Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  Maybe the other member states would not make up the loss of Brazil and Spain, and unbelievably, there were the nations which had become late payers.

  For the League, it was the worst year to date financially. She sensed that others were also unnerved.

  Edith thought those gathered there in the private room at the Café Landolt were definitely the best and brightest of those now working at the League — well, at least of the younger Secretariat members. Those there in the Café Landolt wouldn’t be the first retrenched, if there were ever retrenchments, something else which had been unthinkable until recently, but it seemed to her that it was partly up to them, the younger members of the Secretariat who would one day run the place, to come up with some answers to the League’s finances.

  Edith was doubly depressed. She had been servicing the meeting of the General Transit Committee on Calendar Reform and was sick to death of arguments about fixing the moveable feasts and the simplification of the Gregorian calendar. Frankly, she didn’t care one way or another and was willing to accept that thirteen equal months of four complete weeks each might be best for the world. It was obvious that for the world to work together it had to have one calendar. It was just as obvious that all cars should travel on the same side of the road in every country so that people could use one set of road rules wherever they were. The League could not achieve agreement even on that. Sometimes she despaired. China had its own calendar and was totally opposed to calendar reform and the Pope didn’t want to fix Easter. Though if China didn’t pay its dues, why should anyone listen to them? Of all the work the League did, why did the calendar reform attract an anonymous donation of $10,000? She knew why, of course. It attracted cranks.

  Through the haze of the café and the haze of her tired eyes and the mind haze of the Moselle wine, she saw Cooper expounding. She wondered if she ‘liked’ Claude. She was having trouble with the word ‘like’ and ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. At times, she would find herself thinking that a particular person was foolish but she would make an immediate correction and dismiss this judgement, saying to herself that within all people could be found something of value to any given colloquy.

  Maybe she was suppressing her natural reactions to people, no longer permitting herself to say she liked or disliked. It was also in her nature to expect people to perform better than they could, and she expected that all people could rise up to the circumstance. Sometimes she suspected it was a form of sickness in her, this inner tension. It was a sending of telepathic messages to other people, for instance, during a discussion, urging them to be better, or to recognise that they were not qualified to speak, or had not informed themselves sufficiently.

  Often at the League, people did behave better. In committees, especially, everyone tried harder and often surpassed themselves, often did better than she would ever have expected. Though when things went badly she felt that it was hurting her to suppress herself so. Sometimes she wanted to yell at a delegate on a committee, or to take over the chair. All that life spirit which she put into connecting and seeing the other persuasion. She wanted the right to express animosity and the atmosphere of the League did not allow it. She had also suppressed her urge to ‘apportion blame’. Too often she had had to avoid blaming anyone for what had happened in the world. She felt it was about time blame was apportioned.

  She now made herself listen to Cooper, and that itself was an example. ‘Making herself listen’ to someone. It was a necessary discipline, although when she had time she would dearly love to examine herself to see whether making oneself listen hurt the spirit.

  Cooper was talking about investing in the stock market. He was saying that the League could invest, or that one of the funds — say, the provident or building fund — could be invested, or a staff syndicate formed which might channel profit back into the League.

  She reflexively opposed this. Maybe it was her dislike or, well, her not being empathetic to Cooper that caused her always to take the opposite position to his. ‘We are not an organisation of financial speculation,’ she said, taking a drink of Moselle.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Joshi, who might be a world authority on malaria but who would certainly change his mind according to the way of the wind.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Ambrose quipped, ‘as an organisation we are the greatest speculative venture in history. It could be said that we are purely a speculation.’

  He won some laughs, and she smiled across at him.

  Disregarding the laughter, Cooper said in his boring way that it would give the League another back-up financially.

  ‘By us — do you mean the League or those of us here?’ someone asked.

  ‘Maybe both,’ Cooper said. ‘We could try to get Council to do it, but if not, we could set up our own fund to safeguard us, the staff, from financial disaster if everything crashes. After all, some of us gave up good jobs to come halfway around the world to work here.’

  Sitting beside Edith, Florence was reading the Continental Daily Mail, ostentatiously expressing abstention from the proceedings while still hearing what was being said. She worked in Finance but said she knew nothing of ‘shocks and snares’. Nor would she do anything that Cooper proposed.

  It was not alien to Edith to consider investing, although her father and mother had only a small investment in the stock exchange. She could remember her father being opposed to simply gambling on the stock market but not to investing in it. Gambling, he said, produced neither goods nor services and therefore must be taking from the labour and intellect of the economy without giving anything in return. ‘I like to make things,’ he would say, ‘or I like to make things happen — one or the other. There is nothing else worth doing.’ Consequently, as far as she remembered, he invested mostly in new companies and didn’t make much money from it.

  She sat there and changed her position slightly about Cooper’s scheme, although not about Cooper. What came to her was that she found herself warming to the idea of being ‘a woman who owned shares’. She imagined herself talking at dinner parties about her share-holding and she imagined having wonderfully printed share certificates in a bank strongroom box which she could examine, which said Amalgamated Oil, Trans-Pacific Railroads, Brazilian Gold Mines, and Consolidated East Africa Coffee. Maybe not Brazilian Gold Mines, given their behaviour at the League.

  She and those there at the Landolt were supposed to be experts at organising the work of committees, yet tonight they were breaking all the rules by not having a position paper, an agenda, or anything. She suspected that even Cooper was not an expert on the stock market. They shouldn’t be meeting in the Landolt either. It was the wrong atmosphere in which to inaugurate serious projects. The meeting was a professional shambles.

  She looked over at Ambrose who had borrowed Florence’s paper. He and Joshi were looking at the financial pages.

  Ambrose owed her six hundred francs.

  ‘You seem to have views on the stock exchange, Berry,’ Cooper came back, friendly mockery in his voice. ‘Maybe you’d like to say something?’

  Cooper was guessing that she wouldn’t know anything about the stock exchange, which was correct, despite her background.

  She needed a Way, one of those Ways from days past when she had such things. She decided to go the Way of the Fool, to seek the protection of conceded ignorance. ‘As a matter of fact, Cooper,’ she said, pausing to take a drink of Moselle, ‘I know bugger-all about the stock market.’ She just stopped herself saying, ‘And so do you.’

  This caused laughter of relief which told her that some of the others knew bugger-all about the stock market. She hadn’t sworn in public since university days.

  Joshi slapped his hand on the table with appreciation. ‘I also know bugger-all about the stock market,’ he said laughing, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. ‘I know bugger-all about motor-cars. I know bugger-all about Persian carpets. I know bugger-all about the game of bridge. My professors at Oxford said I know bugger-all about medicine.’<
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  He roared with laughter at his own joking confessions. He kept on going. ‘However, I do know a bloody lot about tennis,’ he said, ‘and I know too bloody much about mosquitoes.’

  More laughter.

  Amid the laughter, she continued with her private reflections and it crossed her mind that owning shares might make her ‘independent’. What was the idea of independence about? Apart from earning her living, why did she feel she needed more? She had her mother’s inheritance, the gift of money her mother had sent her some months back. It then occurred to her that the ‘inheritance’ showed that her mother had been almost financially independent of her father. She returned herself to the conversation.

  ‘Where, then, should I begin to explain the stock market?’ said Cooper, savouring the chance to lecture, addressing them as he might a school class. He explained the stock market to them.

  ‘The secret to my plan,’ said Cooper, seeming to swell with his sense of himself, ‘is that we are well placed to hear — not about individual companies, but we have a bigger ear. We see all those statistics before anyone else, about crop production and the assessment of ore potentials and so on. Predictions of the future of things, of wars and the talk of wars,’ he said. ‘Even the weather affects the stock market and we at the League hear lots about weather prediction.’ He explained about the business people and delegates and experts from the countries of the world who came in and out of Geneva. ‘They’re the people we have to pump.’

  Edith did not like the idea of pumping people. She felt uneasy about the use of the League’s information, even if it wasn’t confidential. This was not the use for which it had been gathered. She felt the conversation was getting close to breaching the proper conduct of officers.

  There was definitely another inner voice speaking to her about this stock market business. She thought it might be the voice of avarice. She was always pleased to find some inkling of vice in herself. Sometimes she felt too saintly working at the League. Which was probably why she sometimes let herself be decadent with Ambrose.

  Although she was not being won over to the plan of involving the League, she was curious to know about the stock market. Her friend from back home, George McDowell, would probably know and he had said he would visit her in Geneva as part of his world trip. John Latham was in Geneva with the Australian delegation to the Assembly Maybe he could advise her.

  Assembly time was a fifth season for Geneva. The city overflowed with delegates, journalists, and visitors from all over the world. A new social season at least. It disturbed and changed Geneva just as much as the climatic seasons.

  The meeting broke up with an understanding that those present would ‘think about it’.

  As she and Ambrose walked home from the Landolt, she listened to Ambrose enthuse about the idea of the syndicate. ‘I must say that I rather like the idea of “playing the market”,’ he said.

  She found herself annoyed by his enthusiasm, and by the way he was ignoring his debt to her. He made no mention of it.

  They reached his apartment.

  ‘Coming up?’ he asked. ‘It’s Friday.’

  She again noted how much she made the decisions within their love affair. ‘Not tonight, dear Ambrose. No.’

  He walked on with her to her pension and there they kissed, and he went away without demur.

  Slowly rubbing the night cream into her face, she pondered the motley feelings she had about Ambrose owing her money. At first she’d been happy to be needed by him. It had been a tangible expression of their bond, and yet now it dissatisfied another part of her.

  That ‘borrowing dulled the edge of husbandry’, came to her at the dressing table. Also something, she supposed, her father had said. She liked the play on the idea of husband. Ambrose — no husband he. She should look for more, though, from life than an adventurous lover. She was, deep down, more emotionally ambitious than that, but it would have to wait. She had other things to do. A world to set right. And now, perhaps, she had the stock market to ‘play’.

  She sat for some moments then in lascivious wanderings, her fantasy settling on recollections of Jerome in Paris. The fantasy led her hand which held her bone-handled hairbrush down between her legs, and with the cool handle of the brush, and with her eyes shut, she pleasured herself.

  The meaning of Ambrose’s debt to her persisted even after this dalliance with fantasy. As she went on to brush her hair, she observed that the problem with lending money to a friend was that a strange burden fell onto the lender.

  Were you a good enough friend to lend money? In asking for the money back, the lender then ran the danger of impugning the honour of the friend who had borrowed it, of suggesting a fearfulness about the money being repaid.

  But to avoid asking for the money caused the debt to become something that the friends couldn’t talk about. It created a perilous spot in the friendship.

  The repayment was not only in money, it involved the borrowing friend’s ‘gratitude’ which could unbalance things, too. Too much gratitude was uncomfortable for both people. Gratitude represented an unspecified and unagreed ‘emotional interest’ on the loan and with the limits of gratitude being so poorly defined it was difficult to ever get it out of the system of the friendship.

  She massaged cream into her feet, the final act of the day, and tried, as always, to get to the bed without her feet touching the floor. Since she’d been about fifteen and conscious of her body and its care she had done this, trying to fly from the dressing table to her bed without touching the floor. She’d told herself repeatedly over the years to use her bedroom slippers, to break the childish habit of hopping barefoot to the bed, but she never had.

  In bed, before sleep came to her, she enjoyed the idea of becoming a modern woman who knew about stocks and shares.

  She took time off to go to the Assembly meeting in the Salle de la Réformation, to hear John speak. She went to hear him at the Assembly as an Australian, to ‘support the home team’, and for an hour or so she allowed herself patriotic feelings, silently barracking for the Australians to acquit themselves well. She was proud that Australia was an international presence in its own right.

  She was glad that the three hundred seats in the press gallery were almost fill to hear John speak.

  John had argued well against the French delegate M. Louchcur, who wanted blank votes included in the count when deciding whether a majority had voted for the candidate nation. M. Loucheur called blank voting ‘inertie courtoise’. He said that some Assembly members cast blank votes to avoid the discourtesy of voting against the candidate country, which perhaps national foreign policy might in other circumstances require, but allowing them at the same time to indicate that they had no opposition to the candidate.

  John said that courteous inertia was an inconclusive argument and that nations should show the courage of their convictions. There should be more plain talking. People should vote yes or no.

  Proudly, she liked his style and she agreed with his defence of plain speaking.

  She caught up with him after the meeting and they went for tea at the Hôtel de la Pair where the Australians were staying. She had talked with them on the day they arrived and had helped them book into the hotel. She congratulated him on his call for plain speaking.

  He said that as a politician, or as a diplomat, he hoped that he never had to engage in double talk or to wear his underpants the wrong way round. She laughed and asked him why he would wear his underpants the wrong way round.

  He said, with a small smile, that some diplomats claimed it was a way of avoiding divine punishment when telling a justifiable diplomatic lie. ‘It is another way of crossing your fingers,’ he said, tickled by sharing it with her.

  For John, it was probably a risqué thing to say. She said that she could never think of him as a double-talker.

  ‘Remember though that evil men will always pretend to be frank,’ he said. ‘I think there’s an argument to be made for “delaying the truth”. I r
emember at the Peace Conference I wanted to release something to the press — I was a secretary to the Committee on Czech-Slovak affairs. I forget the substance of the communiqué. The Chairman, Paul Cambon, said to me, “Your communiqué is quite precise. And if it is published tomorrow, hundreds of men will die in fighting.”’

  ‘How could he be so sure that it would result in fighting?’

  ‘It is judgement. In fact when the final draft of those provisions was released, fighting broke out in Czecho-Slovakia.’

  ‘Delaying the communiqué only delayed the bloodshed.’

  ‘Any delay offers hope of avoidance. By all means, publicise the agreements — no more secret arrangements — but deliberate in confidence.’

  She thought then about how she would describe to herself her ‘secret arrangement’ with Ambrose, often thinking that if she ever had to face a judge in the Court of Proper Life Conduct she would say, ‘What we did together was part of my coming to understand life, and as a caring for another human being in his confusion. I didn’t do it as an act of simple carnal pleasure.’ The judge would then say, ‘How then do you explain your carnal pleasure?’ She would say that her carnal pleasure was ‘after’ she had entered into the situation for other more virtuous reasons.

  Edith?

  Yes, she had done it as a vice — out of carnal curiosity and arousal. There, that was out — admitted to herself, at least.

  She attended to their discussion.

  ‘I heard an argument about what the different armies of the world mean by “surrendering”,’ she said. ‘Some soldiers hoist a white flag. Some throw down their arms. The Prussians raise their rifles butt end up. The French required them also to kneel.’ She laughed. ‘And the Russians embrace those to whom they are surrendering.’