Grand Days (56 page)

‘Showmanship' was what had been needed. Just that week she'd been saddened by the news that Captain Strongbow had been murdered in China. She'd been touched that Athena had
written to her. Athena thought that perhaps the ‘Grand Assembly' of the League could observe a minute's silence for Captain Strongbow because of his work for internationalism. Athena had also asked whether the League of Nations had a burial fund to pay for the expense of the return of Captain Strongbow's body to California.

Instead of great celebrations, the silly Mrs Swanwick wanted to have tea at an inexpensive place called the le Creux de Gentot.

Edith thought that maybe she should be appointed Master of Ceremonies for the World. But she instantly plummeted from this grand notion and crashed down amid her own life. She saw that she had lost the domestic ceremonies from her life, she had no true home, she had tried to make the world her dinner table, her fête.

She couldn't even choose true and trustworthy friends.

She poured herself another Scotch and began to weep.

Arbitrarily appointed Days of Healing did not work.

At first, Edith was perturbed that Ambrose had been invited to the next Directors' meeting and had been given permission to make a statement on Agriculture. Apart from it not being his field of expertise, she supposed that she felt that he should have been denied access to the Directors' meeting totally and for ever more, as part of his punishment, but more than that, she didn't like the idea of being in the room while he made his statement, though she wasn't going to miss a meeting because of him. Since their parting of the ways, now over a year ago, she'd barely seen him, except to say hello while passing in the corridor, and consequently no etiquette had evolved to allow them to exist socially or professionally in close proximity. Bluntly, her opposition to him attending the meeting came from a selfish reasoning. She had an equivocal status at the Directors' meetings, as a stand-in for Bartou. She wanted eventually to be seen as a bona fide part of the meeting and she certainly didn't want to have to cope with a disgraced former lover at a Directors' meeting when she had enough to struggle with already.

Ambrose didn't seem in any way to hold her actions against her and in the corridor he always tried to ensnare her, while she, on the other hand, always kept going, waving and smiling, but not stopping. She felt she had nothing to say to him. When she'd seen him around the Palais or, very occasionally, at the Bavaria he appeared to her to be going off somewhat. His smile seemed to be overanxious to find a smile in return; his clothes, while still well-made, were not properly cared for. She was also
irritated that his going off was still being interpreted by those who didn't know the full story as being a result of a broken heart.

Sitting at his large desk, smoking his pipe, Bartou said that Ambrose had been given leave to address the meeting because everyone had a special respect for those officers who'd been there from the beginning.

‘Even if that long service was somewhat disloyal?' she said, grumpily, standing at the window looking at the first snow of winter. ‘Even if it isn't his field of expertise?'

Bartou shrugged. ‘Maybe it's his attempt to find grace again. He can't be punished for ever.'

She still felt much more strongly about this matter than he did. Perhaps she didn't accept that one could regain grace once having fallen from it the way he had. She said she couldn't see why Ambrose wasn't asked to put his statement or whatever in writing.

‘He said he couldn't put it in writing — it was philosophically too involved.'

She could tell there was amusement in Bartou's tone.

Bartou added, ‘I suspect that the Latins think that he might be about to tell them a
British
secret — as penance.'

‘It's a big mystery then?'

‘It is, I suspect, a small mystery. And over a fine lunch some time this week, perhaps, I expect you to tell it to me as a good mystery story should be told.'

‘You won't be going to the meeting?'

‘This is one for you, Edith.'

The fine lunches were too common now, and although she described them as luncheon ‘tutorials', he was teaching her more about lunching than the League. In the old days, Ambrose had taught her about the importance of dinner as a gastronomic
expedition whose course was plotted by wine, and a conversational event where wine was the master of ceremonies. Now Bartou expounded the value of the lunch. Back in the office after these lunches, Bartou tended to doze. He was growing old and had earned easy afternoons. And in her case, the guilt of a good lunch made her work even harder and longer. She'd begun also to take telephone calls and answer letters on his behalf, making his decisions.

Bartou had taken to sending her along to the Directors' meetings more often than not, unless he had something very pressing to say at a meeting. She felt he was pushing her forward, although at the same time, he was withdrawing somewhat from the internal life of the League to get on with preparing the ground for the world disarmament conference which had become his overriding mission. And by devolvement and choice, it was also becoming her overriding mission. The third leg of the tripod — arbitration was in place with the court of international justice, economic sanctions had replaced war, and now followed disarmament.

He returned to the subject of Ambrose saying, ‘Diplomacy sometimes requires the capacity to forget. Or, more precisely, it requires some officers who remember and some who forget. Those who can forget are free to get on with making things afresh with optimism, while those who can't forget issue warnings. If everyone remembered everything in politics, we would all stand eternally condemned and frozen. I think that is why the world forgives and forgets its liars, cheats and other villains. I know we pretend that people in public life who make a serious error are finished. They seldom are if they stay alive and stay in the game. There but for the grace of God, go I.' He said he thought that knowing ‘when to forget' was a diplomatic art. And a social art.

‘Not I. In this particular case,' she said. She didn't care if it sounded priggish.

But by the time the meeting came around, she'd softened her position a little about Ambrose, and felt that maybe it was time for him to be given a chance to redeem himself, although she would oppose any permanent return to the
haute direction
. She was also curious to hear what he'd been thinking about and what he'd come up with.

Her arrival at the meeting room was always carefully timed so that she was not the first there, not wanting to appear an eager beaver, nor the last, fearing that either way she would draw attention to herself, and perhaps bring into question the legitimacy of her presence there. Entering the room, she said hello and sat, as usual, beside Dame Rachel.

She looked down the agenda. She saw that Ambrose was to be called to the meeting first.

He entered the room rather loudly with photographs clumsily pinned to a board and Jules coming behind him carrying an easel. Jules wasn't a messenger in Ambrose's section and must have been there as a favour to Ambrose. The photographs seemed to be of a tractor and farming implements. She recalled with a smile her first ever Directors' meeting and Ambrose's successful arguments for emergency procedures, with working models. She mentioned it to Dame Rachel who said, ‘Oh yes, I remember very well.'

After Jules had put the easel in place, he said, ‘Is that all, Major?' and Ambrose, in a brisk voice, said, ‘Thank you, Jules,' and Jules left the room.

Ambrose came across to Dame Rachel and her, saying hello to Dame Rachel and then turning to her and taking her hand, ‘Edith, it's so good to see you up here with the gods. And good to have a friend in court,' he said warmly. ‘How's tricks?'

‘We're all agog about your mysterious presentation,' she said, in a restrained but sociable tone, uncomfortable with his assumption that she was unquestionably a friend in court. He seemed to have made an effort with his appearance. She glanced at his polished shoes with private unhappy amusement. He had once showed her how he tied his shoes with a double cross in the laces, saying, ‘Things like that are important to me.'

He narrowed his eyes mysteriously. ‘I think you'll all be somewhat bowled over.'

She hoped they would, and that he'd be back in favour again, something of his old self, and that she would be relieved of the guilt she occasionally, and unjustly, felt for his downfall.

The meeting was opened by Sir Eric and he invited Ambrose to talk to them.

In his best English accent, as if also polished for the occasion, Ambrose thanked the Directors and other heads of section for permitting him to speak. He said it was good to be back in such exalted altitudes again, since his own ‘change of circumstances'.

There were supportive chuckles. Edith tried not to chuckle but did, pulled in by the laughter of the others.

‘I want to begin philosophically. In my banishment, I have been able to give much time to thinking philosophically. What has come home to me is that we, in the League, have been dealing with all things in isolation, in compartments, when we should've been looking at them as a whole, as a planetary system, with the planets revolving in fixed axes to each other. We have not been thinking universally. I blame myself as much as I blame anyone. Believe me, it was how I thought until recently. More anon.

‘I see all international predicaments as linked one with the other, all in cause and effect. If we are to wallop these predicaments, I would now argue that we must begin at one correct
and vital place. Not at all places at once. And it is at this one point that we must apply all our coffers. That somewhere, that beginning point, is the key to all our endeavours.

‘For having once found this point, and then having changed this one cardinal part of our universe in an absolute and productive way, it will follow that all other parts will therefore change in an absolute and productive way. There will be a cause-and-effect repercussion through to all the other predicaments — an explosive chain of consequence — through the whole of the universe of predicaments which bedevil us. In medicine we once called it the reflex arc, the theory that one organ can sicken another.'

This was a tantalising, if fanciful, beginning and Ambrose had the attention of the meeting.

‘Down in my place of banishment, my Siberia, I asked myself which predicament it was to which all others are linked.

‘I knew that if I could determine this, then I would have the key to all predicaments. Time went by and no answer came to me.'

He went on with a tense enthusiasm. ‘While on leave, I saw an invention and was struck by the whole philosophical and organic connection to this one invention and I said to myself, “Why, here it is!” We look to conferences and assemblies and parliaments to solve the calamities of the human condition when here before our very eyes — my very eyes in this case — ' he smiled, but went on without waiting for any responsive laughter, ‘here then was the answer, in a field of hay. It is not political theory which will save us, but one simple useful invention. How obvious it now looks!

‘It came to me that all predicaments of the world are linked to a very rudimentary thing — they are all linked to hunger. That if we solved the predicament of hunger then all others
would be resolved, as it were, overnight: war and so on, good health — here I speak as a doctor.'

There were some glances one to the other now as Ambrose talked. He was sounding not like a doctor at all, and less and less like a League official — more like someone at Hyde Park Corner. Or one of the many crank correspondents who wrote to the League.

‘If people are well fed, nourished correctly, they will resist all illness. I believe this. That correct diet will armour people against all illness. I see your first objection. That surely it also matters what persuasions and beliefs these people have to life, that also determines their health mentally. I argue that persuasions and beliefs flow from good diet — good politics comes from good diet.'

Everyone in the room now seemed to know that it was going wrong and that Ambrose was not well, but they were immobilised by courtesy.

He was oblivious to the change in the mood of the meeting. ‘With my haversack and birch staff — very English — ' he smiled at the non-English members, ‘here I was, on a walking trip through Wiltshire in the sunshine, listening to the birds, smelling the flowers, smelling the hay, and I stopped to watch the hay-makers at work. For anyone wanting to refresh their spirits, I would recommend Wiltshire at the end of summer — I have some inns, some addresses if anyone is interested — it was here in Wiltshire and in a field of hay that I saw the answer to all to which we have dedicated our lives: the simple invention which will revolutionise all our lives — trust the British to come up with it, I thought — gentlemen, ladies, this invention is called the New Century Hay Sweep.'

He paused for dramatic effect.

For a single minute, as he stood there expectantly with his
pointer, she was able to look at him dispassionately and she saw that he was unbalanced — perhaps the shock of being demoted and the continuing mental strains from the War had now unbalanced him seriously. There was a desperate tension oozing through his affable manner. She could see now that the affable manner was, in fact, an imitation of an affable manner. There were some nervous clearings of throats, some shuffling. Oh my God, thought Edith, and she looked at Dame Rachel who had closed her eyes.

‘I know what some of you are thinking.' Ambrose tried for a joke, sensing for the first time, perhaps, that the audience was not altogether with him. ‘You are thinking, some of you, that I have a financial interest in the New Century Hay Sweep or that I am connected by family or something like that to the inventor. Not true. Not true at all. No fiduciary connection exists at all. None whatsoever, I assure you.

‘I saw the New Century Hay Sweep being used both with horses and with tractor and the farmers and men using it have nothing but praise for it.

‘It is an absurdly simple contrivance and until you see it in use it looks quite impractical, quite ungainly — clumsy even.

‘The hay is left in long rough lines on the field and the sweep is drawn either by two horses or a tractor.

‘The machine consists of long wooden prongs which can be raised or lowered by a lever in the hand of a single driver. The prongs are lowered until they just scrape the ground when picking up the hay and raised when the sweep is empty or has a load.

‘The sweep takes the hay right up to the stack or barn. I saw it at work on a hot day and the horse hardly lathered at all. I touched the rump of the horse to test if it was straining. I can assure you gentlemen, ladies, that it was not.' He said this with inappropriate intensity.

‘If the sweep, as often occurs, drops or fails to pick up a lump of hay, it merely stops, backs at once out of its load which remains on the ground, and then picks up the bit it has left together with the main load and goes forward again. Do you all follow?