Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘That was one of the worst managed and dullest functions I have ever attended,’ Mrs Swanwick was saying.

  ‘Oh no,’ Edith said loudly, involuntarily, pained, ‘it wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mrs Swanwick in an encouraging conversational tone used for gals from the colonies. ‘And how then should I see it?’

  ‘Well, nothing like this has ever happened — it could never be said to be dull. Surely?’ Edith tried to bring in a note of self-doubt to modify the strength of her reply to Mrs Swanwick. She tried to sound not so defensive. ‘It is to be the first building built and owned by the entire world.’

  ‘But my dear, I felt there should have been pageantry, flags and flowers and singing, didn’t you?’

  ‘The appropriate pageantry hasn’t been thought of yet. No pageantry would be suitable. Any pageantry would just be borrowed from some lesser activity. There just isn’t any pageantry suitable yet,’ Edith struggled to say. ‘For me, it was a simple event of the most magnificent order,’ and then added, rather pompously, ‘and we were invited by history to witness it.’

  That wasn’t really quite what she felt.

  Mrs Swanwick said she would’ve liked some Swiss choral singing and ‘people from the countryside in peasant clothing’.

  That was the last thing Edith wanted. It would then have been nothing more than a Swiss fête. But in general, if she didn’t grate so much with Mrs Swanwick, she would have allowed herself to agree with her more. She would have agreed that the event had needed something else.

  Although she had a lot of time for the other people from the Union for Democratic Control, Mrs Swanwick had always put her teeth on edge. At any banquet, she always made a point of never taking all the courses, as if to say, Look at all you gluttons, look at how frugal and sensible I am, why can’t you all be as frugal and as sensible as me?

  At other Assemblies where Mrs Swanwick had been a delegate, or a supplementary delegate, she was always going bemoaning the banquets and balls and the lavishness of the social life around the League. She didn’t realise that people with less puritanical ardour than she came to the League and supported the League and they needed refreshment and reward to keep their spirits up. Edith felt banquets and so on kept up people’s confidence. And celebrated their labours. Ye gods, what were a few glasses of champagne? People had to feel valued.

  And as for herself, she wanted to take from life as generously as she gave to life.

  She had to admit that Mrs Swanwick was good about always refusing to speak ‘on behalf of women’ because a man never spoke ‘on behalf of men’.

  Edith declined an invitation to dine with Mrs Swanwick and the others.

  ‘It was a new type of History,’ she expounded to Jeanne over tea at Jeanne’s apartment. Jeanne couldn’t come to the laying of the stone because of a sprained ankle.

  Edith felt pressingly that she had to get Jeanne to agree with her about the solemn symbolism of the laying of the stone — and to make herself feel something. ‘Even if it was like a shire council function. It will be the first time a building will belong to the whole world.’ She was still struggling to feel right about the day.

  ‘You make it sound dull, Edith. Oh so dull. I hate to agree with Mrs Swanwick. But certainly not Swiss peasants in costumes.’

  Jeanne asked her to explain what a shire council function was, which, impatiently, she did. ‘But, Jeanne, for the first time, the world is creating a building. And I was there. I was one of the handful of people in the world who saw it happen! Jeanne?’

  ‘It was one way to look at it.’

  ‘The grandeur was inherent. It couldn’t be expressed by a brass band. Or by ceremonials.’

  ‘Edith! But I thought you were for ceremonials? I hear you at other times carrying on about the need for ceremonials.’ She laughed.

  ‘I was. I am. But no one else is — except for Mrs Swanwick who gets it all wrong and wants peasants in Swiss national costume, and anyhow, she’s usually the one who wants less pomp and ceremony. The trouble was that all the ceremonials anyone could think of were from some other time and place and not made for our historical time and place which has never before existed. That was where I was wrong.’ She heard herself declaiming. ‘Maybe I ask too much of the world.’

  ‘That is probably a truth, Edith. But why not ask too much of the world, I say.’

  Edith sometimes worried that the world did not know how to live properly, and that she did. Ye gods, she had often said that the League existed to teach the world manners. Did she, in turn, have to teach the League how to live?

  Really her mood had to do with the leftover feelings of the break with Ambrose. She suspected that Jeanne knew that.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a glass of something,’ she said to Jeanne.

  ‘Look in the cabinet — some port maybe, some pastis?’

  ‘Et pour toi?’

  ‘Une goutte de porto, peût-etre.’

  These drinks didn’t appeal. Edith got up and poured Jeanne a port. From Jerome’s flask in her handbag, she poured herself a Scotch.

  ‘That flask? You hint at the history of the flask but I have never heard the history of that flask.’

  Edith smiled. She wasn’t going to risk another confidence. She stared at her Scotch, ate another madeleine. Her sixth. Her father would frown at her for eating cake and drinking good Scotch. ‘One day, over lunch. It’s a long story. A romantic story.’ Romantic?

  What of ceremonials? Weren’t they part of the complete picture of an institution? The Catholic Church, for example. Ceremonials were the theatre of the institution. The periodical display of the institution’s inner self. Ceremonials were a commitment in a dignified form. Did the paltryness of the League’s ceremonials mean that the League was sober, determined to be about more important matters of substance and that it had no time for the trappings and the pomp of a Church?

  She was grumpy with herself too because of the strength of the remarks she’d made to Mrs Swanwick. In a way she had been put against herself by Mrs Swanwick.

  Last week Mrs Swanwick had talked some of them into going to the Armenian restaurant and eating a peasant’s meal or something of that sort as a political stunt. They all paid what they would have for a five-course French dinner and the money went to some Armenian fund or other. Those people couldn’t enjoy themselves unless it was for a good cause.

  She tried to explain to Jeanne how her exchange with Mrs Swanwick had unintentionally led her to see the stone-laying as ‘simple magnificent history’, quite properly stripped of all commonplace pageantry. She wouldn’t have been forced to see it that way if she hadn’t disliked Mrs Swanwick.

  That raised other terrors. What if there was a whole false way of seeing things which she and other people customarily had, and which she would have gone on having had she not been tripped or trapped into seeing another way by chance encounters such as this?

  It was not because the person you disagreed with saw the world correctly, but that you were forced to see it in an altogether different way, both from how you had seen it and from how the other person had seen it. Through the collision with that person, you were deflected into another third trajectory by the impact. By wanting to distance yourself from that person, you ended up in a new place entirely. But that was hardly a way to find one’s position in life.

  It had been a laying of a simple stone in an empty field, with a casket of languages and money. With words said over the stone.

  But upon that stone would be built the first building owned by the world.

  ‘You know, Jeanne,’ she said, wondering if she was going to weep, ‘I thought it was going to be the most wonderful day of my life. And it wasn’t.’

  ‘Oh, Edith.’ Jeanne awkwardly leaned out of her chaise longue and gave Edith a clumsy half-hug in sympathy, and they remained in this awkward but comforting embrace. ‘What about if you marry — your wedding day! That will be the most wonderful day of your life, will it not?’
r />   ‘You are a true romantique, Jeanne.’

  ‘And you, Edith?’

  She smiled at Jeanne. ‘If I marry. Well, that would be something else. But historically the most wonderful day of my life should’ve been today.’

  ‘Maybe you watch for history too hard, Edith. And me, I search for the romantique too hard?’

  ‘I think you’re right about me, Jeanne.’

  ‘Wedding night might be more likely the most important day, if you can say that in English,’ Jeanne said.

  ‘We aren’t the sort of people who wait, are we? For the wedding night?’

  They both smiled. She knew Jeanne understood what was still disheartening her.

  Jeanne said, ‘It would be nice to wait, I think, sometimes. But — too late.’ Jeanne gave the impression of having had many lovers.

  ‘Yes, too late for girls like us.’

  Something grand should have happened tonight after the laying of the stone. There should have been a banquet in every village, town and city, the whole world should have been banqueting, watching fireworks. Something should have happened on this day of all days, some celebration not yet imagined. Everyone remembered where they were on Armistice Day — no one would remember where they were on the day of the laying of the foundation stone of the new Palais of the League of Nations.

  ‘Showmanship’ was what had been needed. Just that week she’d been saddened by the news that Captain Strongbow had been murdered in China. She’d been touched that Athena had written to her. Athena thought that perhaps the ‘Grand Assembly’ of the League could observe a minute’s silence for Captain Strongbow because of his work for internationalism. Athena had also asked whether the League of Nations had a burial fund to pay for the expense of the return of Captain Strongbow’s body to California.

  Instead of great celebrations, the silly Mrs Swanwick wanted to have tea at an inexpensive place called the le Creux de Gentot.

  Edith thought that maybe she should be appointed Master of Ceremonies for the World. But she instantly plummeted from this grand notion and crashed down amid her own life. She saw that she had lost the domestic ceremonies from her life, she had no true home, she had tried to make the world her dinner table, her fête.

  She couldn’t even choose true and trustworthy friends.

  She poured herself another Scotch and began to weep.

  Arbitrarily appointed Days of Healing did not work.

  The Key to All Predicaments

  At first, Edith was perturbed that Ambrose had been invited to the next Directors’ meeting and had been given permission to make a statement on Agriculture. Apart from it not being his field of expertise, she supposed that she felt that he should have been denied access to the Directors’ meeting totally and for ever more, as part of his punishment, but more than that, she didn’t like the idea of being in the room while he made his statement, though she wasn’t going to miss a meeting because of him. Since their parting of the ways, now over a year ago, she’d barely seen him, except to say hello while passing in the corridor, and consequently no etiquette had evolved to allow them to exist socially or professionally in close proximity. Bluntly, her opposition to him attending the meeting came from a selfish reasoning. She had an equivocal status at the Directors’ meetings, as a stand-in for Bartou. She wanted eventually to be seen as a bona fide part of the meeting and she certainly didn’t want to have to cope with a disgraced former lover at a Directors’ meeting when she had enough to struggle with already.

  Ambrose didn’t seem in any way to hold her actions against her and in the corridor he always tried to ensnare her, while she, on the other hand, always kept going, waving and smiling, but not stopping. She felt she had nothing to say to him. When she’d seen him around the Palais or, very occasionally, at the Bavaria he appeared to her to be going off somewhat. His smile seemed to be overanxious to find a smile in return; his clothes, while still well-made, were not properly cared for. She was also irritated that his going off was still being interpreted by those who didn’t know the full story as being a result of a broken heart.

  Sitting at his large desk, smoking his pipe, Bartou said that Ambrose had been given leave to address the meeting because everyone had a special respect for those officers who’d been there from the beginning.

  ‘Even if that long service was somewhat disloyal?’ she said, grumpily, standing at the window looking at the first snow of winter. ‘Even if it isn’t his field of expertise?’

  Bartou shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s his attempt to find grace again. He can’t be punished for ever.’

  She still felt much more strongly about this matter than he did. Perhaps she didn’t accept that one could regain grace once having fallen from it the way he had. She said she couldn’t see why Ambrose wasn’t asked to put his statement or whatever in writing.

  ‘He said he couldn’t put it in writing — it was philosophically too involved.’

  She could tell there was amusement in Bartou’s tone.

  Bartou added, ‘I suspect that the Latins think that he might be about to tell them a British secret — as penance.’

  ‘It’s a big mystery then?’

  ‘It is, I suspect, a small mystery. And over a fine lunch some time this week, perhaps, I expect you to tell it to me as a good mystery story should be told.’

  ‘You won’t be going to the meeting?’

  ‘This is one for you, Edith.’

  The fine lunches were too common now, and although she described them as luncheon ‘tutorials’, he was teaching her more about lunching than the League. In the old days, Ambrose had taught her about the importance of dinner as a gastronomic expedition whose course was plotted by wine, and a conversational event where wine was the master of ceremonies. Now Bartou expounded the value of the lunch. Back in the office after these lunches, Bartou tended to doze. He was growing old and had earned easy afternoons. And in her case, the guilt of a good lunch made her work even harder and longer. She’d begun also to take telephone calls and answer letters on his behalf, making his decisions.

  Bartou had taken to sending her along to the Directors’ meetings more often than not, unless he had something very pressing to say at a meeting. She felt he was pushing her forward, although at the same time, he was withdrawing somewhat from the internal life of the League to get on with preparing the ground for the world disarmament conference which had become his overriding mission. And by devolvement and choice, it was also becoming her overriding mission. The third leg of the tripod — arbitration was in place with the court of international justice, economic sanctions had replaced war, and now followed disarmament.

  He returned to the subject of Ambrose saying, ‘Diplomacy sometimes requires the capacity to forget. Or, more precisely, it requires some officers who remember and some who forget. Those who can forget are free to get on with making things afresh with optimism, while those who can’t forget issue warnings. If everyone remembered everything in politics, we would all stand eternally condemned and frozen. I think that is why the world forgives and forgets its liars, cheats and other villains. I know we pretend that people in public life who make a serious error are finished. They seldom are if they stay alive and stay in the game. There but for the grace of God, go I.’ He said he thought that knowing ‘when to forget’ was a diplomatic art. And a social art.

  ‘Not I. In this particular case,’ she said. She didn’t care if it sounded priggish.

  But by the time the meeting came around, she’d softened her position a little about Ambrose, and felt that maybe it was time for him to be given a chance to redeem himself, although she would oppose any permanent return to the haute direction. She was also curious to hear what he’d been thinking about and what he’d come up with.

  Her arrival at the meeting room was always carefully timed so that she was not the first there, not wanting to appear an eager beaver, nor the last, fearing that either way she would draw attention to herself, and perhaps bring into question the legitimacy o
f her presence there. Entering the room, she said hello and sat, as usual, beside Dame Rachel.

  She looked down the agenda. She saw that Ambrose was to be called to the meeting first.

  He entered the room rather loudly with photographs clumsily pinned to a board and Jules coming behind him carrying an easel. Jules wasn’t a messenger in Ambrose’s section and must have been there as a favour to Ambrose. The photographs seemed to be of a tractor and farming implements. She recalled with a smile her first ever Directors’ meeting and Ambrose’s successful arguments for emergency procedures, with working models. She mentioned it to Dame Rachel who said, ‘Oh yes, I remember very well.’

  After Jules had put the easel in place, he said, ‘Is that all, Major?’ and Ambrose, in a brisk voice, said, ‘Thank you, Jules,’ and Jules left the room.

  Ambrose came across to Dame Rachel and her, saying hello to Dame Rachel and then turning to her and taking her hand, ‘Edith, it’s so good to see you up here with the gods. And good to have a friend in court,’ he said warmly. ‘How’s tricks?’

  ‘We’re all agog about your mysterious presentation,’ she said, in a restrained but sociable tone, uncomfortable with his assumption that she was unquestionably a friend in court. He seemed to have made an effort with his appearance. She glanced at his polished shoes with private unhappy amusement. He had once showed her how he tied his shoes with a double cross in the laces, saying, ‘Things like that are important to me.’

  He narrowed his eyes mysteriously. ‘I think you’ll all be somewhat bowled over.’

  She hoped they would, and that he’d be back in favour again, something of his old self, and that she would be relieved of the guilt she occasionally, and unjustly, felt for his downfall.

  The meeting was opened by Sir Eric and he invited Ambrose to talk to them.

  In his best English accent, as if also polished for the occasion, Ambrose thanked the Directors and other heads of section for permitting him to speak. He said it was good to be back in such exalted altitudes again, since his own ‘change of circumstances’.