Dark Palace

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘The children are in Ireland,’ he reminded them. ‘One parent should be there.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Aghnides.

  As usual the loss of anyone was seen as disturbing, a loosening of the timbers of the ship.

  Lester said that all Americans had been instructed by the Consul to leave Switzerland.

  The Sweetsers’ farewell party was that night.

  Lester seemed to be implementing a policy of evacuating families regardless of Avenol.

  She reported that Avenol was not doing anything untoward, and that he was taking the usual steps to allow staff to return to their home countries, arranging internal matters. ‘We have booked alternative accommodation for the Secretariat in France, in case of an invasion of Switzerland,’ she revealed.

  It was accepted without much comment.

  The talk then turned to the continued German advances.

  She did not report that she had a growing inner conflict about being a traitor to her office—that is, to Avenol’s office. There was an ethic about what one owed an office, both in the sense of the position and in the physical sense of the bonds of the people who worked together.

  Such qualms seemed self-centred in the threatening atmosphere which surrounded Geneva like a fog.

  Avenol and she began to draft a protest for Council against the German invasion of the neutral countries.

  As she dutifully took down the draft, she felt now how impotent the words of a League of Nations protest were against the relentless rolling forward of the German tanks with their fresh, clean, crews in their new uniforms.

  Later that morning, Avenol went to talk with M. PiletGolaz, the Swiss President. He returned grey-faced.

  ‘Forget the protest. Tear it up. The Swiss think that such a protest coming from the League on Swiss soil would provoke the Germans. Worse, the Swiss wish for us to leave. They want us off their soil.’

  Until now this had been a hypothetical discussion among hundreds of alternative hypotheses about the war and what would happen to the Swiss.

  If Germany no longer respected the neutrality of Holland and Belgium, why would it respect Swiss neutrality?

  ‘They say we jeopardise their neutrality. By our very existence we invite German or Italian intervention in Swiss territory. They are in terror of the Germans. Or awe,’ Avenol said, in a voice which showed confusion. Showed perhaps the very terror and awe that the Swiss felt.

  He asked her to book a call to Léger at the Quai d’Orsay and to the places in France where she had arranged options on accommodation for such a contingency.

  Late in the day, calls came through from the French government in Paris agreeing that the League might make its headquarters in France.

  She ordered the staff to begin hiring lorries and buses to take the archives and staff, and to book seats on the trains.

  A general meeting was called of Aghnides, Lester and the remaining Heads of Sections.

  During the meeting more news came by messenger and was shared among those at the meeting. News came of a Swiss general mobilisation. German forces were manoeuvring on Lake Constance.

  The message said that Swiss refugees were arriving from Basle and Zurich. The bourse had closed and there were queues at the banks.

  It began to seem clear that the invasion of Switzerland was imminent.

  Walters, Loveday and Wilson were excused from the meeting to allow them to arrange for the immediate evacuation of their families.

  After they had left the meeting, Avenol abused them to the others. ‘We French have more discipline. French families suffer their fate together.’

  Those remaining were stunned by the outburst.

  She thought it was aimed also at Lester and she saw him chafing under the remarks.

  Surprisingly, no one, not even Lester, protested at Avenol’s remarks. Respect for his office still restrained them publicly.

  Those who remained seemed unwilling to leave the meeting, as if being together was something of an action in itself. It was also the place to be if one was to know what was happening.

  Gerty knocked on the door, but this time did not have a telegraph or message to hand over. Instead she reported that resignations had begun coming in by internal messengers from junior staff throughout the Palais.

  ‘We no longer have time to read and authorise these,’ she said.

  Messages came from the Permanent Delegates who wanted to know if accommodation was to be provided for them in France and were they too to be evacuated along with the Secretariat?

  Avenol had no answer.

  He looked at her. She said, ‘We had trouble finding accommodation for the Secretariat. No accommodation was booked for the Permanent Delegates.’

  The meeting was finally closed and everyone went about their business. What business? What business was worth doing now?

  She went about preparing for the evacuation. Even if she were a watchdog in Avenol’s office, she was still an officer with duties. She was working normally, albeit in circumstances she had never before experienced. Her day was still made up of documents to be drafted and typed, telephone calls to be booked and made, cables to be sent and petty cash to be accounted.

  Next day, she told Avenol that the remaining staff wanted to have a wireless set in the Library so that they could follow events.

  After half a day of consideration, he agreed.

  There were rumblings of complaint among the staff about being asked to move from relatively safe neutral ground in Switzerland to France, a belligerent country.

  Meanwhile, Germany drove deeper into Belgium and Holland.

  She was taking shorthand from Avenol when a special announcement was foreshadowed on the wireless set kept on during the day at low volume in his office.

  ‘Turn up the volume,’ he said, agitated.

  They heard some of the ‘Marseillaise’ and then an urgent-voiced French military attaché read a message from the President of France stating that as of four o’clock that morning France had been invaded.

  Avenol began to tap his fingers on the desk.

  He asked her to leave him.

  He then called her back and beckoned for her to sit. She sat while he booked calls to his relatives in France with the wireless in the background. She offered to do it for him but he seemed to need the activity.

  As he booked the calls and as the calls came back, having been given official priority, he would mutter to her personal details about the particular relative to whom he was speaking, classifying them according to their courage or their poltronnerie.

  All over Europe people were trying to telephone to warn, to calm, to reassure, to plan.

  His hands were now shaking and his voice was strained as he gave out advice and listened to information.

  From time to time there would be a knock on his door and she would answer it, shielding him from callers.

  He then asked her to call Securitas and hire an additional personal bodyguard for him.

  ‘It will be where the Germans are stopped,’ he said. ‘This is the moment of truth for the Germans. The French and the British armies will bring them to their demise.’

  ‘I am sure they will be stopped.’

  As they were both leaving that evening, he told her that during the night he would be contactable at an address across the Swiss border in France, which he gave to her. ‘I fear that if I sleep at my home I could be kidnapped by German agents.’

  He had made these arrangements himself. Was it a sign that he did not trust her?

  She gave no hint that she thought the change of address was strange. She saw him as a man straining to be the administrator of a great international organisation which he had somehow both to protect and at the same time to also dismantle, while his own nation fought a war for its survival, and his friends and relatives were sucked into the war zone.

  Avenol was a man bending in a gale.

  She felt for him. She was perhaps swinging to his side. She did not want to be false to hi
m. For all his stiff posing, she did not want to deceive him.

  She damned the others for having put her in this position. She would’ve rather given herself whole-heartedly to the protecting of the organisation, to the whole question of what was to be done as the world fell apart.

  And as a woman working with a man under huge and unique pressure, she could no longer deny that she was forming sentiments of attachment, the special bond of the office.

  At first, when she’d changed offices, her daily close contact with Avenol had made her feel as if she were being unfaithful to Bartou. She had been changing partners in a vocational marriage.

  Or, more accurately, becoming bigamous.

  With Avenol, she was in part playing the office wife in a very faint and restrained way, but because of the peculiar plot which lay behind her presence there, she was also at the same time being unfaithful to him.

  She could not now fully involve herself in the pleasures of either role—that of the clever confidence trickster or that of virtuous subordinate which came from professional fidelity and from the special restrained intimacy created within such an office.

  That night, she and Ambrose had a personal emergency meeting at the Molly.

  ‘I am loading trucks tomorrow,’ she told Ambrose.

  ‘So the move is on.’

  ‘I’ll have to go with the others to France.’

  ‘France will probably fall,’ he said. ‘The Americans are not coming to help. Bloodlines do not seem to be working.’

  ‘Won’t it be more like the first War—trenches and years of fighting?’

  ‘That’s not what they’re saying. It’s all blitzkrieg. Tanks. Rapid movement. No trenches.’

  ‘The French have tanks.’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘And what should we do then?’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘Loveday and Walters are getting out, it seems. Wilson is going to England, and then probably back to New Zealand—if he can get a boat.’

  ‘Heard from Robert? He might know what’s happening.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She didn’t know where he was.

  ‘Sit tight is perhaps the policy for the moment. What is your favourite saying these days—“We will wait upon the turn of events in hope of advantage”?’

  ‘You will sit tight, with me? I think you should come to France.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Call Bernard over—I must keep him up-to-date on events. Although he seems always to be ahead of us.’

  She took her apron and work gloves to the office, plus others for those staff who might not have thought of them.

  She helped select and then supervise the loading of archives into the lorries, glad of the physical work.

  She sent off the first convoy.

  Avenol visited the Permanent Delegates from the Latin American countries—who seemed to be about the only ones around—and asked them to take into their custody some of the other archives.

  Towards lunchtime, she received a hand-written instruction from Avenol to stop the removal of the archives and to recall the lorries already dispatched.

  The instruction said that the Swiss government had reversed its position. ‘It now fears that for the League to leave will create panic among their citizens who will also try to flee.’

  Ye gods, the Swiss government was in panic.

  She went to his office for further clarification.

  As she stood there in her apron and gloves, they both laughed at the Swiss reasoning and from a certain relief.

  ‘Recall the archives from France. Unbook the accommodation,’ he said.

  He even placed a comradely hand briefly on her arm.

  That evening at the Molly Club, she told Ambrose, Bernard and a couple of others that Avenol had inquired about whether she was kitted-out to walk from Switzerland back to Australia.

  She told them that the Staff Committee had advised those who still remained not to buy new walking shoes. For walking of long distances, it was important to have shoes which were walked-in.

  Ambrose said he would do it in high heels.

  Bernard thought high heels would be appropriate for them all. ‘Style above comfort, always,’ he said.

  She was also able to report that she’d heard from Robert, who’d moved to Arras along with his dreadful friends Potato Gray, Moorehead, Philby and some other reporters.

  His card had said, ‘We are drinking out the now not-so-phoney war.’

  She had a new fellow feeling for him in the turbulent times but she felt no desire to be in his company.

  She imagined that he and his newspaper friends would now be scooting down through France, perhaps to Amiens.

  Avenol kept her about him, talking to her more, at times talking to himself in her presence, but wanting her to be there nonetheless.

  To be around him.

  There were moments when she told herself to be cautious, thinking with suspicion, ‘He actually wants me to report back all he is saying—he knows I’m a traitor in this office and is now using me against the conspirators.’

  She thought him cunning enough to do this.

  But she relaxed from this suspicious position, deciding that his tone and manner were too naturally like that of a Secretary-General with his female personal aide.

  That tone and manner invited certain things from her—comfort and support—and she felt inclined to respond. For all his difficulties of demeanour, or because of them, she was warming to him.

  She moved into subaltern positions too well, too snugly.

  And so, as Edith sat there in the dim office, waiting for him to find his words during dictation, she was astounded at times to feel this snugness through her body. As she looked at this French man with all his power and trappings, regardless of the future outcome for her and for them both—for all of them in the League—regardless of the appropriateness of this to her career, to her age, to her relationship with Ambrose—she felt through her body the glimmering possibility of a surrender of herself to this Secretary-General, to the power of his office.

  The daily exchanges between them, the cups of coffee and biscuits, the occasional glass of port at the end of a day of long hours, the special tensions which they were sharing, the unusual hours which they spent together, all of it was entwining her spiritually with him.

  When he would lock the office door behind them for security or reasons of privacy and they would be alone inside the locked room, her spirit would begin to melt towards him, giving up all resistance to him. It was a state which she hoped remained unknown to him.

  However, however, however—whatever her body told her, in her mind she knew that it was not within the scheme of human alliances and the tempo of the times for her to allow this ever to happen.

  What she felt was just a very distant bodily glimmering and to give in to it would be a debasement with untold consequences.

  Even if she were now too senior—say it, Edith, yes, too old—to adopt that subaltern relationship there was, she saw, another, older version of that subaltern love.

  Where two were equal in the importance of their talents and acumen but where those talents and acumen were not identical and where, in this twosome, one was required professionally to subordinate for reasons of appointment or temperament or sex, there was for her as a woman, a dreadful pull towards surrender.

  And so it had been with Bartou—daily she had silently offered herself to him, knowing that it would not happen but still, regardless, making the silent offering. And he had probably used his discipline of self to hold her at proper distance until he had, in the last year or so, grown old and ailing, had weakened, and she had become his guardian. He had become dependent on her opinions, unable himself to lead or contribute. And the risk of any physical surrender had passed and the silent offering had ceased.

  In New York with Gerig and Sweetser, she’d tasted a new experience—the wielding of power, which showed her that she had the inherent
will and confidence to take the position of power. Did it follow that if she ever took power, would she then have offered to her this special—limitless?—devotion from a subordinate?

  Frances, her stenographer in New York, drifted across her mind as someone who might have developed into a devoted assistant, if time had permitted.

  With Avenol she’d partly gone back in time to feeling younger because of the false reduction of her status and the devotion was there as well—sometimes during the day or in bed at night, she almost ached to be able to perform, totally, all that devotion could be asked.

  But Avenol, too, would never ask more than he was at present taking.

  And, for the good of her soul, she was glad of that.

  Those in the conspiracy were having difficulty in finding a way to act.

  Aghnides believed that Geneva could be the rallying point for Europe and the whole world against the Nazis.

  He saw a role for the League as a global moral spokesman.

  She was unconvinced.

  She did however want to stand up to the Nazis somehow. Other than running up a silly flag.

  She held to the position that for the League to flee was to invite all to run.

  ‘Surely, though, you only stand where you can fight?’ Bartou asked.

  ‘Can’t we fight here? Not militarily but, well, morally, diplomatically?’

  ‘By being taken prisoner?!’

  ‘By being here and yes, even by being taken prisoner. The Nazis may be uncertain of how to act towards us. And we would be a very special kind of prisoner and would be diplomatically—a symbol,’ she said.

  She felt she was now required to buck them up. She had to buck up Avenol during the day and then turn her hand to keeping up the spirits of her co-conspirators, Bartou especially.

  ‘The Germans have shown precious little uncertainty.’

  ‘When the idea of leaving Geneva comes up, Avenol has fallen back on the legality of Article VII which says that the seat of the League shall be Geneva until Council decides otherwise,’ she said.

  ‘If there is ever going to be another Council meeting,’ Aghnides said.