Grand Days (53 page)

She was learning that to attend to one's own interests
required, at times, the making of hard decisions against others. It was far easier to serve the interests of others.

She would also consider it a relief to be free of Internal Administration under the Marquis Paulucci di Calboli Barone. He wore a Fascist party badge in the office and was not her style of man. While she had nothing very much against the Fascists or Mussolini, she was against the wearing of badges in the office. Liverright had stopped wearing red in reaction against the Marquis' example. She'd had less to do with him even than with Under Secretary Monnet.

She consulted with Dame Rachel who told her to take the position with Bartou. ‘Enough women are shunted into Social Questions. They think we're best dealing with “miseries and forlorn hopes”, as Mrs Swanwick calls the work of the Fifth Committee. Take it.'

She went back to Under Secretary Bartou and accepted the position. Under Secretary Bartou agreed that she should talk with Ambrose before any official reaction was communicated to him.

Her only other thought at this point was that she would, from now on, sit with different people at lunch in the office restaurant. A long way from Florence and her crowd. That didn't bother her at all.

 

She suggested to Ambrose dinner at the Lyrique, one of their familiar places. As soon as they entered the restaurant, she knew the choice of meeting place was wrong and that they should have gone to a neutral place or perhaps to his office. She was embarrassed by M. l'Hôte, the owner, who had known them both for some time now, who presented them with a complimentary
apéritif
of port wine, treating them not only as favoured
customers, but as a favourite couple. Ambrose made one of their old jokes about ‘having a port' when for most people ‘a sailor or two would suffice'.

She observed how well she maintained the pretence of normality with M. l'Hôte and Ambrose while they ordered. Another petty deceit in a chain of deceit.

After they had settled their orders, with Ambrose ordering with gusto and she ordering apathetically, and had their second
apéritif
of port in their hands, the first having been hastily drunk, she confronted him with her discovery of his secret work for military intelligence. Her hands were not shaking but they felt as if they were. She did not tell him just yet that she'd been to see Under Secretary Bartou or that she had searched his apartment. Maybe she still hoped that it could all be understood in a dazzling new light and that she could then tell Under Secretary Bartou that the matter should be forgotten. She observed that in the early days she would have told everything at once.

At first his face showed a coldness and hardness which she had never seen in all the years she'd known him, as if all masks had fallen to show this hardness. He was disturbed and for a few seconds did not look at her. She in turn, seeing the look of hardness, hardened herself.

Then, in his fashion, he switched to the manner which presumed that the serious things of life were best taken lightly. ‘The game's up, then. I'm unmasked. And you occupy a new position
uti possidetis
.' The jocular pose had replaced the hard face.

She knew it but couldn't be sure that she had it right, so she played along and indicated that she didn't know that diplomatic term, concealing her irritation with his forced jocularity and this game-playing, allowing Ambrose, for the last time, to take his old role as diplomatic teacher.

‘It refers to possession of territory. The two parties making
a truce at the end of hostilities remain in possession of what they have conquered from each other — in your case, the moral high ground and information about me and my government; you have that by right of conquest. I retain my intelligence work, for what it was worth. But what each of us has conquered must be precisely defined — that is, if we're to make a treaty of peace between us.'

He lost jocularity towards the end of this speech and a nervousness began to show. ‘If we are making a peace treaty?' he repeated.

He was trying to bargain with her. She wondered if there could be a peace between them. She asked Ambrose how he justified himself.

‘Oh, you know old Ambrose — right hand doesn't know what my left is doing — Ambrose in the daytime is one thing: in the evening she is something else. Life's rich tapestry and all that.'

Ambrose then abruptly abandoned the bantering form of life-lightly-taken. He said that coming out of the bloodiness of the War, he'd determined to do everything to secure the peace. ‘And in my view of things that meant both working at the League and also working for my government which I believe also wants to avoid further war. I was helping both parties, dear Edith, because I believed they were as one.'

She was dissatisfied with this. ‘And if they subsequently became not one with each other — who then was your master?' She went on with her eating without appetite.

Ambrose said that sometimes people turned into revolutionaries or zealots before your very eyes. One's duty then, he said, was to collaborate with those who opposed the zealots. Especially to oppose those zealots who thought they were your friends but who had unwittingly become your enemies. He said it wasn't
required by the rules of the game that you told them you were working against them.

She saw the worrying convolution of his mind which over the years she'd seen surface now and then.

‘You see us in the League as dangerous to you? As dangerous idealists? You see me that way?'

‘Some in the League are. I am saying that it's conceivable that the League could be captured one day by zealots. I don't only mean Paulluci. It could be said that I was helping the League in a way — guarding it. Keeping an eye on it. Helping others to keep an eye on it.'

This rang hollow or barmy. It was the spies who were the zealots. Conspirators were the real zealots.

‘No — you were serving the British government. But the important thing is that this particular higher allegiance was never in the preamble of our friendship. The important thing is that you deceived me.'

‘To reveal myself would have defeated my mission. Deception is in the nature of spying. It's not like other deception. Not like personal lying or anything like that.' He waved his fork. ‘And I wasn't a dastardly spy every minute of the day — I could also give my very best to the League at the same time. I was a dutiful servant of the League.'

She realised she yearned still to be his friend, for things to be as they once were. She wanted to believe him, to be logically convinced of his innocence, even a form of innocence, and to have the pain of the breach and the suspicions and the deception talked away, turned to mischievous joking. But his words were not doing that and she was still left with his massive breach of friendship, as well as a breach of his contract with the League. An ugly blight had settled over the table.

‘I want to be your friend, Ambrose.' She touched his
hand. ‘I do want a treaty of peace.' She regretted using the word friend — it was too imprecise a word, too strong for what she saw for their future. She avoided his hand which reached out. He turned the gesture into the taking of a piece of bread.

‘I consider that very, very generous, dear Edith.' He seemed tearfully grateful, and he reached out for her hand again, in a clumsy way, but again she avoided his hand. ‘Have me as your “rotten friend”.'

Could she do that? Put him in the peculiar category of rotten friend? Did you need some category like that in life? No, she couldn't see that. What she needed was to make herself absolutely clear without being unduly cruel.

‘I want a peace with you, is what I mean. But there is a preamble to the peace — my allegiance is to the League. Any friendships I form must never conflict with or harass that allegiance.'

‘How binding is a preamble?' he said lightly, referring back to some old discussion, using their old conversational style.

She replied in a dull voice, obedient to the call of the old days but no longer part of them in spirit. ‘A preamble has no binding force. It simply states the purpose and spirit of the treaty.' She saw how he was clinging to the rituals of their old friendship, trying to keep them both bound together in the old ways.

‘You always learned well, Edith.'

‘You were a good teacher. Ambrose — ' her voice becoming firm and neutral, stripped of intimacy and of warmth, she wanting no misunderstanding, ‘whatever we are to each other in the future, it will never, can never, be the same as it was. It can be a peace between us but not a friendship.'

‘Not a friendship?' he said in a voice as hard as his face during his first reaction to her announcement.

She paused while the main course was served and the waiter had gone.

‘A peace between us,' she repeated, ‘but not a friendship.'

The situation had shuffled itself and it became starkly obvious to her that she could not again be seen to be associated with him. That he could jeopardise her integrity, her career, her standing. She hoped he would resign and go out of her life.

He did not touch his food. He spoke in a low pained voice, ‘Remember, Edith,
surtout pas trop de zèle
.'

He was hiding also, hiding behind this diplomatic talk, inveigling her into it as well. It seemed so ridiculous. She felt, though, the point of this remark. She did tend to be zealous and she sensed she was becoming more so. Time was so short to remake the world. She was impatient. This led her to zeal, or was she just sedulous?

‘I take your advice,' she lied — maybe zeal was what might be needed — ‘I see myself, though, as sedulous, not zealous.'

He managed to capture her hands in his and said with a friendly voice, oddly inappropriate to the words he seemed to be uttering, ‘Let us cease to be friends and lovers then.'

She was surprised to have him take her hands at the same time as he'd relinquished her and their friendship.

He then said, ‘Let us, dear Edith, instead, marry, and be man and wife.'

The idea cuffed her. She looked to see if he were jesting and he clearly was not. She removed her hands from his, as her first reaction. ‘And who will be the wife?' she managed to get out, making it as a joke, but it was a biting statement, containing her refusal.

He smiled seriously and said, very seriously, ‘We know all the worst things about each other — or at least you know my worst tricks.'

‘Ambrose, it is simply not conceivable.'

‘I would give up my bad habits. Some at least.'

‘Which, dear Ambrose, which of your multitude of bad habits?' She hated now his way of reducing the gravity of things by college flippancy which again infected her way of responding.

‘The spying habit, for one. I'll retire hurt.' He was regaining his airy style, his life-lightly-lived form.

She was not playing with him any more. They were no longer playmates in life.

Perhaps it was a chance to save a spy, to reform a spy. She smiled inwardly, with a sad severity. That was what a spy would say to save himself. And that observation established simply the impediment now in any relationship with him: from this whole dirty incident onwards, she could never again believe what he said. That was the gist of it for ever more. She supposed that he would realise this too, sooner or later.

He was, unbelievably, waiting for her to answer his proposal of marriage. She almost said she was married to the League, but simply said, ‘I'm afraid, Ambrose, that I couldn't.'

He nodded, small tears came to his eyes and he pretended to rub his face while his fingers wiped them away. She thought that the pretence was in the transparent act of concealment, that she was meant to see him trying to conceal his tears. She did not reach across to him.

He did not urge his suit of marriage. ‘But at peace then.' His voice was forced back to the businesslike, if not the flippant. ‘You won't tell. I will retire as a spy.'

She looked at him again with disbelief. ‘How could I believe you?'

‘Because we are dear friends.'

She felt the beginnings of disgust with him. ‘I have already told them.'

‘Why didn't you come to me first?' His voice was toneless.

‘Why didn't you?'

He didn't answer.

She told him then of spying on him. She also brought up the fact that he had said to her that he would reword the report about herself and the Sapphist, but hadn't. She didn't mention Under Secretary Bartou's role.

He listened without speaking or eating. He seemed to accept that he was fully exposed and that she was deeply hurt.

She said, rather bluntly, ‘Why don't you leave — resign — go home?'

‘What has Under Secretary Bartou in mind for me? I suppose he knows all?'

‘He knows all. I don't know that it's up to him.'

‘I think I will wait and see —
attentisme
. Take my chances.'

She said, ‘And I see that as a master spy you know to whom I have been speaking. How did you know that I'd talked about this with Bartou?'

‘When you were at lunch yesterday in the restaurant with Victoria, I saw the way you ate your orange. I know about the Old Swiss Fox and his passion for oranges.'

He was obviously pleased in a minor way with himself about the orange observation, again slipping into his frivolous tone. He chuckled, ‘You're impressed.'

She let him have his petty pleasure. Regardless of his outward act, Ambrose was increasingly distracted and neither of them did justice to their dish. She wished to end the dinner now but it had to run its course and it continued in a strained way, as he returned once or twice to his attempts at justifying himself, still arguing that to serve two compatible masters was no crime.

He then came up with the defence that he was not so much a spy as an observer in a balloon. ‘I was really carrying dispatches
by observation balloon from one part of the army to another. That's how it should be seen.' He mumbled something about the status of an observer in a balloon being left as an open question by the Brussels Declaration.