Grand Days (39 page)

‘Would you mind if I ordered a drink? I feel wretched.'

‘I'll have one with you. Whatever you're having.'

Caroline ordered three Scotches; two, evidently, for herself. Unless she expected someone else. She lit up a cigarette, offering one to Edith who declined. ‘But, Caroline, you were marvellous — it was a first-rate show. You should be chuffed.'

‘Everyone just went off. Left me. Sophie made me some tea and I had to sit with her and make dreary conversation about the dreary ILO, when I wanted to be with real people and have a drink. You're alone?'

‘Yes, the others took an early night.' Edith realised that the drama club audience back at Sophie's might have snubbed
Caroline because of the book's revelations. Or more likely, no one thought to ask her to go with them to a café or wherever. ‘People are probably shy of you, now that you're a novelist.'

‘Do you think so? I think they're snubbing me. I think they were all put off by the book and think I went too far.'

‘Robert Dole told me that the other journalists began behaving strangely to him when they knew he was writing a novel.'

‘He's writing a novel too! The bookshops'll be flooded.'

‘I doubt it.'

‘A hundred novels about the League of Nations. Ugh. At least I have a publisher. The Hogarth Press are going to take it. I sent them a few chapters.'

‘That's marvellous.'

‘Don't tell anyone.'

‘I'll keep your secret.'

‘Don't tell Robert Dole — he'll send his book there and they'll take his rather than mine.'

‘He wouldn't do that.'

‘Yes, he would. Newspaper people.'

Edith saw dourly that she had been socially switched from tending to her own distress about Florence's behaviour to listening to the moaning of this temperamental, rather jumped-up young woman. Part of her mind continued to fret about whether she had truly lost Florence or whether it would all be healed in the morning.

‘Did you really like my book?'

‘I really did. I liked the way you showed the men finding out about each other's secret self. And the problem of the League itself taking a lead,' Edith added, scratching for something more to say.

Caroline lapped it up. ‘Ambrose is your
friend
, isn't he?'

The implication was obvious. Why lie? ‘Yes.'

‘I suppose you recognised something of him in Humphrey Hume?'

‘A little.'

‘I don't draw exactly from life in my work. I am more an impressionist. You don't think he'll be angry?'

‘I shouldn't think so. But how well do you know Ambrose?'

If it were Ambrose depicted in the book, Edith wondered, what had been his connection with the typist who died in the mysterious operation? More, what was his relationship to Caroline Bailey? He had mentioned her and her book once or twice. There was the trip to Paris together. Caroline was on the edge of the Bavaria crowd, but had never become a friend. Surely she hadn't gone to the Molly Club with Ambrose? Ambrose had said in some general way that he had not lived the life of a monk before she'd arrived in Geneva.

Caroline burbled on, ‘I see him around the office, at the Bavaria. I move about, I see things. God, I hate this town. Did you like the bit about the insipid blue of the dreadful lake? I must be the first writer in history to criticise their sacred lake.'

Edith loved the lake. She knew all about the mysteries of the origins of lakes, springs, and artesian wells. ‘Someone said that it was perfectly described, but maybe a man wouldn't describe it like that. It's more the way a woman might see it.' Was Caroline secretly observing her and Ambrose? Was their life, her life, revealed in the book, and about to come tumbling out for all to see?

Caroline was immediately defensive. ‘The bit about pale blue and little girls coupling it with pale pink? Men have little sisters. Men know about these things.'

‘I suppose that's right.'

Caroline seemed hurt. ‘Little boys grow up with their sisters.'

‘I didn't mean it as a serious criticism.'

‘I think that it's perfectly all right for a man to think that. The lake reminded him of, say, the way his little sister would see it.'

‘Of course.'

‘Heavens, most of Chaucer's tales are about women or told by women. Have you read Chaucer? Anyhow, who cares. I'm going to live in Paris. When we were all down in Paris that time I went to the Café Certa. Where the surrealist crowd goes. I don't know what you were all doing.'

‘Nothing much.' Edith enjoyed, in a joyless way, having her secret to herself. She half-listened to Caroline's frenzied talk, knowing that Caroline didn't want answers to the questions she threw out.

‘Ambrose wasn't mixed up with the typist — the one who died?' Edith wanted answers.

‘Wasn't he?' Caroline was being enigmatic.

‘I'm asking you the question,' Edith said, keeping an over-friendly smile on her face.

‘Every man in the section was mixed up with her.' Caroline kept glancing about her at the strangers in the café as if waiting for them to come over and congratulate her. ‘I hate this city. And I hate this café.'

Edith decided to let it pass. Caroline was temperamental and restive and, for a writer, was not a person who seemed to care much about the precision of things.

Edith had to defend the League. ‘You shouldn't be so hard on everyone.'

‘The Secretariat is a toy shop of broken dolls. Everyone here is busted up somehow. That's what the book is about.'

Edith held back a sharp answer, remembering what Florence had said about Caroline's broken heart, which explained other
things. And I, for one, she thought, am not a broken doll.

The Scotches came and Caroline threw both hers down, one-two, like a Boer, Edith thought. She watched to see how they affected her. They appeared not to affect her at all, yet.

‘I have no faith,' Caroline said, and called to the waiter, ‘Monsieur!
Encore, s'il vous plait
.' Edith said she didn't want another.

‘“The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom”,' Caroline said. ‘Let's hope Blake's right — but anyhow, at least you get the excess even if you don't get to the wisdom.'

Edith stored away this quote from Blake, smiling inwardly as she recognised it as part of Liverright's repertoire of quotations. Although she didn't believe excess led to wisdom, she might say it to Florence when she attempted a reconciliation tomorrow. She was finding Caroline objectionable. ‘I think we have to learn to work with perplexity,' she said to her, wanting to say something much harsher.

‘You think I don't understand?'

‘I don't believe we should throw up our hands in horror. I think there are better things to do than that.'

‘It's about time someone threw up their hands in horror. It's about time we all threw up our hands in horror. But my book's about more than that.'

‘I wasn't thinking of your book so much. We were wondering what you meant by “strange gods”?'

‘Nothing. I just like the expression — “strange gods” — I like the mystery of it. “Strange gods”. Everyone is going to hate me when the book comes out.'

Edith struggled to be civil. ‘You'll be the toast of quai Woodrow Wilson, although you were hard on Liverright. Don't you care what he feels?'

She giggled like a bad schoolgirl. ‘I've read it out to him
and he doesn't give a damn. He's not that sort. Anyhow, by the time it comes out, I'll be back in Bloomsbury, I hope. Or Paris. Out of this bloody place. We must have a talk one day about “older men”.'

Edith doubted that they would. ‘Leonard Woolf owns the publishing company?'

‘Leonard Woolf owns the Hogarth Press. He liked the book because he's interested in international matters. Don't know what Virginia thinks of it. Don't particularly care.'

Apart from Robert Dole, who hadn't yet published a book either, Caroline Bailey was the first author Edith had known. Though Caroline hadn't published anything she seemed closer to it than Robert Dole. Yet Robert Dole seemed more ‘like' a writer. She wondered whether she was a ‘writer' herself, having written eleven poems. None ever submitted for publication. She hadn't told anyone except Florence and hadn't shown anyone, including Florence, and now probably wouldn't.

‘I'm cynical through and through,' Caroline said. ‘To the core.'

‘I'm not,' Edith said, stubbornly. ‘In fact, I'm rather engrossed by it all.'

‘Bully for you.'

‘That's a little rude.'

‘You said something earlier about me not using my intelligence. I found that rather rude. I think anyone who's not cynical isn't using their intelligence.'

Caroline Bailey looked around her in disgust at the café, Geneva, the League, the world. ‘The most boring place on earth. And this café! Why do you all come to this wretched place?'

Edith kept herself in control. She wanted to find out what Caroline knew and didn't know. ‘You made Geneva sound rather glamorous, with mentions of vice and dark practices and so on.'

‘Oh, every town has
maisons closes
but this bloody city has them discreetly out of the city on the French border. Did you know that?' Caroline blew smoke out at Geneva, and said in a voice which sounded full of regret, as if talking about art museums or street markets, ‘This town really doesn't have any true vice.'

‘Your characters aren't being truthful then.'

Caroline looked at her with derision. ‘You're a rather naïve woman for your age. About novels.'

Edith didn't respond, allowing a formal silence to settle. She did not know whether it was the reference to her age or to her naïvety which nettled her most but still, Caroline's rudeness was unsuccessful.

Caroline said dismissively, ‘I thought, after the Paris trip, that you might be different from the rest of them. I thought your carry-on about the black woman singer was very astute.'

This came as a surprise to Edith, but she didn't want to talk with Caroline. ‘I'm rather tired. I think I'll say good night.'

‘Say good night then. Go along with all the rest. Bye bye.' Caroline rudely waved her hand in front of her face.

As Edith stood up, Caroline added offensively, ‘Oh, by the way, you should be careful — they say you're becoming the office vamp, now that June-alias-Rose is dead.'

‘Good night, Caroline.'

Edith gathered her things.

Caroline went on. ‘I observe things. I see you vamping around those people at the top.' It was as if she would say anything to keep her there as company, did not want to be alone.

What Caroline was saying was astonishing to her but she wasn't going to stay to hear it.

Aware that she was, in a way, repeating Florence's behaviour, Edith worked out from the waiter's tickets how much she owed,
took money from her purse, placed it on the table, and left.

At the door she glanced back to see the beturbanned Caroline looking about for the waiter, for another Scotch, no doubt. Edith wondered whether it was true that the road of excess led to the Palace of Wisdom. She hoped, for Caroline's sake, that it was.

As she walked home through the night, still cold although winter was almost gone, Edith felt miserable and alone. How could she possibly be a vamp? What exactly was a vamp? Is that how people saw her? She vaguely remembered Jerome calling her
belle vamp australienne
. But that had been friendly. Within the League she hadn't had intimate relations with anyone but Ambrose and considered that in the office she conducted herself with men in a pally, but correct, manner. Too pally, maybe? What she'd done for Sir Eric during the crisis wasn't vamping. That was comradeship. But Caroline's perception couldn't be trusted.

Together with this disconcerting idea, recklessly thrown at her by Caroline, there was still the earlier alarm from the unreconciled sense of herself, the sense of herself as daring, as having had a strange adventure in human passion, against the sense of her proper womanhood, about which Florence had so strongly reminded her. Somehow those had to be reconciled. Maybe her sense of womanhood was changing. Maybe some episodes which occurred in one's life could, in fact, be put aside from one's life, had no bearing on what one really was. Or were we the sum total of all that we allowed to happen to us? Were we made from everything that happened to us?

She arrived at another troubling thought. If her experiences were in fact ‘untellable' to her friends, she was doomed to being a liar and a sneak with them, having those parts of her which she could not show. Or was there no obligation to tell all? What about if she married? When and how should she explain these
things then? She realised that Ambrose was the only person on earth who truly knew her. And, of course, now Florence. Although Florence now ‘knew' things about her, she didn't feel that Florence knew her — fairly.

That made her feel very much alone.

She thought of calling in on Ambrose and worming her way into his bed. But she saw herself, once there, beginning a cross-examination in the middle of the night about his connections with the typist who had the mysterious operation and died. That would be a nice way to end the night and anyhow she had the Disarmanent Preparatory Commission beginning tomorrow. At least she would not have to face Florence for a few days.

She used self-control and went home, having lost a friend, although deep in her heart she believed there would be reconciliation in the morning, a friend who had called her a neurasthenic, and on top of that, a silly young writer had called her naïve and also branded her as the office vamp. A top night, a real top night. She tried to smile away her fears with this flippant Ambrose-style expression, but she was, she saw suddenly, at risk in the world.