On her feet, feeling shaky at her knees, helped by his pale-skinned palms, she pulled her corset bodice and dress back over her exposed breasts, shoulder straps back in place, straightening everything that could be straightened, ran her fingers over her damaged stocking knees, and glanced at a mirror, touching at her make-up with her fingers, at her hair, and at her mouth, hoping that she saw all that she needed to see. She turned to Jerome. She smiled at him. He wiped the neck of the flask with a napkin and offered her the flask again. She took a swig, holding the unidentifiable spirit in her mouth, rinsing, and then swallowing and this time coughing on the spirits. She turned and saw Ambrose’s head at the door. ‘We’re moving on, Edith.’ She handed the flask back to Jerome. He took her hand and again kissed it. He then screwed on the flask cap and handed the flask to her. ‘A memento of your visit. A gift in return for a gift.’
‘How kind.’ She fondled the flask. ‘But you have already given me a gift — your music. But how very kind. Thank you. I accept it.’ She thought she sounded like her mother at a Red Cross function.
‘Adieu, belle vamp australienne,’ Jerome said, lifting his hat a little.
‘Au revoir, Jerome.’
As she joined Ambrose at the door, she was relieved that the scalloped hem of her evening dress covered the damaged knees of her stockings.
In the taxi, Ambrose was at first talkative in a forced, light way, about anything and everything, except about what was, she sensed, on his mind — the room Artiste.
He let her scat sing, although be was a trifle concerned about what the driver might think, and he refused to drink from the flask. She found she could scat sing quite effortlessly, and knew that she would go on to teach the world to scat sing.
Back at the hotel, Ambrose was still unquestioning about the room Artiste but silently and morosely so.
He prevented her placing trunk line telephone calls with the night concierge to Arthur Sweetser in Information, to tell him about her revelation. He said she could book the call in the morning.
She was almost drunk. Unsteady and almost undone. Unsteadily undone, Edith, undone. Absolutely undone. But not dizzy.
Outside his room, she kissed Ambrose, conscious, very conscious of her mouth, and her mouth said to Ambrose that there was nothing for him to worry about. ‘It is Paris,’ she said into his ear. ‘C’est Paris. No. C’est-à -dire — Paris and Edith.’
She awoke in the dark hotel room very alive, full of Paris, her revelations of the night before still clearly in her mind and pleasing to her. She did not know whether it was her room or Ambrose’s room. She had on her nightdress. She raised herself and saw her suitcase. It was her room. She tried to recall. She did not know where the WC was. She recalled that Ambrose’s room had no bath or WC, but hers did. She did not know the time. She did not know whether there was an electric light switch. There was. She found it. She found her watch. It was 8 a.m. She gave the watch a wind. Her mouth was very dry but she had no headache.
She rolled herself out of the bed and after going to the WC, she opened the windows and the shutters with exhilaration on to a wintry Paris, with only a bare morning light. The rooftops of Montparnasse. She saw a white cat. Behind her the steam-heating in the room made small creaking noises. She heard the building yawning.
She was very thirsty and her mouth savoured the residue and memories of masculinity and champagne and whatever was in the flask of Jerome. She breathed in the baking smells from the hotel kitchen and of Paris.
She stood at the window and exposed herself to the chill air, feeling it in her nipples, and then closed the windows as the cold began to get to her, giggling as she remembered Jeanne suggesting that she should scat sing to the Seventh Assembly of the League.
Since coming to Europe, she experienced winter differently. It tightened her. Although it had to be said that her behaviour the night before had been rather loose. It surely had been. Perhaps she was on her way to being the wickedest woman in Europe. She smiled again.
Turning to the table for water, she saw Jerome’s flask standing there and she recalled the gift-giving. She opened it and sniffed it, still unable to identify its contents, but it certainly wasn’t milk. She placed it against her cheek and then put it before her on the table, admiring its battered leather and silver. Last night she had not appreciated the animal from which the leather had been made and imagined the silver mines, although she had never been in a silver mine. It also obeyed the Rule of Trophy and Memento as an object which she was admitting into her life. She did not believe that all gifts had to be admitted into one’s life. Some gifts were best discreetly stored away or lost.
She poured a glass of water from the carafe on the table.
She’d suffered some sort of crash last night. She had, she thought, somehow tumbled off the rails, but had enjoyed rolling down the slopes for a while.
She recalled every teeming detail of the night. She still believed that she’d had a revelation about scat singing and human parlance. But she had no urge this morning to call Arthur Sweetser.
She then permitted herself to face how outrageously she’d behaved but she could not be sure who knew what she’d done. Could it be outrageous if no one knew what she had done? She rushed to apply one of her ways of going from the old days, the Way of All Doors. She had certainly obeyed the Way of All Doors. Cautiously, she examined her inner state and found that she did not feel ashamed. On the contrary, she felt absolutely amazed. Amazed at herself, and at her audacity, and at her carnality. And, furthermore, she said to herself, looking again at her inner state, I think that I am proud of my carnality. She would never do it in Geneva, but she was glad she had been bold enough to do it just this once. With a complete stranger. In Paris. With a black man. Where better to do it than in Paris? With a black man.
She had flexed her own temerity, had taken voluptuous pleasure intuitively and at will. Deep in the situation, her body had known what she wanted to do, and that impressed her. She had been able to confound and ambush herself, confound all her proper feelings.
She recalled that Ambrose had been the first man to talk to her about this form of physical love and had told her that men liked it, although, even as a girl, she recalled that she’d had an inkling of it, and at university there’d been veiled jokes among the girls while eating bananas. She felt unperturbed about it because it seemed a safe and simple thing to do. She did then recall, in a zigzagging way, an incident from her childhood when at about twelve or thirteen, she had been kissing and cuddling her puppy, allowing it to lick her face. Her mother had warned her about microbes but she had disregarded her mother’s warning. She could not accept that one should be fearful of the lick of a puppy. Nor, she now felt, should one be fearful of the lick of a man. She recalled how the petting of her puppy back then had sometimes brought on a kind of delirium in her. What she’d done with Jerome was a carnal gesture where she knew clearly the beginning and the end and which she could now confidently begin and carry through. She could see that it was by far the best and safest thing for her to do with a man when her complete pleasure was not likely to be met. After all, the giving of pleasure was itself a pleasure which was not to deny the peculiar pleasure of the experience in itself for her. While not replete in the climactic sense, it was somehow complete. Speaking scientifically, it was a complete oral sensation in its gaminess and tang and corporeality. Without a doubt it vitalised the whole of her.
With her teeming morning-after thoughts, and free of any serious self-recrimination, she flopped into the armchair, cradling the water glass against her lawn nightdress.
Reluctantly, she admitted to herself that she could not see how the League could use scat singing. She said a poignant goodbye to that fanciful idea and the idea, like a genie, smiled at her and vanished into the morning light of Paris, having entertained her, maybe enlightened her, but which had to go.
That day she was lunching with Ambrose and Professor Clérambault at the Club des Cent which was a genteel club
for which she would need, she remembered, a new pair of silk stockings. And where she might taste ortolan for the first time.
She toyed with the idea of returning that night to the Ad Lib Club, which was not a genteel club and for which she might not even need stockings, but, really, in the end, she was a girl who belonged at the Club des Cent.
As Edith drank more water in the light of a Paris winter morning, it seemed clear that the jazz word scat had nothing to do with animal scats, but she felt that she’d had a private insight about the animal sense and the jazz sense of scats. That in every conversation there were scats, not all were rhythmical, not all of them were artful. In some conversation the scat was a glimpse of a quandary, or a befuddlement, or in some, a dropping of mystical excrement, something of their soul. True, most conversation was just drapery to make the person conversationally adorable, but the scats were always there, the noises, the rumblings of deeper unspeakable meanings of self, and definitely of quandary and befuddlement. We are all scat singers, Edith declared. She entered some of these thoughts into her personal manual, a beautiful notebook, with its stiff, blue-marbled cover which contained her attempts at poetry and other observations of self and the world. She’d created a special code and she used this to record her encounter with Jerome and to denote the intensity of sensation.
Over a late breakfast, Ambrose referred to Jerome only once. He said to her, ‘Did you actually kiss him?’
She looked across, silent, not from evasion, but from surprise at his question.
‘I have to know,’ he said.
‘Kiss him?’
‘Did you kiss him?’
She thought back to the night and inwardly smiled, realising from his question that he had not seen anything, but also becoming aware then of the underlying concern in Ambrose’s voice. It had to do with Jerome being a Negro. And of course, that had something to do with the whole experience for her. The exotic blackness could not be denied.
Putting down her knife, she reached her hand across to Ambrose’s hand, and she said, honestly, ‘No, dear, I didn’t kiss him.’
They went on with their breakfast and she marvelled that she could do what she had done the night before and yet reappear next morning, back in her ordinary life, washed and carefully dressed, with stocking knees a little damaged perhaps and just barely covered by her day dress, to eat hot rolls and to drink chocolate in a hotel dining room.
‘I think I had something of a crack-up last night,’ she said. ‘I was a bit off the rails.’ She didn’t explain that she had enjoyed rolling down the slopes.
‘You were a little overwrought.’
They discussed their plans for the day. ‘I’m to have my hair styled at a place in the Passage de l’Opéra recommended by Jeanne,’ she told him, ‘and then we’ll go to a long Parisian lunch at your Club des Cent with the fascinating Professor Clérambault.’
‘Not shorter?’
‘The hair or the lunch?’
‘Your hair.’
‘Yes, shorter. The lunch — longer.’
Although she did not care for strange hairdressers, she looked forward to the touch of a fine hairdresser, to feeling his strong fingers kneading her scalp, to have a strange hairdresser’s hands praising her hair, and to be flattered by words and by touch, pampered and cut. To emerge cool and dazzling about the head, to catch sight of her newly shaped hair in shopfront windows.
‘If it’s any comfort,’ he said, ‘Liverright was a little more overwrought than you.’
‘Yes, even I was aware of that,’ she said.
‘Truth be said,’ Ambrose smiled at last, ‘we were all a little buzzed.’
Whatever he’d seen or not seen last night, Ambrose was now brightening; forgiveness was in the air, and the jolly Ambrose was returning. She wanted to go with him to the genteel Club des Cent, that Edith was returning also, and that Edith had her style and needs as well.
The Question of Germany
It was Edith’s job to see that the horseshoe table was correctly positioned in the Glass-room, where the Council met.
She considered herself very good with workmen and with tables.
The workmen made some jokes in French about horses with hooves the size of the table, the resulting manure, and relating this to the business of the League. She understood their jokes, although not all of the Swiss argot, and briefly laughed with them, but not giving herself over fully to their joking, showing by her restraint, she hoped, some mild protest against mindless anti-League humour — and she’d learned how hard it is in politics to argue against a joke. At the same time she tried to show that she did not consider herself above them, showing them Australian mateship while not engaging in that false camaraderie that pretended to deny other differences.
She’d explained to them what the table was for, its importance in the scheme of things, and a little about how the Council worked. She always wanted people to like their work and to understand it.
She was pleasantly aware too, of the constant glint of their male glances off her body, like sun off moving water.
The horseshoe table was on a raised platform at the end of the hall. Edith measured the distance from the walls with a tape to ensure that the table was dead centre. She experimented by coming and going to the table from the door behind it, and ensured sufficient room for chairs to be pushed back, keeping in mind that some subordinate would be perhaps seated or standing behind the member of Council.
When the table was in position, she sent one of the young workmen to get small metal carpet protectors for the table legs.
With her hands on her hips, she then stood way down at the back of the room where the public would be and looked at the table, imagining the Council seated around it. She had positioned Miss Dickinson’s chair for the Council President. She was still having trouble understanding quite why Sir Eric thought the horseshoe table overcame protocol problems. She could see that it meant that no member of Council had their back to the room, which would happen with a round table.
She always liked the idea that the Glass-room was formerly the ballroom of the hotel. Momentarily she saw the elegant European couples from the past waltzing on the parquet floor, she heard the murmur of conversation and laughter, the waltzes. The smell of the room always reminded her of the day of her arrival.
She’d had wax polish and a cloth sent up from the cleaning staff and she polished the table and chairs herself. She hummed the Blue Danube.
She then went along the hall to stores and asked for the national place names used by the Council, including the new one for Germany. She arranged them on the Council table, and arranged the chairs. For a finishing touch, she wished that there was a League pennant which she could affix to the table. She gave Miss Dickinson’s chair a final polish.
Finally, as her assignment had specified, she called Sir Eric’s office and left a message that the table was in place and ready for him to inspect.
He came almost immediately.
He walked around the table, hands clasped behind his back. He tested the moving of a chair back from the table as she had done.
‘You know, at Locarno Sir Austen wanted a round table to accent the equality of all present — there was no round table, so he decided on a square one. But no square table either. Sir Austen took a rectangular table, measured it himself and then had them cut it clean in half. Had legs put on the sawn end. Worked well. An historic table.’
He seated himself at the table where the President would be seated. ‘Never underestimate the importance of the table.’
‘I don’t, Sir Eric. I am something of a student of tables.’
‘I say, this is a fine chair.’ He stood and examined Miss Dickinson’s chair more closely. ‘Needs a cushion, though, wouldn’t you say — or aren’t you a student of chairs also?’
Yes, she said, she was a student of chairs and also of rooms. Edith ‘reminded’ him where the chair had come from. But not how it had got there.
‘Can’t keep tr
ack. As long as someone worries about these things.’
‘Yes, Sir Eric.’ She suggested he make a reference to Miss Dickinson and the orphans at the next Council meeting.
‘Write me a little speech about it. Make sure I get it before the meeting.’
Grand Days Page 18
