Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  Maybe he was, in fact, cured of his old predilections.

  He sat down and removed his shoes and socks and garters.

  She was relieved that he was, today, simply male. To do what she was now doing was enough of a demand on her very self, without the other.

  She deliberately took off her skirt and blouse, leaving on her chemise, brassiere, and silk underpants, and together in their underwear they moved to lie on the bed where they kissed and their bodies embraced.

  She could not restrain her craving, and pushed up his silk vest, her mouth finding his nipples on his hairless chest.

  His hands cradled her and she suckled, and began to rock in his arms. She found herself calming into a deep peace.

  After a time, a blissful eternity, on his breast, she let go of his nipples, and looking up at him, said, ‘Enter me,’ and putting her hand on him she felt him grow larger. She guided him fully into her, holding aside her underpants and, to her absolute surprise, she reached the height of her pleasure almost immediately, and tears came to her eyes at the rarity of that in her life in recent times. She wiped them away with her hand, smiling at him, her tears like light rain on a sunny day.

  He kissed her tears, as she tried to recover her breath. ‘Oh my, oh my,’ she said.

  She then took his testicles tightly in her hand and coaxed his fluids with words, making him release them, allowing them to flow freely into her. She rose to his coming a second time.

  It was strange that his infertility granted to them this freedom, the freedom for her to allow his fluids to flow into her without consequence or hindrance. She was glad that again she could have all this without any of the impediments of birth control.

  As if her body had appreciated that she was again open.

  They had champagne sent to the room. She hid in the bathroom while it was delivered.

  And there in the bathroom, having reluctantly and gently wiped herself, she accepted that she had committed adultery. She held the stained towel to her face and breathed it in with a strange exhilaration as if it were air from another planet. Which perhaps it was. She then washed herself in the bidet, sad to feel the exquisite fluids leaving her body.

  But that was that.

  No washing would change it. She’d broken the contract of marriage. She’d failed to keep her end of the bargain. And it was no use her saying to herself or to the Court of Life that because it was with Ambrose, it did not count. He had entered her. He had flowed into her. That was that.

  She was an adulteress.

  She was starkly aware of this but not devastated. She did not know what it meant. She wished she had felt strongly enough about Robert to have kept the pledge. She had not. She had fallen from that grace.

  That was the test of it all, the test of her pledging—as a Rationalist she did not care a hoot about religious vows—the test she’d failed, as a Rationalist and as a woman, was her pledging as a woman to a man. The pledge to commit ‘to the exclusion of all others’. She had let it happen. Invited it to happen.

  She did not feel guilt but, inescapably, she felt she had changed her life and her view of herself and she knew not whether it was for good or ill.

  She was now something other than simply a married woman.

  She looked briefly at herself in the mirror, mainly at her make-up.

  And then, in her very much alive adulterous skin, she went back out, knowing that she was again going to join Ambrose’s body.

  There in each other’s arms, afternoon drifted to twilight.

  At some time, they removed their underwear, and Ambrose brought his small, firm, but not fully rigid penis against her, the unpenetrating penis which she loved, not completely entering her, but pleasuring her deliriously with a keen frottage, and they found again their twilight pleasure, belonging neither to woman nor to man, something else. Together they unlocked hidden pleasures.

  During the ensuing hours, they talked of all things intimate and trivial and supreme.

  At some point, she wept for her marriage.

  She was not pleased with herself as a person of integrity but she was pleased with herself as a person who had regained something precious to her life, something she had almost lost, had believed lost, and, worse, had believed to be something which had no further place in her life.

  They talked of the affairs of nations.

  She even outlined her intentions for the winter disarmament picnic.

  Ambrose said protectively, ‘Don’t do it, Edith. Have your picnic, but don’t try to talk with them about their nature and their policies. Don’t do it. They aren’t listeners. People who are fanatical have lost the art of being listeners.’

  She looked into his eyes, tracing his face with her fingers. ‘I want to try to give them back that art. I do not believe, will never believe, that people do not hear reason—and while they do not change at that moment, they will one day, maybe years later, consider that reason if it had been true and genuinely put.’

  Staring up at the high ceiling of the hotel room, with its grandeur, promiscuously shared by many anonymous lovers over decades, she quoted Pearson: ‘ “Hidden beneath diplomacy, trade, adventure, there is a struggle raging among modern nations which is none the less real if it does not take the form of warfare.” Making the peace has to be more hard-knuckled than pacifism.’

  ‘Who will pay?’ asked Ambrose. ‘Will Sir Eric cough up?’

  ‘I will pay,’ Edith said.

  ‘Must pay my respects to Sir E. He drops me a note now and then. Rather good of him.’

  ‘I will use my own money. Grimly enough, the war in the East has sent some shares up, despite the Depression. Rubber is especially good.’ She had her main investment in rubber—Firestone stock. ‘Remember, it comes from my mother’s inheritance? I had always earmarked its earnings for this sort of thing. Allows me to be responsibly rich.’

  ‘And what makes you think they’ll listen?’

  ‘That is my secret stratagem.’

  ‘What is your secret stratagem?’

  ‘It will be my picnic: they will be my guests: they have to listen.’

  She did not go to Marseilles to see Robert off on his ship. She said goodbye at the railway station in Geneva.

  He had become renewed by the idea of travelling again and, it seemed to her, also by the idea of war. He showed no sign of wavering at his decision.

  She had a stirring of hurt about his lack of regret or second thoughts and at the same time felt relieved that he had not changed his mind at the last moment. She scolded herself for expecting to be paid the ordinary emotions while grasping at the personal freedoms which came to her from his going away.

  He had on his old greatcoat from the War, his Army Warm.

  He travelled light, as if wishing to gain speed from the absence of luggage. He carried his new portable typewriter which she had bought for him as a going-away present and on the case she’d had his surname painted in small script. He had been thrilled. Even if she said so herself, it was a terribly fine gift.

  He was cheery and she was lightly affectionate. She did not cry although some conventionally shallow part of her wanted to. To cry would have been a lie. It would have also given something to Robert which she did not feel he deserved.

  She still could not determine whether she was letting him go from her life or whether she still needed to half-believe that he was still her husband who had simply gone to the war. There was something of a comfort in thinking that way. If she could believe that way.

  A husband away at the war.

  As the train pulled out she pondered the arrival of Ambrose and Robert’s leaving and the symmetry it had brought to her life. Why was symmetry appealing, even endorsing? Was it because it suggested, however ridiculously, a deeper order to life?

  Despite what had happened at the Richemond with Ambrose, she was still holding to her ambiguous situation as wife.

  Maybe ambiguity suited her. Suited her just fine.

  Ambrose himself
was, if not ambiguous, then a personality of ill-connected parts. And had no claims and could never make claims on her.

  And, ye gods, if all this suited her just fine, what then was happening to her?

  In the landau, with a hired groom at the reins, they clip-clopped—or as Ambrose, in very high spirits, said, ‘titupped’, savouring the word, and repeating it, claiming it to be the more precise word—along the snowy lanes of Geneva, through the white fields now empty of cows.

  With rugs over their knees, they sipped from Ambrose’s silver travelling cups filled from his and her pocket flasks of cognac, holding the cups in their gloved hands. The picnic baskets tied on to the back, everyone chattering, singing.

  The weather was sunny and they had both the back and front hoods down.

  She had ended up with two picnics—her large special Disarmament Picnic still to happen and, taking up Jeanne’s proposal, this small picnic.

  What had been intended as the farewell picnic for Robert had, instead, become a welcome to Ambrose.

  She had left it to Robert’s journalist mates to organise his public farewells.

  She’d invited Bernard Follett, proprietor of the Molly Club and a former friend of Ambrose’s and someone from the old days. She was glad to see him again and to welcome him back into her life, wondering though, as she did, about the mixing of her categories of friends—League and Molly Club. This had never happened back then but the 1930s were a new world.

  Edith hadn’t see Follett during the couple of years after Ambrose had left the League. She had mixed feelings about him. Follett shared Ambrose’s predilection and she suspected he’d been once a lover of Ambrose’s. Despite his louche club Follett had always seemed to be well connected both diplomatically and in Geneva’s closed social circles.

  Today, as ever, he was charming.

  Ambrose had wanted to make contact again with his old friend. It was perhaps evidence that the predilection remained and if Ambrose was to be back in Geneva the Molly Club would be part of his life. Her life?

  From the League circle, Jeanne was there and so was Victoria, a remarkably efficient New Zealander from Registry. Jeanne was supposed to have brought one of her beaus but as sometimes happened with Jeanne, he failed to appear. Victoria was her determinedly hearty self, never having managed a steady beau and forever bemoaning her single life. Trying hard to be someone helping to make a good time while not herself sure whether she was having a good time. She brought along a generous donation of home-baked cakes.

  And how were Ambrose and she presenting themselves at this picnic? A couple again united as the husband conveniently disappeared? And were those at the picnic celebrating this? Tacitly marrying them in some informal way?

  Ambrose and she worked well as a socialising couple and fell back into their comfortable, companionable style. There was much smiling and touching between them as they titupped through the snow.

  ‘Miss Coventry both drove a four-in-hand and smoked tobacco,’ Ambrose said. ‘And that was eighty years ago.’

  ‘Who was Miss Coventry?’

  ‘A character in a forgotten novel,’ Ambrose said. ‘I now read only forgotten novels. I have made myself the caretaker of forgotten novels. My job is to remember the passingly good forgotten novels.’

  As they rode on, Jeanne said, ‘Tell us all about the latest plans for your Disarmament Picnic for a Thousand, Edith.’

  ‘Not a thousand,’ Edith said. ‘I want to have a gathering for the non-diplomats who’ve come to Geneva for the conference, with their petitions and pleas for total disarmament.’

  ‘Edith wishes to mould them into her secret diplomatic corps,’ Jeanne said conspiratorially to the others.

  ‘Picnics must either be simple—one dish, one gateau, one wine, one cheese, one fruit—or very complicated,’ Victoria said seriously.

  ‘Which is the New Zealand way?’ Jeanne asked her.

  ‘Oh, we always have the most complicated picnics and every picnic I’ve organised in my life has given me a headache,’ she said. ‘I usually have to retire to the car with a cold cloth on my forehead.’

  They all laughed. It sounded achingly true of Victoria.

  Everyone’s reaction to the disarmament picnic had been pretty much the same—razzing. They teased her mercilessly.

  ‘What’s your secret diplomacy?’ asked Follett, but he alone did not indulge in the playful derision. He seemed genuinely curious.

  ‘I want to introduce that pacifist crowd to champagne,’ she said laughing, trying to lighten things up. ‘They’re so prudish. They’re out to stop more than just war. They have a whole list of things to stop.’

  ‘They seem to wish to stop every single one of my vices. Including some I will not list,’ Follet said.

  She did not want to talk about the picnic but she had to say something. ‘As you all know, the Disarmament Conference simply plans to reduce the armed forces of all countries to a level compatible with national safety. The pacifists and their lot want all armaments to go. And they want them to go now, immédiatement. Actually, I just want them to accept the idea of permanent and unpredictable danger.’

  ‘Advanced weapons are the answer—not the threat,’ Follett said, ‘Old weapons are dangerous. Last month the Bedouins managed to kill two thousand people by wielding knives.’

  Jeanne sprang into the argument. ‘New weapons make new problems. The Bedouins could kill two thousand but that was probably all they could kill.’

  ‘Until they’d had their dates and wine at the oasis and could begin again,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘Bombs are only another form of artillery,’ Follett said. ‘The projectile is carried and dropped instead of being propelled by a gun. And the artillery shell is only a new form of a rock thrown by a savage. Or by David’s slingshot at Goliath. Both can kill. You can’t ban rocks.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Victoria, reaching for the cognac flask, ‘that it’s an entirely different thing, dropping a bomb on someone’s head from a great height.’

  Follett continued his argument in favour of the new weapons. ‘My point is this, the aircraft and the bomber can bring about a preclusion of war. Take the North West Frontier. Drop a bomb on warring villages and you stop them dead in their tracks.’

  Edith felt delightfully woozy from the cognac, rolling along there in the crisp chill of the snowy landscape. Woozy or not, she couldn’t help but note that the genial nightclub proprietor Follett had strong ideas—this man who’d created a club where the outside political world seemingly did not exist. His club was a place where the world and its dangerous madness had no place, yet where everything that was amusingly bizarre and darkly pleasurable had a place and a home. She remembered it as a club which banished the pain of existence for a night—a long night.

  In fact, she had rarely if ever seen him in daylight or in a situation such as today, outside the Molly Club.

  And they were more than ideas that he seemed to have—he had information.

  She would keep an eye on this other Mr Follett.

  ‘Dead in their tracks is correct,’ Jeanne said.

  ‘That’s why we have to study how to improve weapons. It may give us the dream of the short war, at least.’

  ‘Happier if we are the ones with the bigger bombs,’ said Victoria.

  ‘Of course,’ said Follett.

  ‘You should tell the pacifists that,’ Ambrose said. ‘Tell them that peace lies in the very opposite to their position.’

  There in the landau, they all chortled.

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as defending bombing,’ Edith said, laughing, trying to keep it all light. ‘But I do think that the pacifists have to see that abolition of all aircraft isn’t possible.’

  ‘It is possible!’ Jeanne exclaimed passionately.

  ‘Jeanne, you can’t stop history and put it back to where it once was,’ Victoria said. ‘At least, I don’t think you can,’ she said, as ever immediately reconsidering her position.

  Je
anne attacked Victoria gleefully. ‘You can put the clock back. Mr Winston Churchill said that because of our military misuse of air travel, humanity had proved unworthy of the gift of air travel. He said it should be taken back from us.’

  ‘Jeanne,’ Follett said patiently, ‘if something is invented it cannot be uninvented.’

  ‘I have never seen the force of that argument,’ Jeanne said blithely. ‘We invented slavery and then abolished it. We invented the rack and now we don’t use it.’

  ‘There may be other examples in history,’ said Victoria. ‘I would have to research that.’

  ‘The beauty of the abolition of all aircraft would be that you would know immediately if someone had breached the treaty,’ said Jeanne. ‘The plane would be spotted and reported to the League. Every pair of eyes would be a keeper of the peace.’

  The others laughed.

  Victoria said, ‘I would love to fly one myself. May become something of a pilot. I would be good at the controls, I suspect.’

  ‘And I, dear Victoria, would be rather bad at the controls, I suspect,’ said Ambrose.

  Victoria had been quick to forgive Ambrose during the time of his disgrace in the Secretariat. ‘Oh Ambrose, dear, I could teach you the controls.’

  ‘I fear not, Vicki, I fear not. But if ever I were to learn control it would be to you that I would come.’

  ‘Perhaps it is I who needs to come to you—for lessons in getting out of control,’ Victoria said.

  ‘The world was a very good place before aeroplanes came,’ Jeanne said, ‘and we made our life well enough without them.’

  Follett was playful in the delivery of his ideas, but Edith felt he probably believed in this use of bombing. She suspected she might too. ‘Who said that once nations had the weapons to annihilate each other in a second, war would cease?’

  ‘Alfred Nobel—having invented dynamite, he had a vested interest,’ Follett said.

  ‘I suppose the aeroplane is a weapon of retaliation and of aggression,’ Edith said.

  ‘Which shows that the whole effort to separate defensive weapons and aggressive weapons and weapons of retaliation is rather slippery,’ Ambrose said.