Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  She remained at the commission for an hour to watch her table livery at work. The delegates did use it as she predicted and no delegate changed the arrangements. All delegates drank from the bottled water. Some read the label of the bottle. She did wonder if they drank from it simply because it was ‘there’?

  As she walked to the Bavaria she felt pleasantly stateless. She thought that Geneva with its medley of languages helped people feel stateless. Someone had said that being in Geneva was being nowhere. Whatever she had shed of her nationality had been replaced with a sense of the momentousness which she drew from her work at the League. Though she was annoyed sometimes because people granted you the mystique of your nationality but couldn’t see how you were international. And although opinion in the Secretariat was against the idea of the League being a super-state, she liked the idea. She now liked the idea of the League having its own flag and stamps and passports. Its diplomatic status. It was not going to adopt Esperanto or find its own language, but it did have its own vocabulary and it was making its own customs.

  Harold Nicolson had said to her that being internationalist for him meant that he would have to stop using the word ‘wogs’. She did not like the man. There was something deficient in his oh-so-civilised self.

  Sometimes, too, she was left with the lonely feeling of being part of a new organisation which didn’t yet have itself very well known. She yearned for the League to be stronger. Although when she showed the American millionaire James Forstall through the Secretariat at the Palais Wilson he’d said, ‘You have taken over the biggest and best hotel in Geneva. That shows that the League means serious business. An organisation with a plant like this cannot fail. And back home we’ve outlawed slavery and we’ve outlawed the saloon — now let’s outlaw war.’

  She agreed that it was difficult to understand why it hadn’t been thought of before.

  Ambrose was waiting in the Bavaria. ‘Sherry?’ he asked.

  She felt thirsty. ‘Beer.’

  ‘Beer! How queer to want beer. Local or what?’

  ‘I suppose it’s now permissible to order a German beer?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ Ambrose said with mild surprise, and with a slight grumpiness, ‘it may even become fashionable again.’

  He called Maurice, the waiter.

  ‘Pilsen or Munich?’ Maurice asked, order pad and napkin so correctly held. German beer seemed never to have disappeared from the Bavaria. ‘You come from thirsty work?’

  She agreed with Maurice that she had indeed come from thirsty work. ‘Munich, please — for the taste of Weimar.’

  ‘Your best Munich lager bier for madam and a sherry for me,’ Ambrose said. ‘Remember, Edith, I am a child of the War. They cut down the oaks, remember.’

  ‘The oaks?’

  ‘In 1870 — the Germans cut down the oaks of France.’

  She laughed at him.

  He flared with irritation. ‘Hell, Edith! There were atrocities. They did happen. The Germans did commit them — and within the first month of war. Dreadful things. Believe it or not, they are not like us at all.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She still sometimes forgot the consternation that Germany always caused in him.

  He forced himself to recover immediately. He gave his wicked smile. ‘Although, as you well know, I am very much a Weimar girl.’

  ‘Indeed you are.’

  The drinks arrived.

  ‘A drink to — what?’ Ambrose asked. ‘The triumph of stationery stands?’

  They touched glasses and drank.

  He said to her, ‘Did you get your bottled water?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good for you. You know the stationery stands and bottled water controversy resurfaced at the Directors’ meeting today.’

  ‘Ye gods!’

  Ambrose mimicked McKinnon Wood: ‘Is this proper professional concern with the work of the conference or is it an excessive womanly concern with unimportant detail?’

  ‘He worries about women taking authority.’

  ‘Sir Eric approved. On the basis of defending “delegation of duties”. The Marquis Paulucci defended your good taste. It wasn’t a big issue, Edith.’

  ‘It’s more than good taste,’ she said, her voice rising. She also wondered testily what she and the Marquis had in common when it came to good taste.

  ‘I know, I know. Be calm.’

  ‘It’s a question of sense of occasion. There’s a case for pomp and circumstance. Bottled water isn’t exactly pomp.’

  ‘Sir Eric liked your stationery holder.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘He wants one. You had better send one up first thing, And I want one.’

  Since the morning of the shaving, she’d had peculiar sensations when Sir Eric showed any interest in her. She didn’t know what to do with these sensations. It wasn’t infatuation or anything like that, it was more a deep binding which had occurred but for which there were no real protocols of expression or progression. He hadn’t come to her with any special tasks since then. It was as if he didn’t know how to handle it either. She was thrilled that he wanted a stationery holder and that something of her would perhaps be on his desk. She wondered if this were a message for her from Sir Eric?

  ‘Cooper tried to start the argument again today but gave up before combat.’

  ‘He is a man who, in his mind, prepares constantly for engagement but refuses the engagement.’

  ‘He was just being pally.’

  Ambrose told her that Jacklin had opposed bottled water at conference tables in the future — ‘might give the impression that the League is profligate’.

  This did not deflate her too much.

  During their drinks Robert Dole, the prickly English correspondent, came over and forced himself onto them. Dole was known as something of a naysayer. For Dole nothing could ever be innocent. When things were really as innocent as they seemed, people like Dole went badly wrong. He had no understanding of the cunning of integrity in human affairs, which had ways of escaping from the hands of those who tried to manipulate it.

  As Dole arrived at their table, Edith noticed the way that the ever-genial Ambrose avoided making a sitting space for Dole.

  Dole leaned over their table. ‘You know that the pact is really France trying to marry America,’ he said. He went on to say that the Kellogg–Briand Pact, if signed, was simply France manipulating America into a military alliance disguised as a peace treaty. Dole was going about at present arguing that France was the real threat to the peace of the world.

  They were trapped into chatter about the preparatory commission and Edith, as usual, started coolly enough but lost diplomatic restraint and became defensive, arguing in what she called her ill-behaved voice, which rose unpleasantly to just below a shrill. She said that even when countries pretended to obey international law they were, at the same time, inescapably recognising international law.

  Ambrose placed a cautioning hand on her and she strove to get back her reserve and swallow down her shrillness.

  After this unavailing exchange, she and Ambrose had a light meal and then went to his apartment even though it wasn’t yet the week-end. She needed comforting. The falling out with Florence worried her. Dole unsettled her.

  Ambrose took her head in his hands and spoke calmly to her. ‘You must not be so visionary when talking with tipsy journalists. Even the smart ones like Dole — or especially the smart ones like Dole.’

  ‘Even if Dole is right about the French motive, the French may find themselves captives of their pretence. Captives of the Pact.’

  ‘Enough, Edith,’ he said. ‘Enough.’

  She noticed that these days he tired easily of the business of the League.

  He went to the Scotch bottle which stood on a butler’s table with the soda siphon and poured them both a large one. She heard the hiss of the soda siphon and his deeply tired voice say, as he had so often, ‘Edith, you give it all too much heart.’

  She went over to him. ‘P
lease — before we change the subject — you agree, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Everyone agrees that since Locarno, and since the proven power of the League to settle conflicts — Germany in the League, and so on — you agree that things have never looked better?’

  He smiled. ‘I agree. It is a historical fact. Things have never looked better. But you must also keep a realpolitik view of things, Edith.’

  ‘But that’s my point!’ she shouted at him. ‘International accord is realpolitik! Why is it that only disagreement and secret treaties are seen as the realpolitik!’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He pushed the drink at her.

  ‘Mr Stresemann said it is now Sunday in the life of nations. If the German Minister of Foreign Affairs can say that, surely something has changed?’

  ‘Drink your Scotch, Edith.’

  Later, after the Scotch, lying in the dim pink-shaded light of his room, she did relax and she pulled Ambrose to her and ran her hand through his hair, undressing him in the manner that he liked, and she responded to his liking it, undressed him as she would a child, he standing arms raised as she pulled off his shirt, he surrendering to her ministrations, she marvelling once again that although Ambrose was older than she, both in years and worldliness, that age was dissolved and reversed and shifted by the elixir of sexuality. She began to undress, holding out her foot so that he could kneel and take off her shoes as he always did, kissing her feet. She put on her most sensual nightgown while he lay on the bed and watched, as a child might love to watch his mother change, although she, like a mother, revealed little of her body during the changing into the nightgown, she held away discreetly the secret parts of her body he dearly loved to glimpse, if he could, but the peeping and not seeing was, she knew, what also aroused him, and then she came to the bed and sat on the bed, releasing her breast from her nightdress, cradling his head, raising him to her breast, and feeling him so naturally taking the nipple into his mouth, loving to surrender, loving to be released from all the roles of her working day, which she experienced with an intensity that, at times, was almost unendurable, and he also was released from the load of his work, and from himself. She felt the joy of their being able, as grown woman and grown man, to play the games they played, to be unashamed with lascivious words and with their hidden sexual games. She fondled him, pleasured his anus the way she had found he liked, felt herself moisten, and together they became calmly aroused, to the state where she would lie back and spread her legs wide, edging up her nightdress, welcoming him with her hands, guiding him into her, his mother. He calling to her as his mother. Then he would thrust himself into her in what was probably a fairly manly way. And he would sigh and she would peak, and he would flow into her in boyish spurts. In her clouded consciousness, she sensed that he was alive to the sequence and progression of her finishing, now that they knew each other so well, but it did not seem that he did it consciously, it did not seem that it was at all calculated; there was a charming physical harmony between them in their strange, uncommon coupling.

  Next day at the Salle de la Réformation she was met by Cooper, whose face warned her to prepare for complications. His face said that Something Had Gone Wrong. She was annoyed that she hadn’t been the first at the Salle that morning.

  He followed her into the temporary administration office which they shared there at the Salle. She pulled off her gloves and leafed through the daily memoranda, waiting for him to speak. There was a note from Caroline Bailey which she opened and read while Cooper talked.

  ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened.’

  She abhorred that way of beginning a conversation.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, without looking up from Caroline’s note.

  ‘Your stationery holders.’

  Caroline Bailey had written apologising for her ‘hysterical behaviour’ in the Café du Siècle. Caroline asked her to forgive ‘a very nervous and insecure young writer who was making her debut’. There was a postscript which said, ‘I believe in the League.’ Edith was touched and put the note in her handbag. She would go out of her way to make a friendly approach to Caroline. There was no apology from Florence.

  She turned her attention fully to Cooper. ‘What about my stationery holders?’

  ‘Firstly, they’re empty.’

  ‘Empty? Why so?’

  She sat down and looked at him, preparing herself for what he obviously felt was bad news for her.

  ‘Empty. People took the stationery.’

  ‘People? Took it? Locally employed staff? Who?’

  She could see that Cooper was experiencing a confusion of feelings, maybe taking pleasure from her discomfort, but he was also being her superior and trying to show the concern of a senior for a junior in trouble.

  ‘The delegates!’ he said, with a small flourish.

  This did not so much disconcert her as it won her interest. She looked at him. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘The delegates took the stationery. At the conclusion of business last night. They took the stationery. Stuffed it in their bags.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Pretty much all of it. But that’s not all.’

  He stood there, tight from having restrained himself enough to allow for another revelation. She could see he was intrigued too by the strangeness of what had happened as much as he was with trying to surprise her.

  She said, ‘We have more stationery. I’ll replace it,’ knowing, as she said it, that she’d talked too soon, that this was not an answer to what he was about to reveal to her.

  ‘But other things have happened.’

  ‘What else?’ she asked, flatly. ‘Tell it all, Cooper, what are you waiting for — a roll of drums?’

  ‘Some took the blotters.’

  She was genuinely intrigued. ‘They took the leather blotters?’

  ‘Some did. I won’t say which nations. You can guess. But more …’ He again paused, maybe trying to protect her, she thought, more than disconcert her. But he was always so ill-timed in his delivery of even the most surprising information, he usually managed to spill the amusement before it reached the table.

  ‘Cooper, go on.’

  ‘Some took the stationery holders!’

  This more than confounded her. She did not want to show him that she was in any way unprepared for anything that could happen within the jurisdiction of her preparations. But this. This was confounding. Senior diplomats and members of parliament of some of the great nations had taken — stolen — League property? Or maybe it was more likely to be the advisers and aides and so on. She restrained herself from dashing to the meeting room to see for herself.

  She now realised that she felt quite cold. I’m shocked, she thought. She looked back at Cooper who was watching her. This was not his problem, this was her part of things. I piss on you, Cooper, she thought to herself, wondering where that expression had sprung from. The Bavaria, no doubt. She used it not against Cooper, really, but against the world.

  ‘I’ll take a look, in due time. Thank you for telling me.’

  ‘I say, Berry, I am sorry — but when you look at it another way it is a bit of a joke, isn’t it? I mean, do we call the gendarmes or agents from Securitas? And then, you couldn’t very well arrest the Latin chappies, could you?’

  I piss on you, Cooper, she said to herself as incantation, I piss on you, piss on you, while acknowledging that in his clumsy way, he was trying to ease things. She got up. ‘Thank you, Cooper.’ She left the office to go to the main hall. He made to follow her. ‘I won’t need any help, thanks, Cooper. I’ll work something out.’

  The hall was empty save for a man in a dust coat working on a microphone. She was conscious that Cooper while not having accompanied her was now standing over at the far door, watching, concerned. Many of the blotters had gone, twelve of the stationery stands, nearly all the stationery. Even ashtrays were missing here and there. All the inkwells remained. At least they had not spilled the ink on the floor and taken those.

  She
could simply remove those stationery stands which were left and pretend that they’d never existed.

  She would not pretend that they had never existed.

  Edith felt weak.

  It was true that most of the delegates to this preparatory commission were politicians and their assistants and military experts — not diplomats. She did not know if that made a difference. Still, only twelve of the stationery stands were missing.

  She sent a messenger to stationery supplies and had the spare blotters sent across urgently. She had the replenishment stationery in the office there at the Salle de la Réformation but had not planned on them taking it all or using it all on the first day.

  She tried to come up with a plan. I would imagine, she thought, that they will souvenir only one of each thing. She hated the aesthetic shallowness that ‘souveniring’ represented: a collection of things stolen — worse, usually things easily stolen. It was about as aesthetically discriminating as plunder. Well, those who took the stationery stands did show some taste. But the stationery stands she could not replace.

  At the morning meeting of staff she could see that her conference table livery and the aftermath were a joke. They were mainly Disarmament section people, not Internal.

  ‘You invited theft,’ said Rosting, who was in charge of premises and house staff, ‘you give people things so good, of course they steal. I will ask the President of today’s session to request their return by 0900 Wednesday. I will be personally present to witness their return.’