Grand Days (35 page)

There were knowing noises from members of the audience, and a light clapping of approval.

Edith was fascinated by this statement. It made graphic the fact that, in life, there were people who made decisions for or against us, who might be acting from punitive or other concealed reasons, about which we would never know. There were hidden gods. There were perhaps many such gods in any one person's life. ‘For obvious reasons, we do not wish to bring police attention to the club.'

‘I, myself, would be glad to invite any attention I can get,' said the
travesti
who had claimed both the doormen, in a stage falsetto voice. He was becoming the meeting comedian. Lessening tension. A few laughed. Mr Follett smiled, and said, ‘Olivia, you get too much attention,' and then went on seriously: ‘To put it another way, we do not wish to become a police file.'

He suggested that in future people leave the club in groups.
Ambrose asked if he could speak. He rose to his feet and said in his normal male voice that it was important the club members show they were not intimidated. They should go on with the activities of the club. However, it was also important that club members not provoke the Action Civique by flaunting their behaviour. Comings and goings, for instance, should be discreet, and he suggested with respect, that patrons leaving the club wear regular overcoats and hats, and so on.

‘Darling, I wouldn't know how to be discreet,' Olivia said, drawing laughter, ‘it goes against my nature.' Edith sensed that the audience felt Olivia was overtaxing its willingness to joke about the matter.

For the first time that evening, Edith also smiled. She realised that the sense of bizarreness which she'd felt up to now had dissipated and what was around her, and where she was, had become unexceptional, almost prosaic.

Mr Follett said he noted and he hoped others noted, and he hoped that Olivia noted, Carla's point, which he endorsed. Edith was surprised that Mr Follett knew Ambrose's
nom déguisée
and it awakened the feelings she'd had about Ambrose's evasiveness. That Ambrose had more to do with the club and everything about it than he'd told her. But she also decided to cease worrying about the club and Ambrose's murky connections. This was to be definitely her last visit.

Those who had been injured would be compensated from a members' fund which the club was starting with a donation of 1,000 francs. There were other details.

Free drinks and hors d'oeuvres were then handed around and Mr Follett's assistant manager announced that a diverting spectacle had been devised and would be performed.

Those club members who were to perform left the meeting
to prepare themselves. The chairs were pushed into clusters, tables brought out, and the meeting dissolved into a social evening. The Negro orchestra appeared and took their places. Other people were arriving now, perhaps having chosen to miss the meeting.

‘Can we go now?' she asked Ambrose.

‘Let's see the show.'

‘I'm not sure I want to see the show.' She wanted to leave but remembered the menace which still hung about the club. Irritated, she realised she would have to wait for Ambrose as an escort.

The lights went down and the orchestra began to play. The curtain rose on the small stage.

There were uneasy giggles and appreciative gasps, as three of the cast danced on stage, costumed as Action Civique.

A voice in the audience shouted out in mock horror, ‘Oh no. Who asked for an encore?'

Edith felt a clutching of her stomach as she saw the armbands, the black leather caps and the batons again. Ambrose gave a small sideways glance at her, as if checking to see that she was all right, and he took her hand.

Then on stage danced three pretty
travesties
who joined with the Action Civique actors in singing popular songs. After the singing, the female performers went into a salacious cabaret routine of grappling, resisting and dancing with the Action Civique, and then baring themselves, offering themselves. Edith was both riveted and chilled. She watched as those dressed as Action Civique went through a re-enactment of the lifting of dresses with the batons and the touching of the genitals with' the batons, much, much play with batons, but with the
travesties
circumspectly keeping their backs turned to the audience.

They played out a funny sketch full of sexual innuendo where the Action Civique were vanquished with a repeated chorus line about ‘men who needed batons'.

Edith thought that the spectacle had been well rehearsed. There were cries of ‘show us' and eventually, as the finale, the girls did turn around, lifting their skirts and dresses to show their underwear and glimpses of their tucked away bulges.

Edith was glad the lights were down, because she had never seen anything as salacious as this. Taking another drink from the waiter, she drank deeply, seeking calm from the alcohol. She had heard of shows in Berlin and Paris. The atmosphere in the club was no longer prosaic. It was, she thought, very much an atmosphere of the times. During other events, she had felt that she was of the times. Being in Geneva she sometimes felt that, too. And now, in this cabaret, she felt it. The darker side of the times.

There was excessive applause from the audience, and the cast came back and took a bow, the Action Civique and the ‘girls' of the cast linking arms. The lights came on.

Mr Follett thanked the audience again but said that as it was not a regular night for the club, the club would be closing now and he wished them all good night. He reminded any club patron who had suffered injury and medical expenses to give details to himself or to the assistant-manager.

She was relieved that the night was over.

As she and Ambrose stood up, Mr Follett came to them and said quietly that he would like to invite them upstairs to his apartment, for a nightcap drink and a chat, when the others had gone.

Edith rushed to say that really they had to go, and found that her voice wobbled from the drinks she'd had.

Mr Follett said, ‘You are a heroine of mine, you were very
brave. I insist you honour me with your presence.'

Edith managed to say graciously, ‘We were all heroines on that night.'

But she again felt an embarrassed worry about how much he had seen on the dreadful night. She now worried too about compromising the League by any closer involvement with the Molly Club. She glanced at Ambrose, hoping that he would extricate them from the invitation by saying that they had to go. He didn't. Instead, he enthusiastically accepted.

They waited, drinking, while the last few patrons, reluctant to leave, clinging to the evening, were eventually ushered out by the doormen, good-naturedly protesting as they went. Mr Follett went about putting out lights and collecting ashtrays. She and Ambrose finished their drinks in the emptied club and she felt, standing there, how the empty nightclub seemed to rebuff the presence of only one couple, as if one couple alone did not belong in a nightclub.

His duties finished, Mr Follett came to them and led them by an interior stairway at the back of the club up two flights to his apartment. He knocked on the door in a way that announced his arrival to whoever was inside the apartment. The door was opened by one of the young men who had acted as Action Civique in the show, and who was still in costume, and they went in. She and Ambrose were introduced and she was again praised for her courage. She said she would prefer now for that to be put behind them all.

‘Agreed,' said Bernard Follett. ‘Bernard Follett says that to laugh is to demolish.'

She thought, but did not say, that sometimes humour simply dodges.

It was a luxurious place, with well-chosen furniture and
objets d'art
. While Mr Follett fussed about drinks, she occupied herself
by examining a bright blue screen which divided the room and which was decorated with golden peacocks whose tails reached from the top of the six-foot-high screen down to the floor in an oriental style.

She turned from the screens and screwed herself up to being sociable. The company of the smiling boy dressed as Action Civique caused an unsteady apprehension, an entwining of the pleasant and the unpleasant. He was a living sculpture of a threat and of her dread, now turned to a matter of play-acting, to a social ornament — for when she allowed her gaze to focus on him as a person, she could see that he was muscular and very handsome.

Music came from a gramophone.
The Firebird
. Bernard Follett began dancing with Ambrose, and she, by pressure of circumstance, danced with the Action Civique boy, who called himself Patrice.

The pairing into dancing couples seemed to happen so easily, so inescapably, although it became obvious to her that Ambrose was an attraction to both Bernard Follett and to Patrice. This at first surprised her but she had to remind herself that Ambrose, well, was very familiar to her, but that to them he was ‘fresh', and when she looked at him through their eyes, she could see that he made a very attractive
travesti
. She also reminded herself that these men were not necessarily interested in a woman as a woman.

Patrice took something of a polite interest in her, although she felt she had to share it with his over-the-shoulder interest in Ambrose, but this interest was sufficient for her, for that night, and for the circumstances. She did not want, in any way, the burden of amorous attention.

The record on the gramophone came to an end and she
considered that she might let herself become drunk. Or she might not. She might get up from the sofa where she had now flopped, find her coat, and take her leave. Or she might not. But if she was simply contemplating ‘getting up' while remaining seated, she was almost lost — that was a sure indication that her will was oozing away.

She might let herself be kissed by Patrice. Their eyes kept meeting each other's lips as they talked. Or she might not.

She would go now. Rising to her feet she asked Mr Follett to telephone the taxi depot and arrange for a taxi to be sent to the club.

‘Of course.' He offered no argument.

Ambrose said he would go with her.

‘Stay,' she said. ‘Have a night out.'

‘You don't mind?'

She smiled and shook her head. Their eyes met and registered that she was ‘resigning' from the club. She was backing away from the club and all its works.

‘I'll see you at the office,' she said. This told him that she was going to her own rooms.

He took her hand. ‘Thank you, Edith. Again.'

Follett helped her into her coat and walked down the stairs with her to wait for the taxi.

The doormen were still putting things away.

‘It is all right,' she said to Follett, ‘I will wait here on my own.

Follett told the doorman to see her to the taxi and he said good night and left her.

Shortly after, her taxi driver came to the door of the club and the doorman called to her.

In the taxi she wondered whether such things as the Molly
Club had happened in her parents' times. Her mind attempted to visualise what Ambrose might be doing back in Follett's apartment.

As she lay back in a late-night bath she thought to herself that she wouldn't be surprised if the night had indeed been, in Ambrose's word, cathartic. However she did not think that she would go back to the Molly Club.

Next day at lunch she asked Ambrose whether he'd had ‘a good time'.

He smiled diffidently. ‘Oh yes. Nothing wrong with a little Greek revelry. Once in a while.' She smiled, but without the confidence of knowing fully what she was smiling about. Nor did she wish to know more.

‘As long as it's without moderation,' he added.

She asked him if he thought that there had been such clubs as the Molly in their parents' time.

Ambrose looked at her with his frown of amusement. ‘As shocking as it may be, dear Edith, I believe that it happened also in our parents' time.'

‘You think they were as wicked as us?'

‘I do believe they were. Some of them.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Oh? I've seen the forbidden books of their time. And I hear tell.' Ambrose prattled on. ‘We could die of etiquette. In fact, I knew a chap who died of etiquette. Death from good form, the coroner said. Need to break out now and then.'

She could tell that he was trying to be sure that she felt ‘right' about it all.

What she felt glad of was that she had ventured into that dark world not as a place to live, but as a locale she had now visited and where she'd been able to glimpse more of the nature of things. Or perhaps, the de-naturing of things.

About three weeks after this strange night, Edith was walking along the rue de Berne when she saw the young man who had assaulted her. He was unloading boxes from a truck outside a store. He looked hot and miserable. She took off the glove of her right hand, walked over to him, and slapped his face.

His hand went to the slapped cheek and his eyes were dully uncomprehending, stunned.