Grand Days (23 page)

He shook his head.

‘I could take the message to the Germans.' This was a brave offer and a job she didn't want. Is that why he'd called for her?

He looked at her dully. ‘Thank you, Berry. Not your job.'

He was a man in shock. He looked at her in the same frozen way he'd been looking at the lake, unable to break his blank gaze. He made a shrugging gesture. ‘Have to go myself. Sir Austen, Briand and I will have to go to the Metropole in person this morning. Tell them face to face.' He sat without moving, hands still gripped.

His voice said that doing this, going to the Metropole, was beyond him.

She was glad that she didn't have to face the Germans sitting at the Metropole dressed in their top hats, with their medals and so on, waiting to attend their admission to the Assembly and Council. Oh God, what a mess. Oh God.

She wondered if there was something she could do — as a woman. Take his head and stroke it.

He made to speak again but couldn't.

The telephone rang, and continued to ring.

She realised he couldn't bring himself to lift it. She put down her folder and went around to his side of the desk and picked it up and said into the mouthpiece, ‘One minute, please.' Edith hoped that the call would be someone somehow saying that the
crisis had been resolved. As she reached across to take one of his message sheets and a pencil, her shoulder touched his, and she let it go on touching him. She felt his body respond dependently. He was leaning on her. She took down the message which was unimportant. His eyes had turned to her expectantly, also hoping for good news. She shook her head, signalling that it wasn't, looking briefly into his hopeless eyes.

She finished taking the unimportant message and put it before him. He glanced at it.

She stood there now beside him, allowing him the contact with her body, wanting to put an arm around him in a comradely and womanly way.

She saw now quite certainly that there was no ‘reason' for her to be there — he had no task for her, but he'd needed some sort of supportive presence. It was a reaching out, but she was unsure quite how to consummate that reaching out.

‘If you're going to the Metropole, you will need to shave,' she said in an almost wifely voice.

‘Quite so.' He put a hand to his face.

‘What time is the meeting?'

‘Nine-thirty.'

She kept up the contact between their bodies.

She smelled his exhausted body. ‘Is there anyone I should call?' she said in a soft voice.

‘No. Thank you, Berry.' He gripped her hand and she gripped his, trying to impart to him her fortitude. They stayed this way for a minute or so. She had to get him moving. She withdrew her hand and left his side, going to the window and opening it, allowed the sun to stream in.

‘I'll shave you,' she said, turning back from the window. ‘I am an extremely experienced shaver of men. My father and my grandfather will give references.'

She kept chattering as she went to his WC and washbasin recess and found shaving brush, shaving soap, razor and bowl. She ran hot water, prepared the soap, and stropped the razor. She carried it all out and made space on the desk for it.

He sat passively while she took off his tie and collar and helped him out of his coat. She put a towel around his neck and, holding his head with her fingers, began lathering his face. She tried to keep her touch as neutral as a barber's.

The rasp of the razor as she shaved him seemed very loud.

He moved his head obediently as she manipulated it with her hand, relaxing into the sureness of her touch. Shaving was a special nearness to the face of a man and she could see his pores, his lumps, his lines, the hairs of his nose and ears. She could see with intimate clarity the shape of his ears, his balding. She could see with intimate clarity his lips. As she entered this intimacy she did not feel like a barber. She wondered whether she felt like a nurse or a daughter or a wife. Something of all. She hoped and prayed that Tiger wouldn't arrive and come upon this scene. It would be difficult to explain.

She finished the shaving and dabbed his face with the towel and broke the touch.

‘That's much better,' he said in a small voice, as if what had happened between them was fairly routine. ‘Feel much better.'

He took out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes and blew his nose.

She put the things back and when she returned she reminded him that there was a clean shirt hanging in the recess. She looked at her watch. The restaurant staff would be in. ‘And I'll call up some tea.'

She took the telephone and rang the restaurant and asked for tea and toast to be sent up. He began sorting papers on his desk. He looked at her and said with a faint smile, ‘The Secretary
General is not a foreign minister, Berry. He's a postman.'

She helped with his sorting of papers and the taut, self-conscious intimacy faded into a bland usefulness. Presently there was a knock on the door. Edith let in the woman from the restaurant and directed her to put the tea and toast on one of the side tables, which she did and then left.

Edith poured the tea for Sir Eric. ‘I'll keep the telegram ready, Sir Eric.'

He managed another small smile. ‘Yes, hold on to it, the telegram. Who knows? Save yourself some work.' His voice was still close to exhaustion. ‘But you know that it could mean the end?'

‘The end of the League?'

‘Don't go around talking of it in the corridors.'

‘Of course not, Sir Eric.'

She took a wastepaper bin and went around emptying the ashtrays.

‘I suppose it'll be in the world press by now. We're a laughing stock. A Special Assembly of the nations of the world with nothing to do. I suspect the United States. I think they're behind Brazil. Berry, I'd appreciate if you'd not mention my — well, the fact that I'm a bit knocked about by all this.'

‘Of course not, Sir Eric.'

‘Must keep morale up.'

The telephone rang and this time he answered it, his voice close to normal. She stood waiting to hear if it was good news but could tell from Sir Eric's answers that it was not to do with the admission crisis.

She waited. He finished the call.

‘Thank you, Berry. Must get on with the day.'

She smiled a very special and spirited smile and left his office taking with her the unsent telegram.

As she walked down the corridor she felt a deep, gaping pit in her stomach, and then felt as if a large flock of black birds were flying out from this pit, through her.

On the way to Ambrose's office, she passed Tiger on her way in and they exchanged formal greetings. She saw that throughout the Palais people were gathered in troubled discussion.

‘Is it the end?' she asked Ambrose.

‘I don't know about the end. I've talked to Salter. He and I agree that until September the League is immobilised. Absolutely impotent. Let's pray there's no outbreak of war. We couldn't do a thing. No one would listen to us. We're a joke.'

‘That's what Sir Eric said.'

‘You've been to see the Old Man?'

‘Yes. Is it the end, Ambrose?'

‘May well be. Tell me, what did the Old Man think?'

‘He's holding up. What does Bartou say?'

‘As cool as always. Says that in a great experiment such as the League we must learn “that nothing ever quite happens the same way twice”. Too much the sage is Bartou. Although, it's true of scrambled eggs.'

It was wiser than the diplomatic maxim Sir Eric had taught her, but she couldn't smile. ‘He's probably right.' She remembered her science training — we could not classify by sameness, only by likeness. Resemblance always connoted variation. Of what use was that?

‘He also said we'd learned something about Brazil.'

‘What have we learned?'

‘That Brazil is too small to bully but too big to bend. I believe they threatened to take the Rothschild's loan away from Brazil. Tried everything.'

She wanted Ambrose to reassure her that it wasn't all over. He wasn't reassuring. He went on about Germany. ‘Germany
made the conditions of entry. Germany's destroying the League. She's the one who wouldn't agree to Brazil having a permanent seat along with her.'

‘Will they ever come back to Geneva?'

‘I doubt it.'

She wondered what she would do ‘if she were Germany'. ‘Stresemann must understand what's happened?'

‘He will fall — the Reichstag will sack him after this. It was his idea to get Germany into the League. He's lost face. Germany is humiliated.'

She went to her office to find Cooper waiting. ‘What's happening?' he asked her impatiently.

She was surprised. Surely he knew. ‘You know about Germany?'

‘I know the bare facts. But what did Sir Eric say? You seem to have special entrée there.'

As she reported a version of her early morning meeting with Sir Eric, she basked in Cooper's new deference to her.

That afternoon, people gathered gloomly at the Special Assembly to hear the Brazilian delegate, Señor Mello Franco, say that another permanent seat should not be given to Europe if one seat was not at the same time given to South America. He said that they were his instructions. He seemed to be a reluctant convoy for his country. He knew that he was putting the League in jeopardy and seemed sad.

The matter of Germany's entry was adjourned to a special commission with the task of finding a compromise before the September Assembly. But it was considered that the League was in crisis.

In the cafés, even journalists showed distress. Edith saw how much everyone cared for the League. Even Liverright was shaken behind his sardonic humour. He said that he'd seen the Austro-
Hungarian Empire collapsing around him and had leapt into the army for security and then the War had broken out around him. He had leapt from the War into the League of Nations and now it was collapsing around him. He didn't know if he were to blame or the world.

Florence, Victoria and Edith — the ‘Dominion Sisters' as they were sometimes called — sat up most of the night talking about their future. She had expected Victoria to be shaken, but Florence was no better — she was quite disturbed, her Canadian self-assurance gone. Edith felt she may have been wrong about her, that she too cared deeply for the League.

They drank hot chocolate made on the spirit stove which Edith had in her rooms. Florence lay back in the Wilson chair, Victoria on the velveteen armchair, and Edith on the bed. She lit the room with three candies for a softer, more comforting light. Edith had noticed that, at this time of crisis, League people seemed to draw close to their own national group. The three of them had huddled in the Empire. Or at least among the dominions group. She now saw that New Zealanders and Canadians were the first natural allies of an Australian. Not the British. Ambrose, for whatever reason, for the future of the League or for support and comfort, was spending long nights with his countrymen within the League.

‘How can one contemplate working anywhere else after having worked for the League?' Victoria said, which was Edith's reaction as well.

Edith kept trying to imagine packing up her things, booking the return to Australia — and then what? Working with John again? Moving with him to the new parliament house in Canberra? The photographs she'd seen of Canberra showed a dusty paddock. It would be going back to a country town in the
middle of New South Wales. Ambrose often said she couldn't ever go back because the Australian climate didn't suit her complexion. She couldn't see it happening yet. She'd somehow stepped outside the borders of herself and did not want to step back — yet. On the footsteps of this thought came another which she hastily pushed away. Had she come to Geneva to escape the ‘real world' of her own country? Had she fled to a fantasy, pretending to herself that she was coming to the ‘centre of things'?

‘I'm going to take the money owed to me and go to Russia,' Florence said. ‘Money owed for vacation and for repatriation and allowances for severance, and home leave still owing. It will be a goodly sum.'

The wilful and wild Edith responded to this idea, of having funds, although she also had her mother's money, ‘her inheritance' which her mother had sent to her, saying that she and her brother may as well have it now, rather than ‘waiting', that it would be of more use to her now in Europe. Her mother's money virtually made her independent. She would not go to Russia. Travelling, maybe — just going away, aimlessly. Maybe Ambrose and she would travel to exotic places. But the responsible Edith was disappointed with Florence's talk of how much the League would pay them if it closed down. She'd also heard two typists talking in the Palais restaurant about how much would be owed to them and she'd almost gone over to them and told them off. That wasn't the correct spirit. ‘Why Russia?' asked Victoria. ‘It sounds a little too scientific to me. Might suit you, Edith.'

‘They might need financial experts.'

‘Book-keepers?'

‘Why not?'

‘Why would a socialist country want book-keepers?'

‘Every system has people who cheat on claimed expenses, I'm sure, and who need to be caught.'

Edith listened to this exchange wondering whether anyone wanted her skills. She wasn't truly a scientist. She was half-trained as an international civil servant. Who needed half-trained international civil servants? Victoria was a bit older than both of them and trained in Registry work which was useful anywhere.

Victoria said she couldn't imagine going back to Wellington.

‘At least Wellington is a city. Canberra isn't even built yet,' Edith said.

‘You haven't seen Wellington,' Victoria said.

They laughed more loudly than the quip deserved and then became sober again.

‘I might travel to exotic places,' Edith said.

‘But what happens when the money runs out?' Victoria said, as always, looking ahead to the pain of things.