Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Oh yes, of course, the Treaty of Lausanne. I know it as part of the Treaty.’

  They exchanged glances. ‘For us here—known more as the Chanak matter.’

  ‘Do you believe the League is “the great shipwreck of Wilsonian ideology, only fit for the scrap heap?”,’ the thin one said, laughing off the question to show he wasn’t expressing his own opinion.

  Or was he?

  How bizarre. Was everyone quoting Mussolini? Was it fashionable?

  ‘I do know who said it,’ she said. ‘And no, I don’t believe it’s a shipwreck.’

  They were stuck on this shipwreck metaphor.

  Edith looked out the window and across the paddocks to the arcaded buildings of what she thought must be the Civic Centre shops. How nice to have the arcades rather than country town verandahs.

  Or was it?

  ‘And you agree or disagree?’

  She brought her mind back to the room.

  It was hard for her to say it, but she did. ‘I agree with Mussolini that if there is to be peace now it has to be an armed peace. We can assume that the Disarmament Conference has failed.’

  ‘We should be glad that Italy is with us, I suppose,’ the one who wasn’t thin said.

  ‘If she, in fact, stays with us,’ she said.

  ‘She was with us in the last war against Germany,’ said the thin one.

  ‘You have doubts?’ said the other.

  ‘I have doubts,’ she said.

  ‘They may have enough on their hands with Ethiopia,’ one said.

  Since returning, she had learned that the labour movement, for one, was opposed to sanctions against Italy. It was said that it was because of the Roman Catholic bloc within the Labor Party and in some of the unions. The unions were split.

  She knew that the Department was not RC so she took a risk and said, in a clubby way, that she would, herself, rather ‘be an Ethiopian of whatever religion ruled by Ethiopians, than a Roman Catholic under Mussolini’.

  They guffawed.

  Obviously Protestant. She’d got it right.

  They then asked her about Japan, now sounding somewhat more friendly after her daring revelation of her religious preferences.

  She said that she had doubts that Japan could be brought into a non-aggression pact in the Pacific, which Prime Minister Lyons was urging.

  She said she did not trust Japan since Manchuria.

  ‘Some in the unions here argue that it’s the workers of the world who will stop war.’

  ‘I suppose I believe that loading ships should be left to those who load ships and diplomacy to those who practise diplomacy,’ she said glibly. ‘And I’ve noted that the labour movement is split on the issue. Who speaks for the workers? Who speaks for Australians?’

  They smiled in agreement.

  The Diplomats’ Union.

  ‘What hours do you work at the League?’

  ‘Eight to six, different in winter—some of us work all the time, it seems to me. We do have one-and-a-half hours for lunch.’

  They nodded. ‘We work 8.30 to 4.50 p.m. With half an hour for lunch.’

  ‘We have the long French lunch in Geneva.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  She thought she would amuse them. ‘I’ve heard that the British Foreign Office enjoys a rather long lunch too—they are like the fountains in Trafalgar Square, they play from 12 to 3 p.m.’

  They laughed. The atmosphere had melted.

  The thin one looked at his watch.

  She thought she might use up the remaining thoughts in her head.

  Push her barrow. Get in Eden’s name.

  ‘I still believe sanctions are the answer to war. I worked with Eden on the Committee of Five and the Committee of Eighteen. I found it very illuminating.’

  They asked about Eden and she told them snippets of information and gossip. They lapped it up.

  The interview seemed then to be over, if interview it was, and the men were standing as if by mutually agreed signal.

  She placed her napkin back on the table, and stood.

  ‘You mentioned sinking ships once or twice,’ she said, smiling at the thin man. ‘But you did not mention rats. Thank you.’

  They laughed loudly. The thin man blushed.

  She felt the three of them had ended up liking each other.

  She could see herself working with them.

  But would she forever be seen around the Department as the ‘rat who jumped’?

  On Sunday, a young officer from the Department, Noel Deschamps, took her to play tennis at the residence of the Secretary to the British High Commissioner, who had a tennis court.

  This Noel Deschamps was the secretary of the tennis club, she learned. And had read politics at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

  He seemed to get that into the conversation rather too soon. He also pointed out to her that he was christened ‘Noel’ because he was born on Christmas Day. ‘As in “Nöel”,’ he added, in a passable French accent.

  She found she liked him almost immediately. She supposed he told her so much so quickly because he was young.

  ‘I’ve come good at tennis rather late in life,’ she said. ‘However, not that good,’ she lied.

  ‘Oh, you’ll find some good players here,’ he said. ‘You’ll get a run for your money.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ she said to him.

  He laughed.

  The two men from the Department greeted her like an old friend but said nothing about any response from the Department to her fishing for a job. Would not be proper, she supposed.

  She met the British High Commissioner and managed to get Eden’s name into the conversation and had what she considered to be a genuine conversation on genuine matters with him.

  She knew that he was the only diplomat yet to be appointed to Canberra.

  Maybe she stood a better chance of a job with the British Foreign Office?

  In the general chat at the Residence, she remarked how much the setting up of Canberra reminded her of the setting up of the League.

  ‘How so?’ said Watt’s wife.

  ‘The working out of things for the first time. It was still like that when I arrived there. Allocating rooms. New appointments. All that sort of thing. We then went through it again last year moving into the new Palais des Nations.’

  Someone picked up the conversation. ‘The photographs of the Palais look very grand. Sad that the Palais is completed just when the League itself is so shaky.’

  ‘I do wish people would stop saying that,’ Edith said, laughing, ‘or I will be talked out of a job.’

  ‘I am sorry—I shouldn’t be so negative.’

  ‘I see the Palais as a re-commitment to the League in a way. A re-dedication,’ she said, sounding pompous. ‘Or it’s the world’s last great folly,’ she added, saving herself. Winning a few laughs.

  Throwing it back at them, she asked about the newspapers who said that Canberra was a failure and doomed. ‘Menzies doesn’t seem to believe in it,’ she said.

  ‘Too late now,’ someone said.

  ‘Menzies got us the golf course,’ someone said.

  Another laughed, and said, ‘You must come to a meeting of the Kangaroo Club.’

  ‘And what is the Kangaroo Club?’

  ‘Our citizens’ committee—its job is to “keep Canberra hopping”,’ the wag said.

  She laughed along with the others. She sensed it was a joke they had enjoyed before.

  She positioned herself out of the sun and became an appreciative and noisy spectator of the tennis until it was her turn to play.

  She was fitting in all right, she felt.

  She played very well. The sun—the whole atmosphere—made even the playing of tennis something of a struggle against nature and against the rawness of it all, but this brought out new power in her.

  She beat Noel 6-2, 6-4 in a singles game. He took it rather well.

  And later over cakes, tea and barley water, she overheard that s
omeone else had been appointed editor of Current Notes.

  She swallowed her disappointment and showed no emotion.

  Unless something else was offered, she was to return to Europe. And, if everyone was right—to return to the maelstrom.

  And to Ambrose.

  They would get a dog.

  She received a long-distance call from John Latham in Melbourne, which she took in the telephone booth in the foyer of Beauchamp House.

  ‘Recovered from the train journey to Canberra?’ he asked.

  ‘It was worse than the whole trip back from Europe. And seemed to take longer.’

  ‘They leave the road bad and the rail link impossible as a way of stopping people leaving. How did it go at the Department?’

  ‘Hopeless,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t drop your champagne glass?’

  ‘Who told you that?!’ She was glad he couldn’t see her blush. ‘Did Bruce tell you that? Or Frank McDougall?!’

  ‘A Little Bird.’

  On no, why did they gossip like that?

  She kept her end up, ‘I haven’t had a glass of champagne since arriving in Canberra. But how dreadful that they brought that gossip back.’

  ‘My Little Bird said that you handled the situation with aplomb. He was impressed. Has happened to everyone. I think you got marks for your handling of it.’

  She hoped that were true. ‘I suppose they remembered the dropping of the glass but didn’t remember any of my remarks on matters of import?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, one of your opinions has travelled around the world.’

  Dare she ask?

  ‘Which nugget was that?’

  ‘ “Still trying to sell your dried fruit, Frank.” ’

  Oh. ‘More a quip than a nugget.’

  ‘And also your belief in sanctions.’

  ‘I’m flattered to be quoted.’

  ‘Tell me what went wrong?’

  She described the interviews. ‘It’s really a case of nul et non avenu.’

  ‘You mean, you delivered them a message and they returned it unanswered?’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘You know that being married is the problem.’

  He must have mentioned it in his letter of introduction. ‘I know. But I was married in a church.’

  He got the joke and laughed. ‘You mean that for Rationalists a church marriage doesn’t really count?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They both chuckled.

  ‘I had a call from a mutual friend of ours,’ John said.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Scraper Smith—said he’d bumped into you in Sydney.’

  She felt sick

  ‘Small world,’ John said.

  ‘Small world.’

  John went on, ‘Scraper said that you were a treasure and should be grabbed by the Department.’

  Grabbed.

  ‘How do you know Scraper?’ she managed to ask.

  ‘He did some work for me on a case—a few cases actually. As you see, he can’t ever appear in court—does devilling. You impressed him.’

  She tried to control the nausea rising inside her.

  ‘I agree with him,’ said John.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About how Australia should grab you and put you to work somewhere.’

  ‘Oh well, thank you, John,’ she said. ‘We tried. I appreciated your letter to the Department. Being married is probably the biggest obstacle.’

  ‘You’ll go back to the League?’

  ‘I think they still need me.’

  ‘I am sure they do. Australia’s loss.’

  Robert Comes Home

  1938

  ‘Ambrose,’ she said, waking him, holding on to his arm. ‘Someone’s just let themselves into the apartment.’

  Ambrose sat up in the bed, listening.

  ‘Must be Robert,’ she said.

  ‘He didn’t telegram?’

  ‘No.’

  They listened and heard two male voices. The sound of luggage dropped to the floor.

  The light in the front room came on, and showed under the door of Ambrose’s room.

  There was a silence as she heard what she knew was Robert at the drawer where any mail for him was put.

  The sound of a drink being poured.

  Then Robert called her name and she heard him go to her bedroom and knock. She heard the door of her bedroom being opened and then heard him return to the living room, calling out both for her and for Ambrose.

  Ambrose put on the bedside light. ‘It’s two in the morning,’ he said.

  She made the sickening admission to herself that this had had to happen sooner or later.

  Ambrose was en femme.

  That everything between Robert and Ambrose and her had been left horribly vague now came crashing down on her. She’d tried at times in letters to make it clear that the marriage was over and that something else now existed between them, better described in her mind as a friendly, bohemian arrangement about accommodation.

  That hadn’t quite stuck, nor been quite true.

  ‘He can go to his room—the bed’s made up,’ she whispered.

  And it was no longer his room, it was a guest room.

  ‘There is someone with him,’ Ambrose said.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  ‘You stay here,’ she said, leaving the bed, finding her robe and slippers.

  Damn.

  And then Robert, without knocking, opened the door to Ambrose’s room, coming face to face with her as she tied the sash of the gown around her waist. She closed the gown across her breasts barely concealed by the lace of her nightgown.

  Light from the front room streamed some way into the bedroom.

  He stood there and behind him she saw Potato Gray.

  He and Gray both peered in behind her.

  She couldn’t believe their crassness. Both, of course, were under the weather.

  She glanced quickly to see what it was they could see. Ambrose, lying on one elbow, was mostly covered by the bed clothing, but it was clear in the glow of the bedside light that he was in a feminine silk nightgown—well, boudoir satin, to be precise—and that he had traces of make-up, his lips definitely had lipstick on them and he wore black eye make-up, giving him Egyptian eyes. The one hand which showed had its nails painted crimson. He wore three silver rings. After their coupling, they’d both fallen into sleep without properly removing their make-up. There were two bedside tables and both had jewellery on them.

  Robert’s eyes went from Ambrose’s bed to her and then back to Ambrose.

  He turned to Gray and said in a crude voice, ‘Potato, have you seen anything like this in all your born days?’

  Potato made an amused, embarrassed noise but avoided a reply.

  ‘Oh, this must be Shanghai, Potato—we must be back in the bordellos of Shanghai.’

  She moved forward, pushing them out of the room.

  Her mind was racing with thoughts about the situation as her anger tried to find expression.

  She closed the door behind her, still shepherding both the men into the front room.

  Robert had ‘known’ about Ambrose only in the abstract, had never witnessed it. During all his other visits he’d seen a very respectable and conservative Ambrose.

  The impact of what he’d seen now showed on his face as the three of them stood facing each other in the front room.

  ‘Why didn’t you telegram that you were coming?!’ she almost shouted.

  And she’d forgotten whether she’d ever made it clear that Ambrose and she had resumed a physical relationship. Or whether Robert had ever asked. Or whether that was taken for granted. Or whether she’d considered it none of his business. Or whether he ever considered Ambrose as being eligible for the category of lover.

  Robert probably dismissed him as a rival of the proper male sort.

  She was afire with angry embarrassment. And guilt. That this had happened was inescapably her fault.
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br />   Way back at the beginning of the separation, there’d been bedroom nonsense with Robert coming and going, a few days at a time, with each of them—Robert, Ambrose and she—sleeping in their own bedrooms, although, in Robert’s and her case, not altogether decorously. In those early days, he’d taken his husbandly rights now and then. But that sort of thing had not happened for some time.

  In those days, Ambrose had silently accepted all this, behaving with absolute correctness in matters of dress and conversation, with everything very pally and clubby in the apartment. And she’d hid deep down in her confusions, allowing the confusions to drift on.

  Why, oh why, hadn’t she cleaned it all up and had done with the empty marriage? Why the nonsense of leaving him all that time with a key? Why the symbolic suit hanging in the wardrobe?

  It was the weakest thing she had ever done in her life. Dishonest in every way.

  And there’d been silly play-acting about her marriage back in Australia. A game which no one close to them in the League and diplomatic life now believed or expected.

  And then, within the empty subterfuge of the marriage, there was the real subterfuge—the game within a game—because of Ambrose’s secret life and the secret intimate life which had grown out of it which lived itself out in the privacy of the Molly Club and occasionally at dinner parties in some apartments with friends from the Molly who were in the know or themselves players of the same game.

  Now this secret intimacy had been appallingly revealed in the most embarrassing and uncouth of ways.

  With the gross Potato Gray as the witness at the funeral.

  She wondered if she had the odour of the night about her. Too bad if she did.

  Gray was, at least, ill at ease.

  Good.

  She regained her composure.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Robert said. It was clear to her that he was in an ugly mood.

  ‘Perhaps we could find a doss at a friendly inn, old man,’ Gray said.

  ‘No, make yourself at home, Potato—this is my home—you’re welcome here,’ Robert said. And looking then at her, said, ‘Isn’t he, my love?’

  She looked at him. He’d declined. What age was he now? In his mid-forties? His decline was ahead of his age.

  ‘Both of you should leave,’ she said, coldly. ‘I’ll call an hotel and book for you both.’