Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘I suppose so. Can’t have the Palace crowd gallivanting about with coloured folk.’

  Robert’s tone of speaking about this was wrong and it irked her.

  She handed the paper back to him and acted as if she intended to go on reading her reports, indicating that the matter was closed.

  As if she had any concentration left for reports.

  She pretended to read, head down, a hand shielding her hot face.

  He continued to stand there in the semi-darkness outside the light cast by the reading lamp, watching her.

  She knew her breathing was broken and heavy and that her breasts were heaving and that he could see this.

  After a minute or so, he said, without tenderness or affection, ‘Remind you of anything?’

  She did not reply.

  ‘Well, Edith,’ he said, in a derisive voice, ‘your moral deportment has been taken up by High Society. You’ve set a fashion, it would seem.’

  He laughed again his horrible sour laugh, but within the derision, she heard masculine pain. ‘You’ve always hankered for the life of that set.’

  Robert had put it rudely, but it was a little true. She did have a silly, fascinated interest in that world, the world of the Mountbattens. For a Jasper’s Brush girl it had been a fairy tale world. She almost laughed. That world certainly had not been in her mind back then in Paris. In fact, she’d felt that her action had been some straying from the track of all proper life, an escapade which had to be forgiven by the circumstance of champagne and Paris and jazz and The Times.

  He made a noise of contempt, whether for her or High Society she did not know. It carried with it the man’s pain she’d sensed in him earlier. She was sorry then that he’d carried that pain buried within him since their marriage.

  She could not help that now.

  She continued to pretend to read, staring blindly at the documents on her table.

  He stood there in the semi-darkness. ‘I suppose you still have perverted dreams of your Nigger Prince. Your Othello.’ That it had happened with a Negro was part of his pain.

  He seemed to want to delve into it.

  She did not reply. Robert was perhaps close to rage. She could tell that he wasn’t affected by drink.

  She felt desperately protective of her difficult, passionate, well-meant young confession from back then in their courtship. She did not want it brutalised.

  ‘You must be pleased to know your morals are the morals of High Society.’

  He wanted to goad her.

  She prepared an answer and then spoke it, trying to be calm and to be careful of his feelings. ‘I’ve no problem living with my morality.’ She said it without looking to him. ‘I shared that secret of myself with you back then as a gesture of my love for you. That’s all there is to say.’

  ‘I suppose you look at the flies of all men and think about possibilities. Or is it only for black men that you lust?’

  She now burned tearfully from the unfairness of his words. She wished she were not in the glare of the reading lamp.

  She looked up at him, at his eyes, there in the outer rim of light. ‘Please leave me now, Robert. That’s all in our past.’

  She had no confidence that this would extinguish the matter.

  He came back, ‘Such a thing can never be buried. What you did with the Black was an outrageous, unwomanly act. You never apologised for it.’

  Apologised? To whom? For what? For her youthful zest? She may owe an apology to Ambrose, who’d been her companion on that particular night, and who may or may not have been hurt by it.

  ‘Apologise? Back then, when I told you, I thought I was making a clean breast so that we could begin our life together. I didn’t tell you about it so that you could raise it at your perverse convenience.’

  Not ‘clean breast’—in the telling of it there had been a muffled pride in what she’d done, pride in her Jazz Age intrepidness.

  ‘Did you really believe that I could forget such a thing!?’

  Robert had always claimed to be progressive in his views, and something of a bohemian. That pose had fallen away. He was a wretched little prig.

  She maintained her position. ‘Why did you marry me then, if you saw my character as besmirched?’

  ‘I now suspect that you used it to entice me in some perverted way.’

  ‘What utter rubbish. Please go.’

  Was it a seductive thing for a woman to talk of such things to another man? Oh God, it probably was salaciously enticing to men.

  Without having to look, she became aware then that he was unbuttoning his flies.

  Before she could properly come to terms with his actions, she heard him say, ‘A husband’s perquisite?’

  She had never heard such an expression. And she had never been so confronted.

  Her breathing was now so heavy and erratic as to be discomforting.

  ‘Please leave the room,’ she said. She felt queasy.

  She couldn’t look directly at him, but was vividly aware of his posture from the edge of her vision.

  He moved closer to her, standing nearer, so that she could not avoid seeing his flies gaping open, his hand holding himself.

  She could smell the male odour of his groin.

  ‘Please get control of yourself, Robert, and leave.’

  He stood there in his provocative pose.

  ‘Robert!’

  She was disconcerted by his action. She raised her voice. ‘Leave me alone.’

  He remained there, his hand holding himself, presenting himself to her mouth. It seemed enormous. She had always considered it long in comparison with the three others that she’d seen in an excited state—leaving aside Ambrose’s German magazines and her mother’s copy of the Kama Sutra.

  The dreadful thing of it was that she was ever so slightly drawn to it, while not being in any way aroused, as if there were a natural call which she was obliged, as a woman, to answer—something in the pit of her being. She would not permit herself to answer.

  She felt dizzy from the grossness of his approach and her primitive responsiveness to it.

  She dismayed herself by her confusions.

  Oh God.

  Another thought shot across her mind—that if she succumbed to this gross advance it would in some strange way re-excite their marriage, cause some animal fire to ignite, and would cause her to fall down some other trapdoor of marriage.

  Everything would revolve. She would stand in a different way to him. There would be a heavy, bizarre cost for following that primal submission.

  She forced herself to look at him. She looked first at his hand and groin, saw that he was fully stiffened, wondered how that could possibly be, what it was about her demeanour that could possibly have caused that. Where was the impulse coming from which now stiffened him? From the picture in his mind of her with a Negro’s black penis between her painted lips? She then lifted her eyes to his, expressing repudiation of him, and also demanding a return to the courtesy of two married people, realising, at the same time, that the courtesy of marriage was another illusion and that no two people could express more viciously, or have the craftiness for deeper discourtesy, than a married couple.

  She held his gaze. Their eyes were in contest.

  The courtesy she was demanding was the deadening courtesy which also killed passion in marriage but she didn’t want to succumb and rearrange their marriage that way. It was too late for that.

  She sensed clearly that to yield to him would be a true and animal thing but he was no longer the person with whom she wanted this true and animal thing. That was no longer possible. Had been lost, lost, lost.

  His gaze was filled with lust. She could also see in his eyes a desire to punish and degrade her. As if the punishment and degradation would burn Jerome out of his heart. Affirm his own supremacy. But blazingly, it was lust. He wanted her to pleasure him. He wanted her. And she yearned for lust and, to her unnerving surprise, her body, at the sight of his stiffened cock, was becoming
ready to receive him. She had deep urgings to kneel and take him to her mouth.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ Her mouth was thick with saliva.

  There was a burning silence and he did not make any other gesture but to hold his stiffened cock in his hand for her to take.

  ‘No,’ she said, thickly. ‘No. Go.’

  Without breaking their gaze, he made an ugly, frustrated noise, a man’s noise which she had never heard before, a pained whimper.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw his cock had lost some of its rampant stiffness.

  Turning from her, he put it away and did up his flies, and left the room without speaking.

  She was breathless with colliding emotions—of relief that he had not prevailed, yet a sense of a loss of the rising lust within herself, that she had not abandoned herself to the primal call to do what he had asked—and at the same time, a sense that something even more dreadful than anything which had gone before had happened between them, and to them. And that dreadful thing, as gross and as unjust as it was, came from her denial of his lust. And her denial of the animal lust within herself.

  That form of sex had happened between them only once during the very early days of their marriage, as some levy he had imposed, perhaps, after her confession, and which she had been delighted to pay, to show him that she was entirely with him and for him. It had never happened again, as if it had become something which had happened with another, worse, with an exotic other, and did not belong in a decent marriage.

  The confession from way back then must have been eating at him. Eating and eating at his spirit to become some chronic indignation. Or need.

  Now something had broken irrevocably between them, her refusal to submit to it, to abandon herself, had caused a rupture from which she could see no recovery.

  After a while she rose, finding that she was shaky. She had difficulty in moving steadily. She quickly drank a glass of sherry.

  She had to flee from his proximity.

  She went to the telephone and had herself put through to Jeanne, telling her in a low quiet voice that she must see her urgently, that perhaps they could meet at her place.

  She had an inkling that Jeanne would understand, although she was unsure what it was she would tell Jeanne.

  She went to the dressing room, hesitated about what to wear and, for the first time, felt fearful of being undressed in the same place as Robert.

  She dressed for dinner, knowing that Robert must be listening to her movements. She packed some clothing and things for an overnight stay with Jeanne, and gathered her work papers. She had never gone to stay outside their marriage in this way before.

  She then went to the door of his room, agitated.

  He was now drinking whisky but appeared to be doing nothing else.

  She said, ‘I am going to dinner with Jeanne. I think it best that I stay with her tonight.’

  ‘Perhaps you could both find yourselves a rendezvous.’

  She could hear his rancour.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Go back to the gutter.’

  ‘You have a disgust of the world. I don’t wish to be poisoned by it. You abused my candour.’

  They had never spoken to each other with such disrespect. She felt her whole being deforming, warping, inside her.

  He drank from his whisky as a way of dismissing her. He did not look up.

  He seemed utterly without empathy, regret or kindness.

  She stayed the night with Jeanne, explaining her surprise visit simply as a marriage spat, not feeling sure she could go to the heart of the matter with her just yet. Or perhaps ever. She felt scared of ever offering confidences again.

  On consideration, she would never go to the heart of the matter with Jeanne or anyone.

  Jeanne had been rather thrilled to have her as a guest and to provide a hideaway, and rose to the occasion with great tenderness, and with absolute commitment to her, as if her running away from Robert confirmed to Jeanne the supremacy of her own single life. They slept chastely together but she was glad of the near warmth of Jeanne’s body and her sisterly caresses.

  When she returned to the apartment, Robert and she seemed to avoid each other, although that happened in the natural flow of things, and communication was now mostly by businesslike notes left on the table, a sad reversal from the earlier days of marriage when the notes had been those of loving and witty exchange.

  Over the next few days at the office, Edith followed the story of Edwina Mountbatten in the bits and pieces of tittle-tattle which came up in conversation.

  All the English on the staff were following the case, but she did not wish to show to them any uncommon interest, a caution which came from an absolutely ridiculous fear of revealing her burning personal preoccupation.

  She went daily to the League library and furtively checked the London papers and saw with some puzzlement that Edwina Mountbatten had taken the People newspaper to court for libel.

  This was something she would’ve loved to have talked to Robert about but there was no one really who could answer her questions.

  In the court proceedings, Edwina Mountbatten denied ever inviting any coloured man to her house or of knowing any coloured man.

  She read that on the day after the court case, Dickie and Edwina had lunched with George V and Queen Mary at the Palace. So the Palace was forgiving them or standing by them, it seemed.

  Robert and she, alone of all the English people on the Continent, did not talk of the matter, although communication after a week or so resumed at a housekeeping level.

  She wanted to know more and wondered who she could ask about the scandal who would be reliable. She could, she supposed, write to Ambrose who would know all.

  Yet Ambrose was an approach not without qualms and snares either.

  She had been in the company of Ambrose on that night in Paris when she’d been in compromising circumstances, to use the language of the newspapers, with Jerome.

  Her own incident had arisen at a visit to a jazz club in Paris. Ambrose had come looking for her after she had been absent—probably for longer than was polite—and it was he who’d found her in the Room Artiste with Jerome.

  How much Ambrose had seen, or what he had surmised that night had never been discussed nor resolved between Ambrose and herself.

  For her to take an interest in the Edwina Mountbatten story now would perhaps inflame his imagination as much as it had inflamed Robert’s.

  Was there anything to be lost in inflaming Ambrose’s imagination? Ye gods, he lived for aberration. She could’ve told him back then. Of all the people in the world, it was he with whom she should have talked about it all.

  Or were there things which could never be told to anyone without setting in play unforeseen repercussions of an unguessable magnitude? Better consigned to eternal silence?

  Yet, in those earlier days, all the candour she had risked with Ambrose, and he with her, had created a fineness of life. Their mutual candour had exhilarated them.

  God, how she now missed him.

  It brought home to her how many boundaries there were to the conversations and friendships which she had around the League. Even among the progressives and the radical reformers. There was on the one hand so much propriety among those of conservative leanings and, on the other, so many things which were not worthy of serious moral discussion among the progressives.

  There had been no taboo on the salacious with Ambrose. If something had been seen as salacious in the respectable world, it became a giggling lark in Ambrose’s world.

  It was Ambrose she needed to speak with and she began her letter to him—and, with a deep breath, decided once again to risk the candid approach.

  ‘We, or at least I, are all agog at the Edwina Mountbatten scandal,’ she wrote. ‘I am dying to hear more. You must be close to that crowd. Of course, you will be saying to yourself, “Edith has every reason to be interested in that affaire” or is it more that it would be for me an affaire de go�
�t. Recalling, of course, our infamous night in Paris.’

  There, it was out and plain between Ambrose and her.

  She had decided to write on the assumption that he knew what had happened that night between the black musician and herself. If he did not indeed know, she prayed he would enjoy having his suspicions confirmed. That he would relish it.

  If he did not—if he were hurt or offended—then the possibility of finding their way back to their outrageously candid relationship was lost.

  That was the risk.

  It could be that she was asking too much of that former intimacy, just as she had asked too much of her marriage.

  Her statement in the letter—‘an affair of taste’—had such ambiguity in this particular matter. She hoped that Ambrose would enjoy the vulgar ambiguity of it.

  She recalled that in Ambrose’s and her affair, this particular carnal pleasure had been, for a time, a favourite thing for both of them. And he was the only man who had ever pleasured her with his mouth.

  The more she thought about it, that particular sexual act had never gone out of season in their affair. In fact, it had seemed to be more the natural thing for their affair and its nature.

  She then realised that the letter to Ambrose had other yearnings hovering about it—a yearning to tell him of the crumbling of her marriage.

  She was not yet ready to tell of the crumbling of her marriage. That was, as yet, too personal and undigested a mess. She hoped their letters would in the future allow her to blurt out the sorry mess.

  She finished the letter, though, with some of her yearnings expressed: ‘I miss you dear Ambrose … oh, how I miss you,’ she wrote.

  Tears fell to the page. She blotted them with her sleeve, glad to see that they had swollen the fibre of the letter paper. She hoped he would see the tear stains.

  Unbelievably, in the days after she had sent the letter, her relations with Robert slowly healed and warmed, and even approached a cheerfulness.

  They were able to resume eating together and doing things in public together. A marriage of appearances.