Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  She herself also abhorred women’s pyjamas, silk or not, despite the fashion.

  Some nights she felt her satin, shantung, and voile nightdresses—any of the many which she wore in a considered rotation—were not really friends to his brusque pyjamas. There was a discordance there. And she also chose her nightgowns to glamorise the carnality of the bed. Indeed. Most definitely.

  She had tried to tell herself that his pyjamas were virile, but that hadn’t altered things much and he hardly needed to proclaim his rather active virility. The virility was there too in the rank, sweaty smell of his leather watchband and its cover when it came near to her face. A virility which had been active last night in response to her soignée appearance, or dare she say it, her glamorous appearance. He had energetically violated that as well. Rather pleasurably, even if the subtlety of it had been lost through drink.

  Of course, he never removed the pyjamas during his virile activities.

  Oh no.

  Leaving aside these physical matters—about which she had little complaint—her feelings were that one had to sleep in what made one feel sumptuous. One should leave the exhausting waking world for sleep and then return to it the next morning, well turned out, but most of all, feeling sumptuous.

  Still, her bedroom did not really reach her mother’s standard.

  She did not quite have the time to get it right.

  One day she would.

  He, on the other hand, wanted to preserve the quality of being able to ‘sleep rough’. Whatever the quality of ‘sleeping rough’ was and why it should be pursued in life. ‘Sleeping rough’ was, she would have thought, more an unfortunate scrape than a virtue or worthwhile life-practice. Robert seemed to be still rehearsing for some crisis in life for which he would then, unlike the rest of the world, be prepared and able to cope. Some nights he slept on the floor of the sitting room or in the second bedroom with a pillow and a blanket. Usually when crocked. But sometimes, she noticed, for no reason at all.

  He believed in the hard truths—maybe his regimentals were some sort of philosophical ‘exercise’ in hard truths for the sleeping mind.

  It wouldn’t surprise her if he thought that way. Marriage, she’d discovered, was an unravelling of the other person’s mind and personality there before one’s very eyes. She had once propounded the idea that one should get to know the other before marriage. That idea now made her laugh. She would now argue the opposite. One should avoid ever knowing the other in too much dingy domestic detail. The hairs in the bath of married life should be avoided. She was relieved that they had two bathrooms and that she never had reason to enter his.

  She had consciously recoiled from this form of knowing in marriage as soon as she saw it gathering like dust on furniture. Jeanne correctly said that a woman should aim not to be honest but to be beguiling, to be Unknown. But then, Jeanne had never been married. Perhaps she had an expert committee to which she could refer such matters.

  And what was Master Robert aiming for in his domestic demeanour? To beguile? For mystery? Hardly. His rough-cut self-resilience made him seem like an out-of-place bear as he moved about the apartment.

  To be frank, she would like separate bedrooms. He left books open face down on the floor. He left unfinished drinks on the bedside table which, in the morning, filled the room with the odour of a bar-room. Still, part of her resisted the idea of separate bedrooms also, because it seemed to admit to a failure of something in marriage, in her vision of the consolation of marriage.

  Leaving the bed, she held the satin nightdress against her body, a sensation which never ceased to affirm her, and which felt cool against her newly waxed legs—the work of the dreaded Mme Lélu and her depilation at the Institut de Beauté.

  Oh, she was so pleasured by her full body, by her womanhood, by the emollients of womanhood, even if on some days she fell short of the ideals of that womanhood. Too often fell short because of her life of rush.

  She had not fallen short last night at the Hôtel des Bergues.

  She bathed, dried herself and dusted herself with powder. After all this diplomatic uproar was over, she would give more time to the pampering of her body.

  She went from her bathroom back to the dressing room.

  She had a sore head. She went back to the bathroom and took out a headache powder from the cabinet, mixed it in the water glass, drank it, grimaced, and returned to her dressing room.

  She would wear a soft beret. Trés chic. A stiff tie-neck blouse. The dark grey suit with the buttoned cuffs and mid-calf skirt with its off-centre pleat. Yes. Perfect.

  One thing she did not suffer was clothing indecision. Mrs Swanwick, the great British feminist delegate to Assembly, would certainly approve of that—no time wasted on trivialities of appearance. But, Mrs Swanwick, it didn’t mean that she did not consider her daily appearance. She considered it before going to sleep and her mind simply resolved the matter during the night.

  Having dressed, she ducked down for the newspapers from the kiosque, opening them there in the street and scanning the headlines for the American story.

  She felt sick. Most had it.

  She’d denied Robert a story which the others had from one source or other. It looked as if the news had come from Washington.

  She was guilty and sick both from her action and her sore head.

  She got her rolls from the boulangerie and went back up to the apartment.

  She wrote a note for Robert, something she’d once done every morning when they had first married, but which had faded out of the morning rituals.

  In her note, she apologised for withholding the information about the US presence at the Council table until after his deadline, although she pleaded ‘diplomatic confidentiality’.

  It’d been a little more than diplomatic confidentiality and she was now rather nonplussed by her motive. And failed to find it. Motives were rarely coherent or visible, as Bartou would say.

  She gave him, as a gift, the detail that the Japanese had opposed the US being invited to Council but had been defeated at the secret meeting of Council. That wasn’t in the other papers. But she swore to herself that it would be the first and last time she breached confidence.

  She put the note with his rolls.

  Her guilt faded somewhat.

  She left the rest of the news unread and had her coffee, cream, and hot rolls and jam with good appetite while she worked out on a sheet of paper the speaking order for the day and the dining protocol.

  As she did her face, she smiled to herself about something Mrs Swanwick had once said to her about cosmetics. ‘Can you really follow a scientific demonstration or a piece of music when a good part of your thoughts are concerned with the question “Is it time to powder my face?”.’ Such a grump. Such a prude. And, Mrs Swanwick, the answer is, ‘Yes, I can sometimes think of my nails and attend to a complex piece of music at the same time.’ And furthermore, myself and the other young lady students in our science course at university could present ourselves smartly and follow scientific experiments.

  She knew what Swanwick meant, though, about being reminded so much of one’s womanly nature when working alongside men, and about how much the feminine did intrude. A certain type of scrutiny by men, their glance, their stare, always gave her a renewed sense of her body and its shapes and made her fleetingly curious about what it was that her body silently suggested and stimulated in male eyes. She perhaps knew more than Swanwick about all that.

  She certainly knew more than Swanwick about all that.

  It wasn’t the powdering of the face that caused the problem. It was the need to appropriately manage these stares and glances of men, caught, but not acknowledged, and to get on with the work. Once the men she was working with and she were caught up in the work, she found no problem. She had dispensed however with sleeveless dresses. They were not fair to men. She worried too about any emphasis to the breasts, the separating and uplifting of them, a question which arose now that such ways of dressing the
breasts were fashionable. She made a note to warn Gerty about this. But what of gloves? Were bare hands more stimulating to men than gloves? She felt that long gloves were rather alluring.

  She wondered again about the girl from the Japanese delegation, how the Japanese girl felt in her kimono and tight gait. How she felt about the men who watched her. And the women who observed her. As a woman, one had to deal with both inspection by men and by women. She doubted that a man felt perused at all by other men or by women.

  Passing out of the apartment, she re-read her morning note to Robert again and frowned at its tone, the asking for forgiveness.

  Something else. She had not, in fact, written a note to Robert—it was a note to some other imagined Robert.

  Did she need to recreate Robert in her mind so that she could feel happy about him? It was not that she recreated him as an ideal man but more as the man he could be, the man he concealed within himself. Or so she believed. It was as if the Robert with whom she lived and who went about in the world was an unfair presentation of the real Robert. Perhaps that real Robert just couldn’t exist at all. Perhaps circumstances and pressures caused this unreal Robert to exist in his place.

  Oh dear. All too hard.

  She left the note unchanged.

  She wanted to be there before Sweetser, who had been temporarily seconded to Bartou’s office from Information during the emergency.

  Getting there first, no matter how hard she had played up the night before, was an office game for her, although she doubted that Sweetser, or anyone, was aware of it.

  She still had a head.

  Suffer it through. Have a nap in the nurse’s room later in the day. Nurse Hollander was always indulgent of her morning-after condition. Nurse Hollander might give her one of her special sniffing capsules for such conditions, to clear the head.

  She loved to see Sweetser’s face when he came in and saw that she was already at work. She suspected that he had, on a few mornings, tried to outdo her but had since given up before he looked ridiculous—before he began arriving before daylight. Not that he didn’t work as hard as she. His life was all work for the League, his lunches were work, and so were his dinners, his golf, his tennis. He was dedicated. There was no doubt of that.

  She reached her office and had her papers out and was working when the telephone rang on Sweetser’s desk. She went across and answered it.

  It was the American Consul, Prentiss Gilbert. He too was up early.

  ‘Good morning, Consul.’

  ‘Good morning, Berry. Is Sweetser in?’

  ‘Not yet. May I be of assistance?’

  There was a pause while Consul Gilbert considered the competence, perhaps, of her offer. ‘I think that you could well be. I am never sure to whom I should speak about some matters. I did not wish to bother Sir Eric. It’s a matter of procedure. What will be the order of business today? Who speaks and when?’

  She was ready with these details.

  ‘The invitation to your Secretary of State will be confirmed by Council this morning. There will be no debate—that was established yesterday at a private meeting of Council.’

  Consul Gilbert queried the invitation formalities.

  ‘Sweetser or I will bring the invitation to you by hand and you can telegraph it to Washington. We will wait with you until confirmation of acceptance is telegraphed back from Washington. You will then accompany us to the Council with your advisers.’

  She was privately amused by this conversation. She knew that Gilbert already had the authority from Washington to accept the invitation and that the talk of telegraphing was a necessary fiction and, further, that Sweetser had drafted both the invitation and the American acceptance.

  ‘And seating?’

  ‘I have placed you at the left end of the inner table, opposite the Chinese, with seats for two advisers. Three seats have been reserved in the diplomatic section of the gallery. You will be seated in these until your acceptance is formalised. You will then be invited to come down and join the Council table.’

  Edith had decided overnight that placing them in the delegates’ lounge would risk a protest. Sweetser had been right about that. It was not a time for playing Secretariat games.

  Sweetser came in puffing, arms bulging with papers. He stood listening to her conversation. He mouthed urgently the question, ‘Gilbert?’ and pointed at the ’phone. She nodded to him.

  He gestured to her to pass the telephone handpiece to him.

  With a delicious exercise of command, she held up a restraining finger at him, a finger which asked him to wait, and she went on to tell the Consul, ‘I think it best that we include the complete text of the Council’s proposal to you and your government—to avoid the dangers of summary.’ Edith loved hearing herself say, ‘I think it best …’

  Sweetser jigged about. She held his impatience at bay with an outstretched hand, nails still painted from last night—perhaps wrong for the office—as he continued to gesture to her to hand the telephone to him.

  She’d silently ruled that this was a matter of protocol, which was her business. ‘Consul Gilbert, Mr Sweetser is here now and would like to speak with you. Thank you. I will put him on the line—handing over now.’

  She was about to hand the telephone to Sweetser but heard Gilbert’s voice still talking to her and took it back from Sweetser’s eager hand, ‘Yes, Consul, I agree entirely. It will be truly an historic day.’

  Sweetser slid into his chair as she left it, taking the telephone handpiece from her, arranging his body in a self-important way, taking off his hat, throwing it towards the hat rack, which it missed. He put his hand to his tie. ‘Good morning, Consul,’ he said, in his diplomatic voice. ‘My apologies for not being here when you called. Yes, it is early, but we all have a momentous day ahead of us. Let me run through the procedure.’ There was a pause, ‘Oh, she has? Good. Oh yes. No. She is in some ways our Chef du Protocole. Yes. I am sure that she was correct in everything she said. But I would like to run through it to be sure.’

  Another pause.

  She went over, picked up his hat, and put it on the hat stand.

  ‘No? If you are satisfied. We will leave it as it stands.’

  And then it was obvious that Gilbert had rung off.

  Sweetser looked at her balefully. ‘I wish I’d been in earlier. Bad practice to not be here to take his call. Damn and blast it.’

  ‘Don’t fret, Arthur, I handled it.’ She relished rubbing it in. ‘I’ve put them in the diplomatic gallery.’

  ‘That’s best,’ he said grudgingly.

  He looked over at her. ‘Stop gloating, Edith.’

  She made a face at him.

  He screwed up a sheet of paper and threw it at her.

  When Sweetser and she went down to the Council room, the place was already filling.

  Mary McGeachy from Information told them that around two hundred journalists had asked for tickets. ‘They are arriving from all over Europe as fast as transport will carry them.’

  ‘They can’t have all known about the Americans so quickly?’ she said to McGeachy.

  ‘Oh, they’d sensed something. And regardless of the Americans, they know that the League has to do something about stopping the Japanese.’

  In the Council room, the chairs had been placed by the huissiers according to her directions, which she’d passed down to them through Gerty. Gerty was putting out the nameplates of the member states.

  Sweetser went over to check the American placecard. She called over to him, ‘I told Gerty not to put the name “United States”, but to use the word “Reserved”. I reasoned that it was premature to put up the name of the United States—it not being a member of Council.’

  ‘Yet.’

  She’d been inclined to put out the name of the United States as a way of nudging history along, but had resisted. Those sorts of Secretariat manoeuvres had their time and place. Today was not such a time nor place.

  She then noticed that one chair had b
een taken from behind the Japanese to make up the two behind the US. ‘The Japanese are a chair short,’ she called to Gerty.

  Sweetser said, ‘I took one from them to give to the Americans.’

  ‘Arthur! That isn’t correct.’ Her reprimand came out in a motherly way.

  He winked at her.

  ‘No, Arthur. That’s not correct. We’ll have them feeling slighted and then walking out.’

  Gerty came over. Edith instructed her to find another chair. ‘If it isn’t a matching chair, then find two matching chairs,’ she told her.

  Sir Eric came in to look at the arrangements. He came over to her, said good morning to them and then said, ‘Berry—a word?’

  He placed an arm behind her and took her to the side of the chamber, leaving Sweetser standing, as lonely as a cloud. ‘Who should speak first? After the formalities, that is?’ he said.

  She said without hesitation that the US should speak first. ‘Gilbert should have an opportunity to state the terms on which he represents his country, so that everyone knows what the situation is. Where the Americans stand.’

  Sir Eric said, ‘My thinking entirely.’

  ‘And furthermore, as a newcomer, Gilbert’ll be nervous. Let him get it over with. Put him out of his misery.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Sir Eric left her, saying, ‘Well done, Berry.’

  She went over to Sweetser who wanted to know what Sir Eric’d wanted. She told him. They then circled about, pausing to chat with the gathering journalists. Robert arrived. He looked rumpled.

  She prepared herself for his displeasure but he gave a small smile.

  He said, ‘Thank you for your note. Understood.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Thank you. I’m sorry.’

  McGeachy handed out information papers to the reporters and Robert was taken away into his newspaper world.

  The buzzer sounded for the start of Council and she glanced at her watch. It looked as if this would perhaps be the first League Council meeting to begin on time.

  The delegates came in from their lounge through the delegates’ door.