Grand Days (66 page)

 

Despite their confessions, they laughingly agreed to keep to their injunction never to mention the subject of contraception again, but the subject arrogantly and disobediently entered her life that week at the office.

She was discussing with Bartou a speech she'd written for him when Dame Rachel came to the door with a letter in her hand and interrupted.

‘Bartou, could I have a word with you? And you too, Berry; this might interest you.' Dame Rachel was always including her, as a way of coaching her. ‘It's this World Population Conference. I think I'll go along. I think we should be there. I've been talking to Mrs Sanger — or is it Doctor Sanger? — and I now
have an invitation to the conference from Sir Bernard Mallet.'

Bartou said, ‘Sensitive invitations usually go through Sir Eric.'

‘Sir Bernard says an invitation is on its way to Sir Eric.'

They exchanged a glance which Edith could not understand. Bartou spoke. ‘You know he won't have anything to do with it. Especially if Sanger is involved.'

‘What should I do — just go without clearing it with him? But I can hardly just sit discreetly up the back. They all know me and I'll be dragged into the spotlight a little. It has to be raised with Sir Eric.'

‘Do nothing. Wait and see if it goes through his office unobstructed. See whether “the first nail will drive”,' he said.

Dame Rachel stood in thought, staring out of the window. Then said, ‘
Très sage
,' and left.

‘What,' Edith asked Bartou, ‘is a world population conference?'

‘I understand it's a gathering of scientific men to work out the best size of population for each country. To worry about the mental and moral hygiene of the race.' Bartou laughed, and added, ‘They want to take over some of God's load.'

‘How can a country control the size of its population?' Her mind partly answered the question with a clang. ‘Yes, I think I know something of the answer,' she hurried to say, and then steered the subject by saying, ‘It does sound like League-type business. The size of a population in one country could affect its neighbour.'

She began to recall her study of genetics. She had read Pearson on eugenics but had never given it much thought, had just accepted that it was a move in the right direction, as long as the weak were sheltered and not ‘driven to the wall'.

‘It does.'

She thought about it and then said, ‘I suppose it's only sensible to be concerned with racial hygiene.'

‘But we don't know what the implications are for the race if we encourage people to control their fertility. Which family may or may not have this or that number of children. Difficult. It will not get on Sir Eric's agenda.'

 

She mentioned the conversations to Robert. He found it curious as well. ‘I suppose it could be linked with our proscribed topic.'

‘The proscribed topic. Yes.' She thought and then asked, ‘How would it all work? Racial hygiene?'

‘I know that it's about preventing undesirable elements in the population from breeding — the insane, the crippled, the criminal and so on.'

‘Well, we can't go on spoiling the human race.'

She found that on all this her mind maddeningly refused to think, but she didn't want to show this reticence, this dimwittedness. She wanted to clarify it all but her mind seemed to be going at its own pace, happily dithering with other matters, refusing to logically engage with the subject. It was as if her reticence were acting as something of a protector for the time, though how, she did not know. This protective reticence would have to go, sooner or later. But she saw how reluctant her mind was to leave the village of her womanly instinct, as unprogressive as it may be. She had a suspicion that her intention of becoming a married woman, a wife, had caused these primordial instincts to try to reclaim her. She was being called back to the womanly village and its unscientific ways.

It came up yet again at work the following Monday. It was as if birth control were following her around like a lurking stranger.

A memorandum passed across her desk from Dame Rachel to Sir Eric in which Dame Rachel reported that she'd warned Mrs Sanger against trying to link the World Population Conference with the League and against trying to have formal recommendations made to the next League Assembly on birth control. But the memorandum at the end implied, at the same time, that she, Dame Rachel, would be attending the conference. Attached to the memorandum was material about the conference which Edith read with interest. Both Dame Rachel and Sir Eric were marking the correspondence for the attention of Bartou.

‘Dame Rachel is trying to drive the nail,' she said to Bartou, ‘with a few heavy blows of her hammer.' She read him the memorandum.

‘Interesting. She's almost disowning this Sanger woman. Even if it is as a tactic.'

Edith noted to herself that she was able to read out the memorandum mentioning birth control to Bartou without being rattled.

Next came a copy of a letter from Sir Eric to the conference organisers apologising to the conference and saying that it was impossible for the League to be represented in any way because the conference coincided with the meetings of Council and Assembly. But this wasn't strictly true.

Edith read his letter and Dame Rachel's memorandum through again. Something was eluding her. She knew now, only too well, that birth control was a difficult subject for private discussion and still not a matter for newspaper discussion. The Church of England and the Catholics were both against birth control. But surely it could be discussed among modern people, League people?

She made a comment about the letter and the minute, to draw Bartou into saying something which might dispel her confusion about it all. She said, ‘But the conference doesn't overlap with Assembly.'

‘A ruse. For a good Catholic like Sir Eric it's a subject whose name cannot be spoken.'

She then looked away. Her mind became giddy from the uncanny linkage between the business of the office and her personal life, an abrupt linking of her most intimate life with this business of Sir Eric and birth control. That afternoon she had the ‘fitting and practice' with the doctor. She realised, too, that she'd never thought of Sir Eric as ‘Catholic'. She had seen him as being above religion and nationality. And she had grown up feeling that all religious people lived by superstition but that, with education, they would eventually disregard it.

‘Is population control an “inadmissible idea”?' she asked.

Bartou thought about it. ‘Yes, it is at this point in civilisation, an inadmissible idea.'

Later, Sir Eric came into their office and stood where Dame Rachel had stood, and also talked with Bartou about the conference. She could see that he was uneasy about discussing it in her presence and he kept his eyes away from her and talked in a voice specially directed in tone towards Bartou. ‘Behind the scenes I have chatted with Sir Bernard. I told him that the things which his conference was going to discuss arouse the strongest national feeling and are of a highly delicate character.'

Bartou said, ‘True.'

‘Regulation of the population excites religious feelings. It would be extremely dangerous for the Secretariat to have any official cognisance of the conference.'

‘You think so?'

‘Anything whatsoever to do with it, is what I mean. It would
lay us open to attack. Italy would be very unhappy.'

Edith sensed that Sir Eric wanted Bartou's support for his action.

Bartou said nothing.

She realised that she was not certain where, in all this, Bartou's opinion lay. She was curious and waited to hear.

When Bartou failed to answer, Sir Eric said, ‘I suppose there's no way I can object to individual members of the Secretariat attending privately. Is there?'

Again, he seemed to want Bartou to come up with a justification for stopping Dame Rachel going along privately.

Bartou moved himself in his chair, leaning back, and busied himself with lighting a cigar, but said nothing which would give Sir Eric reassurance. ‘It would be difficult.'

‘Sir Bernard asked that I treat the conference with “benevolent neutrality”. I said I would show neither benevolence nor malevolence. Do you agree?'

‘I really don't see any problem with the Secretariat sending a technical observer. Sooner or later, these things will come to us. Whether we like it or not.'

‘I would prefer to wait and see if these things ever come to us. Or whether, as I suspect, they will simply go away. After I raised the issue of the Sanger woman and her movement, Sir Bernard said he would ensure that the subject was not raised in any way at the conference. Unofficially, Sir Bernard is very much on my side about this. Which is something achieved.'

Bartou spoke again, ‘Which subject is that, Sir Eric?'

‘Birth control, of course. The wretched Sanger woman and her incessant shouting in public about contraceptives.'

‘My advice is to send technical people. Send Joshi. Or send Berry. People not seen as too political.'

Sir Eric glanced at her, as if she had suddenly appeared in
the room, conjured up by Bartou from the teapot spout. She didn't respond to the proposal, could think of nothing to say. Her fitting that afternoon was on her mind and so was her new awareness that Sir Eric would be bitterly opposed to it, if he were to know.

Regardless of her Rationalism, she felt she didn't want to have much to do with this ‘Sanger woman' shouting about birth control, even if Sanger was an apostle of scientific enlightenment. Even if she, herself, was now an expert on the subject. But she was for forthright contention and therefore not clearly on Sir Eric's side and that troubled her. Well, she was for open discussion in the arena, if not in the bedroom.

Bartou pointed out that to ignore the conference was itself a political statement, and then added, ‘Berry has a scientific background.'

She wished that would be forgotten.

‘I want no official presence at this conference,' Sir Eric said, ‘with all respect to Berry, and to your advice. And to Dame Rachel.'

Bartou gently exhaled the smoke of his cigar. Sir Eric left the office, without saying anything more, and not in a very good mood.

She and Bartou exchanged glances like school children amused at the teacher's discomfort.

‘How can he keep it out of the League?' she asked.

‘Sir Eric argues that most of the member states are Catholic. But remember that even your Church of England is against it.'

It was not ‘her' Church of England. Curiously, she had never before seen her positions as being those of the minority within the League. On this it seemed she was very much in the minority.

They both went back to their respective daily tasks. Bartou, without looking up, said, ‘I have never heard the expression
“benevolent neutrality”. Nor can I conceive of the diplomatic condition of malevolent neutrality or of benevolent neutrality. Neutrality is either impartial, blind to good and to evil, or it is not neutrality. Sir Eric is correct on that.'

 

At dinner in the Lyrique, she raised the subject again with Robert, telling him of the further developments.

‘I can't believe it,' she told him. ‘In and out they come, talking about nothing else. It's a nightmare come true.'

‘And, consequently, now we seem to talk about nothing else,' he said. ‘Exactly — it seems that what was for us a personal bother has become a matter concerning the whole world. I feel plagued by it.'

She asked if he was going to write up the conference. He said that no newspaper would touch birth control. He thought that he could perhaps write about it for one of the quarterlies. She went on to say, ‘I've been to see Doctor Monet. That's all done.' She wondered if he would ask to see it. Should she take it out and put it on the table? Would he suggest they go to his apartment and ‘try it out' even though it wasn't yet the weekend? She was keeping strictly to the week-end only rule — to make their coming to live together as man and wife more exceptional.

‘What are your thoughts then?' he asked.

‘My thoughts?' Her thoughts? She'd had to practise in front of Monet but she wouldn't talk of that. From Monet, she'd also learned something interesting about using her vaginal muscles to increase the pleasure of physical love. But that could wait.

He said, ‘Put it out of your mind.'

He was dodging the fact of its arrival from Germany. Fine —
so would she. ‘I was wondering whether it was really proper for Sir Eric to be trying to stop discussion and so on. Some scientific control of population seems sensible. For some classes, at least.'

‘Some classes? You mean because the rich have few children and live in the largest houses and the poor have the most children and live in the smallest houses?'

‘Something like that,' she said. ‘And I think there's a conspiracy.'