Grand Days (10 page)

He pushed at her. ‘Are you suggesting that we arrange a meeting with Sir Eric?'

She wasn't suggesting that.

‘Or what?' he said impatiently.

She wanted the mess off his desk and to get her hands on the telegram with her name in it, and the whole caboodle, so as to somehow save herself. She'd simply burn the file.

‘You could dump it on to Political section, or you could make it my responsibility to investigate it and report,' she said, and before he could make a decision, she leaned over and took the file off the desk. ‘I'll sort it out,' she said.

‘I don't want us looking ill-advised,' Cooper said, ‘or to seem to be a section which is always passing things on. And I don't want to let Political in on it — if it is in any way a going thing, that is.'

She suspected that Cooper was one of those people who often compulsively spoke the description of themselves that they most deeply dreaded. He was forever saying that he did not want to appear ill-advised, and yet that was just how his actions so often appeared to her. As she walked along the corridor, she looked at the file and saw that in the telegram Strongbow
mentioned her as a ‘wise counsellor'. That annoyed her but it could have been worse.

Back at her desk, she found that a box had been delivered to her. Addressed personally. From what Strongbow had told her, she thought immediately of bombs. She pushed the box with a pencil. Not a gift box but a serious-looking parcel the size of a shoebox. She wondered whether she should call one of the military chaps on the staff. She decided that she was being panicky and gingerly opened the box. Inside it was a card. The card was from Strongbow and it said that the box contained a gift for her, sent in the spirit of internationalism.

The Strongbow mess was spreading. With sickening apprehension, she looked into the box.

Inside was a jewellery box. She could not imagine how she would explain an expensive gift to Cooper — maybe she would even have to explain it to Sir Eric, to Tony Buxton, to the lot of them. Yikes. She opened the hinged jewel case and oh, it was velveteen-lined but it was no jewel case. Inside, in a recessed compartment was a small silver-plated revolver. A booklet of instruction said it was a Ladies' Handbag Pistol. There were five shining bullets in their velveteen recesses. She closed the presentation case and got up and locked the door to her office.

She looked at the revolver again. She took it out carefully. She had seen revolvers only in motion pictures and museums. She gripped it and awkwardly pointed it. She liked it. But she would have to think about the protocol, so she put the revolver back in the case and into her drawer. She could return it to Strongbow and not mention it. She would have to think.

If it had been diamonds, she would have given it in to Cooper or no, she would have given it to Under Secretary Bartou who handled these things until they had a
Chef du Protocole
. Under Secretary Bartou might be the person to see about
the whole matter. That would keep it well out of Internal Services and anyhow, she felt intimidated by Under Secretary Monnet, her real boss who she rarely saw.

Part of her, though, was coldly certain that she intended to keep the revolver and to keep it a secret. It seemed to her that it was what she needed here in Europe. She had not realised it until this very moment, but she needed an instrument of personal safety. She thought that maybe Strongbow was correct about enemies of the League, not that they would go for someone at her level. At some point, she might need to defend others.

 

That evening she took the revolver home with her and exulted in the possession of it and the exultation pushed away any sense of dishonesty.

The next weekend when she went to stay with Ambrose at his apartment, she showed it to him, and asked him to teach her to shoot.

‘Where did you get it?'

She told him.

‘Send it back.'

‘No.'

‘It's against rules.'

‘I consider it a personal gift — from a man to a woman. A gift of admiration.'

‘From an admirer?'

She could tell that he had changed his approach and tone. ‘From a would-be admirer. Will you teach me to shoot it?'

‘I was a medical officer. Not very good at shooting.'

‘Teach me the way it works.'

‘What sort of captain is he, this Captain Strongbow?'

‘I don't know what sort of captain he is. You were an officer. You must have had to shoot.'

They argued about her accepting the pistol and then he grudgingly agreed to show her how to shoot, ‘For the sake of public safety,' and then he allowed himself to be interested in the pistol.

He was partly pacified when she said she would talk unofficially to Under Secretary Bartou. She would discuss the matter of Captain Strongbow with Under Secretary Bartou but would not discuss the pistol.

They argued.

She said, ‘There is a distinction between a gift from an admirer and an intended bribe.' The pistol was a gift from an admirer.

They agreed to disagree.

That Saturday, they bought a packet of bullets and drove out to the Bois de Veyrier. Ambrose stood behind her and held her arms for her and guided her with instruction.

She felt the little spurt of power that firing the pistol gave to her. She loved it. She liked the explosive smell.

She fired off the whole box, but kept the original five bullets that had come with the gun.

She went to the tree and examined her target and the effect of the bullets on the tree. ‘Will the tree die?' she asked.

‘Oh no — trees are sturdier than we,' Ambrose said.

Back at his apartment, under guidance from Ambrose, and still warm with excitement, she washed the barrel and oiled the pistol.

 

On the Monday, she called on Under Secretary Bartou who had been a Swiss diplomat of the old school.

He welcomed her to the League and said the usual things about the expense of living in Geneva.

‘I've been here five months now,' she told him, in case he thought she was green.

She explained the problem of Captain Strongbow. He seized the problem immediately. ‘What we have with this Captain Strongbow is someone desperate to have a relationship with the League which can then be used by him elsewhere as a credential. If he can, he will use it on his letterhead, will mention some sort of relationship with the League of Nations. You understand?'

Edith nodded.

‘The thing to understand in dealing with such a communication,' Under Secretary Bartou went on, ‘is that we must avoid confirming any of his claims. An unscrupulous person will write calling himself, say, the Commissioner of the World Police, and if we reply addressing him as the “Commissioner of World Police”, he will twist this into an acknowledgement by us of his status. You have been entrapped perhaps?' Under Secretary Bartou asked how she had communicated with this Captain Strongbow.

‘In a street. At least, in a café conversation. I said for him to make a submission to the League, yes, I suppose.' She was colouring with embarrassment, more strongly felt in front of Under Secretary Bartou than in front of Cooper, an embarrassment not only of diplomatic naïvety.

‘You may find that he now talks of “having been invited to make a submission to the League of Nations”. I wouldn't worry,' he said, perceiving her embarrassment, ‘we are all subjected to it. The best protection is to minute these encounters. Treat them as a letter not answered.'

In her favour, though, she had sensed back in the café that she was being used. Her instincts had been right. Damnation.

Under Secretary Bartou said, ‘You must now minute your meeting and have nothing more to do with him. To reply or not to reply, by letter or by the telephone, is always a diplomatic act.'

He stood up and she stood up, and they shook hands. She thanked him for his advice.

 

Later she realised that she hadn't liked the tone in Bartou's advice. For all her respect, she resisted a little. It sounded like instruction, not advice. But then, he was trained in the diplomacy of the old school. She was of the new school of diplomacy — open diplomacy. She fiercely believed that the obscure issues from which international quarrels arise had to be dragged out into the light of day and the creation of a public opinion made possible. Diplomats and politicians had to learn to face the public and make themselves understood by the public on matters of foreign policy. No more secret treaties. But she had to keep back her irritation because she was, if not green, still a New Girl about the place.

She saw that Under Secretary Bartou and maybe even Cooper were worried about minor infractions to the dignity of the League and were, in that sense, hobbled in the most limiting way. They ought, she thought, to develop the philosophies and procedures of the League in a more enterprising way if they wished to escape from diplomatic restraint. Even if there were risks, the League had to take them. There was something she badly wanted to learn: she wanted to learn what made an idea tenable and what made an idea untenable. Politically. Diplomatically. She wanted to know about the assessing of ideas which were ‘unprecedented'. Under Secretary Bartou and Cooper wanted to follow only precedented ideas. Golly, the League itself was unprecedented. She recalled something that Balfour had
said, that in foreign affairs it was always politically safer to do an absurd thing with precedent than to make oneself responsible for an unprecedented act of wisdom. She couldn't remember, though, which position Balfour approved, the unprecedented or the precedented. But she was interested in Ideas Ahead of Their Time and Ideas Whose Time Had Arrived, as well as Seizing the Moment.

Overnight she decided that she had to make a name for herself at the League and contribute to the development of this new temper. Henceforth, as a rule of personal behaviour, she would do the opposite to that which she imagined Cooper doing. Or, for that matter, the way her dear friend Ambrose would act, he being another old style, British Foreign Office person. She put Under Secretary Bartou to one side because he was a different fish to them both.

At work next day she opened the file and looked at Strongbow's telegram and saw that it had been sent from the Hôtel Richemond. Taking a deep, deep breath, Edith had herself put through, by telephone, to the Hôtel Richemond and to ‘Captain' Strongbow. Following Under Secretary Bartou's advice on this point at least, she pondered how to address him without granting him his title. She reached not Strongbow, but an eager-voiced Mr Kennedy, and she made an appointment to see Strongbow.

She wanted to see Strongbow and establish for herself, by her own tests, whether his ideas were tenable, regardless of the soundness of the man. If Captain Strongbow's ideas were honourable and valid, she wanted to advance those ideas. She wanted to find a way that would allow her to go into the jungle of the world Out There and mix with its animals and still keep unimpaired her analytical self-respect, and the loftiness of the League. She wanted to be a person who could arbitrate and respond to a vital idea of the times.

Her nerve deserted her for a second and she considered that maybe she was not destined for diplomacy: maybe she was someone who should work in the field. She sometimes yearned to be able to ‘do something' — to bandage, to ladle soup, to fight malaria, to install wind pumps in Africa, even to fight in just combat.

But her nerve returned and she resumed her course of action. Further, she wanted to rebuke Strongbow for misusing her.

At the Richemond she told the desk clerk that she was there for an appointment with Mr Strongbow. The desk clerk said a porter would take her up to his rooms. She would rather have met with him in the lobby.

In his rooms she was pleased to see a woman, who was introduced as his wife Athena. Athena was dressed in a leather flying outfit with calf boots. Used, Edith guessed, as a motoring outfit. Why wear it in a Hôtel room? Did she not have any other clothing? They were drinking champagne. It did not feel like diplomatic intercourse, at all.

She refused the offer of a glass of champagne. In what she thought was a formal voice, she raised the matter of the use of her name in a communication to the Secretary-General. Strongbow apologised. She hunted around for a form of rebuke, but none came to mind and she felt she had to leave it at that.

She wanted now to somehow test his ideas and find if there was reason or evidence behind any of them. She had devised three ways. The first was the Way of Numbers: is there a statistic? Butler had said that a reliable supply of facts and statistics will in itself be a powerful aid to peace. They were the only escape from the guess, the national lie, the false claim, the delusion, and the wish. Statistics had no nationality.

The second was the Way of Recognition: did he have any
status in the eyes of anyone or any organisations which she respected?

The third was more difficult to use and she was uncertain of it. She called it the Way of Aura: was there an aura about this man Strongbow or his organisation which she could detect and which would substitute for the absence of the above?

Before she could apply her ways, Strongbow called for tea and said that before they talked about anything else, he had a proposition to announce.

Because it was difficult to talk seriously while waiting for tea, she thanked him for the pistol and made a half-hearted gesture of returning it as an extravagant gift from one stranger to another. But the mention of the pistol and her primly thanking him for it, seemed to make for a fanciful atmosphere and anyhow she'd already fired it. The unreality of the situation was taken further when Athena showed Edith her pistol, what she called a ‘point two-five calibre'. She said it was a purse pistol. Edith took it and handled it. It had an engraved handle inlaid with silver and ivory. Every girl should have a pistol of silver and ivory.

‘It's truly beautiful,' she said.

Talk about pistols took over for a time.