Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  The doctor was close to Robert’s age. He glanced at her left hand for an engagement ring. She inferred that perhaps Swiss law required her to be married, or engaged to be married, and she rushed to tell him she was to be married soon. She liked the sound of it and reminded herself again that it was true.

  The doctor, practising his English, took a polite interest and asked whether the wedding would be at the English church.

  She told him that it would be. The minister there was a friend of her fiancé. She used the word fiancé confidently, although she and Robert didn’t really believe in the ‘engagement’ and certainly not in long engagements, although it could be said that they practised long courtships. The minister at the church was also a friend of the League and had agreed to say ‘love, honour and trust’ instead of ‘love, honour and obey’ in the wedding service. She didn’t tell the doctor that both Robert and she were non-believers. She wanted to be free from the deceptions that being unmarried lovers involved. Yet, to reach the state of declared and loudly proclaimed love, she would have to go through the deceptions of the Church service and the hypocrisy of that, although she rather liked the ceremonial of the wedding service. Her father would shake his head sadly but would understand. She didn’t know what John would think, but he’d married Ella in a Methodist church. Colonel Ingersoll believed in marriage. If the hypocrisy of it worried her, she supposed that she could always wear her panties back to front during the ceremony. George would simply ask if it was the biggest church in town.

  The doctor said, ‘Why come to a doctor about birth control?’

  Flustered, she said that she was sorry but she didn’t follow his line of thinking.

  ‘The medical profession thinks that birth control has nothing whatsoever to do with medicine.’

  She said that she assumed that a doctor would know more about the body than anyone else and how to safely guide her in — she was about to say ‘physical love’ — but changed it to ‘the planning of her fertility’.

  ‘Thinking in the medical profession is that it’s not a medical problem. It may be a theological question. It may be a question of methodology, in the realm, say, of the principles of mechanics, but doctors mostly say that it is not a medical question.’

  Irritated and flustered, she began to rise, pulling on her gloves, saying to herself in her head, ‘And the properties of matter, sound, heat, and light.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, there has been a misunderstanding.’ She even held out her hand to say goodbye. She couldn’t see why she’d ever considered it to be a ‘medical problem’.

  ‘Sit down, please.’ He now seemed mildly distressed that he’d disconcerted her. ‘I do not express myself clearly — I say this only to show you the stupidity, sometimes, of my profession. Of course, birth control has to do with the health of women. I believe that.’

  She sat down.

  ‘More, it has to do with the pleasure of men and women. That interests me just as much.’

  She must have looked at him, this time, with a different reservation, for he rushed to say, ‘Happy people are healthier people, is what I believe.’ He said, ‘You must know this English nursery rhyme — “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe”?’

  Edith nodded, feeling a little tossed about.

  ‘A colleague tells me that in England the birth control reformers have a poster now that says — please forgive my English — “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, She had so many children she didn’t know what to do. Don’t be like her. Ask the doctor for birth control advice.”’

  This obviously tickled the doctor and he laughed heartily. She smiled, to show she appreciated his efforts to put her at ease, but she wished he would get on with giving her the advice she needed so that she could be out of this situation. He was, she thought, relishing the opportunity of doing this service.

  To show she was not totally ignorant, she said that she knew that there were now heavy penalties in France for people who gave advice on evasion of pregnancy. She believed that was not the case in Switzerland.

  ‘Oh no, not here. The French need children.’ His voice then became impersonal as he began his professional advice. He explained the Dutch cap, the Waldenberg loop, and the pessary, and other methods, all of which caused her inwardly to groan. He told her of the latest development from Germany, a silver ring invented by Doctor Graefenberg. She had only a vague idea where the silver ring went and no idea of what it did and she did not ask. She contemplated a joke about having shunned an engagement ring she was now to wear a Graefenberg ring but it was beyond her. I am a blockhead, she thought. She was overwhelmed by the idea of making a choice.

  He advised against the sheath. ‘It is now believed that the condom deprives the woman of the benefits of true coitus,’ he said. ‘It biologically starves her of the seminal secretions of the man absorbed through the walls of the vagina.’ He wasn’t quite able to look at her as he told her this.

  She forced herself to look at him.

  She appreciated very well what he meant but she hadn’t realised that it was also ‘good for her’.

  ‘Like vitamins?’

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  He relieved her of choice by advising a Dutch cap, made of rubber, and she nodded, being able to somehow conjecture how a rubber cap might work and where it might go and liking the sound of rubber rather than the sound of the silver ring. ‘I am a rubber cap sort of person rather than a silver ring person,’ she joked aloud, more to herself.

  He laughed heartily, probably suspecting an English language joke that he should have understood. He suggested that an X-ray impression be made. He would also ‘take measurements’ for a sketch and order a personalised cap from a laboratory in Germany. He then made a joke about Dutch and German hats — about helmets and tulips — which she didn’t listen to attentively enough to understand but at which she laughed heartily in return.

  She was not at all clear about the taking of measurements and she had never had an X-ray impression. She inwardly whimpered at the idea of the taking of measurements.

  The doctor began to explain what the cervix was and she was pleased to find that she remembered where the cervix was and was able to display some scientific knowledge.

  ‘Good, you know the cervix, then,’ he said. He asked her to sign a form releasing the X-ray impression, after use, to the University of Munich for scientific purposes. ‘Or you can have it returned to you.’

  Damnation. ‘Can I simply have it destroyed?’ Even this idea went against her spirit.

  ‘Of course, but I thought that as an official at the Société des Nations — scientific research, and so on.’

  Was there no end to it?

  ‘All right — give it to Science, give it to the university.’ No greater love hath any woman …

  She undressed behind a screen, which seemed purely a gesture to modesty given what she assumed would next be happening to her. A nurse helped her into an open-fronted, starched white robe which she found inexplicably reassuring, and guided her to a reclining stirrup chair.

  She closed her eyes and thought of the township of Jasper’s Brush and Australian wild flowers growing in profusion on sweeping, sunlit plains.

  ‘It’s coming from Germany,’ she told Robert at his apartment that weekend. ‘In a laboratory in Germany they are, at this very moment, looking at my most intimate part on an X-ray photograph and the doctor’s sketch.’

  ‘A sketch?’ Her description of what had happened was making him uncomfortable.

  ‘Doctors do have to touch me,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let me explain the alternative methods of birth control,’ she said teasingly. Having come through it, and knowing now about Graefenberg rings and such, she wanted a chance to display, in some way, her newly won expert knowledge.

  He stopped her. ‘I don’t wish to know.’

  At first she was surprised by his shying away from this. She could appreciate his possessiveness a
bout her intimate body, but she had difficulty understanding his masculine discomfort. She couldn’t see why he should be behaving as if he’d been, well, subjected to it. Still, if he wanted to avoid the subject, so did she. ‘Let’s then not talk about it any more. Evermore. It’s done,’ she said.

  She began to sense why they should not talk about it but it was difficult when both of them avowed that the Health of Being came from the ability to talk of everything, freely and without shame. Yet she sensed that contraception as a subject was sui generis. It certainly did not belong in the romance of all that was happening to them and was best excluded by silence unless it could somehow become part of the erotic play of love which was something she could not see happening.

  He mumbled apologetically about his squeamishness, smiling ruefully.

  At dinner, the wine lifted her spirits and she even ventured a joke about it all, violating their prohibition, ‘I suppose I could have the X-ray photograph and the sketch returned and we could frame them along with the Kelen sketch. An illustrated history of modern love.’

  ‘You’re out of order,’ he said. ‘We agreed not to talk about it.’

  She again accepted the prohibition as being correct and inscribed it on her mind. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I do agree with you about it.’

  The agreement ‘not to talk about a subject’ caused her to return to a qualm which had been with her since the night at the Bergues. She had wanted to tell Robert of all the things which had made her. Not just her Rationalist childhood and her electoral work with John Latham. She wanted especially to tell of those things which might cause him to think again. She wanted to rid herself of her secrets.

  Until now she had been excusing her failure to ‘tell all’ by using John’s advice about the diplomatic delaying of truth. The need to consider the timing of the telling of truth so that it was not damaging or ill-placed. She also saw that the truth had to be told in the right tone and with the vocabulary appropriate to the situation. And other items in their life had to be encountered before she could make her dramatic life confessions. But now the confessions had been over-delayed. Some confessions should obviously come before the sending out of invitations to the wedding. She smiled, recalling a similar joke she’d had with herself about Ambrose.

  Yet she was still aware of the repercussions of her revelations to Florence and she winced at the delicate demands involved in the telling.

  Her father would remind her of the lesson of the hot stove and the cat. She had to decide whether the telling of the episode was another hot stove that she was about to sit on or whether she was the stupid cat who avoided all stoves and thus forfeited the warmth of stoves. She decided that telling Robert was not another hot stove. And she winced again, this time at the very idea that her father would ever have to be appraised of her secrets so as to give such advice on the telling of those secrets! For all the family’s Rationalism, sexual matters had always been heavily wrapped in the broadest of progressive theory and had thus been denuded of any useful detail.

  She momentarily considered whether the telling of her past might be similar to talking about birth control. That it might do damage to the erotic romance of their life. It could, on the other hand, enhance this — could bring tang to their life. She would keep that in mind when telling. She would not be impersonal or clinical in the telling. She closed her eyes and leapt into the dark.

  But what was the right language in which to tell a new lover of her former carnality?

  She poured herself another glass of wine. ‘Robert.’

  ‘Edith?’

  ‘Robert, I want to tell all. I want you to know the woman you’re taking as a wife.’ She tried to make it sound light-hearted.

  ‘Do I have to tell you my sins in reply?’

  She hadn’t thought too much about that. If his vices were as off-course as Ambrose’s had been, maybe she should know before the wedding day. But she couldn’t conceive of breaking it off now, regardless of what he told her. Not even, she decided, if he admitted to Ambrose’s vice, although she considered that unthinkable. At least if it were that, she would be experienced in dealing with it. ‘I can’t conceive of anything which you could tell me which would cause me to reconsider,’ she said, wondering whether that was true. How much about the world did she still not know? ‘I did make enquiries — we have observed each other’s conduct over a few years.’ Yet this too was a foolish thing to say. People had observed her and Ambrose when they’d been together and suspected nothing. Or had they suspected? Bartou had talked of eunuchs. Obviously there’d been talk of something fishy. She was again startled at how she must have looked to others after having been Ambrose’s escort for so long. ‘I withdraw that statement,’ she said, wanting to be at her intelligent best with Robert, ‘at least the part about having observed each other. I realise that what we see of other people in public is not the full story.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘What I am about to say concerns Ambrose, inescapably. It is therefore in strictest confidence.’

  His interest was clearly aroused yet he was struggling with a question of propriety. ‘I’m not at all sure we need to do this confessing. I already know that when you awaken in the morning you like to discuss your night of sleep as if you have been on a long journey. I know that you once shaved Eric Drummond although I still find that difficult to believe.’

  She smiled at him, seeing that he was implying that they not pursue it. Should she take the dispensation? ‘As for the matter of sleep,’ she said, ‘I consider that if someone has been absent for eight hours in an interesting place, it should be talked about. As for my confessions, you, as a writer, should be curious.’

  ‘But I write mysteries.’

  ‘With serious intentions.’

  Or did writers make our secrets more frightening?

  He didn’t comment.

  ‘From you,’ she said, ‘I ask only that you tell me that which you consider could affect our love or marriage.’

  ‘Why don’t you apply that test to your own confessions?’

  Should she say that she was also using her confessions to discover what sort of person he was? Was he someone like Florence who might recoil from her? She also wanted to share her experiences, to be able to scrutinise them with another human being, and to be told by another human being that what she had done to herself was not contemptible or ruinous. To have someone else answer Florence’s question about what she might have done to her womanhood.

  ‘I am applying that test,’ she said, allowing fear to trickle through her.

  ‘Then I await this revelation with wonder,’ he said, rather cockily.

  Did he think that her life had been such that she could not shock him? That she was a person who could not possibly have led a life within which bizarre experience occurred? She gazed at him speculatively and nervously. Or did he want her to be the sort of woman who’d led a correct and suitable life? He had not expected a virgin, she knew that. Or did he? ‘You were not disappointed that I wasn’t virginal?’

  ‘I would’ve thought less of you if you had been. I would have then found myself with an inappropriate person, a person who would have been an unsuitable match to my own misspent life. We are both people of our times. We are both voyageurs.’

  ‘Yes, we are.’ That was right. That was how she saw them both.

  She then told him of Ambrose’s predilection and how she had happily indulged him in it and how she had enjoyed the perversity of it and she told a little about the Molly Club.

  He listened without speaking but he widened his eyes theatrically and put on a small accepting smile, all intended to reassure her that he was not recoiling. ‘I have never had an inclination to dress as a woman — that is my first reaction to your confession,’ he said, ‘but I did have a friend who preferred men. My second reaction is that if I were to find such an inclination in myself, I have the right companion.’

  She considered whether the second part of his answer constitu
ted a foreshadowing of something but decided that it did not. ‘I don’t think that Ambrose really wants men. He wants to be a womanly man among women,’ she said. Robert had not said anything about what it had meant about her womanhood. ‘You do not think that my having indulged in this degrades me as a woman?’

  He seemed to consider this. ‘To me, it makes you a woman who has seen something of the world. Who knows about the deviance of human beings. I’ve heard of this club but have never been there. You must take me there.’ He seemed openly curious.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Now for the harder part. Jerome.

  Before she could begin, he added some more information, perhaps trying to show that he was also knowledgeable about this part of life. ‘I know of Follett. I hadn’t quite connected him with the club. I know him in another role.’

  ‘How?’ She asked as a conversational courtesy, overriding her impatience to get her story told.

  ‘As a patron of the arts. He gives money to the Museum of Geneva and makes other such gestures. Some say he spies for one or other of the non-member governments. We live in a nest of spies.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She would eventually have to tell that she had also been the lover of a spy. She wondered whether Ambrose and Follett were spying confederates. She stored that away for another time.

  ‘Is there more?’ he asked.

  ‘There is a further confession,’ she said. She wanted to be quickly and absolutely reassured that he was not recoiling or would not recoil at some other time in the future. She fervently hoped that he would be able to so convince her.

  She told of what she’d done in Paris with Jerome, an unknown Negro man. As she told it, she remembered Ambrose’s reaction. He had never been able to joke about it, but nor had she ever known quite what he saw that night. It was the one thing which he had never turned into banter. She realised as she told of that night that it was not only about a lasciviousness in her nature but also about a man who was black. That was something she had not really ever been able to think about. It was a psychological nerve centre. The blackness and her subordination. And nor could she focus on it, nor deal with it. But if she could not explain it, she could at least tell it.