. He would not change. She kissed his cheek and said that she was going to mingle, and she pushed her way through the crowd to find another drink as she had so many, many times there in the Bavaria, and also to find some more strong, good memories to paste onto the page of this unsettled day.

  Long Day’s Journey Into History

  As the UN train pulled in to San Francisco, Edith looked out of the carriage window and searched for Sweetser’s face.

  She saw him wearing a red carnation and holding up a placard, saying ‘Welcome to the League of Nations: Part Two’, with their names on it.

  He had printed his name at the bottom in large letters.

  Perhaps in case no one remembered his face.

  She smiled. He was surrounded by others she took to be from the United Nations conference, although she didn’t recognise any of them.

  The platform was jammed with reception groups meeting the train from New York.

  Other conference officials held placards identifying themselves as meeting points for national delegations. Uniformed chauffeurs held name placards or offered limousine service. She turned back to the others.

  ‘There’s something of a reception. Dear Sweetser is holding a placard with our names on it. And his own. How very American.’

  ‘Sweetser always feared he would not be recognised,’ said Ambrose, rising to get the briefcases from the overhead rack. ‘He reintroduced himself every time one met him.’

  Ambrose handed the briefcases to their respective owners.

  ‘Sweetser, what a curious man,’ Loveday said, rising from his seat, dusting his trousers. ‘Indispensable, but where does one put him within any given organisation?’

  ‘Undoubtedly he’s found a title,’ Ambrose said. ‘And while you all discover what that title is, I’ll lure a porter or two.’

  ‘I’m glad to have him here—after all, he’s one of us,’ Lester said, also rising from his seat and stretching. ‘Makes one feel a little more at home.’

  ‘Remember that he’s now an employee of the State Department,’ Loveday said.

  ‘But looking after us, I hope,’ said Lester. ‘He and Ruth always had a magnificent table.’

  They found their way down the steps, assisted by the black train attendants, out onto the platform.

  ‘Ambrose,’ Lester said, ‘would you look after any tipping that’s necessary, please? I find American tipping something of a puzzle.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ambrose said and went off.

  Why would he think Ambrose knew about American tipping?

  ‘Gerig and Gilchrist are supposed to be here too in some capacity,’ Edith said, looking around the platform as they moved towards Sweetser.

  She wondered whether there would be the usual bodyguards and all the other American fuss.

  She rushed ahead of the others and hugged Sweetser, his placard hard against the back of her head as he pulled her towards him. ‘Oh, Arthur …’

  ‘Thank God you’re here, Edith. Nothing can go wrong now.’

  They parted and looked each other over.

  ‘Let’s thank the gods that you’re here, Arthur. None of us speaks American.’

  Her breathing was constricted with emotion. ‘It’s so grand for us all to be together again,’ she said. She felt tearful with the joy of it.

  ‘And was that the enigmatic Ambrose I saw darting about?’

  ‘Oh yes, Ambrose is very much here.’

  ‘I am told through the grapevine,’ Sweetser said, ‘that you and he are … companions, still? And he’s working with the delegation?’

  ‘Not with the delegation as such. He’s my aide-de-camp.’

  Sweetser put on his face of discretion and nodded knowingly.

  ‘Oh, there are no secrets, Arthur,’ she said. ‘He’s more an attendant lord, I suppose.’

  They both watched as Ambrose herded up porters. ‘He’s been magnificent behind the scenes—his remarkable connections and so forth. With me, the office really gets two for the price of one.’

  ‘I remember him in the old days when we began the League—he was almost second-in-command. He came over to Geneva on the League train from London in 1921. Now he repeats history by coming to San Francisco on the UN train. He’s a damned fine fellow.’

  ‘He is, indeed, a damned fine fellow.’

  ‘And still a spy?’ Sweetser said, grinning.

  ‘Oh, indubitably.’

  ‘Feel in retrospect that he was badly treated,’ Sweetser said.

  She linked arms with Arthur. ‘The English never believed he was a spy.’

  Arthur laughed. ‘And now, as it turns out, everyone was a spy during the war. We all ended up being spies.’

  Lester and Loveday reached them. Edith could see the joy in the reunion of the men, the aching bonds which gripped them as they shook hands using both their hands in that positive men’s way, and then thumping each other’s backs. They had put civilisation together after the first war and had then seen that civilisation fall apart.

  Now they were here to put it back together again.

  The men talked excitedly with much laughter.

  ‘Not only is America in the League: the League is now in America!’ Sweetser said, as usual implying that he’d at last brought it off. Maybe he had—at last.

  ‘Well said.’

  She was still tight with emotion and tears, but she turned back to business and looked at the other people around Sweetser and then realised that perhaps they were not all with Sweetser, that some were simply part of the throng. There were officials and people in military uniforms galore still milling about on the platform.

  ‘Which are our people?’ she asked Sweetser, quietly.

  She could see that Lester and Loveday were also interested in who was there.

  Arthur said, ‘For now, I’m it.’ He did an imitation of a tap dance and bowed. ‘I’m your reception party—the formalities come later.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ said Lester.

  ‘We’re working with an improvised staff,’ Sweetser said. ‘This is not Geneva—no well-oiled machine here—yet. There is great chaos, as you would expect.’

  Lester and Loveday were looking about them. ‘We saw Victor Hoo on the train. Only face we knew.’

  ‘Naturally there’ll be the official stuff, but not on the railway platform. I have cars waiting. I’ll find a porter.’

  ‘Ambrose is on that mission. And here he comes,’ Edith said.

  Ambrose arrived carrying newspapers and magazines, followed by two black porters with red caps and trolleys.

  He and Sweetser embraced, which she found touchingly intimate, holding the embrace, their cheeks touching, Arthur patting Ambrose’s back.

  Then Arthur pulled away, saying, ‘Enough is enough, Ambrose—people will talk.’

  ‘You look well, Arthur,’ Ambrose said, his voice tinged with emotion.

  ‘Oh, I’m still overeating.’

  ‘Since the end of the war we are all overeating.’

  Ambrose said that the porters would get their luggage and the boxes of official documents and so on.

  Loveday said, ‘Have they provided cars for us?’

  He
probably expected brass bands, Edith thought.

  Sweetser overheard him and said, ‘It’s all hell here at present, Alex—I collared some taxis to take us to the hotel. It’s sheer hell in this city at present. Let’s get you settled.’

  She decided to let things just happen. ‘Yes, let’s get to the hotel—I’m dying for a hot bath.’

  ‘I could do with a gin,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘We’ll find you some gin, Ambrose. Instead of tonic or whatever pretence of moderation it is you put in your gin, we’ll just drop in an olive and a dash of vermouth and call it a martini.’

  ‘Sounds fine to me,’ Ambrose said. ‘Though I doubt that I need the olive.’

  Sweetser ushered Loveday and Lester towards the exit.

  Ambrose shepherded the porters as they made their way out of the station.

  In the drive to the hotel, Lester told Arthur about the UN train trip across from New York. ‘It was very moving. At every stop people gathered to cheer us on. I don’t mean that they were actually cheering the League. They wouldn’t have identified us as such, but the whole idea of the new United Nations—citizens, the mayor or city manager, were all out at each station. We sometimes got out to stretch our legs, talk with them. Wonderful to see.’

  ‘We’re making history here,’ Sweetser said fervently.

  Everyone laughed and Sweetser looked at them, not understanding the source of the humour.

  As they pulled into the hotel, Sweetser, obviously heading off their disappointment, said, ‘Now remember, accommodation is scarce. The Soviets demanded the best, the Americans took the best, the French found the best—chaos, a dreadful scramble—but this is a decent enough hotel, and much better than it looks.’

  ‘And the British are made think they have the best,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘Right!’ said Sweetser, laughing.

  Loveday asked whether Lester and he needed to be briefed.

  ‘All that comes later, Alex. The official stuff all comes later,’ Arthur said. ‘For now, relax. Take in the sights.’

  Edith and Arthur and Ambrose exchanged bleak glances. The hotel was less than first class. In New York they’d stayed in style at the Taft.

  Sweetser said, ‘I know the manager personally—Tremain Loud—you’ll be well looked after. You’ll be treated like royalty. Which you are.’