Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  Robert Dole whispered to her that he believed they now shared both ‘a position and an intention’.

  It seemed to Edith that Robert Dole was trying to be sure that she was offering more to him than just being pals. He wanted to be sure that she was no longer dismissing him as a possible swain. She sensed that this had become for him a point of anxiety.

  ‘I understand,’ he whispered, ‘that to give up something can be painful but it can also free the spirit.’

  If he were referring to Ambrose, she wondered what he knew about their life together and their parting.

  ‘When to compromise, or when to abandon a position, or when to fight to the finish — these are three subtle judgements,’ she whispered in reply.

  ‘Indeed, and judgements upon which lives often depend. My very own in this case.’

  ‘Come, Mr Dole,’ she smiled, ‘to exaggerate the extent of a concession is a crude manoeuvre.’

  He smiled and they again turned to Mme Weiss. Edith was conscious that Jeanne was paying more attention to their whispered negotiation than to the talk.

  Mme Weiss said, ‘We once heard the cry that war is the health of a nation. This is plainly contradicted because the world is becoming habituated to using international negotiation.’

  Robert Dole leaned over to her, bringing their bodies warmly back into touch. ‘This exaggerating of concession gives room for manoeuvre.’

  ‘I don’t like that approach,’ she whispered in reply. ‘Negotiations which involve asking too much, so that something may be painlessly given away, or cleverly offering too little, so that something can later appear to be generously added — these are not sincere compromises. I do not call that genuine negotiation.’

  ‘It is a leisurely way to reach a real position,’ he persisted. ‘Perhaps over-asking or under-offering could be seen as a dance?’

  ‘Are we dancing?’ she asked.

  ‘Are we?’

  Mme Weiss said there had been a ‘moral relaxation of tension’ in the world. There were some titters. Maybe Mme Weiss should have chosen different wording. ‘Too much so in Geneva,’ someone from another table interjected playfully. There was a festive spirit in the room.

  Mme Weiss joined in the smiling herself but without yet seeming to comprehend what the tittering was about, and she went on to say that Locarno and the Pact of Peace were not just the inventions of brilliant minds. They were the result of laborious effort by many people over the last ten years — the logical development of mankind’s thinking.

  ‘It helps too,’ Edith whispered to Robert Dole, ‘in the case of concession, if your adversary in negotiation smooths the way for that change in position — if your opponent allows that change to happen gracefully.’

  ‘Apéritifs this evening at the Hôtel des Bergues at seven o’clock — is that graceful enough?’

  He was choosing a very manly locale, and an expensive one. Her first day at the League and her great dinner there with Ambrose crossed her mind, but she found no troubling associations. She found the Hôtel des Bergues quite acceptable.

  ‘Agreed,’ she said to him. ‘The choice of locale — is it to honour Aristide Briand?’ Modifying, perhaps, what she sensed was the single-mindedness of Robert Dole’s invitation, making the purpose of the invitation a little more diffused.

  ‘I had that in mind also,’ he said, readily accepting her addendum, or perhaps he had truly had that in mind.

  They smiled at each other.

  Under the cover of the table, he clasped her hand. She squeezed his. Sealing what? Maybe losing, instantly, the diffusion of meanings she had tried to bring to the evening’s invitation. She smiled to herself.

  They turned back to Mme Weiss, who was saying, ‘Our madam chair pushes my elbow.’

  Christina had indeed touched Mme Weiss’s elbow, much to Edith’s admiration. It was Christina’s first time in the chair and she had touched Mme Weiss because her time was up. Bravo, Christina.

  ‘The push on the elbow — a forthright American way of saying, stop now with your long-winded European speech,’ Mme Weiss said, smiling generously.

  Christina was flustered and said something about not having meant to touch her quite so hard. Mme Weiss was not put off. ‘I will end by saying we are not the same Europeans as we were before these Pacts — thanks to Aristide Briand, the first true European. And, madam chair, I will finish with one brief story of Aristide Briand. I visited him in his apartment in Paris recently — three rooms, a few paintings given by friends, a few books. His bodyguard said to me, “How is it that a man many times premier of France and responsible for the secret funds of France could be so poor?”’ She turned to Christina. ‘He was an honest man.’

  During the applause, Edith’s attention was taken away from Mme Weiss by the arrival of a sheet of sketching paper with a blank sheet of paper pinned at the top to cover it, which had been passed to her, hand-to-hand. She lifted the cover sheet to reveal a sketch of her and Robert Dole done by Emery Kelen. He had drawn their table as a bed, a bed set in the luncheon hall, surrounded by people attending to a speaker but with Edith and Robert Dole, both in night attire, gesturing to the other to enter the bed. Both had cartoon words coming from their mouths, and both were saying, ‘After you.’

  Edith was taken aback. Robert Dole held out his hand for it, but she momentarily withheld the caricature, covering it. Pausing to absorb her embarrassment. They had been observed not only by Jeanne, but by Kelen. Maybe by all in the room. She stole another look at the sketch. I must react like a modern woman, she said to herself, and then passed it to Robert Dole who looked at it and smiled to himself, and then smiled at her, warmly and merrily. He handed it back to her, touching her hand as he did, and she again quicky covered the caricature with the top sheet and turned it over on the table, her hand holding it there. Both Jeanne and Victoria signalled to her and at the covered caricature, unable to contain themselves, dying to see what it was that had been passed to her. She shook her head in a very definite, if mysterious ‘No.’

  Robert Dole turned and gestured ‘thank you’ to Kelen and then touched her hand again. ‘Emery sees everything,’ he said.

  She was no longer abashed and she, too, could now turn and wave to Kelen, and she blew him a kiss in the way of a modern woman.

  They had been observed in their emotional diplomacy by Kelen, who’d hung around the Bavaria and the League for centuries. Ye gods, she and Robert Dole’s flirtation had entered history.

  After work that day, she went back to her pension, spending enough time on her make-up for it to be clear to herself that she was taking this dinner seriously. She dressed in her velvet evening dress. She took out her long pearl necklace which, when she put it on the glass top of her dressing table, sounded wonderfully arctic and chilling. White pearls on the glass top echoed back to when she was a little girl watching her mother dress to go out, the dressing room filled with smells only smelled on the nights when her mother went to a ball or dinner, of rare perfume brought out for that night, and the sound, that chilling sound, of pearls on glass.

  She pulled on her long kid gloves and momentarily crossed her fingers for luck. She thought, fleetingly, about birth control, her mind dodging away from it — it was all too soon for that. She was not going to be Bohemian any more in life. She wanted to have a decorous life.

  He came for her in a taxi. He had changed too, and was in black tie, including pale grey gloves and hat, and looked spiffing. Well, well, even the hard-bitten Mr Dole was taking this dinner seriously. He had not brought flowers, but then maybe it was not yet quite right to bring flowers. She remembered to bring the caricature which Robert Dole wanted to see again.

  They were shown to their table whch was not the table she and Ambrose had eaten at those years before. ‘Briand’s table.’

  ‘That table over there is where Briand sits when the French delegation are staying here,’ she said.

  He looked over to where she was pointing.

  �
�They always eat in a private room,’ he said. ‘Although Briand sometimes takes tea with a mixed bunch out in the lounge.’

  Ambrose. She laughed to herself.

  They studied the sketch over champagne, giving them something to talk about during the first stilted minutes. He explained his dinner suit and the champagne as being to mark an announcement he intended to make, as well as to celebrate and mark the change in their ‘respective alignment’. Surely, he wasn’t intending to propose to her? This unlikely notion caused her to quickly compose a speech which would be courtly, not off-putting, and yet would not require her to give an answer that night. Even if she suspected that she already knew her answer.

  ‘Now my announcement,’ he said. He announced that Longmans, Green, and Co. had accepted his novel and that it would be out in June. ‘Mr Longman and Mr Green and Mr Co are all very complimentary about my poor long-time-coming book,’ he said. And they had paid a decent advance on royalties.

  She toasted him and his imminent fame.

  It had not been a proposal of marriage but it answered one of her questions about his prospects. He could become a distinguished author. She argued to herself that to be interested in success was not uncouth. Her father, had he been there, might have asked Robert Dole about his prospects. It was the same thing. If and when, of course, a proposal of marriage were made. The other thing that made it consequential was that as a woman dedicated to the affairs of the world, she wanted a man who was able to proceed with her in the affairs of the world, who would not be a Dull Freddy or an impediment to her life. She wanted the exhilaration of accomplishment and the access to life which it brought — both for herself and for any man she was bound to. She felt her professional and private life had nearly suffered a complete disaster through her association with Ambrose.

  She asked him what it was about. He said it was a detective novel but with literary pretensions. ‘I sneak in some philosophy.’

  ‘May I read it?’

  ‘You will be its first genuine reader, yes. You are also the first to know of its acceptance.’

  She saw that it was not just a celebration of his news. He was using his news to embrace her.

  At dinner in the gleaming dining room he asked about the place of Ambrose in her life. ‘Some time back we heard of a change of fortune for Major Westwood and in your affections also. Now we hear sad news of him.’

  Edith considered this an acceptable enquiry but wondered how to talk about it. She did not want the change in Ambrose’s fortunes and the change in her affections to be directly related.

  ‘Ambrose Westwood and I parted ways over a year ago.’

  Robert Dole absorbed this. He said, ‘My analysis of his position in the Secretariat before his recent breakdown was that he’d slipped a number of rungs on the ladder. My analysis of your position is that you had gone up — at least more than two jumps.’

  ‘You know I can’t talk about Ambrose’s personal affairs.’

  ‘I respect that. Allow me to think aloud. It seems to me that it was punishment, but for what? Not incompetence, because incompetence would have been revealed earlier.’ He watched her face.

  ‘Please,’ she said, realising as she said it, that serious limits surrounded their relationship because of his work as a reporter, and further, she felt a pang of guilt on hearing Ambrose’s fall and her rise twined together.

  ‘I am thinking aloud,’ he said, pursuing the subject over her objections. ‘He did something wrong and you did something right. It is unlikely that he got caught with the family silver. He didn’t seem to have a drinking predicament — any more than any of us, that is. He was not lazy. I found him at times a little daft, but how would that make him stand out in this town? He had an acid wit. But that wouldn’t be sufficient to warrant demotion. What, then? I say that it was probably some very serious gaffe he had made in a very important place. Maybe he annoyed one of the Council members? Offended the pride of some nation?’

  Bartou also had seen Ambrose as a bit daft. She’d never thought of him that way and it startled her. Perhaps she’d been too close to him. And if he had an ‘acid wit’, he had never used it against her. Had what she’d taken as his fun-loving self really been a form of madness?

  She did not want Robert Dole to be a correspondent. She wanted to be free to talk about all things with him.

  On he went, ‘Or did he seriously annoy Sir Eric? And for you to be rewarded with promotion? As always, there’s much spy talk. Was Major Westwood spying for the Russians?’

  She was impressed that in his meandering way he had unknowingly reached close to the truth, but she was not made in any way comfortable by seeing the bared truth, ghostlike in the conversation, even if she alone could see the ghost.

  ‘Please, Robert, I don’t like this talk. We have to change the subject. What’s happened to Ambrose is sad but recent reports about his health are encouraging.’

  ‘I apologise. He isn’t the first to have broken down. The League is hard on people, it seems.’

  To enforce the change of subject she asked him whether a member of the Secretariat and a member of the press gallery could ever be true friends.

  ‘Good question,’ he said earnestly. ‘But as from tonight I may not be a member of the press gallery — I am from tonight an author.’

  She dearly hoped that was correct.

  He then spoiled it all while they were eating their canard a l’orange, by being flippant about the League.

  He repeated a rather old joke about the League of Nations being the wastepaper basket of the world. But the joke caused her constraint with him to return, and her willingness to follow her desire for him to weaken.

  He made it even worse by saying that, no, the League was not a wastepaper basket, that he would withdraw that remark. Instead, he agreed with Stresemann’s remark. The League was more a marketplace where nations were bought and sold.

  She further withdrew into herself and held back from the conversation. He noticed it and commented.

  She said that defeatist jokes about the League pained her.

  He said that she should develop a sense of humour.

  She said that he should develop a sensitivity of humour.

  There was a momentary silence between them. Then he laughed in appreciation of her retort. She smiled to herself but was still distanced from him.

  ‘I am really a little tired of these old jokes about the League,’ she said. ‘It is not that I lack humour or that I cannot joke about the League.’

  ‘But remember what Stresemann went on to say. He said that he wanted to be there because it was a marketplace. If there were dealings going on, he wanted a seat on the stock exchange.’

  ‘I still don’t like to talk about the League that way,’ she said, and thinking that it sounded priggish, ‘I like jokes that sharpen points, not jokes that dismiss thinking.’ In truth, she still had a lot of trouble with joking about serious matters.

  ‘Hence, you enjoy the Kelen caricature,’ he said craftily, touching the rolled-up sketch on the table.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking at it again.

  The conversation did pick up but she was still resistant to him and he had again lost her concurrence in any ventures of a romantic kind which he might have had in his head for this evening, although she doubted that he knew he’d lost this concurrence.

  They were choosing cheese from the chariot when the head waiter came to the table and said that Mr Dole was needed at the telephone.

  While he was away, she worked half-heartedly on her speech of non-acceptance of any amorous invitation which might follow dinner. She smiled as she remembered Jeanne’s joke about the women in Secretariat spending all day saying, ‘Yes, monsieur,’ and all night saying, ‘No, monsieur.’ Especially when the Assembly was in session or during a large conference. This would be her no-monsieur speech. She wished with her whole heart she could have given a yes instead.

  He returned in a mood of nervous aliveness.

  ‘
My office is looking for me. That was Miriam.’

  ‘Do you have to go?’

  This would be an easy way for her to escape the claims and inducements of the night. Or was he, perhaps, escaping the night, fleeing from her? That idea made her feel alarmed — that this call from his secretary might have been prearranged for him to get out of a dinner if he felt it had gone badly. She heard of people who made such pre-arrangements. But why was she thinking like that? Was suspicion now branded into her soul?

  ‘I should. Tonight, at least, I am still a newspaper man.’ He looked at her meaningfully. ‘However, I do not plan to go just yet.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said, relieved by his wish to stay, seeing it as evidence that he wasn’t fleeing her, regardless of her own plans for flight, and confused that she should have cared whether or not he was fleeing her.

  ‘Regardless of the calls of duty I can assure you that I intend to remain with you as long as it pleases you. To hell with London and Berlin.’

  ‘I am honoured.’

  ‘Given that we are, among other things, honouring Aristide Briand, I recall that he once said, “There will be no war as long as I am alive.” He could very well have meant that when he died, there was sure to be war. He is not far from death. Stresemann’s gone — not only from a broken heart and too much work either. I once saw him eat half a pound of caviare.’

  He referred again to his humour, as a way of apology. ‘Edith, you shouldn’t misread my humour. I know that I am sometimes brutish.’

  Was he really brutish? If so, what would she make of a man who was so? Was he capable of white anger with her? What underself would she find in him? She recalled the wrist-grabbing incident. How scintillating we all are, she thought, when we are simply curious creatures in the distance, before we come close and search the other, find the underselves and the blemished nature.

  He looked serious, and then grimaced. ‘I have too many painful feelings about too many things about which I can do nothing. I use joking to avoid being hounded by them.’