Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  She wanted to sound intelligent, but the way she said it sounded as if the mind had been knocked ‘unconscious’, rather than whatever the Freudians meant by unconscious mind.

  ‘You know of the unconscious mind?’

  ‘I have a layperson’s knowledge of Freud’s work. And I studied science at university.’

  What had that to do with it? They had not studied the unconscious mind. But by saying that she supposed it let him know she was reasonably educated. That she was somehow more his sort than his usual patients.

  What would that gain her? Immunity? On the grounds that educated people could not be mentally unbalanced? Parity? She supposed it was parity that she sought. She wanted him to consider her something of a social equal, at least. A cerebral equal.

  More silence as the doctor looked at her. Inquiringly?

  Was she another mask, a League of Nations Mask for his collection? What was she supposed to say?

  He looked down at his notes and without looking up, said, ‘How is Major Westwood? Doctor Westwood?—man of two titles. He writes to me as a doctor, so we will call him doctor.’

  ‘Fine—just fine. The Ambrose of both titles is fine.’

  She smiled at her own jest. He nodded. He looked up but did not particularly smile at her jest.

  She felt compelled to go on talking. ‘He’s here in Geneva again. With the Federation of International Societies.’

  Another silence.

  Edith again felt compelled to break it, although she knew about that conversational ploy which forced the other to speak. ‘The Federation helps coordinate all the different international societies which are here now in Geneva. They all want to have dealings with the League. He coordinates things.’

  ‘I see.’

  He saw what exactly? That therefore he was her lover?

  The doctor spoke. ‘And he has written to me asking me to see you.’

  ‘I wanted to talk with you about strain of work. “Nerves”? Ambrose—Doctor Westwood—pointed out that I was under strain.’

  ‘How are you under strain?’

  ‘Italy invading Ethiopia—I work at the League, I deal with these things—I was the Secretary-General’s liaison officer with Anthony Eden.’

  ‘Will sanctions work?’

  ‘The Assembly has held firm—except for Switzerland and Venezuela on oil. And except for the Americans, of course, who, as you know, still haven’t joined the League. They say they’ll impose bans on arms sales but not on other trade. One more turn of the screw and Italy will collapse. But I ramble on …’

  ‘It is interesting. I am interested in what you do.’

  ‘But it is better for a country to lose money by imposing sanctions than to spend money on war.’ She felt she should return to her own problems rather than those of the world. ‘Long hours at work. Failure of the Disarmament Conference to make headway has saddened me. I fear trouble brewing in Spain. Germany and Japan have left the League. Everything’s going wrong.’

  As she described things, she felt very seriously that everything was going wrong. She had babbled out all this stuff. She feared she would cry.

  ‘Everything’s going wrong? I read that the British have moved the battle-cruisers Hood and Renown to Gibraltar. That shows the British are serious. No? Have you lost faith?’

  She was not going to engage in the endless talk about diplomatic tactics and Italy. The diplomacy of moving of ships about. Was he going to engage in amateur diplomacy? Maybe at least that would let her off the hook about herself.

  ‘I haven’t lost faith. I was close to losing my faith.’

  He seemed to become aware that in his political inquiries he had asked an irrelevant question, too removed from their purpose. ‘You are married? Do you have children?’ he asked.

  No, she did not have children. And soon it would be too late.

  ‘I have no children.’

  ‘No children.’

  The dog was back on the scent.

  ‘I see in this letter from Doctor Westwood, that you are living in the same residence. By the way, the Disarmament Conference has reconvened, yes?’

  ‘It’s limping. Japan and Germany have walked out.’

  ‘You see no hope for disarmament?’

  She considered her answer. ‘Not with Hitler rearming. No. None.’

  ‘Too bad. And apart from the burdens of a troubled world?’

  ‘My husband is away.’ She said that rather quickly.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He’s a foreign correspondent for a London newspaper. Travels a lot.’

  My minstrel boy to the war has gone.

  ‘How long has he been away?’

  ‘Oh, months now.’ She tried for a less bewildered voice, tried to make it all more commonplace, for a husband to be away, and for her to be not sure how long he’d been away.

  ‘And he will be returning?’

  ‘To be precise, he’s been away for a year—he’s been gone for more than a year.’ She tried to make it sound as if it were simply a matter of mathematic calculation which she was now correcting. ‘Returning? Oh, yes, he’ll be back. One of these days.’

  She tried to make it sound light, forcing herself to grin.

  Silence. He stared at her. It was, she supposed, acceptable for such a doctor to stare.

  ‘You seem to be uncertain—your voice. You seem not to know how long he will be away, your husband?’

  ‘I don’t, really …’ She again felt tearful. ‘But you see, there are two answers to your question—when did he leave the first time, decide to be a foreign correspondent, that is, rather than working here in Geneva, and when it was that he last “visited”—which was nearly a year ago.’

  ‘It is hard, his being away?’

  ‘Oh yes, I miss him.’

  Silence. A silence, provided, it seemed to her, to give her an opportunity to elaborate, revise? Change her statement?

  She didn’t feel ready yet to mention that whenever he returned Robert usually took the husbandly rights and comforts without asking. And about which she was only mildly pleased. He seemed to get a lot out of it, though. Oh well. It wasn’t a great demand for him to make in itself. Although during it, she worried a little about catching foreign diseases. She could hardly tell the doctor that. Nothing to be done about that, they were, after all, husband and wife. And if she couldn’t get this little thing right, what hope was there for her?

  This doctor’s silence was not in the give and take of negotiation.

  This was a silence which sucked up things from within oneself.

  And the doctor was being silent because it was the patient who had the things to say—he was not there to speak.

  She knew enough about it all to know that the doctor was there to read what she said rather than just take it in at face value.

  She thought she might as well be honest about her marriage, that at least. ‘I think he’s away indefinitely. Modern marriage. We thought a break would be best. His newspaper work and my diplomatic work don’t fit well together. Something like that.’

  Was that the truth?

  ‘You don’t miss him, then?’

  She tried to smile a wry smile, and shrugged. ‘I don’t really. No.’

  Again she was near to tears. ‘I suppose I should. But I don’t.’

  She looked inside herself. ‘I don’t, really.’

  That was now a little untrue in the opposite direction. There were days when she missed him. Hard to be precise. But this revised answer was more true than her first attempt.

  The doctor didn’t smile back, he refused to be complicit. ‘Has the marriage ended, then?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t really know.’ She was uncomfortably close to tears.

  ‘Has he left you?’

  The words ‘left you’ caused her heart to clutch. She had never put it in those words. In the vague shape which her marriage now took, if anything she preferred somehow to see herself as the one who’d ‘left’—even if
she’d been the one who’d, literally, stayed in the matrimonial home.

  She’d been the first to leave, emotionally.

  Or was it really that Robert had left her?

  She felt cold. Their parting words in all their airy ambiguity and breezy affection had never quite added up to anything much in the way of a plan for their lives. On reflection, it had never been clear what was happening.

  ‘You seem distracted?’

  ‘I prefer to refer to it as a separation. We have never discussed divorce. A separation.’

  ‘And Doctor Westwood?’

  And Doctor Westwood.

  ‘He is sharing my apartment—while my husband is away.’

  Silence. Doctor Vittoz stared at her.

  She blushed. She had thought that blushing was out of her life.

  Oh well, here goes. ‘We are lovers.’ She managed to get it out, in a rather small voice.

  ‘You were lovers before. When I saw Doctor Westwood. Do I remember that correctly?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we were, before I married.’

  ‘And now you are lovers again?’

  ‘Yes. Again.’ She made her wry face, trying to say, well, these are novel times.

  Again and again.

  ‘Again,’ she repeated, and this time it came out sounding very strange indeed.

  ‘You repeat the word?’ His voice seemed kindly, at last.

  She looked at him and shrugged. They held each other’s gaze—his face was kindly. ‘Again, yes again, lovers again,’ she said, feeling compelled to utter the word ‘again’. But the word she wasn’t saying was ‘forever’, together again and, she suspected, forever.

  She now began to cry, scrabbling in her handbag for a handkerchief.

  He offered her a laundered and pressed handkerchief from his drawer. Did he have a drawer full of handkerchiefs for weepy ladies?

  A copious male handkerchief.

  ‘Oh dear.’ She pulled her voice together, and dabbed her eyes dry. ‘Oh dear, I didn’t mean to cry. It’s not as if my life is a tragedy.’

  ‘You may cry here. This is a place to cry.’ As he said this, she began to cry again. ‘Everyone’s life, if not a tragedy, is lived on the precipice of tragedy. In fear of tragedy and loss.’

  When she was again in control of herself she said, ‘Yes, we are again lovers, Doctor Westwood and I.’

  ‘Again.’ He smiled.

  She smiled, and nodded. ‘But that is not why I am here.’

  She put on a strong voice, trying to keep to what she thought was a safeguarded point, and to keep her life simple for the doctor, and for herself, and for the purposes of explanation. ‘I am here about strain. Work strain. I really need to be examined for … work strain.’

  ‘How do you suggest that I do that?’

  She was surprised. Wasn’t it his job? ‘Oh, I didn’t think that you would have an instrument which measured it,’ she smiled and sniffed and used the handkerchief to wipe the tearful moisture from her nose. ‘I suppose—I suppose by me telling you about the hours I work and so on. The dreadful problems we face at the League. Statistically. Perhaps.’

  She felt a tiredness, a deep tiredness.

  ‘What brings you here this day—particularly—at this time of your life—apart from the demands of work? An incident? Something has happened to bring you here?’

  ‘Not Ambrose—not being lovers. That is not why I am here.’

  Silence.

  She found herself with nothing to say.

  ‘Your husband understands this? Your being lovers with Doctor Westwood—again.’

  ‘It was understood, I believe, before my husband and I … separated … that Ambrose was living in Geneva again. And I wrote to my husband about Ambrose—Doctor Westwood—moving into the apartment.’

  ‘Still, this part of your life is somewhat, how to say it? Somewhat “nebulous”?’

  ‘To outsiders, perhaps, but not to those of us who are intimately involved. I believe we all understand.’

  Much had been left unspoken about the arrangement.

  ‘Be that as it may, that is not why I am here. I was told something by a colleague at work,’ she stumbled, ‘which led me—and Doctor Westwood—to think I was under strain.’

  ‘Tell me about the something which was told to you.’

  ‘It was gossip and I resented it and I wanted to rebuff it. That’s why I am here.’

  ‘You haven’t told me what it was—this that the colleague said which touched a nerve?’

  ‘It didn’t touch a nerve so much as it annoyed me. And it brought home to me how frazzled I was.’

  How very weary.

  ‘Everything you say to me is confidential. And we are not here to judge—only to remedy, if we can.’

  ‘This colleague referred to drinking, which is not what I am here for. I don’t see drinking as the problem.’

  To her relief, the doctor seemed to accept what she’d said and returned to her marriage. ‘You cried when we mentioned … Doctor Westwood, Ambrose … and your husband’s absence—but that’s not what you are here for?’

  ‘I suppose everything is connected,’ she finally admitted. ‘One might have to say that—that everything is connected.’

  She cried again.

  The doctor again softened his voice. ‘That’s a big leap for us to take. To allow that everything is connected, it lets loose all sorts of fears that seem unmanageable. But they are manageable. Often everything is a symptom of everything else.’

  Crying into the handkerchief, head down, she nodded.

  ‘Never fear. We can come to an understanding with these phantoms. Fatigue distorts yet it also serves us by allowing things to capture our attention. Things which we had tried not to see. Which we block out by everyday matters. Fatigue allows serious things to break through sometimes. The dam bursts.’

  ‘I suppose it does, the dam does burst.’ She tried to laugh about her tears, struggled to make a joke about the dam, struggled to control her tears, but gave up. ‘I suppose, though, that specifically, I am here so that you can verify my state of mind as being, well, frazzled. Something like that.’

  She tried to seal off her tears and to find control again. ‘And I would rather not let everything become tangled together, even if they are connected. I would like to deal with one thing this time. Maybe the other things at some other time.’

  He didn’t laugh. ‘You mention drinking, your colleagues mentioned your drinking?’

  She felt herself colour. ‘That was annoying but that was, well, just that—annoying.’

  She felt herself sinking into heartache, sitting there, trying to keep things from becoming tangled. ‘Very annoying. Very affronting.’

  ‘It cannot be very good, for your colleagues to talk about you that way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you, yourself, worry about your drinking?’

  ‘Not at all. Not that is, until this annoying business of them talking about it.’ She found a clever formulation. ‘It is not my drinking which is the problem: it is their talking about it which is the problem.’

  That was suddenly clear.

  ‘Why do you think they talk about it?’

  Her self-defensiveness was giving her insights. ‘I suppose, because I am a woman. If I were a man they wouldn’t care two hoots. Women who drink … only loose women drink. Every man can drink.’

  That it was only gossip wasn’t strictly true—Walters, Bartou were not gossips. Sweetser was perhaps a gossip. How much gossip was there and for how long had there been gossip?

  This idea distressed her further. She saw Florence and the others talking about her, whispering about her as she went by. Did her friends also gossip about her?

  ‘You drink more than a woman should?’

  She looked directly at him, ‘How much should a woman drink?’ she said, aggressively, at last gaining some strength to resist. He didn’t respond to her question.

  She said, ‘It’s seen as unwomanly. That�
�s the problem.’

  ‘As unwomanly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you feel unwomanly.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  What an odd question. How would she feel if she felt unwomanly? She wondered if this connected to Ambrose. If this doctor was to see everything as connected, then perhaps unwomanly and womanly and so on were all churning about in his head? And Ambrose’s womanliness was also there in this doctor’s head. Oh dear. Where were they? ‘It is seen that way only in some circles. Not in sophisticated circles, not in liberal-minded circles.’

  ‘Is the League a sophisticated circle of liberal-minded people?’

  She was shaken. ‘That’s not quite how the League is at all. It is a mixture. Some are, for example, very religious.’

  ‘Yet you had tended to look at it as a circle of liberal-minded sophisticates?’

  ‘I think I had. I think I had wished it to be that way.’

  She was shaken a little by having to accept that, to realise how wishful her thinking had been about the nature of the League. Her group was not the League anymore. The League was now bigger than simply her circle.

  ‘Does it affect your work?’

  ‘Drinking?’ He didn’t answer her query. ‘I don’t consider that it does.’

  ‘Your colleagues do?’

  She resisted admitting this. Presumably that was a conclusion that the gossip could lead to. ‘This isn’t the issue. The issue is …’ She’d lost track of the conversation. ‘The issue is my need for a doctor’s assessment from you. Relating to strain.’

  He again left her stewing in silence.

  She said, ‘As far as it affecting my work, I get to the office before any of the others. I work longer than others.’

  ‘You feel that this is saying something to the others? This getting to work first?’

  ‘It says that I am serious about my work. My work is my life.’

  ‘Does it say anything else?’

  She thought. ‘That I am dedicated to my work?’ It was as if there was a correct answer which she was expected to find.

  Silence. ‘Anything else?’

  Why weren’t her answers enough for him? She scratched around to find something else to throw to him, ‘My coming to work early is a game, I suppose—to beat the others. Also as a personal standard—that regardless of whether I may have caroused the night before I still get to work first.’