Grand Days (34 page)

Mr Huneeus was lying down on a couch, covered with a blanket, suffering from shock. He kept saying that a bodyguard usually accompanied him. That he would, tomorrow, instruct
his bodyguard to track down these thugs. They would be dealt with. Dealt with.

She wanted to believe him; she thought it probable that someone like Mr Huneeus would have a bodyguard. She believed it and felt good about it and she wanted him to track down the thugs and beat them.

While Mr Huneeus rested, the four of them sat around, the English couple in their women's clothing without wigs, the older one inhaling from a preparation, all retelling, cursing, and sharing observations now in their fully male voices — as survivors from a shipwreck, all solicitous of Edith. They were all made very close from what they had been through. She no longer felt any antipathy towards the two Englishmen. She kept shivering and Ambrose fetched a rug which she draped around her shoulders. The couple asked if they might stay, and Ambrose fixed a bed for them in the guest room and they said good night, kissing Edith and holding her in a strong embrace.

After dozing for a short time, Mr Huneeus awakened and said a formal good night. Ambrose, who had a telephone, called the taxi depot. As Mr Huneeus prepared to go, he handed her his card. She fumbled in her handbag and found her card which she gave him, without any thought of protocol or the League or any of that. He read it, bowed formally to her and to Ambrose.

In bed she began to cry. As Ambrose comforted her and they talked there in the dark, she realised that Ambrose had not seen, or had not registered, what had happened to her. He spoke of the brutish behaviour towards Huneeus but did not mention the behaviour of the youth to her.

‘And there was what they did to me.'

‘Are you hurt too?' He half sat up in the bed.

‘Not bodily.'

‘You were very brave.'

She wondered if she should tell him. ‘I mean the other thing, the thing they did to me.'

He was silent, as if trying to recall. ‘I don't follow.'

For a flashing second, she thought that she might have imagined it all, that it was her mind enacting a primeval terror. ‘They molested me.'

Ambrose turned on the bedside light and looked at her. She could tell that he was disturbed, was perhaps worried that she was hysterical, that she was caught in frenzied fantasies of womankind. Or that she was using the language loosely.

‘You were molested?' His voice now had the protective concern of a doctor. She began crying. ‘I didn't see this. Was it at the time you tried to protect Huneeus?'

As she cried she suffered a peculiar opposition of feeling — relief that he hadn't seen and that maybe others hadn't seen, and yet also a yearning for pity.

‘How were you molested? I mean, talk to me as a doctor.'

‘I'm all right. In a way I'm glad you didn't see it. Maybe others didn't see it either. I don't want to describe it. My head aches, but it's more from humiliation.'

He held her. ‘I didn't see what happened in the confusion. I don't want to sound disregarding.'

She liked that he was a doctor, and she relished a sense of protection. ‘It's all right. Turn off the light. Let's sleep. I need to sleep.'

‘I'll get you a sleeping draught.'

‘No, don't bother. Thank you.'

He ignored her, and left the room, returning with a mixture in a glass. He held her head as he would a child, and helped her drink it and she felt comforted by him there in his regimental striped pyjamas, and as a doctor.

For the first time since coming to Geneva, she wanted to go home to Australia.

 

She did not go to the office on the Monday but by Wednesday her spirits had returned, her agitation had settled somewhat, and, though still deeply sombre and occasionally shaking, she went into work.

In her office, there was a formal note from His Excellency, Mr Huneeus, and flowers from him which had been put in water by one of the women in the bureau, but they were wilting. The note invited her to come to his embassy on the Tuesday of the following week. She wondered tiredly if the invitation implied amorous interest by Mr Huneeus. She felt affection for him from their having shared a horror and survived, but she did not want to encourage any amorous affection. She pushed the matter aside for now.

Ambrose had gone back to the club and retrieved their coats and hers was on a hanger behind the door of her office.

 

She decided to have Ambrose accompany her to the Embassy of Azerbaijan. They discussed whether Mr Huneeus would recognise Ambrose as a man, and decided that, given Mr Huneeus's condition on the night, he probably would not, and that if he did, he would choose not to refer to the strange circumstances under which they'd met.

It was a rambling, clean office in Servette, and she surmised that Mr Huneeus and others lived in the upper apartments. On the wall was a framed portrait of the President, a group photograph of his cabinet, a framed copy of the constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and a national coat-of-arms.

Mr Huneeus sat at a green-covered desk. His lips were still swollen. There were three other men and one woman in the room. A map was spread on the desk. A rubber stamp and inking pad. A document. An ink well. A wooden rocking-blotter.

He rose and, as a traditional greeting, hugged them both. If he recognised Ambrose, he did not indicate it by any word or gesture.

Speaking with some distress and further distortion because of his lips, he said that it was to be a formal occasion after which they would retire to a less formal reception.

He handed a sheet of paper to one of the other men who read from it in French, as if reading a proclamation, using a deep, loud voice: ‘I wish to announce to the world that the Deputy President of Azerbaijan, with the powers vested in him, in gratitude for the efforts of Edith Campbell Berry to save the Ambassador-at-large and Deputy President of Azerbaijan from bodily harm, in recognition of her gallant and courageous efforts to extricate all from a situation of certain danger, the Republic of Azerbaijan hereby declares and irrevocably assigns, the name of Edith to the River Akara in the sovereign republic of Azerbaijan and that henceforth this river will be known as the River Edith.'

Edith was suffused with emotion and began to shake. From where he'd been standing in the background, Ambrose came up behind her and she felt his arm supporting her, as tears rose to her eyes.

Mr Huneeus took up the rubber stamp, inked it, stamped the proclamation, signed it and blotted the signature.

He rolled up the proclamation, tied it with blue silk ribbon, and handed it to Edith, again formally hugging her and kissing her on both cheeks.

‘I am overwhelmed,' she said, feeling truly overwhelmed,
tears now coming to her eyes and flowing. ‘I cannot say how moved I am.'

One by one, the other men and the woman came to her and hugged her, and kissed her on both cheeks.

Ambrose said softly, ‘Well earned, Edith,' and gave her a hug and kiss.

‘Come.' Mr Huneeus gestured to her to look at the map, and he traced with his finger, the river. ‘This is the River Edith. It is a fine, clear river, it flows through forests and snow-covered mountains to the Caspian Sea. It is untouched and unspoiled.'

Edith had another burst of crying then, briefly, but dried her eyes and pulled herself together like a good diplomat, though remaining on the brink of tears. She realised that it was not her courage alone that was being attended to. She knew from his words that Mr Huneeus was also attending to her hurt.

He said, taking her arm, ‘Come, now we will feast,' and he led her to a drawing room where traditional Azerbaijan food was laid out. Champagne was served by a member of staff dressed as a waiter, but who did not move as deftly as a waiter.

She was toasted. The champagne seemed to her to be from the waters of the river. She felt cleansed by its clean taste, and cleansed by the image in her mind of the clear, fine river flowing through forests and snow-covered mountains, and she felt herself healing, felt the sullying being taken from her by the river and by the sincere and serious honour which these people had bestowed, even if, as she suspected, their authority was doubtful.

‘I hope,' she said, tightly holding her champagne glass, tears again in her eyes and her voice, ‘I hope one day to visit my river, in the free Republic of Azerbaijan. I toast the free Republic of Azerbaijan.'

They all toasted the free Republic of Azerbaijan.

Leaning back in her office chair, Edith said that she would not, not, not go back to the Molly Club. Standing against the filing cabinet, hands in the pockets of his tweed suit, without his jacket, his waistcoat affecting fob watch and chain, his regimental cuff links visible, Ambrose stared out at the snow slush in the Palais courtyard.

‘That I appreciate. And consequently, you're “parade exempt”, Edith. Attendance not expected. I thought that you should know about the meeting, that's all.'

‘How did they contact you? How did they get your name!?'

He shrugged. ‘When I went back for the coats there was a notice. And Follett, the owner, talked with me.'

For no good reason, Edith felt that what Ambrose said sounded like an evasion. She had no reason to think it was evasion. He had no reason to be evasive. What did she care if he had been back every night? But when it came to this matter he always sounded evasive. He had explained the two ‘sisters' from England as having been part of his old gang from London which meant that he had indulged his predilection before her. Perhaps she considered Ambrose inherently dubious, in the deepest sense. If his sexual rudiments were unstable, did not all of him become questionable? No, that was unfair. It was because of the loathsome incident which made the Molly Club and anything about it seem to her so murky. She felt that much more was going on than she was being told or that she understood. The loathsome incident had stirred up a nest of spiders in her mind.

Anyhow, it was his peculiar mania. She simply shared his secret and participated in it in their private life. She did not really belong in his darker covert life outside the bedroom. If, indeed, he had one. If it wasn't all in her distraught head. But she continued to wonder whether he'd been back there without her, and if so, what he'd got up to there.

It was that she was jittery and moody about it all. Nothing sat well with her at present. Her work was scrappy.

He went on, ‘We — those who have been to the club — we, they, feel we should stand up to them.'

‘Stand up? We? I thought you had been to the club only that once.'

‘Oh, you know, go on as usual, I mean, but with a little more precaution.'

‘It doesn't need me.'

‘Quite right. They feel that to bow down to them would be giving up too easily.'

She nearly said, harshly, that the Action Civique were just trying to clean up the town, to keep Geneva decent. Not that it needed to be much cleaner. And it probably needed a little indecency. With effort, she curbed her antagonism and reversed her first sentiments and forced out a joke. ‘I suppose Geneva needs all the indecency it can get.'

Ambrose gave a short laugh, but coloured. ‘Indecency?' he said, as though he'd never thought of his behaviour as indecent. He glanced at her to see if she might not also have been sarcastic. ‘I suppose it does.' He regained his humour. ‘And we're just the people to maintain Geneva's sense of indecency.' He also forced out a laugh.

‘Indeed you are.'

The thing she found sticky and displeasing was that all this had nothing to do with the League. She wanted no outside
untidiness or demand in her life. The League was too urgent. She had no time for other things, let alone messy and murky things.

‘It's a matter of standing up to them,' Ambrose repeated, trying to sound righteously firm, ‘to go peacefully about our business.'

She sensed then, that for all his releasing of her from the matter, he was still trying to persuade her to be involved.

‘One day you must explain to me what precisely that business is — that the Molly Club goes about.'

‘If only I knew, dear. Words fail.'

He looked at his watch, came over and kissed her, and said he would be off. ‘Don't you worry.'

After he left, she went to the window wondering if it would snow again. A snow-covered European city was still a wonder to her and it made her feel she was living inside a toy village. She watched the smoke tumbling lazily from the apartment chimneys. But the snow denied what happened in the buildings that it covered with the false white innocence of snow. The snow was oblivious of her hurt.

She found it bewildering that she shared the indignity of that night only with the shadowy incognito people of the Molly Club who she would never see in daylight. Or see again. Or maybe she did see them. Maybe they worked here at the Palais, maybe she saw them in the mornings stamping the snow from their shoes, brushing it from their shoulders. Maybe she passed them daily in the streets and byways of Geneva because, truth be known, she would not recognise them without their costumes, the cloak of inversion, and heavy make-up. She paused, but they must recognise her, she had not been disguised on that evening. She didn't know what to make of that thought.

She saw how a few natural women, like her, were permitted, chosen maybe, to be a court to their behaviour, to be an
affectionate, indulgent audience of natural womanhood, to sanction them in their play.

Approached from another position, maybe she had a democratic obligation to go to the club and stand up to Action Civique. The Molly Club was not part of the toy town. It could be argued that it was all very well for her to be fighting for world order and peace with letters and memos. What about the threats of disorder now, here and now, in her own life or at least, in Ambrose's, her friend's life? In the town in which she lived. But which was the disorder? The
travesti
who contradicted their nature? Or the Action Civique? If Ambrose were there she would have made a joke about it. The difference, she forced herself to note, was that there was no violence in what Ambrose and his effeminate pals did. It was the arrogant young men in uniforms with clubs. The other night at the Bavaria, Herr Stresemann had told her that duelling in student corps was fashionable again in Germany in the Borussia Corps and so on. Getting their cheeks slashed to prove their aristocratic manhood. Stresemann himself had slashed cheeks but he was a man from another century. Even Bernard Shaw, whom she usually admired, had seen something impressive in Mussolini and his uniformed youths.

She saw that if she continued to think like this she would have to go to the meeting. Didn't she already give enough to the bloody world? She again felt close to tears as waves of recall from that night at the club passed through her.

Throughout the day she felt she was dodging the moral dilemma of attending the Molly Club meeting by hiding behind her personal hurt. She was then more annoyed that she should be troubled at all by it as some sort of moral dilemma.

What would it be, this meeting? Would the meeting be businesslike or would they all dress up again and carry on? But for the first time since the dreadful night she recalled the other
ungruesome parts of the occasion. Her fears about her fur coat. The two Englishmen dressed as sisters, preening and giggling, and saying some very funny things. She remembered the younger one getting the cocoa at Ambrose's apartment when they were safely home, and how close they had all felt that night. And then the naming of the river. She became tearful again.

Curse it. She would call Ambrose and say she would go to his stupid meeting.

 

And again she helped Ambrose with his costume and make-up at the dressing table in his apartment. He sitting there in stockings, suspender belt, knickers, and chemise, enlivened by the clothing, delighting in the application of powder, lipstick, and mascara. The painting of his nails.

She had groaned out aloud when he timorously told her that he was going to the meeting dressed as a woman. He explained defensively that it was considered essential that they go to the club as they usually would go, and not to bow down in any way by dressing in everyday clothes.

She had again questioned his use of ‘usual', but without pursuing a reply.

‘I take it that they don't know about the meeting — the Action Civique?'

‘I doubt that they would. I don't see how. It's a private meeting. It's hardly likely to be written up in the
Journal de Genève
. At least, I hope not.'

‘Ambrose, I can't go if they are going to turn up and all that is going to happen again. I just can't.'

‘I cannot see how they could possibly know. And there will be precautions.'

‘What precautions?'

‘Doormen and so on.'

‘Why are you dressing up, then? Won't that be provocative?'

‘I am not going to parade through the streets. Nor, I doubt, are any of the others. We are dressing up as an act of self-respect.'

She refused to allow herself to see that it had to do with self-respect. The contradictions defeated her.

He turned away from the mirror and took her hands. ‘I speak as a doctor and I think that going to the club again might be good for you. It might be what is known in psychology as cathartic.'

‘What is “cathartic”?'

‘It might help banish your phantoms from that horrible night. By challenging them, they go away.'

She wasn't so sure. Couldn't it also revive the phantoms?

He went on, ‘I don't mean confronting the Action Civique — I mean confronting the place where it all happened.'

She could see that he was being brave. She knew that she should also be brave. ‘It's all right — I'm coming with you.'

‘Thank you, Edith. I mean that. Thank you.' He stood and kissed her cheek.

He sat down and turned back to his face, back to plucking his eyebrows. ‘Back to the important things,' he joked.

She managed a smile. ‘I agree with the amber bracelets, rings and earrings. They will work well.'

‘I think so — with the green dress.'

When he dressed as a woman he wore a reddish wig so that he could take advantage of her wardrobe and jewellery.

‘I'm curious about something, Ambrose,' she said, as she stood behind him, fitting his wig.

‘Yes?'

‘Do you really feel desire in your rectum?' she said good-humouredly.

He smiled back at her through his reflection in the mirror. ‘As a matter of truth, Edith, I do. Just here.' He touched his rear. They both spluttered with laughter.

‘What do you really feel?' she said.

‘Oh, it's rather nice. I would rather like to think it is what you feel.'

‘I suppose we will never know if it is like what I feel.'

‘We do know one thing. We know it's satisfied by the same shape of thing.'

They both laughed.

‘Only very occasionally though,' he added, seriously, ‘do I feel this.'

‘By “very occasionally” do you mean occasionally every day? Or every month?'

He made eyes at her in the mirror. ‘Or occasionally every waking minute. No, seriously, every few months or so.' He took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. ‘But best of all, I want you, Edith. That's the best.'

She also wondered to herself if she ever wanted to have physical love his way.

 

At the door of the club, the shuddering recollection of the dreadful night went through her and she had to will herself down the steps. Entry was more supervised this time. They knocked, the peephole opened and they were scrutinised. Ambrose said something about the meeting and gave his name to the face at the peephole. This time he did not wear her fur-trimmed coat but wore his own everyday coat and hat over his dress, and they came in a taxi. Ambrose, discreetly, did not talk during the ride in the taxi. The bolt was drawn and the door opened to admit them. In the club the manager-owner, Mr
Follett, dressed in women's clothing and wig, recognised Edith and came over to her. He took both her hands and thanked her for returning and said something about her courage on the night.

Dressed as a woman, he was rather flamboyant.

‘I took what seemed the only course of action. At the time,' she said to him. And for my distress, she thought, I now have a river named after me, which is one of the nicest things which has ever happened to me. The worst and the best that had happened to her in life so far had sprung from the same sordid source.

‘You did more than that,' Mr Follett said sincerely.

The club was set up for a meeting with chairs in rows, rather than as a nightclub. Mr Follett seated them and brought them drinks.

She wondered how many of those in the club had witnessed her indignity that night. She knew Ambrose hadn't seen it and therefore it was likely that others hadn't seen it, but she would never know who knew and who did not know. Looking around, she saw others in the club who still bore signs of their injuries. Two had arms in slings.

The weirdness of the evening was heightened because of the formal seriousness of the discussion by men dressed as women and a couple of women dressed as men. Again, a few natural women like herself were there as themselves. Mr Huneeus was not present. She found that she was relieved to be in a meeting where, for once, she had no duties, and was almost invisible. Pity it was that she was not fully invisible.

‘We appreciate your presence,' Mr Follett said, addressing the meeting, speaking with a normal male voice. It was all too bizarre.

‘We made every endeavour to contact those who come to the club. As you would have seen at the door now, we are
using the peephole more strictly — in future all guests to the club will have to be identified — and we have a mirror to view the street from the club. And we will have, not one, but two doormen, who will be armed with stout clubs.'

There were noises of approval. Everyone looked to the door and to the two unsmiling doormen who looked powerful and competent in bow ties and dinner suits.

One of the
travestis
said, ‘I lay claim to the one on the left.'

Another said, ‘I lay claim to both.'

There was some laughter, but the doormen didn't smile.

‘Please, this is a serious meeting. Some amongst us are in the position to try discreetly to make sure that such a thing does not happen again. And to punish, in various unseen ways, those responsible for what happened that night.' Mr Follett then gave a malevolent smile, and added, ‘Those so punished may never know they have been punished.'