Dark Palace (43 page)

She could imagine her belly with child. Could imagine a playpen with a gurgling child wearing only a nappy and a smile. With effort, she said, ‘I won't leave it overnight. The answer is, no. The marriage is over, Robert.'

He stood up, drinking the last of his drink as he stood. How she hated that.

‘Goodbye, Edith. I'll sign the papers and send them back to the lawyers tomorrow.'

‘It's not about Ambrose,' she said, feeling that she had to save that in him. ‘It's about me. Things lacking in me, I suppose, as a woman.'

She took the blame—to spare him. Gave him the half-truth. Patronising, she supposed. But an act of kindness.

‘I knew it couldn't really be about him,' he said.

He believed that too readily.

She didn't stand up.

He stood for a moment, hat in hand, and then walked out with a good stride. She saw him stop and give the waiter money, and then he stood as if calculating, and then gave the waiter some more money—the tip, she guessed.

And, putting on his hat with a decisive movement, pulling it low over his eyes, he went out through the door, held open by the doorman, into the busyness of 44th Street still bright with the late sun of New York City.

How had she come to marry him?

She breathed deeply, and lay back in the chair, gesturing to the waiter for a drink.

Perhaps she would write to Robert and say that there would always be a room for him at the apartment in Geneva.

If Ambrose were agreeable.

A kind gesture to a former husband who had been spurned.

No.

She would not.

It was all over.

She had passed across some great line in her life. She had tendered her resignation from motherhood.

More, she had acknowledged—and accepted—her perhaps less than complete life. A life which was not going to change.

Ultra posse nemo obligator
, as Bartou would have said. ‘No one is obliged to do more than he can.'

1940

When, some months after her return from New York and the World's Fair, Bartou took Edith to the Hôtel de la Paix for summer evening drinks and an
échange des vues
and she found Deputy Secretary-General Sean Lester and the Greek Under Secretary-General Thanassis Aghnides there, she deduced that something consequential was happening.

She had met socially with each of them, indeed with combinations of all three, but not all three at once. And, in fact, rarely with Under Secretary Aghnides.

And not at a hotel lounge.

From the window of the hotel where they were seated they could see the lakeside machine-gun nests at the bridge Mont Blanc, surrounded by sandbags and manned by highly trained, earnest Swiss soldiers, who seemed to her to be somehow unsoldierly, still looking like clerks and schoolteachers in uniform, their binoculars scanning the lake for German hydroplanes and scanning the sky for parachutists.

There was something unconvincing about ‘neutral soldiers', although she tried to take reassurance from their weapons, which were real enough.

Aghnides offered around cigarettes in a silver cigarette case, ‘Turkish on the left, Virginian on the right—
blonde et brune
.'

She had only recently taken up smoking. She took a Virginian, although tempted by the Turkish.

‘No,' she said, putting back the Virginian. ‘I'll be bold and try a Turkish.'

‘Bravo,' said Aghnides.

There in the Hôtel de la Paix with this wartime backdrop the first talk was, as always, about the war—about whether Norway would hold out, whether the British forces there were strong enough. And there, among the men and the talk of war, she drew carefully on the Turkish cigarette, and found that it did not cause her to cough.

With her second draw on the cigarette, she was in control of it.

Lester thought that the Anglo-French force belatedly assembled to fight against the Russians in Finland could be sent to Norway, given that the Finns had capitulated to the Russians.

Everyone had some scrap of information to throw into the stew of gossip and anxiety.

‘Mrs Leland Harrison told me that she wouldn't care too much if the British got it in the neck,' Edith said. ‘Which is fine when you're packing to go back to America and can put it all behind you.'

The Americans on the staff, especially, were getting out and going home. Sweetser was going.

She'd miss Arthur.

Bartou said that he had good reason to believe that the British blockade of Germany was now beginning to bite and it would not be long before Germany was out of iron.

And of course Italy. If Italy joined Germany in the war then France's back was threatened by the Italian dagger.

‘I wonder what meaning we can put on the arrival at the Palais of the armillary sphere as a gift from Rome?' Lester asked.

‘I suspect that Mussolini was barely aware that it was being manufactured.'

‘It was promised by Mussolini years ago when the Italians were in favour,' she said. ‘Now it might contain a bomb with a timer.'

‘Where's it going to be placed?' Aghnides asked.

‘In the Court of Honour, or near the Library—somewhere there. In the garden.'

‘Court of Honour for an Italian sculpture. That would be a nice irony,' Aghnides said.

They laughed.

‘The English children are being evacuated from the International School,' Lester said.

‘I was told by one of the teachers,' Edith said, ‘that those leaving promised the other students that they would be back soon. I found it rather touching.'

Some of her mother's inheritance was invested in the school.

This was the most serious gossip of Edith's life and it gave electricity to being there in Europe. Underlying it was the not-so-distant thought which surfaced from time to time that one's very own life could quickly be in danger.

Despite the declarations of war by France and England last September, during which not much fighting had occurred at all, the League Commissions had disregarded the war and had held their annual meetings and had set meeting dates for this year.

The Assembly had held a special meeting in December, and had taken its strongest action ever by expelling the Soviets for their invasion of Finland, although most countries abstained from the vote.

Life at the League had been so eerily normal until now.

They were sleepwalking through their business. They clung to agendas and budgets and details of administration to avoid seeing the beast coming out of its lair.

Lester introduced a lighter note.

He said he'd been invited to join the Shoe Club of the USA, which collected pairs of shoes worn by notables from all walks of life. ‘Is this American recognition of the League?' Lester joked. ‘Or only recognition of my shoes?'

‘Did you send them a pair?'

‘Elsie wanted me to get rid of a few pair. But no. Didn't think it added to the dignity of the League.'

It was Bartou who opened the discussion about why they were there at the Hôtel de la Paix.

Without looking directly at her, he said, ‘Edith, we have a mission for you. We want to move you to Avenol's office. As you know there's a convenient vacancy. And he can't hire anyone from outside with such a tight budget.'

She knew what the gathering was all about then.

‘You want me to keep my eye on Avenol.'

Lester said, ‘Precisely.'

‘You'll work in with Vigier,' said Bartou.

She stared down into her drink and felt the irony of it. How righteous she'd been those years ago when she'd discovered that Ambrose was passing information to the British Foreign Office. How he would enjoy the account of this meeting.

‘I don't really see myself as a fifth columnist. And Vigier—what do we think of his loyalties?'

‘He's decent. A good international civil servant,' Lester said.

‘He won't be in on it?' She may as well say it. ‘In on the plot?'

‘No.'

‘Who is? Who are the Baddies and who the Goodies in our plot?'

‘We are not writing a novel, Edith,' Bartou said.

She realised that Bartou, for the first time in her long experience with him, had slightly misunderstood the English word ‘plot'.

No one was going to correct him. ‘What precisely are we doing?' she said. ‘I detect a whiff of insurrection.'

Bartou coloured, and mumbled to the others, ‘Tell Edith.'

Lester named people who were concerned about Avenol's loyalty to the League and his judgement in the crisis.

‘And I am one of them, of course,' said Aghnides.

‘We think he's losing control of the situation,' Lester said.

Sweetser and some of the other Americans were named as being worried about Avenol. There were, it seemed, two groups: those who were in on the plot and those who, while not in on it, were considered to be on side.

‘Would he have me around the place? Wouldn't he want a French person?'

‘There're no French available.'

‘He got along well with Bruce, your fellow countryman,' Lester put in. ‘He thinks Australians are all anti-British—that you're all Irish. By the way, I won five francs from your former Prime Minister at bridge once. I seem to remember that Bruce and his wife regard themselves as no small beans.'

‘Back home he was ridiculed for wearing spats,' Edith said. ‘He was the first Australian Prime Minister to have a valet.'

Aghnides asked, ‘What's happening to the Bruce Report?'

‘What can happen?' Lester said, ‘It's hardly time to begin reforming the League. Sweetser is making the report known in the right places in the US. That's about all we can do.'

‘What
is
your attitude to the British?' Aghnides asked. ‘Simply as a matter of interest.'

‘Being of British stock made me a better Australian,' she said. ‘My family read the
Round Table
. I often thought the Empire was a forerunner of the League. We could've had a community of equal nations within the Empire. Still could, I suppose. We're a long way from any friends, down there.'

Turning back to the matter at hand, Bartou said, ‘That you're close to Jeanne will help ease you in to Avenol's favour.
We want you to try it, Edith—and yes, he may reject you.' Bartou fidgeted. ‘There's a hard part, Edith.'

‘Yes?'

‘I'm going to “drop” you from my office.'

She made histrionic noises of protest.

He held up his hand, ‘Of course, not for incompetence.'

She laughed sourly. ‘For overstepping?'

As the three men laughed, she crossed her fingers and hoped that he was not going to resurrect the drinking question.

‘I think we could mount a case for that, Edith,' Lester said.

‘For reasons of political unreliability,' Bartou said, watching her reactions as he went about the business of lighting his pipe. ‘You can see the strategy?'

‘I can't say I'm happy about it all,' she said. ‘It may come as a surprise to everyone but conspiracy does go very much against my nature.'

She was worried about involving Jeanne in the situation. She assumed that Jeanne could not be told of the scheme. She was then being asked to use Jeanne.

And she didn't know whether to trust Jeanne with word of this plot. Whether to place the burden of it onto her.

She really had to talk with Jeanne. ‘What about Jeanne? In or out?'

The men looked at each other and shrugged. Lester then looked to her. ‘What is your assessment of her position vis à vis Avenol?'

‘I really don't know, now that France is under threat. The beast of nationality has sprung to life,' she said.

She could not believe that Jeanne would be other than loyal to the League. Just as she was. But then, her country was not under threat.

Being part of the inner gang was nice, but what was not so nice was that the League was breaking into gangs and groups as the crisis around them became more frightening.

At first, she'd expected that the crisis would draw them all closer together. Instead, they were dividing into three groups, those who were pro-German, those who were anti-German and the Neutrals—usually dishonest neutrals who secretly supported one side or the other.

The pro-Germans divided into those who hoped for a benign outcome from the German victories and those who had no concern one way or another for any evil which might come with a German victory.

In fact, they saw no evil.

‘You can probably find out easily enough—without giving the game away,' Lester said.

Again, the finding out would be an abuse of her friendship. She bridled at the suggestion.

‘I don't think the situation is exactly a plot,' said Bartou. ‘A plot is an activity of a politically criminal nature, surely.' The little bell in his head must have rung about the confusions over the word plot.

‘Quite so,' said Aghnides.

The men gave some nervous laughs.

She didn't feel that it was a joking matter. She was the one who would be jumping into the fire.

Lester came in, ‘By putting you out of the British camp you can be seen by Avenol as a potential ally. Thanassis is seen as acceptable by Avenol by reason of being Greek.'

‘We have a social life together,' Aghnides said, apologetically. ‘And he thinks the British have too much influence even in Greece.'

‘Won't it mean that I won't be able to be seen with my friends? And what about Ambrose?'

Lester said, ‘For a month or so, that's all we ask—by then the situation will have cleared; Hitler may feel enough is enough. Until then, we need a set of eyes and ears in Avenol's office.'

‘But I will not be able to mix socially with those who are seen as being in the British camp?'

‘ “I do desire we may be better strangers”,' said Bartou.

‘I don't recognise the quotation,' Aghnides said.

Nor did she. Nor, she could tell, did Lester.

‘
As You Like It
. Rosalind says to Orlando—a girl dressed as a boy, remember—that it would be better for the time that they meet as seldom as they can. Orlando replies rather nicely, “I do desire we may be better strangers”.'

As if this had been somehow discussed at another time, Bartou then said, ‘I think you may safely share what we say today with Ambrose.'

The other two nodded.

Was it because they knew he was no longer trying to be a spy for the British? Or because that was no longer an offence in their eyes?

‘We want you at the keyhole,' Bartou added.

‘
That
would be a criminal act,' she said. ‘And worse, it would be unladylike.'

They smiled.

‘I can't see it working,' she said.

And she couldn't see herself going back to taking shorthand.

‘Which part of it?' Lester asked.

‘My French shorthand part,' she said. ‘I'm very glad to say that my shorthand is rusty.'

She pondered the legality of it out aloud. ‘His appointment
was
confirmed by fifty member states. His authority is not in question.'

‘Only his sanity,' said Lester. ‘His competence. And, of course, his loyalty.'

The strength of Lester's attack made her look to Bartou and he looked across at her with unspoken connection.

Everyone in the higher levels of the Secretariat was aware that Lester had become a vehement opponent of Avenol. And he had most to gain—if you were to think that way. The Secretary-General's job would fall into his lap.

But Lester's loyalty to the League or his sound-mindedness was not in question.

Only, perhaps, on the matter of Avenol.

‘He won't even speak with me,' Lester said. ‘Consultation has broken down.'

That Lester, as Avenol's deputy, was finding it impossible to consult with Avenol was itself,
prima facie
, a crisis.