Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  She took off her robe and slid into bed beside him and they turned to each other, taking each other’s hands, looking at each other in the moon- and fire-lit room. He had on his pyjama trousers but she divined that the flies were rather gaping, and felt that anyhow, it suited that their night clothing held them a little apart at this first eternity, allowing them to come gradually to feel and be accustomed to each other’s body. Maybe the clothing allowed her to momentarily pretend nothing momentous was about to happen. She was aware that he had splashed cologne on his face while she had been in her room.

  The eternity of this clothed preliminary innocence then passed, and their bodies entwined, their hands went inside the clothing and they lost themselves in kissing. As their passion overtook them, he muttered to her that there was ‘no need to worry about anything’, but the champagne and the quivering of her body and the blood racing through her had already banished any qualms, social or biological, from her mind. With a slight happy nervousness they found their carnal way and although this was not her first time, it was very nearly her first time, and it felt unique in a physical way. He was not a man made trembling and strenuous by his nervousness, as she had experienced in younger men who embarked on carnal enterprise, but was made careful by his nervousness and sensitive to her hand’s tentative guidance. She attributed this to his being older and not, she surmised, to being, as far as she could tell in such matters, any more experienced. Their slow, unfrenzied copulation was more an introduction to each other’s body than anything like a passionate enraptured whole, but she was also aware of the physical fit of their bodies being hugely pleasant, and of her disappointment when she felt him withdraw from her.

  As they fell towards sleep, holding each other, she felt an immense, pleasurable comfort from being with him in the bed, and their bodies remained touching, one way or another, during the night. She didn’t mind their mingled wetness that came from her to the sheets during the night although she worried briefly what odours her body would give off in the morning but could not see that they should be offensive to either of them.

  They were awoken by the breakfast gong and looked at each other with some curiosity, seeing each other in this other private way, the way of the bed and the morning, smiling with a rather guilty smugness.

  Ambrose made the joke that it was the gong which the Swiss used to remind guests to return to their rooms.

  She was able to say that she’d heard that joke made of guesthouses in the Blue Mountains behind Sydney, adding that she wasn’t an habitué of such guesthouses. She had gone there in weekend parties, usually chaperoned, at least conjecturally chaperoned.

  Warm in bed, she waited for a time to see if he would take her again, then when it seemed that he wouldn’t, she contemplated taking him, but decided that what had happened already constituted enough for both of them to handle, so she held back her desire for further carnality.

  As she crept from the bed into the chilly room, she was aware that he was watching her body as it was revealed by the clinging fall of her silk nightdress, but he watched surreptitiously, without seeming to look. Pulling on her robe, she returned to the bed and bending over, kissed him, then went to the door, opened it, and looked out along the corridor. Turning once more to wave and to blow a kiss, she dashed for her room.

  She was in the room only a matter of minutes before the maid knocked with hot water. Before she let in the maid she pulled back the bedding and made the bed seem slept in.

  As she sponged herself with the hot water, face first, and then her private parts, detecting no unpleasant odour, only the smell of a slept-in body, she announced to herself that in only one week on the Continent she had already begun a romance.

  And even if it were not a torrid romance, she was, she appraised, now the mistress of an older man.

  She had spent her first full night in the bed of a gentleman. Although she had heard it said on the ship coming over that spending a night with a woman did not constitute an introduction, she felt that she and Ambrose were now well and happily introduced.

  She had presented her credentials.

  International Civil Cowgirl

  The first time she realised that she truly belonged was when she gave directions to a visitor at the Gare de Cornavin.

  She had been about to say that she herself was new to Geneva, but then realised that she knew the answer to the question asked of her, and gave her reply in French, pointing in the direction of the Paquis.

  The second change which she noted was that now when she saw the word Australia, while it still caused a movement of her heart, she no longer had an urge to bring it to someone else’s attention. Words which reminded her of home still caught her eye. But I am no longer a visitor, she said to herself, I am now a resident.

  Now I am a resident of Geneva, venturing to the old city for coffee on a clean spring afternoon. She savoured it by saying it quietly to herself and by holding herself conscious of it for as long as she could. And my French is becoming acceptably good.

  She went to the old city for coffee because she felt it was as far from the busyness of the League as Geneva could offer her. She felt it was refreshing for her work to be able to cut off from it, and turn away for an hour. It didn’t mean that she was in any way fed up.

  What would happen to the old city when Geneva really became the world capital? Would the new world capital require vice? Or would the League stamp it out? Not that much vice still remained in the old city. It now was mostly on the French border, or so she was told. Geneva’s ceinture de chasteté.

  She’d attended Professor Zimmern’s lecture that week on International Man and had no doubts that was what she was becoming. She was an international man or, at least, an international woman in training.

  She believed that she and the others at the League were a new breed dawning. She did not think that being in her mid-twenties was too late to refashion oneself, while still keeping a grip of political realism.

  Sitting at the outdoor café in the old city, on a spring afternoon in Geneva, wondering if she would be mistaken for a woman from a maison close, Edith tested herself to see if she indeed felt international, in any bodily way or perhaps, and this was not so silly, whether she was different in style of movement from, say, those at the other table. She moved her mouth to an expression of resolution, cleared her mind of self-consciousness, and when her mind had settled to blankness, she let it pounce on herself. She then looked to the paws of her mind to see whether any signs of transformation had been caught by the pounce. She found nothing in the paws of her mind. Though surely such a change in the national sense of oneself and the detaching of oneself would mean a difference in the way she carried herself. Didn’t ministers of religion move in ways different to laymen? Didn’t royalty move differently? Didn’t sporting people? Surely, then, an international civil servant also comported differently.

  For instance, if one were skilful enough, strangers could be detected by the way they comported themselves in an unaccustomed environment. An internationalist would never be a stranger, would belong everywhere, and yet would neither be a person attached to the soil of the country upon which they walked. They would never, then, walk like a peasant walked on the soil of their village. But never would an internationalist walk like a tourist. Maybe one would move more like a diplomat. She would study the movement of diplomats while at the League, although diplomats represented their own country while living in another. They were a walking and talking piece of their own country. She thought that internationalism might feel like patriotism but it would be different in its compass.

  She took out her non-work book to read — more Balzac in the French — to make it clear to anyone who might be watching that she was not an ‘available woman’. She opened the book but today her eyes would not stay with the page.

  She was one of a new breed, as they all were at the League — well, at least those in the Secretariat. Maybe not the messengers or Roneo operators, but she hoped that they, to
o, were part of the new breed, because if they could not be made or won to the new breed of internationalism, then what hope was there for the League? Or did they come next after seeing the Secretariat setting a mighty fine example?

  She thought about the messengers and Roneo operators that she knew, and decided that, yes, they probably came next. Though some of them were refugees and had education. Jules the messenger, for instance.

  She would have to begin setting a mighty fine example. When she’d got ‘being international’ right, that is.

  Yet drinking Italian-style coffee outdoors in the old city on a clean spring afternoon was more cosmopolitan than international. That was another transformation. She would also like to be seen as cosmopolitan. She questioned herself about having sugar in the coffee and whether it was cosmopolitan to have it or not to have it. She would have to observe what cosmopolitan ladies did about sugar.

  She sat at the outdoor table in the old city and drank coffee and felt that she was at peace, and in place. Not at home, but in place. The right place at the right time in history.

  Or was that a feeling of being ‘European’, as a style, that she was having? Cosmopolitan or European? She also made herself conscious then that she had a ‘lover’ in the Continental sense, and that helped to make her cosmopolitan. Although Ambrose and she were unpledged as lovers they had an established love affair with a carnal side to it, albeit a polite carnality. Somehow, it seemed quite acceptable here in Geneva, especially in League circles, as long as one didn’t flaunt it. She was very far from flaunting it and still felt a little furtive about it all, even though it seemed that it was only at the week-end that she spent nights with him and even then told Madame Didier at the Pension Levant that she would be spending the week-end away.

  But yes, she had a lover, and that was a very cosmopolitan thing to have, although somewhere she thought that it would lead perhaps to a proposal of marriage.

  Maybe she could never be European. If there was indeed such a state of personality as European, which M. Briand claimed. One, she imagined, could not ‘become’ European the way one could become an internationalist, or the way one could, eventually, after exposure to enough strong influences, become cosmopolitan. Although in the sense of her lineage, through England and through invasions long ago, through a family of Saxon warriors and wheat-threshing women, she was by blood joined to Europe. Howard Liverright had told her that one could become Viennese, that the Viennese had all come from somewhere else. Being Viennese also had to do with being part of the intellectual life of the city, rather than from having been born there, and that to be part of that intellectual life was to be a reborn in some way.

  There was something about the age-old feel of Europe and the way that this entered her very marrow, giving her a sense of return. As though she had come, if not home, had come back to her historic quintessence, had passed through the photographic postcard and walked back into the scene. She felt slightly ashamed about this filling of her very marrow with ancient sensations, about admitting to herself that this had been missing back home, ashamed about feeling that maybe she needed this ancient texture about her. She even wished that the buildings of Geneva were older.

  Back home, she’d grown up in a brand-new house. Her parents had grown up in a brand-new house, and so had her grandparents. No one had ever lived in old houses. There were no old houses. She yearned to live in a house where people had lived for ‘generations’. She wanted ruins which spoke of former habitation, of the sense of habitation built upon habitation over centuries, and lost worlds around her and under her feet. The building beneath the building. Musty cellars of wine. Attics of old things. Home had been without cellars and attics. Her life had lacked the Gothic and the sublime. She had to confess to herself that the aged world of Europe consummated her in some way and that at the same time she couldn’t bathe in this feeling yet — she had to fight off pangs of disloyalty to Australia when she felt this way.

  As Mary Colum had said to her in London, Europeans were used to places where for centuries people lived and died and were buried, where a long exchange had taken place between man and the earth.

  She ordered a second coffee. As for reconnecting with Europe, she thought, I will eat and drink myself into being European with wine and coffee and galettes St Michel. That surely was a truth, as well, that one could be changed by the cuisine.

  Yet there was another paradox in her thinking. She wished the League had its own new building. A new building would emphasise the newness of their breed. She’d heard the argument for taking over an historic building, to make the lineage of the League to The Hague. But, in truth, there was nothing before the League with which it could be linked. The League was the newest thing in the politics of mankind. True, they were dealing with age-old predicaments.

  She luxuriated then for a while in the old city of Geneva around her, and with appearing — if she could but stand opposite and look at herself— very cosmopolitan. Just ‘appearing’ cosmopolitan was enough, for now. She allowed herself to bathe in that.

  I am not confused, she said, I am transmuting. Coming forth. That in itself may be an odd feeling, but it is not the feeling called discord. She also consciously felt that her inner self was immensely empowered by her status as a League official. She enjoyed the knowledge that in her handbag she had her carte de légitimation.

  Regardless of the book in front of her, she became aware that a man was gazing at her — thinking maybe that she was available, part of the Traffic in Women. Or thinking that she was perhaps a Bohemian artist. She moved her eyes far from his. She blushed and the blush became intense. Perhaps she should experience that, the going with a man for money. Once. Before it was stamped out by the League. She laughed inwardly. She must tell Ambrose of her inclination towards infamy. She confessed infamous thoughts to him because he claimed to be hopelessly depraved, in a private way. ‘I become depraved after dinner,’ he said, although she had never seen anything particularly depraved about him and he was very good at his work at the League. She was able to relax with him but she did not know if it was ‘love’, or even if it felt romantic. Maybe more adventurous than romantic.

  The man’s gaze having moved from her, she returned to contemplating the life of the old city, and was surprised to see a military-style vehicle stop and park. It had no gun but it was, she supposed, a former military vehicle. Incongruously, a conventional chauffeur got out of it, and opened the door for two men. She supposed they were wearing something resembling a uniform but they were not from any national military that she recognised. They looked about. They looked at her looking at them. She looked away, just before their gazes linked, while remaining aware of them, and knowing now that they were approaching her. All the people at the café had looked at the vehicle and at the men as they got out. Why pick on her? Was it to do with the way she was sitting? She straightened up her posture.

  ‘Ma’am?’ an American accent said. Edith turned to them, shading her eyes from the sun.

  ‘Ma’am — may we have a moment of your time?’

  Edith felt she should perhaps tell them straight out that she was not that sort of old-city woman. How to say that.

  ‘Ma’am.’ One of the men was imposing and the other was obviously a subordinate.

  ‘I am afraid you have the wrong person,’ said Edith. ‘I am afraid you have the wrong kind of person,’ she said, aware that she was not saying exactly what she meant. ‘I am not that kind of woman,’ she added, ‘I’m afraid. Sorry.’ She tried again. ‘I’m afraid you have the wrong woman.’ She thought briefly that she might be speaking the wrong language, and should be speaking in French. She thought of telling them to go across the border to Annecy. She remembered someone mentioning Annecy in conversations about this topic. But it was no doubt improper for her to advise men on this subject. On a number of counts.

  ‘Ma’am?’ The American appeared puzzled.

  ‘The kind of woman you are probably seeking — I am not that kind
of woman.’ This time she was almost impatient with them standing there forcing her to keep on saying it.

  ‘Ma’am, I think you mistake me. We are looking for a woman to help us in a very special mission. We are hiring. What we are about is legitimate business.’

  Oh. In a military motor-car? She was losing her hold on the situation. ‘Help you? Well, maybe then I am that kind of woman — a woman who helps.’ She smiled at them. They asked if they could sit. She gestured at the empty chairs, wishing that they would not.

  ‘My name is Captain Strongbow and this is my associate, Mr Kennedy. Strongbow by name and Strongbow by nature.’

  She turned the name over to find his meaning. Oh yes. A silly sort of name. Or maybe his family went back to Agincourt.

  ‘We are supporters of the League of Nations, of which you may have heard.’ They paused for her to confirm this.

  She looked at them with a renewed focus. ‘Indeed I have.’

  Captain Strongbow went on to explain his concern. ‘We have come to Geneva to aid the League. There are people out there,’ he waved, gesturing Out There, ‘who do not want the League of Nations to succeed, who would indeed stand to lose billions of dollars if peace came to this earth. Billions of dollars. I speak not only of the armaments manufacturers.’

  Edith nodded. A nod, she hoped, of an international civil servant, an internationalist, and what else? The nod, also, of a cosmopolitan. ‘I should stop you before you proceed too far,’ Edith said to them. ‘I am an officer of the League of Nations.’

  Her voice did sound different to her as she said it. She felt that she should warn them of what she was, sensing that there should be or would be a rule requiring her to announce herself.