Dark Palace (26 page)

She considered her answer. The arrangement no longer seemed unusual to her. Did that show how unusual she herself had become?

Bartou was something of a father figure. What to tell him? ‘In many ways it has to do with Robert. All things are connected.'

‘Of course. Is the marriage … over?'

She again considered her answer. She said. ‘We have not pronounced it over.'

Auguste looked at his
petits four
as he thought about her answer. ‘You have made a personal treaty to cover your marriage? And the treaty holds?'

‘It hasn't been negotiated in detail. It has evolved.'

‘And Ambrose Westwood is to continue as your
escort
?'

Bartou had been a close witness of the collapse of Ambrose in the old days, and her connections with him back then.

‘Yes.'

‘I always liked Westwood. He fell from grace but he seems to be recovered. That you two are together again is a remarkable turn of events.'

He didn't pursue the matter of Ambrose. ‘You must take your home leave.'

Home leave? She hadn't thought of home leave.

‘I was thinking more of a break to London.'

‘Go home. Walters will be glad that you're having a long break. You know we talked about this in the early days of the League—the need for officers to go home from time to time, the dangers of being cut off from one's
patrie
—and the dangers of living here in the artificial atmosphere of Geneva and the League.'

She wondered if Auguste and Walters, maybe others, had talked among themselves about her taking home leave?

She enlisted Sweetser's advice about her strain and confided in him her visits to Doctor Vittoz. He was complimented by her confidence in him and enthusiastic about any form of psycho-analysis.

‘You have my support, Edith. The analysis in Vienna saved me. And we should talk about a proposal I have. You can join me in it. An institute to study the psychological dimensions of political life.'

‘When I come back perhaps, Arthur—and when I know more about this psycho-analysis.'

‘Of course.'

‘You'll keep this confidential?'

‘Naturally.'

He stood up and came around to her and hugged her.

She went to Nancy Williams in Personnel and asked about leave.

Nancy took out her file and flicked through it. ‘I see that you've carried over much of your annual leave. You have rather a large slab of leave owing.'

‘Dr Weber-Bauler says I'm run down, but in good general health. He feels I should take a break.'

‘You hardly need a doctor's certificate to take leave, Edith. You are long overdue,' Nancy said. ‘Go home to Australia, Edith—all expenses paid. Go.'

As she left the office, she wondered if Nancy was in a plot to send her home.

But her anxieties were melting away and she was beginning to feel that people were thinking of her and her welfare.

She waited until they were together in bed before telling Ambrose of the new possibility that she should go to Australia on home leave.

‘That would be for three months?'

‘Three months yes, but with some additional leave and the time of the travel there and back tacked on, closer to six months. I have the feeling that Walters and the others want me to take a long break. Auguste seemed to have considered it before I talked with him. And it's time. It's time for me to go back. My father is alone and growing old. I missed seeing my mother before her death. I suffer remorse because of that. I must not miss seeing my father before he goes.'

He took her hands. ‘Go. But I will miss you greatly.'

‘I'll be back.'

‘What if you choose to stay?'

‘Why should I?'

‘Didn't you say that Australia now had a Department of
External Affairs—Australia is handling its own foreign policy? Maybe you'll be offered a position?'

It hadn't crossed her mind.

‘You would be a jewel in their crown.'

She wondered if that was how they'd view her? And what followed then?

‘But then I would have to live in Canberra. I hear that it is a couple of buildings in a paddock. I would be a jewel in a potato patch.'

‘What if they do offer?'

‘Then you can come to live in Australia.'

He pulled a face. ‘Really? Barely imaginable.'

‘There are bohemian types there, you know. Even people of your bent, I dare say.'

He was silent.

She touched his face with her fingers, ‘No long faces. Come on, I wouldn't desert you and I wouldn't desert the League. I'm an internationalist, remember.'

He was serious, ‘I would hate to lose you, Edith. We've come a long way, and have a long way to go.'

‘I, too, believe that,' she said.

They kissed.

‘However strange this partnership is, Edith,' he said. ‘It's a very fine thing we have. We should not lightly treat it nor risk it,' he said.

She had never heard him show emotional nervousness in this way.

‘Dear Ambrose, I'm aware of what we have. It's safe—believe me. Trust me. But you must see it's time for me to go home? You see that?' she said, searching for his blessing.

She sought it not entirely in good faith. She was not really sure what would eventuate from her return to Australia. But she needed the blessing, selfishly. ‘You agree?'

‘Yes.' He looked at her shrewdly. ‘This will be a momentous visit for you. A return. Maybe you should not be making
promises about the future at this time. To anyone.'

She saw what emotional bravery was behind this gesture. A generous offer of ‘latitude'.

‘Thank you, Ambrose. Thank you. Of course, you'll stay on here in the apartment.'

‘If you so wish.'

‘This is your home. Of course you'll stay on. Guard the fort.'

‘And when and if Robert comes to Geneva?'

‘As usual, you two will get along, I'm sure. I'll write to him and let him know I'm going home.'

‘By the way,' he said, ‘do you know he has rooms in London?'

It hit her like a slap. She was strangely offended that Robert had not told her.

Why should he tell her?

‘I didn't know—who told you?!'

‘Someone casually mentioned having visited him there—a journalist.'

‘How interesting.'

‘Probably for convenience. I assumed that you knew.'

‘Probably. His postcards still come from exotic places.'

‘He probably needs a place in London.'

‘Yes, probably.'

She wondered if this told her anything about Robert's attitude to the marriage.

‘Anyhow, they can't dismiss me while I'm on home leave.'

‘No. And out of sight, out of gossip. And Edith, one other thing.'

‘Yes?'

‘Take your hip flask—as a talisman.'

‘Thank you, dear Ambrose. Thank you.'

Edith experienced a growing excitement from her decision to return home. She did not wish to lose Ambrose from her life
but the return would be a time of reassessment—the time on the boat going over, the time among her country folk.

It would normalise her life for a while. She wouldn't be a married woman living with a man not her husband.

And she would not be telling them back home that she'd flunked her marriage.

Maybe she should see Robert while on leave?

She thought it should be mentioned. ‘I could well bump into Robert,' she said casually one night. ‘If he's in my neck of the woods.'

‘Where is he?'

‘Last address was Ethiopia. I wouldn't mind rendezvousing with him somewhere. To find out what we should do with what is left of our marriage. Perhaps consider divorce. Perhaps on my way back through London.' She mentioned divorce because she sensed that would calm Ambrose.

He made no comment. She could see that Ambrose had been made to feel vulnerable by the idea of her taking long home leave and the mention of Robert.

She continued her appointments with Doctor Vittoz up to the time of her departure. She now felt at home on the couch under the gaze of the African masks, kicking off her shoes, lying back and letting her mind float.

Her appointments with Vittoz at first concentrated on the idea that Robert had perhaps, or indeed, left her and they gradually reached a point where she saw that she was fearful of Robert's strong male nature and following from that, she feared, in some sense, marriage itself. And motherhood.

Their conversations—if that was what they were—also drifted further towards her earlier life back in Australia.

Her talking to Vittoz about her father and mother and her distant, wandering brother was like some preparation for her
return to Australia, a going over of the ground and ploughing it before she landed back there.

She glimpsed something else about it all. It may indeed be a break from things but it could also very well be a fleeing—a fleeing from all of her life here in Europe as her coming to Europe had been a turning of her back on Australia.

If it were a fleeing, would she also be leaving Ambrose?

On the matter of Ambrose, Doctor Vittoz had suggested the possibility that she was suffering
chagrin d'amour
—the tendency when disappointed in love to turn against the opposite sex. Hence her turning to a man not quite a man. But this interpretation denied the friendship which preceded her sexual involvement with Ambrose. And it ignored the ongoing, undiminished pleasure that this part of him gave her.

The Vittoz observations did, however, cause her to ask seriously if Ambrose was the right person for her. He was, apart from the irregular side of their sexual matters, just a little too much older than she.

As they would say back home—‘couldn't she do better?'

Because she'd be catching the boat in Marseilles there'd be no streamers, no on-board entertaining on sailing day.

On the day she was to leave, Ambrose gave her a gift.

It was his second gift to her in all the years that she'd known him.