Grand Days (16 page)

She moaned to Florence about how she'd been seen as a horse-trader and not a diplomat at the meeting.

Florence said, ‘The point is, dear Edith, you were noticed. Now, both of you, tell me what happened. Tell the gossip — is Germany in? Tell all — what exactly did you both do?!'

Edith was about to tell of her contribution in every detail when Ambrose put a finger to his mouth and shook his head. ‘Confidential.' He put an arm around Florence, ‘Our lips are sealed — you know, it's all hush-hush at Directors' meetings.'

‘You can tell me,' Florence said, miffed.

‘Surely I can tell Florence about my contribution?'

‘No. All's confidential,' Ambrose said, seriously.

She shrugged and grimaced at Florence. ‘Sorry.'

‘But I was the one who talked you into wrangling your way into the meeting!' Florence was genuinely hurt.

They walked for a little way in uncomfortable silence.

At the Beau-Rivage Florence hesitated about joining them, intending to go off in a sulk. They both grabbed her arms and marched her in and made efforts to jolly her out of it.

With the help of the champagne they were soon giggling and gossiping — but not about the Directors' meeting, although Edith was still hankering to tell all.

When the Assembly decided, at last, to build the Palais des Nations, Edith cried.

She cried alone in her rooms in the boulevard des Philosophes from an elation which had begun jetting up out of a pool of humble relief. By deciding to build the Palais, the League had affirmed the covenant in an undeniable, durable and irrevocable way. As her father would have said, affirmed it in bricks and mortar. For these, her old father's words, she also cried. And she cried because it happened on St Edith's Day, allowing herself to enjoy a silly congruence.

It also affirmed to Edith that her work for the League would continue, not in the crass sense of having a job, but in the sense that she believed in her vocation and wanted it to go on to fulfil its destiny. Until now the League's only solidity was in its procedures, the making of new files, the enlarging of the staff, and the pumping out of League publications. The Assembly still met in a rented hall and the Palais Wilson was, after all, a renovated hotel.

To get down to the level of the whinge, yes, she would be heartily glad to get out of the Palais Wilson and its foul acoustics and away from office overcrowding. Of course, she would work in a hole in the ground for the League if she had to, but the ‘physicals' — again, her father's word; he had always stressed the physicals — were the credence of an enterprise. The League had now to affirm itself and build its Palace as a bulwark against human frailty.

She dried her eyes and put on a gramophone record of
Carmen
and prepared for a night alone, flopping into her big, soft armchair. Though she wouldn't mind if she cried on and off, but it would be the crying of mellow tears from the anticipation of vulnerable, good things.

Although she saw herself as a person who wanted to be with people, she also cherished the aloneness of some of her nights of solitary indulgence. She led a life of ever-changing faces at ever-changing meetings and she didn't bemoan this. Every month at the Secretariat there seemed to be new faces. She had her familiars and her work friends, but sometimes it was a relief to know that nothing was happening or changing in her life that night, or the next morning, and especially if nothing was happening also the following day. She treasured waking up in the morning and realising that she had nothing to do, that no one expected anything of her that day. She was absolutely sure that she was suited for administrative work which required so much dealing with strangers and most of the time she enjoyed the exploration of new faces and meeting someone of a nationality she had not before encountered. She never minded having to tell strangers how the League worked. Every new document which came to her desk she took up with enthusiasm. Nor did she feel strange in Geneva, but there was still some unfamiliarity in the city. She had yet to become fully international but was making progress; she still found her French, while much improved, would occasionally bring corrections from her French friend Jeanne or from those who, unasked, dutifully adopted the role of French tutor at every conversation.

But that she couldn't intensely and tearfully share her jubilation about the new building with anyone was also part of her tears. She cried alone because she thought it would be difficult to share with Ambrose, who was always wanting to live life
lightly and sardonically, or with Florence, who was, she now thought, a bit breezy, and who could be seen also as crafty, or with Victoria, who worried, and was not a jubilant type, although they were all committed to the League. If she'd tried to celebrate her joy with Victoria, Victoria would say, ‘Prepare yourself to be cheated.' They were all staunch, she knew that, but they did not suffer as much as she did about all this, about designing the future. Florence talked of going to work in Russia for the revolution although she was not a communist. She tried to describe herself as an adventuress but it didn't quite fit. Ambrose still had some arrangement, a bolt-hole he called it, with the British Foreign Office.

For Edith, there was now nothing else in her life. Maybe she had a life back in Australia, but that was fading as time passed — her life back there was rusting away in a paddock. Letters were not as frequent — from her to Australia as well as to her. Except for her family, her friends didn't correspond the way they'd promised they would. She had Ambrose as something of a lover, but she didn't have a husband and family, unlike most of her friends back home, something she kept meaning to think seriously about — because she certainly wanted to be a mother and a wife, it came to her mind every month at the cycle of her womanhood. When? She liked the idea of being a wife and liked the word wife. Those matters had been adjourned in her. Could these things really be adjourned? She didn't have an eligible man and was not conscious of looking for one. Ambrose was too bizarre, and her own behaviour of late with Ambrose had not led her to believe that she was fit to be a bride just yet. She giggled, sniffling from her mellow tears, drying her eyes. Sometimes, in fact, with Ambrose she was more the bridegroom than the bride. Although it was sometimes said that the modern bride, or any bride at any time, had to be something of a
courtesan as well as wife and mother to the man. Her behaviour was somewhat different again to that of a courtesan and she didn't have a word for it, if a word existed, and she perhaps didn't want particularly to know the word which applied to her amorous behaviour at this point in her life. The world had changed in that matter, the matter of sexual behaviour. Even her broadminded mother would die if she could see how people in Europe behaved now. She really believed that sexual behaviour at least had been separated from sin, and then separated from motherhood, and the implications of this were something she meant to learn more about, and that was an advance. Physical love was now also what it should be — a manifestation of the times. The League was not yet concerned with these matters but she imagined that it would get around to it.

All this being the case, she was no longer a girl and maybe the time for her being a Manifestation of the Times was coming to an end and she would have to give some thought to the matter of her amorous behaviour of late. Being in Geneva had permitted her to behave in a way she would never have dreamed back in Australia. This was not only the refashioning of self on which she knew she was embarked. She supposed that it could be seen as a coming out of self, as well as a becoming of self. That is, if she had any ‘original self' left. Back home too many people watched her with their own expectations of her, and she'd had to acknowledge this and respond to them as they might want her to respond to them. Now there was the New Edith. The big difference, and the good difference, was that now she had placed herself, rather than finding herself placed, among people whose expectations of her were also her expectations of herself.

The planned Palais des Nations was to be an expression of the grandeur of the League; at the same time, the Palais was to
embody the workings of a parliament of the world, or at least act as a business office for the world, and also be a temple of peace. While not herself being exactly what someone might describe as a nun devoted to Holy Orders, she had, she sometimes thought to herself, taken vocational vows. There was a clericature to her life. If there had been a League of Nations vow, she would have taken it. It was more that she was, perhaps, a courtier — maybe a priestess — and needed to live in a Palais, if not a temple. She wished the Secretariat could all
live
in the Palais — not, though, she smiled, as if in a monastery — and she had been disappointed when she learned from the specifications given to the architects for the competition that this was not to be.

They'd been at a meeting where the assistant architect had explained the specifications for the new Palais and Edith had asked where the living quarters were to be.

The assistant architect had been puzzled and had explained that there were no living quarters in the specifications.

Edith had been about to ask ‘Why not?' when she realised that the others at the meeting found her question strange and she shut up and sat down. Anyhow, she'd already asked two questions. She'd asked whether the architect had visualised how the building would look in the four seasons, in rain, in snow, in sunlight and how it would look in two hundred years' time. The assistant architect had replied to her that he would ask the head architect the first question, and God the second question.

How grand it would be for all of them to live in such a Palais. It would be like the court of England, when they spoke both French and English, all living in the court, say, about the time of Henry VIII, with ceremonials, jousts, feasting and diplomacy. Under Secretary Bartou said that it was good that
the Secretariat and other staff lived out in the city of Geneva with the citizens but she couldn't see much advantage. The Swiss, or the Genevese, seemed fairly indifferent when they were not for having Switzerland out of the League or, in extreme cases, the League out of Switzerland. So why live among them? It really didn't matter what the Swiss or the Genevese thought. She hoped that the League would go ahead with the plans to have its own railway station and airport. There was also talk of the League buying its own train which could speed to a crisis and negotiate.

Edith blew her nose, and with her glass of sherry tried to concentrate on shedding a few more tears of joy or of something like joy, by thinking of the building of the Palais des Nations, her father and mother, her home in Jasper's Brush, sea shells, the swirl and wash of the long curving surf of Seven Mile Beach, and one peaceful world. When no more tears were left, she let herself turn to enjoying her rooms, her own cloister, which were becoming at last a portrayal of herself. The rooms had higher ceilings than she'd ever seen in a private home in Australia. Her curtains were heavy maroon, velvet, velvet being her favourite fabric. They helped to reshape the window. It had seemed out of shape. It also helped exclude from the view some of a building which she didn't like. She argued with herself, on and off, about whether one should ‘accept' the view from any given window as being the bona fide and incontestable ‘outside' of the room. The windows looked out on a courtyard which she didn't find disagreeable at all. It was a building to the left which she disliked and tried to exclude.

She'd found the low, deep-seated, heavily padded soft armchair from the last century, covered in velveteen, a maroon very close to that of the curtains, in which she could sprawl and read — more a sprawling chair than a reading chair. She'd found
a low table with two folding side panels, which tended to become a dumping ground for magazines and books, but when she had someone to her room, she could clear it off and serve tea and cakes from it carried up by Madame Didier. For the low table, she had two Viennese bent wood armchairs, which were comfortable enough for sitting up at afternoon tea. If the afternoon tea went well they could retire — the guest to the sprawling chair, and she to the Wilson chair. The American Wilson chair was a much-loved monstrosity with an adjustable back, adjustable body section, adjustable leg panel and an adjustable attached foot stool. She and Florence had found it at the flea market in la plaine de Plainpalais. It could fully recline to become a bed and one night Florence had slept on it, covered by a travelling rug, too lazy from wine to go to her own pension. The chair lent itself to irreverent jokes about President Wilson's Fourteen Points. She tried to tell herself that the jokes gave the chair Historical Lineage but she wasn't convinced. She liked the Wilson chair because it was mechanically ingenious. But she didn't think that mechanical ingenuity was an Aesthetic rule. It was really just a curiosity She liked it because it allowed her have an unposed attitude, neither demanding that she sit or that she lie. She adjusted it according to mood. She had a few potted plants on her windowsill.

From Australia had arrived the chest containing her few possessions including her much-loved dark-red karri-wood vases, poker-worked with Australian wild flowers. She had three framed lithographs of Sydney, the work of Thea Proctor. Photographs of her family and a class photograph from her last year at school were on the mantel above the fireplace. Her eighteenth-century brass microscope was also there. It was an object which looked bizarre wherever she put it but it had been a gift from her mother. It had to go somewhere. She'd had her mother ship
over all her books, including her school books and her science books and all her Everyman's Library books. She'd wanted them all as a way of reminding herself that she did
know things
. It somehow reinforced her as a person to have Porritt's
Chemistry of Rubber
and Marshall's
Frog
in her bookcase. She had a work table with a velvet bag hanging under the table top on slides which meant that it could be pushed away under the table. She had her Smith-Corona typewriter which she thought very attractively shaped, and a wooden clerk's chair on castors. That was also adjustable, and had a sprung back which was supposed to reduce fatigue, but Edith didn't know, having never had fatigue. She was still searching for a pulley lamp for her desk which she could raise and lower with a ceramic weight. She'd found a dressing table with three mirrors, the two side mirrors being on swivels, so one could see nearly all of one's head. It had ten drawers. Then there was her neat single bed in a discreet alcove. The floor rugs were handcrafted. She had five table and standard lamps to allow her to light different spaces of the two rooms for different purposes and moods.

Nearly everything in her two rooms now had been chosen by her, or if not, left there because it pleased her. She savoured her rooms at the Pension Levant and her meagre but irreproachable and agreeable possessions.

The opera played on and she thought to herself, Each of us has a space around us which we could sculpture, and then we could work outwards, each from our gardens, spreading into the world, as in Geneva the League would build a Palais des Nations in the parc l'Ariana, and grandeur and reasoned order would spread outwards, But unless that centre was in good order, no good order could flow out from it.