Grand Days (6 page)

He said, ‘I rule that anything of substance goes into the minutes.'

She did not say it, but it was also her experience that only the minutes truly remembered. Committees had faulty memories. ‘One more thing, if I may, Mr Chairman?' Edith said, relishing speaking out, feeling the relaxation which always came to her once she had managed to speak.

‘Speak, Madam Secretary, speak.'

‘This meeting may only be about the allocation of rooms, but how we set ourselves up in buildings is a portrait of ourselves. More than that, even, it is an assertion of the gravity and spirit of the covenant.' She then said quietly, so that it didn't sound pretentious, ‘The physicals incorporate the philosophical.'

‘Nicely put,' someone said.

‘We could adjourn and talk among ourselves,' Mandates said, persisting, ‘or does Madam Minutes Secretary, Edith Campbell Berry, have objections to that also?'

Ambrose laughed loudly, perhaps to break the tension. ‘I have ruled that everything said is for the record.'

Mandates continued on, unhappily, ‘We fear that to move Mandates out of the Palais could be understood by the delegates
as being a punishment of Mandates. In a sense, it will be seen as being thrown out of the Palais. Downgraded.'

‘We won't sack you,' Joshi said. ‘Someone has to stop those black chaps eating each other.'

Edith suppressed her smile. She was curious that Joshi didn't see himself as black. And she also noted to herself that she had never seen a black man on a committee before in her life.

Ambrose said, ‘At the start of the meeting I told you that Sir Eric is adamant that moving to the Annex should not be seen as derogatory.'

‘It's the way it will be seen. I have one other thing to say. Most of us here have heard that the Annex is damp and is not a particularly wholesome environment.'

Lloyd broke in to say that maintenance work would be done to correct those problems.

‘Be that as it may, two of our ladies have been seriously ill in the last two months. Mademoiselle Bonna is convalescing. Miss Elwood, whose health is never strong, is completely run down at present and has been under great nervous strain. She is threatened by breakdown. I must add that the rumours about the future of the Mandates Section have contributed to her condition. It would be a calamity for these two ladies to be housed in anything but satisfactory accommodation.'

Edith bridled again. She suspected the men in Mandates were hiding behind a sickly women argument.

This time she must have allowed an expression of irritation and incredulity to pass across her face.

‘Does Edith Campbell Berry have a comment?' Mandates said testily. ‘Perhaps Australian women are made of more rugged stuff?'

‘I know nothing of the personnel problems of Mandates,'
Edith came back, ‘and I know of no medical data supporting the argument that women necessarily suffer more than men from damp.'

She would let the covert slight against the femininity of Australian women pass. For now.

She saw Liverright pull a so-take-that face at Mandates. But she also began to fall apart inside. I am here less than a day and I have already made an enemy of Mandates, my favourite section. And I have behaved improperly as a minutes secretary by grimacing, and I have been made to look a fool about Zembla. Top day. First-rate beginning.

Ambrose stepped in. ‘Berry is a member of section and she is entitled to an opinion and to courtesy.'

‘Hear, hear,' said Figgis.

‘No,' she said, gathering herself, ‘if I could add something, Major Westwood? I may be entitled to an opinion but I do apologise to Mandates. As minutes secretary, it is not my place to display unspoken snide reactions to what's being said. I apologise to Mandates.'

‘Apology accepted,' Mandates said, ‘and apology extended.'

‘Both of you, stand in the corner for five minutes,' said Liverright.

Ambrose tried to pull the meeting together. He asked around the table for the attitudes of the sections and services which had not spoken.

Joshi leaned over to Liverright who seemed to be dozing off. ‘Wake up, Liverright. Suffering from the sleeping sickness?' He winked at the others.

Without opening his eyelids, Liverright replied, ‘It is not I who am suffering from sleeping sickness, Doctor. It is the rest of you who appear to suffer from insomnia.'

He again won some laughter.

‘I have the funny feeling,' said Ambrose, ‘that no one wants to go to our new Annex. I'll ask for volunteers. Who'd like to take over a fine new building and live happily ever after?'

He looked around the committee. They either looked down at their notes, or shook their heads as his gaze reached them.

‘No one?'

As they all sat in adamant silence, Edith looked around at them. I can handle this crew, she thought, I am not fazed by these people. But it had not been a smooth beginning.

‘We could draw lots,' Dr Joshi said.

‘Coward's castle,' said Ambrose. ‘I'll report back to Sir Eric that his Papal commission having thoroughly investigated all evidence, rules that the souls of the blessed saints do come face to face with the Divine Essence at the moment of sainthood.'

There were chuckles as people sat happily slumped in the impasse, as if it were an achievement.

Edith thought that given that no section wanted to go to the Annex, which must have been pretty much known before the meeting, there was, in fact, no decision that this committee could have reached — unless some sections ganged up on one section and threw it out of the Palais. For this committee the problem was insoluble. It was the wrong committee for the problem.

She put down her pencil. It clattered and the committee looked to her, as did Ambrose.

‘Our minutes secretary has spoken,' said Ambrose. ‘This meeting is closed.'

People gathered their papers and began to leave. But most of them came over to welcome her personally.

The two women came to her and told her not to take too much notice of Liverright's joking or Mandate's irritability. ‘Liverright's a smart aleck,' Figgis said. They both said that they would contact her and invite her to tea.

As the two women stood there talking to her, she was aware that Liverright was also waiting back.

When they'd gone, he came over to her. ‘Hope you weren't offended.'

‘I can take a joshing.'

‘Good.' He said lamely, ‘I hope I see you about the place.' He then said, ‘Do call in,' with a charm which changed it from a courtesy to a personal proposition. He shambled off.

Her first day and her first approach of that sort from a young man. She was conscious that Ambrose was eavesdropping.

Ambrose and she were left in the room. She liked the aftermath of committee meetings, the sudden relaxing into informality as the gathering was reduced to those who were allies, or to those who were linked together as officials of the situation. Now she was left with her new friend who at the same time was an allied functionary — the chairman and the minutes secretary.

‘Somewhat of a flop,' he said. ‘Hope you don't judge the Secretariat by this meeting.'

‘I was somewhat of a flop as well. Sorry.'

‘You weren't! Not at all. I thought you were precisely correct. Handled it all well.'

She needed to believe him but couldn't decently seek any further assurance. She said, ‘It was not the right committee for the sort of decision we had to make,' hoping to repair her position by saying something of merit.

‘Who should make it?'

‘You and I should've made it,' she joked.

‘Shall we?'

‘Make a recommendation? On what authority?'

‘Oh, we could say that following the impasse of the meeting
the secretary and chairman make the following recommendation, blah blah.'

‘Could you and I agree?'

‘Let's try. Who would you send to the Annex?'

‘On the evidence of this one meeting?'

‘Yes.'

‘And bring down on my head the wrath of whatever section we send to Siberia?'

He laughed. ‘And upon my head as well.'

‘Translating can go for a start. As punishment for japing me.'

Ambrose pursed his lips. ‘A very good idea indeed.'

It was too soon to admit it as a fully certain idea, but Edith already sensed romantic competition for her between Ambrose and Liverright. She said, ‘After all, Translating is not dealing directly with delegates, only with documents,' trying to make it sound a rational suggestion.

‘Fine, we send Translating to the Annex,' said Ambrose. ‘Write it down. Bundle off Liverright and his gang.'

She laughed. ‘I suppose I could punish Mandates as well. But that would be unfair.'

‘You would have the death of two fine ladies on your conscience. We will send Translating. We shall wage utter war on Translating,' Ambrose said, looking to her as he echoed their time on the train.

She smiled at him and gathered her things.

After the meeting she went to the library and surreptitiously looked up Zembla in the atlas and encyclopedia and could not find it. Zembla was, then, a fictitious country.

She sat there staring at the encyclopedia in painful consternation. What if she had claimed to know Zembla in the meeting? As, in fact, she nearly had. She would have been a laughing
stock. She would have been the laughing stock of the League of Nations. It would have dogged her days for ever. She may well have been laughed out of the Secretariat. She saw it now as a particularly cruel jape. Maybe this man Liverright had not foreseen its potential consequences or maybe it had been a test. Perhaps they'd all planned it before the meeting. Was Ambrose part of it? While she was filled with relief at having somehow escaped, she was, at the same time, alive to the terror which came from having been so close to professional disaster. She also felt wary and isolated. She felt slightly queasy. She wiped perspiration from the palms of her hands with her handkerchief. She had nearly ruined her career. She would be very careful of this man Liverright — more wisely, she should befriend him. But she would not forgive him for having placed her at such perilous risk. She would also determine if it had been preplanned and whether Ambrose was part of it all.

After sitting for a minute, she took a deep breath and went on with her work. She took down the staff lists and counted the staff in Translating and Précis-writing and saw that they would fit neatly into the Annex. The Way of Numbers.

Back in her office, she laboriously rewrote the minutes of the meeting into a new notebook, this time deleting the word Zembla which she had written down beside Liverright's name, redrawing her map of the meeting, in case anyone should ever, at any time in history, look into her notebook and find the word Zembla there. She put the first notebook in her handbag to be disposed of somewhere far from the Palais. Or maybe she would keep it as a memento of her first day. She would see.

 

At 6.36 Ambrose collected her from her office and together they walked across the lake to the Bavaria Brasserie where he said
most of the younger set and quite a few journalists gathered in the evenings. Delegates also dropped in during Assembly, he said.

She wanted to blurt out her question about whether the jape had been preplanned by them all but held back, waiting for the time to be right.

Ambrose said hello to people and introduced her to some, but it was all a blur. Through her mind kept going the phrases, here I am in Geneva, at the League. Here I am in the famous Bavaria. Here I am. But the jape had spoiled something of her arrival by making her feel guarded towards all the new faces. It was spoiling her feelings about Ambrose.

They settled down at a table on their own.

He asked her what she liked to drink.

‘What should I be expected to drink?' She looked around her at what others were drinking.

‘What should you drink now you are a lady of Geneva?'

‘Yes.' She wondered if she would become a woman who drank cocktails.

‘What would you have drunk back in Australia?'

‘Sherry usually.'

‘Quite acceptable here in Geneva.'

‘But what would the French order? It is, after all, part of the French civilisation.'

‘Oh, the French? They aren't like us. The Frenchman would order a port as an
apéritif
. They drink other vile things made from artichokes and meadow weeds. Stick to sherry and you'll come through all right.'

She was about to take his advice but instead when the waiter came she remembered Dubonnet which she had never tasted, and she asked Ambrose to order her a Dubonnet.

Ambrose raised his eyebrows.

‘I have to explore my new world,' she said. ‘All my life I've
seen advertisements for Dubonnet in French magazines. I always dreamed of trying it.'

She sipped her Dubonnet and to her surprise, could not tell whether she liked it or not. The glamour of it and her new surroundings overwhelmed her taste.

‘How is it?' he asked.

‘I really can't say.' She gave a helpless laugh.

‘You don't know whether you like it or not?'

‘No.'

He laughed with her. Raising his Scotch, Ambrose proposed a toast. ‘To your career as an international diplomat. To your first day.' They clinked glasses. ‘And your first Dubonnet.' He made it rhyme.

‘Thank you. But I still feel something of a fool on this my first day.' She would edge into the matter now.

‘You handled yourself very well. Liverright's awfully plausible — when sober — but you fielded it well. I would've stopped it sooner but he slipped it through. You don't know the story of Zembla?'

She shook her head. By implication he had attributed the jape all to Liverright.

‘It's rather an old joke. Vare, an Italian diplomat, started it. An Italian of the old school.' Ambrose made a regretful face.