Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Maybe. Maybe we will have need of other people’s spies to inform ourselves at times of crisis. Yes, I can see that.’ He looked at her. ‘I have a question for you — about something which intrigues me,’ he said. He seemed to want to spend the afternoon mulling over the matter also.

  ‘Yes?’ She tensed herself against more probing into her intimate life with Ambrose.

  ‘The pain of turning against a friend I can understand, but as an Australian, your soul began where Major Westwood’s soul began — in the heartlands of England, with some Nordic blood perhaps. You are of the same stock — do you not feel allegiance? Loyalty? Can you so easily turn against him? I suppose I ask as a former Swiss diplomat with a very great curiosity about the English and their empire.’

  Sitting there, she thought about it as best she could. She’d had too many other complications concerning standards of self and friendship to have had time to think of grander notions. She had not thought of the allegiance of British blood. ‘It did not come to me in those terms at all,’ she concluded, wondering if this was another dagger which would come sooner or later to cut her in the dead of night.

  ‘Interesting. Your soul came from the same place but it has been altered. Altered by the sun and by the pioneering and by the distance in under a hundred and fifty years. I am interested in what happens to the national soul when it’s transplanted.’

  ‘What happens to our souls when we are transplanted to Geneva?’ She gestured at the unseen thousand people working away in the Palais Wilson and the other buildings. ‘Or what about you? Seemingly still on the soil of your own country but legally in a diplomatic nether region.’

  ‘The discovery of our international soul?’ He smiled. ‘You’re right. Those of us who come to work at the League are all immigrants.’

  ‘You return home though when you step outside the door, back onto Swiss soil.’

  ‘True. But I can never be Swiss again in the same way. Another question: is there an Australian way of handling a friend who turns out to be a spy?’

  She thought of the romanticising of the bushrangers in Australia, which she didn’t like. She said that a spy might stand a chance of becoming a popular legend like a bushranger — if he or she spied for the right country at the right time.

  ‘But I grew up in a family which believed in polity — my father’s word: that we were involved in the making of the polity, the making of our new culture. Openly doing this. People secretly serving foreign masters — even spies serving English masters — were considered to be something of a danger.’ She smiled. ‘Especially those serving the Pope.’

  ‘What was your father’s occupation that led him to use words such as “polity”?’

  ‘My father was in business but he was also something of a private scholar. He had a large library. He read a lot.’

  ‘What business?’

  ‘He had a small factory which made water tanks. And other things. He sold anything to do with water — piping, pumps. He said that Australia was always going to worry about water and that’s the business he went into.’

  ‘Tell me of your upbringing.’

  ‘My mother put everything into the Red Cross. That was her life. After being a mother. She was State President and held all sorts of positions. Although now it’s a bit inactive in the town.’ She was away a lot, Edith thought. Perhaps a good mother should not be around too much. Edith found herself at last on prepared ground, having thought much about her upbringing while in Chamonix. ‘I was raised on Six Ethics. The Ethic of Rationalism which kept me away from religion and pushed me towards science although as it turns out, I am not a very good scientist. My father’s mother was a follower of Ingersoil.’ She looked at him to see if he knew Ingersoll. ‘The great American agnostic,’ she said, in case he didn’t know. ‘He believed in what he called the “enfranchisement of the human mind”. He liked good wine and good food, too.’ She tried to be light. ‘I follow him on that as well.’ That was perhaps enough about Colonel Ingersoll. ‘That’s how my family came to know the Lathams. John Latham worked for the Rationalist Society for a while.

  ‘The Work Ethic — which as a Swiss you understand — pride in work, thoroughness, the making of things.

  ‘The Study Ethic. I grew up in a house of books and talk of books and of magazines; we had Ingersoll’s magazine in the house for as long as I remember — my father still sends me issues — and we were Democrats who believed we were responsible for our domain.

  ‘The Obligation to Participate. The citizen had to participate — my father would say, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of fighting for it.” That sort of thing. Both my mother and father talked of democratic voting as “the ceremony of the whole”. The family were forever at meetings and the family itself was a continuous meeting. They would quote Ingersoll: “every family a republic, every fireside a democracy”.

  ‘And my mother taught me the Ethic of the Domestic, how to make a beautiful life around oneself, the ceremonies and graces of domesticity. There were codes of conduct which followed from these ethics. That’s how I understand being Australian.’

  She sat there with a satisfied smile. He sat there with a surprised and interested smile.

  ‘My father also drilled wells. He searched for water but he wasn’t a water diviner. He used geology.’

  ‘To me it sounds like Calvinism sans Calvin. I see why you are at the League of Nations.’ He said he thought she had mentioned only five ethics.

  She ran through them again in her head, cursing herself. Was there something deficient in someone who couldn’t hold six points in their head? ‘I missed the Bush Ethic. Self-reliance yet willingness to give help to others and to combine to do things together as a community — mutual aid. We liked to go out into the bush as a way of exploring the country and nature.’ She decided she’d said enough. She hoped it didn’t sound as though her family was dreadfully serious. But she supposed it was a serious family.

  ‘One day you might explain to me further about what you call the Bush Ethic? Do you know the bush?’

  ‘I know how to find water.’

  He seemed very pleased with her answer. ‘I believe you would know.’

  ‘When I say that I was not a very good scientist, I should say that I passed well. At university my herbarium was much praised. I think I had more species than required. I remember I had more fungi than required.’ She stopped herself, sensing how she was babbling on.

  He took his pipe from his mouth and held it at arm’s length as if studying it. She had once been told that the distance he took his pipe from his mouth was a measure of the importance of what he was about to say.

  He then asked her if she would like to work with him.

  She hesitated. Was this a reward for her informing on her lover? She wanted no reward which would be tarnished, which would carry with it a load of remorse, and be an enduring reminder of this affair. And people were right about the pipe.

  ‘Why are you offering me this?’

  ‘I have asked people about you. I know something of your flair. I remember very well the day you instructed the Directors on how to run the business side of the League. I have followed your files which begin with the visit of an American showman. You’ve handled well what you’ve been given. It’s time you were given more.’

  Strongbow. That was so far back and she often felt that others knew what she had really done. Of course, they couldn’t know.

  ‘Would you have offered me this position if I hadn’t — exposed Ambrose Westwood?’

  He thought about it. ‘This matter has brought you into my focus. I like the way you handled it. There was no “clean” way of handling it. You rolled up your sleeves and did the job. I imagine that’s an Australian characteristic. And a Swiss characteristic also.’

  Dirty work. He was right, she had done some dirty work.

  ‘You did not come to me as an informer. You came to me as a concerned colleague.’
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  She did not want to go on working for the Marquis Paulucci. Her realistic expectations had been eventually to transfer into Social Questions with Dame Rachel to work with La Commission Sentimentale. ‘At what level would my appointment be?’

  ‘You would be, in British parliamentary rank, my Private Secretary, as it were. However, because of the accommodation problems you’d not have your own office, you’d work in here with me.’

  ‘Would I be able to attend Directors’ meetings? That’d be good training for me.’

  He looked at her, smiling. ‘The League of Nations was not created for you to complete your education, Berry.’ He continued to smile at her. ‘Although the new countries, I notice, treat us as a college in international affairs.’

  She said she would like a short time to think about it.

  ‘Remember that ill-defined appointments suit ambitious personalities — you can expand the appointment to suit your aspirations.’

  As she got up to leave, he said to her, ‘Do you know what this agency is — the address that was in Westwood’s secret papers?’

  She could guess at some licentious possibilities. She shook her head.

  ‘It’s strange. It’s an agency which, for a fee, will post your letters from any part of the world.’

  ‘So that you can pretend to be where you are not?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘How odd.’ As she walked down the corridor, she wondered how Under Secretary Bartou knew the function of such an agency. She remembered how she had originally seen Ambrose as a proper English civil servant with endearing vices, and had been rather proud at having him as an escort. But this sort of Englishness held no appeal for her now.

  She was unsure how she would like Under Secretary Bartou, but it was not a question of friendship — it was vocation. Under Secretary Bartou seemed to have become her ally. She smiled grimly at something Ambrose had once said about allies — the surest ally is one with whom you share the spoils. This made her uncomfortable. She assumed that Under Secretary Bartou would earn some commendation from presenting the discovery to Sir Eric and presumably to Council.

  After she left his office, she sat in the parc Mon Repos over from the Palais Wilson but felt no repose. Edith saw now that she’d arrived at yet another position in life. She was going deeper into the hierarchy of the League and closer to it. Ambrose was going further away from it, if not totally away from it, and she from him. She wondered whether, for all his perfidy, she could continue to accept Ambrose as a colleague — if, that is, they permitted him to remain. She now believed that the situation as it had developed excluded Ambrose from any protection from the consequences of breaching that allegiance, and she would not extend sanctuary to Ambrose, nor protection from the repercussions of her actions upon him. He had negated, within the friendship, one of its highest requirements and was entitled now to only a lesser relationship of, say, acquaintanceship. She would have to confront Ambrose with this. Another dreadful deed ahead of her.

  She was learning that to attend to one’s own interests required, at times, the making of hard decisions against others. It was far easier to serve the interests of others.

  She would also consider it a relief to be free of Internal Administration under the Marquis Paulucci di Calboli Barone. He wore a Fascist party badge in the office and was not her style of man. While she had nothing very much against the Fascists or Mussolini, she was against the wearing of badges in the office. Liverright had stopped wearing red in reaction against the Marquis’ example. She’d had less to do with him even than with Under Secretary Monnet.

  She consulted with Dame Rachel who told her to take the position with Bartou. ‘Enough women are shunted into Social Questions. They think we’re best dealing with “miseries and forlorn hopes”, as Mrs Swanwick calls the work of the Fifth Committee. Take it.’

  She went back to Under Secretary Bartou and accepted the position. Under Secretary Bartou agreed that she should talk with Ambrose before any official reaction was communicated to him.

  Her only other thought at this point was that she would, from now on, sit with different people at lunch in the office restaurant. A long way from Florence and her crowd. That didn’t bother her at all.

  She suggested to Ambrose dinner at the Lyrique, one of their familiar places. As soon as they entered the restaurant, she knew the choice of meeting place was wrong and that they should have gone to a neutral place or perhaps to his office. She was embarrassed by M. l’Hôte, the owner, who had known them both for some time now, who presented them with a complimentary apéritif of port wine, treating them not only as favoured customers, but as a favourite couple. Ambrose made one of their old jokes about ‘having a port’ when for most people ‘a sailor or two would suffice’.

  She observed how well she maintained the pretence of normality with M. l’Hôte and Ambrose while they ordered. Another petty deceit in a chain of deceit.

  After they had settled their orders, with Ambrose ordering with gusto and she ordering apathetically, and had their second apéritif of port in their hands, the first having been hastily drunk, she confronted him with her discovery of his secret work for military intelligence. Her hands were not shaking but they felt as if they were. She did not tell him just yet that she’d been to see Under Secretary Bartou or that she had searched his apartment. Maybe she still hoped that it could all be understood in a dazzling new light and that she could then tell Under Secretary Bartou that the matter should be forgotten. She observed that in the early days she would have told everything at once.

  At first his face showed a coldness and hardness which she had never seen in all the years she’d known him, as if all masks had fallen to show this hardness. He was disturbed and for a few seconds did not look at her. She in turn, seeing the look of hardness, hardened herself.

  Then, in his fashion, he switched to the manner which presumed that the serious things of life were best taken lightly. ‘The game’s up, then. I’m unmasked. And you occupy a new position uti possidetis.’ The jocular pose had replaced the hard face.

  She knew it but couldn’t be sure that she had it right, so she played along and indicated that she didn’t know that diplomatic term, concealing her irritation with his forced jocularity and this game-playing, allowing Ambrose, for the last time, to take his old role as diplomatic teacher.

  ‘It refers to possession of territory. The two parties making a truce at the end of hostilities remain in possession of what they have conquered from each other — in your case, the moral high ground and information about me and my government; you have that by right of conquest. I retain my intelligence work, for what it was worth. But what each of us has conquered must be precisely defined — that is, if we’re to make a treaty of peace between us.’

  He lost jocularity towards the end of this speech and a nervousness began to show. ‘If we are making a peace treaty?’ he repeated.

  He was trying to bargain with her. She wondered if there could be a peace between them. She asked Ambrose how he justified himself.

  ‘Oh, you know old Ambrose — right hand doesn’t know what my left is doing — Ambrose in the daytime is one thing: in the evening she is something else. Life’s rich tapestry and all that.’

  Ambrose then abruptly abandoned the bantering form of life-lightly-taken. He said that coming out of the bloodiness of the War, he’d determined to do everything to secure the peace. ‘And in my view of things that meant both working at the League and also working for my government which I believe also wants to avoid further war. I was helping both parties, dear Edith, because I believed they were as one.’

  She was dissatisfied with this. ‘And if they subsequently became not one with each other — who then was your master?’ She went on with her eating without appetite.

  Ambrose said that sometimes people turned into revolutionaries or zealots before your very eyes. One’s duty then, he said, was to collaborate with those who opposed the zealots. Especially to oppose those z
ealots who thought they were your friends but who had unwittingly become your enemies. He said it wasn’t required by the rules of the game that you told them you were working against them.

  She saw the worrying convolution of his mind which over the years she’d seen surface now and then.

  ‘You see us in the League as dangerous to you? As dangerous idealists? You see me that way?’

  ‘Some in the League are. I am saying that it’s conceivable that the League could be captured one day by zealots. I don’t only mean Paulluci. It could be said that I was helping the League in a way — guarding it. Keeping an eye on it. Helping others to keep an eye on it.’

  This rang hollow or barmy. It was the spies who were the zealots. Conspirators were the real zealots.

  ‘No — you were serving the British government. But the important thing is that this particular higher allegiance was never in the preamble of our friendship. The important thing is that you deceived me.’

  ‘To reveal myself would have defeated my mission. Deception is in the nature of spying. It’s not like other deception. Not like personal lying or anything like that.’ He waved his fork. ‘And I wasn’t a dastardly spy every minute of the day — I could also give my very best to the League at the same time. I was a dutiful servant of the League.’

  She realised she yearned still to be his friend, for things to be as they once were. She wanted to believe him, to be logically convinced of his innocence, even a form of innocence, and to have the pain of the breach and the suspicions and the deception talked away, turned to mischievous joking. But his words were not doing that and she was still left with his massive breach of friendship, as well as a breach of his contract with the League. An ugly blight had settled over the table.

  ‘I want to be your friend, Ambrose.’ She touched his hand. ‘I do want a treaty of peace.’ She regretted using the word friend — it was too imprecise a word, too strong for what she saw for their future. She avoided his hand which reached out. He turned the gesture into the taking of a piece of bread.