Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  She tried to tell it with lascivious detail.

  ‘I remember it as being very rigid, yet it was not hard, and it was hot and became wet quickly, not only from the wetness of my mouth.’

  ‘In the room Artiste?’ His voice told her that he was responding well to her telling, but his question was a way of maintaining his balance in the conversation.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where were the others?’

  ‘Ambrose came looking for me. He came to the door of the room Artiste but I don’t know what he saw.’

  ‘You think he saw you?’

  ‘I don’t know what he saw.’

  She sat silently, not wanting to prejudice or falsify his responses by making insecure requests for assurance.

  ‘He didn’t say anything?’

  She tried to give out a nervous giggle. ‘He said: “Adieu, belle vamp australienne.”’

  ‘I really meant Ambrose — what did he say?’

  ‘About this? Nothing.’

  ‘It is true that I am amazed,’ he said. ‘Truly amazed.’

  She chilled and rushed to say, ‘As difficult as it may be to understand, at the time it did not feel unnatural that this should happen.’

  ‘I think I can understand the urgings towards the exotic.’ She watched as he found things to do with his hands. He blew his nose.

  It was Jerome’s blackness that unsettled him as it had allured her. Then he looked back to her eyes and said, ‘We shouldn’t regret our experiences.’ She did not regret them at all. He had gone to a platitude.

  It was not a fully personal response. But he had not exploded, flared, or shattered. She still needed more assurance. It was a different Robert Dole she was meeting. Not the Robert Dole who had told her to go read Erasmus and to consider the unconsidered particulars of life. He was being something of a man of the world but he was not quite a man of repose who could take with nonchalance all that the world could parade before him.

  She said, ‘It was such wayward conduct. It was going out of bounds but I was exhilarated.’

  He sat pondering it all. She watched his face.

  She became apprehensive again and rushed to say, ‘I am not that sort of person. But I am a woman who has done that thing. That’s all. Done it with a stranger.’

  She wanted to make it absolutely clear to him. ‘I am the sort of woman who has done that with a black man.’

  He did not hesitate in his reply. ‘It’s all right, Edith. Nothing in your “confession” causes me to shrink from you. For me, colour does matter dreadfully even if I believe that we must sometimes pretend, anyhow, that it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Do you fear it?’

  ‘I can never really get around it to the person. It is so …’ he struggled for his words, ‘it is a very visible difference. It demands that I see the person as different.’

  ‘But we mustn’t let it affect judgements?’

  ‘No. To pretend that it doesn’t matter to us is an honourable pretence.’

  ‘So, in my confession, it is that which bothers you?’

  ‘It astounds me. But he was a musician. It was jazz music. It was Paris. But I am astounded that you could overcome so much in yourself to be able to do that. It is the leap in conduct which astounds and impresses me.’

  It was honest of him to admit to being astounded. She could see that he was not going to be disgusted. ‘Yes, it was Paris. He was a musician. It was the only time in my life that anything remotely like that has happened.’

  He said quietly, his composure returning, ‘There is another thing about it.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I found your description and the way you enjoyed it, I found that exciting me. And perhaps sometime,’ he smiled handsomely, ‘perhaps you will do it for me?’

  She was now reassured. She smiled assent and compliance. ‘It will come to happen and you must know now that my body is for you only. For you in whatever way will arouse pleasure in you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you for hearing me and for accepting what you heard.’

  He said, ‘I have been with other women. But I have never loved before, properly.’ He paused, as if about to tell her some appalling secret, as if it were hard for him to say. He coughed and said, ‘I have only truly been with one other woman, in a loving way. Back in England when I was young.’

  She realised then that in these matters she might be more experienced than he. In panic she sensed that this was not good for a man.

  She had rarely been more experienced than others in anything. She didn’t want to overwhelm him with her knowingness. ‘I have had only one lover, really — Ambrose,’ she said, ‘and as you see, he was not fully of ease as a man. I really am something of an innocent.’ She wanted him to feel secure.

  ‘Experienced enough.’

  She glanced at him to be sure in what tone he had said that. It was affectionate.

  ‘I think we are both experienced enough,’ she said.

  ‘But I do have a confession,’ he said. He began his confession in return. ‘On leave during the War some unusual things happened. I have, for instance, been in the same room as my friend while we were with women. Paid women.’

  ‘You were each with women? In the same room?’ This interested her.

  She asked whether they had done it because of the lack of another room.

  ‘We did it because it seemed appealing to drunken soldiers.’

  ‘You found it appealing?’

  ‘Oh yes, very.’

  ‘You liked the noises? The sounds of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You watched your friend and the woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You liked seeing your friend enter the woman?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  Tentatively, she queried whether he wanted to repeat the experience.

  ‘Not involving you,’ he laughed. ‘Some of the bizarre things of life come to us when we are wandering lost. There is no one more lost than a soldier on leave in a strange city. When we aren’t lost, these out of character experiences don’t occur.’

  She saw that he might be right. But she struggled to say that she felt the experiences she’d had represented another part of her which was also her true self. But she could see that all the selves within one could not be fully lived out, were not all compatible.

  ‘I was not out of character,’ she said. ‘It was me.’

  He grinned. ‘Then nor was I “out of character”.’

  Their conversation became a low, happy collusion, and they questioned their way back over their experiences openly but carefully. They delighted in the cautious liberty of their conversation. It was a different liberty to that which she’d had with Ambrose. With Ambrose life had always to be fitted to banter. With him, matters which could not be made into humour could not be talked of. With Robert, an erotic precision of wording and feeling mattered most.

  As they talked, she marvelled that two people who’d known each other for so long could have combusted into love and found a new, vivid awareness of each other.

  Negotiated positions were often disappointing: less shining than the hoped-for outcome, less shining than the preliminary rhetoric of hopes and dreams which came before negotiations began. But their love was a negotiated position which didn’t fail the shining vision of either of the negotiators.

  Despite their confessions, they laughingly agreed to keep to their injunction never to mention the subject of contraception again, but the subject arrogantly and disobediently entered her life that week at the office.

  She was discussing with Bartou a speech she’d written for him when Dame Rachel came to the door with a letter in her hand and interrupted.

  ‘Bartou, could I have a word with you? And you too, Berry; this might interest you.’ Dame Rachel was always including her, as a way of coaching her. ‘It’s this World Population Conference. I think I’ll go along. I think we should be there. I’ve been talking to Mrs Sanger — or
is it Doctor Sanger? — and I now have an invitation to the conference from Sir Bernard Mallet.’

  Bartou said, ‘Sensitive invitations usually go through Sir Eric.’

  ‘Sir Bernard says an invitation is on its way to Sir Eric.’

  They exchanged a glance which Edith could not understand. Bartou spoke. ‘You know he won’t have anything to do with it. Especially if Sanger is involved.’

  ‘What should I do — just go without clearing it with him? But I can hardly just sit discreetly up the back. They all know me and I’ll be dragged into the spotlight a little. It has to be raised with Sir Eric.’

  ‘Do nothing. Wait and see if it goes through his office unobstructed. See whether “the first nail will drive”,’ he said.

  Dame Rachel stood in thought, staring out of the window. Then said, ‘Très sage,’ and left.

  ‘What,’ Edith asked Bartou, ‘is a world population conference?’

  ‘I understand it’s a gathering of scientific men to work out the best size of population for each country. To worry about the mental and moral hygiene of the race.’ Bartou laughed, and added, ‘They want to take over some of God’s load.’

  ‘How can a country control the size of its population?’ Her mind partly answered the question with a clang. ‘Yes, I think I know something of the answer,’ she hurried to say, and then steered the subject by saying, ‘It does sound like League-type business. The size of a population in one country could affect its neighbour.’

  She began to recall her study of genetics. She had read Pearson on eugenics but had never given it much thought, had just accepted that it was a move in the right direction, as long as the weak were sheltered and not ‘driven to the wall’.

  ‘It does.’

  She thought about it and then said, ‘I suppose it’s only sensible to be concerned with racial hygiene.’

  ‘But we don’t know what the implications are for the race if we encourage people to control their fertility. Which family may or may not have this or that number of children. Difficult. It will not get on Sir Eric’s agenda.’

  She mentioned the conversations to Robert. He found it curious as well. ‘I suppose it could be linked with our proscribed topic.’

  ‘The proscribed topic. Yes.’ She thought and then asked, ‘How would it all work? Racial hygiene?’

  ‘I know that it’s about preventing undesirable elements in the population from breeding — the insane, the crippled, the criminal and so on.’

  ‘Well, we can’t go on spoiling the human race.’

  She found that on all this her mind maddeningly refused to think, but she didn’t want to show this reticence, this dimwittedness. She wanted to clarify it all but her mind seemed to be going at its own pace, happily dithering with other matters, refusing to logically engage with the subject. It was as if her reticence were acting as something of a protector for the time, though how, she did not know. This protective reticence would have to go, sooner or later. But she saw how reluctant her mind was to leave the village of her womanly instinct, as unprogressive as it may be. She had a suspicion that her intention of becoming a married woman, a wife, had caused these primordial instincts to try to reclaim her. She was being called back to the womanly village and its unscientific ways.

  It came up yet again at work the following Monday. It was as if birth control were following her around like a lurking stranger.

  A memorandum passed across her desk from Dame Rachel to Sir Eric in which Dame Rachel reported that she’d warned Mrs Sanger against trying to link the World Population Conference with the League and against trying to have formal recommendations made to the next League Assembly on birth control. But the memorandum at the end implied, at the same time, that she, Dame Rachel, would be attending the conference. Attached to the memorandum was material about the conference which Edith read with interest. Both Dame Rachel and Sir Eric were marking the correspondence for the attention of Bartou.

  ‘Dame Rachel is trying to drive the nail,’ she said to Bartou, ‘with a few heavy blows of her hammer.’ She read him the memorandum.

  ‘Interesting. She’s almost disowning this Sanger woman. Even if it is as a tactic.’

  Edith noted to herself that she was able to read out the memorandum mentioning birth control to Bartou without being rattled.

  Next came a copy of a letter from Sir Eric to the conference organisers apologising to the conference and saying that it was impossible for the League to be represented in any way because the conference coincided with the meetings of Council and Assembly. But this wasn’t strictly true.

  Edith read his letter and Dame Rachel’s memorandum through again. Something was eluding her. She knew now, only too well, that birth control was a difficult subject for private discussion and still not a matter for newspaper discussion. The Church of England and the Catholics were both against birth control. But surely it could be discussed among modern people, League people?

  She made a comment about the letter and the minute, to draw Bartou into saying something which might dispel her confusion about it all. She said, ‘But the conference doesn’t overlap with Assembly.’

  ‘A ruse. For a good Catholic like Sir Eric it’s a subject whose name cannot be spoken.’

  She then looked away. Her mind became giddy from the uncanny linkage between the business of the office and her personal life, an abrupt linking of her most intimate life with this business of Sir Eric and birth control. That afternoon she had the ‘fitting and practice’ with the doctor. She realised, too, that she’d never thought of Sir Eric as ‘Catholic’. She had seen him as being above religion and nationality. And she had grown up feeling that all religious people lived by superstition but that, with education, they would eventually disregard it.

  ‘Is population control an “inadmissible idea”?’ she asked.

  Bartou thought about it. ‘Yes, it is at this point in civilisation, an inadmissible idea.’

  Later, Sir Eric came into their office and stood where Dame Rachel had stood, and also talked with Bartou about the conference. She could see that he was uneasy about discussing it in her presence and he kept his eyes away from her and talked in a voice specially directed in tone towards Bartou. ‘Behind the scenes I have chatted with Sir Bernard. I told him that the things which his conference was going to discuss arouse the strongest national feeling and are of a highly delicate character.’

  Bartou said, ‘True.’

  ‘Regulation of the population excites religious feelings. It would be extremely dangerous for the Secretariat to have any official cognisance of the conference.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Anything whatsoever to do with it, is what I mean. It would lay us open to attack. Italy would be very unhappy.’

  Edith sensed that Sir Eric wanted Bartou’s support for his action.

  Bartou said nothing.

  She realised that she was not certain where, in all this, Bartou’s opinion lay. She was curious and waited to hear.

  When Bartou failed to answer, Sir Eric said, ‘I suppose there’s no way I can object to individual members of the Secretariat attending privately. Is there?’

  Again, he seemed to want Bartou to come up with a justification for stopping Dame Rachel going along privately.

  Bartou moved himself in his chair, leaning back, and busied himself with lighting a cigar, but said nothing which would give Sir Eric reassurance. ‘It would be difficult.’

  ‘Sir Bernard asked that I treat the conference with “benevolent neutrality”. I said I would show neither benevolence nor malevolence. Do you agree?’

  ‘I really don’t see any problem with the Secretariat sending a technical observer. Sooner or later, these things will come to us. Whether we like it or not.’

  ‘I would prefer to wait and see if these things ever come to us. Or whether, as I suspect, they will simply go away. After I raised the issue of the Sanger woman and her movement, Sir Bernard said he would ensure that the subject was no
t raised in any way at the conference. Unofficially, Sir Bernard is very much on my side about this. Which is something achieved.’

  Bartou spoke again, ‘Which subject is that, Sir Eric?’

  ‘Birth control, of course. The wretched Sanger woman and her incessant shouting in public about contraceptives.’

  ‘My advice is to send technical people. Send Joshi. Or send Berry. People not seen as too political.’

  Sir Eric glanced at her, as if she had suddenly appeared in the room, conjured up by Bartou from the teapot spout. She didn’t respond to the proposal, could think of nothing to say. Her fitting that afternoon was on her mind and so was her new awareness that Sir Eric would be bitterly opposed to it, if he were to know.

  Regardless of her Rationalism, she felt she didn’t want to have much to do with this ‘Sanger woman’ shouting about birth control, even if Sanger was an apostle of scientific enlightenment. Even if she, herself, was now an expert on the subject. But she was for forthright contention and therefore not clearly on Sir Eric’s side and that troubled her. Well, she was for open discussion in the arena, if not in the bedroom.

  Bartou pointed out that to ignore the conference was itself a political statement, and then added, ‘Berry has a scientific background.’

  She wished that would be forgotten.

  ‘I want no official presence at this conference,’ Sir Eric said, ‘with all respect to Berry, and to your advice. And to Dame Rachel.’

  Bartou gently exhaled the smoke of his cigar. Sir Eric left the office, without saying anything more, and not in a very good mood.

  She and Bartou exchanged glances like school children amused at the teacher’s discomfort.

  ‘How can he keep it out of the League?’ she asked.

  ‘Sir Eric argues that most of the member states are Catholic. But remember that even your Church of England is against it.’