Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

The next day over breakfast with Robert, she brought up the matter of Ambrose. Not that she needed a clearance from Robert now for anything. However, oddly, she sensed that there were niceties to be observed. ‘How do you feel about Ambrose’s visiting Geneva?’

  ‘How should I feel?’

  ‘He and I were lovers.’ She imperceptibly winced as she again took one more of the sensitivities of her past out of the bag. Too bad.

  He moved in his chair. He obviously still found it difficult to accept this as a conceivable fact. Her confession and revelations about Ambrose had been another part of her attempt at complete candour during the courtship.

  ‘Some years back now,’ Robert said, tightly.

  He was trying to be civilised about it.

  She wondered whether that was a clearance.

  She stayed on her guard—prudently as it turned out, because Robert then said, ‘I have never asked questions. Not after you told me about him and his nefarious predilections.’

  She noted that he didn’t use the word ‘nefarious’ jokingly. How she wished that she had been able to lie back then.

  As it turned out, he hadn’t deserved the deeper truths of her life.

  ‘I appreciated that.’ She granted him his virtue in not having brought it up before.

  For all his paraded worldliness, she suspected that he’d never asked about her time with Ambrose because it was so incomprehensibly and sickeningly alien to him.

  He then surprised her. Struggling towards a smile, he said, ‘I think I will leave it at that. I’ve done enough dabbling in your past. I believe in our marriage, you know. Regardless of my going to distant parts. I still see us as a married couple.’

  She’d hoped that he would have avoided saying things like that. It required her to affirm and, as yet, she did not know what it was, exactly, she wanted to affirm. She supposed that she saw it now as a partly relinquished marriage.

  He seemed to have given it some thought. And regardless of the scandale Jerome and now the Ghost of Ambrose Past, he was persevering with some idea of a married life. Perhaps as his departure drew near, he had started fearing the separation.

  She ducked giving the affirmation he seemed to want and instead said, ‘I take it you don’t wish to discuss the visit of the “nefarious Ambrose”?’

  He shuffled a little and said, in his man-of-the-world voice, ‘I’d be happy to say hello.’

  She said she thought that would be fine. ‘Jeanne was thinking of us all going on a picnic.’

  ‘Ambrose?’

  ‘A bunch of us.’

  ‘That might be going too far. Hate picnics. Count me out.’

  She was glad he didn’t want to join it. Good.

  They then went back to reading their newspapers there in the café.

  Or to the appearance of reading. She continued with her thoughts of Ambrose and suspected that Robert continued with his thoughts, also of Ambrose.

  Back in the old days, Ambrose had, at times, felt challenged by Robert’s manliness and Robert and he had engaged with each other occasionally in a bantering bellicose café manner. Robert had hated what he described as Ambrose’s pose of ‘drawling detachment’. Robert, on the other hand, had conceded that Ambrose was a good administrator with important Foreign Office connections.

  This had been before her pre-marriage revelation of the precise nature of her affair with Ambrose and its perverseness.

  In her recent letters to Ambrose, she had, in the end, spoken only of the ‘ups-and-downs’ of married life and left it at that. It seemed to her that Ambrose had to accept that she and Robert were a married couple, regardless of what had happened within that marriage, and regardless of its state of disrepair.

  She tried then to stop herself laughing at the ordinariness of their appearance there in the café, as a man and wife, sitting reading their newspapers, munching their toast and marmalade, in the only English breakfast café in Geneva, which Robert now asserted as his preference.

  How bizarre it was that they pretended to be doing the normal things when they were feeling so far from normal.

  She couldn’t decide if these were the last dying days of a marriage or an interregnum or a new marriage arrangement. She was tired of it all. For now, apathy would have to do all the work.

  She would not try anymore.

  She would place herself in the hands of apathy.

  Ambrose arrived two days after the opening of the Disarmament Conference.

  Robert joined her in meeting him at the railway.

  Ambrose came off the train and she realised that she’d forgotten how dashing and good looking he was now in his mid-forties. How slim. He was slimmer than she.

  She sighed as they hugged. Ah, those strange, lost, wicked days.

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ Ambrose said, stepping back. ‘Either of you.’

  He shook Robert’s hand with energetic friendliness, ‘No, I lie,’ he said, looking at them through hooded eyes. ‘You have both changed into a seriously happy married couple.’

  She and Robert laughed together merrily like a seriously happy married couple, and for a second she felt seriously and happily married.

  ‘I despise you both,’ he said, laughing.

  Robert and she laughed again as a couple, and she heard Robert say, ‘We get along—more like cats and dogs than a house on fire.’

  ‘Oh, much better to be cats and dogs than a house on fire,’ Ambrose said.

  She wondered if that was now how Robert wished to see them ‘as a happily married couple who fought like cats and dogs’.

  Ambrose hugged her again. ‘I missed the beginning of the conference. Heard it on the wireless, nonetheless.’ Ambrose was using his diplomat’s voice.

  Robert did not offer to carry Ambrose’s bags.

  Talking like a newspaper reporter, Robert described the opening of the Disarmament Conference to Ambrose, probably for want of something to say, to cover the need for conversation now that he was face to face with Ambrose.

  Ambrose said he heard the church bells of Geneva ringing away via the wireless. ‘Heard Arthur Henderson ask the assembled world, “Have we all genuinely renounced war as an instrument of national policy?” ’

  ‘Did you hear any reply to the question?’ Robert said, laughing to keep the situation jolly.

  ‘The whole world was, as you know, tuned to it on their wireless or waiting to hear that the world was disarmed,’ Ambrose said. ‘I suppose they were waiting to hear the clatter of guns being dumped in a heap.’

  ‘They’ll wait a long time,’ Robert said.

  ‘Quite surprising to get sixty-one countries together—including the US and the Soviets. Pretty much everyone who matters.’

  ‘Sweetser takes it as an omen that President Hoover will soon join the League,’ she said, keeping up the laughter.

  ‘Dear Arthur has been predicting that the US would join the League now for twelve years. How is the old dear?’

  She told him about Arthur wanting to go back to get his hat during the Manchurian crisis.

  ‘As you must’ve heard, the whole disarmament show was an hour late starting because the Council was hearing about the Japanese invasion of China,’ Robert said. ‘A war gets underway as disarmament begins. Truly, there is a Laughing God.’

  ‘Are you backing ratios?’ Ambrose asked, still using his serious, diplomatic, man-to-man voice to Robert.

  She observed that she was listening to Robert as if he had also just arrived on the train. As something of a stranger.

  ‘If I’m backing anything.’

  ‘It’s probably the only way to go, that’s what my pals at the FO think,’ Ambrose confided. ‘Lock together the big powers—Britain: Japan: US: France: Germany: Russia—to set ratios for their armies, navies, airforces, and their munitions production. And then over the years you reduce the ratios.’

  ‘As long as there are no cheats. Don’t see how you can catch the cheats,’ Robert said.

  ‘There is the incentive
that reducing armaments saves each country money,’ she put in.

  ‘I’d keep Germany totally disarmed,’ Ambrose said.

  ‘Lost cause. They’ve secretly armed. Even under Stresemann they were getting their guns together. Which is why the Disarmament Conference will not work. As long as people can rearm secretly, how can it?’

  The two men were fixed on each other, like two circling dogs.

  Edith mentioned the idea of international inspection teams freely travelling in all countries.

  ‘How will they know where to look?’ Robert said, dismissively.

  ‘I would biff them back into a state of disarmament,’ said Ambrose.

  Robert laughed in agreement.

  She said that the inspection teams would have to be more cunning than those who tried to hide weapons.

  ‘And what if they were bribed to look away?’ Robert said.

  She said that, as with eradicating all corruption, you had to make it more worthwhile not to be corrupt.

  Ambrose chose to stay out of this argument.

  The three of them walked silently to the car.

  It was a long time since she’d heard Ambrose’s real-man voice. Perhaps he had changed back into being a man 100 percent. If it were true, it would perhaps be for the best in this stern world.

  She felt Robert had been very civil.

  She fell then into deceit.

  They dropped Ambrose at the Hôtel Richemond and she and Robert went on to their respective work places.

  As soon as she was back at her office desk, she called Ambrose at his hotel and said that she would like to come around to the hotel immediately.

  ‘Come,’ he said, and it was not his diplomat voice, nor his man-to-woman voice, nor his voice for dealing with the everyday world. It was his Other Voice.

  And her voice to him was not that of a proper wife. Or any wife.

  In Ambrose’s rooms at the Richemond, they held each other in a long embrace, melting from being an embrace of the upper body to an embrace of their entire bodies.

  She stood there in his arms tearful with the relief of it and she felt his body responding to their physical cleaving.

  She moved away and sat on a chair, her breathing broken.

  He looked across at her, speaking with his eyes, a deep craving look she knew from the old days, and one which expressed bodily longing for her and for the consolations of their former love.

  She shook her head gently, slightly, but unambiguously.

  She dried her eyes.

  She rose, went to him and kissed his forehead. ‘I must go now,’ she lied, ‘I just wanted to say a proper hello. I’m a married woman, dear, and cannot stay long—if at all—in a gentleman’s room. I came so that we could hug properly, that’s all.’

  How false she sounded.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, rising quickly and resuming his friend-like voice, a voice of courteous understanding about the nuance of things, ‘Of course, dear Edith. Fully understood.’

  ‘May we expect you for dinner tomorrow, as arranged?’

  He looked at her. ‘May I be excused?’

  She looked at his eyes and saw a miserableness, the miserableness which came from the unmeasurable distance between them now that she was a wife. As she continued her pose as a wife.

  It wasn’t just the pose of a wife. It was a fear within her about the whole nature of her former intimacy with Ambrose, the nagging question of what it meant about her if she desired a man such as Ambrose?

  And she did, did desire him.

  Dreadfully.

  She was using the shell of her marriage to hold him off but sooner or later he must realise that her marriage had become a broken thing. What would restrain them then?

  ‘Are you sure you won’t come to dinner?’

  ‘I am sure.’

  ‘Then, dear Ambrose, you are excused. And understood.’

  She was relieved. It would not have worked.

  She looked at him. ‘Remember, I love you in a very special way.’

  ‘And I you, dear Edith,’ he said. ‘I would find the dinner party too full of jumping beans, demons, and sharp corners. I do not think I would survive.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Why was she talking of loving in special ways as if to classify it all, to put it off there in a file, and then back into the filing cabinet?

  ‘When do you return to London?’

  ‘Friday. I think the draft convention will have been adopted by then. It will all be over. Just a matter of tedious detail after that.’

  ‘It’s rather breathtaking, isn’t it? That we should’ve lived to see the world disarm? And to have been part of making it happen?’

  He nodded. ‘And there’s something else.’ He was nervous.

  ‘Yes? What?’

  ‘While here, I’m charged with looking for accommodation for our Geneva offices. There’s a possibility that I might be returning to Geneva—for the longer term. More international organisations have opened up their offices here. Geneva as the Headquarters of the World, sort of thing. The Federation feels that it should be here to help.’

  His coming to live there permanently was not in her scheme of things.

  Ambrose being around. Ambrose being around while Robert was not. That was not how she had seen it.

  ‘When will all this happen?’

  ‘Oh soon. Immediately perhaps. Would my being around worry you to death?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Would you welcome my presence? My return to the old crowd—the fast set—forgiven and feted.’

  ‘And very fast?’ She managed to make a joke but found that she did not have a ready inner response to the question of his returning.

  ‘Oh yes, I am much faster now.’

  Her heart was still preparing its answer. His living in Geneva would give her another quandary in an already quandary-filled life.

  The contemplation of it was seductive and portentous.

  He was not the man of her dreams but he was the man of her present hankerings, or the man who enlivened her shadowy side, a man who gave her inadequacies some sort of strange competency. Oh yes, he gave to her psyche a coherence, he infused its timid darkness and disarray with an irreverent confidence.

  Her sense of courtesy answered. ‘Congratulations, Ambrose. That’d indeed be fine. It’ll be like the old days,’ she said, and added, ambiguously, in this day of ambiguity, ‘but you must be prepared to find so much changed. The League is huge now. I’ve changed: we’ve all changed. We are all so much older.’ And she said with a false lightness, ‘And you, yourself, you have changed, I’m sure.’

  He considered his answer. ‘Much. I am older but Wilde-r—as in Oscar Wilde-r. Without the wit.’

  She laughed. ‘And here I am—a dull married woman.’

  Why did she say that?

  ‘You should stop saying that you’re a married woman, Edith. I’m well aware that you are a married woman.’

  If he were so sensible of her married status, how then did he justify his suggestiveness of touch and embrace just minutes earlier?

  How did she?

  Their friendship was having difficulty finding its feet. If it had any feet.

  ‘It’s much in my mind. Being married. It has changed so much for me,’ she said soberly with a dishonest emphasis meant for him.

  ‘Edith—you aren’t happy.’

  She bridled at his presumption. Even coming from a special other person such as Ambrose. Of all the presumptions, presumption about one’s unhappiness was the most unacceptable. It carried in it an assessment by the person of one’s very success at living.

  She did not show her displeasure, but simply shrugged.

  He said softly, ‘Your letter, your letter about Edwina Mountbatten. It was a cri du coeur.’

  She tried to smile gaily, ‘Oh come, Ambrose—it was a letter seeking gossip.’

  ‘If you wish.’

  ‘I do wish.’

  ‘I apologi
se for my presumption,’ he said.

  This was no good. No good. No good.

  She detested the duplicity. Ambrose and she must not make a false start.

  She had to come clean. ‘You’re right. It was not a letter seeking gossip. It was a letter seeking … just seeking.’

  He reached over and took her hands. He waited for her to go on.

  She looked at him helplessly. ‘Not very happy, no.’

  ‘Is marriage supposed to be happy? I thought it was supposed to be, at best, comfortable. Give and take. Something like that. So I read.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be happy. That was what I was led to believe.’

  ‘Maybe marriage is different now. Modernity.’

  ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘Enough of that. So dreary. And I am hardly an expert.’

  It was far from being enough of that. She tried not to cry.

  Get the rest out of the way. ‘And you? Are you all cured now?’

  ‘Cured? Did I say I had been ill?’

  ‘Have you been ill?’

  ‘Nothing to talk about. I don’t remember saying anything in my letters about being ill. Perhaps the odd cold. Rather good health, really.’

  ‘I meant something else.’

  ‘I know that you meant something else. Cured of being a spy?’ He was joking with her.

  ‘That might be somewhere to start. But what’s the point? You would never tell the truth. Spies aren’t expected to tell the truth.’

  ‘I was a very poor spy. Very lazy. Too half-hearted. Really couldn’t be counted as a spy. Just talking to old friends at the FO. That’s how I saw it.’

  She looked at him tenderly, full of yearning for his arms, his soft body, his breasts.

  And what about his predilections?

  It was not the time to speak of that.

  She rose to leave.

  She rose—and went to him. He rose from his chair. Resting her head on his chest, she lifted her face. ‘What are we to do with you?’

  They kissed deeply.

  She then took off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, wondering what she would find beneath.

  And what her heart would do about it.

  She pulled his braces off his shoulders and then took off the shirt, and allowed the trousers to fall to his ankles.

  He stepped out of them. He wore a grey silk vest and grey silk undershorts.