Grand Days (17 page)

When all the Palais design entries from around the world were in and the competition jury couldn't agree on a winning entry, Edith did not laugh along with the journalists and the rest. That the jury couldn't agree on the winning plan was a joke around Geneva and, of course, at the Bavaria and among the Swiss Germans around the corner at Gambrinus, and among the socialist crowd at the Landolt where, she suspected, all jokes about the League began.

There was a progressive group around the Secretariat and the Bavaria who had wanted Le Corbusier to win. She discovered that she was more of a traditionalist and had wanted someone solid like Nenot from Paris to win. Perhaps she should try to be more modernistic about architecture but she was modern about most things without being wearisomely ‘advanced' in her thinking on all matters. About architecture, she thought that maybe she would continue to be an inveterate traditionalist. That would be one of the things that the Refashioned Edith would be traditional about.

‘I'm afraid that when it comes to architecture I am an inveterate traditionalist. I prefer the stately,' Edith said out aloud in the Bavaria, for the sound of it, trying it out. The word ‘stately' was perfect. ‘To be frank, I prefer the august to the angular.' No one seemed to be listening in the babble. She said it to herself and to her wine glass. She thought the League should have some of the grandeur of the world of Roman legations while still acknowledging that the League was trying to break with the diplomacy of the past. That was part of it — she wanted the new building to do something
to her
. To do something for all of them who worked there and who entered there to meet. She wanted to be exalted. ‘I want to be exalted by my surroundings,' she said aloud.

Florence heard her this time and glanced at her, and then
looked around the Bavaria, crowded with journalists and the younger set of the Secretariat. ‘Exalted?' Florence asked.

‘Never mind,' she said to Florence, ‘I was somewhere else.'

‘To be exalted, you would have to be.'

She hoped that the Building Committee would resolve the impasse and decide for something which acknowledged the past while meeting the future. She did not want Le Corbusier to win and she argued this very well against the progressive set at parties and picnics who said things like, ‘The building should be a negotiating machine.'

‘I don't want to work in a machine. I want to work in an edifice.' She even argued that negotiation was best done in august surroundings because august surroundings calmed passions and diminished egotism. She wanted to work in a building which spoke to her and touched her every day she went to it. Which daily convoked her ideals as she went up its steps. She did not want to work in a building she failed to notice. Or worse a building which touted the personality of its architect.

 

When the Australian government was the first nation to offer a gift to the planned Palais of Nations, Edith cried a few tears of pride.

Victoria, who worked in Registry, rang her and said, ‘Edith, this will make you happy.' Victoria read out the telegram from the Prime Minister of Australia to the League of Nations.

Edith kept an interest in the Palais and its development, and when, in the new file on the Palais furnishing, she came across the letter from Miss Dickinson she was moved to exclaim and went along the corridor to show it to Florence.

Miss Dickinson's letter was handwritten in what seemed to be home-made black ink. The letterhead was from a linocut of her school for war orphans in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and was addressed to Sir Eric.

They both looked at the photograph of the chair. ‘Very nice,' Florence said. ‘Who is Sir Willoughby Dickinson? Should we know?'

Edith shrugged.

On reading the letter to Florence, Edith saw the war orphans working industriously on the chair, she saw the public-spirited,
practical Annie Dickinson hovering about, caring for them and guiding them. Maybe that was where she, Edith, belonged, working with the orphans. Making things from wood. She'd begun a poem about working with wood. The poem said that the pencil and the paper with which she worked were made from wood. The Secretariat in fact worked with wood.

She went back to her office, glancing through the rest of the file as she walked along the corridor. She came to a minute from Lloyd who was secretary of the Building Committee, to Sir Eric, which read: ‘Please see the accompanying letter from Miss Dickinson (sister of Sir Willoughby Dickinson). I suggest this little gift should be informally accepted now and put into use in one of the present committee rooms. It would seem to give it an undue importance if it were left over to be sent in as a gift to the new building.'

Edith lost her calm. ‘Little gift', ‘undue importance' — what in the world did he know about importance and its size?

Edith's heart hurt. She was about to storm down to Lloyd's office and ask him what he knew about undue importance. She felt that it would be impossible to give the chair too much importance!

She raged about her office, trying to regain a condition of mind which would permit her to speak.

Then she did go to Lloyd's office.

He heard her out.

‘I take your point, Berry. You have more of the poet in you than I. See it from my perspective — I have to maintain an overall view on the Palais. I have to see that everything is in proportion. If we started to accept chairs from everyone in the world, where would we be?'

‘Everyone in the world does not offer us chairs. If they did, well, maybe that would be a marvellous thing too. We could say
that the chairs of the League of Nations were donated by the people of the world.'

‘They would not match,' he said and then realising that was an argument not likely to touch her, his voice died off into a cough.

Edith took it that he saw the sadness of his comment and let it pass. She said, ‘Furthermore, we have a photograph of this chair. This is a remarkable chair.'

‘Remarkable?' He looked again at the photograph in the file. ‘I don't know if I'd want to sit in it too long.'

‘I agree, Lloyd, that the test of a chair is in the sitting. All things being equal it should be a reasonable sitting chair.'

He agreed to reconsider his advice to Sir Eric.

As she left his office, she thought that it was the nearest thing to a row that she'd had at the League. When she'd first arrived she'd thought rather unrealistically that people mightn't have rows at the League.

Edith kept a watch on the outward file and saw no letter of acceptance to Miss Dickinson. She waited another month and there still wasn't one.

She again went to Lloyd, trying not to fume, and asked him what had happened. He pleaded the burden of the project. This time she waited in his office while he drafted a letter of acceptance, using her female wiles and the force of virtue, speaking for the orphans of the War, there in Jugo-slavia, waiting for their gift to be recognised by the League of Nations in Geneva.

She orated, but mostly she sat on the edge of his desk showing silk-stockinged legs, her ankles, and the cross-straps of her new kid leather shoes.

He worked up a draft of a letter of acceptance which would go to Sir Eric for signing and handed it to her to read.

‘Good, that's good. Thank you, Lloyd,' she said, taking the
draft from him and reading it again. ‘You say “a chair suitable for a chairman of committee” but I'm sure that Miss Dickinson saw it being the Assembly or Council President's chair. But I'll bow to your judgement.' Like hell she would; she would somehow see to it that the chair was used by one or other of the two presidents.

She left the corner of his desk and stood facing him. ‘Know now, Lloyd,' she said, ‘that you are a person complete within this day.' He moved papers on his desk, flushed, not looking at her. She went on, ‘By writing this to the orphans, you could die tonight and not feel that you have lived badly, or left undone those things which ought to have been done.' She thought that she needed to lay it on thick, he being Welsh.

Lloyd smiled uneasily, looking at her breasts, and then frowned uncomprehendingly as she left the room.

‘Maybe a cocktail after work?' he called to her back, in an uncertain voice.

‘Maybe a cocktail after work one of these days, by all means. Not tonight. Busy. Thanks, Lloyd.'

She did not trust anyone in Internal Services on this. They did, indeed, lack poetry. She went down and had afternoon tea with Victoria in the Registry and asked her to keep an eye on mail related to the chair and let her know.

‘I will not tamper with anything,' Victoria said, defending the honour of her position. Every time Edith looked at Victoria she recalled that one of the first things Victoria had told her about herself was that, back in New Zealand, she'd founded the League of Nations Union in Opotiki.

‘Victoria, I wouldn't expect you to tamper with anything. I want only to be alerted to the comings and goings of letters about the chair.'

‘Because you feel so strongly about the orphans?' Victoria said, by her tone somehow doubting this.

This surprised Edith, this note of doubt. ‘Why? Do you doubt my motives?'

‘It's a rather sentimental stand to take, to be interested so much in a chair. Even if made by orphans.'

Edith began to wonder whether she was the only one who saw what the chair meant. ‘You don't see me as sentimental?'

Victoria considered her answer and then said, ‘You live it up — you don't seem to be sentimental, no.'

Edith realised then that she didn't know whether she'd describe herself as ‘sentimental'. Nor had she realised that she ‘lived it up', or was seen to be ‘living it up'. Then she said, ‘Anyhow, I don't consider this as sentimentality.'

She pondered what it was that the chair was about. ‘I see it as part of the creating of the new Palais. I think that is how the League should be created — by gift.'

‘I suppose so.'

Edith felt inspired. ‘We start with just a chair as this — we start with Miss Dickinson's chair. I want the Palais to be layer upon layer of the best of human effort and art, a museum of all the best in human experience.'

‘My, my,' said Victoria, ‘we are inspired today.'

‘I want the new Palais to be an organ of human memory.'

That was all a bit beyond Victoria, although people said she was terribly good at her job.

Victoria wanted to be justified in extending the mail privilege Edith was asking but Edith knew Victoria would do it also because of the little sorority which was emerging in the Secretariat. After all, it wasn't in breach of office rules. ‘Victoria, we girls have to stick together,' she threw in, as she left. Victoria
didn't respond to this one way or another — the sorority wasn't altogether something that Victoria approved of either. It suggested misty codes of behaviour outside the staff rules.

Victoria, for whatever reason, did keep an eye on the correspondence to do with the chair, and she alerted Edith to the next letter from Miss Dickinson to Sir Eric, which said, ‘I am sorry to trouble you again should you have received my first letter, but I fear that is not the case. I am writing again after writing months ago …' It was clear that no communication had reached her. Miss Dickinson again described the chair. ‘I wrote to Lord Cushendun who is an old friend, asking advice as to how and when to present it but he never received my letter, either. Later I wrote direct to you but I fancy the same fate for my letter. Now this, my third letter, I am sending through England but I have no third photograph to hand. My young craftsman has put his whole heart into this chair …'