Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  All this being the case, she was no longer a girl and maybe the time for her being a Manifestation of the Times was coming to an end and she would have to give some thought to the matter of her amorous behaviour of late. Being in Geneva had permitted her to behave in a way she would never have dreamed back in Australia. This was not only the refashioning of self on which she knew she was embarked. She supposed that it could be seen as a coming out of self, as well as a becoming of self. That is, if she had any ‘original self’ left. Back home too many people watched her with their own expectations of her, and she’d had to acknowledge this and respond to them as they might want her to respond to them. Now there was the New Edith. The big difference, and the good difference, was that now she had placed herself, rather than finding herself placed, among people whose expectations of her were also her expectations of herself.

  The planned Palais des Nations was to be an expression of the grandeur of the League; at the same time, the Palais was to embody the workings of a parliament of the world, or at least act as a business office for the world, and also be a temple of peace. While not herself being exactly what someone might describe as a nun devoted to Holy Orders, she had, she sometimes thought to herself, taken vocational vows. There was a clericature to her life. If there had been a League of Nations vow, she would have taken it. It was more that she was, perhaps, a courtier — maybe a priestess — and needed to live in a Palais, if not a temple. She wished the Secretariat could all live in the Palais — not, though, she smiled, as if in a monastery — and she had been disappointed when she learned from the specifications given to the architects for the competition that this was not to be.

  They’d been at a meeting where the assistant architect had explained the specifications for the new Palais and Edith had asked where the living quarters were to be.

  The assistant architect had been puzzled and had explained that there were no living quarters in the specifications.

  Edith had been about to ask ‘Why not?’ when she realised that the others at the meeting found her question strange and she shut up and sat down. Anyhow, she’d already asked two questions. She’d asked whether the architect had visualised how the building would look in the four seasons, in rain, in snow, in sunlight and how it would look in two hundred years’ time. The assistant architect had replied to her that he would ask the head architect the first question, and God the second question.

  How grand it would be for all of them to live in such a Palais. It would be like the court of England, when they spoke both French and English, all living in the court, say, about the time of Henry VIII, with ceremonials, jousts, feasting and diplomacy. Under Secretary Bartou said that it was good that the Secretariat and other staff lived out in the city of Geneva with the citizens but she couldn’t see much advantage. The Swiss, or the Genevese, seemed fairly indifferent when they were not for having Switzerland out of the League or, in extreme cases, the League out of Switzerland. So why live among them? It really didn’t matter what the Swiss or the Genevese thought. She hoped that the League would go ahead with the plans to have its own railway station and airport. There was also talk of the League buying its own train which could speed to a crisis and negotiate.

  Edith blew her nose, and with her glass of sherry tried to concentrate on shedding a few more tears of joy or of something like joy, by thinking of the building of the Palais des Nations, her father and mother, her home in Jasper’s Brush, sea shells, the swirl and wash of the long curving surf of Seven Mile Beach, and one peaceful world. When no more tears were left, she let herself turn to enjoying her rooms, her own cloister, which were becoming at last a portrayal of herself. The rooms had higher ceilings than she’d ever seen in a private home in Australia. Her curtains were heavy maroon, velvet, velvet being her favourite fabric. They helped to reshape the window. It had seemed out of shape. It also helped exclude from the view some of a building which she didn’t like. She argued with herself, on and off, about whether one should ‘accept’ the view from any given window as being the bona fide and incontestable ‘outside’ of the room. The windows looked out on a courtyard which she didn’t find disagreeable at all. It was a building to the left which she disliked and tried to exclude.

  She’d found the low, deep-seated, heavily padded soft armchair from the last century, covered in velveteen, a maroon very close to that of the curtains, in which she could sprawl and read — more a sprawling chair than a reading chair. She’d found a low table with two folding side panels, which tended to become a dumping ground for magazines and books, but when she had someone to her room, she could clear it off and serve tea and cakes from it carried up by Madame Didier. For the low table, she had two Viennese bent wood armchairs, which were comfortable enough for sitting up at afternoon tea. If the afternoon tea went well they could retire — the guest to the sprawling chair, and she to the Wilson chair. The American Wilson chair was a much-loved monstrosity with an adjustable back, adjustable body section, adjustable leg panel and an adjustable attached foot stool. She and Florence had found it at the flea market in la plaine de Plainpalais. It could fully recline to become a bed and one night Florence had slept on it, covered by a travelling rug, too lazy from wine to go to her own pension. The chair lent itself to irreverent jokes about President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. She tried to tell herself that the jokes gave the chair Historical Lineage but she wasn’t convinced. She liked the Wilson chair because it was mechanically ingenious. But she didn’t think that mechanical ingenuity was an Aesthetic rule. It was really just a curiosity She liked it because it allowed her have an unposed attitude, neither demanding that she sit or that she lie. She adjusted it according to mood. She had a few potted plants on her windowsill.

  From Australia had arrived the chest containing her few possessions including her much-loved dark-red karri-wood vases, poker-worked with Australian wild flowers. She had three framed lithographs of Sydney, the work of Thea Proctor. Photographs of her family and a class photograph from her last year at school were on the mantel above the fireplace. Her eighteenth-century brass microscope was also there. It was an object which looked bizarre wherever she put it but it had been a gift from her mother. It had to go somewhere. She’d had her mother ship over all her books, including her school books and her science books and all her Everyman’s Library books. She’d wanted them all as a way of reminding herself that she did know things. It somehow reinforced her as a person to have Porritt’s Chemistry of Rubber and Marshall’s Frog in her bookcase. She had a work table with a velvet bag hanging under the table top on slides which meant that it could be pushed away under the table. She had her Smith-Corona typewriter which she thought very attractively shaped, and a wooden clerk’s chair on castors. That was also adjustable, and had a sprung back which was supposed to reduce fatigue, but Edith didn’t know, having never had fatigue. She was still searching for a pulley lamp for her desk which she could raise and lower with a ceramic weight. She’d found a dressing table with three mirrors, the two side mirrors being on swivels, so one could see nearly all of one’s head. It had ten drawers. Then there was her neat single bed in a discreet alcove. The floor rugs were handcrafted. She had five table and standard lamps to allow her to light different spaces of the two rooms for different purposes and moods.

  Nearly everything in her two rooms now had been chosen by her, or if not, left there because it pleased her. She savoured her rooms at the Pension Levant and her meagre but irreproachable and agreeable possessions.

  The opera played on and she thought to herself, Each of us has a space around us which we could sculpture, and then we could work outwards, each from our gardens, spreading into the world, as in Geneva the League would build a Palais des Nations in the parc l’Ariana, and grandeur and reasoned order would spread outwards, But unless that centre was in good order, no good order could flow out from it.

  When all the Palais design entries from around the world were in and the competition jury couldn’t agree on a winning entr
y, Edith did not laugh along with the journalists and the rest. That the jury couldn’t agree on the winning plan was a joke around Geneva and, of course, at the Bavaria and among the Swiss Germans around the corner at Gambrinus, and among the socialist crowd at the Landolt where, she suspected, all jokes about the League began.

  There was a progressive group around the Secretariat and the Bavaria who had wanted Le Corbusier to win. She discovered that she was more of a traditionalist and had wanted someone solid like Nenot from Paris to win. Perhaps she should try to be more modernistic about architecture but she was modern about most things without being wearisomely ‘advanced’ in her thinking on all matters. About architecture, she thought that maybe she would continue to be an inveterate traditionalist. That would be one of the things that the Refashioned Edith would be traditional about.

  ‘I’m afraid that when it comes to architecture I am an inveterate traditionalist. I prefer the stately,’ Edith said out aloud in the Bavaria, for the sound of it, trying it out. The word ‘stately’ was perfect. ‘To be frank, I prefer the august to the angular.’ No one seemed to be listening in the babble. She said it to herself and to her wine glass. She thought the League should have some of the grandeur of the world of Roman legations while still acknowledging that the League was trying to break with the diplomacy of the past. That was part of it — she wanted the new building to do something to her. To do something for all of them who worked there and who entered there to meet. She wanted to be exalted. ‘I want to be exalted by my surroundings,’ she said aloud.

  Florence heard her this time and glanced at her, and then looked around the Bavaria, crowded with journalists and the younger set of the Secretariat. ‘Exalted?’ Florence asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said to Florence, ‘I was somewhere else.’

  ‘To be exalted, you would have to be.’

  She hoped that the Building Committee would resolve the impasse and decide for something which acknowledged the past while meeting the future. She did not want Le Corbusier to win and she argued this very well against the progressive set at parties and picnics who said things like, ‘The building should be a negotiating machine.’

  ‘I don’t want to work in a machine. I want to work in an edifice.’ She even argued that negotiation was best done in august surroundings because august surroundings calmed passions and diminished egotism. She wanted to work in a building which spoke to her and touched her every day she went to it. Which daily convoked her ideals as she went up its steps. She did not want to work in a building she failed to notice. Or worse a building which touted the personality of its architect.

  When the Australian government was the first nation to offer a gift to the planned Palais of Nations, Edith cried a few tears of pride.

  Victoria, who worked in Registry, rang her and said, ‘Edith, this will make you happy.’ Victoria read out the telegram from the Prime Minister of Australia to the League of Nations.

  Edith kept an interest in the Palais and its development, and when, in the new file on the Palais furnishing, she came across the letter from Miss Dickinson she was moved to exclaim and went along the corridor to show it to Florence.

  Miss Dickinson’s letter was handwritten in what seemed to be home-made black ink. The letterhead was from a linocut of her school for war orphans in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and was addressed to Sir Eric.

  I am writing direct to you. Ever since the War, I have been in Jugo-slavia where a war orphanage I started in 1919 has developed into a cabinet-making industry. It has always been my wish to make something appropriate for the League of Nations for whose aims I have worked like my brother Sir Willoughby Dickinson since even before the War. My boys have now designed a chair suitable for a chairman’s seat, made of Balkan woods and which my boys and I should like to present to the League of Nations. The design represents doves with outstretched wings and is beautifully carried out as regards to workmanship.

  Believe me,

  Yours faithfully,

  Annie J. Dickinson.

  They both looked at the photograph of the chair. ‘Very nice,’ Florence said. ‘Who is Sir Willoughby Dickinson? Should we know?’

  Edith shrugged.

  On reading the letter to Florence, Edith saw the war orphans working industriously on the chair, she saw the public-spirited, practical Annie Dickinson hovering about, caring for them and guiding them. Maybe that was where she, Edith, belonged, working with the orphans. Making things from wood. She’d begun a poem about working with wood. The poem said that the pencil and the paper with which she worked were made from wood. The Secretariat in fact worked with wood.

  She went back to her office, glancing through the rest of the file as she walked along the corridor. She came to a minute from Lloyd who was secretary of the Building Committee, to Sir Eric, which read: ‘Please see the accompanying letter from Miss Dickinson (sister of Sir Willoughby Dickinson). I suggest this little gift should be informally accepted now and put into use in one of the present committee rooms. It would seem to give it an undue importance if it were left over to be sent in as a gift to the new building.’

  Edith lost her calm. ‘Little gift’, ‘undue importance’ — what in the world did he know about importance and its size?

  Edith’s heart hurt. She was about to storm down to Lloyd’s office and ask him what he knew about undue importance. She felt that it would be impossible to give the chair too much importance!

  She raged about her office, trying to regain a condition of mind which would permit her to speak.

  Then she did go to Lloyd’s office.

  He heard her out.

  ‘I take your point, Berry. You have more of the poet in you than I. See it from my perspective — I have to maintain an overall view on the Palais. I have to see that everything is in proportion. If we started to accept chairs from everyone in the world, where would we be?’

  ‘Everyone in the world does not offer us chairs. If they did, well, maybe that would be a marvellous thing too. We could say that the chairs of the League of Nations were donated by the people of the world.’

  ‘They would not match,’ he said and then realising that was an argument not likely to touch her, his voice died off into a cough.

  Edith took it that he saw the sadness of his comment and let it pass. She said, ‘Furthermore, we have a photograph of this chair. This is a remarkable chair.’

  ‘Remarkable?’ He looked again at the photograph in the file. ‘I don’t know if I’d want to sit in it too long.’

  ‘I agree, Lloyd, that the test of a chair is in the sitting. All things being equal it should be a reasonable sitting chair.’

  He agreed to reconsider his advice to Sir Eric.

  As she left his office, she thought that it was the nearest thing to a row that she’d had at the League. When she’d first arrived she’d thought rather unrealistically that people mightn’t have rows at the League.

  Edith kept a watch on the outward file and saw no letter of acceptance to Miss Dickinson. She waited another month and there still wasn’t one.

  She again went to Lloyd, trying not to fume, and asked him what had happened. He pleaded the burden of the project. This time she waited in his office while he drafted a letter of acceptance, using her female wiles and the force of virtue, speaking for the orphans of the War, there in Jugo-slavia, waiting for their gift to be recognised by the League of Nations in Geneva.

  She orated, but mostly she sat on the edge of his desk showing silk-stockinged legs, her ankles, and the cross-straps of her new kid leather shoes.

  He worked up a draft of a letter of acceptance which would go to Sir Eric for signing and handed it to her to read.

  ‘Good, that’s good. Thank you, Lloyd,’ she said, taking the draft from him and reading it again. ‘You say “a chair suitable for a chairman of committee” but I’m sure that Miss Dickinson saw it being the Assembly or Council President’s chair. But I’ll bow to your judgement.’ Like hell s
he would; she would somehow see to it that the chair was used by one or other of the two presidents.

  She left the corner of his desk and stood facing him. ‘Know now, Lloyd,’ she said, ‘that you are a person complete within this day.’ He moved papers on his desk, flushed, not looking at her. She went on, ‘By writing this to the orphans, you could die tonight and not feel that you have lived badly, or left undone those things which ought to have been done.’ She thought that she needed to lay it on thick, he being Welsh.

  Lloyd smiled uneasily, looking at her breasts, and then frowned uncomprehendingly as she left the room.

  ‘Maybe a cocktail after work?’ he called to her back, in an uncertain voice.