Grand Days (28 page)

‘I'll repay you from my stock market winnings,' he said.

This tipped her from feeling generous to feeling that he was trying to fool with her in an unpleasant way.

‘I do not think, temperamentally, you're the person to play the market, darling. I really don't.' Her voice had hardened.

The atmosphere in the room had lost its playfulness.

She was about to say to him that he lacked ‘the nerve' to play the market. More, that he had a predisposition, she thought, to lose. To say this to him, though, would not just be being candid with Ambrose, it would be nasty, and she tried to stop it coming out, but out it came. ‘You lack the nerve.'

He sat up, his voice changed a little, back towards being fully masculine. ‘Oh, I think I have nerve.'

That was true. ‘Perhaps the stock market requires a different nerve. Needs a different sort of courage to the battlefield.'

‘The nerve to play with money isn't what I call nerve,' he said.

She couldn't stop herself. ‘There's no nerve required if you play the stock market with someone else's money.'

A silence came between and around them.

He pulled to the other side of the bed, his back towards her. ‘For God's sake, if it's the four hundred francs I owe you …' he said, more to the wall than to to her.

She sensed in herself a pause, during which she considered whether to say that the amount was, in fact, six hundred francs. She did.

‘Whatever.'

‘And you lack the judgement. You would lose.' She didn't say, and you will always lose. It was good for him to hear the truth at last, to know what he was.

‘I accept that I am not particularly clever about money.'

‘Oh, stop simpering,' she said. ‘Be a man.' This statement caused a cold silence.

‘It hasn't bothered you before,' he said, again his voice wavering towards the masculine. ‘You seem to like someone who isn't a man. Maybe I am something more than a man. Maybe you wouldn't care for a man who was only a man.'

His insult did not land home.

‘I know what I am. And I know what you are.' As she heard herself say it, she realised that it was a serious insult, and that it could very well have been cruel.

They'd never said things like this to each other before.

He pulled back the covers and got out of the bed. ‘You
should've spoken sooner. It would have been more honest for you to have spoken up. Much earlier.'

He sat at the dressing table in his nightdress. She let him burn in his humiliation.

She began to get a glimmer of understanding about why the outburst had happened. It was not all aimed at him — she had wanted to be cruel to the world.

It had not come out as pure cruelty It had posed as fake principled behaviour. It was also said to relieve herself of what she felt about Ambrose — about his deficiencies. But he would not grow strong from knowing his weakness. Or what she thought were his weaknesses. Having been callous released her from her irritation and she didn't feel a need to go further with her cruelty.

Nor could you insult someone into awareness of their faults.

She thought about ‘imperfect friends'. Maybe that was all she had. Maybe that was what she was. Was anyone ever a ‘perfect friend'? As a child she'd believed that all insects were perfect, ladybirds for example, but under the microscope she found that even insects are flawed, crippled.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘For what?' he asked in a small, defeated voice.

‘For the suggestion that you lacked nerve.'

‘Others decide if we are brave. I don't think I have it.' His voice was self-pitying.

She had no antagonism now. She wanted things to be calm and intimate again, not only for his sake, but for her own peace. ‘I said I'm sorry. Come back to bed.'

He did so.

As he entered the bed she pulled him toward her and kissed him as he began to sob. She stretched out a hand and turned off the bedside lamp.

‘It's all right, darling,' she said to him, feeling contained and clear-seeing and controlled. ‘I'll be the one who worries about money.'

Through his crying, he said, ‘I'm really hopeless about living — living outside some institution, some organisation.'

‘You're not. In so many ways you're a remarkable person.' That was true. ‘Maybe not so good with practical living.' She did not really think that she'd go on worrying about money for him as well as for herself, not through life. She made that silent reservation.

What was she to do with Ambrose?

‘You do good things for the world,' she said. ‘Now hush.'

 

On the day he left, John sent her a note containing a warning which he'd meant to give her before. He said that in his experience, successful people rarely knew the reasons for their success. When they contribute their success to these or those factors, they were often wrong.

‘This is simply a gentle warning against the well-meaning wisdom of successful people like James Forstall. Good luck.'

But then who could explain what they did and why?

 

On the day it had been decided that the Landolt crowd would make up its mind about investing in the stock market, Edith was the only one who came to Cooper's office.

‘Where are the others?'

‘Not interested,' said Cooper abruptly, eating an oatcake biscuit.

‘None of the others are interested!?' she said.

‘You're the only one.'

Cooper said not one of the others had been interested at all and he himself had lost interest. ‘Have a biscuit.' He pushed the plate of biscuits to her.

Oh.

She sat there in his office, looking at him. She realised that although he'd put up the scheme, deep down he too lacked nerve. He had never had the nerve to carry it through.

For want of something to say, she asked, ‘Are you waiting until blood is running in the streets?'

‘I'm sorry, I don't follow.'

‘Never mind.'

How odd.

This made her different from the others in the crowd.

How odd.

How different? Different how?

‘You can have the name of my brother's broker in London,' Cooper said, reaching for his address book, ‘if you want to go ahead yourself.'

‘It's all right. Mr Forstall has given me the name of a broker.'

Cooper was piqued and surprised. ‘Oh,' he said, restraining himself from asking further about her knowing Forstall.

She found she was relieved that they weren't setting up a syndicate. She would manage it herself and for her mother. She would do it with caprice. At least for her first splash. After that she would take advice. She did not have the time in her life to study both the stock market and the troubles of the world.

That is how she came to invest her mother's gift in the stock market. Her first investment was in Firestone Rubber because they were investing in Liberia, the nation run by former Negro
slaves from America. She wanted to help Liberia but she also wanted to commemorate another caprice — her night in Paris with Jerome.

When she'd left home to go to Sydney University, George McDowell had been the most promising young man in her district, although sometimes laughed at for his schemes. He'd gone on with the blind expectation that people
should
take him seriously, and as long as he paid his bills, she supposed they
would
take him seriously, and she presumed that George made money, although he never seemed to boast about it and did not live in a flashy way. Though she remembered that he always sought to be treated preferentially with expressions such as, ‘I know this is not the usual way things are done but I want you to do it for me as a favour', or ‘I am going to ask you to do a rather difficult thing for me.' Older men called him ‘Mr McDowell', even when he was barely twenty-one. He had a rapid manner, reminding her, in recollection, of some of the earlier, jerky motion pictures.

While at university she had been his ‘agent and technical adviser' in one of his schemes for marketing a water clarifier and had made, she recalled, about fifteen guineas out of it. He was the only man she had ever seen wear overalls over a suit and tie but it expressed him perfectly. He was always ready to muck in on a job but underneath it, he was always the manager.

Although he was a few years younger, she'd flirted with him at balls when she had been home on vacation. As a suitor, he had been a possibility, but she had other roads to travel. George was a man with big ideas in a small town, and she could not see herself back there, living on the coast with George.

The letter from George said he was coming to Geneva. To ‘inspect' the League for himself.

She remembered that George, as a young man, had been the first person in their circle to go overseas. He had gone not to Europe, but to the States, where he believed the future lay. There'd been Scribner, an older man of no particular age, who'd earlier been to Oxford, or at least that was what people said, but if he had been to Oxford and gained a degree, what was he doing back in the town?

Scribner existed without a job, although he was always in the street first thing in the morning in collar and tie, involved in undertakings of a mysterious personal kind which seemed to fill his days, and from time to time he worked with George on schemes, writing brochures, cranking handles, driving George about in George's Studebaker tourer, both of them dressed in white dust jackets, goggles and suits.

As much as she had affectionate memories of George and of those days, Edith really didn't want George McDowell in Geneva and around in her life now. She wasn't the flirtatious girl from the town balls any more, doing the hokey pokey and the progressive barn dance. She certainly was not ‘Edy', as George had addressed her in the letter.

There was something unnerving about the idea of a visit from someone she had left behind. John had been different — he belonged half in her world anyhow. George's visit would mean facing the self she'd left behind. The discarded self, even. Did the visiting person seek to find the person they'd known? Or did they hope to find a new person who'd surprise and dazzle them? Or did they fear meeting some formidable new person who would dismay them? Whatever, it was an unwanted reunion with no definable purpose.

Typically, he talked in his letter of her helping him to make
‘the best use of his time in Geneva'. George led a relentless life.

George would want to meet Sir Eric. Oh, she saw it now. George believed in ‘going straight to the top'. Just when she'd begun to be noticed by Sir Eric and had the very special bond with him, along came George to muddle it. Admittedly, she hadn't been back in that office since the crisis about Germany and the shaving of Sir Eric. It was as if that special morning were something holding them at arm's length in their work, that Sir Eric did not dare allow her to be too close again.

She couldn't arrange for George to meet Sir Eric, anyhow, but deep in her heart she knew that, by one means or another, George would get to see Sir Eric. As long as he didn't drag her into it. The more she thought about it, the better it was that he do it himself, and she would beg him not to mention their connection back in Australia. At all. In any way.

It then crossed her mind that George might propose to her if he wasn't yet married to Thelma, the belle of most of the balls, who came from one of the older families. One of her mother's letters had mentioned Thelma.

It wasn't that Australia was not a ‘real' place, full of real people doing real things, finding happiness, making families, practising the arts of friendship, practising the arts of politics, and practising, albeit in a youthful way, the arts and scholarship — doing all the things she knew mattered in life. It was that she needed now in her life to put herself in a position which made her productively
nervous
. Even if it was a bit uncomfortable at times. She had to be where she didn't know quite what was happening next, to be living precipitously. She wanted to be in the presence of people who made her a little nervous. She wanted to be among objects, buildings and art works which made her mindful and sentient, which could cause her, now and then, to be in awe.

She wanted to feel that she was
absorbing
from her world, she wanted to feel as if these buildings and objects were entering her spirit. She knew that French culture, or at least Genevan French culture, would shape her, not into a French person, but into another sort of person.

There was a loss from living in Europe, she acknowledged. For instance, on the day she first visited Mont Blanc, she had lost the mythical ‘Alps' of her childhood with all their fables and fantasy. They were no longer ‘the Alps' in quite the way they'd been before when she had seen only photographic postcards or just heard the words ‘the Alps'. They were mountains now.

She had also lost mythical ‘Europe'. The mythical Europe of her childhood picture books and the many hearings of the word spoken so longingly and with such aching and worried significance by the adult world around her as a child. She lived in a real Europe now — and in some minor ways, regretfully. A Europe of visible and touchable places to walk, to ride, to shop, to eat and drink — and of dull and ugly places as well.

Still, sometimes on a mountain road driving around a bend to face a vista of farms and churches and fields she became breathless, or when driving through the dark, narrow, winding cobble-stoned streets of a village. The word Dubonnet on a sign above some tables and chairs could still thrill her.

She was willing to forgo such things as family and friends for now, to have placed herself where these European sensations might become part of her, because she felt at times that she might not be able to have her own family, could not yet see how that could be in her life. It was also true that she was not sure how much she was prepared to forfeit to be able to have these sensations of Europe and the work of the League. She prayed that what she was pursuing was more than just sensations. Or more, that they were consequential sensations. And, as time moved on,
she was aware of the dire bargain she was making with her life, and with her womanhood.

Sir Eric wanted them to be representatives of their nations within the Secretariat, in the sense that they should be able to guide the League in its dealings with their own countries, although no one had officially asked her anything about Australia since she'd been at the League. Nothing whatsoever.

For good or for ill, she now lived in Geneva. The capital of intellectual life, as Flaubert said. Her life was assemblies, congresses, receptions, banquets, and she had a lover. That was her life and that was how she wanted her life for now. She did not see how a visit from George fitted in.

Would she introduce Ambrose to George? She groaned. Not likely.

She sat in her office and ashamedly cursed George McDowell away from Geneva and her life.

 

The curse did not work. George came. George paced about her office, examining the pneumatic tubes, the window-opening devices, holding the League notepaper to the light to look at the watermark, and standing on a chair to look at the electric light. She wished her office wasn't so small, was more impressive for George to report on back home.

He glanced through the files on her desk.

‘Those files are confidential, George. Secrets of the nation states of the world.'

‘“Have no secrets”,' he stated to no one in particular, but he respected the files, and closed them. He took the glass from over the water flask, and poured himself a drink. He appeared to ‘taste' the water. He was cultivating his taste, he'd told her. He went to look at one of Mantoux's jokes pinned to the wall.

‘It's an office joke, George.'

She was frightened that he'd take it seriously and write it down in his notebook. The joke was a ‘formula' for disarmament.

‘Has anyone tried it? It might work.' He next looked at the Punch cartoon of the ‘League of Nations Hotel' and laughed.

Edith saw it afresh after all this time and decided to take it down. It was something she no longer saw on her wall.

Turning back to her he said, ‘On this trip I've picked up five new ideas. I came from the United States to here. You know I've been to the United States twice now? Do I sound American?
You can't help picking up some of the American way of talking. I'm not going to England because England has nothing to teach Australia.'

That was typical of the breathtaking ideas that George came up with — to travel the world and to avoid England.

‘But I came here because Geneva's more important than London. That's one reason why I looked you up. I am admiring of you, Edy. You were the first internationalist from the south coast. Maybe the first from New South Wales.'

‘What about Scribner?'

‘Scribner?' George chuckled. ‘Scribner. You know what he asked me to bring him back?'

She shook her head. ‘I'd imagine it would be a book or a musical score.'

‘Wrong. He wanted me to get him a honey spoon.'

She allowed herself to laugh. Suddenly it was nice to hear about Scribner, Doctor Teddy Trenbow and the others from her younger days. These people lived on in her life now only in dreams and recollections; they would never reappear in her life. Except for George. ‘A honey spoon!'

‘A wooden Alpine honey spoon. I'll admit I'd never heard of such a thing. It exists, all right. It's made of wood and doesn't look like a spoon. It has this grooved end. You push the thing into the honey pot and twist it. It winds up the honey. You hold it over the bread and unwind the honey onto the bread. Scribner explained it to me. In fact, he made a drawing of it. I've got it back at the hotel.'

‘We'll have a look for one.' She was beginning to relax with George.

George said there could be a market for it, Australians being big honey-eaters. Then he said, ‘Scribner is not an internationalist
or a citizen of the world.' George stood at the window presumably thinking of Scribner and at the same time examining the geraniums in her window box.

He laughed. ‘I remember you lecturing me about gardens. You told me that gardens were nature in a prison.'

She had once said that. She smiled, flattered that he'd remembered something she'd said. ‘Yes, that is my little prison. Those are my Swiss geranium prisoners.'

George turned to her. ‘Seriously, you were the first from our district to know what it was all about. About being international.'

He waved his monogrammed leather-bound notebook at her. ‘I don't mean inventions. I mean ideas in the realm of the philosophical.'

She leaned back in her chair and smiled at him with the protective superiority of an older sister indulging the enthusiasms of a younger brother.

‘An example: take this key.' He went to the door and removed the key. ‘The teeth of this key might be the same as in other countries; the shank is the same; but in every country I have visited the finger-turning part is different. Why is that?'

‘I've really never thought about it, George.'