Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  Caroline Bailey had obviously heard what she’d said, and she just rolled her eyes. There had been a long discussion about whether Caroline should ever have been asked to come on this Paris trip. She was rumoured to be writing a novel about the League. If Florence hadn’t been sick with influenza, almost certainly Caroline would not have been asked.

  ‘I need to know,’ she said. ‘I want to know what it’s called.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Ambrose said, touching her hand.

  Liverright said, ‘Call it bel canto.’

  It was not bel canto and she did not want to be calmed by Ambrose. Or have Caroline Bailey roll her eyes.

  She wanted to be answered. Though maybe it had to do with bel canto.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone know?’ she almost shouted, bringing their attention to her. Edith glanced hopefully at Liverright, but he had little attention left to pay.

  Victoria wanted to help, but could only say, ‘I will admit that it’s uncanny, but I’m no use. I don’t particularly listen to the music, I watch the musicians more — even in symphony orchestras there’s something to see.’

  Liverright had another stab at it. ‘The cello, you know, has the exact range of the human voice. Basso profundo to soprano. I always think of it as the most human of instruments. And Honegger did do a train in Pacifique deux cent trente-et-un.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is, Edith,’ said Caroline in her droll voice, ‘it’s called voodoo music, that’s their word for it.’

  ‘I could use some voodoo in my life,’ said Victoria, wistfully.

  Liverright pushed the champagne bottle over towards her. ‘Have some,’ he said.

  The orchestra began again.

  ‘Go and ask,’ Edith said to Ambrose.

  ‘I can’t just go over and talk to them.’

  ‘Why not? I want you to.’

  ‘Well, they look rather unapproachable.’

  She looked across at the black musicians in their bow ties and jackets. One wore a bowler hat. She saw what he meant. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re a diplomat. You’re supposed to be able to approach anyone.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s part of the job. And Negroid musicians aren’t, as far as I recall, referred to in Satow.’ Ambrose looked apprehensively at the Negro orchestra. ‘And if I’m wrong, Edith, don’t correct me.’

  ‘Ambrose, please?’

  At the conclusion of the next set of music, Ambrose reluctantly stood up, took courage from a draught of champagne and moved towards the orchestra. The orchestra had finished playing for now and were chatting among themselves, blowing out their instruments.

  On his way, she saw Ambrose go to the cloakroom girl and buy a packet of cigarettes. As he walked towards the orchestra, he opened the packet and then clambered up on to the stage and offered cigarettes, firstly to the woman singer and then to the others, smiling in his nervous, winning, English way, and gesturing back to their table. The cigarettes were a brilliant move. The orchestra all took cigarettes.

  Edith saw then that Ambrose gave Eddie South the whole packet, perhaps to be shared among the orchestra. Edith looked away. That was wrong, wrong, wrong. Giving them the whole packet was colonialist.

  When she looked back, she saw that Eddie South was sharing out the remaining cigarettes. Ambrose then talked to one of them — not Eddie South, but the black man in the bowler hat, who listened and then looked across to where she was sitting and looked straight at her, causing her to smile at him in a fuzzy way. The black man put his instrument into its case, stood up, and together with Ambrose, clambered off the stage and began to walk back to the table.

  That was not necessary. It wasn’t necessary to bring the black man in the bowler hat to the table but the idea of meeting one of them made her uneasily excited. Ambrose introduced the black musician as Jerome and looked pleased with himself for having captured such a trophy.

  Jerome said, ‘I am a supporter of you all — deeply in my heart, I support your work at the League of Nations.’

  The table became enlivened, and even Liverright rallied, saying that he was both ‘honoured and syncopated’, before drifting off again into the alcoholic background. They had the waiter bring another glass and gave Jerome some champagne.

  There was no spare chair in the club so Ambrose made Jerome sit in his chair next to Edith while he crouched on the other side of her. Ambrose prompted her, ‘Ask Jerome your question, Edith.’

  Edith stared at the man. It was the closest she had ever been to a Negro. He was different from Arun Joshi. Quite different. She remembered an experiment the physiology class had done with black skin where they tried to extract melanin pigment from it without success. The conclusion was the melanin was stable and insoluble. She guessed that they could have asked a black whether it ever washed off. Edith asked her question but found she had another difficulty; while waiting for him to reply, she realised her eyes had come to rest on the black man’s lap. Good Lord, she thought, I’m becoming entranced. But it had also to do with where Ambrose was crouching. That sort of talk among women about jazz men and Negroes was drivel.

  ‘What you have been commenting on is called scat singing,’ Jerome said, smiling.

  Edith forced her eyes up from below the table. Why hadn’t Ambrose brought back the woman singer instead of this formidable man? She felt shaky. It was the Reaction, Negromania, which she considered all bosh. She tried to bring herself together.

  ‘Scat singing?’ she said, her voice unreliably off-key.

  ‘Yes, scat singing. Maisy is a fine scat singer.’

  Edith couldn’t quite believe that it was called scat singing. At university, they’d collected scats on field trips. Why did they call this ‘scat singing’? Scats were the droppings of animals. She couldn’t quite ask that question, just yet. The situation was becoming an immensely hot confusion, with this talk of scats, and the Negro man’s sweaty, sultry smell and smile rolling over to her, lapping her face. The sultry smell she knew was typical of the Negro, and came from a special glandular condition. His fingernails were manicured. She felt entranced by their white moons. She tried to keep her gaze above the table top.

  What did singing have to do with faeces? For a moment, she feared that she had asked this. ‘It is another language.’ Her voice again came out unreliably.

  The black man agreed. He said that it was a way of ‘saying the feelings’.

  Victoria asked him who had invented it and in what year. Caroline and Ambrose broke into giggles. Victoria wasn’t being funny, but when people laughed, she always accepted that there could be something funny in what she’d said.

  Jerome said he didn’t know if it had been invented, as such. He laughed and said that it had been told to him that a singer once lost her word sheets and had invented it to cover up but he didn’t really believe that.

  She then remembered why she felt it was a revelation, this scat singing, how it all linked to life back at the League, and why she had felt it was pressing to know. She remembered now. It was how it might be used. The work at the League was often a use of language that wasn’t argument or even the making of negotiation — it was a way, perhaps, of expressing a presence. Affirmative noise, questing without knowing the questions, hot air. They could turn the hot air to this scat singing.

  ‘Yes!’ she burst out, ‘of course!’

  ‘Are you all right, Edith?’ Jeanne was asking in her over-concerned way.

  Edith gestured for a momentary silence, a finger across her mouth. She wanted a minute to think before talking again. She would make a submission to Council. Or to one of Jeanne’s expert committees. Esperanto she didn’t support. Scat singing was different — maybe this was a language to express things not yet internationally expressible and which would, at the same time, be comprehensible to all people regardless of their language. Maybe a vocabulary of sounds could be compiled. The way the League was an instrument to achieve what had never before been achieved. She raised her eyes from the black man and brea
thed deeply to bring herself together again. The group, except Caroline, were waiting on her to speak, obeying her edict. For the first time. She couldn’t remember what she’d said.

  ‘It’s another parlance,’ she pronounced. ‘Somewhere between language and silence.’

  ‘To say that might be going too far,’ said Victoria. ‘I wish we could put a date to it.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re well?’ Jeanne asked again.

  Caroline, for all her pose of jadedness, was trying to make conversation with the black musician, being flirtatiously over-attentive.

  Ambrose said he thought there was but one way of saying things and that was with words, precisely used. ‘Preferably words signed and sealed in a treaty. You may call me limited.’

  ‘I call you Limited,’ said Victoria, pleased with herself.

  As usual when Victoria tried to be funny, no one laughed at her effort, although Caroline returned to the conversation to try to steal it away from her. ‘You can call me Beyond the Limit,’ she said, kissing Ambrose on the cheek, probably because she was timid about kissing the black man’s cheek, and laughing out her cigarette smoke in an affected way.

  Edith was a long way from the joking. Liverright seemed to be falling asleep and trying to light a cigarette at the same time. She thought that Caroline had given up on him, and might now be concentrating her attentions on Jerome. Or Ambrose, even. Edith couldn’t worry about that just now.

  ‘My God. It’s a new parlance,’ Edith said, marvelling, trying both to hold their attention and to hold her thoughts. ‘Jerome can come to Geneva and give us evidence about it all.’

  Jerome was trying to cope socially with the flirtatious attention of Caroline, with Ambrose’s courteous chat, and with her invitation to him to come to Geneva.

  ‘You will scat sing to the Seventh Assembly, Edy?’ said Jeanne, with a kind laugh, patting her hand.

  The others came back into the conversation with Jeanne’s joke and laughed. They laughed, it seemed to Edith, with rather wide mouths, and too loudly. Liverright came awake and said, ‘Syncopated, I’m sure,’ and returned to struggling with his somnolent state and with his matches and cigarette.

  ‘I well may,’ Edith said. They laughed, but she was not joking. ‘Will you come to Geneva and tell the Council about this scat singing, Jerome?’ she asked. ‘Or if not Council, an expert committee?’

  She saw now with sparkling clarity where sound became music; where music became jazz; where jazz became poetry; where poetry became scat singing; where scat singing became meaning. Edith heard Liverright say, more to the champagne bottle than to anyone, ‘If only the perception could be cleaned — correction, cleansed — all things could then be seen as they are, as they truly are — infinite.’

  So he had been paying some attention to what she’d be saying.

  ‘Blake,’ he said, smiling sloppily across at her, ‘not Liverright. Blake.’

  No one seemed to listen to him quoting Blake, they were all talking, but she didn’t really care — she saw what Liverright was getting at. For the first time in her life she saw silence clearly too. She saw it. Palpable silence. ‘And silence,’ she said. ‘You must come to Geneva and tell us about silence, also.’

  From under his bowler hat, Jerome was considering his answer, tapping off the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray. ‘I have not played in Geneva,’ he answered, noncommittally.

  She felt herself falling a little, falling forward.

  She was not, however, falling. She was still decently in her seat. She pulled herself together. ‘Then you must come. The mouth is not just for saying words,’ she said in a very strange voice indeed. ‘Come to Geneva, that is.’ She flushed, but again, no one was listening to her or looking at her except this Jerome, who was listening and smiling at her, smiling back at her merrily, she thought, and she smiled merrily at him.

  Jerome stood up and thanked them and said he had to play again, and after politely shaking hands with the others he turned, especially to Edith, and said, ‘The next occasion we meet, I will talk to you about what the great Erik Satie, God rest his soul, called “furniture music”, which he said was the music you listened to without listening, as scat is the sound you speak when you are not speaking.’ He then turned to them all and said, ‘Enjoy. Keep on with your fine and great works.’ And then turning again back to Edith said, ‘I may one day come to Geneva.’

  Furniture music, another revelation. She wanted to tell him that she understood the music of furniture too. To show him Miss Dickinson’s chair. Then, and then, he kissed Edith’s hand.

  ‘You,’ she said in her strange voice, her hand still in his, ‘you too, keep up your works.’

  She wondered as she spoke whether what she said had a double meaning. She couldn’t supervise all her words and thoughts — they were streaming through her, and from her.

  He shook hands with Ambrose and was gone.

  ‘You made that rather obvious,’ Ambrose said in an aside, resuming his chair, trying to be light but she could tell that he was miffed at her establishing a private bond with Jerome. She caught Caroline’s eye too, and saw a knowing look.

  All of them, then, had been paying some attention to her.

  Yes, she and Ambrose were lovers, of a sort, in Geneva, but this was Paris.

  She saw that their liaison had now become impossible to wriggle out from, shrug off, duck out of. She was lumbered with it. Though in all fairness to Ambrose, on the train on the way down they had been affectionately nostalgic, she tearfully so, and had felt very close, remembering their first meeting on the train from Paris to Geneva and their grand lunch together.

  Ambrose now said, ‘In the War, the Boche bugler could bugle out twenty-four different orders, you know, speak to each other in the fog. Sneaky chaps.’ Ambrose was trying, she could tell, to diminish the magnetism of the black man but was also, oddly, still competitive with Liverright after all this time.

  ‘“Clever chap, the Boche”,’ Caroline mimicked Ambrose.

  ‘You could not be more wrong,’ Edith said fervently to Ambrose. ‘It’s the other way around — instruments try to mimic the human voice — that singer was doing something else.’ She knew she was becoming confused with instruments, voices, and mouths. Victoria was listening, trying dutifully to understand her. Caroline was trying to rouse Liverright. She lighted on Caroline. ‘Do you have inexpressible emotions in Printing, Caroline?’

  ‘In Précis-writing. Yes, we do, Edith. Lots,’ Caroline replied without turning her head. She was trying to revive Liverright by pinching his arm rather hard but was getting no useful result.

  Edith continued to talk at Caroline, a disguised assault, knowing that Caroline was not in the least interested. ‘You see, Caroline, scat singing’s more than musical instruments can do because it’s the …’ she stumbled over her words, ‘uninterpreted feelings of the person that are coming out. Some things in life, Caroline, cannot be done by the Translating and Interpretation Service.’

  ‘The feelings of the Negroid?’ said Caroline with a small snigger of innuendo. ‘Tell us, Edith, about these untranslatable feelings of the Negroid.’

  The party smiled weakly. It was an attempt at a sophisticated joke in poor taste, she supposed.

  ‘What are these feelings? These feelings of the Negroid? Tell us, Edith,’ Caroline persisted.

  ‘Caroline, we heard you the first time,’ Ambrose said, using his special superior tone to shut her up although, Edith thought, they were of the same class, but Ambrose outranked her.

  Victoria said, ‘I think he was perhaps a Bahama Negro — he had aplomb.’

  ‘Victoria seems to know her Negroes,’ said Caroline, ‘seems to have been around.’

  ‘I read, Caroline,’ Victoria said. ‘That’s a way of being around too.’

  ‘A safer and cleaner way, definitely.’

  Liverright aroused himself and said, ‘That’s what went wrong, you know, between the Greeks and Bulgarians.’

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nbsp; Everyone looked at him, trying to decide whether to bother with his comment.

  ‘How’d you mean?’ Ambrose said shortly.

  ‘No bugler. The Greek officer got himself shot with the white flag. Should’ve had a bugler.’

  ‘You’re not making sense,’ Caroline said.

  ‘What he means,’ said Ambrose without any interest, ‘is that a truce party must have a bugler as well as a white flag.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ said Liverright, pleased with Ambrose’s elucidation and pleased with having made what he saw as a contribution to the conversation.

  ‘I should’ve have tipped him, I suppose,’ said Ambrose. ‘Should go over and give him something.’

  ‘No, you will not,’ Edith said.

  The night was almost over, the orchestra had gone from the stage. Edith rose to go to the toilet. Again Jeanne expressed concern and wanted to come with her but she told Jeanne she was all right. She didn’t need help to go to the toilet.

  She went across the room towards the toilets, guiding herself by the backs of chairs. Drunk but steady. No, unsteady but undrunk. One or the other. On the way, she passed the room Artiste.

  In the rather dirty, rather smelly toilet she tried to keep herself from contact with anything. She checked her make-up in the cracked mirror and washed her hands, drying them on her own handkerchief because there was no towel. Then she breathed deeply of the smell, liking the smell. She thought of it as a smell of Paris and the smell of women and the smell of animal life, an ancient smell, the smell of ancient sewers, the abyss of the city, the smell of the human beast coming up from the depths of the ancient city It took her back to the boat trip over, the smell of Port Said.

  On the way back from the toilet, she looked into the room Artiste.

  He was there alone in a cubicle drinking from a flask. Jerome. Bowler hat and all. She smiled. ‘Why! Hello?’ he said, and held out his flask as a beckoning gesture, and she went into the room, closing the door behind her, over to where he was and took the flask and drank from it, the spirit in it tasting like milk. She handed it back to him and with it the offer of her hand, which he took and gracefully drew her to him, onto his knee. Time and movement then became slippery, as she gracefully slid, seeing for the first time his caramel and cream shoes and without thinking too much at all about things, it seemed his warm dark hands were on her exposed and very alive breasts, which she felt she had delivered up to him; all seemed to happen in flowing fixed steps, something like a waltz, except that they were not moving from where they were adhered together in this strange way, and without any guidance at all and in no time at all, and with no impediment, with no thought at all, warm, fleshly and flowing, it was finishing, and she took her lips, tongue, and gentle teeth away, opened her eyes and looked across the room to an open instrument case. The next thing of which she became mundanely conscious, was a vague worry about the knees of her silk stockings, the only pair she’d brought with her, and her second mundane worry was about the state of her face, and then Ambrose was banging on the door Artiste — or had the banging started earlier? His voice saying, ‘Edith? Are you there, Edith?’ She rested her head on Jerome’s knee, unable or unwilling yet to rise, and she let Ambrose’s words search for her, and then she heard him say, ‘Edith, we’re moving on now. Edith?!’ She smiled up at Jerome, swallowing, and said softly, ‘C’est bon?’ and he smiled down at her, saying, ‘Très bon,’ raising her to her feet, she thinking to herself, another life foray, for indeed, she had never done that to any man, let alone a black man. He hadn’t taken his bowler hat off.