Grand Days (54 page)

‘But you weren't in a balloon.'

‘Not strictly speaking. No. True.'

For one odd moment, he appeared to have seen himself in a balloon. He seemed to have actually entertained the idea, literally.

‘Or even more pointedly,' she said, attempting a lighter tone herself, ‘if you were in a balloon, then that was something else you forgot to tell me.'

He was grateful for her lightness of tone, and seized on it, laughing too much at her small joke and prattling on about the ‘balloon defence' as if that might be his exculpation.

On and off, she entertained the idea that his conduct could be mitigated by explanation, but no, for all his twisting rationale, the breach had been made and she was distanced from him and she stopped listening with the hope that something might be said which would erase everything, which would, by some verbal alchemy, return things to the jolly way they'd once been. As the meal laboured on she was still able to enjoy his refinement, his attempts not to succumb to the unhappiness of the evening, his banter, now a little half-hearted but still there, and his possession of exotic information now all brought to the service of perhaps gaining her complicity, her forgetfulness, or her forgiveness. How painful it was to try to eat fine food when you felt such unhappy tension. She was tormented, too, by the memory of fine dinners they'd shared there in the past. She felt a sad, shedding feeling and it left her standing alone on a new windy plateau in life, yet as he prattled, he seemed to be determined not to acknowledge that he had wrecked their friendship. His
refusal to face it served to keep her dry-eyed, at least for now, and prevented her from falling into grief.

Only once during the meal did he approach self-pity or the maudlin and it was while throwing out some of his typically exotic information.

He told her that he'd heard of despairing African soldiers doing it during the War — using an incantation to commit suicide. By uttering a long combination of sounds and words and, at the same time, manipulating the breathing, this self-cursing, this incantation caused sufficient psychological and neurological pressure to come to bear against the human system that it literally stopped the person breathing and caused a nervous seizure, resulting in collapse and immediate death. He said that it probably inhibited the vagus nerve. ‘I wish I knew it,' he said. ‘I believe it could be taught only in sections — taking over a year. The witch doctor charged a very large fee for teaching it. I suppose by the end of the year you'd forgotten why it was you wanted to die.'

She'd said that it sounded fanciful and added that whatever the outcome of all this was, he would survive. ‘The Foreign Office will always have you back,' she said both to continue to bring home to him that something very serious had happened in his career and between them, and to lessen the horror of it for her.

‘Of course,' he said, replacing his mask of self-possession, ‘always a bolt-hole there.'

She wondered if this was a situation where she should practise the skill of knowing how to make someone resign.

He made only one mildly unkind remark: ‘We always spend third term at college getting rid of those people we befriended too quickly in first term.' She did not take it up, except to say, that in their case, it had been a long first term.

It allowed her one intimate criticism of him. ‘You've never bought me a gift as long as I've known you,' she said. She'd always thought it was more of a confirmation of the limits of their former love and, at the same time, said something about his selfishness. Now it was an idle remark of curiosity, given the circumstances.

His reply bewildered her. ‘I never had the courage to buy you anything,' he said, his voice humble. ‘I thought I might get it all wrong. Might buy you something which damned me in your eyes.'

She had no reply to this. She saw that her power had been unfelt and therefore unexercised, at least consciously. It was the unfelt power of the young and of the beautiful.

After uncomfortable excuses to the proprietor about their not fully consuming the main course, they managed some cheese for the sake of appearances but did not have dessert, and there was no lingering over after-dinner drinks.

There was the final act of severance to be gone through, that of collecting her things from his apartment. As they took a taxi, she explained that she would do it tonight.

‘Of course. Best thing,' he said.

The taxi reached his apartment and she had the taxi wait for her, feeling as she did, that it made her intentions about the visit severely clear.

She was surprised that Ambrose made a gesture, without much ardour, towards continuing the carnal part of their life, propelled perhaps by some insistent male urge, or maybe by deviousness. ‘The comforts of the bed — one last time?' he said, as they went up the stairs, and although his voice was without any confidence in her reply, it did carry some right of assumption. ‘Shall you and I play the dally? What do you say, Edith?' As if this could continue without friendship.

She shook her head and perfunctorily squeezed his hand. ‘I will collect my things and say good night.' She wanted for it to be over quickly and to be gone. Her sexual desire for him had been waning, and she found no desire within her this night. She hoped that it stayed this way and that she would not have to live with any sexual torment, as well as whatever other torments of spirit lay ahead for having been involved in this mess of his downfall.

As they went into the flat, she felt the pull of another bond that had been in his proposal, another allegiance, but she'd let it pass without listening to its demands. It was the bond of petty decadence: their sexual practices had been a secret bond. She glimpsed the outlines of another web of allegiances spreading from this — it was the midnight intrigue and involvement which surrounded his minor vices and her indulgence of them, and her tolerance of the Molly Club people, that small, strange nation of the night, and she saw that, yes, it too had its allegiances and made its demands. But she could walk away from that web because it had never truly enfolded her. She'd been simply audience to his petty decadence. She thought that Ambrose, in a way, had also disgraced their secret life because there had been a courageous truthfulness that had sprung from their petty decadence which, it was now revealed, he had not fully honoured.

While she gathered her things from the apartment, he stood by abjectly with a large Scotch. She put her things in one of his suitcases.

He prattled bravely to cover his nervous unhappiness. ‘The business in bed — the girl's clothing and all that — tell me, you were put off a bit by that?'

‘No, I rather liked that from time to time — our love in costume. You looked good in the clothing.' That sexual play had touched something in her. He was simply seeking to recover
something of their intimacy; he was desperately holding on.

‘Thank you.' He said only one serious thing: ‘Admit that I battled for the whimsy in your soul, Edith. I was a friend to the caprice in you.'

Her soul was receiving some scrutiny these days. ‘I know,' she said, ‘I always appreciated that.'

‘I hope it stays alive.'

‘It will. I'll see to that.'

‘Don't let sedulity, or whatever, destroy your caprice, Edith.'

‘I won't. I will return the suitcase to you at the office tomorrow.'

‘Here — let me.' He put down the glass, and carried the case down to the waiting taxi.

‘Cheerio and toodle pip,' he said, tears in his eyes, his merriment, again, abject. Tears came to her eyes too, but she did not show them. As the taxi began to pull away, he was still moving alongside and he tapped on the window. She told the driver to wait, and wound down the window.

Ambrose whispered to her, ‘Without you to help with my clothes buying, I will go out of fashion.'

She smiled. ‘You'll find another lady buyer, I'm sure.'

She wound up the window, telling the driver to proceed.

She felt a cold, lifeless relief from having parted from him. As the taxi passed through the night, Edith thought briefly of the American woman, the voluptuary upon whom she had spied and from whom the whole sad matter had arisen. She found it impossible to believe that she had ever contemplated going back to dally — using Ambrose's word — with that woman. That she had entertained that idea at the time was to do with the atmosphere of petty decadence created by Ambrose around them both. But she summoned up the voluptuous feeling of being with the woman that night, savoured it, and then let it fade.

The following month, having agreed to sever his connections with the British Foreign Office, Ambrose was moved to the part of the section where he would be concerned with building maintenance, furniture, and cleaning. Even this, she saw as evidence of the British at the top looking after their own. Or maybe it was the other club — of those men who had served in the War. She had begun to sense that within the organisation many ‘clubs' had formed. Even she belonged in one or two. Had he been a spy for the Bulgarians or a Balkan state he would not have kept his job. Later when she queried this with Under Secretary Bartou, he had replied in a mock British accent, ‘“You don't ruin a good fellow because he's been a silly ass.”' She didn't know if it was Sir Eric he was quoting.

Ambrose's acceptance of this demotion and that he did not bolt back to the Foreign Office showed her that he was determined to go on working for the League in whatever capacity and that he did have an allegiance of a kind. Or was it that, in reality, he had no other place to go? A few months after his demotion, he sent her a cheque for the money he owed her, although it was for a lesser amount than her records showed. It contained a note which cried out for some reconciliation but she couldn't grant that. She wished he'd gone back to England.

She formally received an invitation to work with Under Secretary Bartou, and on the day that she went to see him to formally accept, she made clear one thing which had been worrying her.

She reminded Under Secretary Bartou of an earlier conversation about eunuchs.

Under Secretary Bartou nodded.

‘I feel honour-bound to make a statement,' she said.

‘Please do.'

‘Ambrose Westwood is not a eunuch. Or anything resembling a eunuch,' she said.

She felt she owed Ambrose that. She didn't want to dislodge by her silence any avalanche of rumour and innuendo which might begin to further fall on him with his demotion. Maybe Under Secretary Bartou might be able to check some of that avalanche. Although Ambrose may not have been an altogether conventional man, they had, for a time, been true lovers, as a man and a woman. She saw that she was also protecting the reputation of her womanhood. She did not want to be known as Someone Who Had Eunuchs as Friends. Not, at least, until she knew more about eunuchs.

‘I note that,' Under Secretary Bartou said, and with a smile added, ‘in my head.'

Leaving Under Secretary Bartou's office, she was now sure that she walked the corridors in a different way. It was a self-assurance but it did not come so much from her rise within her vocation, but rather from the dark, maybe grim, wisdom which increasingly seemed to come from the daily practice of the idealism of her vocation. Her body in her new suit felt vigorous, but her heart had been scarred again. She did recall Edward Trenbow, a friend who had been for a while a doctor in her home town, once saying to her that a scar was the strongest part of the skin. She fervently hoped that he and her father were both right about scars.

As she let go from Ambrose, Edith began to see that what they'd shared as a couple was a covert dependency but that their initial meeting could probably still be seen as an auspicious encounter, regardless of what had happened. She recalled how inflexible her personality had been then as she faced the ordeal of proving herself at the League and yet, for all the rules of the League and all her own rules of inner management, she recalled also how unguided she'd been. But, looking back, she'd quickly learned how to turn her gullibility into an unclosed approach to the world. How to turn her naïvety in the direction of original reflection. At first, she'd tried to make Going Against the Rules a personal rule until she'd realised that it was just inflexibility wearing a different uniform.

She also saw that in her initial isolation she had been too quick to befriend Ambrose, or as it turned out, perhaps he'd been forcing the relationship along for his private reasons as a mask for all kinds of concealments. Yet she tried not to believe that of him. He himself had quite early in their friendship told her of the advice of Lord Malmesbury to be cautious of those who, on your first arrival, appear the most eager to make your acquaintance. But then, someone contriving a relationship would say that. It was not knowable. She was learning to clear her mind both of those things which were unknowable and of those things which were unchangeable. Anyhow, she had gripped on to him as a companion and because, with his Foreign Office background, he'd been able to tutor her, so that from another point
of view it could be seen as a contriving on her part. To a degree, perhaps both of them had been contriving a relationship.

One's first friends usually showed you how you saw yourself at the time. Perhaps how others saw you. Or was friendship more accidental than that? A surrounding of haphazardly formed contracts. And was life always too short to allow you to ever sort them out?

No. There had been real attraction between them, and in that first year it was only when in bed with Ambrose or when making banter over drinks with him that she had ever been able to slacken from her rule—bound self. She saw now how unthreatening he'd been because of his illusive maleness and how this had been a respite for her, both from the burdens of work and from the claims of womanhood. He himself had been escaping from the worldly part of himself into his silken fantasies of Woman and resting in, and relishing, the feminine aura which she could provide. He had never seriously offered himself as husband. His last-minute declaration had been more of an attempt to hold on to her as a comfortable friend — or maybe simply to turn her into an accomplice — than to win her as wife, and he had, over the years, made only the most diffident claims as a lover. She, for her part, had never offered herself as a wife. But had she succeeded in being an accomplished mistress? Perhaps she too had been pretending and hiding — pretending to the world that she had a proper man and pretending to her friends that she was a proper mistress. No, she believed that it had been an authentic coupling with its own character, but still, authentic.

While being a safe and temporary man, Ambrose had, at the same time, opened her to ‘experience' in the most graphic meaning of the word. He had emboldened her, had been an exuberant leader and companion in escapade. She suspected that she would
have become a grey person sequestered in her pension and her work had it not been for his leading her on excursions into his own and Geneva's few dark secrets. This companionship had also been a meeting with some peculiar traits within herself, although nothing, that she could yet discern, which caused her to question or deviate in any dire way from the natural drives of womanhood. Despite what Florence had once said.

From Ambrose she had also learned about the codes men lived by, of avocation and protocol and also about the hidden rules, known as good form and bad form, by which men also lived. She'd learned about the aptitude some people had for concealing parts of themselves in sovereign compartments, so that at any given time you were never seeing a reliably complete person at all.

And he'd taught her yet another lesson: the presence of the third level of existence. This was not the existence of the institutional self which often involved a precautionary concealment of one's true opinion, an understanding that there was no social obligation to always express disagreement when one disagreed. Nor was it casual duplicity, which she knew about now only too well. Nor was it the contradictory nature of the murkier self which appeared sometimes in the passions of the night. This third level was the life of methodical subterfuge — which meant that apparently good men like Ambrose could be spies. It was by this unintended and final lesson that he had tutored himself out of true friendship with her.

She suspected that Ambrose and she would have only a pale professional acquaintanceship. This gave her pain of loss. They had lost the friendship in which everything was possible, without the constraint of righteousness or self-regard. She was learning that this was a rare thing, of the highest value, and she was fearful that she would not find it again with anyone. But she
could see another lesson in this which she hadn't quite seen before. That candour could be divisible.

She sometimes wondered whether if she hadn't been an officer of the League, and knowing that he spied, she could have gone on being Ambrose's intimate friend. She thought it feasible, but then, if she did not work for the League she would perhaps be a different person. We become what we do. She would have become, in Caroline's words, Someone Who Had Spies as Friends, whatever that sort of person was.

She hoped that his final lesson to her hadn't been to teach her permanent and universal mistrust.

Her working with Bartou was a tutoring too, a form of higher study. Bartou practised wisdom, including what she called dark wisdom. Ambrose had a good background in diplomacy from the FO but she wouldn't say that he had wisdom. To know the doorways of minor decadence was perhaps a fascinating lore, and a knowledge of the mysterious self and its pleasure, but it was not really a wisdom.

One other thing had to be faced. Although she now had a Wise Man as her superior in her professional life — her own
chef du protocole
— she had no Lover, both in its carnal sense and in its other meanings. Having had a Lover, she felt its absence more tangibly than the way she might have felt it as a girl, when it had been a romantic abstract. It was, she found, another conscious incompleteness about her life. It was something she saw clearly and unhappily expressed in Victoria. Victoria had dreams of being with a man but could not seem to form a crossing of the boundary between men and women. Victoria caused men to be uncomfortable about passion yet they liked her as a pal, as if refusing to see her as a woman. Edith's private theory was that Victoria was a victim of her name. Her name came from another generation and another time and from royalty. Men perhaps
thought she was from the world of their mothers.

Was she now destined, like Victoria, to give herself more and more to the League?

During her breakdown over it all, she'd kept up the practice of disappearing from the pension at the week-ends. It had served as an opportunity to go away by herself into the countryside for solitary walks, to stay by herself and read in country inns. But finally, on the advice of worried friends, she had begun a round of social activities as a way of overcoming not only the loss of Ambrose from her life but the shock which had come from the nature of that parting. So had been the new clothes, the new style of hair — not quite Louise Brooks, but similar — and even a change of cosmetics. She found that she could not tolerate the thought that some of her toiletry had been used by her and Ambrose in their weird former affair. She had gone about removing any object in her life that had come out of that companionship while, curiously, still having erotically charged recollections about their time together.

She had a sense of loss but she did not have a broken heart. She had talked with Caroline about it before she'd left. She'd asked Caroline about her own heart. Caroline had become immediately tearful — the only time she'd seen Caroline cry. Caroline said that once your heart had been broken you could never again believe in a merciful God. She said that once your heart was broken all the fine and happy times spent with that person were brutally effaced. Every time you saw the lover's name or something triggered a recollection of your time together it scratched your heart. She said she feared that people with broken hearts went on to break other hearts because, emotionally, they were blinded and were simply stumbling through life bumping into people. If you did not withdraw from life, you could hurt others in your ruthless search for solace.

She'd asked Caroline about Liverright. Caroline said that Liverright did not have a broken heart but that life had taken away from under him the ground on which he'd stood. ‘The secure ground disappeared from under his feet. It seems to give a similar result to having your heart broken. He and I are both broken dolls.'

She'd held Caroline in an embrace while she sobbed.

Edith had never heard Caroline speak with such bitter fervency. At least Caroline had had the experience of great love. And at the time that she'd had it, those hours and days could not be taken from her. Surely only the memories were effaced? But she could not ask this.

Edith was spending more time dancing at the Restaurant des Eaux Vives or Maxim's and going to every new motion picture. She even went to see
The Sunny Side of the War
. She usually went as an invited companion of one or other of the polite young men about the place, invitations which she accepted almost without discrimination, as a personal tenet — yet another personal tenet! — because she felt, and Joshi and Jeanne also advised, that she should expose herself more to men in more customary ways. At the same time, she was watching for a sign of that relaxing candour she had lost when she broke from Ambrose — although she sometimes despaired that she would ever find it in these polite promenades, suspecting that it might flourish only in the irregular byways. None of these companions became lovers in the carnal sense. As she'd said to herself a few times now, she had no intention of becoming a loose woman, and she considered that perhaps a few experiences before marriage was modern but that there was a boundary line and she was approaching it. She had no intention of becoming like Iris in
The Green Hat
.

Without regret, she was spending less time in the Bavaria,
the place where she was more likely to run into Ambrose.

She somehow hoped that the laying of the foundation stone for the new Palais des Nations might mark all manner of things both for the League and for herself. And she so decreed that the occasion of the laying of the stone would mark the end of her time of sadness and deadness.

She accepted a minor task there as Bartou's consort.

She was standing near the canvas awning erected for the dignitaries, after having made sure that all the dignitaries were properly acknowledged and seated. She was, she thought, almost the hostess of the occasion, certainly more so than Lady Drummond. She couldn't see Ambrose anywhere in the crowd. Nor Florence and her crowd. Robert Dole was there with the press and she could see McGeachy fussing around them. Victoria was there with some of the Registry people. A group of children from the League school, led by the exuberant Zilliacus girl, was barely behaving itself.

The President of Council, M. Foroughi of Persia, stood in the parc de l'Ariana, and tapped the foundation stone of the Palais des Nations with the silver trowel and began to speak, but the loudspeaker still wasn't working and it was difficult to hear his words unless you were as close as Edith. She finally went over to the man working the loudspeaker and, while not shaking him, told him what it was that he was doing wrong. He didn't take kindly to her advice but the sound did improve.

She waved and smiled to Victoria. She had nearly lost that friendship too. Victoria had come to her after the crisis with Ambrose and said that she wanted to know what had happened between her and Ambrose and why Ambrose had been demoted. She said that she felt she had a right to know. She'd heard all sorts of gossip. She realised then that Victoria saw herself as a closer friend to her than she had seen herself to Victoria. This
had saddened her and she wished that she could be a close friend to Victoria. It had been easier when there'd been the three of them but now that Florence was no longer her friend it had become harder being just with Victoria. The ‘Dominion Sisters' no longer existed. She acknowledged Victoria's right to know and told Victoria most of it, although not the carnally irregular parts of her and Ambrose's story. She told of Ambrose misusing League documents, showing them to people outside the League and how she felt Ambrose had used her.

Surprisingly, Victoria had said that she felt she, too, had been used — by Edith. Edith had been stunned by this. Victoria said that often over the years, Edith had requested things of her, sometimes asking her to bend the rules, yet had rarely ever explained the reason. Had rarely brought her into the secret. More surprisingly, Victoria said she'd suspected Edith of perhaps betraying the League by misusing documents. Edith had spent time assuring Victoria of her loyalty as a friend and colleague and to the League and apologising for her thoughtlessness. Against her personal inclination, she had gone out of her way then to invite Victoria places. She couldn't bear the loss of someone else, however meagre that friendship might be.

In the special cavity in the foundation stone, the President placed the casket containing a document describing the event in thirty languages and including coins from all member states. Well, nearly all — South Africa had missed out. And as for languages, Sir Eric had said no to Esperanto, and for India they'd had to settle on English. New Zealand nearly missed out with their coins because the letter asking for it, as usual, got to New Zealand too late. Poor old New Zealand. Sir James Parr had saved the day and sent some New Zealand coins over from England.