Dark Palace (31 page)

And then it was back to Sydney where she had to give a talk at the University. And then on to Canberra.

She wanted to say to Thelma and George, ‘Come on—you can both have another life. There are things of the mind you may be missing. You can have a great life here where you are. You don't have to move. You can expand what you have.'

For whatever reason, they couldn't. They had a good life but failed somehow to give it due appreciation and had lost the way of expanding it.

There were just different worlds one could inhabit, no better no worse, but absolutely different and with unmistakable borders.

She knew this now. There was no superiority in it. Indeed, she was unsure about whether her own life was in any way on a proper course.

Very much unsure. Perhaps she had been born into the wrong generation. Perhaps she belonged more properly with the next generation of Australians?

She wished she were back on board ship—at the beginning of the voyage—when one was suspended from ordinary life and time seemed endless.

She couldn't fix George: and she couldn't deny her difference.

She had to let it all go.

Tonight, life's cogs had moved, ratchetted around a few notches, and the three of them were all in different places now.

And her skin had been caught in the teeth of the cogs, and bruised.

For comfort, she felt her nipples through the georgette of her dress and the silk of her brassiere. They became erect and
the good feeling came, and then the good feeling moved down through her body and as she played with her nipples she imagined them being suckled by a baby, as Ambrose had suckled her breasts from time to time, and she his. She crossed her legs and found the right position and rocked her leg and, slipping her hand into the brassiere to her breasts, she fondled them around the nipples, gently squeezing, and then uncrossing her legs and still squeezing her nipples, she put her other hand up inside her skirt and pleasured herself in a small way.

Edith stood in the quadrangle cloisters of the university caught in a gale of recollections from her prickly student years.

She felt again the inadequacy of that time and shivered. At least the Quad was finished now.

She recalled the downright fear of being wrong about everything while at the same time trying to maintain an air of certainty about all things.

A feeling of downright ineptitude which could never ever be shown and confessed.

Each day had been a quandary, even about what to wear, about her hair—long or short, back or forward, up or down, about her make-up or absence thereof. She'd stood out as a girl who had been taught about make-up by her mother, she had dithered and bothered about her personal appearance for years. As her social group changed and her friendships firmed up or fell away, a subtle change of appearance seemed to be required, to be got right.

Not that she'd ever aspired to be, or had any desire to be, a glamour puss. Well, for one term maybe she'd entertained
strange notions of her beauty. She'd dared to varnish her nails for a time.

As she walked about the university, she caught again the smell of the laboratory which, as a student, she'd feared would penetrate her skin and remain with her forever.

She stood and smelled the laboratory, the formalin, the sulphur.

And then the false release of graduation, which had not brought to her the certified competency she'd so much needed.

In the last year of her science degree, she'd finally and consciously turned her back on any idea of a scientific career. She'd admitted to herself that she was not going to become another Madame Curie. Consequently, the degree brought to her none of the assurance of direction that it had for the other girls in her graduation year. Although the girls with science degrees had less assurance of career than then those from arts, who were nearly all destined for teaching careers.

The science girls had all considered themselves pioneers. But teaching was usually where they went too.

The degree had been very close to being a waste, although she'd fought away that idea—the thought of having wasted three years of her young life was simply too appalling.

In reference to something else, her mother had once told her never to dwell on what you felt was a waste in your life because the ‘dwelling' itself became then a second waste of time.

Back then, she'd told herself that, after all, they were all living in a scientific age and that the degree equipped her for that scientific age.

There'd been a lot of Darwinism, Mendelism, and Pearson and, of course, Galton, which she supposed had given her an edge in some arguments and helped form her world view.

She loved Galton's experiments to prove the inefficacy of prayer.

Galton had discovered the use of fingerprints for identification. He and Pearson had been her heroes.

Walking towards Women's College, she remembered her ‘path to go' from Women's College to the lecture rooms and labs. She'd worked out the most pleasing walk even though it was longer. Alva and the others had sometimes indulged her, but mostly they left her to walk her own way alone, while they went the short cut.

She'd also devised her own ‘way to go back' to college, that too chosen for its pleasing trees and because it gave her time to calm down after the day, before facing college life.

She had always devised ways of coming and ways of going to the places where she'd worked or lived.

She stood outside the college and decided not to go in. Maybe later in the week she'd go in and look at her old room. All she seemed to remember at that moment were the frantic efforts to keep up her grooming, to get the creaming of her body and hair plucking done, in the rush and bustle of shared bathrooms and the college timetable.

Her gang, had not been only from Science but included also some of the Arts people at Manning and the Union. That and the Public Issues Society had been her real university life.

It was in those places that she'd begun to somehow turn her provincialism into a suave questioning—a style of urbanity based on curiosity.

She thought that she still held civility and curiosity as her highest personal values.

Standing there in the university grounds, she again felt herself as a perplexed young undergraduate who concealed her perplexity by behaving loudly.

Oh God, her laugh! Back then her laugh had been so false. It had been too loud.

They'd all been putting on an act to get by.

At least, now the Quad and the Harbour Bridge were
finished. Two things at least. Almost nothing had been finished in Australia when she'd left.

She had the sort of mind which yearned for, and in fact, lived in, projections of some idea of a
completed future
. She was always impatient with incompletion.

That was what she loved about Geneva—it was a finished city, old and solid.

Finished, that is, except for the Palais des Nations—but almost finished.

She felt a coldness pass through her at the idea of living in unfinished Canberra, of going back to another unfinished, imaginary state of mind and place.

And the world the League was trying to design was certainly far from finished. She'd expected the newly designed world to be finished by now.

The joke at the League was that when the world was perfect they'd be out of a job.

Had she lost faith?

One day, she'd have to sort out the whole business of political faith. Faith came into play at that point where statistical information no longer pointed the way forward and some sort of belief was needed—or if not belief, perhaps a Grand Wish.

Did she live by Grand Wishes?

She'd once thought her view of things was historically inevitable. She now saw that she belonged more with the crowd who thought that there were identifiable things which could be won or lost, that everything was always in the balance. That there was no inevitability.

And you never knew which gesture, word, or action won the day. Which silence, which acquiescence, which inaction lost the day.

She guessed that there was also the poignant position of belonging to a lost cause.

The League?

And then there was the more complicated position, of
belonging to a lost cause while welcoming the justice of a new regime. Karen in
The House in Paris
, speaking of the socialist revolution, had said, ‘I should always work against it, but I should like it to happen in spite of me.'

She headed towards the Student Union.

Time to meet the organisers from the League of Nations group.

It was somehow more daunting to speak to those who'd known you when you were immature. And she assumed that some of her old teachers and friends would be there.

An audience of strangers was alive only to what you were saying.

A familiar audience, especially one from one's past, was alive to your person and to your background—they saw too much of you as you spoke. And in this case, they would be seeing that younger version of herself, not the new improved version.

And, in so many ways she'd been such a queer young undergraduate and today they would probably still see her as such.

Maybe she was.

As such.

At the Union refectory, she was met by two of the academic staff, an A.P. Elkin, and an Irishman, Enoch Powell, who was younger than she but was introduced as ‘Professor'. So young?

Hanging behind them was an undergraduate introduced as Rob Follan.

They were joined by a Hermann Black—handsome, with a fine voice, from Economics—who brought with him a couple of other undergraduates.

She did not remember any of these dons from her days nor they her. Too much time had passed.

She wore her wonderful wide-brimmed felt hat with a feather tucked in the band. She'd once been told a French
proverb, that ‘when a person wears a hat it is impossible to tell what is on their mind'.

She felt she needed any shielding of her mind that a hat might give.

She had on a black suit with a hip-length jacket, a box-pleated skirt, and belt. Two-toned blue and white shoes. She rather liked the two-toned shoes although on men she considered two-toned shoes to be cad's shoes. As a general rule. The rule had not applied to Jerome—but he was another sort of person from another time.

And she wore soft kid-leather gauntlet gloves.

And a cape.

The gloves, she thought, were rather swashling. The swank hat was perhaps excessive, although when she'd put it on that morning, she'd thought at first that it suggested the sheep station. But on second thoughts had seen it, simply, as swank. For Sydney.

Give them
splash
, Edith.

Perhaps, there was also something defiant in the hat.

She wore no jewellery, apart from Ambrose's necklet which could not be seen.

She realised that most of those present were younger, and she had to remind herself that this was only natural. And then, hovering in the background, she saw dear Alva, whom she'd asked to be included at the official lunch table.

She excused herself from the greeting party and went over to embrace her. She'd been closer to Alva than anyone else in the last year at university.

‘It looks as if we're the only two women at lunch,' she said to Alva, leading her back to the greeting party.

She introduced Alva and then asked the men, ‘Will there be a turnout?'

‘I think the League group is still the largest society on campus,' Elkin said, turning to Black. ‘Would that be right, Hermann?

‘Oh yes, by far,' said Black.

‘And I think Camilla Wedgewood, Principal of Women's College, will join us—to even up the sexes.'

‘Support for the League is holding?' she asked.

‘Own up,' said Powell to the other men, and then turned to her. ‘Dwindling, I'm afraid—in attendances.'

‘But not in dedication,' said Black.

‘Can't be sure of that, either,' said the man Powell.

The Harsh Realist.

‘Disheartening times,' she sympathised. She asked what their activities were. She felt momentarily as if she were a member of the royal family in a cinema newsreel visiting a factory.
And your work is to sweep up the iron filings—how interesting that must be
.

Elkin said that Black and he were doing broadcasting work and talks to trades unions. ‘And we organise model assemblies for the brighter high school students.'

‘Broadcasting! Splendid,' said Her Royal Highness. ‘Duncan Hall, of course, invented the idea of the model assemblies—an Australian idea.'

They then turned the questions to her and she felt herself sink as she tried to make answers for them which would hearten them. She ached to be able to tell them that something grand, noble was about to flow from Geneva directly to the world and to them.

She said that there was a feeling that the League had to leave aside sanctions and a collective military force for now. Moves were afoot, to let go of the idea that the League could police the world. Time to concentrate on good works. Relieving suffering.

The undergraduate Follan asked a question about citizen sanctions as his way of making a rather strident statement—‘the trades union can stop goods moving from one country to another,' he said. ‘The workers can choose to stop buying the goods from another country, sanctions could be done by the people, not only by governments.'

‘The trouble with citizen sanctions is that you could have one foreign policy pursued by the trades union and another by the farmer organisations. Confuses everyone abroad,' Edith said. ‘But, I agree that they are a new form of diplomacy. And more diplomacy seems to be done outside of government. The Peace Ballot, the Red Cross, and the international conferences of citizens. Can't be sure it's a good thing.'

She saw Follan had not accepted her answer.

Bolshie.

He began another foray. She held up a hand, laughing. ‘Don't make me give my talk twice. I'm going to argue sanctions this afternoon.'

Follan unwillingly withdrew.

Black, the economist, said, ‘Sanctions could make the marketplace more devious—make traders cunning at finding ways around the blockades and so on.'

Powell said in a staccato voice, ‘And I'm worried about the hollow value of treaties. Hitler has killed the Locarno peace treaties now that he's invaded the Rhineland. One could ask what value there is in treaties?'

He was irritated with the world. Maybe with the League. Maybe with her?

Edith had long pondered the enigma of treaties.

She was about to reply when Black said, ‘
Rebus sic stantibus
,' as if pulling it as a rabbit from a hat. ‘When the circumstances change the treaty no longer applies.'

‘You make my point,' said Powell, impatiently.

They looked to her. She was being paid respect. She was also being seen as a bearer of the latest from Europe. The Latin term brought with it a crowd of memories for her. It had been one of her first lessons in the arts of diplomacy.

She had also once lived by it. ‘Diplomatically, most of us now consider the doctrine of
rebus sic stantibus
a rather immature doctrine,' she said. Hoping it didn't sound offensive.

‘Which doesn't prevent some nations applying it,' said Powell.

The Pessimist.

‘The doctrine lends itself to misuse by politically irresponsible nations,' she said. ‘We—the more responsible diplomatic community—have tossed it.'

She went on, ‘The advanced nations do not accept that one party can just up and terminate a treaty.'

There were smiles showing that they knew which nations these were.

She turned to Powell, trying to win him. ‘I'm reminded of what Alexis Léger once said to me. He said, “We must act within the League to prevent, or punish, all treaty violations. Treaties are the handshake of world civilisation. When the trust of the handshake has gone so has civilisation.” He said that the only way treaties will be kept is reward and punishment.'