Grand Days (61 page)

Edith considered this an acceptable enquiry but wondered how to talk about it. She did not want the change in Ambrose's fortunes and the change in her affections to be directly related.

‘Ambrose Westwood and I parted ways over a year ago.'

Robert Dole absorbed this. He said, ‘My analysis of his position in the Secretariat before his recent breakdown was that he'd slipped a number of rungs on the ladder. My analysis of your position is that you had gone up — at least more than two jumps.'

‘You know I can't talk about Ambrose's personal affairs.'

‘I respect that. Allow me to think aloud. It seems to me that it was punishment, but for what? Not incompetence, because incompetence would have been revealed earlier.' He watched her face.

‘Please,' she said, realising as she said it, that serious limits surrounded their relationship because of his work as a reporter, and further, she felt a pang of guilt on hearing Ambrose's fall and her rise twined together.

‘I am thinking aloud,' he said, pursuing the subject over her objections. ‘He did something wrong and you did something right. It is unlikely that he got caught with the family silver. He didn't seem to have a drinking predicament — any more than any of us, that is. He was not lazy. I found him at times a little daft, but how would that make him stand out in this town? He had an acid wit. But that wouldn't be sufficient to warrant demotion. What, then? I say that it was probably some very serious gaffe he had made in a very important place. Maybe he annoyed one of the Council members? Offended the pride of some nation?'

Bartou also had seen Ambrose as a bit daft. She'd never thought of him that way and it startled her. Perhaps she'd been too close to him. And if he had an ‘acid wit', he had never used
it against her. Had what she'd taken as his fun-loving self really been a form of madness?

She did not want Robert Dole to be a correspondent. She wanted to be free to talk about all things with him.

On he went, ‘Or did he seriously annoy Sir Eric? And for you to be rewarded with promotion? As always, there's much spy talk. Was Major Westwood spying for the Russians?'

She was impressed that in his meandering way he had unknowingly reached close to the truth, but she was not made in any way comfortable by seeing the bared truth, ghostlike in the conversation, even if she alone could see the ghost.

‘Please, Robert, I don't like this talk. We have to change the subject. What's happened to Ambrose is sad but recent reports about his health are encouraging.'

‘I apologise. He isn't the first to have broken down. The League is hard on people, it seems.'

To enforce the change of subject she asked him whether a member of the Secretariat and a member of the press gallery could ever be true friends.

‘Good question,' he said earnestly. ‘But as from tonight I may not be a member of the press gallery — I am from tonight an
author
.'

She dearly hoped that was correct.

He then spoiled it all while they were eating their
canard a l'orange
, by being flippant about the League.

He repeated a rather old joke about the League of Nations being the wastepaper basket of the world. But the joke caused her constraint with him to return, and her willingness to follow her desire for him to weaken.

He made it even worse by saying that, no, the League was not a wastepaper basket, that he would withdraw that remark. Instead, he agreed with Stresemann's remark. The League was
more a marketplace where nations were bought and sold.

She further withdrew into herself and held back from the conversation. He noticed it and commented.

She said that defeatist jokes about the League pained her.

He said that she should develop a sense of humour.

She said that he should develop a sensitivity of humour.

There was a momentary silence between them. Then he laughed in appreciation of her retort. She smiled to herself but was still distanced from him.

‘I am really a little tired of these old jokes about the League,' she said. ‘It is not that I lack humour or that I cannot joke about the League.'

‘But remember what Stresemann went on to say. He said that he wanted to be there
because
it was a marketplace. If there were dealings going on, he wanted a seat on the stock exchange.'

‘I still don't like to talk about the League that way,' she said, and thinking that it sounded priggish, ‘I like jokes that sharpen points, not jokes that dismiss thinking.' In truth, she still had a lot of trouble with joking about serious matters.

‘Hence, you enjoy the Kelen caricature,' he said craftily, touching the rolled-up sketch on the table.

‘Yes,' she said, looking at it again.

The conversation did pick up but she was still resistant to him and he had again lost her concurrence in any ventures of a romantic kind which he might have had in his head for this evening, although she doubted that he knew he'd lost this concurrence.

They were choosing cheese from the chariot when the head waiter came to the table and said that Mr Dole was needed at the telephone.

While he was away, she worked half-heartedly on her speech of non-acceptance of any amorous invitation which might follow
dinner. She smiled as she remembered Jeanne's joke about the women in Secretariat spending all day saying, ‘Yes, monsieur,' and all night saying, ‘No, monsieur.' Especially when the Assembly was in session or during a large conference. This would be her no-monsieur speech. She wished with her whole heart she could have given a yes instead.

He returned in a mood of nervous aliveness.

‘My office is looking for me. That was Miriam.'

‘Do you have to go?'

This would be an easy way for her to escape the claims and inducements of the night. Or was he, perhaps, escaping the night, fleeing from her? That idea made her feel alarmed — that this call from his secretary might have been prearranged for him to get out of a dinner if he felt it had gone badly. She heard of people who made such pre-arrangements. But why was she thinking like that? Was suspicion now branded into her soul?

‘I should. Tonight, at least, I am still a newspaper man.' He looked at her meaningfully. ‘However, I do not plan to go just yet.'

‘That's nice,' she said, relieved by his wish to stay, seeing it as evidence that he wasn't fleeing her, regardless of her own plans for flight, and confused that she should have cared whether or not he was fleeing her.

‘Regardless of the calls of duty I can assure you that I intend to remain with you as long as it pleases you. To hell with London and Berlin.'

‘I am honoured.'

‘Given that we are, among other things, honouring Aristide Briand, I recall that he once said, “There will be no war as long as I am alive.” He could very well have meant that when he died, there was sure to be war. He is not far from death. Stresemann's gone — not only from a broken heart and too much
work either. I once saw him eat half a pound of caviare.'

He referred again to his humour, as a way of apology. ‘Edith, you shouldn't misread my humour. I know that I am sometimes brutish.'

Was he really brutish? If so, what would she make of a man who was so? Was he capable of white anger with her? What underself would she find in him? She recalled the wrist-grabbing incident. How scintillating we all are, she thought, when we are simply curious creatures in the distance, before we come close and search the other, find the underselves and the blemished nature.

He looked serious, and then grimaced. ‘I have too many painful feelings about too many things about which I can do nothing. I use joking to avoid being hounded by them.'

He was giving her an insight into his nature, which did not seem to her to be brutish at all, and she could see that it was hard for him to say it, and her tenderness towards him returned and went out to him. ‘My jokes are pain,' he said, grimacing.

Edith suspended her speech of non-acceptance of romantic proposals, and again thought fleetingly about birth control.

He seemed bent on continuing with confession. ‘You'll be curious to know, Edith, that I have now, these recent minutes, concluded a negotiation within myself, a change of position. A not altogether painless change of position.'

She looked at him, indeed with curiosity. ‘I hope,' she said smiling, picking up the reference to the negotiations at lunch earlier in the day, ‘that I can make it easy for you to negotiate this change, whatever it might be — as long as it is, of course,' smiling encouragingly at him, ‘a change of stance which I favour.'

‘I do not see — if I ever did see — the League as a wastepaper basket.' He looked down at the table in thought.

‘That pleases me.'

‘To change the metaphor, I see the League as our fire station.'

Edith had never heard the League referred to as a fire station.

He went on, ‘I have this feeling, new to me, and it came to me tonight — I'll explain — that the League will need all the firemen it can get.'

On hearing Robert Dole commit himself to the League, she said, ‘Surely it hasn't been the pleasure of my company that has changed you? My company could've been had for a lesser concession.' Not true.

He shook his head. ‘You haven't told me what changed your attitude to me,' he said, parrying her question, ‘your reappraisal of me?'

‘I have reappraised my attitudes to you, Robert Dole,' she said lightly, ‘but I should warn you that the reappraisal continues.'

She hoped her tone was emotionally reassuring to him.

He said that the telephone call from Miriam was about news from Berlin. In the elections the National Socialist party had 107 deputies elected. ‘They'd only twelve in the old Reischstag.'

‘And this has changed your stand on the League?'

She did not quite see the connection.

Robert Dole said he was opting for the bureaucratic wizardry of the League, however lumbering it was, against the diseased magic which he saw happening in Germany and Austria. ‘I sense magicians at work to summon up the dark forces. Democracy is no safeguard. It can allow civilised behaviour but it does not guarantee it. Democracy can endorse evil. Only a guardian of the ethos can save us. The League. If only it can make a powerful military combination to defend the Covenant.'

She thought he was probably over-alarmed by the Berlin
election result. The British ambassador in Berlin, Lord d'Abernon, had told Bartou and her privately that the National Socialists were not the problem. She wouldn't say anything about Lord d'Abernon just now. She'd tell him at some other more useful time. Maybe she'd tell him ‘in the morning' — she savoured the expression and all it meant.

She thought of the night when he had argued that France was an enemy of peace, and a danger, and she hadn't understood. ‘I feel embarrassed.'

‘About what?'

‘About that time you argued with me about the danger of France. I was naïve. I've been embarrassed ever since. France is a danger. I know that now. I was bewitched by Briand.'

‘I don't really remember. I know that for a while I went on about France. I was frightened by France.'

‘You don't remember the night we … tussled … we argued? You wrote me a note of apology?'

‘We've had a few disagreements, Edith. I remember the note but not the argument.'

He said her name in a way she had not heard him say it before and it warmly alerted her to the changes happening between them.

It was mollifying to realise that events which we recalled in embarrassment were often forgotten by those who witnessed them. Of course — those who witnessed such embarrassment never felt the embarrassment.

She sat there enjoying the release from that embarrassing night when she'd argued against him. She was released from her naïvety. He remembered nothing of it.

‘And to think I nearly wrote you a note apologising for my naïvety,' she laughed.

He smiled back. ‘Naïve is the last thing I would see you as.'

How extraordinary.

He then said, ‘Why don't we stay here at the Bergues?'

‘Stay?' The proposal, of a kind, had arrived, perhaps more decisively than she had fantasised. ‘Book into the hotel, you mean?'

‘Yes.'

‘Without bags, without being married, without a reservation?' Was she now about to reveal her naïvety?

‘Without all those things.'

‘With the staff knowing?'

‘I am afraid I can't arrange for us to stay without the staff knowing,' he said smiling at her, taking her hand. ‘Of course, if you prefer … I realise that it is rather impulsive. Inconsiderate?'

She had vowed to cease being Bohemian. Prefer what? What had she expected to happen? She supposed they might have gone to his apartment. If anything was going to happen. She'd never taken a man to her rooms, which would be embarrassing, facing the inquisitive eyes of the other residents the next morning. She had managed to avoid that so far in her life and had kept, at least, her rooms chaste. His place? She had no idea where he lived. He seemed to be forever in bars and cafés.

‘I hadn't anticipated staying, well, staying here at the Bergues,' she said, and as she listened to herself, she realised that it implied that she had intended staying somewhere else, with him. ‘It is difficult. The arrangements.' She had trouble imagining the ‘staying' without luggage, without proper attention to her personal details.

‘You remain here at the table and I will arrange everything.'

‘Isn't it scandalous?' she said half-seriously, and wondering how he would take care of everything which included her personal necessities.

‘I don't think that we can do anything that the Hôtel des
Bergues hasn't seen before. And we are, for the present time of our lives, in the rank just below where our behaviour becomes public scandal. And it is, after all, the hotel of the French delegations and we know about the conduct of the French.'