He tried to laugh them off. They had to wrestle a bottle of Scotch away from him and then he broke down. Joshi talked him into allowing him to inject him with a calming drug.
The ambulance arrived while she was packing some clothing for him. They went with him to the ambulance. He was unsteady on his feet from the drug and was helped into the ambulance by two attendants.
She had no urge to stop them taking him.
Joshi and she stood together on the pavement as the ambulance drew away.
‘And about you, how is it with you, then?’ Joshi said, turning to her. ‘Are you bearing up?’ He held her face in both hands, looking at her closely, kindly.
‘I am not all right at all.’
‘I’ll walk with you back to your pension.’
‘Thank you. Please walk with me.’ She took his arm, feeling absolutely blighted by Ambrose’s crash.
The Dance of Negotiation
It was a grim observation, but as the weeks passed she felt now that Ambrose was truly out of her life. At least she did not see him scurrying around corridors at the Palais. Somehow it helped that he was considered scientifically ‘ill’.
Sir Eric, and some of those who’d served in the War, had visited him at the clinic. They said he still seemed to be lost in delusion. The most encouraging sign, Major Buxton said, was that Ambrose had claimed to have become ‘rather keen’ on one of the machines.
She didn’t have the fortitude to ask them if he was saying anything against her or whether he blamed her.
She’d offered to go to read to him but his doctor believed that ex-lovers could not heal those they’d spurned. She had not been able to clarify this as well as she wanted and let it go, assuming that it was probably part of Ambrose’s story to his doctor.
She paid the rent on his apartment and wrote to him each week, although he never replied.
She didn’t suffer as much from this second episode which was more an emphasising of their breach, more a confirmation that they would not be falling back together again from habit or from forgiveness or from the blurring of time. That she had moved on. Now, more than a year after the breach, her own disheartened state at last began to lift.
As she danced at Maxim’s and walked in the Jura, going about her own healing, she became increasingly alive to the idea of having something romantically to do with Robert Dole, despite all the friction that had existed between them and her times of resistance to him over the last couple of years. The irony of her situation was that despite her holding him at bay, he had only recently given up asking her to join him for social activities and consequently he wasn’t among the young men who had become her social escorts. But nor could she have coped with a strong contender for her emotions during this last year of the breach and of Ambrose’s collapse. She hadn’t been ready. She barely coped with her polite dancing and concert escorts. Had the breach, though, not occurred the way it had, she saw now that her relationship with Ambrose would have had to change.
She wanted only to associate with people who were robust and undefeated. That was another of her New Tenets of Self. She hoped that as she took on new tenets, she discarded others — if not, she laughed, she would have a very crowded personal creed.
She would have to determine whether Robert Dole was going to be victorious in life, and perhaps, distinguished. Although when she came to consider it, he was somewhere in his thirties and maybe he should have been distinguished by now if he was going to be distinguished. Perhaps being League correspondent for an important London newspaper was distinguished? She thought that might be prominence, not distinction. She thought that Robert Dole might have wisdom too, wisdom of a knarled kind rather than a dark wisdom. She knew to make a distinction between wisdom and the instinctive scepticism of some of the newspaper people. Variations of cynicism were perhaps youthful standbys until one of the wisdoms was reached. But she found these varieties of cynicism unsatisfying. In men she wanted intricacy of mind. She found this alluring and becoming. And manly. Manly. Yes, she wanted something substantially manly in her lover now. For a time Ambrose had suited and she’d been content during that time to carry on her life with him within the semilight of the glitter-ball.
After making discreet enquiries as to his past she discovered that he’d been an officer in the War and had been discharged as a captain, but she could not discover which regiment. She’d already observed that for some reason or other he still used khaki handkerchiefs. That would have to change if a romance ever developed between them. She also found out that he was five years older than she and was not known to have a wife hidden back in England. Having observed that he didn’t seem to have a regular escort here in Geneva — although she knew that there’d been ‘women in his life’, and as far as she could decently enquire, assuring herself that there had been no men in his life — she turned from her enquiries to take action, that is, to write a note to Robert Dole.
To open her further analysis of Robert Dole, she would invite him to a luncheon at the Expatriates’ Club of Geneva — called by some of its members the Homesick Club. The luncheon was to celebrate the ratification, at last, of the Pact of Peace by the United States Senate.
For her, it would be something of a debut, coming out from the twilight, coming out from being a person in rehearsal and stepping, she hoped, onto the lighted stage.
For one thing, deep in her heart she knew she could not be a lover with him until she was sure he shared an affirmative sentiment about the League. It had sometimes crossed her mind when talking with him that he wanted her to convince him about the League, that he was a man hungry for conversation, yearning to be given a deep conviction in life. Maybe Jeanne’s reading of his eyes had been right.
‘I know that you have had reservations about the Pact,’ she wrote in her note of invitation to him, enclosing the luncheon programme, ‘but I’d like you to be my guest.’ She recalled the strange occurrences between them when the Pact was first being discussed. She left the note in his slot in the pressroom.
A reply came back that afternoon by messenger: ‘I accept your delightfully unexpected invitation to the luncheon, if you will be my guest for an apéritif this evening and then dinner.’
How excessive — lunch and dinner on the same day. How driving of him. He was still strong on her, despite her discouragement. She scribbled back a reply: ‘Must you make an invitation into a negotiation?’ She felt her reply had a clever strength to it.
As she wrote the word ‘negotiation’, she remembered precepts that she had heard from Bartou: know what you want for an outcome; be sure you know the negotiating customs; and have a plan of concessions, in which you know well the limits, both up and down, beyond which you will not negotiate.
Without being sure, in any way, of any of these things, she said to herself, staring at his note, Yes, perhaps I will join you for an apéritif and dinner if I am satisfied with your conduct at lunch. She did not answer his proposal in writing, giving in her reply only the arrangements for the luncheon.
Some people created a beguilement which caused you to believe that you had approached them, but in fact they brought you to them, caused you to come. Over the years, she had always felt this about Robert Dole and it had been only her philosophical frustration with him, her preoccupations with work, and the convenient obstacle of Ambrose, which had weakened the powers of his beguilement. She’d felt until now that she did not have the time or strength to deal with someone like Robert Dole. Because the city was small and the social life of those around the League so in-turned, the friction between them had not stopped their coming together at the same League social occasions, and also, it was the resilience of his interest in her that had kept her preoccupied with him. There was something flattering about this resilience of interest which he had displayed virtually up to the last six months. She had remained vividly conscious of him whenever they’d been in the same room. Thoughts about him had come in a flurry after she and Ambrose had parted. She found herself relie
ved that, in the period when she had discouraged him or had been emotionally numb, no other woman had entered his life.
His manner marked him off from the rest of the press. He sometimes sat alone in the bars or cafés reading, or writing his book. He had been a friend of Stresemann, for instance, and knew Sir Eric.
She saw that if, perhaps, she’d been flirting into the net of beguilement spun by Robert Dole, she had this time, not so unconsciously, chosen a meeting ground which was securely hers. The Expatriates’ Club was predominantly feminine, and at this luncheon a woman would be guest speaker, Madame Weiss. Edith would have her friends about her, it was her table and it was by her invitation.
That she needed such a background showed her, though, that she was still apprehensive of him. She thought now that the friction she’d sometimes felt with him might have been, in fact, apprehension. And now the possibility of entering into the embrace of this apprehension, and of dissolving the apprehension into something else — into passion? — tantalised her. Robert Dole was not thin soup.
With the American Christina Merridale chairing the luncheon and because of a sprinkling of other Americans, including Arthur Sweetser, Mary’s boss from Information, there were opening jokes about the Yale-Harvard football game, which, she gathered from the remarks, was being played that very day in Boston.
At her table there were Jeanne, Victoria and some of the women from the Registry, some of the women from Social Questions, and Robert Dole. She had been unable to convince Bartou to come. She went out of her way to smile across at Victoria.
Florence was at another table with her bunch and had openly stared at her when she’d come in with Robert Dole. She no longer acknowledged Florence. It had been reported to her that one night in the bar someone had asked Florence what had happened between Edith and Ambrose. Florence had replied, ‘Didn’t you hear? He went mad and she called the police and had him shot.’
She enjoyed Florence’s boggling.
The only members of the press gallery who were there were Rachel Chaies, Gertrude Dixon, the editor of the Official Journal, Robert Dole — and he only as a guest — and Emery Kelen, a caricaturist, who went anywhere that he might find a subject for a caricature which he could sell to a newspaper.
‘I hope you don’t mind being the only man at a table of women?’ Jeanne asked Robert Dole.
‘My male friends would find it an enviable situation,’ he replied charmingly. Edith had not heard him being charming.
He urged an apéritif on her. She said that she drank apéritifs only after seven.
As she agreed to a sherry, she said, ‘You see, I am making a concession.’ She didn’t know why she said it.
‘Must I now make a concession in return?’
‘Not immediately.’ She then heard herself say, so naturally, ‘It is not clear yet what it is we are negotiating. Or, whether we are negotiating.’
He smiled at her with his astute smile, indicating that he thought that a negotiation was taking place and that they both knew what it was that was being negotiated.
She smiled back, but not in full complicity with his smile. No, Mr Dole, you do not know quite what is being negotiated here between us, apart from lust. She realised that it was perhaps nice, when personal things were being negotiated, for some of them to remain unlisted, vaporous even to both parties.
In her opening remarks, quavering a little, Christina Merridale said that mankind was once more on the move: ‘The very foundations have been shaken and loosened.’ She said the League of Nations provided that regulating influence to give practical and benign shape to this progress. She then introduced Mme Weiss, a French expert on world affairs.
They applauded as Mme Weiss took the rostrum. She announced that because of the composition of the club, she would speak in English.
‘I remember back to when I was at Locarno,’ Mme Weiss said. ‘On the day the treaty was initialled, people of the countryside crowded to the Town Hall to see the treaty held up at the window. The sound of bells rang from the church of the Madonna del Sasso across the lake. Women of the village knelt and crossed themselves when they saw the treaty, and fathers held children high to see it. Most of the homes burned a candle in the window to commemorate the signing. There was dancing in the village of Locarno square that night, danced by young men and women who will never have to know war. Today I want to quote only one statesman, my most dear compatriot, Aristide Briand, now sadly ill. He told me of one letter he received after the Locarno agreement which made a lifetime in politics worthwhile. It was from a French mother who wrote to him saying, “May a mother congratulate you … Now I will be able to look at my children and love them without fear of losing them to war.”’
There was appreciative applause.
As she clapped, Edith leaned over to Robert Dole, conscious that her body just touched his, enjoying the odour of his body and clothes, and said, ‘Personally, I’m not one of those people who believes all things can be negotiated. I don’t believe, as Arthur Sweetser is fond of saying, that there can always be a “deal”. I agree more with Salisbury: “If one country wants to eat another, no accommodation is possible.”’ She sometimes worried too, about what was a ‘principle’ and what was ‘negotiable’, especially for a moral woman in matters of intimacy. A tolerably moral woman.
Robert Dole smiled as he listened to her but made no reply, instead, raising his glass, he made a sotto voce toast around their table to Aristide Briand, and to the recovery of his health. He directed his glass to her. ‘To Aristide Briand,’ Robert Dole said quietly, raising his glass. ‘Aristide Briand,’ Edith and the others said quietly. Robert Dole and Edith touched glasses first and she felt that, for them, it carried a personal implication, an echo from an earlier argument they’d had, and then they clinked glasses with the others, but Robert Dole returned his gaze to her. Jeanne had tears in her eyes from Mme Weiss’s mention of Briand and Locarno, and joined the toast fervently. Although Edith thought that Jeanne might also have been aligning herself with Robert Dole, perhaps a little too strongly. They had all known Aristide Briand when he’d been around the League.
Edith felt confirmed in her feeling that Robert Dole was not as ironclad as he sometimes pretended.
Mme Weiss continued, saying that the Locarno Non-aggression Pact and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of Peace were not pacts as pacts were once known — they were the crystallisation of deep changes that had occurred in the human condition. She said they were not pacts between nations or governments but pacts on behalf of people in perpetuity.
‘I hear,’ Robert Dole said to her in a whisper, leaning towards her, his body quite unmistakably leaning into her, ‘that there has been a change in your human condition in the last year.’
He waited for her to reply but she simply smiled and raised an eyebrow.
He then said, ‘I know that sometimes to change one’s attitude is an uncomfortable inner negotiation.’
While hearing him clearly, Edith did not look at Robert Dole, and again made no comment. She paid studious attention to Mme Weiss, while Mme Weiss went on to trace the agrarian reform which had ‘changed the face of Europe’.
Edith sensed Robert Dole watching her face for a response.
Mme Weiss said that millions of peasants had now become small owners of land and were looking to the preservation of their property. They were now hostile to military ventures which threatened their property. ‘There is a deep change in the human background of the world.’
Edith realised that a whispered personal negotiation in public, at a luncheon talk like this, allowed time for the parties to manoeuvre, delayed the parries and the replies of the conversation quite nicely. Their whispering reminded her, too, of classroom whispering back at the one-roomed school of her childhood at Jasper’s Brush. The intimacy of whispering gave an excuse to lean closer together.
Mme Weiss said that most people not only now had property — they also had an alphabet in their heads. This was the truly invisible revo
lution. Before this time in history, many people had lived in huts and had only religion. They had hoped for a better life after death. Now people wanted a better life here and now.
‘It is true that there has been a change,’ Edith whispered, ‘and it is true that my attitude to you is being reviewed. And you, Robert Dole, as a man used to these things, you must at least be aware that negotiation, for both parties, involves the use of a crystal ball. It is a game of wishes.’
She had made Robert Dole smile, and she smiled too, so as not to appear to be too restrained.
Mme Weiss said that the new democratic administrations were another sign of the times of which President Mazaryk in Czechoslovakia was the best symbol. Another sign of the times was the League, a conception which was being taught in every school. The idea of international collaboration with the central guidance of the League was being understood by children who would, tomorrow, become the leaders. A new understanding also existing among the labouring classes, the intellectual class and the peasants. They were closer together than at any time in history.
‘I sense a new understanding between the fourth estate and the Secretariat class. And it is true that I am wishing,’ Robert Dole whispered, ‘but I am also reading the signs.’
Edith smiled, a smile which didn’t mean much, was simply further kindling for the warmth between them.
Mme Weiss said that Geneva was a town all people had learned to cherish, but that Geneva was not just a town — it stood for a method and a hope. ‘A method, because we have a crowd of young administrators and international diplomats working for the League. They understand the psychology of international interchange. In the League we have a large, well-financed organisation which is making a new expertise with the know-how to influence the press, and which will shortly have its own radio station.’ Wireless offered the hope of instant communication among peoples, allowing for the dispelling of rumour and false information. And, she said, for the first time in history, the opinion of the public mattered in international affairs.
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