Grand Days (26 page)

She massaged cream into her feet, the final act of the day, and tried, as always, to get to the bed without her feet touching the floor. Since she'd been about fifteen and conscious of her body and its care she had done this, trying to fly from the dressing table to her bed without touching the floor. She'd told herself repeatedly over the years to use her bedroom slippers, to break the childish habit of hopping barefoot to the bed, but she never had.

In bed, before sleep came to her, she enjoyed the idea of becoming a modern woman who knew about stocks and shares.

 

She took time off to go to the Assembly meeting in the Salle de la Réformation, to hear John speak. She went to hear him at the Assembly as an Australian, to ‘support the home team', and for an hour or so she allowed herself patriotic feelings, silently barracking for the Australians to acquit themselves well. She was proud that Australia was an international presence in its own right.

She was glad that the three hundred seats in the press gallery were almost fill to hear John speak.

John had argued well against the French delegate M. Louchcur, who wanted blank votes included in the count when
deciding whether a majority had voted for the candidate nation. M. Loucheur called blank voting ‘
inertie courtoise
'. He said that some Assembly members cast blank votes to avoid the discourtesy of voting
against
the candidate country, which perhaps national foreign policy might in other circumstances require, but allowing them at the same time to indicate that they had no opposition to the candidate.

John said that courteous inertia was an inconclusive argument and that nations should show the courage of their convictions. There should be more plain talking. People should vote yes or no.

Proudly, she liked his style and she agreed with his defence of plain speaking.

She caught up with him after the meeting and they went for tea at the Hôtel de la Pair where the Australians were staying. She had talked with them on the day they arrived and had helped them book into the hotel. She congratulated him on his call for plain speaking.

He said that as a politician, or as a diplomat, he hoped that he never had to engage in double talk or to wear his underpants the wrong way round. She laughed and asked him why he would wear his underpants the wrong way round.

He said, with a small smile, that some diplomats claimed it was a way of avoiding divine punishment when telling a justifiable diplomatic lie. ‘It is another way of crossing your fingers,' he said, tickled by sharing it with her.

For John, it was probably a risqué thing to say. She said that she could never think of him as a double-talker.

‘Remember though that evil men will always pretend to be frank,' he said. ‘I think there's an argument to be made for “delaying the truth”. I remember at the Peace Conference I wanted to release something to the press — I was a secretary to
the Committee on Czech-Slovak affairs. I forget the substance of the communiqué. The Chairman, Paul Cambon, said to me, “Your communiqué is quite precise. And if it is published tomorrow, hundreds of men will die in fighting.”'

‘How could he be so sure that it would result in fighting?'

‘It is judgement. In fact when the final draft of those provisions was released, fighting broke out in Czecho-Slovakia.'

‘Delaying the communiqué only delayed the bloodshed.'

‘Any delay offers hope of avoidance. By all means, publicise the agreements — no more secret arrangements — but deliberate in confidence.'

She thought then about how she would describe to herself her ‘secret arrangement' with Ambrose, often thinking that if she ever had to face a judge in the Court of Proper Life Conduct she would say, ‘What we did together was part of my coming to understand life, and as a caring for another human being in his confusion. I didn't do it as an act of simple carnal pleasure.' The judge would then say, ‘How then do you explain your carnal pleasure?' She would say that her carnal pleasure was ‘after' she had entered into the situation for other more virtuous reasons.

Edith?

Yes, she had done it
as a vice
— out of carnal curiosity and arousal. There, that was out — admitted to herself, at least.

She attended to their discussion.

‘I heard an argument about what the different armies of the world mean by “surrendering”,' she said. ‘Some soldiers hoist a white flag. Some throw down their arms. The Prussians raise their rifles butt end up. The French required them also to kneel.' She laughed. ‘And the Russians embrace those to whom they are surrendering.'

He laughed. ‘Beware the embrace of the Russian bear.'

She told him that there was really no international agreement on even this matter. She was trying to impress him by showing the sort of things she heard and talked about here in Geneva.

She said that confusions such as this made her sympathise with those who tried to govern. She said she was more and more amazed that government was possible. She said she was impatient with those people who scorned politicians.

‘I am amused by the League talk of electing “semi-permanent” members of Council. It all sounds very much like our talk about a “temporary permanent” parliament house at Canberra, don't you think?'

She told him Ambrose's joke about semi-virgins. He liked that.

‘I worry about the League speeches sometimes,' he said. ‘I was talking with one of the British delegates, Mrs Swanwick, after Count Apponyi's speech …'

Edith made a gesture of dislike at the mention of Mrs Swanwick's name.

‘Mrs Swanwick not to your taste?'

‘Not at all. I agree with her on most things but I can't abide the woman.'

‘I think I know what you mean. Anyhow, I said that in his speech Apponyi had been brave by withholding nothing and Mrs Swanwick came back at me saying how sad it was that to tell the truth in Geneva was considered “brave”.'

A typical Swanwick remark. She leapt to find a position away from that of Mrs Swanwick. She no longer believed that ‘empty rhetoric' was empty She had come around to seeing that rhetoric was useful, even if unfelt by the speaker, because it contained within it the expression of what was ‘acknowledged' as being desirable. That a hypocrite was affirming virtue by paying ‘lip service'. Next time the virtue might be harder to disregard.
Rhetoric contributed to the formation of a future consensus.

He kept talking and she listened as she went over her thoughts, wondering whether she should say them to John. She decided she might as well speak and see what he thought.

She said, ‘Even if the speaker doesn't believe it, and even if the country has no intention of doing it, the important thing is that they feel compelled to
say it
and to
say it in those words
to the international community.'

She felt she was perhaps overstating her position and she threw in something light. ‘I do admit that I've heard too many speeches which begin with the words, “When mankind first emerged from the primeval mud …”'

He laughed. ‘But that's quite an observation,' he said. ‘Doesn't it reduce the weight of your praise for my plain speaking? Aren't you saying that there is more than one way to “speak” diplomatically? Are you becoming a diplomat, Edith?'

She detected in his voice a tone which began as teasing and then turned into bemusement as he realised that he'd been pulled up.

She was unprepared for the impact of his interest. She was flummoxed too, by his observation of the contradiction and her devaluation of her earlier praise of him.

Suddenly she saw that maybe John was wrong about courteous inertia. The French were perhaps wiser on this. There was nuance and that was what she had to learn. The blank ballot was a courtesy containing a comment, a nuance. A yes vote which was cast without conviction was perhaps the true hypocrisy. The courteous inertia created a third type of vote.

It crossed her mind then that there were perhaps other ways of voting than yes and no. The League needed more ways of voting than yes, no and abstention.
Inertie courtoise
was already one. She remembered now that at a League conference she'd
attended, someone had wanted to be counted as absent when they were present in the hall. They wanted to be listed as absent during the vote. They did not want to abstain, nor vote yes or no, nor put in a blank vote. Being technically absent was more than avoiding making a decision at that time — it was saying that you were not ready even to confront or acknowledge the issue at that time. Intellectual absence.

There was also the French use of the word ‘
voeu
' — an expression of a wish rather than a decision.

Within conversation, too, she realised there were many ways of ‘voting'.

She felt this was a personal breakthrough in her thinking,
une prise de conscience
. She felt she had to digest it before putting it out into conversation, especially with John who was now in her mind clearly wrong. Simple plain speaking was not always the scrupulous way. It tried to pretend that everything could be expressed. But the greater fault in politics and discussion was careless imprecision. Diplomacy was closer to the truth because by creating honest silence it tried to avoid saying things which were untrue through imprecision. Diplomacy could create the ‘semi-silence'.

Or it avoided saying things
at that time
, before anyone was ready to say something. It was a way of maintaining verbal relationships while at the same time holding off superfluous statement and unneeded position-taking. The raisings of unnecessary disagreement. Which, she guessed, was also the value of card-playing.

As she registered her thinking, she realised that she was changing her position on something rather important. She felt nicely nervous.

‘I liked what Briand once said about it all,' John went on. ‘He said that at the end of all diplomatic proceedings, all tedious
speeches, and all the consecutive and simultaneous translations of dusty communiqués there are people in anguish.'

She could agree with that wholeheartedly. ‘Briand is my hero,' she said.

‘Oh?' He gave a wry smile.

‘After you, of course.'

‘You don't have to place me ahead of Briand.'

She did not want to be a challenge to John. Deference and affection, nicely blended, stepped between them. Disagreement, if it existed between friends, did not always have to be expressed or pursued. It could be left forever peripheral to the friendship or even in silence. Everything didn't have to be said. She turned the conversation and sought his advice on the stock market but he seemed to be unacquainted with its workings. He said that some of his friends were making large amounts of money on the share market. He advised her to buy property. He said that owning property was good for the personality ‘simply by the span and variety of responsibilities which it brought' — legal questions, maintenance, improvements of it. He said that owning property also involved you in a community, questions of governance at a local level, belonging in a neighbourhood. ‘Moneymaking isn't bad for the character,' he said. ‘It's perhaps the most harmless employment there is. Compared with politics.'

He did tell her to beware, though, of stock market ‘pools' and so on. When she questioned him further about these stock market pools he retreated and was uncomfortable, having been caught going conversationally slightly too far on too little knowledge. He was usually cautious about stepping too far from the path of his certitudes.

She again changed the subject to avoid discomforting him. She realised that she was manipulating the conversation to protect his pride. For the first time she was having trouble achieving
a conversational ease with him. She thought of something soft and unthreatening to say. ‘Do you remember your advice to me about ordering soup on trains?' she said smiling, her voice turning back through the years to that of the girl she had been then when he had given her this advice in Australia. Her voice again had a girlish lightness.

‘I do remember. Never order soup on trains,' he said with mock judicial certitude.

‘I broke your rule. On the PLM train from Paris to Geneva, I ordered soup.'

‘And you spilled your soup?'

‘No! There was no spilling. I think trains have improved.'

‘Perhaps the soup is thicker?'

‘The suspension of the trains is smoother, I think. Or the tracks are more even.'

Ye gods, here she was contradicting him again. She was finding it difficult to play the younger person. ‘I learned a new rule for eating on trains which I will pass on to you. In return for your advice to me, even though I disregarded it.'

‘What's your advice to me?'

‘When dining on a train, order all courses.'

‘Why so?'

She summoned up her girlish voice. ‘As an antidote to boredom!'

‘I am rarely bored,' he said, somewhat ponderously.

She told John about her first meal on a train coming up from Paris with Ambrose Westwood.

John smiled. ‘I can see you are learning the rules of a more opulent world than mine. You've left behind my sober colonial precautions about eating soup.'

Oh dear. She glanced at him to be sure that he was joking but sensed that maybe there was vulnerability there, maybe he
regretted not being part of the cosmopolitan world. He was part of it, of course, though not as fully as she was, perhaps, living in Geneva.

‘Geneva is hardly opulent,' she said. ‘It can be rather cheerless.'

‘It's opulent compared with dusty Canberra, I can assure you.'

‘When do you move there?'

‘Next year, it seems.'

She wanted to flatter him. ‘Please, John, don't get me wrong. You gave me much good advice and not only on the eating of soup. And you could never be described as colonial.' She took his hand and smiled at him. ‘Maybe a little out of date in your knowledge of the suspension of trains.'