Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  It was not ‘her’ Church of England. Curiously, she had never before seen her positions as being those of the minority within the League. On this it seemed she was very much in the minority.

  They both went back to their respective daily tasks. Bartou, without looking up, said, ‘I have never heard the expression “benevolent neutrality”. Nor can I conceive of the diplomatic condition of malevolent neutrality or of benevolent neutrality. Neutrality is either impartial, blind to good and to evil, or it is not neutrality. Sir Eric is correct on that.’

  At dinner in the Lyrique, she raised the subject again with Robert, telling him of the further developments.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she told him. ‘In and out they come, talking about nothing else. It’s a nightmare come true.’

  ‘And, consequently, now we seem to talk about nothing else,’ he said. ‘Exactly — it seems that what was for us a personal bother has become a matter concerning the whole world. I feel plagued by it.’

  She asked if he was going to write up the conference. He said that no newspaper would touch birth control. He thought that he could perhaps write about it for one of the quarterlies. She went on to say, ‘I’ve been to see Doctor Monet. That’s all done.’ She wondered if he would ask to see it. Should she take it out and put it on the table? Would he suggest they go to his apartment and ‘try it out’ even though it wasn’t yet the weekend? She was keeping strictly to the week-end only rule — to make their coming to live together as man and wife more exceptional.

  ‘What are your thoughts then?’ he asked.

  ‘My thoughts?’ Her thoughts? She’d had to practise in front of Monet but she wouldn’t talk of that. From Monet, she’d also learned something interesting about using her vaginal muscles to increase the pleasure of physical love. But that could wait.

  He said, ‘Put it out of your mind.’

  He was dodging the fact of its arrival from Germany. Fine — so would she. ‘I was wondering whether it was really proper for Sir Eric to be trying to stop discussion and so on. Some scientific control of population seems sensible. For some classes, at least.’

  ‘Some classes? You mean because the rich have few children and live in the largest houses and the poor have the most children and live in the smallest houses?’

  ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘And I think there’s a conspiracy.’

  ‘A conspiracy?’ He teased her. ‘Sir Eric?’

  ‘It could be a Catholic conspiracy.’

  ‘It could just be fear of talking about it. We have enough trouble ourselves.’

  ‘I suppose it could be seen as dysgenic if women in large numbers begin using it to escape from having children, from lactation and from the care of children. But I don’t think Bartou is frightened of the subject reaching the Council.’

  She tried not to bring Bartou up too often, because Robert felt a foolish rivalry with him.

  He said, ‘It’s about working with nature.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ She looked at him seriously. ‘I think it’s probably not a laughing matter. I don’t think Sir Eric is behaving correctly.’

  ‘He probably isn’t.’

  ‘I should raise it with Dame Rachel.’

  ‘From what you say, she has her own difficulties. And she’s leaving soon.’

  She felt a miserable loss when she thought of the Palais Wilson without Dame Rachel. ‘Someone should raise it. I could get Bartou to raise it.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘With members of Council. Or at a Directors’ meeting.’

  ‘Would Bartou take on Sir Eric — head-on?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s so much the Swiss diplomat, the house expert on neutrality. I might do it. I see now why neutrality is an ugly position. You have to be impartial to evil. I will raise it at the Directors’ meeting — drag it screaming into the light of day.’

  ‘Edith, I can’t see you talking about this subject at a Directors’ meeting. You’re there by Sir Eric’s grace and favour and this isn’t a matter which concerns your bureau.’

  Robert was right. And she had a rule that even over drinks, one should never take strong positions which, if one had power, one would not have the stomach to implement. Only argue for things which one would have the stomach to carry through. ‘I’ll get someone else to do it. A man.’

  ‘Is that what Mrs Swanwick would do — ask a man to do it?’

  ‘I’m not Mrs Swanwick.’ She realised then that the controversy was, for her, very grave. ‘To put it more strongly, if I can’t get this matter raised, I might resign.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I don’t like it. I think Sir Eric is serving another master. Betraying the Covenant.’

  ‘You mean he’s serving God.’

  ‘Serving the Vatican. And I don’t believe that the Vatican is God’s secretariat on earth. There’s a battle going on. I see it now. They come to Bartou for advice to win him to their side. But I think Dame Rachel feels too demoralised to fight it through.’

  As she let her temper run, she again found an unfamiliar inner discord. She saw that her primordial, or whatever, feelings were not impressed by her talk of scientific progress and betrayal of the Covenant. The primordial feelings were more in tune with the old woman who lived in the shoe. But she wasn’t going to listen to primordial feelings.

  She reached over and took his hands. At one side of her feelings, too, was a fear of losing her respect for Sir Eric. ‘I’m tired, Robert — the unruly things are eating me.’ She also wished that it were Friday night and they could go to his apartment and go to bed and have done with this strange device sitting in her handbag.

  He held her hands warmly and firmly.

  She went on, ‘Whatever else the League fails at, we should be a shining example of good social practices. A model of how to do things. How to discuss things. I’m afraid, Robert,’ she said. ‘I will have to take a stand and I don’t want to.’ She looked over at him with the look that he knew. ‘This is a question of the integrity of the Covenant.’

  He then suggested that maybe it was her soul that Dame Rachel and Sir Eric were fighting for. Maybe they were talking to her through their visits to Bartou.

  She’d never thought of it that way. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Because you’re young. You’re the future. They are coming to the end of their time. They want you to be there after they’ve gone, as their progeny.’

  Robert could be correct, that she was being indirectly enlisted. She was Bartou’s protégée. But perhaps he was immobilised by neutrality. She had spent much more time with Dame Rachel since the night of the riot and she was deeply unhappy that Dame Rachel was leaving. ‘I either speak or I fail myself.’

  ‘Resign? What would we do then?’

  Until this day she’d never really considered resigning. ‘Go back to Australia,’ she said. ‘Live in a shoe.’

  ‘This is serious, then?’

  ‘Very serious.’

  ‘Just one thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Australia is not my country. I’m not an Australian. And after we marry, nor will you be. You’ll be British, legally speaking.’

  ‘In the eyes of the League I will always be Australian.’ As she said this, she thought of how she’d once hoped to become an Internationalist and to shed her nationality. She’d had some notion that one day the Council would call her up and declare her International and relieve her of being Australian. Now she was assuming the burden of two nationalities. ‘And, anyhow, you were at Gallipoli — that makes you something of an Australian,’ she said to him.

  He grunted. ‘I was at the Dardanelles.’

  At present, she didn’t have time to think about marriage or the changing of her nationality when, truthfully, she wanted to think about nothing else but the promises and fears of marriage and the changing of her status. She was being distracted by this office issue. She hadn’t time to think about marriage in all its meaning
s, nor the wedding in all its details.

  She glimpsed a smiling village woman within her who welcomed the idea of resignation. It was the primordial self which would welcome that. She would then be fully a wife, able to live with Robert in equanimity, collaboration, and quiet passion. To go on and make a family.

  She first raised it with Dame Rachel. As they discussed it, she found herself doing much of the talking and then found that Dame Rachel was looking at her with solicitude.

  ‘Resign?’ said Dame Rachel. ‘But we have so much work to do!’

  ‘I can’t go on with my work.’

  ‘You’re agitated.’ Dame Rachel then placed a hand on Edith’s forehead. ‘Are you unwell?’

  ‘I don’t believe I am. Why do you ask?’ What were the meanings of unwell? Pregnant?

  ‘You are putting more passion into this than it’s probably worth.’

  ‘Oh?’ Edith felt then that maybe no one else was giving it proper importance.

  ‘This place is a railway station of issues and debates. They arrive. They depart. You know that.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was very unwilling to be relieved of the propulsion of the issue, increasingly conscious that the conflict could lead to her resignation and that resignation would lead to her release.

  ‘Get away for a few days. Take some leave. You’re getting married. Take some time off beforehand. And thank you for the invitation to the wedding. Figgis and I will be there with bells on.’

  ‘I want to take up the matter at the highest level or resign.’

  Dame Rachel became concerned and asked Figgis to get out the brandy bottle and to call Bartou. ‘But you can’t go,’ Dame Rachel said, ‘we defended the Palais together on that dreadful night.’ Dame Rachel’s concern brought Edith close to tears.

  Figgis poured them both a drink.

  ‘Figgis, tell her she can’t go. We need her.’

  ‘We need all the good soldiers we can get,’ said Figgis obligingly but sincerely. ‘Especially someone who can confront an angry crowd and not flinch.’

  Figgis called Bartou through the switchboard and he arrived shortly after. Figgis poured Bartou and herself a drink.

  Bartou turned to her and said, ‘Is it this population conference?’ She heard that his voice was softer than his normal office voice.

  She nodded.

  In a fatherly way, he said that a young diplomat must be on guard against the notion that her own post was the centre of affairs. ‘This applies to all of us sitting in our offices preening our own sectional concerns.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Dame Rachel said. ‘The S-G and Council have the job of estimating the urgency of issues. The League has to choose its fights carefully.’

  She found this hard to take. She sipped the brandy. She suspected that Dame Rachel and Bartou between them had decided to evade this particular issue.

  Dame Rachel took up the argument. ‘We have to trust them on questions of priority. Even if it’s galling at times.’ She said that the issues which were temporarily disregarded, maybe wrongly disregarded, would, if they were of enduring concern, arise again.

  Meanwhile, Bartou said, they must concentrate effort. ‘Let’s go on with disarming the world. You must be here for that, Edith. The world has begun to disarm and now we have to keep on, “we band of brothers”. We must not sink the boat to catch a fish.’ He had never called her Edith before. Sir Eric had called Ambrose by his first name on the day he’d gone mad at the Directors’ meeting. Maybe she was crazy too.

  ‘Or even to catch a whale,’ Dame Rachel added.

  Figgis began firmly to massage her shoulders.

  Bartou said that the work of the League, like diplomacy, was not a hurried endeavour, or a single episode, but ceaseless activity, a never-ending engagement. ‘You have heard it said many times, Edith, that the League always adjourns, it never gives up. It never walks out of a meeting. It never loses patience. It never tires. Individuals do those things. The League persists.’

  She again felt close to tears. Her efforts to gain release were being thwarted by them. She saw how much she wanted to get out, to find a way out. And they wouldn’t let her.

  Bartou finally said, ‘Everything in life is pis aller, Edith — you know that — we take a course of action because there is no better one. Rarely are we able to follow the ideal course. We are forced always to follow some imperfect way. The style of our character is made by how we involve ourselves in the imperfection of the world and how we handle the imperfection of ourselves. How favourably we exploit and conduct the imperfections of our life.’

  They had blocked her in with advice.

  Bartou had a little more. ‘And how we solace them — our imperfections.’

  Drying her eyes, she said she thought she might take the afternoon off. They all agreed that would be a good idea. The Way of Imperfection. She was sick of wise advice.

  She wandered, unseeingly, through the art museum. She sat and looked at the few other people in the museum. She often felt that those in an art museum were members of a club. She liked to think that they were all potential friends and shared a love of the same world. But it was a club in which the members did not speak.

  She realised that what had been gnawing at her was an immense personal confusion of grand matters, of trivial matters, of the intimate and the public, of the primeval and the ethical — a noisy mêlée of all her sundry selves. Clouding her mind was Sir Eric’s falling from respect in her eyes. Also, tonight was Friday and the start of another week-end with Robert. They would certainly have physical love, and for the first time with the new device. It was too much in her mind, the whole thing. And also with clarity, she acknowledged her wish to, one day soon, or even now, have a child with Robert. Instead, they were engaged so much in not having a child and, in all this, the talk of controlling birth in all the world.

  She left the museum and walked to Robert’s office. She went in past the sloping bench where the back issues of the newspapers were kept, hacked apart by scissors. Miriam said, ‘Hello,’ looking up from typing but continuing to bang away at the typewriter. Edith lifted the flap of the counter and went into where Robert worked.

  Standing next to him, Edith told Robert that she was on her way to confront Sir Eric.

  Robert, in shirtsleeves and bow tie, leaned back in his spring-backed chair, hands behind his head. ‘What do you expect to happen?’

  ‘I want to clear it from my mind. I don’t care what happens,’ she said. Then, half-smiling, ‘I may send a telegram to a President: or I may shave a man.’

  He smiled. He put an arm around her waist and held her. ‘Do what you have to do. I am quite flexible myself.’

  She leaned into him and then reached out to use Robert’s telephone to call Sir Eric’s office, sitting on his desk, a hand on his shoulder. As she waited for the exchange to answer, she looked at the stationery stand which she had once presented to him in the Bavaria.

  She got through to Tiger and asked for an appointment. Tiger asked her to hold on, saying efficiently, ‘Apologies, Berry — placing telephone on desk,’ and Edith heard the telephone receiver clatter on the wooden desk while Tiger went to check. She imagined the little scene. Tiger came back on the telephone. ‘Resuming the call: Sir Eric is free to see you this afternoon at 4.40. He has about fifteen minutes free. Will that do?’

  Edith thanked her and said that she would be there. She replaced the telephone.

  ‘Call me as soon as you’re finished,’ he said. She nodded and they exchanged an affectionate glance. As she left, Miriam said, ‘Bye,’ without looking up from her typing.

  Back in Sir Eric’s office again, she and Sir Eric exchanged a smile and a meeting of eyes which indicated that each was recalling the morning of the shaving. She saw her stationery stand still in use on one of his side tables.

  ‘Nice to see you again. Thank you for the invitation to your wedding,’ he said. ‘Dole’s a good man.’

  ‘It was good of you and Lady Drummond
to accept.’

  ‘Will your parents be able to come from Australia?’

  ‘My mother’s dead but my father will come. He sails this week.’

  ‘Good. I look forward to meeting him. Tell me, that Australian Rotarian chap who called on me — some time back?’

  ‘George McDowell.’

  ‘George McDowell. Full of verve. Do you hear from him?’

  ‘He’s married now. Battling through the Depression. He’s in the aerated waters business.’

  ‘You won’t be leaving us right away? You’ll stay on for a while?’

  This was the time to tell him. ‘Robert and I will not be having a family straight away.’ She watched to see how Sir Eric would react.

  ‘Good. We’ll need you. But you know that you can stay on after you have a child?’

  ‘Yes. Williams explained that to me.’

  Within a minute of being in his office she had told him she was practising birth control. Within minutes they were talking about her most private bodily processes.

  It again linked everything together in a confusion. What if she had a row with Sir Eric and then had to face him at the wedding? Well, too bad.

  She spoke out, but her voice was not as firm as she would have liked. ‘I’m unhappy with what’s been happening about the World Population Conference.’

  Sir Eric was surprised. ‘How so?’

  She said that she considered it to be League business but she feared that he was blocking debate.

  Sir Eric was cautious. ‘What in particular do you see as League business?’

  ‘Well, the world is rapidly filling up. Except for France. More importantly, we should be concerned with the quality of the people being born into the world.’

  ‘You support that line of thinking?’ He seemed surprised that she did. ‘You support the thinking of the eugenicists and all that?’

  ‘People say, that is, people who should know, say that the national stock is deteriorating. That more people with mental and physical defects are being born.’

  ‘Berry, you are a first-rate officer. I admire you and so do others. I don’t see how this concerns your work now with Bartou. I was simply seeking Bartou’s personal advice.’