Grand Days (21 page)

‘How kind.' She fondled the flask. ‘But you have already given me a gift — your music. But how very kind. Thank you. I accept it.' She thought she sounded like her mother at a Red Cross function.

‘
Adieu, belle vamp australienne
,' Jerome said, lifting his hat a little.

‘
Au revoir
, Jerome.'

As she joined Ambrose at the door, she was relieved that the scalloped hem of her evening dress covered the damaged knees of her stockings.

In the taxi, Ambrose was at first talkative in a forced, light way, about anything and everything, except about what was, she sensed, on his mind — the room
Artiste
.

He let her scat sing, although be was a trifle concerned about what the driver might think, and he refused to drink from the flask. She found she could scat sing quite effortlessly, and knew that she would go on to teach the world to scat sing.

Back at the hotel, Ambrose was still unquestioning about the room
Artiste
but silently and morosely so.

He prevented her placing trunk line telephone calls with the night concierge to Arthur Sweetser in Information, to tell him about her revelation. He said she could book the call in the morning.

She was almost drunk. Unsteady and almost undone. Unsteadily undone, Edith, undone. Absolutely undone. But not dizzy.

Outside his room, she kissed Ambrose, conscious, very conscious of her mouth, and her mouth said to Ambrose that there was nothing for him to worry about. ‘It is Paris,' she said into his ear. ‘
C'est
Paris. No.
C'est-à -dire
— Paris and Edith.'

 

She awoke in the dark hotel room very alive, full of Paris, her revelations of the night before still clearly in her mind and pleasing to her. She did not know whether it was her room or Ambrose's room. She had on her nightdress. She raised herself and saw her suitcase. It was her room. She tried to recall. She did not know where the WC was. She recalled that Ambrose's room had no bath or WC, but hers did. She did not know the time. She did not know whether there was an electric light switch. There was. She found it. She found her watch. It was 8 a.m. She gave the watch a wind. Her mouth was very dry but she had no headache.

She rolled herself out of the bed and after going to the WC,
she opened the windows and the shutters with exhilaration on to a wintry Paris, with only a bare morning light. The rooftops of Montparnasse. She saw a white cat. Behind her the steam-heating in the room made small creaking noises. She heard the building yawning.

She was very thirsty and her mouth savoured the residue and memories of masculinity and champagne and whatever was in the flask of Jerome. She breathed in the baking smells from the hotel kitchen and of Paris.

She stood at the window and exposed herself to the chill air, feeling it in her nipples, and then closed the windows as the cold began to get to her, giggling as she remembered Jeanne suggesting that she should scat sing to the Seventh Assembly of the League.

Since coming to Europe, she experienced winter differently. It tightened her. Although it had to be said that her behaviour the night before had been rather loose. It surely had been. Perhaps she was on her way to being the wickedest woman in Europe. She smiled again.

Turning to the table for water, she saw Jerome's flask standing there and she recalled the gift-giving. She opened it and sniffed it, still unable to identify its contents, but it certainly wasn't milk. She placed it against her cheek and then put it before her on the table, admiring its battered leather and silver. Last night she had not appreciated the animal from which the leather had been made and imagined the silver mines, although she had never been in a silver mine. It also obeyed the Rule of Trophy and Memento as an object which she was admitting into her life. She did not believe that all gifts had to be admitted into one's life. Some gifts were best discreetly stored away or lost.

She poured a glass of water from the carafe on the table.

She'd suffered some sort of crash last night. She had, she thought, somehow tumbled off the rails, but had enjoyed rolling down the slopes for a while.

She recalled every teeming detail of the night. She still believed that she'd had a revelation about scat singing and human parlance. But she had no urge this morning to call Arthur Sweetser.

She then permitted herself to face how outrageously she'd behaved but she could not be sure who knew what she'd done. Could it be outrageous if no one knew what she had done? She rushed to apply one of her ways of going from the old days, the Way of All Doors. She had certainly obeyed the Way of All Doors. Cautiously, she examined her inner state and found that she did not feel ashamed. On the contrary, she felt absolutely amazed. Amazed at herself, and at her audacity, and at her carnality. And, furthermore, she said to herself, looking again at her inner state, I think that I am proud of my carnality. She would never do it in Geneva, but she was glad she had been bold enough to do it just this once. With a complete stranger. In Paris. With a black man. Where better to do it than in Paris? With a black man.

She had flexed her own temerity, had taken voluptuous pleasure intuitively and at will. Deep in the situation, her body had known what she wanted to do, and that impressed her. She had been able to confound and ambush herself, confound all her proper feelings.

She recalled that Ambrose had been the first man to talk to her about this form of physical love and had told her that men liked it, although, even as a girl, she recalled that she'd had an inkling of it, and at university there'd been veiled jokes among the girls while eating bananas. She felt unperturbed about it because it seemed a safe and simple thing to do. She did then
recall, in a zigzagging way, an incident from her childhood when at about twelve or thirteen, she had been kissing and cuddling her puppy, allowing it to lick her face. Her mother had warned her about microbes but she had disregarded her mother's warning. She could not accept that one should be fearful of the lick of a puppy. Nor, she now felt, should one be fearful of the lick of a man. She recalled how the petting of her puppy back then had sometimes brought on a kind of delirium in her. What she'd done with Jerome was a carnal gesture where she knew clearly the beginning and the end and which she could now confidently begin and carry through. She could see that it was by far the best and safest thing for her to do with a man when her complete pleasure was not likely to be met. After all, the giving of pleasure was itself a pleasure which was not to deny the peculiar pleasure of the experience in itself for her. While not replete in the climactic sense, it was somehow complete. Speaking scientifically, it was a complete oral sensation in its gaminess and tang and corporeality. Without a doubt it vitalised the whole of her.

With her teeming morning-after thoughts, and free of any serious self-recrimination, she flopped into the armchair, cradling the water glass against her lawn nightdress.

Reluctantly, she admitted to herself that she could not see how the League could use scat singing. She said a poignant goodbye to that fanciful idea and the idea, like a genie, smiled at her and vanished into the morning light of Paris, having entertained her, maybe enlightened her, but which had to go.

That day she was lunching with Ambrose and Professor Clérambault at the Club des Cent which was a genteel club for which she would need, she remembered, a new pair of silk stockings. And where she might taste ortolan for the first time.

She toyed with the idea of returning that night to the Ad Lib Club, which was not a genteel club and for which she might not even need stockings, but, really, in the end, she was a girl who belonged at the Club des Cent.

As Edith drank more water in the light of a Paris winter morning, it seemed clear that the jazz word scat had nothing to do with animal scats, but she felt that she'd had a private insight about the animal sense and the jazz sense of scats. That in every conversation there were scats, not all were rhythmical, not all of them were artful. In some conversation the scat was a glimpse of a quandary, or a befuddlement, or in some, a dropping of mystical excrement, something of their soul. True, most conversation was just drapery to make the person conversationally adorable, but the scats were always there, the noises, the rumblings of deeper unspeakable meanings of self, and definitely of quandary and befuddlement. We are all scat singers, Edith declared. She entered some of these thoughts into her personal manual, a beautiful notebook, with its stiff, blue-marbled cover which contained her attempts at poetry and other observations of self and the world. She'd created a special code and she used this to record her encounter with Jerome and to denote the intensity of sensation.

Over a late breakfast, Ambrose referred to Jerome only once. He said to her, ‘Did you actually kiss him?'

She looked across, silent, not from evasion, but from surprise at his question.

‘I have to know,' he said.

‘Kiss him?'

‘Did you kiss him?'

She thought back to the night and inwardly smiled, realising from his question that he had not seen anything, but also becoming aware then of the underlying concern in Ambrose's voice. It
had to do with Jerome being a Negro. And of course, that had something to do with the whole experience for her. The exotic blackness could not be denied.

Putting down her knife, she reached her hand across to Ambrose's hand, and she said, honestly, ‘No, dear, I didn't kiss him.'

They went on with their breakfast and she marvelled that she could do what she had done the night before and yet reappear next morning, back in her ordinary life, washed and carefully dressed, with stocking knees a little damaged perhaps and just barely covered by her day dress, to eat hot rolls and to drink chocolate in a hotel dining room.

‘I think I had something of a crack-up last night,' she said. ‘I was a bit off the rails.' She didn't explain that she had enjoyed rolling down the slopes.

‘You were a little overwrought.'

They discussed their plans for the day. ‘I'm to have my hair styled at a place in the Passage de l'Opéra recommended by Jeanne,' she told him, ‘and then we'll go to a long Parisian lunch at your Club des Cent with the fascinating Professor Clérambault.'

‘Not shorter?'

‘The hair or the lunch?'

‘Your hair.'

‘Yes, shorter. The lunch — longer.'

Although she did not care for strange hairdressers, she looked forward to the touch of a fine hairdresser, to feeling his strong fingers kneading her scalp, to have a strange hairdresser's hands praising her hair, and to be flattered by words and by touch, pampered and cut. To emerge cool and dazzling about the head, to catch sight of her newly shaped hair in shopfront windows.

‘If it's any comfort,' he said, ‘Liverright was a little more overwrought than you.'

‘Yes, even I was aware of that,' she said.

‘Truth be said,' Ambrose smiled at last, ‘we were all a little buzzed.'

Whatever he'd seen or not seen last night, Ambrose was now brightening; forgiveness was in the air, and the jolly Ambrose was returning. She wanted to go with him to the genteel Club des Cent,
that
Edith was returning also, and
that
Edith had her style and needs as well.

It was Edith's job to see that the horseshoe table was correctly positioned in the Glass-room, where the Council met.

She considered herself very good with workmen and with tables.

The workmen made some jokes in French about horses with hooves the size of the table, the resulting manure, and relating this to the business of the League. She understood their jokes, although not all of the Swiss argot, and briefly laughed with them, but not giving herself over fully to their joking, showing by her restraint, she hoped, some mild protest against mindless anti-League humour — and she'd learned how hard it is in politics to argue against a joke. At the same time she tried to show that she did not consider herself above them, showing them Australian mateship while not engaging in that false camaraderie that pretended to deny other differences.

She'd explained to them what the table was for, its importance in the scheme of things, and a little about how the Council worked. She always wanted people to like their work and to understand it.

She was pleasantly aware too, of the constant glint of their male glances off her body, like sun off moving water.

The horseshoe table was on a raised platform at the end of the hall. Edith measured the distance from the walls with a tape to ensure that the table was dead centre. She experimented by coming and going to the table from the door behind it, and ensured sufficient room for chairs to be pushed back, keeping in
mind that some subordinate would be perhaps seated or standing behind the member of Council.

When the table was in position, she sent one of the young workmen to get small metal carpet protectors for the table legs.

With her hands on her hips, she then stood way down at the back of the room where the public would be and looked at the table, imagining the Council seated around it. She had positioned Miss Dickinson's chair for the Council President. She was still having trouble understanding quite why Sir Eric thought the horseshoe table overcame protocol problems. She could see that it meant that no member of Council had their back to the room, which would happen with a round table.

She always liked the idea that the Glass-room was formerly the ballroom of the hotel. Momentarily she saw the elegant European couples from the past waltzing on the parquet floor, she heard the murmur of conversation and laughter, the waltzes. The smell of the room always reminded her of the day of her arrival.

She'd had wax polish and a cloth sent up from the cleaning staff and she polished the table and chairs herself. She hummed the Blue Danube.

She then went along the hall to stores and asked for the national place names used by the Council, including the new one for Germany. She arranged them on the Council table, and arranged the chairs. For a finishing touch, she wished that there was a League pennant which she could affix to the table. She gave Miss Dickinson's chair a final polish.

Finally, as her assignment had specified, she called Sir Eric's office and left a message that the table was in place and ready for him to inspect.

He came almost immediately.

He walked around the table, hands clasped behind his back. He tested the moving of a chair back from the table as she had done.

‘You know, at Locarno Sir Austen wanted a round table to accent the equality of all present — there was no round table, so he decided on a square one. But no square table either. Sir Austen took a rectangular table, measured it himself and then had them cut it clean in half. Had legs put on the sawn end. Worked well. An historic table.'

He seated himself at the table where the President would be seated. ‘Never underestimate the importance of the table.'

‘I don't, Sir Eric. I am something of a student of tables.'

‘I say, this is a fine chair.' He stood and examined Miss Dickinson's chair more closely. ‘Needs a cushion, though, wouldn't you say — or aren't you a student of chairs also?'

Yes, she said, she was a student of chairs and also of rooms. Edith ‘reminded' him where the chair had come from. But not how it had got there.

‘Can't keep track. As long as someone worries about these things.'

‘Yes, Sir Eric.' She suggested he make a reference to Miss Dickinson and the orphans at the next Council meeting.

‘Write me a little speech about it. Make sure I get it before the meeting.'

She wrote a note to herself in her notepad, keeping her pad with her for further notes.

‘You know,' he said, ‘Sir Willoughby — Annie Dickinson's brother — drafted the Covenant. Or had a go at it.'

She said that she hadn't known that.

He asked her to be Germany. ‘Go out and come in when I call.'

Despite the no-smoking signs, the workmen stood smoking in the corner, catching the ash in the palms of their hands, and watching the play-acting.

She felt a little embarrassed. She stood outside the door of the Glass-room and waited.

‘I invite the German delegates to take their places,' called Sir Eric. ‘Enter, Germany.'

Edith came in. She stood in the room, not feeling like Germany at all.

‘Of course, someone will have to lead them to their seat,' Sir Eric said. ‘Make a note of that, will you.'

‘We should have a ceremony,' Edith said, surprised at how strong her voice sounded. ‘It should be more ceremonial,' she said, this time more tentatively.

He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Could be right. Sweetser said the same thing. First new permanent Council member. Don't get around to thinking about ceremonies. How'd you see it? This ceremony?'

‘Oh — well, the huissiers could wear uniforms, for a start.' Was that too Germanic? She stood, thinking. ‘A voice could then boom out, “Enter, Germany.” There could be a fanfare of trumpets, perhaps?'

‘Don't go for fanfares of trumpets myself. Not really a fanfare-of-trumpets man. Or fanfare of anything.'

‘I don't mean only for Germany. For each new Council member, in the future.'

‘The Americans might like the fanfare of trumpets. They go in for that. Drums for the Germans, perhaps? Do you think the Germans are drum people? Feel somehow we've already done enough for Germany.' Sir Eric glanced over at the workmen as if he had perhaps committed a diplomatic gaffe and that they would immediately communicate it to Berlin. They
were watching with curiosity.

Edith warmed to the idea of a ceremony. ‘We could have the booming voice read out something grand. “Hear ye, hear ye — it is solemnly declared that the sovereign nation state of Germany … is now admitted to the Council of world nations … under the sacred Covenant of …” and so on, etc.'

‘You have something of a feel for this sort of thing?' Sir Eric said, looking at her with interest. ‘Didn't think you Australians went in for it.'

‘I suppose we don't,' she said. ‘But again, this is not Australia.'

‘Don't go in for the hear-ye-hear-ye stuff, myself. Too much House of Lords. The Coronation.'

‘Oh, I meant something along those lines.'

‘Could be right.' Sir Eric looked at her again, recalling her. ‘I remember now, you came up with an answer for us on another matter. Tenders for furniture. Something like that. That was you, wasn't it?'

‘Yes, Sir Eric.'

‘At a Directors' meeting?'

‘Yes.'

He looked at her and thought for a second or two. ‘Remind me again — what were you doing at the meeting?'

‘Filling in. Under Secretary Monnet was away, and Claude Cooper was ill.'

‘What grade are you?'

‘I'm only class B — I was not filling in so much as reporting back. I was just there to report back anything that our bureau might have to do.'

‘Maybe the hear-ye-hear-ye stuff would be better for Assembly.'

She could tell that he wasn't enthusiastic. She decided,
though, that working out a ceremonial procedure might be a way for her to make her mark.

He seemed to remember the Directors' meeting now. ‘Edith — that's your name.'

‘Yes. Dame Rachel and I were the only women present. I'm Edith Campbell Berry.'

She sat there, still in Germany's place at the Council with Sir Eric sitting in as President of Council. The workmen were now down the end of the hall, lounging in chairs in the public section, being, she supposed, the World.

He pointed to an empty chair. ‘America will sit there, of course. When they get around to it.'

‘Will they get around to doing it?'

‘Difficult to say.'

‘I've put up the signs,' she said. She pointed. ‘The
Prière de ne pas fumer
signs.'

Sir Eric looked across at one of the signs. ‘Very good. No one will take the slightest heed. Don't be hurt.'

She laughed and said she expected that to be the case. She gestured at the smoking workmen.

‘Briand won't take any notice either,' he said.

One of the workmen approached the table and asked if they were still needed.

Sir Eric nodded at Edith and said in French, ‘She's your boss, Ask her.'

She turned to them and told them that they could go. They gathered their tools.

He leaned across to her. ‘Should give them something — a gratuity?'

‘I'll offer them something for a glass of Ricard or whatever.'

‘Good idea. Could you look after that for me?' He gave her some money and she went over to them and gave the foreman
the money and told him to buy his men a drink. As they trooped out, the foreman said something, which she could not catch, about a woman having given them money for it, and they all laughed. She stood, again looking around at the room and at Sir Eric seated at the table.

‘Sit down again, Berry,' he called.

She came over and seated herself, this time in the chair in which the United States might one day sit.

Sir Eric seemed in a talkative mood. ‘You say you're a student of tables?'

‘A student of furniture, to be more accurate, and of rooms.'

‘I remember how Lord Curzon always had a personal baize-covered footstool at conferences and meetings — for his gout. You know, he wore a back brace too. People used to say he was very formal — but it was his back brace. Made him seem very stiff' Sir Eric laughed.

‘“A most superior person.”'

Sir Eric laughed at the old joke. ‘Well, now you see — it was his back brace.'

She was pleased. ‘I do know,' she said, ‘when the horseshoe table was first used in diplomacy.'

‘You know more than I do then.'

She hoped that Sir Eric didn't believe that he'd been the first to think of using a horseshoe table. ‘At the Tuileries at the end of the eighteenth century.'

‘Interesting.'

‘It was for a meeting of the Convention.' As she delivered the information she disliked herself. What a useless fact. She believed in statistical facts but only when made into a worthwhile pattern. She hated smart alecks.

‘Tell me, Berry, what would you do if you were me, and you had two member states who want to discuss something or other?
They don't have diplomatic relations — will not talk to each other.'

She was taken off-guard, having had her mind on the lowly matters of tables and chairs, no-smoking notices, and ceremonial procedures.

She wondered whether he was talking about the diplomatic problems between Russia and Switzerland. But Russia was not yet a member. ‘Would these countries come into the same room?' she asked.

‘I doubt that they would. No.'

Edith began working her way to some sort of answer while fearing that her solution would probably be diplomatically very foolish. Still, she had to have a go. ‘You could become a neutral state.'

‘Me?'

‘I mean your office. The position of Secretary-General could be seen as neutral territory.'

‘Where would that get us?'

‘If the two countries accepted you as neutral, each could speak to you … if not to each other.' She saw then how it might be done. ‘One country could tell you what it wanted to say to the other country. You could convey it to that country. They could respond to you and then, you could convey that back. And so on.'

‘Where would these envoys be? In their own countries? I would have to go back and forth by train or by aeroplane? It would take months.'

She could see it wouldn't work. ‘They could both be here,' she said, suddenly, ‘here in Geneva.'

‘I would go back and forth to their hotels?'

‘I suppose so.' Again, she could see that it would be too undignified perhaps to have the Secretary-General running
between hotels acting as a go-between. ‘I see that could be undignified for the office of Secretary-General.'

She sensed that he hadn't altogether seriously expected her to come up with a solution. Or maybe he was interested in what a middle-ranks woman might come up with.

He rose and then stopped. ‘There's one more thing you might do for me, Berry.'

‘Yes, Sir Eric?' She opened her pad.

‘You know that this Special Assembly is going to be something of an historic moment?'

‘Very historic.'

‘After the decision to admit Germany is taken, I think a messenger must go immediately to the German delegation waiting at the Metropole and a telegram must be sent to President Hindenberg in Berlin. Immediately.'

‘I think that would be very appropriate.' Thank you, Edith Campbell Berry.

‘We must ensure that there's a record of communication with Berlin. Show Berlin that we do things promptly here. I was wondering, would you look after all that? Draft up something like: “Please accept heartfelt congratulations of President and Secretary-General STOP Germany admission unanimous STOP.” So on, etc.'

‘I'll see to that. And the message to the German delegation?'

‘Compose a message and dispatch a messenger. Good lass. See me in my office later, say, tomorrow morning. We'll look at your draft.'