Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  Language was a bridge to trust and even though Jeanne and she spoke each other’s language they could never truly be sure that they were in each other’s language club—the club of subtle meanings.

  The League Secretariat had thought it was above all extraneous and petty allegiances. Had worked to be better than that.

  And many times they had managed to rise above nationality and language. Some of them at some times had risen above those obstacles.

  The others in the conspiracy had entrusted her with this judgement. She could no longer maintain the position of salus populi suprema lex.

  There was absolutely no way she could determine whether Jeanne would betray the conspiracy. But she would take the risk.

  She stirred herself from her thinking.

  At that moment, Jeanne burst into the room.

  Jeanne was ablaze.

  She burst out, ‘It is not good enough, Edith, it is not good enough for you to say you cannot tell yet. After all we have seen together. Not good enough.’

  She leaned forward, two hands on the desk, as though resting her anger there.

  Edith leaned back on the sprung chair, as if making distance between herself and Jeanne’s temper, trying to find words. ‘Sit down, I’ll tell you all.’

  ‘Edith. No. I do not want to know. No. That is no longer at issue. What is at issue is that you would not tell me until now that I confront you. You would not tell me out of friendship.’

  Edith rushed to say, ‘These are horrible times. We find ourselves behaving badly—behaving strangely.’

  ‘You find yourself behaving badly, you smug one. Not everyone is behaving strangely. Look at you—leaning back in your chair so arrogantly.’

  Jeanne’s abuse crashed through and struck her.

  She leaned forward to refute the charge of arrogance. ‘I was simply leaning back, Jeanne. Don’t be silly. I was just leaning back. I am not arrogant.’

  Jeanne walked angrily about the office.

  ‘Jeanne listen to me …’

  Edith stood up and came around the desk to Jeanne.

  Jeanne turned to face her and said angrily, ‘I will not listen. You have a superiority about you which is not justified. You live a strange life—you dénatures yourself with Ambrose Westwood. I have never really understood that liaison. What you are doing with him? You had a good husband even if I did not like him. And you go off to places without your friends—let me finish—you are a secretive, snobbish person. And you parade as the great lover of the peace and of the world yet you find everyone around you imparfait. And you live with a man who is imparfait as a man.’

  Jeanne had never, never spoken to her this way.

  ‘You know nothing of my friendship with Ambrose. Don’t speak that way. You know nothing.’

  ‘I know. I can tell.’

  Edith found fighting words leaping to her mouth and she shouted back, ‘Surely it’s you, you with your Frenchness—it’s you who parades superiority. Pretends to know the secret ways of the world. Looks down on the rest of the world, looks down on Australians such as me. But look at your country now!’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk with disrespect about France. We will repel the Germans. You will see.’

  ‘If the British Empire does the fighting for you—as perusual.’

  Oh how silly. She was saying silly things. They were both saying silly things.

  Edith was not sure who hit whom first, the first slap—perhaps they both went to slap each other at the same time.

  She felt the incredible pain of the slap which seemed to be something so much more powerful than a hand and at the same time felt her own palm hit Jeanne’s ear rather than the cheek, failing as a slap.

  The pain in her cheek drove her to try again to slap Jeanne but Jeanne pushed her away roughly and she fell against a chair, which tipped over. She recovered herself and lurched back at Jeanne and hit her shoulder with her hand and this time Jeanne went backwards.

  Edith felt all self-control go, and she hit out at Jeanne with both hands, trying to slap both sides of her face, but the slaps went wild and hit Jeanne’s neck and chest.

  Jeanne lunged forward and grabbed Edith’s hair, dislodging the hair clip, and jerked the hair, pulling her head down, the hair paining at the roots.

  She went on flailing her hands trying to hit Jeanne although she couldn’t get her head up to see her.

  They were both breathless with fury as Edith now tried in turn to grab Jeanne’s hair, getting hold of it so that they were both pulling at each other’s hair with one hand and slapping with the other.

  Jeanne stumbled against a chair and fell backwards onto the arm of the couch and then off the arm to the floor, her hair pulling free of Edith’s grip, at the same time. She herself lost her grip on Jeanne’s hair.

  Edith glared down at Jeanne.

  Edith dropped to her knees and went for Jeanne again, getting down and kneeling on her arms and gripping her throat, not to choke so much, more to shake her, to bang her head against the floor.

  All her fights with her brother and others in the playgrounds of Jasper’s Brush came back to Edith and she heard herself shouting, ‘Give up! Give up? Give up! Give up???’ first as a command and then as an interrogation.

  Jeanne was trying to bang her with clenched fists but her arms were pinned by Edith’s knees.

  ‘Take it back! Take back what you said about me and Ambrose!’ Edith said, her voice made high pitched by her temper. ‘Take it back!’—fleetingly wondering if Jeanne would know what ‘take it back’ meant.

  ‘False friend!’ Jeanne said. ‘Traitor! Traitor!’

  Edith then sat back on Jeanne’s stomach, and let go of Jeanne’s arms, her ears hurting from the clouts of Jeanne’s fists. Jeanne was gasping for air, her body still struggling.

  Edith felt her fury subsiding.

  Jeanne spat at her.

  The wetness of spittle hit her forehead.

  Edith’s tears came—a different sort of tear, as if from a different part of her eyes, tears from a different emotion.

  Tears of violation and insult—she wanted to spit back but her mouth was dry. She wiped her face quickly with the back of her right hand and, drawing her hand back, slapped Jeanne with force, a slap which began way out and which connected perfectly and powerfully.

  Jeanne gave a cry of acute pain and stopped struggling, her hands going to her face.

  Edith looked down at her, fearing that she had injured her, the slap being so powerful, so perfectly landed, so fierce.

  She saw that Jeanne had given up fighting.

  Edith stood up, brushing her skirt, tucking in her blouse, straightening her hair.

  Her breathing was so rapid it was difficult for her to catch her breath.

  She went over and picked up her hair clip, keeping one eye on Jeanne who remained on the floor, sobbing with pain.

  Well, she’d asked for it.

  Edith found her feelings changing to concern for Jeanne and for the French, and for herself, a confused sense of shame jostling with feelings of base satisfaction about what had just happened.

  Jeanne got to her feet.

  They stood opposite each other at a safe distance, both with uneven breathing.

  Jeanne fixed her clothing, looking down at a huge ladder in her stocking, putting a finger to it, her tearful eyes all the while looking cautiously back at Edith.

  Jeanne then straightened up, threw her hair back and strode out of the office, slamming the door.

  The sound of the slam of the door seemed to go on and on.

  A mess.

  A bloody, bloody mess.

  She hadn’t explained the situation to Jeanne.

  Her fingers explored the swelling on the left side of her face and a scratch on her neck. She went to the washbasin annex to her office and examined the scratch in the mirror. She remembered the spittle but did not feel disgusted. She washed her face and hands thoroughly for the sake of her appearance, dried herself gently, and th
en redid her make-up, putting foundation and powder over the scratch, and buttoned up her blouse, pulling up the collar. The scratch still showed a little.

  Back in her office, she stood unable to grasp quite what had happened in the bizarre whirlwind.

  She found it so hard to believe, as if it were some bad dream which had leapt into the room from her childhood. A feeling too, that it was part of the total disintegration of things around them.

  Trembling still, although her breathing was returning to normal, she righted the chair, and sat down on the couch.

  Oh, how bloody awful.

  How bloody awful.

  The door swung open again.

  Jeanne burst back in. Edith rose from the couch and brought her hand up in fright. But Jeanne was not attacking. She came straight to Edith, embraced her and she embraced Jeanne back.

  They held tight in the hug.

  They let go a little and looked at each other and looked into each other’s eyes and then without hesitation they kissed each other, a kiss which began as a kiss of sisterly forgiveness, and which then changed, and their lips opened to each other. It became a kiss as a man might kiss a woman.

  The kiss was short and then they looked at each other again. They embraced, kissed again, and this time the kiss was long and Edith melded into it and into Jeanne’s arms and her knees became weak.

  She broke apart from Jeanne after a time, continuing to hold Jeanne’s hands, giddy, lowering herself on to the couch.

  Jeanne sat down with her. She looked into Jeanne’s eyes and said, ‘Did that really happen?’

  And Jeanne said, smiling, her breathing uneven, ‘The kiss? Or the fight?’

  ‘The fighting.’ Edith smiled and added, ‘And the kiss.’

  And Jeanne said, softly, without recrimination, ‘You are conspiring against Avenol.’

  Edith nodded.

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  Edith nodded and made a small face, ‘Lester thinks we have to.’

  ‘I don’t want to know. It’s all too dreadful. Do what you have to do but do not expect me to be part of it. And do not tell me.’

  ‘Agreed. And, Jeanne—I’m so, so, so sorry.’

  ‘Edith, it is all right now. I love you, you love me. We will be all right.’

  It was not all right—not just yet.

  She did not know what it was. This thing between herself and a woman had happened once before. An American woman, years back, whom she’d thought about often. Who had touched her breasts once at a party. At least, Edith remembered it that way. Maybe it hadn’t happened quite that way. A full and proper kiss certainly had happened between the American woman and her at that party. And she had gotten to know such women at the Molly Club where two or three came sometimes dressed as men. She sometimes watched them and wondered about their lives.

  And then there was what went on between Ambrose and her, too. The femininity of it.

  She had gone some of the distance down that road with the American woman because it was alluring.

  But too much was spinning through her head now.

  She gave a sheepish glance back up at Jeanne beside her there on the couch as they sat there holding hands.

  Jeanne, sitting beside her, holding her hands very tightly, said in a low voice, ‘You know, Edith, we could be lovers.’

  Edith at first thought Jeanne meant that the way they were sitting together was a bit like the way lovers sat when they were together.

  Then she realised that Jeanne had made some sort of a proposal.

  A proposal that they become lovers.

  ‘We could—but we can’t,’ Edith said, looking down at the carpet, her hands still captured by Jeanne’s hands. ‘I am not able to cope with that, or to contemplate that. No.’

  It had never crossed her mind in all these years, that Jeanne might be like that.

  Jeanne had men. Were there women too? Why hadn’t Jeanne told her? She’d told Jeanne about her love life, quite a lot. Although not very much at all about Ambrose—Jeanne had guessed about that.

  Maybe she was the first woman Jeanne had professed love for.

  There was no response from Jeanne.

  ‘I really couldn’t, Jeanne. I’m not up to it. I am with Ambrose.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jeanne said, quietly. ‘I don’t know what I was saying. It is the hysteria.’

  ‘I can barely cope with my life as it is.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jeanne said. ‘I was not myself. I spoke madly.’

  She let go of Edith’s hands.

  Edith took hold of Jeanne’s hands again. ‘We are both on the edge. The war …’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jeanne said, and kissed her lightly on the cheek, and letting go of Edith’s hands, she smoothed Edith’s hair, touched her inflamed cheek, saw the edge of the scratch, undid Edith’s blouse, and touched that with her fingertips. ‘It’s all right, Edith. Shush. And I take back what I said about Ambrose—he is a good man. And I enjoy him so much. I was just angry. Angry. C’est la guerre. The war is making us mad.’

  ‘I may be doing something dreadfully wrong—with the Avenol matter.’

  ‘We have to take risks of being wrong.’ And Jeanne kissed her lightly again and said, ‘Even you, Edith Alison Campbell Berry.’

  Edith sniffed her running nose, and smiled, looking up. ‘It’s just plain Edith now.’

  ‘Edith Berry.’

  They looked into each other’s eyes. She again tried to find a place for Jeanne’s profession of love—that kind of love—but couldn’t find a place for it in her life.

  ‘About our fighting …’ Edith tried to find something to say. A way of erasing it. There was nothing to say.

  They both began giggling.

  ‘It was so so dreadful—how could we?’ Jeanne said. ‘How could we???? Behaving like schoolgirls!’

  Their giggling, as juvenile as their fighting, overtook them and, locked in each other’s arms, they giggled until they cried. But even then, as she came up out of the depths of their giggling, part of Edith’s mind told her that another part of the world had slipped, had become unsteady.

  When the giggling did stop and became smiling, she was aware there on the couch that Jeanne wanted to kiss her again.

  And that she wanted to kiss Jeanne.

  But, by whatever subtle distance she managed to keep from Jeanne, or whatever her mouth showed, it did not give any invitation to the kiss.

  It was true that she had willingly joined with Jeanne’s first kiss and it was true that she’d felt weak in her knees when they had been in that kiss.

  It told her something about her life with Ambrose more than it told her about her feelings for Jeanne.

  Coils of Office

  On the first day at her new posting to the Secretary-General’s office, Edith came to the Palais to find maintenance workmen painting red arrows on the walls.

  She asked them what they were for.

  ‘Abris,’ the foreman said.

  ‘Shelters from what? Attaque aérienne?’

  ‘Oui—les bombes.’ The workmen made gestures and whistling noises of how they imagined the bombs falling.

  Amused, they seemed to find the dropping of bombs unlikely.

  She understood from the scraps of information they threw to her that the arrows were to lead to basements designated as gathering places during attacks from the air.

  The paraphernalia of warfare came ever closer. In a shivering way it heightened her senses. It was as if she were coming closer to the very nature of the human species. As if an unreality was being stripped away. She also felt that she was now in it—the war—and she marvelled at how things around her had begun to prepare for it—to administer the war and its destruction. How the wording of signs was being discussed by Swiss committees, how paint was being ordered—which colour for this? Which colour for that? And how the costing of shelters and the furnishing of shelters was now the daily business of people throughout the world.

&
nbsp; How long, though, did the administrative responses remain in place and working? When did these also fall apart? When did the civic administrators decide that it was no longer possible to administer the war? When did they decide to lock their offices and flee, leaving the population to fend for itself?

  How dreadful it must be when the signs were still there but the people who had written the signs had fled or been killed. Or when the shelters themselves had collapsed. And when the signs kept on saying shelter or first aid or hospital and there was no shelter, no first aid, no hospital.

  That was when war truly began, perhaps, when all had collapsed and it was every person for themselves. She’d heard that a collapsing army was a dreadful sight to witness.

  That must mark the end of something too. Military discipline was the last line of anything resembling civilisation.

  Would they become animals? Would they scramble over each other and loot? It would be a strange freedom to be able to go into the fine Geneva stores and take what she wanted. To her consternation, she found that the thought of going into a fine shoe store and being able to take what she wanted was tantalising.

  Even the petty freedom of being able to go behind a bar and take what you wanted seemed a tantalising fantasy.

  She frowned. Part of her was hankering for it, hankering for the freedom which flowed from catastrophe. Not just to see it but for its release from routine and the humdrum of order.

  From constraint.

  It would be like being let out of school early. Or the absence of the teachers. The sudden absence of rules and supervision.

  She was slightly disgusted to find such hankerings within herself.

  She met Sweetser in the corridor, who stopped to explain the way the shelters would work. ‘There is an irony,’ he said. ‘The Palais—a building constructed to procure peace—is now protecting itself from war. The populations of the cities will huddle in these shelters until the bombing has stopped and then come out of the shelters to find no electricity, no water and the telegraph destroyed. The whole thing will take a week.’

  Dear Sweetser, always looking for tragic ironies, grand allegories, turning points in history.