Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  She went to Lloyd’s office and said that the ILO had rung to say that Miss Dickinson’s chair was there waiting for them.

  ‘It arrived, did it?’ said Lloyd. ‘Is it a good sitting chair or not?’

  ‘I haven’t sat in it,’ she said, thinking that she might not sit in it, superstitiously, that it might be not be proper for her to sit in it — though if she could sign the Secretary-General’s name, she might as well sit in the President’s throne.

  He said he would get it over from the ILO.

  ‘Let me know when it arrives,’ she said to him.

  He did and they inspected it together. It was a fine chair. They both sat in it and decided it needed a cushion.

  ‘I suppose the Secretary-General would like to see it,’ said Lloyd. ‘I’ll let him know that the chair’s arrived. He probably has ideas about where it should go.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just take it now and put it in place in the Council room?’ She wanted done with it and without involving Sir Eric.

  Lloyd said the chair had to be entered in the property register and then numbered and then allocated.

  ‘If it doesn’t go into the register of property no one after us would know it existed,’ he said. ‘I have never understood why you made so much fuss about this chair. We really should only have furniture which is consistent with our needs and the architecture of the premises.’

  ‘That might be the right policy in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred but in this case it would be the wrong policy. That chair has to have a place in our lives or we are living our lives wrongly and running this League wrongly,’ she said. ‘Heavens above, Lloyd, this chair is a test of us all! Can’t you see that!’

  ‘Not really,’ Lloyd said, quietly going about his work. ‘I suppose we could get the Deputy Secretary-General or an Under Secretary at some point,’ he said, ‘and have a ceremony. If you feel so strongly.’ He was saying this to make her happy.

  ‘No! No, don’t do that. I don’t want a ceremony. It might be a sentimental gift but it is, after all, just a chair.’

  He looked up at her, puzzled by her change of direction.

  ‘Sir Eric’ wrote saying the chair had arrived safely. Edith hoped that this, her third forgery, would be her last.

  A few days later, she went to Internal Service’s storeroom in the rented annex and showed them a requisition form.

  She signed for the chair and then with Florence’s help carried it along the street to the Palais Wilson and installed it in the Glass-room. They took away the President’s usual chair and put that in a smaller committee room.

  They stood at the door of the Glass-room and looked at Miss Dickinson’s chair.

  ‘Mission complete,’ Florence said. ‘You should feel proud, Edith.’

  ‘I don’t, Florence,’ she said fervently, ‘I feel guilty. This is not the way I want to do things. I worry too much.’

  ‘This time, though, it was the only way really to get the orphans and Miss Dickinson treated right.’

  It wasn’t all over. Annie Dickinson wrote back.

  Thank you for telling me that the chair has arrived safely at its destination. I am waiting to settle on a suitable very short inscription to be put on the plate. Possibly, I might pass through Geneva with my head boy on my way back to Jugo-slavia and I should bring the plate with me and he would fix it in a suitable but not an evident place.

  Believe me,

  Yrs truly

  A. J. Dickinson.

  Oh no. Edith went back to her office and wept tears of frustration and self-recrimination.

  After a while she pulled herself together, blew her nose, and rang Florence, although she was now beginning to have reservations about Florence’s advice and would sort that out later, after she had sorted out this mess.

  ‘Florence, there’s an emergency.’ She told Florence what was happening.

  Florence suggested the restaurant.

  ‘No! This has to be discussed elsewhere. The lounge of the Hôtel de La Paix. Now!’

  She grabbed her coat and went to Florence’s office and together they went along the street to the Hôtel de La Paix and ordered afternoon tea.

  She pointed out to Florence that if Miss Dickinson and boy arrived at the League and wanted to see Sir Eric he would be bewildered and questions would be asked about the chair. The whole thing would unravel, files be called for, signature examined, detectives called in.

  Florence said, ‘Calm down. We’ll receive Miss Dickinson and the orphan. Ambrose will play the part of the Secretary-General.’

  ‘Ambrose would never do anything out of line.’

  ‘He won’t know.’

  She looked at Florence.

  ‘We’ll tell Miss Dickinson and the orphan boy that Ambrose is an Under Secretary. We won’t tell Ambrose that we’ve told them. We’ll tell Ambrose only about the chair and the boy and ask if he would like to meet them. He’ll say yes. He’ll think he’s just coming along — we’ll use the Glass-room. He looks like a Secretary-General. They all dress like Sir E. He’ll make all the right noises. Without knowing a damn thing.’

  This solution filled Edith with further dismay and exasperation. She put her head on her arms on the table. She would leave the League and offer her services to the orphaned children and Annie Dickinson.

  Florence put a hand on Edith’s arm. ‘Sit up, Edith. They’ll think something’s wrong. It’ll work.’

  In her own mind, Edith thought of owning up. She thought of getting a letter to Dickinson to prevent her coming to Geneva. But Florence’s plan could work.

  ‘When she tells us that she’s coming, then we’ll go into detail.’ Florence made it all sound so easy. Florence stumbled through no slough of despond.

  As it turned out, they needed no more plotting and deviousness.

  Miss Dickinson wrote that she and the boy couldn’t come to Geneva. She enclosed the silver plate, saying that she wanted it fixed under the seat out of sight.

  Victoria wouldn’t let her have the plate, saying that it had to go with the letter to Sir Eric’s office.

  Edith sickened every time she went illegally into Sir Eric’s office but she went yet again and confiscated the plate and removed the letter from the file. The plate read, ‘Beati Pacifici. Cadeau des orphelins de guerre.’ Edith was rather annoyed at Miss Dickinson for not including the names of the orphans who had worked on the chair. She wrote what she prayed would be her last forged letter thanking Miss Dickinson for the plate and promising that it would be affixed ‘out of sight’.

  She watched while the maintenance man put the plate under the chair.

  One day Edith passed the Glass-room and saw a black man in robes of national dress, maybe a Liberian, seated in Miss Dickinson’s chair presiding at a committee meeting and she smiled a complicated smile to herself, at the centre of which was wistful pleasure, despite all the tribulation to her spirit.

  Privately she resolved never again to listen to Florence’s advice, no matter how breathtakingly wily. Sadly, she had come to see how Florence’s ways were not the ways of a diplomat but the errant ways of a misbehaving student. Mary McGeachy had used wiles as a way to get the League across but Florence was just bucking the system for its own sake. Florence sat in the bar and enjoyed watching others stick their necks out. At some point in the whole thing, Florence had also asked her to take some of Sir Eric’s specially embossed notepaper so that she could write to her friends. Edith had said she would but purposefully hadn’t taken the paper for Florence.

  If she, Edith, were ever to be Secretary-General, she would be Secretary-General actually appointed by the Council and not Secretary-General by studentish subterfuge.

  What did interest Edith about the whole business was that she now saw how others might use such stratagems within the organisation of the League, might pursue private policies by stealth, and how dangerous this would be. The League had passed a certain size and was now less and less overseen. That scared her. Or should it please her? Ma
ybe it meant that the organisation itself was now more self-describing, rather than being defined, detail by detail, by Sir Eric, or the Council, or the haute direction. However, when she came to a position of authority, she would watch for crafty people like Florence. And she would watch for impetuous, heart-led, young officers like herself with their noble private policies. She would appoint only those officers, who, if they did pursue private policies would by their natures pursue such policies, which, if ever exposed or articulated, would be found by analysis to be perfectly acceptable.

  She would strive always to appoint such people, or to delegate in such a way that those people went on, uninstructed, unasked, to fill out the unpremeditated intention of the organisation, even if no one person could ever say what that intention was in all details. They would consummate the organisation, fill it out into an acceptable shape. Again, a shape which could not be foreseen in all detail or planned in all detail. She saw that the secret was in the appointment of people who had this happy implanted latency. One had to recognise this latency and know that it would eventually germinate and that it could be left unattended to elaborate into a flowering. Perhaps there had to be judicious and politic intervention by teaching and leadership, from the interplay of the office. She rated interplay in the office very highly now.

  She believed herself to be an officer with happy latency.

  She believed that Miss Dickinson’s chair also had a happy latency. The Rule of Happy Latency in the choice of belongings. It was not only officers who had it, but objects — objects which could sponsor chains of other detail, chains of consequence which could only later be seen as positive or deleterious. Miss Dickinson’s chair was positive and would proliferate into marvellous arrangements not yet imaginable. She now understood that. That the new Palais would grow out of Miss Dickinson’s chair.

  Edith was also exuberantly gratified that the Palais architectural jury decided in favour of M. Nenot, from Paris, and a M. Flegenheimer, from Geneva, both reasonably classical in their style. M. Le Corbusier wrote a protest but to no avail.

  Edith did not join in the heated discussions about the decision. She felt that for now, she’d done enough for the new Palais des Nations.

  International Language: Scat Singing, its Ramifications, Magnitude, and Consequences

  When Edith said she’d heard ‘lots of jazz’, she meant on the gramophone and the wireless. She had not been to a performance of jazz, or a rendition, if rendition were the right word.

  When Jeanne, her French friend from the office, asked her if she would like to ‘attend some jazz’ she had thought first of gramophone records.

  Jeanne exclaimed, ‘No, no — Eddie South is coming — is coming here to play. Really! Eddie South!’

  They’d all heard of Eddie South. ‘Here to Geneva?’

  ‘No, no, I mean to Paris.’ Jeanne, a Parisian, sometimes forgot she was now working in Geneva, which was understandable, given that Jeanne worked for the Intellectual Cooperation section of the League in Geneva although, for all purposes, its central office seemed now to be in Paris. Regardless of the logistics, Jeanne had permanent discord of the head, body and soul though usually, at any one time, part of her was always in Paris. ‘Really, you must give me permission to contradict myself,’ was one of Jeanne’s most frequent sayings.

  The jokes about the Intellectual section were unfair. According to Florence, the section’s accounting was meticulous and they were good about returning files. It was true that they had more expert committees than any other section, but then, they were the section for experts. They had people like Professor Einstein. Although in her work Edith didn’t have much to do with the Intellectuals, apart from Jeanne, she had good feelings towards them.

  ‘We could voyage up to Paris. And then go directement to the Ad Lib Club,’ said Jeanne, with conspiratorial anticipation.

  There was no reason why, with a holiday and a week-end coming up, they shouldn’t jump on the train up to Paris. Since arriving in Geneva Edith had not left it. It was as if she had to stay on call in case the world needed her. Staying on call, though, had meant that she went dining and to concerts of the Orchestre Romand and to motion pictures with Ambrose or Jeanne or Florence or fox hunting out at Veyrier with Major Buxton — twice — although on most nights she ate at her pension, sometimes reading a book at the table or writing in her journal as a way of keeping the other pension people away, but sometimes chatting with the other residents, and then after dinner if she didn’t go into the lounge to chat or listen to the wireless with the other residents — she hated playing cards — she read alone in her room, listened to gramophone records, or got on with work she’d brought home with her. They’d been called back a few nights but never with the urgency or frequency that she’d expected. She was puzzled sometimes by how quickly within the workings of the League all great and urgent questions lost their urgency. It was, of course, that the League was able to subdue and refine crisis — able to turn a crisis into Roneoed pages of data and topics for colloquy, into things which could be unflappably administered, conciliated, the way a surgeon handled mutilation and serious injury.

  She had also been straining. She’d been straining to become part of a lofty international community, a world of essentials and high procedure. So often she’d had to pretend to know what she was doing, while still learning, and to make it up as she went along because no one had done it before her, never in the history of the human race. Cooper sometimes forgot that.

  As Jeanne talked about going to Paris, she realised she was at last able to relax her grip and go. If the world needed her, it would know where to find her. She would take some leave in Paris. Also, everyone was saying there was not enough iodine in the air of Geneva at present.

  ‘Yes, Jeanne, we will go up to Paris. Let us flee — as the doctors are saying, there is not enough iodine in the air of Geneva.’

  Jeanne said, ‘You take a long time, Edith, to make up your mind on such a simple matter of going to Paris and going to a club to hear the black men play jazz. Eddie South and his Alabamians.’

  She loved the way Jeanne said the word jazz — in Jeanne’s mouth it was a word that promised every tantalisation. Edith hardly knew Paris at all, having spent only a couple of days there on her way to join the League. She certainly didn’t know Jeanne’s Paris. Or Ambrose’s Paris of the Club des Cent. She knew the Paris of Flaubert and Balzac.

  ‘I think that the League can now get along without me for a day or so. Should we make up a party?’

  Jeanne agreed that a party would be chic.

  The Ad Lib Club was hot. Hot in the way that jazz people said hot, and also just hot.

  Some of the music was familiar to her from records but the proximity to the musicians and patrons gave the music an almost insufferable closeness. At first she listened too hard and couldn’t relax back in her chair. And she wasn’t sure which one was Eddie South and had to ask. The jazz records heard in solitude had their own intensity but it could be controlled by tempering the music with a personal mood, or by looking out the window, but here in the Ad Lib Club, she couldn’t simply modulate the music with her mood because her mood was being intensified and churned by her friends and the strangers and the champagne and Paris and the hot club and the sight of the black musicians making their music. She could not do anything but allow herself to seethe pleasantly, although for brief moments now and then, she did return to a burning self-consciousness and withdrew and paused, for only a second, an observer of her own perspiring, delightfully nervous body.

  Liverright, who was with Caroline Bailey, was joking about the smoke not all being from tobacco cigarettes which she took to mean that people were smoking hashish or whatever.

  When he mentioned it they all chorused, ‘Stamp it out,’ and stamped their feet, a joke their gang had about the League’s efforts with vice.

  Liverright was from vice-ridden Vienna, and presumably knew about these things. Despite being a League officer, he kept attachments
to Bohemia and carried on about ‘the cult of the multiple-sensation’, talked endlessly about Dada, and always wore red to display his politics, against the unwritten rules of the office. Tonight it was a handkerchief flowing from his dinner jacket pocket. But regardless of that he was very staunchly League. And Edith suspected that it was not so much that he was a socialist but that he chafed against rules.

  A Negro woman vocalist was singing and as Edith listened something happened there at the Ad Lib Club which she could not have ever foreseen. All the rest — the atmosphere of the club, her churning aliveness — she could perhaps have imagined. But what she could never have imagined was the way the woman was singing, and how the singing reached into her.

  She was hearing something she had never heard before. Although she must have ‘heard’ it on records, she now heard for the first time the way the Negro woman used her voice, a rhythmic use of syllables. It was the voice trying to say something which was beyond words. A sort of warbling. The woman was not singing words at all. She was singing sounds in between the music and words of the song.

  Edith was transfixed by the singer’s way of playing with her voice. Edith felt very certainly that this ‘hearing’ she was experiencing was revelation. She pulled at Jeanne’s arm.

  ‘Jeanne, what is that — the way they sing without words?’

  Jeanne shrugged. Jeanne was moving her whole body to the music, away somewhere else. Maybe Jeanne’s body was there but her mind wasn’t anywhere near by, and even her body looked as if it might be about to leave her too, and writhe away across the club.

  Edith asked Ambrose. Ambrose didn’t know. ‘Humming?’ he said.

  ‘It’s more than humming!’

  She became impatient to know.

  In the break, she said, ‘It seems to me to be the most interesting thing this whole evening,’ more loudly than she expected, ‘the way the Negro woman used her voice — like another language.’

  The others did not want to talk — they were letting the atmosphere and the champagne overtake them. But she always had trouble getting conversational attention in café groups like this and trouble holding it as well. She thought it had to do with the lightness of her voice, or the Australian accent.