In answering, Dieter addressed himself to Ambrose. ‘Himmler’s personal orderly told me. But we clean the place and we see secret papers left lying around. We hear telephone talk. We hear table talk.’
There was perhaps hearsay in all this.
She tried once more the womanly line of questioning, again asking about the sort of food to be served.
This time, Dieter looked at her and answered with surprising animation, tickled by the sharing of domestic tattle with a woman.
‘We have a First Class menu and other menus. This was our First Class menu—for very special occasions.’ He said, ‘I have a joke in English!’
They gave him their attention.
‘It is not the menu which is important: it is the men you have beside you.’
They all gave out obligatory laughter.
‘It is a good joke, is it not?’
He laughed again.
He then went on about the catering plans. It did sound like a very special party was being planned.
They talked more, going over the same ground. Dieter again alluded to payment and his coming to live in Switzerland.
‘I would be happy to live here with my new friends,’ he said looking at the two men, putting a hand on the hand of each of them.
She had another insight into him. While he sometimes identified with his Nazi bosses in his boasting, he was, at the same time, frightened.
Dieter excused himself to go to the toilet and while he was away from the table, Ambrose suggested she might go home.
If she left, he might say more.
Bernard seemed to agree.
She saw their point. ‘He’s frightened, you know, frightened of his Nazis employers.’
They then spoke quickly, analysing his information while Dieter was away from the table.
Bernard said, ‘What if this Dieter is sent here to spread such information?’
‘To what end?’ she asked.
‘To have it reach official circles, for the alarm to be falsely sounded—and then for the Germans to blame the Zionists for spreading alarmist propaganda. Cry wolf a few times and the world will stop listening. And then they can do what they will.’
Ambrose added, ‘The Allies would be accused of atrocity propaganda.’
‘If this were true, wouldn’t they have sent a more convincing rumour-monger?’ she asked.
‘So you think he’s unconvincing now?’ Ambrose said.
She laughed. ‘ “Grubby” is the word I had in mind. Grubby—but not unconvincing. That he thinks the information worth money is important.’
‘You would think that the Germans would be more likely to expel the Jews—to give the British a headache in Palestine and divert British troops there,’ Ambrose said.
‘What of this about extermination of sexual vagrants?’ Bernard asked. ‘What do you make of that?’
‘I think he has that wrong,’ Ambrose said.
‘I think he believes it,’ she said. ‘The man is scared.’
‘I think he feels we are part of something bigger—a network—or that we represent the British government,’ Bernard said.
‘Are we going to pay him?’ she asked as she began to get her things together to leave.
‘As much as I find him rather distasteful, yes,’ Bernard said. ‘If he’s correct, “we” have gone from being a colourful part of city life to being petty criminals and finally, now—to being … well, dispensable.’
Dieter returned to the table.
Bernard asked one of his waiters to go out and find a cab for her and when it arrived, she said her goodnights.
As she went up the stairs she was, in a way, relieved to be free of Dieter’s grubby presence although slightly miffed at Bernard’s and Ambrose’s suggestion that she leave.
Some birthday party.
In her bedroom, she awoke to hear Ambrose preparing for bed in his room, although she’d not heard him come in. She looked over at the clock—it was almost dawn. She must have been only lightly asleep or already awakening.
She called to him to let him know she was awake.
He came to her room in a silk nightgown and she opened the bedclothes to invite him in.
As he slid in beside her, she smelled the smoky odour of the Club, the liquor on his breath.
She asked him to tell her what had happened after she’d left.
He was brief, saying that Dieter had rambled on mainly to show how close he was to the men of power—even if only by waiting on their tables and in their beds—salacious stories from the Nazi court, a nice story about Hess, known as Fräulein Anna. ‘Of all this, more later,’ he said tiredly.
He said that Bernard had paid Dieter.
‘How much?’
‘I don’t really know. Or care.’
‘I suppose it means that we get to hear other things.’
‘It means that every drunken little steward from Germany will find his way to the Molly Club looking for a pay-off. Yes.’
‘You believe him?’
‘As bizarre as it all is, yes, I now do believe him.’
Ambrose was inclined to think nothing could be done with the information.
She disagreed.
After talking around in circles about what to do with the information, Ambrose and she lay together in an uneasy bed, with only tired politeness keeping her from asking him to go to his own bed.
Underlying the discomfort of their bed, she found that she still resented having been excluded at the end.
And she was edgy in a vague way about Ambrose’s odour of the night.
About that, she didn’t want to know.
He eventually reached over to her and held her. She accepted him and they folded into each other.
‘It’s not been what you might call a spectacular birthday for you,’ he said.
‘My own fault.’
‘I’ll make it up to you.’
‘May I make a joke in bad taste?’ she said, sleepily, glad that they were reconciled, glad that a joke had come to her which she could wrap around them. ‘It’s really in bad taste, given the ghastly nature of the whole business.’
‘Any sort of joke in any sort of taste, please. I need a joke.’
‘If the Germans are really doing this, this rounding up en masse of your lot, it’ll only encourage others to think that if this kind of pleasure has attracted such a huge penalty from the Germans—it must mean that it’s a very remarkable pleasure indeed.’
He chuckled. ‘The Nazis will grab you for making jokes like that.’
He held to her, a desperate hug, a hug looking for an end to all the ghastliness. He seemed to want to hug himself to another place within her.
Their embrace became an enveloping of each other, their bodies made an oblivion of warmth and enclosure in the world of the bed.
In the morning, they again argued about what to do with the information.
‘Would it matter that much if we went to the Foreign Office or the State Department about the planned en masse execution of the Jews, and it turned out to be wrong?’ she said, as they breakfasted downstairs in the café.
The newspapers, hastily flipped through, were piled on the floor beside them.
‘It’d panic those Jews already in occupied countries, for a start,’ he said.
‘Or warn them.’
‘Why warn people who can do nothing to escape their fate?’
‘How do we know they can do nothing about their fate?’
Gloomily, they ate their breakfast.
A niggling thought surfaced in the bright morning light.
‘What did you all do, until dawn?’ she asked.
‘Prattled on.’
‘I trust that was all you did.’
It didn’t come out right. It sounded querulous.
He looked at her. ‘Edith?’
She flinched.
She found she couldn’t stop herself. ‘Well …?’
‘There are more pressing matters than Dieter’s vices
.’
‘Or your vices?’
‘Or my vices.’
She realised that there was something of an answer in his reply.
Was he implying that he had, well, caroused with Dieter?
She then found she wanted to scream, did you or did you not carouse with him?
She just restrained herself.
She hated herself for this wife-like jealousy, the shark which sometimes surfaced in their life.
After all, Ambrose had put up with Robert’s comings and goings and her acquiescence to Robert’s sexual needs in the past.
And her fling in Spain. And the bizarre episode with Scraper.
She’d always accepted that he was sometimes tempted by amourettes of the sort which, he’d explained, could only occur between strangers. That he hungered sometimes for those strange and dark experiences which the loved one could never give. Although it hadn’t happened often. In fact, it had become rare in his life. He always told her of these amourettes.
It was not the loss of Ambrose which she feared: it was exclusion.
She was excluded when he entered that other world, a world which by its very nature was one which she could never enter or realistically be part of.
Yet despite her realistic understanding of it all, it still at times hurt. She tried not to retreat to the position held by The Married who felt that a person should forgo one existence to secure the other.
She wanted them both to have all possibilities of existence.
And who among passionate people really believed in for-going one way to secure another? Didn’t most people want to have everything that life offered?
And there was an answer to her jealousy—a solvent, which they used at times. He sometimes told her of his dark encounters, often at her urging—and she found his telling about the amourettes suggestive and provocative. Sometimes the telling caused heightened sexual feelings in her. For him to bring these dark affairs into their own bed this way, she found, was the best way to deal with this side of his life.
It was by his erotic telling of his adventures that she was re-embraced by him.
Perhaps her insecurity now was because of the war. Blame everything on the war. Perhaps the war was leading her to cling.
Everyone was clinging to those others who could offer, however intangibly, the chance of preservation while at the same time avoiding those encumbrances and those people who were flappable, who would hamper a swift flight.
The wavering people and the paralysed people were being pushed away. Excluded also from political arguments and plans.
She breathed deeply, trying to restrain the ugly thumping jealousy in her heart. She returned to the issue of Dieter’s information.
She said, ‘I think I would rather lose credibility than be negligent in the face of this information.’
Ambrose said quietly, ‘It could cause a reaction which might be rather ugly?’
‘Surely it would cause revulsion throughout the world?’
‘Not necessarily. As unfortunate as it may be, we may find that many people side with the Nazis on this question.’
This had never crossed her mind.
He went on. ‘There are some European countries which might think that driving out the Jews was not such a bad thing—and some individuals in our own countries might think likewise.’
She found this beyond her comprehension. ‘We aren’t talking about driving them out. We’re talking about some sort of slaughter.’
‘The argument could well still apply.’
‘You believe that?’
‘It’s a possibility. What I’m saying is that if we make this war a crusade to save the Jews we might find a weakening of resolve among some of the Allies, and in the attitude of some of our citizenry. We might find some of the fighting men saying, “Well, if this is all about saving the Jews—to hell with it. Let’s go home.” ’
‘What’s the war all about, if not about saving people from the Nazis?’
‘It’s about not letting Germany dominate us. Staying afloat.’
‘I think that we have to take the risk of adverse public reaction—and, if it occurs, argue against it.’
‘And if we find that people are anti-Semitic in our own countries?’
‘I have never thought about it.’
She’d never even contemplated these sorts of consequences. ‘You think that one should avoid confronting those things about which one can do nothing? Or if what you do might possibly have results as bad as the injustice you wish to redress?’
‘I probably do, yes.’
She said, ‘But you can never be sure of the consequences?’
‘You can be fairly sure.’
‘I still want to take the risk. I could telephone Eden.’
‘That would be an interesting conversation.’
‘You think he’s one of those who does not particularly care for the Jews?’
‘I was fantasising more about you raising the other matter—the question of our lot. By the way, sorry again about your birthday. It was a dismal affair.’
‘Oh, ye gods, did I really spend my birthday with a Nazi?!’
They both laughed in a subdued kind of way.
‘At least you didn’t want to leave the dinner,’ she said.
‘I certainly did not.’ He frowned. ‘There in the Perle du Lac, I really felt it might be our last night on earth.’
‘What brought that on?’
‘Just a premonition. Russia’s crumbling. The Germans will be in Moscow soon. I really think they’re going to win the war. India will probably jump ship to the Germans. Switzerland will probably be overrun soon. The Americans aren’t joining in to fight. I had a dreadful premonition of the end.’
‘It looks bad.’
‘And then on top of everything, you brought news that the Germans were coming to get me.’
‘And we agreed that they would probably take me as well.’
‘And worse—there at the Perle I was struck by the thought that the Nazis may be right: that unreason is a higher order of reason; violence is a healthy cleansing energy; morals are for the weak. Nazism suddenly seemed to be a vigorous—vehement—position into which one could dissolve and happily lose one’s mind.’
‘Ambrose …’
‘The Nazis are showing that their way of thinking breeds power—and they can brawl, smash, plunder, all for the hell of it. No stuffy rules for them. No tedium. And you get to belong to the superior bunch and swagger around.’
‘And how do you feel this morning? Do you feel like smashing?’
‘It was a false premonition. The feeling has passed. Sorry. Temporary thing. The German armies will overextend. But what I should say is that this morning, while I don’t believe that we will lose the war, I somehow think that we could spend the rest of our lives fighting it. We may never see the end of the war in our lifetimes.’
‘We’ll just have to wait upon the turn of events in hope of advantage.’
He laughed. ‘Edith, you’re probably the only person in the League who still knows the diplomatic language—but someone should remember it.’
‘And what are you doing today to win the war?’ she said.
‘I thought I would duplicate some of your office files—set up an independent record of what’s important. Put them into smaller boxes which could be stored. Or could be carried in the luggage compartment of a car.’
‘Lester buries his diary in the garden each night. Perhaps we need a hiding place for our files.’
At the Palais des Nations, as she went through the cool, empty corridors, she passed the doors of hundreds of empty offices.
She silently said hello to the ghosts as she passed offices where former friends once worked.
She stopped at the Council room and looked in at the green covers fitted to the curved dais and benches where once five hundred delegates and others would have gathered.
She glanced yet again at the murals: ‘The End of Pestilence: Strength: Law: t
he End of Slavery: Solidarity of Peoples: the End of War’.
All closed now. All unseen and unbelieved.
The murals spoke only to themselves. They were tied up there like hungry pets.
She remembered the official opening of the Palais in ’36.
The Spanish Civil war was raging. M. Gallardo, who, on behalf of the Spanish government, had made the gift of the murals said, ‘These are some solace to us at this tragic hour of our country’s history …’
She remembered the grand, glittering opening party—the only party ever held in the new Palais. The Aga Khan had paid for it.
She closed the door and remembered that one reporter had written recently that the Palais had become a ‘magnificent mausoleum’.
She guessed that it had.
She went on to her office.
During the day, her jealousy about Dieter and Ambrose resurfaced and she found herself unable to bring her mind back to the business on her desk.
Surely Bernard would not have condoned it?
She trusted Bernard and Bernard’s mature understanding and his protectiveness of her and Ambrose’s attachment.
She stewed. Where did they go? To Dieter’s seedy hotel? To somewhere grand with Ambrose paying?
At last she found herself compelled to telephone Ambrose at their other office.
After he’d answered, she blurted out, ‘Did you bed this Dieter? Was there some carry-on last night after I left?’
There was a momentary silence. ‘I did. There was some carry-on.’
She took a deep painful breath.
‘You bedded him.’
‘I did.’
‘After he boasted about those ghastly things?’
‘Yes.’
‘It made no difference to you?’
He didn’t answer at once. He then said, perhaps with the hint of shame. ‘It made no difference as it turned out.’
‘That’s disgusting.’
He tried for a joke, ‘Know the enemy.’
‘That will not do. You cannot joke about this. He disgusted me. He disgusted Bernard.’
Ambrose was silent.
Would it absolve him if he had done it to confirm this Dieter’s story? As some sort of tactic!?
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