Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I consider that very, very generous, dear Edith.’ He seemed tearfully grateful, and he reached out for her hand again, in a clumsy way, but again she avoided his hand. ‘Have me as your “rotten friend”.’

  Could she do that? Put him in the peculiar category of rotten friend? Did you need some category like that in life? No, she couldn’t see that. What she needed was to make herself absolutely clear without being unduly cruel.

  ‘I want a peace with you, is what I mean. But there is a preamble to the peace — my allegiance is to the League. Any friendships I form must never conflict with or harass that allegiance.’

  ‘How binding is a preamble?’ he said lightly, referring back to some old discussion, using their old conversational style.

  She replied in a dull voice, obedient to the call of the old days but no longer part of them in spirit. ‘A preamble has no binding force. It simply states the purpose and spirit of the treaty.’ She saw how he was clinging to the rituals of their old friendship, trying to keep them both bound together in the old ways.

  ‘You always learned well, Edith.’

  ‘You were a good teacher. Ambrose — ’ her voice becoming firm and neutral, stripped of intimacy and of warmth, she wanting no misunderstanding, ‘whatever we are to each other in the future, it will never, can never, be the same as it was. It can be a peace between us but not a friendship.’

  ‘Not a friendship?’ he said in a voice as hard as his face during his first reaction to her announcement.

  She paused while the main course was served and the waiter had gone.

  ‘A peace between us,’ she repeated, ‘but not a friendship.’

  The situation had shuffled itself and it became starkly obvious to her that she could not again be seen to be associated with him. That he could jeopardise her integrity, her career, her standing. She hoped he would resign and go out of her life.

  He did not touch his food. He spoke in a low pained voice, ‘Remember, Edith, surtout pas trop de zèle.’

  He was hiding also, hiding behind this diplomatic talk, inveigling her into it as well. It seemed so ridiculous. She felt, though, the point of this remark. She did tend to be zealous and she sensed she was becoming more so. Time was so short to remake the world. She was impatient. This led her to zeal, or was she just sedulous?

  ‘I take your advice,’ she lied — maybe zeal was what might be needed — ‘I see myself, though, as sedulous, not zealous.’

  He managed to capture her hands in his and said with a friendly voice, oddly inappropriate to the words he seemed to be uttering, ‘Let us cease to be friends and lovers then.’

  She was surprised to have him take her hands at the same time as he’d relinquished her and their friendship.

  He then said, ‘Let us, dear Edith, instead, marry, and be man and wife.’

  The idea cuffed her. She looked to see if he were jesting and he clearly was not. She removed her hands from his, as her first reaction. ‘And who will be the wife?’ she managed to get out, making it as a joke, but it was a biting statement, containing her refusal.

  He smiled seriously and said, very seriously, ‘We know all the worst things about each other — or at least you know my worst tricks.’

  ‘Ambrose, it is simply not conceivable.’

  ‘I would give up my bad habits. Some at least.’

  ‘Which, dear Ambrose, which of your multitude of bad habits?’ She hated now his way of reducing the gravity of things by college flippancy which again infected her way of responding.

  ‘The spying habit, for one. I’ll retire hurt.’ He was regaining his airy style, his life-lightly-lived form.

  She was not playing with him any more. They were no longer playmates in life.

  Perhaps it was a chance to save a spy, to reform a spy. She smiled inwardly, with a sad severity. That was what a spy would say to save himself. And that observation established simply the impediment now in any relationship with him: from this whole dirty incident onwards, she could never again believe what he said. That was the gist of it for ever more. She supposed that he would realise this too, sooner or later.

  He was, unbelievably, waiting for her to answer his proposal of marriage. She almost said she was married to the League, but simply said, ‘I’m afraid, Ambrose, that I couldn’t.’

  He nodded, small tears came to his eyes and he pretended to rub his face while his fingers wiped them away. She thought that the pretence was in the transparent act of concealment, that she was meant to see him trying to conceal his tears. She did not reach across to him.

  He did not urge his suit of marriage. ‘But at peace then.’ His voice was forced back to the businesslike, if not the flippant. ‘You won’t tell. I will retire as a spy.’

  She looked at him again with disbelief. ‘How could I believe you?’

  ‘Because we are dear friends.’

  She felt the beginnings of disgust with him. ‘I have already told them.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come to me first?’ His voice was toneless.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  He didn’t answer.

  She told him then of spying on him. She also brought up the fact that he had said to her that he would reword the report about herself and the Sapphist, but hadn’t. She didn’t mention Under Secretary Bartou’s role.

  He listened without speaking or eating. He seemed to accept that he was fully exposed and that she was deeply hurt.

  She said, rather bluntly, ‘Why don’t you leave — resign — go home?’

  ‘What has Under Secretary Bartou in mind for me? I suppose he knows all?’

  ‘He knows all. I don’t know that it’s up to him.’

  ‘I think I will wait and see — attentisme. Take my chances.’

  She said, ‘And I see that as a master spy you know to whom I have been speaking. How did you know that I’d talked about this with Bartou?’

  ‘When you were at lunch yesterday in the restaurant with Victoria, I saw the way you ate your orange. I know about the Old Swiss Fox and his passion for oranges.’

  He was obviously pleased in a minor way with himself about the orange observation, again slipping into his frivolous tone. He chuckled, ‘You’re impressed.’

  She let him have his petty pleasure. Regardless of his outward act, Ambrose was increasingly distracted and neither of them did justice to their dish. She wished to end the dinner now but it had to run its course and it continued in a strained way, as he returned once or twice to his attempts at justifying himself, still arguing that to serve two compatible masters was no crime.

  He then came up with the defence that he was not so much a spy as an observer in a balloon. ‘I was really carrying dispatches by observation balloon from one part of the army to another. That’s how it should be seen.’ He mumbled something about the status of an observer in a balloon being left as an open question by the Brussels Declaration.

  ‘But you weren’t in a balloon.’

  ‘Not strictly speaking. No. True.’

  For one odd moment, he appeared to have seen himself in a balloon. He seemed to have actually entertained the idea, literally.

  ‘Or even more pointedly,’ she said, attempting a lighter tone herself, ‘if you were in a balloon, then that was something else you forgot to tell me.’

  He was grateful for her lightness of tone, and seized on it, laughing too much at her small joke and prattling on about the ‘balloon defence’ as if that might be his exculpation.

  On and off, she entertained the idea that his conduct could be mitigated by explanation, but no, for all his twisting rationale, the breach had been made and she was distanced from him and she stopped listening with the hope that something might be said which would erase everything, which would, by some verbal alchemy, return things to the jolly way they’d once been. As the meal laboured on she was still able to enjoy his refinement, his attempts not to succumb to the unhappiness of the evening, his banter, now a little half-hearted but still there, and hi
s possession of exotic information now all brought to the service of perhaps gaining her complicity, her forgetfulness, or her forgiveness. How painful it was to try to eat fine food when you felt such unhappy tension. She was tormented, too, by the memory of fine dinners they’d shared there in the past. She felt a sad, shedding feeling and it left her standing alone on a new windy plateau in life, yet as he prattled, he seemed to be determined not to acknowledge that he had wrecked their friendship. His refusal to face it served to keep her dry-eyed, at least for now, and prevented her from falling into grief.

  Only once during the meal did he approach self-pity or the maudlin and it was while throwing out some of his typically exotic information.

  He told her that he’d heard of despairing African soldiers doing it during the War — using an incantation to commit suicide. By uttering a long combination of sounds and words and, at the same time, manipulating the breathing, this self-cursing, this incantation caused sufficient psychological and neurological pressure to come to bear against the human system that it literally stopped the person breathing and caused a nervous seizure, resulting in collapse and immediate death. He said that it probably inhibited the vagus nerve. ‘I wish I knew it,’ he said. ‘I believe it could be taught only in sections — taking over a year. The witch doctor charged a very large fee for teaching it. I suppose by the end of the year you’d forgotten why it was you wanted to die.’

  She’d said that it sounded fanciful and added that whatever the outcome of all this was, he would survive. ‘The Foreign Office will always have you back,’ she said both to continue to bring home to him that something very serious had happened in his career and between them, and to lessen the horror of it for her.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, replacing his mask of self-possession, ‘always a bolt-hole there.’

  She wondered if this was a situation where she should practise the skill of knowing how to make someone resign.

  He made only one mildly unkind remark: ‘We always spend third term at college getting rid of those people we befriended too quickly in first term.’ She did not take it up, except to say, that in their case, it had been a long first term.

  It allowed her one intimate criticism of him. ‘You’ve never bought me a gift as long as I’ve known you,’ she said. She’d always thought it was more of a confirmation of the limits of their former love and, at the same time, said something about his selfishness. Now it was an idle remark of curiosity, given the circumstances.

  His reply bewildered her. ‘I never had the courage to buy you anything,’ he said, his voice humble. ‘I thought I might get it all wrong. Might buy you something which damned me in your eyes.’

  She had no reply to this. She saw that her power had been unfelt and therefore unexercised, at least consciously. It was the unfelt power of the young and of the beautiful.

  After uncomfortable excuses to the proprietor about their not fully consuming the main course, they managed some cheese for the sake of appearances but did not have dessert, and there was no lingering over after-dinner drinks.

  There was the final act of severance to be gone through, that of collecting her things from his apartment. As they took a taxi, she explained that she would do it tonight.

  ‘Of course. Best thing,’ he said.

  The taxi reached his apartment and she had the taxi wait for her, feeling as she did, that it made her intentions about the visit severely clear.

  She was surprised that Ambrose made a gesture, without much ardour, towards continuing the carnal part of their life, propelled perhaps by some insistent male urge, or maybe by deviousness. ‘The comforts of the bed — one last time?’ he said, as they went up the stairs, and although his voice was without any confidence in her reply, it did carry some right of assumption. ‘Shall you and I play the dally? What do you say, Edith?’ As if this could continue without friendship.

  She shook her head and perfunctorily squeezed his hand. ‘I will collect my things and say good night.’ She wanted for it to be over quickly and to be gone. Her sexual desire for him had been waning, and she found no desire within her this night. She hoped that it stayed this way and that she would not have to live with any sexual torment, as well as whatever other torments of spirit lay ahead for having been involved in this mess of his downfall.

  As they went into the flat, she felt the pull of another bond that had been in his proposal, another allegiance, but she’d let it pass without listening to its demands. It was the bond of petty decadence: their sexual practices had been a secret bond. She glimpsed the outlines of another web of allegiances spreading from this — it was the midnight intrigue and involvement which surrounded his minor vices and her indulgence of them, and her tolerance of the Molly Club people, that small, strange nation of the night, and she saw that, yes, it too had its allegiances and made its demands. But she could walk away from that web because it had never truly enfolded her. She’d been simply audience to his petty decadence. She thought that Ambrose, in a way, had also disgraced their secret life because there had been a courageous truthfulness that had sprung from their petty decadence which, it was now revealed, he had not fully honoured.

  While she gathered her things from the apartment, he stood by abjectly with a large Scotch. She put her things in one of his suitcases.

  He prattled bravely to cover his nervous unhappiness. ‘The business in bed — the girl’s clothing and all that — tell me, you were put off a bit by that?’

  ‘No, I rather liked that from time to time — our love in costume. You looked good in the clothing.’ That sexual play had touched something in her. He was simply seeking to recover something of their intimacy; he was desperately holding on.

  ‘Thank you.’ He said only one serious thing: ‘Admit that I battled for the whimsy in your soul, Edith. I was a friend to the caprice in you.’

  Her soul was receiving some scrutiny these days. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I always appreciated that.’

  ‘I hope it stays alive.’

  ‘It will. I’ll see to that.’

  ‘Don’t let sedulity, or whatever, destroy your caprice, Edith.’

  ‘I won’t. I will return the suitcase to you at the office tomorrow.’

  ‘Here — let me.’ He put down the glass, and carried the case down to the waiting taxi.

  ‘Cheerio and toodle pip,’ he said, tears in his eyes, his merriment, again, abject. Tears came to her eyes too, but she did not show them. As the taxi began to pull away, he was still moving alongside and he tapped on the window. She told the driver to wait, and wound down the window.

  Ambrose whispered to her, ‘Without you to help with my clothes buying, I will go out of fashion.’

  She smiled. ‘You’ll find another lady buyer, I’m sure.’

  She wound up the window, telling the driver to proceed.

  She felt a cold, lifeless relief from having parted from him. As the taxi passed through the night, Edith thought briefly of the American woman, the voluptuary upon whom she had spied and from whom the whole sad matter had arisen. She found it impossible to believe that she had ever contemplated going back to dally — using Ambrose’s word — with that woman. That she had entertained that idea at the time was to do with the atmosphere of petty decadence created by Ambrose around them both. But she summoned up the voluptuous feeling of being with the woman that night, savoured it, and then let it fade.

  The following month, having agreed to sever his connections with the British Foreign Office, Ambrose was moved to the part of the section where he would be concerned with building maintenance, furniture, and cleaning. Even this, she saw as evidence of the British at the top looking after their own. Or maybe it was the other club — of those men who had served in the War. She had begun to sense that within the organisation many ‘clubs’ had formed. Even she belonged in one or two. Had he been a spy for the Bulgarians or a Balkan state he would not have kept his job. Later when she queried this with Under Secretary Bartou, he had replied in a mock Bri
tish accent, ‘“You don’t ruin a good fellow because he’s been a silly ass.”’ She didn’t know if it was Sir Eric he was quoting.

  Ambrose’s acceptance of this demotion and that he did not bolt back to the Foreign Office showed her that he was determined to go on working for the League in whatever capacity and that he did have an allegiance of a kind. Or was it that, in reality, he had no other place to go? A few months after his demotion, he sent her a cheque for the money he owed her, although it was for a lesser amount than her records showed. It contained a note which cried out for some reconciliation but she couldn’t grant that. She wished he’d gone back to England.

  She formally received an invitation to work with Under Secretary Bartou, and on the day that she went to see him to formally accept, she made clear one thing which had been worrying her.

  She reminded Under Secretary Bartou of an earlier conversation about eunuchs.

  Under Secretary Bartou nodded.

  ‘I feel honour-bound to make a statement,’ she said.

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘Ambrose Westwood is not a eunuch. Or anything resembling a eunuch,’ she said.

  She felt she owed Ambrose that. She didn’t want to dislodge by her silence any avalanche of rumour and innuendo which might begin to further fall on him with his demotion. Maybe Under Secretary Bartou might be able to check some of that avalanche. Although Ambrose may not have been an altogether conventional man, they had, for a time, been true lovers, as a man and a woman. She saw that she was also protecting the reputation of her womanhood. She did not want to be known as Someone Who Had Eunuchs as Friends. Not, at least, until she knew more about eunuchs.

  ‘I note that,’ Under Secretary Bartou said, and with a smile added, ‘in my head.’

  Leaving Under Secretary Bartou’s office, she was now sure that she walked the corridors in a different way. It was a self-assurance but it did not come so much from her rise within her vocation, but rather from the dark, maybe grim, wisdom which increasingly seemed to come from the daily practice of the idealism of her vocation. Her body in her new suit felt vigorous, but her heart had been scarred again. She did recall Edward Trenbow, a friend who had been for a while a doctor in her home town, once saying to her that a scar was the strongest part of the skin. She fervently hoped that he and her father were both right about scars.