Grand Days (60 page)

‘I hear,' Robert Dole said to her in a whisper, leaning towards her, his body quite unmistakably leaning into her, ‘that there has been a change in your human condition in the last year.'

He waited for her to reply but she simply smiled and raised an eyebrow.

He then said, ‘I know that sometimes to change one's attitude is an uncomfortable inner negotiation.'

While hearing him clearly, Edith did not look at Robert Dole, and again made no comment. She paid studious attention to Mme Weiss, while Mme Weiss went on to trace the agrarian reform which had ‘changed the face of Europe'.

Edith sensed Robert Dole watching her face for a response.

Mme Weiss said that millions of peasants had now become small owners of land and were looking to the preservation of their property. They were now hostile to military ventures which threatened their property. ‘There is a deep change in the human background of the world.'

Edith realised that a whispered personal negotiation in public, at a luncheon talk like this, allowed time for the parties to manoeuvre, delayed the parries and the replies of the conversation quite nicely. Their whispering reminded her, too, of classroom whispering back at the one-roomed school of her childhood at Jasper's Brush. The intimacy of whispering gave an excuse to lean closer together.

Mme Weiss said that most people not only now had property — they also had an alphabet in their heads. This was the truly invisible revolution. Before this time in history, many people had lived in huts and had only religion. They had hoped for a better life after death. Now people wanted a better life here and now.

‘It is true that there has been a change,' Edith whispered, ‘and it is true that my attitude to you is being reviewed. And you, Robert Dole, as a man used to these things, you must at least be aware that negotiation, for both parties, involves the use of a crystal ball. It is a game of wishes.'

She had made Robert Dole smile, and she smiled too, so as not to appear to be too restrained.

Mme Weiss said that the new democratic administrations were another sign of the times of which President Mazaryk in Czechoslovakia was the best symbol. Another sign of the times was the League, a conception which was being taught in every school. The idea of international collaboration with the central guidance of the League was being understood by children who would, tomorrow, become the leaders. A new understanding also existing among the labouring classes, the intellectual class and the peasants. They were closer together than at any time in history.

‘I sense a new understanding between the fourth estate and the Secretariat class. And it is true that I am wishing,' Robert Dole whispered, ‘but I am also reading the signs.'

Edith smiled, a smile which didn't mean much, was simply further kindling for the warmth between them.

Mme Weiss said that Geneva was a town all people had learned to cherish, but that Geneva was not just a town — it stood for a method and a hope. ‘A method, because we have a crowd of young administrators and international diplomats working for the League. They understand the psychology of international interchange. In the League we have a large, well-financed organisation which is making a new expertise with the know-how to influence the press, and which will shortly have its own radio station.' Wireless offered the hope of instant communication among peoples, allowing for the dispelling of rumour
and false information. And, she said, for the first time in history, the opinion of the public mattered in international affairs.

Robert Dole whispered to her that he believed they now shared both ‘a position and an intention'.

It seemed to Edith that Robert Dole was trying to be sure that she was offering more to him than just being pals. He wanted to be sure that she was no longer dismissing him as a possible swain. She sensed that this had become for him a point of anxiety.

‘I understand,' he whispered, ‘that to give up something can be painful but it can also free the spirit.'

If he were referring to Ambrose, she wondered what he knew about their life together and their parting.

‘When to compromise, or when to abandon a position, or when to fight to the finish — these are three subtle judgements,' she whispered in reply.

‘Indeed, and judgements upon which lives often depend. My very own in this case.'

‘Come, Mr Dole,' she smiled, ‘to exaggerate the extent of a concession is a crude manoeuvre.'

He smiled and they again turned to Mme Weiss. Edith was conscious that Jeanne was paying more attention to their whispered negotiation than to the talk.

Mme Weiss said, ‘We once heard the cry that war is the health of a nation. This is plainly contradicted because the world is becoming habituated to using international negotiation.'

Robert Dole leaned over to her, bringing their bodies warmly back into touch. ‘This exaggerating of concession gives room for manoeuvre.'

‘I don't like that approach,' she whispered in reply. ‘Negotiations which involve asking too much, so that something may be painlessly given away, or cleverly offering too little, so that
something can later appear to be generously added — these are not sincere compromises. I do not call that genuine negotiation.'

‘It is a leisurely way to reach a real position,' he persisted. ‘Perhaps over-asking or under-offering could be seen as a dance?'

‘Are we dancing?' she asked.

‘Are we?'

Mme Weiss said there had been a ‘moral relaxation of tension' in the world. There were some titters. Maybe Mme Weiss should have chosen different wording. ‘Too much so in Geneva,' someone from another table interjected playfully. There was a festive spirit in the room.

Mme Weiss joined in the smiling herself but without yet seeming to comprehend what the tittering was about, and she went on to say that Locarno and the Pact of Peace were not just the inventions of brilliant minds. They were the result of laborious effort by many people over the last ten years — the logical development of mankind's thinking.

‘It helps too,' Edith whispered to Robert Dole, ‘in the case of concession, if your adversary in negotiation smooths the way for that change in position — if your opponent allows that change to happen gracefully.'

‘
Apéritifs
this evening at the Hôtel des Bergues at seven o'clock — is that graceful enough?'

He was choosing a very manly locale, and an expensive one. Her first day at the League and her great dinner there with Ambrose crossed her mind, but she found no troubling associations. She found the Hôtel des Bergues quite acceptable.

‘Agreed,' she said to him. ‘The choice of locale — is it to honour Aristide Briand?' Modifying, perhaps, what she sensed was the single-mindedness of Robert Dole's invitation, making the purpose of the invitation a little more diffused.

‘I had that in mind also,' he said, readily accepting her
addendum, or perhaps he had truly had that in mind.

They smiled at each other.

Under the cover of the table, he clasped her hand. She squeezed his. Sealing what? Maybe losing, instantly, the diffusion of meanings she had tried to bring to the evening's invitation. She smiled to herself.

They turned back to Mme Weiss, who was saying, ‘Our madam chair pushes my elbow.'

Christina had indeed touched Mme Weiss's elbow, much to Edith's admiration. It was Christina's first time in the chair and she had touched Mme Weiss because her time was up. Bravo, Christina.

‘The push on the elbow — a forthright American way of saying, stop now with your long-winded European speech,' Mme Weiss said, smiling generously.

Christina was flustered and said something about not having meant to touch her quite so hard. Mme Weiss was not put off. ‘I will end by saying we are not the same Europeans as we were before these Pacts — thanks to Aristide Briand, the first true European. And, madam chair, I will finish with one brief story of Aristide Briand. I visited him in his apartment in Paris recently — three rooms, a few paintings given by friends, a few books. His bodyguard said to me, “How is it that a man many times premier of France and responsible for the secret funds of France could be so poor?”' She turned to Christina. ‘He was an honest man.'

During the applause, Edith's attention was taken away from Mme Weiss by the arrival of a sheet of sketching paper with a blank sheet of paper pinned at the top to cover it, which had been passed to her, hand-to-hand. She lifted the cover sheet to reveal a sketch of her and Robert Dole done by Emery Kelen. He had drawn their table as a bed, a bed set in the luncheon
hall, surrounded by people attending to a speaker but with Edith and Robert Dole, both in night attire, gesturing to the other to enter the bed. Both had cartoon words coming from their mouths, and both were saying, ‘After you.'

Edith was taken aback. Robert Dole held out his hand for it, but she momentarily withheld the caricature, covering it. Pausing to absorb her embarrassment. They had been observed not only by Jeanne, but by Kelen. Maybe by all in the room. She stole another look at the sketch. I must react like a modern woman, she said to herself, and then passed it to Robert Dole who looked at it and smiled to himself, and then smiled at her, warmly and merrily. He handed it back to her, touching her hand as he did, and she again quicky covered the caricature with the top sheet and turned it over on the table, her hand holding it there. Both Jeanne and Victoria signalled to her and at the covered caricature, unable to contain themselves, dying to see what it was that had been passed to her. She shook her head in a very definite, if mysterious ‘No.'

Robert Dole turned and gestured ‘thank you' to Kelen and then touched her hand again. ‘Emery sees everything,' he said.

She was no longer abashed and she, too, could now turn and wave to Kelen, and she blew him a kiss in the way of a modern woman.

They had been observed in their emotional diplomacy by Kelen, who'd hung around the Bavaria and the League for centuries. Ye gods, she and Robert Dole's flirtation had entered history.

After work that day, she went back to her pension, spending enough time on her make-up for it to be clear to herself that she was taking this dinner seriously. She dressed in her velvet evening dress. She took out her long pearl necklace which, when she put it on the glass top of her dressing table, sounded wonder
fully arctic and chilling. White pearls on the glass top echoed back to when she was a little girl watching her mother dress to go out, the dressing room filled with smells only smelled on the nights when her mother went to a ball or dinner, of rare perfume brought out for that night, and the sound, that chilling sound, of pearls on glass.

She pulled on her long kid gloves and momentarily crossed her fingers for luck. She thought, fleetingly, about birth control, her mind dodging away from it — it was all too soon for that. She was not going to be Bohemian any more in life. She wanted to have a decorous life.

He came for her in a taxi. He had changed too, and was in black tie, including pale grey gloves and hat, and looked spiffing. Well, well, even the hard-bitten Mr Dole was taking this dinner seriously. He had not brought flowers, but then maybe it was not yet quite right to bring flowers. She remembered to bring the caricature which Robert Dole wanted to see again.

They were shown to their table whch was not the table she and Ambrose had eaten at those years before. ‘Briand's table.'

‘That table over there is where Briand sits when the French delegation are staying here,' she said.

He looked over to where she was pointing.

‘They always eat in a private room,' he said. ‘Although Briand sometimes takes tea with a mixed bunch out in the lounge.'

Ambrose. She laughed to herself.

They studied the sketch over champagne, giving them something to talk about during the first stilted minutes. He explained his dinner suit and the champagne as being to mark an announcement he intended to make, as well as to celebrate and mark the change in their ‘respective alignment'. Surely, he wasn't intending to propose to her? This unlikely notion caused her to quickly
compose a speech which would be courtly, not off-putting, and yet would not require her to give an answer that night. Even if she suspected that she already knew her answer.

‘Now my announcement,' he said. He announced that Longmans, Green, and Co. had accepted his novel and that it would be out in June. ‘Mr Longman and Mr Green and Mr Co are all very complimentary about my poor long-time-coming book,' he said. And they had paid a decent advance on royalties.

She toasted him and his imminent fame.

It had not been a proposal of marriage but it answered one of her questions about his prospects. He could become a distinguished author. She argued to herself that to be interested in success was not uncouth. Her father, had he been there, might have asked Robert Dole about his prospects. It was the same thing. If and when, of course, a proposal of marriage were made. The other thing that made it consequential was that as a woman dedicated to the affairs of the world, she wanted a man who was able to proceed with her in the affairs of the world, who would not be a Dull Freddy or an impediment to her life. She wanted the exhilaration of accomplishment and the access to life which it brought — both for herself and for any man she was bound to. She felt her professional and private life had nearly suffered a complete disaster through her association with Ambrose.

She asked him what it was about. He said it was a detective novel but with literary pretensions. ‘I sneak in some philosophy.'

‘May I read it?'

‘You will be its first genuine reader, yes. You are also the first to know of its acceptance.'

She saw that it was not just a celebration of his news. He was using his news to embrace her.

At dinner in the gleaming dining room he asked about the place of Ambrose in her life. ‘Some time back we heard of a
change of fortune for Major Westwood and in your affections also. Now we hear sad news of him.'