Dark Palace (10 page)

It came out. ‘I am going to China. To cover the war.'

She avoided showing any emotion.

Thank the gods.

Oh, thank the gods.

She concealed welling pleasure. ‘Have you missed war so badly that you have to go all the way to China?'

‘I may have. It's the best war we have at present.'

‘When do you sail?'

‘Still finding a ship. Matter of days, with any luck.'

‘For how long?'

He did not answer immediately. ‘For as long as it lasts, I suppose.'

She turned to fully face him and probed further. ‘Indefinitely, that is?'

He looked away from her and cleared his throat, ‘I suppose that's the word—indefinitely.'

She found herself nearly trembling. She was confused now in her emotions. Including her sheer guilty pleasure at the news. However, she could hardly hope for a long war.

‘Is the paper sending you?' Her voice was firm, but it lied.

‘I asked them to send me.'

There was something odd about his reply.

‘They're paying you?'

‘By the line.'

She took a deep breath. There had been no hint, and no discussion. And if they were paying by the line it meant that they had not sent him but that he had chosen to go freelance.

Then, they'd not been discussing much of anything at all.

She reminded herself that it was all for the good, regardless of how abruptly it was being presented. ‘You'll join up with Potato?'

‘Yes.'

‘Who's taking over the bureau here?'

‘James's coming up from Paris.'

‘Until you return?' She wanted this confirmed again.

‘James is permanently replacing me.'

‘I see.'

She sipped her port.

So. This was something of a resolution of things.

He remained standing, as if he were just telling her about some household matter. ‘Of course, I'll send rent money.'

She heard this and found the ground between them again unsure.

‘Oh, no need—I can manage the rent. The League allowance …' Which did not, however, cover the rent of an apartment this size.

His ‘paying the rent'—an expression of his husbandly role—had been something of a farce. He had borrowed from her in a frequent, haphazard and unrecorded way. Borrowed more than the rent. She had subsidised his life indulgences, limited as they were to betting on horses and losses at all-night card-games with his reporter mates—moderate but frequent losses.

‘Better that I keep my end up,' he said.

What did that mean?

‘Oh, you'll have expenses while travelling. I can look after the rent.'

‘My responsibility.' He said this without conviction and as if it were still required of him to say it. ‘Should send you something.'

He was trying to have a place in her life, a toehold.

‘The rent is not going to worry me financially,' she said. She wanted that connection, at least, stopped. She wanted secure command of the apartment.

This did not sound like the beginning of a discussion about divorce. A task for which she had no heart or time.

‘Will we have then a marriage such as that of Edwina and Dickie?' she said, trying to quip like a Modern Woman.

How she hated the nickname ‘Dickie'. And, inadvertently, she'd raised the dreaded subject.

She didn't care anymore.

He cleared his throat again, and said, ‘And how is that?'

‘They seem always to be in different parts of the world. With different people.'

Edith liked the sound of that.

‘I suppose it might be a bit like that.'

‘You don't have to send money.'

‘Doesn't seem quite right.'

‘It's quite all right.'

‘Will leave some stuff here.' His tone was halfway between asking her and telling her.

‘I can arrange to store anything you have to leave.'

She was sure he didn't have storage in mind.

Leave it murky? Or have done with it?

‘Good,' he said. ‘Good to have a base.' He seemed to have ignored her reference to storage.

A ‘base'? Was that the way a husband talked?

Yet something now stopped her from clarifying everything. Although she knew she was happy to have him away from her life, she was uncertain of how she wanted him gone. She could not clarify that to herself just now. To not clarify was best for her sense of self and to her advantage for the time. As it was, perhaps, for him.

It might be best clarified in writing at another time.

‘And you'll be gone indefinitely?' she said, wanting to have that confirmed again.

‘Difficult to say how long.'

He was fudging it.

Best done in writing.

‘Good night, Edith.'

‘Good night, Robert.'

He hesitated and then came over and kissed her cheek and took her hand. ‘Think it's the best plan,' he said.

‘Yes,' she said.

‘For now,' he said.

She nodded.

She heard him go to his bedroom, heard him pour a drink and prepare for bed.

She could turn his room into a guests' room? Or should it remain there for as long as he wanted?

She would become by default now the lessee of the apartment. That, too, would suit her fine. She would have the
contract changed. If she were, as a woman, permitted to sign a lease under Swiss law.

She found herself gasping, trembling. It was over, this uncomfortable domesticity with its disfigured sexuality. For the indefinite future, at least.

She was released. Or partly released.

She felt an urgent burning need to unburden herself to Ambrose.

To tell him that she'd flunked her marriage.

There was another nice parallel in her life, in a time of parallels.

She was present as an official witness at the small ceremony, representing Under Secretary Bartou, together with Under Secretary Marquis Paulucci di Calboli Barone and a few others to see the foundation stone of the new Palais des Nations relaid.

It had been wrongly placed back in 1929. The architects had made a mistake back then and now it had to be moved to its proper place.

The foundations of her life had also now to be repositioned.

Wrongly laid.

But where and how to relay her foundations?

Edith stood at the window in the Palais Woodrow Wilson in the office of her friend Jeanne and looked out across the lake. In the office fireplace behind her the coal fire burned while the dreaded Geneva wind, the
bise
, swept the lake.

She rested her forehead on the chilled window glass and moaned to Jeanne, who lounged on the office settee.

She said that she dreamed for a year of having a ‘Peace Picnic' but that would be out of the question in the bitter Geneva February they were experiencing. And with no break in the weather predicted.

‘Have a
pique-nique en hiver
,' Jeanne said. ‘In Paris we had winter picnics. I had a winter picnic on the floor of my Paris office once. One winter picnic I had in the back of a horse and carriage. Which was altogether too delightful.'

‘And about which you will now talk—a picnic for two?'

‘
Mais oui
, a rug over your,' she looked at Edith, deadpan, ‘… laps?'

‘And you needed gloves?'

‘It was cold but we kept warm.'

‘One glove each?'

‘Each of us wore one glove, yes,' Jeanne said, still straightfaced.

They both giggled.

‘Edith! Sometimes you embarrass even me! You are becoming more bawdy than we French.'

Edith tried to picture herself as bawdy. No, she didn't think that was part of her picture of herself. That was more a word to describe a barmaid. The French word
risqué
sounded much better.

‘I think I would rather be described as
risqué
, Jeanne.'

There was a time when she would have wished to be truly
risqué
. In fact, there was a time when she fancied she might become the Wickedest Woman in Europe. ‘I want to have a winter picnic for one hundred.'

‘For the delegates!?'

‘Not for the official delegates. It'll be a picnic for all those people who come to Geneva to make sure the leaders of the world keep their promises. The citizens, Jeanne.
Les citoyens
.'

‘Edith, those people are not
les citoyens
. They are in politics also, just waiting for their turn in power. And so dull! And you do not like them. Mrs Swanwick will be there. And Mary Dingman. Edith, you do not like them. A
risqué
person does not belong with these people, Edith.'

‘I want the Disarmament Conference to be … more embracing. It's time for involvement of all the people. It is more than a diplomatic thing.'

‘Ah Edith, you are
scheming
. You are playing the crafty diplomat. You want to orchestrate these people?'

Not quite right. Edith wanted to channel the fervour of these well-meaning people who would be coming to Geneva. She wanted them to lose their tone of moral incontestability. And she wanted them to stop shouting. They were mostly ardent pacifists and, while she was drawn to pacifism, as a dreamy magnetic north to her politics, she had reluctantly accepted that pacifism was not a doctrine for this century.
She wanted these well-meaning people to formulate more astute tactics and more intricate positions. She wanted them to concede that there were times for taking up arms against evil, albeit only collective arms through the League. Knowing when to fight with all thy might. She wanted them to come to accept an armed League. She wanted them to adjust to the conditions of ever-present peril. To learn
machtpolitik
.

‘I want to draw a larger box around their small boxes. To make yet another unit of persuasion. At present they are either in their own little box talking to each other or pretending that they are really the only box.'

‘Edith, whatever you have in mind for your
Pique-nique du Désarmement
, let us—our crowd—have a picnic in a four-in-hand—'

She saw Jeanne stop herself, registering that given the situation between Edith and Robert, picnics might not be the right thing just now. Picnics were for lovers and the happy-hearted. Robert and she had forfeited the right to picnic. For now. Jeanne knew it.

‘Will Robert still be here?' Jeanne asked, tentatively, as if asking about an ailing elderly parent, and without waiting for a reply, ‘Just you and me, if you like, that too would be good. Yes? Or another couple? Or bring that nice young man who seems to dote on you. And I will bring … mmmmm?'

Jeanne went through the act of considering a long list.

In her case, Jeanne was referring to a nice young man who seemed to be an admirer of Edith. He was not a young man who wished to romance married ladies—he was, she suspected, a young man who wished to have an older woman friend. She seemed to attract them, these nice young men who wanted older women friends.

Edith's mind was now drifting to the arrival of Ambrose. ‘You know that Ambrose will be here for the conference?'

‘He will? Well, that's good, Edith.' Jeanne searched her face, ‘Or is it not good for you?'

‘I don't know if it will be good for me.'

‘Robert and Ambrose on a picnic? Possible?'

It had been three years since Ambrose had his breakdown and returned to England, and he and she had gone their separate ways.

She'd seen him off on the train back then and that had been the last time she'd seen him. He hadn't come across to Geneva for her wedding, and she'd been secretly glad.

The Edwina affair had brought them back into a more intimate letter exchange, the letters more frequent.

He was working in London for Fred Pickard at the Federation of International Institutions.

How would it be to see him again? Would there be physical attraction? She was still at ease with the idea of his errant nature and, musing in retrospect, she felt she had handled it rather well at the time.

Maybe she could regard it with ease only because it was far, far away.

Regardless of all that, she did want Ambrose to visit her life even if she did not need that part of his nature back in her life. She suspected that it may have gone now from his life, that the treatment he'd had back then may have worked and that he was cured of all that.

More importantly, how stable was he now? Obviously stable enough to hold a job and write merry letters. And he had said he went back to medical practice for a time.

‘Yes, Jeanne. A farewell picnic with Robert would be a fine thing. But not with Ambrose. We may have to have two picnics: a picnic for him who goes and one for him who returns—returns, at least, on a visit.'

‘How sad it is. When one of the old gang leaves I cannot bear it. First Caroline, then Ambrose and now Robert. Even if he and I were not always
sympathetique
.'

‘Only for a time.'

‘Yes, with Robert—just for a time.' Jeanne said, but Edith
detected that Jeanne was just agreeing with her. In Jeanne's voice was a hint that she thought Robert was going for good. And she knew for Jeanne that the hint was also something of a wish.

The next day over breakfast with Robert, she brought up the matter of Ambrose. Not that she needed a clearance from Robert now for anything. However, oddly, she sensed that there were niceties to be observed. ‘How do you feel about Ambrose's visiting Geneva?'

‘How should I feel?'

‘He and I were lovers.' She imperceptibly winced as she again took one more of the sensitivities of her past out of the bag. Too bad.

He moved in his chair. He obviously still found it difficult to accept this as a conceivable fact. Her confession and revelations about Ambrose had been another part of her attempt at complete candour during the courtship.

‘Some years back now,' Robert said, tightly.

He was trying to be civilised about it.

She wondered whether that was a clearance.

She stayed on her guard—prudently as it turned out, because Robert then said, ‘I have never asked questions. Not after you told me about him and his nefarious predilections.'

She noted that he didn't use the word ‘nefarious' jokingly. How she wished that she had been able to lie back then.

As it turned out, he hadn't deserved the deeper truths of her life.

‘I appreciated that.' She granted him his virtue in not having brought it up before.

For all his paraded worldliness, she suspected that he'd never asked about her time with Ambrose because it was so incomprehensibly and sickeningly alien to him.

He then surprised her. Struggling towards a smile, he said,
‘I think I will leave it at that. I've done enough dabbling in your past. I believe in our marriage, you know. Regardless of my going to distant parts. I still see us as a married couple.'

She'd hoped that he would have avoided saying things like that. It required her to affirm and, as yet, she did not know what it was, exactly, she wanted to affirm. She supposed that she saw it now as a partly relinquished marriage.

He seemed to have given it some thought. And regardless of the
scandale Jerome
and now the Ghost of Ambrose Past, he was persevering with some idea of a married life. Perhaps as his departure drew near, he had started fearing the separation.

She ducked giving the affirmation he seemed to want and instead said, ‘I take it you don't wish to discuss the visit of the “nefarious Ambrose”?'

He shuffled a little and said, in his man-of-the-world voice, ‘I'd be happy to say hello.'

She said she thought that would be fine. ‘Jeanne was thinking of us all going on a picnic.'

‘Ambrose?'

‘A bunch of us.'

‘That might be going too far. Hate picnics. Count me out.'

She was glad he didn't want to join it. Good.

They then went back to reading their newspapers there in the café.

Or to the appearance of reading. She continued with her thoughts of Ambrose and suspected that Robert continued with his thoughts, also of Ambrose.

Back in the old days, Ambrose had, at times, felt challenged by Robert's manliness and Robert and he had engaged with each other occasionally in a bantering bellicose café manner. Robert had hated what he described as Ambrose's pose of ‘drawling detachment'. Robert, on the other hand, had conceded that Ambrose was a good administrator with important Foreign Office connections.

This had been before her pre-marriage revelation of the precise nature of her affair with Ambrose and its perverseness.

In her recent letters to Ambrose, she had, in the end, spoken only of the ‘ups-and-downs' of married life and left it at that. It seemed to her that Ambrose had to accept that she and Robert were a married couple, regardless of what had happened within that marriage, and regardless of its state of disrepair.

She tried then to stop herself laughing at the ordinariness of their appearance there in the café, as a man and wife, sitting reading their newspapers, munching their toast and marmalade, in the only English breakfast café in Geneva, which Robert now asserted as his preference.

How bizarre it was that they pretended to be doing the normal things when they were feeling so far from normal.

She couldn't decide if these were the last dying days of a marriage or an interregnum or a new marriage arrangement. She was tired of it all. For now, apathy would have to do all the work.

She would not try anymore.

She would place herself in the hands of apathy.

Ambrose arrived two days after the opening of the Disarmament Conference.

Robert joined her in meeting him at the railway.

Ambrose came off the train and she realised that she'd forgotten how dashing and good looking he was now in his mid-forties. How slim. He was slimmer than she.

She sighed as they hugged. Ah, those strange, lost, wicked days.

‘You haven't changed,' Ambrose said, stepping back. ‘Either of you.'

He shook Robert's hand with energetic friendliness, ‘No, I lie,' he said, looking at them through hooded eyes. ‘You have
both changed into a seriously happy married couple.'

She and Robert laughed together merrily like a seriously happy married couple, and for a second she felt seriously and happily married.