Grand Days (31 page)

 

On the night before he left they had another grand dinner, and at a point in the meal George said that he had something very serious to say to her.

He was going to propose. She waited while he stacked his finished dishes to one side in a way that had constantly embarrassed her at restaurant meals during his visit.

He put his hand over to cover hers and looking into her eyes, he told her that her mother was not well.

‘Ill?'

‘Very ill, Edith. Your father told me that he believes your mother will not live much longer.'

His hand held on to her and she gripped his. She was thrown off-balance by the news. Letters came regularly from her mother and father and nothing had been mentioned. ‘No one told me!'

George had not mentioned or hinted at it when they had talked about her family.

The money. Her mother had sent the gift of money. She must have been ordering her affairs.

‘I think they felt you shouldn't be worried. In this new job and living so far away and all.'

She didn't know what to say.

‘I'm sorry to be the bearer of such news but your father asked me to break it to you. I kept it till the end of my visit because I didn't want a pall to be cast. That was their idea as
well. That was your mother's wish. That I should mention it only when I was at the end of my visit.'

‘How ill — how soon?'

‘It's a tumour, Edith. The doctors think she's dying. Maybe a few more months. She's been to Macquarie Street doctors. She's been treated by the best.'

Edith put down her spoon and put both her hands into George's. He held them tightly.

‘In his letters my father said nothing.'

‘They were being careful about worrying you. You being so far away. There was nothing you could do.'

In her mind she began to plan a return to Australia, although it couldn't have come at a worse time for her.

‘I guess you'll be coming home,' George said.

‘Of course.'

‘Do you want me to see if there is a passage on my ship? You could come back with me.'

‘Thank you, George — no, I'll have to arrange things here.'

‘I could wait.'

‘You must go about your business, George.'

 

George left Geneva with his new ideas and his honey spoons on the lake paddle-steamer
Italie
for Lausanne where he was to join a train for Marseille and home.

Edith's last view of him was in the Captain's cabin, having the controls explained to him, and then waving to her. It seemed to her that he captained the boat out.

She smiled away a tear of affection for him and for
patrie
, for her dying mother.

‘Let me know your ship,' George had said as he left. ‘I'll drive up to Sydney and collect you.'

Crying, she waved sadly to him. She blew him a kiss.

That same week, in her office back at the Palais Wilson, Edith happened to see a circular to Under Secretaries-General, Directors and Chiefs of Section. The circular outlined much of what George had told Sir Eric and suggested that members of Secretariat when visiting another country should inform Rotary of their willingness to speak at Rotary meetings, especially in the United States. It said that ‘one of the characteristics of Rotary being the weekly lunch or dinner'.

George had been taken seriously in his own right although perhaps the secret bond between herself and Sir Eric had helped.

She smiled back tears again, this time pleased by the memory of George's energy, so much of which, she now knew, he used to ‘wrestle down' his shyness. She didn't know whether this was a sad knowledge or not. In George there was no aggressive energy. It was an authority which tried to Get Things Done Properly.

Edith grappled with her dilemma about returning to Australia. She could take a home-leave back to Australia. She wrote to her mother and father and said that George had broken the sad news of her mother's illness to her and she would come home just as soon as she could.

After George's return to Australia she received an invitation to the wedding of Thelma and George.

She wondered if he'd come to Geneva to ‘look her over' before deciding. If things had been a little different, she thought that perhaps she might have considered George as a husband. He hadn't asked and as Florence said, one did, at least, like to be asked.

She observed to herself, pointedly, that during George's visit she'd kept Ambrose mostly out of sight, except for a few polite drinks, and George, on the other hand, had barely mentioned
Thelma. Confused reactions rose in her heart. What was it that he'd found lacking, or was it just that they were headed along different roads? Had she found him lacking and, if so, how? She feared to look, dreading that what it was she saw lacking in him was unworthy of her consideration and that to value those things meant she was becoming condescending or creating a superiority based on spurious values. Was her sense of self causing her to disqualify people? She sent a cable of congratulations and resolved to search for a gift. If, as George had suggested, they'd gone back together, would this have led to a courtship? A shipboard romance?

She was just not ready to go back home yet. Furthermore, she couldn't afford to leave the League for the twelve weeks travelling there and back together with time away. Too many things were happening.

Her mother wrote a long letter which absolved her from the dilemma and the moral disquiet of her decision not to return home. In her letter her mother said, ‘I would rather think of you going on with your fine work in this one chance that the world has to set things aright than to have you moping at my bedside and fetching lemonade. I would feel proud and happy to know that you were going about your destiny and if you were here, I would fret that you were not in Geneva.'

Her mother said in the letter that she wanted Edith to do great things for which the family would be remembered.

Edith sadly doubted that parents were ever remembered for the greatness of one their children.

She'd known that as Rationalists her father and mother would argue that her life was in Geneva and that her work was more important than, well, customs and rituals of death. They were those sort of people although her mother was far less of a Rationalist than her father.

She wanted to see her mother but she had to take that course which furthered her own life, rather than that which served to comfort the end of her mother's life.

She hoped that her mother was being truthful when she said that she would be comforted more by her being a good daughter out in the world doing good works.

She cancelled the appointment with Nancy Williams in personnel which she had made to arrange for her leave. She wrote to her mother in these terms and, as she expected, her mother wrote back again affirming her decision and her father did as well.

A few months later her mother died.

She took a week in the Jura on her own but then returned to work. She repeatedly told herself that by staying at work she was affirming life and not doing what the conventions of grief expected and that this would please her mother.

But she was still filled with guilt for not having tried to get home and all her mother's assurances before she died did not help, and Edith knew she would have to live with her regret for a long time.

Not having seen her mother at her deathbed was unattended-to business and now no way existed for her ever to attend to it and it would remain for ever unattended-to business.

Over drinks in his apartment one winter's evening, Ambrose tried to prepare her for the Molly Club by explaining that it was frequented by those in Geneva who ‘do not quite like being the way God had made them'. At least, did not like it all the time.

She understood what he referred to and yet again inwardly uttered something like, ‘Ye gods, what am I doing with this man?'

She said something about he being one who liked to go in the opposite direction to the way God intended.

He said that he didn't see it as a matter of willpower. Or a quarrel with God. ‘But it is fun.'

He said that he would need her guidance on what to wear, but he would be honoured, ‘Is “honoured” the correct word? Honoured if you would accompany me to the club.'

Was ‘honoured' indeed the correct word? She replied, ‘I am trying to imagine this club.'

‘It is a decent sort of place. Spotless.'

‘Spotless.'

‘Spotless but not blameless.' He was joking to win her participation.

‘You've been there already?'

‘I entered it, so to speak, in mufti. I had a poke about. Looked around. Sniffed it out, so to speak.'

The nature and practice of her and Ambrose's affiliation was still something she could not describe to anyone she knew.
Perhaps not even to herself, not precisely. It was assumed, she supposed, that they were a romantic duet, but she was sure that it was gossiped about because they had not, for instance, talked of engagement. The people at her pension well knew that she did not spend the week-ends in her own bed although she had now forgotten what explanation she'd originally given to Madame Didier. In their moments of secret-sharing and personal confidences, Florence sometimes made discreet forays into the matter but Edith was aware that she had to conceal Ambrose's behaviour from even the closest of her friends for the sake of his career and for the sake of her own appearances and her self-regard. Really, though, apart from his penchant for dressing up in women's clothing, he was terribly correct. She was, in fact, sometimes quietly proud of being associated with such a typical Englishman and even his vice seemed somehow part of it all. Perhaps that was being unfair. That they slept together, unmarried, was no longer such a remarkable thing, especially in Geneva — the times certainly seemed to wink at it, if not condone it. M. Avenol, the Deputy Secretary-General, had a liaison which was not actually conventional: a wife in a clinic and a mistress in his residence. So she and Ambrose dined, they danced, they were occasionally invited semiofficially as a couple. But try as she might, she still found herself baffled at times by Ambrose's feminine posturing, though it never displeased her.

For a while after the bad quarrel they'd had about this matter of character, he had not practised his dressing-up or introduced it back into their love life. Their physical love life had, in fact, faltered for a time. But gradually it had come back and with it their old ways, and again she had found herself helping him buy women's underwear and other things so that he could dress up.

Her reactions to his dressing up were not predictable. She was attracted to their long embracing and the feel of his lips and
hands, and his private parts. She enjoyed the intimate privilege of knowing about his clandestine self. He told her that she was the only woman he had ever told about it. But sometimes it did nothing to encourage her desire. At those times, that he was dressed in satin underwear was of no consequence. At other times, she became aroused by the whispering of depravity and she could feel sexually entranced, perhaps when tipsy with champagne, and then she found his coming to her bed dressed as a woman something of a mysterious arousal. He was then another person, perhaps a stranger, and that person resembled her, and while it was not quite a mirror of herself, it was a sexual gyration which could intensify her. He was nearly always properly aroused as a man but sometimes he became unmanned and soft and they fondled until she had been satisfied and she liked that too, and he seemed also to like it, even though afterwards she saw only traces of male staining. But this dressing up had until now all taken place in his apartment. Had not gone out into the streets of Geneva.

To go to this club which he'd found, and mix, she imagined, with other men dressed as women did not appeal to her as such, apart from intriguing her curiosity.

‘Surely you don't plan to walk through the streets and so on to this club!'

‘It's only two streets from here.'

‘It's not the fatigue of walking, darling; that is not what I am worrying about.'

‘Do you think I look so unfeminine? Would they know?'

‘The Genevese?'

She considered this. He was quite presentable as a woman, with his slender build and smooth complexion. He was not naturally hairy. His feet and hands were not mannish. In the streets the Swiss never looked at one, at least, not detectably.
She believed, however, that they had a way of looking without being seen to look. Hence their world-famous interest in the science of optics.

‘Isn't it against the law? Don't we risk a scandal?' she asked. ‘What about the League?'

‘I don't believe it to be against the law. Nothing in office rules either.'

‘Is it formal evening wear?'

‘Oh — anything goes, really.'

She did not like the sound of that. ‘Do you mean a costume party?'

‘You could say that. But not fancy dress in the sense of a fancy-dress ball.'

She was having difficulty imagining what it would be ‘like'. Her last fancy-dress ball had been as a child in the School of Arts at Nowra. She'd gone as a grasshopper. Maybe she would go to this club as a grasshopper.

‘You could wear the muslin,' she said, as some sort of an answer. She was thinking of something rather simple for him to wear. She realised that she was drinking from an empty glass. The conversation was making her tense.

‘It's too folkioric.'

‘You can have my tulle evening gown — the one with the gold and silver sequins.'

‘I hoped you'd say that.'

‘I knew you would. But what does it leave me to wear?'

‘You look stunning in the black lace. And I could hardly wear a V-neckline.' He was right, the tulle had a square neckline.

‘How do you know about these places?'

He looked at her vulnerably. ‘One just hears, I suppose.'

‘Are there such places everywhere?'

‘I suppose there are. I haven't been everywhere.' He stared out of the window. ‘Yes, I suppose there are.'

‘I am sure there is no such place in Sydney. Definitely not in Melbourne.' She rose and poured herself another sherry.

‘Maybe not Sydney or Melbourne. I wouldn't be so sure though. About Sydney. Or Melbourne.'

‘Oh, I'm sure. And I'm sure that if there'd been such a place, the men I knew would not have been habitués.'

He became silent, and she saw how he could be taking her remark as a reproach, as implying that Australian men had a more dependable masculinity. She saw that it had drifted them closer to the unpleasant shoals of their quarrel a few months before.

‘I don't mean it in any derogatory way,' she said. ‘I just mean Australian men aren't like that. The ones I know, I mean.'

‘Maybe Australian men are different; perhaps they don't care for lace and silk. Suppose it could be so. Pioneers and so on. Living rough.'

‘I'm sure they like lace and silk on their women.'

‘Not on their men, you think?'

She leafed through
L'Illustration
. ‘Not on their men.'

‘I wouldn't be an attraction down there, you think?' He was lightening it up, rowing away from the shoals.

‘I think you'd be better appreciated here in Geneva. Or Munich, frankly. You're more a Weimar person.' She smiled at him, feeling her patriotic moralism receding. Uncharacteristically, he worried away at the implied admonishment.

‘You think I'm a little … disordered … as a person?'

That might very well have been the word she would have used. ‘I think you're a little feminine and I don't think femininity is a disorder. No, you're not “disordered”, dear.'

‘If it's not in the right body, femininity is a disorder.'

She moved to sit near him and to touch him, to reassure him, regardless of what conflicting notions moved in her about this matter — she was too tired to fight. ‘We have to live with it, if it's in the wrong body. If we find we are the one with that body,' she said, trying to ease him.

‘Some of us have to live with it.'

‘And some of us have to live with those who have to live with it. The secret is, I suppose, for all those involved, one way or another, to enjoy it.'

‘I like your answers,' he said, returning the affection.

‘I'm sometimes too good at making answers,' she said. She thought about her wider life. Was she glib? Was she too good at self-justification? ‘I think Cooper believes I'm too good at finding clever answers.'

‘Will I wear a flower on my shoulder? Or is that out of fashion?'

 

At least when they reached the club entrance Ambrose behaved like a ‘gentleman', despite his female attire. At the club stairway he went ahead of her, down the stairs into the menacing, dark cellar and its door with a peephole, wearing her new fur-trimmed double-breasted coat, while she wore her second best overcoat. There was no street sign announcing the presence of the club.

Even with her assistance, he had taken hours to get himself ready. He looked quite stunning, she thought, with fashionably flat breasts. He'd insisted on wearing her violet corset, ‘for the nice tightness of it'. His wig was a good fit. She had convinced him to reduce the amount of lipstick. ‘Let them find out you're a siren — don't advertise it,' she'd told him. He had applied
philtres d'effarement
to his eyes to make them more striking.

‘I thought a siren was just that — someone who advertised it,' he'd replied.

In the low, kind lighting of the surprisingly large club, which had a small orchestra playing Negro music, she saw every possible combination: there were men dancing with men, women with women, and men dressed as women dancing with men, and dancing with women. And inclinations, about which she was not sure.

She ran her eyes over the musicians. The atmosphere caused her to think, unreasonably, that Jerome might be there. But of course he wasn't.

Edith sat at a table waiting for Ambrose to return from looking around for another ‘couple' whom he had planned to meet at the club. She felt insecure, because once in the club, he'd begun relinquishing the male role of looking after things, and she'd had to find a table. She wasn't going to look after things. Not in a club like this, where everything was inverted. It was his club, not her club. What happened at the toilet door? Who went where? She supposed they didn't care. She suspected that when the time came, she would care. She would care dreadfully.

She found that she kept averting her eyes from the surroundings, but she ventured to look around her again. She was relieved to see that some of the clientele appeared normal, in dress at least, although God knew what was occurring in their minds and hearts. Most of the ‘men' were in tuxedos or dinner suits. But then, so were some of the ‘women'. The more she looked, the more she realised that it was a very mixed club indeed, and perhaps more normal, not as confused as she'd first thought. Surely there could not be too many confused people in Geneva?

Ambrose, quite adept in his ankle-strapped high-heels, returned without his two friends and without her fur coat.

‘Where is the coat?'

‘I put it in the cloakroom.'

‘I hope their honesty is more reliable than their sexual character.'

‘How witty, Edith.'

A waiter put down the cocktails which she'd had to order for them.

Ambrose asked, ‘Do you want me to put your coat in the cloakroom?'

‘You may put it in the cloakroom when I am sure I'm staying.'

She drank deeply from the cocktail. She might as well lose herself in drink.

‘You must stay.'

‘Can I have the cloakroom ticket?' She held out her hand to him. Ambrose took the ticket from his handbag, on loan from her, and handed it to her. ‘In case you decide to disappear with a man in a dinner suit, never to be seen again,' she said. ‘I don't want to lose my fur coat. I can afford to lose you, but not the fur coat.' She hoped he didn't take that as a reference to the money he owed her.

He was looking around, as if searching for attention.

She went on, ‘I suppose — if you did disappear — that I might eventually see you again years later, say, one night at Monte Carlo, in the casino — but I couldn't bear it if you were there in my fur coat.'

He chuckled.

As she and Ambrose joked, it occurred to her that she did not quite know how the evening was meant to turn out and she thought she'd better ask. She had difficulty phrasing it. ‘Do you intend to be approached by these … men?' she asked.

‘Asked to dance, you mean?'

She meant that and more than that.

‘Asked to … whatever.'

He looked at her, perhaps surprised at her implication. ‘I don't know. I suppose I want to be admired.'

‘Don't we all.'

‘I admire you, Edith.'

‘You look far better than I do tonight.'

‘Not true — you're being charitable.' His voice implying that he would love it to be true.

‘You look better, darling, because I got second-best choice of my clothing and jewellery. And handbags. And coats.'

‘Touché,' he said, then went on, awkwardly, ‘In reply to your first question — you know that I don't care for men. I prefer to be with women. As a rule.'

‘As a rule?'

‘Yes, as a rule.'