Grand Days (29 page)

‘It has to do with different countries' ideas of what looks good. Beauty.'

She'd never heard him talk of beauty.

‘I have another example not related to beauty. Back home when travelling I always carry a strong electric light bulb because the bulbs in hotels are too weak. But the world has foiled me. Each darned country has a different sort of socket and different voltage. I've turned it into a lesson. I will put that light bulb on my desk back home to remind me.'

He didn't sound at all like an American but he wanted to, so she let him think he did. He had pep and she liked that.

‘Do you know what that badge is?' He leaned over to her and held his lapel towards her.

‘No, George, I don't.'

‘That, Edith, is the badge of Rotary.'

He explained that Rotary was a world organisation of businessmen. Not just any businessmen. An organisation of the most motivated of men, those with the esteem of their fellow businessmen. Those businessmen with respect for life. Membership was, he said, by invitation.

‘It is not the differences in locks and key and taps and switches that worries me. What gets me down, from time to time, is that people love their differences too much,' he said ruefully. ‘And, believe it or not, I think the world could learn something from Australia.'

‘One day we will all be one,' she said.

George burst into a song from the musical
Belle of New York
, ‘“Of course, you could never be like us, But be as like us as you're able to be”.'

She laughed. George seemed to have attained a much better balance between the serious and playful parts of his nature than she remembered.

‘What do you think the world has to learn from Australia, George?'

He thought before he spoke. ‘No bombast. No showy politics.'

She said jokingly that she'd learned new approaches to tendering since coming to the League. She told George of her advice to the Directors' meetings. ‘My friend Florence said that I could've furnished my rooms by taking gifts from the tendering companies.'

‘Don't ever do that, Edy,' George said with concern. ‘It's better to be hard up than to have to live your life feeling bad
about yourself.' He leaned over to her across her desk. ‘Bribery is death to a good country.' Then he grinned. ‘If you're short of a chair, I think I could make a contribution.'

‘No, George, I'm not short of a chair — but thanks. And I don't take bribes.'

‘I never thought for one minute that a girl from the south coast ever would.'

She winced as she recalled the gift of a pistol in her first days at the League.

 

In the Jardin Anglais, he had coffee and she a glass of wine. George still didn't drink alcohol, although he did taste her wine. George tasted everything. Apart from having a passion for wine, she realised with a frivolous, faint embarrassment, that she was also having the glass of rosé to show George that she was a woman of the world now, who could drink alcohol and who knew her wines.

‘For the French, George, wine is food.'

‘For a young man like myself it's a mighty powerful food,' was all he said.

He said he was impressed with her French but that he believed that all people understood one language. Did she know what language that was?

She told him that Briand had said that he and Herr Stresemann were now speaking a new language — the language of Europe.

‘I don't know about the language of Europe. The one language I do know about that all peoples understand is the language of Usefulness,' George said, smiling. ‘I can get across to people as long as they know I am a man of use to them. What is my letter of introduction?'

She shook her head.

He held out his hand, ‘My handshake is my letter of introduction.'

His face showed that he was about to change the subject, and that the subject was important, delicate. ‘Edy — about your speaking of French.'

‘“Edith”,' she corrected. ‘Yes, George?'

He seemed to leave what he had been about to say, and now seemed to ponder her shift from her girlhood name to her full legal name. He seemed to come to a private conclusion about that, and then returned to what he had been about to say. ‘“Edith” — sorry. I want to say something to you straight from the shoulder.'

‘Go ahead, George.' She took up her glass of rosé as if it would shield her, a chalice of magic fluid. ‘You were always one for straight talking, George.'

‘I want to say that I find that you sound different. Very different.'

‘I
sound
different?'

‘When you speak English, you don't sound like the Edy I know.' He looked her straight in the eye, his jaw firm, then remembered. ‘Sorry, “Edith”.'

She coloured because she knew what he was talking about: her intonation had perhaps changed. Sometimes she wondered whether hidden parts of herself came to express themselves through her use of another language, especially when that language
encouraged
, well, certain mores, traits and peculiarities. She thought briefly of her carnal behaviour with Jerome, and with Ambrose, whether that had to do with her being impelled to speak French and to live a French way of life. The ‘French' coming out in her? She was sure she ate differently, with more attention to her food and with more pleasure — that came from
the French. What of the sinister, nastier traits which might sneak out through the speaking of another language? What if she were speaking one of the less cultivated languages — what would come out then?

Then he said, ‘The Japanese believe that when you learn another language you lose part of your Japanese self. They think it's a bad thing.'

Where did George pick that up? ‘We should all have another self or part of our self perhaps which isn't tied to one nationality,' she said.

He said that he thought that learning another language might be a way of disguising oneself.

‘It's perhaps a way of slipping across the border,' she said.

‘Do you know what I think about learning another language?'

‘No, George.'

‘I think it means having to learn two words for the same thing.'

‘It's a key to the door of another culture,' she said. ‘You get let into another people's secrets.' She hoped he didn't ask her to give him an example.

‘Maybe one day I will learn. I want to be a cultivated man, Edy, but it'll just have to wait. I'm in too much of a hurry.' He showed regret and then pulled himself into another mood. ‘I see why you don't want to be called Edy. I know about wanting to get away from childhood.'

‘You were called Georgie.'

‘And Pudden. And Pie. And King.' He smiled quickly. ‘Rather liked King as a name. Billie Fowler still calls me Pudden. I've asked him to stop. He won't.'

She was still holding herself defensively, but knew she'd
better face it somehow. It had to do with mouthing French sounds, day in and day out. She had let her voice change and maybe even pushed it in that direction because she was glad of a new voice.

‘I'm an internationalist now,' she laughed. ‘I had to change, George. What would be the point of being an internationalist and not changing?'

George didn't laugh. ‘No, Edy, it's more than that. I see myself as a Rotarian and a Rotarian is a citizen of the world. I don't speak differently. Except for the American style of speech which is because I was there for a few weeks and I admire them. I picked up American because I wanted to be like them a little. That's different. Americans have a way of speaking to convince themselves of what they've just said. They stimulate themselves with themselves. In business, that's good.'

‘In politics, that's bad.'

‘In politics, that's bad, I agree. With me, it's mostly playing around. I fear for Edith, the person.' He reached out to hold her hand. ‘I am talking, Edith, about you, the Australian.'

She was shaken slightly because he made it sound grave. She was facing the representative of all that she'd left back home. She didn't think she'd changed as much as that. Still, she had not been back to Australia to hear herself — if you could ever hear yourself. George made it sound like a treason, punishable by ominous penalty.

‘Have you been homesick?' he asked.

‘Not really.'

‘I see.'

Was the opposite to homesickness — desertion, disaffection?

‘May I talk to you about your card?' From his wallet he took the business card she'd given him when he'd first arrived. He
placed it on the table squarely between them. ‘I want to say something about your business card.' He studied it while finding his words.

‘I think using an initial in your name is a natty manoeuvre. Very American. I might do it one day myself but I'd be laughed at back home. Not that being laughed at has ever stopped me. When my firm's a bit bigger, I might add a letter to my name. To stop me being confused with my father.'

‘I didn't see it as American. I saw it as making my name memorable.'

‘Precisely. Good move.'

‘What else?' She swigged her glass of rosé.

‘The card gave me my first clue.'

‘To what?'

‘To your metamorphosis. To your personality predicament.'

‘George — I may've picked up an accent and I may've played about with my name but I don't see that I have a predicament.'

‘I'm not so sure about that.'

She became aware that her defensiveness had within it a suppressed real fear, which was wriggling up from her soul, a fear of being exposed as a cheat. ‘We all have to grow up.'

‘Definitely. I don't say that. What I say is that we have to keep on growing “upward” and I say that it's a lifelong science. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being out of shape.' He made it sound ugly, as well as grave.

‘You mentioned a clue?' she asked, now quite defensive.

‘Your card has too many names on it.' He dramatised the counting of the names. ‘One —
Edith
. Two —
the initial A.
That counts as a name in this situation. Alison, isn't it? Three
Campbell
. Four —
Berry
. You know what it said to me, what the card said to me?'

‘No, George.'

‘It made me think you were four people trying to crowd together on one card — to come together as one.'

He was breathtaking, She now remembered why he was the most surprising man in the district. He had not gone to university but he was a man who ruminated. He was spirited.

‘That's fairly psychological, George.'

‘I understand psychology.'

She suspected he meant not the science but psychology as the ‘methodology of life'. Oh God, perhaps he was right about the four names. She'd sensed it when she'd had the new cards printed. It was Florence's influence; Florence had decided that she would champion Edith to the top and this was part of her plan.

She glanced across at him. Could she admit to this country town go-getter that he was right?

‘We shouldn't be secretive about our middle names,' she said, trying to be conversational. ‘I don't know why we're all frightened of our middle names. Do we want to keep one name for our secret self?'

George seemed to be remembering. ‘At school we always tried to keep our middle name secret but I ended up being called by my middle name.' He laughed.

‘It was usually a very old-fashioned name, the name of a grandparent, and we were embarrassed by it,' she said. ‘Maybe it is our name from our former life — the life before we were born. That might frighten us as children.'

‘That could be right.'

The meandering didn't get her out of George's analysis of her card, her life. He had taken up the card again.

‘I'm still finding out how to make my way. That's the problem, George.' Her voice sounded almost discouraged. She felt a gust of deep, deep, fatigue, a feeling new to her.

The confession seemed to deflect his investigation. He raised his eyes to the sky, lifted his right hand as if conducting an orchestra. ‘I suppose, though, that truly we are a Federation of Selves. There's the person within us who goes about the daily affairs and there's the person who goes in to sleep at night alone.'

She thought to herself that there was also the 3 a.m. person.

She felt tired and tearful.

Ambrose had a persona which was in acute and total disarray but it didn't matter that much to him. He seemed positively to delight in it.

‘Should we trust the three a.m. person any more than the other selves, George?' she said. She knew he would know what she meant.

His face seemed to cloud, and he said with defiance, ‘The three a.m. person is the least brave self.'

She thought the 3 a.m. self was the frightened child within. Should it ever have a voice? She saw from George's reaction that the 3 a.m. self frightened him too.

‘Sometimes it might be the most realistic voice?'

‘No,' he said, slapping the table, ‘never take counsel of your fears.' He then left the platitudes and said quietly, ‘I'm wrong. All our inner voices must be listened to, paid their due. The final action of the whole must be decided after listening to all.' Then with an effort he said, ‘Even the small nasty voices.'

There was silence.

Then in a loud, different tone of voice he said, ‘We have a birthright but we have to honour it and, if required, we have to forgive it in ourselves. I'm thinking of some of the bad things we've done as a nation.'

She was glad and relieved that George was a person who could not stay in one chair, or one room, or one place for long,
nor on one subject, and that they'd moved away from talking about her. She ran to catch up to his thinking, and said, ‘But, George, isn't the possibility of regeneration part of our birthright as Australians — the privilege of being able to fashion ourselves?'