Dark Palace (46 page)

They held tight in the hug.

They let go a little and looked at each other and looked into each other's eyes and then without hesitation they kissed each other, a kiss which began as a kiss of sisterly forgiveness, and which then changed, and their lips opened to each other. It became a kiss as a man might kiss a woman.

The kiss was short and then they looked at each other again. They embraced, kissed again, and this time the kiss was long and Edith melded into it and into Jeanne's arms and her knees became weak.

She broke apart from Jeanne after a time, continuing to hold Jeanne's hands, giddy, lowering herself on to the couch.

Jeanne sat down with her. She looked into Jeanne's eyes and said, ‘Did that really happen?'

And Jeanne said, smiling, her breathing uneven, ‘The kiss? Or the fight?'

‘The fighting.' Edith smiled and added, ‘And the kiss.'

And Jeanne said, softly, without recrimination, ‘You are conspiring against Avenol.'

Edith nodded.

‘I don't want to know.'

Edith nodded and made a small face, ‘Lester thinks we have to.'

‘I don't want to know. It's all too dreadful. Do what you have to do but do not expect me to be part of it. And do not tell me.'

‘Agreed. And, Jeanne—I'm so, so, so sorry.'

‘Edith, it is all right now. I love you, you love me. We will be all right.'

It was not all right—not just yet.

She did not know what it was. This thing between herself and a woman had happened once before. An American woman, years back, whom she'd thought about often. Who had touched her breasts once at a party. At least, Edith remembered it that way. Maybe it hadn't happened quite that way. A full and proper kiss certainly had happened between the American woman and her at that party. And she had gotten to know such women at the Molly Club where two or three came sometimes dressed as men. She sometimes watched them and wondered about their lives.

And then there was what went on between Ambrose and her, too. The femininity of it.

She had gone some of the distance down that road with the American woman because it was
alluring
.

But too much was spinning through her head now.

She gave a sheepish glance back up at Jeanne beside her there on the couch as they sat there holding hands.

Jeanne, sitting beside her, holding her hands very tightly, said in a low voice, ‘You know, Edith, we could be lovers.'

Edith at first thought Jeanne meant that the way they were sitting together was a bit like the way lovers sat when they were together.

Then she realised that Jeanne had made some sort of a proposal.

A proposal that they become lovers.

‘We could—but we can't,' Edith said, looking down at the carpet, her hands still captured by Jeanne's hands. ‘I am not able to cope with that, or to contemplate that. No.'

It had never crossed her mind in all these years, that Jeanne might be
like that
.

Jeanne had men. Were there women too? Why hadn't
Jeanne told her? She'd told Jeanne about her love life, quite a lot. Although not very much at all about Ambrose—Jeanne had guessed about that.

Maybe she was the first
woman
Jeanne had professed love for.

There was no response from Jeanne.

‘I really couldn't, Jeanne. I'm not up to it. I am with Ambrose.'

‘It's all right,' Jeanne said, quietly. ‘I don't know what I was saying. It is the hysteria.'

‘I can barely cope with my life as it is.'

‘It's all right,' Jeanne said. ‘I was not myself. I spoke madly.'

She let go of Edith's hands.

Edith took hold of Jeanne's hands again. ‘We are both on the edge. The war …'

‘It's all right,' Jeanne said, and kissed her lightly on the cheek, and letting go of Edith's hands, she smoothed Edith's hair, touched her inflamed cheek, saw the edge of the scratch, undid Edith's blouse, and touched that with her fingertips. ‘It's all right, Edith. Shush. And I take back what I said about Ambrose—he is a good man. And I enjoy him so much. I was just angry. Angry.
C'est la guerre
. The war is making us mad.'

‘I may be doing something dreadfully wrong—with the Avenol matter.'

‘We have to take risks of being wrong.' And Jeanne kissed her lightly again and said, ‘Even you, Edith Alison Campbell Berry.'

Edith sniffed her running nose, and smiled, looking up. ‘It's just plain Edith now.'

‘Edith Berry.'

They looked into each other's eyes. She again tried to find a place for Jeanne's profession of love—that kind of love—but couldn't find a place for it in her life.

‘About our fighting …' Edith tried to find something to say. A way of erasing it. There was nothing to say.

They both began giggling.

‘It was so so dreadful—how could we?' Jeanne said. ‘How
could
we???? Behaving like schoolgirls!'

Their giggling, as juvenile as their fighting, overtook them and, locked in each other's arms, they giggled until they cried. But even then, as she came up out of the depths of their giggling, part of Edith's mind told her that another part of the world had slipped, had become unsteady.

When the giggling did stop and became smiling, she was aware there on the couch that Jeanne wanted to kiss her again.

And that she wanted to kiss Jeanne.

But, by whatever subtle distance she managed to keep from Jeanne, or whatever her mouth showed, it did not give any invitation to the kiss.

It was true that she had willingly joined with Jeanne's first kiss and it was true that she'd felt weak in her knees when they had been in that kiss.

It told her something about her life with Ambrose more than it told her about her feelings for Jeanne.

On the first day at her new posting to the Secretary-General's office, Edith came to the Palais to find maintenance workmen painting red arrows on the walls.

She asked them what they were for.

‘
Abris
,' the foreman said.

‘Shelters from what?
Attaque aérienne
?'

‘
Oui—les bombes
.' The workmen made gestures and whistling noises of how they imagined the bombs falling.

Amused, they seemed to find the dropping of bombs unlikely.

She understood from the scraps of information they threw to her that the arrows were to lead to basements designated as gathering places during attacks from the air.

The paraphernalia of warfare came ever closer. In a shivering way it heightened her senses. It was as if she were coming closer to the very nature of the human species. As if an unreality was being stripped away. She also felt that she was now in it—the war—and she marvelled at how things around her had begun to prepare for it—to administer the war and its destruction. How the wording of signs was being discussed by Swiss committees, how paint was being
ordered—which colour for this? Which colour for that? And how the costing of shelters and the furnishing of shelters was now the daily business of people throughout the world.

How long, though, did the administrative responses remain in place and working? When did these also fall apart? When did the civic administrators decide that it was no longer possible to administer the war? When did they decide to lock their offices and flee, leaving the population to fend for itself?

How dreadful it must be when the signs were still there but the people who had written the signs had fled or been killed. Or when the shelters themselves had collapsed. And when the signs kept on saying shelter or first aid or hospital and there was no shelter, no first aid, no hospital.

That was when war truly began, perhaps, when all had collapsed and it was every person for themselves. She'd heard that a collapsing army was a dreadful sight to witness.

That must mark the end of something too. Military discipline was the last line of anything resembling civilisation.

Would they become animals? Would they scramble over each other and loot? It would be a strange freedom to be able to go into the fine Geneva stores and take what she wanted. To her consternation, she found that the thought of going into a fine shoe store and being able to take what she wanted was tantalising.

Even the petty freedom of being able to go behind a bar and take what you wanted seemed a tantalising fantasy.

She frowned. Part of her was hankering for it, hankering for the freedom which flowed from catastrophe. Not just to see it but for its release from routine and the humdrum of order.

From constraint.

It would be like being let out of school early. Or the absence of the teachers. The sudden absence of rules and supervision.

She was slightly disgusted to find such hankerings within herself.

She met Sweetser in the corridor, who stopped to explain the way the shelters would work. ‘There is an irony,' he said. ‘The Palais—a building constructed to procure peace—is now protecting itself from war. The populations of the cities will huddle in these shelters until the bombing has stopped and then come out of the shelters to find no electricity, no water and the telegraph destroyed. The whole thing will take a week.'

Dear Sweetser, always looking for tragic ironies, grand allegories, turning points in history.

‘Don't make a sonnet of it, Arthur, you'll be out of it all,' she said. ‘When do you leave?'

‘May 15. Regrettably. It's cutting me up. But … the kids.' He looked at her for approval.

Her resigned smile and touch to his arm gave him the approval he needed.

‘You wouldn't like to buy Gerig's car?' he asked.

She contemplated it. Maybe Ambrose and she would need a car for escape or emergency?

‘I'll think about it. I'll let you know.'

She then reminded him, as one of those in on the conspiracy, that he should be cool towards her.

He winked in compliance but said, ‘You've had a fall?', gesturing at her bruised face.

‘Slipped on a banana skin,' she said, with a tone of womanly mystery.

He nodded as if he understood and went off in his characteristically urgent way.

Further along the endless corridor, she met a worried, bewildered Loveday from Economic Section.

His fear of bombs aroused, he wanted to find a safe place for his card index. ‘I have records of all the trade figures of all the countries of the world since 1920,' he said. ‘Their value is incalculable. Edith, you must get someone to do something about it.'

She told him to contact Hadyn at the ILO. ‘He has a small cinema machine which can make photographic copies—3000 copies in an afternoon. So I'm told. You could send a copy of it to London or somewhere safe. Put a set of the cards in a Swiss bank.' She laughed. ‘Maybe not. Maybe even the Swiss banks aren't that safe anymore.'

Ye gods, what was safe? ‘Maybe Australia or New Zealand would be better,' she said weakly. She didn't want to add to his fearfulness.

‘That far away? Do you think so?'

‘Perhaps.'

He thanked her.

She said, ‘Your figures might help us put the world back together again.' She probably shouldn't have said it. It sounded too ominous.

Unsettled by her reply, he stared at her as she walked off.

She turned and called to him, ‘Send a copy to New Zealand—that would be my advice.'

He called to her to wait. She stopped and turned while he came back to her.

‘Could I ask your opinion on another matter?'

‘Of course.'

‘If we were captured and tortured—'

‘Really, Loveday, I don't think that will happen to you. I don't think it will come to that.'

‘There is always a possibility.'

‘Go on. What is it you want?'

‘Do any of your friends have pharmaceutical knowledge?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I believe there is a tablet which can be concealed about one's person and swallowed.'

‘Suicide tablets?'

‘Precisely.'

Ambrose and she had discussed it and Bernard had found some for them. She had a duty, she supposed, to help others.

‘I suppose I could ask around.'

‘Thank you. You're the only person I could come to—on a matter like that.'

Why her? Was her role also to dispense death?

Such grim business now occupied fine minds. ‘I'll contact you tomorrow about it,' she said.

He scurried off.

Her corridor manner belied her inner commotion about her move to Avenol's office. Her inner commotion was not dissimilar to her first day at the League fifteen years before, a day which returned to her again and again, a day of nervous glory.

The new girl.

Avenol was welcoming from the first. Perhaps it was her recently acquired reputation in the
haute direction
as having pro-Avenol sentiments and her being a friend of Jeanne.

Jeanne and she had never discussed the matter again after the day of their scrap. On the surface, everything was as before with Jeanne—and Jeanne was the only one of her old friends with whom she could openly fraternise.

Both of them preferred to take the surface friendliness as the reality and perhaps hope that what lay underneath that surface friendship would properly heal. And Jeanne had not referred again by word or behaviour to her ‘proposal' after the fight.

She suspected that Jeanne had planted things in Avenol's mind which would have given Edith further favour in his eyes.

She simply assumed that Jeanne had not spilled the beans to Avenol.

Avenol asked about her face. She muttered about slipping over and he took no further interest.

As she and her co-conspirators had predicted, the fact that she and Bruce, the chair of Council, were Australians helped.

‘I liked your countryman, Bruce. Bruce and I see eye-to-eye.
We agreed that sanctions against Japan would've been wrong. We agreed on the need for a Central Controlling Committee for the League. To separate the political and military business of the League from the social and economic business. If we'd done what Bruce had argued earlier many countries would have joined up with the League for the social and economic business who were frightened of the political and military. Even the Americans. Now is the time for
un directoire
. That is what we need here in the Secretariat.
Un directoire
to replace all the endless wrangling in the Assembly, the Council, the committees.' He punched his hand. ‘
Un directoire
.'

He stood about the outer office where she was to work but did not offer to help her unpack. She would have to get used to not having an assistant. Gerty had remained in Bartou's office and kept back her tears when Edith had left.

‘I find it interesting that you do not see yourself as British,' he said.

‘I've been here so long now,' she said drolly. ‘I'm perhaps international, or perhaps Genevan.' She smiled, charmingly. ‘Aren't Geneva and Vienna two of the cities which one can claim without having been born there?'

‘I've heard that said.'

‘Or perhaps I am one of the new international aristocracy.'

He didn't respond to that idea.

How well she performed the masquerade and how she hated how well she did it.

As for the Bruce Report, she felt that there was a lot of politics in the ‘social and economic' and a lot of the social and economic in the ‘political'. But that argument was now buried in history. At least until after the war.

She would oppose turning the League into an international department of social services. She still wanted it to be a police station. But she agreed that the international enforcement of peace was a political art still to be learned.

As Avenol left to go back to his inner office, he said, ‘I ask
that you remember only that you work for me now and not for Bartou.'

‘
Mais oui
.'

During the next week, never had Avenol's private filing been more meticulously done—nor as slowly done and redone, as she invented excuses to be in and around his office as he talked endlessly on the telephone.

To her advantage, she found that within the first week Avenol began chatting to her casually.

He liked her company.

Over the days, her unceasing use of French, even on the telephone, also began to put him at ease. But more than all this, she sensed there was another affinity between them which came from her having had, for a time, unusual marital arrangements. So both he and she had an absent spouse and another arrangement. Although so strictly conservative in his politics and administrative style, Avenol was not so in his personal life. His wife was in Paris refusing him a divorce and he had, regardless of opinion, installed Vera Lever in La Pelouse as his mistress.

He was curious to know where Robert was and how she and he saw their marriage although he had difficulty approaching the question directly.

The hopelessly vague, indirect questions restricted by decorum allowed her equally vague and indirect replies.

The unsatisfactory nature of the answers only extended his curiosity and it returned at odd times in the form of yet other indirect questions about her life. Avenol had known Ambrose in the old days, had seen Ambrose crash and leave the League, and had seen Ambrose return to Geneva and had seen them again become a duo.

He was curious about Ambrose and had obviously been party to the gossip that they were a
ménage
. He had also heard on the grapevine that Ambrose had rather publicly moved out of the
ménage
to live in a hotel.

He even sympathised with her about this but his sympathy did not go so far as to accept that her working with him might be the cause.

Ambrose and she still saw each other secretly—after dark, as it were. But they had put it around on the gravevine that he'd been furious that she was siding with Avenol's group and working for him.

In dribs and drabs she let small details of her private life come out, chatting with Avenol although she knew that she was using her very personal life as part of the conspiracy. That she could do this so skilfully somewhat alarmed her.

She had tried at first not to be untrue to herself by her remarks and had then found that this was easier than she would have thought, because she found that she and Avenol actually agreed about much, at least about the stupidity of the conventions for the likes of them and about administrative method, if not about higher policy.

She began to find Avenol quite judicious.

On the day that they heard of Germany's invasion of the neutral states Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, Avenol called her in to take dictation of a memorandum to staff.

He began the dictation: ‘I have heard from the Staff Committee that some members of the Secretariat are in doubt as to the effect which the latest development of the war might or ought to produce in respect to their course of action. Those who desire to do so are free, both morally and administratively, to ask for the suspension of their contract; or if they so wish, to resign and every possible action has already been taken to provide for the security of the staff pensions fund and staff Provident Fund …'