Grand Days (40 page)

At the preparatory commission, Edith had changed the way the conference papers were placed. Instead of the conference papers being placed on the table blotters, she had them placed in specially carpentered stationery stands made from beech wood of the Jura.

She also instructed that bottled water
plat
, together with a crown seal bottle-opener, should be placed at each of the delegate seatings along with the usual carafes of water and glasses. As she gave the instructions to the catering officer she observed to herself that it was an instruction she would not have been able to even conjecture back home, where she had grown up knowing only of tap water and soda water. And, at times, safe water and unsafe water. And times of water shortage when the water became muddy. And the clear icy water in the winter creeks of the Pigeon House Range. Now that she thought about it, she smiled, even in Australia she had known of
assorted
waters. She stood in the winter gloom of the conference room, there in the Salle de la Réformation, her eyes running along the national designations, sure, once again, that little national flags would have been too much like a fête, unbusinesslike. She was pleased with her conference-table livery. Not pleased: triumphant.

‘Why the bottled water? Everyone trusts the water here in Geneva,' Cooper asked as he came to her side and then quickly said, ‘No, I withdraw that — no, I didn't ask that,' showing that he realised too late that Edith would have an answer.

She didn't look directly at Cooper but decided to give her
reasoning to him for the pleasure of hearing it for herself and for the pleasure of rubbing Cooper's nose in her method.

‘Because, Cooper,' she said deliberately, ‘some people do have a preference.'

She thought that was the least part of her rationale, though basic to it. So she went on, ‘I want bottled water because it contributes to the gravity of the work.'

She turned to him with a poised smile. Cooper was again, she could see, wary and also admiring of her because he knew she marshalled herself well, although she could see that the relationship of bottled water to the gravity of an agenda required something of a leap in reasoning.

‘And that, dear Cooper, also explains why we have the leather blotters instead of say, leatherette,' she continued, ‘because the objects that people handle determine how they treat themselves, how they treat each other, and treat the things they are treating. The appropriate objects can cause people to be more contemplative.' Edith thought that didn't explain it fully either. ‘Make people more fertile — ' wrong word; she didn't falter — ‘more resourceful in themselves than they might otherwise be. To elevate their political emotions, Cooper. Some rooms, some chairs, even, I believe, coarsen political emotion.'

He held up his hands to say stop. ‘All right, Berry, all right. I knew I shouldn't have asked. Thank you.'

Alcohol came to mind as something that coarsened politics. Especially in smoky hotel rooms. It did not always coarsen other situations. And her silk underwear came to mind, and champagne, champagne spilled onto her silk underwear, the dampness of the champagne showing up the skin of her body at that place, showing fleshly through the champagne dampened silk. She lingered on the effects of alcohol and how it heightened elegance at other times, at other more intimate places but how the drinking
of alcohol always needed to be ‘managed'. Then, businesslike, she hurried those thoughts on. It was that time of the month for her, when desire was heightened.

‘It is the “crystal and silver or the brass and glass” principle,' she said, turning to Cooper, who was going about distributing papers, and who had indeed heard all this argument from her before.

‘Remind me of that principle,' he called to her with a smile, as he moved away.

She repeated a story told to her by Ambrose of Lord Curzon who, when made Secretary of State, had told Ambrose that he wanted silver and crystal inkstands, not brass and glass. ‘You see,' she said, reciting lightly to Cooper, ‘for the commission, “My name is George Nathaniel Curzon, I am a most superior person”. And “My name is Edith Campbell Berry, superior but capable also of being rather merry”.'

‘Very amusing,' he called from across the hall.

‘Do you know what sort of inkstand Sir Eric has?'

‘No.'

‘Ivory and silver.' And I once used it.

‘Well, of course, you and Sir Eric are special pals.'

This quip flooded her with connections and implications. She assumed he was simply referring to the special work she'd done for him during the admission of Germany. He wasn't the sort of person who would make a snide implication.

She'd opposed leatherette at the commission
pourparlers
. She had initiated, and sketched out for the carpenters, the upright stationery stands for each delegate so that a private screen and a working domain, was formed on the table immediately in front of each delegate. The conference papers she ranged within the stands, so that the heading of each document was visible. She put blank stationery there also. She had argued that delegates
not only talked at a conference table, they wrote notes to themselves, to others, and sometimes they needed to be able to go on with other work when something was happening which did not occupy them — ‘To write to loved ones, to write to mistresses, and other
notes diplomatiques
,' she had said, winning easy laughter from the men at the planning meeting. She had further proposed that the stationery holders also be designed, by her, to act as a temporary filing device for documents not under consideration.

Major Buxton said in opposition that the holders would create a partition between the delegates on each side of the table.

‘Sometimes,' she had argued, thinking quickly, ‘relief from the meeting of eyes is needed in conference rooms.' Again she was interested by how in argument her mind came up with an answer to questions which she had not before confronted. As a girl, she had also learned while helping her mother and the maid arrange for dinner parties that if you wished to discourage general conversation at a dinner table among people who may intensely disagree, you placed large flower arrangements in the centre of the table, which confined people to talk in twos and threes to those judiciously seated alongside each other, and not across the table. She believed that she had a surpassing grasp of the psychology of meetings. Why this should be so she could not say, except that her family had been a family of public life — all members of the family had been forever going to meetings, including the children from an early age. She had a surpassing grasp too of the tone of meetings and the gradations of those tones. She knew when and when
not
to have bottled water or a plain carafe of water. Cooper, unfortunately, might have learned that it was important sometimes to have bottled water. But he would never know when to have both.

Finesse, Cooper, is the word, Finesse,' she called to him
across the hall to where he was distributing papers. That, indeed, was the word. And the Rule of Happy Latency applied. She also had finesse of touch, but you, Cooper, will never discover that of me. Or would he? She looked again at Cooper from this point of view, and confirmed yet again to herself that she would never be touched by him. They got along all right now at work, but no, he would never touch her. How immediately one knew that of another person. Although a vamp wouldn't know it. The whole world touched, and was touched, by a vamp. Maybe that proved she wasn't a vamp.

She turned to look afresh at the layout of the commission table and was elated. It was perhaps a masterwork. She had transferred her arts and ceremonies of home life to the League now that she had no real home life.

It was, after all, a preparatory meeting on the long march to disarmament. The import of it was that the preparatory commission involved the United States and also that the United States was now about to ratify the Kellogg—Briand Pact of Peace even though it had not joined the League. If the United States could be yoked by treaty to France it was, de facto, yoked to the League, Anyhow, all nations, League or not, would, she and the others predicted, sign the pact. And thus war as an instrument of international policy would be outlawed, if not ended. She now knew that it had been unsophisticated to believe that the Great War was the War to End All Wars, and this pact also corrected, to an extent, the grave errors of the Treaty of Versailles.

From a possessive loyalty to the League, she was disappointed that everything was not happening
within
the League but she was now learning to enjoy the craft of political solution: how for any given political predicament a political design and form of words could be found to meet it. She accepted now that
the League was a working model for these things, a machine energising the good forces of the world, an example of how the craft could be practised at its highest level. If the Secretariat had no real power, it still had the power of example. Of settting standards. Standards contained values. She loved also the way new idiom evolved for each political situation and for each conference. So now the vogue word was ‘outlaw' — to put war beyond the law. Even the term ‘preparatory commission' had been invented. She loved it all and, standing there in the Salle de la Réformation, she prayed that her work would not ever be taken away from her. She feared, in the way she imagined someone in love might fear, that their loved one might be taken away by cruel fate.

She remained at the commission for an hour to watch her table livery at work. The delegates did use it as she predicted and no delegate changed the arrangements. All delegates drank from the bottled water. Some read the label of the bottle. She did wonder if they drank from it simply because it was ‘there'?

As she walked to the Bavaria she felt pleasantly stateless. She thought that Geneva with its medley of languages helped people feel stateless. Someone had said that being in Geneva was being nowhere. Whatever she had shed of her nationality had been replaced with a sense of the momentousness which she drew from her work at the League. Though she was annoyed sometimes because people granted you the mystique of your nationality but couldn't see how you were international. And although opinion in the Secretariat was against the idea of the League being a super-state, she liked the idea. She now liked the idea of the League having its own flag and stamps and passports. Its diplomatic status. It was not going to adopt Esperanto or find its own language, but it did have its own vocabulary and it was making its own customs.

Harold Nicolson had said to her that being internationalist for him meant that he would have to stop using the word ‘wogs'. She did not like the man. There was something deficient in his oh-so-civilised self.

Sometimes, too, she was left with the lonely feeling of being part of a new organisation which didn't yet have itself very well known. She yearned for the League to be stronger. Although when she showed the American millionaire James Forstall through the Secretariat at the Palais Wilson he'd said, ‘You have taken over the biggest and best hotel in Geneva. That shows that the League means serious business. An organisation with a plant like this cannot fail. And back home we've outlawed slavery and we've outlawed the saloon — now let's outlaw war.'

She agreed that it was difficult to understand why it hadn't been thought of before.

Ambrose was waiting in the Bavaria. ‘Sherry?' he asked.

She felt thirsty. ‘Beer.'

‘Beer! How queer to want beer. Local or what?'

‘I suppose it's now permissible to order a German beer?'

‘I suppose it is,' Ambrose said with mild surprise, and with a slight grumpiness, ‘it may even become fashionable again.'

He called Maurice, the waiter.

‘Pilsen or Munich?' Maurice asked, order pad and napkin so correctly held. German beer seemed never to have disappeared from the Bavaria. ‘You come from thirsty work?'

She agreed with Maurice that she had indeed come from thirsty work. ‘Munich, please — for the taste of Weimar.'

‘Your best Munich
lager bier
for madam and a sherry for me,' Ambrose said. ‘Remember, Edith, I am a child of the War. They cut down the oaks, remember.'

‘The oaks?'

‘In 1870 — the Germans cut down the oaks of France.'

She laughed at him.

He flared with irritation. ‘Hell, Edith! There were atrocities. They did happen. The Germans did commit them — and within the first month of war. Dreadful things. Believe it or not, they are not like us at all.'

‘Sorry.' She still sometimes forgot the consternation that Germany always caused in him.

He forced himself to recover immediately. He gave his wicked smile. ‘Although, as you well know, I am very much a Weimar girl.'

‘Indeed you are.'

The drinks arrived.

‘A drink to — what?' Ambrose asked. ‘The triumph of stationery stands?'

They touched glasses and drank.

He said to her, ‘Did you get your bottled water?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good for you. You know the stationery stands and bottled water controversy resurfaced at the Directors' meeting today.'

‘Ye gods!'

Ambrose mimicked McKinnon Wood: ‘Is this proper
professional
concern with the work of the conference or is it an
excessive
womanly concern with unimportant detail?'

‘He worries about women taking authority.'

‘Sir Eric approved. On the basis of defending “delegation of duties”. The Marquis Paulucci defended your good taste. It wasn't a big issue, Edith.'

‘It's more than good taste,' she said, her voice rising. She also wondered testily what she and the Marquis had in common when it came to good taste.

‘I know, I know. Be calm.'

‘It's a question of
sense of occasion
. There's a case for pomp
and circumstance. Bottled water isn't exactly pomp.'