Dark Palace (45 page)

The US State Department had ruled that it was not an oath of allegiance and therefore did not conflict with the American oath of allegiance. The Americans who worked in the Secretariat had been permitted to stay on.

Those from whom she was taking a lead, and perhaps instructions, were not in any way external to the League.

In her heart, then, she felt that she was not being disloyal to the Covenant.

Still, still, still—there were questions of propriety.

It then occurred to her that if she were to play the part of being dumped by the English camp and thrown into the French camp, as it were, then Ambrose would have to somehow be seen to be against her.

She heard the key in the door. Ambrose came in. Bowler hat, umbrella, Burberry raincoat.

Each day he went to work dressed as an English public servant, to work below his talents, in the darkest, smallest office in Geneva.

He came over and kissed her.

He went to the drinks table.

‘Drink?' he asked.

‘Yes, please.'

He flopped down. ‘Wretched day. I see more gun emplacements and sandbagging. The Swiss must be convinced the Germans are coming.'

‘Darling, I think it's time for you to leave.'

‘Leave—flee the enemy? Think not.'

‘Leave the apartment.'

‘Why so?'

He brought over the drinks.

He was unflappable, of course.

She knew, however, how to flap him if she wanted to flap him. He did look at her quizzically.

He had his
hello-what's-going-on
look.

‘Not seriously. It's part of a small conspiracy. I told you I was having a strange meeting today—
l'échange des vues
. It was, of course, much more than that. They'd been talking among themselves before I arrived. The upshot is that I'm to go to Avenol's office. As a watchdog.'

That was a better word for it. Less damning.

‘Watchdog?'

‘Watchdog.'

‘Who wants to put you there as a watchdog?'

‘Lester, Aghnides, Bartou.'

Ambrose stared at her, taking it in.

He whistled. ‘I see.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's a coup.'

‘Not quite. Not yet.'

‘Tread carefully. Avenol is not stupid.'

‘He's lazy. And blind to the things happening around him.'

‘He could bite back.'

‘I'm not doing this without misgivings. I'm frightened.'

‘It's a time to be frightened. You are to insinuate yourself into his office?'

‘Something like that. And as part of it, you're to go to stay at an hotel. Or with Bernard. For the time. To create an impression of rift.'

‘Rift?'

‘Rift between me and the British camp. In Avenol's eyes.'

‘I see.'

‘Do you think I should go along with this?'

Ambrose sipped his drink and thought. ‘In these times—yes. But you'll be at serious risk. If he finds out what you're doing you're finished for good. Gone. Everything you have devoted yourself to, worked for—gone.'

‘I know.'

‘When am I to move out?'

‘I'm not sure yet.'

‘For how long?'

‘I am not sure of that either. A month or so. All will be known by then. In the meantime you're part of the plot and you're to seem to be furious with me for my pro-Avenol stand.'

‘How curious.'

‘ “I do desire we may be better strangers”.'

He smiled, ‘How well put—an elegant quotation for a nasty situation. I don't recognise the quotation. Shakespeare?'

‘
As You Like It
.'

‘Very good, Edith.'

‘Thank you, dear.'

‘Don't fancy moving.'

‘You'll be a free man again.'

‘Maybe free is not the way I wish to be.'

‘You don't have to go. If you wish not to go. I am not yet truly committed to the plot.'

‘These are times of manoeuvres and stratagems. I think we have to act. It's good to see someone doing so.'

‘Yes. It's time to act.'

In the new Palais dining room, now virtually empty of the ever smaller lunch crowd—although she'd noted that the lunch crowd, what was left of it, was staying longer and drinking more—she sat with Jeanne, hiding her new conspiratorial role under a pile of endless chatter.

Jeanne broke into the chatter. ‘What is going on, Edith?'

Edith stopped her babbling and looked up from her fiddling with a cigarette case.

Jeanne looked at her searchingly. ‘You haven't been dismissed by Bartou—I simply don't believe it.'

She smiled tiredly. ‘I can't say just yet. Something is going on. I have to keep it to myself for now.'

After much discussion with Ambrose, her decision had been to tell Jeanne but not just yet.
Salus populi suprema lex
—security before principle.

‘Edith, the world is falling apart—this is no time to hold things back from me. From a friend.'

‘I have to. For reasons which I cannot explain. Sorry, Jeanne.'

After a silence, they both stood up to leave.

Jeanne was far from happy.

Fortunately as they walked back to their offices they were joined by a couple of other lunch stragglers which precluded any more irritable interrogation by Jeanne.

Edith sat there in her office. Around her were the boxes into which she was packing her personal things, her dictionaries, and some private files ready to move to Avenol's office suite.

She knew she was now involved in multiple betrayal—the trust of her position as an officer of the League and probably the betrayal of her friendship with Jeanne and betrayal of some of the others in the wider circle.

Many were asking her searching questions about what had happened between her and Bartou. Some were hurt that she was throwing in her lot with Avenol.

She was being, at the least, misleading, but more brutally, she was now lying to a number of people.

And when it came down to it, she worried about why she was not trusting Jeanne.

In a crumbling, threatening world she found that she increasingly asked not only ‘Who is my enemy? Who is my friend?' but more, who of one's friends could be relied upon in a crisis? Why could she not rely on Jeanne? Why was she placing her allegiance to the conspiracy on a higher order than her friendship with Jeanne? Hadn't she herself been the victim of all this sort of thing with Ambrose and his spying in the old days? She'd been excluded from his secret life by him—presumably by something he saw back then as being of a higher order than their friendship. She, in turn, had squashed her friendship with him in the interests of her higher order—the League.

She had never been able to resolve this eruption in their friendship. Or was there no strict ethical rule about all this? Lovers above friends? Friends above loyalty to a set of beliefs or to a cause? Group allegiances above patriotism? Country above cause?

Was the highest allegiance to those around one who shared an abiding belief? To be like a communist? Noel Field had said to her one drunken night—talking, she thought, about himself, but generalising it all about some of the Reds they knew in his circle, ‘To say the truth and not to say the truth, to be helpful and unhelpful, to keep a promise and break a promise, to go into danger and to avoid danger, to be known and to be unknown. He who fights for communism has, of all the virtues, only one: that he fights for communism.'

Could she substitute the League for communism as her higher allegiance?

And then, one rarely knew the reliability of friendship. Did one's friend hold you in the same esteem that you held them?

Or did the friend also have hidden allegiances which would out-rank the friendship in a crisis? Religion, for example?

She liked Ambrose's formula about having Rotten Friends. But would the Rotten Friend formula permit one to continue a friendship with someone who became a Nazi?

Maybe in life there were only slippery rules and tricky judgements. Or decisions with equally unpalatable possible outcomes.

Should one be guided by what one would prefer at the end of the day when all outcomes had eventuated, even if you were there in the ruins of life?

To have lost a dear friend and to have lost the League? Or to have kept a friend and lost the League?

Jeanne was no pal of Avenol but having been told of the conspiracy, Jeanne would then have to make her own odious moral judgements about the League, about her Secretariat oath, and maybe about her loyalty to France, to a French colleague, despite all their high talk of being above nationality.

That last was the uncertain part.

What would she, Edith, do if the Secretary-General who was behaving dangerously were Australian? Certainly not support him—but would she conspire against him? Outside
their own country, isolated in a foreign country, would she feel some protectiveness towards him?

She supposed she would.

Jeanne was not always rational in her judgement of people or in her placing of trust. She used too many superstitions and intuitions—the colour of a person's eyes, their astrological sign and so on. In fact, Edith sometimes wondered how it was they had remained friends.

Language was a bridge to trust and even though Jeanne and she spoke each other's language they could never truly be sure that they were in each other's language club—the club of subtle meanings.

The League Secretariat had thought it was above all extraneous and petty allegiances. Had worked to be better than that.

And many times they had managed to rise above nationality and language. Some of them at some times had risen above those obstacles.

The others in the conspiracy had entrusted her with this judgement. She could no longer maintain the position of
salus populi suprema lex
.

There was absolutely no way she could determine whether Jeanne would betray the conspiracy. But she would take the risk.

She stirred herself from her thinking.

At that moment, Jeanne burst into the room.

Jeanne was ablaze.

She burst out, ‘It is not good enough, Edith, it is not good enough for you to say you cannot tell
yet
. After all we have seen together. Not good enough.'

She leaned forward, two hands on the desk, as though resting her anger there.

Edith leaned back on the sprung chair, as if making distance between herself and Jeanne's temper, trying to find words. ‘Sit down, I'll tell you all.'

‘Edith. No. I do not want to know. No. That is no longer at issue. What is at issue is that you would not tell me until now that I confront you. You would not tell me out of friendship.'

Edith rushed to say, ‘These are horrible times. We find ourselves behaving badly—behaving strangely.'

‘
You
find
yourself
behaving badly, you smug one. Not everyone is behaving strangely. Look at you—leaning back in your chair so arrogantly.'

Jeanne's abuse crashed through and struck her.

She leaned forward to refute the charge of arrogance. ‘I was simply leaning back, Jeanne. Don't be silly. I was just leaning back. I am not arrogant.'

Jeanne walked angrily about the office.

‘Jeanne listen to me …'

Edith stood up and came around the desk to Jeanne.

Jeanne turned to face her and said angrily, ‘I will not
listen
. You have a superiority about you which is not justified. You live a strange life—you
dénatures
yourself with Ambrose Westwood. I have never really understood that liaison. What you are doing with him? You had a good husband even if I did not like him. And you go off to places without your friends—let me finish—you are a secretive, snobbish person. And you parade as the great lover of the peace and of the world yet you find everyone around you
imparfait
. And you live with a man who is
imparfait
as a man.'

Jeanne had never, never spoken to her this way.

‘You know nothing of my friendship with Ambrose. Don't speak that way. You know nothing.'

‘I know. I can tell.'

Edith found fighting words leaping to her mouth and she shouted back, ‘Surely it's you, you with your Frenchness—it's you who parades superiority. Pretends to know the secret ways of the world. Looks down on the rest of the world, looks down on Australians such as me. But look at your country now!'

‘Don't you dare talk with disrespect about France. We will repel the Germans. You will see.'

‘If the British Empire does the fighting for you—as perusual.'

Oh how silly. She was saying silly things. They were both saying silly things.

Edith was not sure who hit whom first, the first slap—perhaps they both went to slap each other at the same time.

She felt the incredible pain of the slap which seemed to be something so much more powerful than a hand and at the same time felt her own palm hit Jeanne's ear rather than the cheek, failing as a slap.

The pain in her cheek drove her to try again to slap Jeanne but Jeanne pushed her away roughly and she fell against a chair, which tipped over. She recovered herself and lurched back at Jeanne and hit her shoulder with her hand and this time Jeanne went backwards.

Edith felt all self-control go, and she hit out at Jeanne with both hands, trying to slap both sides of her face, but the slaps went wild and hit Jeanne's neck and chest.

Jeanne lunged forward and grabbed Edith's hair, dislodging the hair clip, and jerked the hair, pulling her head down, the hair paining at the roots.

She went on flailing her hands trying to hit Jeanne although she couldn't get her head up to see her.

They were both breathless with fury as Edith now tried in turn to grab Jeanne's hair, getting hold of it so that they were both pulling at each other's hair with one hand and slapping with the other.

Jeanne stumbled against a chair and fell backwards onto the arm of the couch and then off the arm to the floor, her hair pulling free of Edith's grip, at the same time. She herself lost her grip on Jeanne's hair.

Edith glared down at Jeanne.

Edith dropped to her knees and went for Jeanne again, getting down and kneeling on her arms and gripping her
throat, not to choke so much, more to shake her, to bang her head against the floor.

All her fights with her brother and others in the playgrounds of Jasper's Brush came back to Edith and she heard herself shouting, ‘Give up! Give up? Give up! Give up???' first as a command and then as an interrogation.

Jeanne was trying to bang her with clenched fists but her arms were pinned by Edith's knees.

‘Take it back! Take back what you said about me and Ambrose!' Edith said, her voice made high pitched by her temper. ‘Take it back!'—fleetingly wondering if Jeanne would know what ‘take it back' meant.

‘False friend!' Jeanne said. ‘Traitor! Traitor!'

Edith then sat back on Jeanne's stomach, and let go of Jeanne's arms, her ears hurting from the clouts of Jeanne's fists. Jeanne was gasping for air, her body still struggling.

Edith felt her fury subsiding.

Jeanne spat at her.

The wetness of spittle hit her forehead.

Edith's tears came—a different sort of tear, as if from a different part of her eyes, tears from a different emotion.

Tears of violation and insult—she wanted to spit back but her mouth was dry. She wiped her face quickly with the back of her right hand and, drawing her hand back, slapped Jeanne with force, a slap which began way out and which connected perfectly and powerfully.

Jeanne gave a cry of acute pain and stopped struggling, her hands going to her face.

Edith looked down at her, fearing that she had injured her, the slap being so powerful, so perfectly landed, so fierce.

She saw that Jeanne had given up fighting.

Edith stood up, brushing her skirt, tucking in her blouse, straightening her hair.

Her breathing was so rapid it was difficult for her to catch her breath.

She went over and picked up her hair clip, keeping one eye on Jeanne who remained on the floor, sobbing with pain.

Well, she'd asked for it.

Edith found her feelings changing to concern for Jeanne and for the French, and for herself, a confused sense of shame jostling with feelings of base satisfaction about what had just happened.

Jeanne got to her feet.

They stood opposite each other at a safe distance, both with uneven breathing.

Jeanne fixed her clothing, looking down at a huge ladder in her stocking, putting a finger to it, her tearful eyes all the while looking cautiously back at Edith.

Jeanne then straightened up, threw her hair back and strode out of the office, slamming the door.

The sound of the slam of the door seemed to go on and on.

A mess.

A bloody, bloody mess.

She hadn't explained the situation to Jeanne.

Her fingers explored the swelling on the left side of her face and a scratch on her neck. She went to the washbasin annex to her office and examined the scratch in the mirror. She remembered the spittle but did not feel disgusted. She washed her face and hands thoroughly for the sake of her appearance, dried herself gently, and then redid her make-up, putting foundation and powder over the scratch, and buttoned up her blouse, pulling up the collar. The scratch still showed a little.

Back in her office, she stood unable to grasp quite what had happened in the bizarre whirlwind.

She found it so hard to believe, as if it were some bad dream which had leapt into the room from her childhood. A feeling too, that it was part of the total disintegration of things around them.

Trembling still, although her breathing was returning to normal, she righted the chair, and sat down on the couch.

Oh, how bloody awful.

How bloody awful.

The door swung open again.

Jeanne burst back in. Edith rose from the couch and brought her hand up in fright. But Jeanne was not attacking. She came straight to Edith, embraced her and she embraced Jeanne back.