Dark Palace (4 page)

She decided that he really was a bit crocked.

‘Potato wants to leave for Manchuria,' he said.

Good, she thought. Geneva would be a happier place without him. ‘Good,' she said.

They sat there silently. Was she, perhaps, in her heart, not properly devoted? And therefore not properly
married
?

That was the point which had been niggling at her all night and it broke through the clouds like a star—she was perhaps
not a proper wife
.

That was the point.

She felt a panic about this thought.

She had a vocation and, as yet, she had no burning desire to have a family, she did not run the household except in the smallest ways, she earned more than her husband, and she had private income, as well, which had survived the Depression. And, for no good reason, after a year of marriage she still hadn't told him everything about the extent of her private income.

And if she were a proper wife, perhaps she would've told him about the United States before his deadline.

How much of the wedding contract had she discounted?

Were they then, just lovers pretending to be man and wife?
Or worse, was he a proper husband and was she just a lover?

What was really
in
her marriage contract?

The Japanese wife was a marker at the far side of the field of marriage. And she was perhaps on the other boundary, if she were, in fact, inside the boundary at all.

She was, perhaps, a Special Companion.

She warmed to that idea but it was a little late perhaps for her to be redefining her bond to Robert.

She nestled her breast against Robert, who moved his hand a little up the silk stocking of her leg. He was responding to her body, her perfume—now a little faded—to the smell of her hair, the feel of her body.

She thought that would be the best way to go now, into the misty world of bodies.

And despite everything, they
were
fine companions.

‘We are fine companions,' she whispered to him.

‘Companions?'

‘Yes, fine companions.'

‘I suppose we are that. Odd way of putting it.' He was silent and then said, ‘You should've told me about the Americans.' But it wasn't a grumpy voice.

That was what she wanted for her marriage—fine companionship. She would work towards that.

She could have a marriage of an artful and unique design.

Robert had no design, he most likely thought that marriage was something already all set out by the conventions.

She turned into him, putting her head on his shoulder, lightly kissing his neck. She laughed silently at having withheld the news from him, laughed with a mild devilry, a delicious petty devilry.

Or was it more a petty cruelty?

She nearly always left for the office before Robert because he didn't begin his work until early afternoon or at best, late morning.

It would be earlier today because of the Japanese crisis, but he was still in bed when she rose.

She often had to fight her resentment at his sleeping in late, that she had to be the one who rose and faced the apartment alone, and then faced the world. She faced the newspapers alone.

It was as if she'd expected marriage would at least mean that two people rose together and that, consequently, you never had to face the world alone.

Perhaps what she wanted was for the Man to rise first and to inspect the boundaries of life and to see that the world was safe, as her brother and father had done in Jasper's Brush.

It was also somehow unnatural for her to see a man sleeping late. When she had been growing up, her father and brother had been the first to rise, although her mother had usually not been far behind them. Except for Those Days when her mother slept late and was not present at breakfast.

She would then visit her mother before school, entering
into that oh-so-determined-womanliness which her mother had created around her in the bedroom. The billowing tulle, the lace, the satin bed cover on the canopy bed. The abundance of freshly cut flowers always placed outside the bedroom at night and brought in first thing by her father so that her mother could rise surrounded by the fragrance and sight of flowers. The much loved volumes in the cedar bookcase, the gramophone in the corner.

Her mother's bedroom was a room such as no other in the house and Edith was always enfolded by it, was always reluctant to leave it, yet feared her urge to linger, because to linger so would suggest that she hide there. Forever.

For her mother, the bedroom had been a refuge from and a resistance to the harshness of the country town and the hot bush, the torment of insects both of nature and those within the mind. Her mother was also setting a standard of intimacy, the
grace
of intimacy.

And on some days, her mother could not leave the room.

Edith, having kissed her mother goodbye there in the bedroom, would herself feel the urge to linger, to hang on there, to lie down with her mother and remain in the lavishness of the imported lingerie and rich scents, and the mirrors both normal and magnifying which seemed to invite the nervous delight of self-scrutiny, which gave out the permission to admire oneself, to lavish on oneself the attention which was deserved. Which those around perhaps did not give.

But the mirrors had returned an unreliable reply to her own self-scrutiny, some days saying: I am a thing of beauty in this life; I am charged with high destiny. On other days, giving back an unanswering blankness.

She wondered now if the mirrors had given succouring answers to her mother. Or whether she had daily to live with the absence of answers. Or with fearful answers.

Her own bedroom here in Geneva was an attempt at such
a haven and an expression of all those womanly essences which her mother had celebrated.

In some contradictory way, Edith also felt that true physical passion could only express itself amid such feminine order even though that passion came as a gasping, grunting disruption of that bedroom refinement, as if the order had to be there for it to be violated and then restored, awaiting the next disarraying visit.

Although they slept together, Robert was always a
visitor
to the bedroom. But then, so had been her father. Neither of them ‘visited' the bedroom until bedtime.

Both saw it as a female domain, at least during the daylight hours.

And Robert did indeed frequently, and mostly to her pleasure, carnally violate her feminine domain with his carnal noises and thrustings.

She was not like her mother in that she ever locked herself away for days on end. She was generally pleased to rise and to go out into the world.

As today, she was pleased to rise. She'd woken early and had lain in bed briefly, thinking of the challenges of her day, how the presence of the US should be handled at the Council meeting. The management of history's stage. Without that management nothing would happen. Or it would happen badly.

She had a feeling of restive pleasure about the day.

She looked at Robert asleep in bed in his regimental pyjamas, a garment she detested and which he would not give up, something he retained from his life as an officer in the War and insisted on reordering from London Naval and Military Store against her wishes.

She had tried to joke him out of wearing them. She had brought fine, black silk pyjamas from Paris as a gift. He would not touch them.

She had come to abhor not only the dull regimentals, but
also, let it be said, his woollen combination vest and drawers.

She herself also abhorred women's pyjamas, silk or not, despite the fashion.

Some nights she felt her satin, shantung, and voile nightdresses—any of the many which she wore in a considered rotation—were not really friends to his brusque pyjamas. There was a discordance there. And she also chose her nightgowns to glamorise the carnality of the bed. Indeed. Most definitely.

She had tried to tell herself that his pyjamas were virile, but that hadn't altered things much and he hardly needed to proclaim his rather active virility. The virility was there too in the rank, sweaty smell of his leather watchband and its cover when it came near to her face. A virility which had been active last night in response to her
soignée
appearance, or dare she say it, her
glamorous
appearance. He had energetically violated that as well. Rather pleasurably, even if the subtlety of it had been lost through drink.

Of course, he never removed the pyjamas during his virile activities.

Oh no.

Leaving aside these physical matters—about which she had little complaint—her feelings were that one had to sleep in what made one feel sumptuous. One should leave the exhausting waking world for sleep and then return to it the next morning, well turned out, but most of all, feeling sumptuous.

Still, her bedroom did not really reach her mother's standard.

She did not quite have the time to get it right.

One day she would.

He, on the other hand, wanted to preserve the quality of being able to ‘sleep rough'. Whatever the quality of ‘sleeping rough' was and why it should be pursued in life. ‘Sleeping rough' was, she would have thought, more an unfortunate scrape than a virtue or worthwhile life-practice. Robert
seemed to be still rehearsing for some crisis in life for which he would then, unlike the rest of the world, be prepared and able to cope. Some nights he slept on the floor of the sitting room or in the second bedroom with a pillow and a blanket. Usually when crocked. But sometimes, she noticed, for no reason at all.

He believed in the hard truths—maybe his regimentals were some sort of philosophical ‘exercise' in hard truths for the sleeping mind.

It wouldn't surprise her if he thought that way. Marriage, she'd discovered, was an unravelling of the other person's mind and personality there before one's very eyes. She had once propounded the idea that one should get to know the other before marriage. That idea now made her laugh. She would now argue the opposite. One should avoid ever knowing the other in too much dingy domestic detail. The hairs in the bath of married life should be avoided. She was relieved that they had two bathrooms and that she never had reason to enter his.

She had consciously recoiled from this form of knowing in marriage as soon as she saw it gathering like dust on furniture. Jeanne correctly said that a woman should aim not to be honest but to be beguiling, to be Unknown. But then, Jeanne had never been married. Perhaps she had an expert committee to which she could refer such matters.

And what was Master Robert aiming for in
his
domestic demeanour? To beguile? For mystery? Hardly. His rough-cut self-resilience made him seem like an out-of-place bear as he moved about the apartment.

To be frank, she would like separate bedrooms. He left books open face down on the floor. He left unfinished drinks on the bedside table which, in the morning, filled the room with the odour of a bar-room. Still, part of her resisted the idea of separate bedrooms also, because it seemed to admit to a failure of something in marriage, in her vision of the consolation of marriage.

Leaving the bed, she held the satin nightdress against her body, a sensation which never ceased to affirm her, and which felt cool against her newly waxed legs—the work of the dreaded Mme Lélu and her depilation at the
Institut de Beauté
.

Oh, she was so pleasured by her full body, by her womanhood, by the emollients of womanhood, even if on some days she fell short of the ideals of that womanhood. Too often fell short because of her life of rush.

She had not fallen short last night at the Hôtel des Bergues.

She bathed, dried herself and dusted herself with powder. After all this diplomatic uproar was over, she would give more time to the pampering of her body.

She went from her bathroom back to the dressing room.

She had a sore head. She went back to the bathroom and took out a headache powder from the cabinet, mixed it in the water glass, drank it, grimaced, and returned to her dressing room.

She would wear a soft beret.
Trés chic
. A stiff tie-neck blouse. The dark grey suit with the buttoned cuffs and mid-calf skirt with its off-centre pleat. Yes. Perfect.

One thing she did not suffer was clothing indecision. Mrs Swanwick, the great British feminist delegate to Assembly, would certainly approve of that—no time wasted on trivialities of appearance. But,
Mrs Swanwick
, it didn't mean that she did not consider her daily appearance. She considered it before going to sleep and her mind simply resolved the matter during the night.

Having dressed, she ducked down for the newspapers from the
kiosque
, opening them there in the street and scanning the headlines for the American story.

She felt sick. Most had it.

She'd denied Robert a story which the others had from one source or other. It looked as if the news had come from Washington.

She was guilty and sick both from her action and her sore head.

She got her rolls from the
boulangerie
and went back up to the apartment.

She wrote a note for Robert, something she'd once done every morning when they had first married, but which had faded out of the morning rituals.

In her note, she apologised for withholding the information about the US presence at the Council table until after his deadline, although she pleaded ‘diplomatic confidentiality'.

It'd been a little more than diplomatic confidentiality and she was now rather nonplussed by her motive. And failed to find it. Motives were rarely coherent or visible, as Bartou would say.

She gave him, as a gift, the detail that the Japanese had opposed the US being invited to Council but had been defeated at the secret meeting of Council. That wasn't in the other papers. But she swore to herself that it would be the first and last time she breached confidence.

She put the note with his rolls.

Her guilt faded somewhat.

She left the rest of the news unread and had her coffee, cream, and hot rolls and jam with good appetite while she worked out on a sheet of paper the speaking order for the day and the dining protocol.

As she did her face, she smiled to herself about something Mrs Swanwick had once said to her about cosmetics. ‘Can you really follow a scientific demonstration or a piece of music when a good part of your thoughts are concerned with the question “Is it time to powder my face?”.' Such a grump. Such a prude. And, Mrs Swanwick, the answer is, ‘Yes, I can sometimes think of my nails and attend to a complex piece of music at the same time.' And furthermore, myself and the other young lady students in our science course at university could present ourselves smartly
and
follow scientific experiments.

She knew what Swanwick meant, though, about being reminded so much of one's womanly nature when working alongside men, and about how much the
feminine
did intrude. A certain type of scrutiny by men, their glance, their stare, always gave her a renewed sense of her body and its shapes and made her fleetingly curious about what it was that her body silently suggested and stimulated in male eyes. She perhaps knew more than Swanwick about all that.

She
certainly
knew more than Swanwick
about all that
.

It wasn't the powdering of the face that caused the problem. It was the need to appropriately manage these stares and glances of men, caught, but not acknowledged, and to get on with the work. Once the men she was working with and she were caught up in the work, she found no problem. She had dispensed however with sleeveless dresses. They were not fair to men. She worried too about any emphasis to the breasts, the separating and uplifting of them, a question which arose now that such ways of dressing the breasts were fashionable. She made a note to warn Gerty about this. But what of gloves? Were bare hands more stimulating to men than gloves? She felt that long gloves were rather alluring.

She wondered again about the girl from the Japanese delegation, how the Japanese girl felt in her kimono and tight gait. How she felt about the men who watched her. And the women who observed her. As a woman, one had to deal with both inspection by men and by women. She doubted that a man felt perused at all by other men or by women.

Passing out of the apartment, she re-read her morning note to Robert again and frowned at its tone, the asking for forgiveness.

Something else. She had not, in fact, written a note
to Robert
—it was a note to some other
imagined
Robert.

Did she need to recreate Robert in her mind so that she could feel happy about him? It was not that she recreated him as an ideal man but more as the man he
could be
, the man
he concealed within himself. Or so she believed. It was as if the Robert with whom she lived and who went about in the world was an unfair presentation of the real Robert. Perhaps that real Robert just couldn't exist at all. Perhaps circumstances and pressures caused this unreal Robert to exist in his place.