Dark Palace (40 page)

‘I'll look.'

‘No—I'll do it.' Before she could leave the bed, Ambrose rose, removed his make-up as best he could there in the bedroom with cold cream, wiping it with a bedside towel. He put on a male lounging robe over his nightdress.

‘Wear the black satin,' she said.

‘Might inflame him with lust.'

She giggled. ‘Could very well—what a fearful idea.'

Ambrose went out into the apartment and then came back. ‘All clear. Gray and his luggage seem to have gone.'

‘Thank heavens.'

He went then to his bathroom.

She lay there in the bed exhausted rather than rested.

Ambrose returned and dressed.

‘Want me to come to breakfast with you—moral support—immoral support?'

‘Thank you, dear. I have to do this on my own.'

They hugged and kissed and he left for his office.

She eventually dressed and joined Robert in the café.

Robert stood up as she came to the table. Being the gentleman.

Awkwardly, he shook her hand.

Embarrassment was making him awkward.

They sat down.

She was trembling but did not think that it could be noticed.

He'd had a coffee but ordered again when she did.

‘We were rather tight. I'm sorry,' he said.

‘I accept your apology.' She wondered if she really did. ‘You were outrageous.'

‘We were.'

‘Has Potato gone?'

‘He's out finding some rooms.'

‘Might be difficult because of the Assembly,' she said, trying to make normal conversation.

She hoped he didn't take that as an invitation to stay. ‘If you have trouble with hotels let McGeachy know—she'll find you something.'

They remained silent as the waiter brought the breakfast.

Robert said, ‘Dull agenda.'

She decided to dump their attempts at companionable conversation.

She said, ‘The marriage has to be tidied up.'

‘I did notice you're not wearing the ring.'

‘Haven't for some time.'

She was confused about the ring. For the purposes of the world at large it sometimes seemed better to wear it.

But it had no sentimental meaning for her.

She said, ‘We have to settle things. I'm happy to pay whatever the law requires me to pay to you, as it is I who owns the assets.'

‘No need to get into legal issues.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Happy to leave things the way they are—neither of us is going to marry. Why bother? Or are you planning to marry again?'

It was dawning on her that he thought they had a marriage of a kind. He was
holding on
. This had never occurred to her.

She looked at him, at the ageing, at the attempted correctness of his manner.

She saw a small, smoky wisp of desperation.

He spoke again, ‘You and Westwood seem to be more than chummy.'

‘Oh, don't pretend you didn't know. And it's none of your business.'

‘My business—in a theoretical sense, perhaps.'

His voice was still trying to be companionable. To be somewhat worldly.

‘I'd like the key of the apartment back.'

‘Rather need a base, you know. A place to hang my hat.'

‘It's not your home anymore.'

‘We'll call it a bolthole, then. I'd be happy to pay something.'

‘I'd rather we settle the matter and make a clean break. It's long overdue.'

She sipped her milky coffee without shaking. ‘I'd like your things out of the apartment.'

‘Edith—no need for this formality.'

‘I think a return to formality is long overdue.'

‘Surely you're not intending to go on living with Westwood indefinitely? That's hardly a proper set-up.'

‘Leave Ambrose out of the discussion.'

‘You don't see this
ménage
with him as being acceptable, do you?'

He always pronounced his French with an English intonation. As if giving up his English intonation would Frenchify him and he'd be diminished in some way.

‘It's been a satisfactory
ménage
for some time now. I see no reason why it shouldn't continue. That is not the issue here.'

She found that she wanted temporary relief from the intensity of the subject.

She asked him why he was in Geneva. ‘Surely the Assembly isn't hot news?'

‘We've heard that Chamberlain is going to Bad Godesberg. Or Munich. To meet Hitler again. We're on our way up there. Thought we might check things here first.'

‘Are you trying to scare up a war?'

‘There'll be war. Chamberlain will give Hitler what he wants. And then there'll be a war, anyhow.'

He was
willing
a war. But arguing with Robert had passed from her life now. ‘How was it down in Spain?' she asked.

‘Haven't you read my dispatches?'

‘I haven't had much time. But I'm going with the League Commission to Spain and then to New York for the World's Fair.'

‘My, my, you're becoming the regular traveller. What's the Commission?'

‘The Assembly has agreed to supervise the repatriation of foreign combatants—from the Republican side.'

‘That seems all the League is capable of.'

She shrugged.

‘Thinking of getting out?'

She shrugged. ‘
Tertius gaudens
.'

He laughed to himself, ‘Still playing the diplomat, Edith. I don't know that tag.'

She considered not telling him. Oh, she wasn't interested in point-scoring anymore. ‘
Tertius gaudens
—we will wait upon the turn of events in hope of advantage.'

‘Not much of a policy.'

‘Not much of a world. As a policy it will do.'

He looked at her, assessing her.

‘I see that the Assembly has abandoned sanctions and collective security.'

‘That's right. We're to be a forum of consultation and nothing more. More realistic.'

‘A talking shop.'

‘There's still work to be done.'

‘Such as putting on an exhibition at the World's Fair?' His voice was drifting away from the companionable.

‘Yes, like putting on an exhibition at the World's Fair.'

He laughed. ‘The theme of the fair is “Tomorrow's World”.'

She didn't laugh. She played with the sugar. They had to return to the matter of the marriage.

‘And you'll be at the League exhibition in New York?' he asked.

She nodded.

‘When do you leave?'

‘After Christmas.'

She took a deep breath. ‘Should we go to the lawyers together?'

He drank the last of his coffee, and said, ‘I don't particularly want a divorce. Don't want the trouble of it.'

‘I do. I shall go to the lawyers myself. No need for you to bother yourself. I'll find out how it is to be done.'

She stood up. ‘I want your luggage out of the place today. Anything you leave I will put in storage. And put the key on the mantelpiece after you're gone.'

He remained seated. ‘I am still
in law
your husband.'

‘Technically.'

She then felt she had to guard Ambrose. ‘I hope you will respect both Ambrose's and my privacy.'

He looked at her quizzically, ‘You mean, will I make a good bar-room story out of my wife's perverted tastes?'

The companionable tone had gone entirely now.

She coloured.

He went on, ‘Will I put it around about her and her nancyboy?'

In a quiet voice she said, ‘I expect you to respect our privacy and to tell Gray to do likewise.'

He didn't say anything.

She tried a wild card. ‘You might consider that if you put it around in any way whatsoever, it could enter people's minds that being my former husband, you yourself may have had similar tastes.'

‘I don't think my virility is in question. Not in this town.' He laughed meanly. Was that meant to imply that he had an affair in Geneva while married to her? Or after they'd separated?

She'd never considered that possibility. With whom did he have an affair? One of her colleagues?

But the jibe assumed, too, that she still had feelings for
him and that those feelings would be wounded now by that.

She was slightly wounded. She didn't show it.

And she was not going to ask and would, presumably, never know.

With quiet deliberation she said, ‘If I hear a breath of rumour about Ambrose which could've come from you or Gray I will certainly make some remarks which will change the way people view your so-called
virility
. After all, you did not father a child with me.'

‘That, as you well know, was never on the cards,' he came back. But his voice was not confident.

He smiled at her in a tough way, trying to smile her threat away.

‘Goodbye, Robert. I'm sorry that it has come so abruptly. But you brought it on. And it's long overdue.'

He looked away.

‘And I mean what I say.'

He didn't respond.

‘You'll hear from the lawyers. Should we send it care of your newspaper?'

‘That will find me.'

‘Or to your rooms in London?'

He was taken by surprise but recovered quickly.

‘No—send whatever to me care of the newspaper.'

She took what she thought would probably be her last close look at him. He appeared as a stranger.

How could all that passionate love have disappeared? Where were all those fine conversations? Where had the tenderness gone? Where had all their mutuality and empathy gone?

Gone, gone, gone.

Was there a black chasm in the ground somewhere, a chasm where all the lost love of the world was dumped?

Outside the café, she was visibly trembling, truly upset.

She had been inwardly affected by having said that they'd
not had a child. The words were so potent. Charged with life.

She was affected too in a way she had not expected, by the actual acknowledgement that the marriage was at an end.

She had never felt such sickening anger before in her life and the anger was directed inwards against herself.

But at last she was cleaning up the mess of her life.

She looked out at the traffic of the street, to the life of the shops and stalls, and people buying and selling, coming and going.

How distant she felt from all this buying and selling and coming and going.

At the New York World's Fair of 1939, by the Lagoon of Nations, Edith Alison Campbell Berry sat down and lightly and privately wept.

Thankfully, the Fair's gawking, hungrily expectant crowds ambling with fairground weariness, hoping for a flash of sensation around the next corner, did not pay any heed to her and her private tears.

She kept her head down and away, looking out over the lagoon, her weeping concealed by her arm.

At this, the Fair of world harmony, she was already in discord and in tears.

And what made it worse, she was up against Sweetser. And she was one of those who appreciated Sweetser. Sweetser was one of the old gang. Sweetser was true blue.

Although, over the years in Geneva—at, say, the League Tennis Club and so on—while appreciating him, it was true that she had not always warmed to him.

The crisis was now over the flying of the League flag.

It was Sweetser who had actually designed the flag. He'd personally taken it to a tailor in downtown Manhattan and had it hand sewn.

Now he'd lost his nerve and wouldn't fly it at the opening ceremony for the League Pavilion at the Fair.

He felt that flying the flag would be provocative to the US because it was a non-member state. He was suddenly frightened about raising the flag of another, perhaps higher, entity in his own country.

Pure funk.

Her brain told her that it was a trivial matter on one level but it had become for her highly symbolic at a time rich in symbolic conflict. Swastikas, uniforms, torch-lit processions, banners and bands.

God knows there was not much else left for the League but symbolism.

There was another part to the problem.

Sweetser felt it was his decision to make.

It wasn't his decision to make.

It was her decision.

Sweetser had always seen himself as the doctrinist, the strategist. An
éminence grise
in the Secretariat.

Well, he wasn't.

She'd even caught him calling himself Counsellor, when the League no longer used that title—and his claim to it, anyhow, had always been in doubt.

And these high and mighty views of himself had now led him to be insubordinate to her. A flaming row had ensued.

Unlike Sweetser, she did have a base of authority within the League, even if it did not flow from an official appointment. Arthur Sweetser had made himself a role as the odd-job man for anything to do with America—but his authority was circumscribed by his job in Information Section. Her authority, on the other hand, was expansive, free-ranging and not circumscribed by any Section.

She, at least, was someone who had the use of the bow, arrows and quiver of power.

Even if her authority was not in the wall-chart of
organisational structure, her authority was as known as the brightness of day. She was a Diana.

Since Bartou's decline and illness, she'd spoken, acted, and thought for Bartou. For all intents and purposes, she
was
Bartou. From this office her line of authority was directly to the Secretary-General.

But hell's bells, she outranked them
by aura alone
—all of them: Sweetser, Ben Gerig, and all the other self-important little men.

And they knew it.

They knew it, they knew it, they knew it!

With those thoughts, Edith pulled herself together, took out a handkerchief and carefully dabbed her eyes, and checked her make-up in the compact mirror. Her eyes showed some strain.

She stood up. She turned to examine the seat of her skirt, dusting it with her hand.

Then, head down, she made her way back through the swarming people to the League Pavilion.

Outside the League Pavilion, she passed the chairs which were filling with guests for the opening ceremony, the young American official guides in their blue satin sashes showing the early arriving visitors to their seats.

She moved into the Pavilion noting with pleasure the crowd inside, pausing to stop a small boy picking at the exhibit which showed the League's success at setting international names and dosage for sera and toxins.

She went straight in behind the exhibits to the staff toilets.

She stood before the mirror.

As usual she avoided seeing the complete picture of her face until the end, concentrating on the particulars of her fastidious new routine of make-up, luxuriating in her new American cosmetics. She'd gone into Manhattan last week to a ‘Beautician' and asked for a completely new approach to her make-up. She'd been in there nearly two hours and came
away feeling very pleased and renewed and with a very expensive package of new cosmetics.

She'd gone back to the hotel and thrown away all her old cosmetics and stuff.

In recent years she'd become insecure about her make-up. What she knew she'd learned from her mother and through rather secretive experiments within her inner circle at Women's College although most of them had been against it. She'd even gone without make-up for a year.

Apart from things Jeanne had told her or she'd observed in other women, she had never really known about make-up fashion. It was something of a confusion in her head. She'd stuck to the older ways of her mother for too long.

Now she felt she was fully renewed. American or not, she liked the look.

Her lipstick was brighter. Her eyes larger.

After she'd repaired her face, she closed her eyes and repeated her intimate litany, saying soundlessly to herself: Edith Alison Campbell Berry, you are thirty-nine years of age; you are comely; you are radiant; you are a woman of precious authority in this world of strife:
go forth
.

She then opened her eyes and looked at herself, fair and square.

Yes, Edith Alison Campbell Berry, you are thirty-nine years of age.

Do you wish to be younger?

Did she wish to be younger?

Thirty-nine may be a fine age but for one thing, it did not proceed—at least as far as she could observe in the nature of things—to yet more glamorous ages. It was the Last Gorgeous Age to Be. Although she did know some glorious older women.

Yes, one could still be glorious into the older years.

But not glamorous.

Make A Wish
.

If she had a wish she would wish to be one year younger. To have thirty-nine always ahead of her.

Wish Not Granted
.

Well then, she would go and do wonders with this her last truly glamorous year.

She studied her re-enlivened face again, stepped back to see a fuller reflection of herself, turning her head left and right. Comely, radiant, perhaps even
striking
.

She turned away from the mirror, washed her hands and primed herself to have it out with Sweetser.

She had only an hour or less before the opening.

She went to Sweetser's office which she'd walked out of after the flaming row and its stalemate. She'd left his office telling him that she was going ‘to consider her position'.

She had acknowledged that in the old days Sir Eric Drummond had not wanted the League to have a flag, did not think it proper for the new world organisation to cloak itself with the appurtenances of a nation state.

The world had moved on since Drummond's days and flags were not only for nation states.

The League, anyhow, was something of a state, although not a nation, as such, it was perhaps a new form of state.

And in these darkening times, she wanted the League to declare itself more stridently, in a state-like fashion. A flag would proudly display and proclaim the power of the League—whatever power resided still within the noble institution.

The League should be an inviolable refuge for all.

People should be able to stand under the flag of the League and feel protected by it. It should provide a sanctuary for those standing under it—the flag should be a fearful warning: ‘do not harm this flag or those it represents or those who gather under its protection.'

It should be a declaration of a mighty, forbidding otherworldly power.

She'd considered just going ahead and flying it herself but that would be seen simply as a petulant act, to be laughed about by the men.

She stopped at the door of Sweetser's office, thought about her approach, and then turned away and went back to her office.

The strategy in a stalemate was that you had to introduce a
new factor
to break that stalemate. You could not simply go over old ground.

She would issue Sweetser with a written instruction.

That would be the
new factor
.

She sat at her desk and summoned the stenographer through the intercommunication device.

The neatly folded, newly made flag with its virgin white rope and shining brass eyelets was still there on her desk.

The stenographer came in, dressed for the opening ceremony, surprised—perhaps grumpy—at being summoned to work on a day which was to be something of a holiday, but carrying her notebook and pencils.

‘I'm sorry, Frances, I have an urgent memorandum. Two memoranda. One to Mr Sweetser and one to Mr Gerig.'

‘Ma'am, are they for tomorrow?'

‘I want them typed now, immediately, and delivered by hand.'

No.

She changed that. ‘I will deliver them myself.'

‘Typed before the opening?'

‘Before the opening. Now.'

‘Yes, ma'am.' Frances looked at her watch and then took a position of alert readiness with her notepad and a pencil, swallowing whatever irritation she felt. ‘I want this done with great urgency.'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘I've changed my mind, they will not be memoranda.'

Frances crossed out whatever she'd written and looked back to Edith.

‘They will be headed DIRECTIVE in capital letters and then OFFICE OF UNDER SECRETARY-GENERAL, then, “Temporary Office, League of Nations Pavilion, World's Fair, Flushing Meadow, New York, New York.” Use the embossed letterhead and heavy cloth paper. The directive will begin: “My dear Sweetser, My dear Gerig. With the authority of the office of Under Secretary-General, Auguste Bartou, I hereby instruct you as follows:

‘Item One) The flag of the League of Nations will be displayed at the opening ceremony along with the flag of the United States. The American flag to the left and the League to the right on the hand-held poles already purchased.

‘Item Two) The flag of the League of Nations will fly at the same height as the American flag.

‘Item Three) Until raised, the flag will be held during the ceremony by a boy scout or state trooper or, failing that, by Arthur Sweetser.'

Edith laughed to herself.

‘Item Four) After today, the League flag will be raised on a permanent pole (to be erected) perceptibly higher than, and between the two poles already in place. The poles already in place will fly the American flag and the flag of the State of New York.

‘This directive overrides any pre-existing national flag protocols.

‘Please note, this is not a request but a directive.

‘It is to be executed forthwith.

‘Nota Bene: No excuse will be accepted for failure to observe this directive.

‘Signed: E.A. Campbell Berry.

‘Date it and also type in the time.' Edith looked at her watch: ‘10.36 a.m.' Now go, Frances. Quick sticks.'

‘Ma'am? Quick sticks?'

‘As fast as you can.'

Frances then said, ‘Ma'am, may I ask a question?'

‘Go ahead.'

‘With respect, that is …'

‘Yes, Frances?'

‘Are you really able to tell Mr Sweetser and Mr Gerig to do these things?'

‘Yes, I am.'

‘Pardon my ignorance, but are you then
their
boss?'

‘I am their boss.'

‘Well.' She looked at Edith with uncertain regard.

‘Go to it,' Edith said.

Frances moved quickly from the room.

‘I will come with you,' Edith said, grabbing the flag and going with Frances to the typing office. She watched over her shoulder as Frances expertly typed the directives.

Edith took them as they came from the typewriter, proofread them and signed them. Flawless typing.

‘Thank you, Frances. Excellent typing.'

‘Ma'am, will I be needed again?'

‘I don't think so. You can get ready for the Opening.'

As Edith turned to leave, Frances said, ‘Ma'am?'

Edith turned back, ‘Yes?'

‘I'll watch for the raising of the flag.'

Edith smiled at her conspiratorially, ‘Can you raise a flag? Were you a Girl Guide, Frances?'

‘Oh no—I can't do that. Oh Lord, don't ask me.'

‘You're free now—enjoy the ceremony.'

Frances said, ‘Go for victory.'

They exchanged kindred smiles.

At least she had one person on side.

Edith licked and sealed the envelopes, gathered up the flag, then dashed down the hallway to her office, put on her hat and gloves, grabbed her handbag, and half-ran to Sweetser's office, knocked and entered without waiting.

He was standing at a small wall mirror adjusting his tie.

‘Arthur.'

He turned away from the mirror and fixed his fine smile on her. ‘Calmed down, Edith?'

‘I am calm, Arthur.'

‘Feeling better?'

She was trembling but it was inner trembling and she did not give a damn. She said to herself, I'm trembling because it's natural to tremble.

‘Arthur, about the flag …'

‘Don't apologise, don't give it a second thought. Matter closed.'

He went back to the mirror, making another adjustment to his tie.

She had observed that here on his home ground in the United States, Arthur was an even more confident person. On home ground he was able to present himself with mystique—as an officer of the distant international institution with unknown authority—among people who had never seen the
Palais
or been to Geneva.