Dark Palace (47 page)

They were interrupted by a telephone call which Edith handed to Avenol. When he put it down he said, ‘Chamberlain has gone—Churchill is Prime Minister of Britain.'

Her spirits soared. But she did not show her reaction. She looked at Avenol and saw no indication of what his reaction was to this news.

She became cautious, sensing that this could be a crucial test of her position. To cheer, which is what she felt like doing, might be too British.

Perhaps he was watching her.

He did not ask for her reaction.

He then said, ‘With Churchill it will now be total war. I wish to meet with the Permanent Delegates. Arrange that.'

‘Returning now to the memorandum. Add this: The Headquarters of the Secretariat will remain in Geneva. The Administration cannot accept any responsibility as regards the practical possibility of travelling, nor as regards the safety of officials and their families whether in Geneva or elsewhere.'

By not cheering Churchill she had made a silent lie. She observed that she was able to enjoy the success of her dissembling. It had within it a prowess which could be enjoyed for its own sake. The way a criminal, perhaps, enjoyed his skill as a safe-breaker or confidence trickster.

And she was impressed by how cool she was as she took such ominous dictation.

As she typed it up she saw that his memorandum was the beginning of the end.

And the war was moving significantly closer to Switzerland.

The closer the end came the freer she felt from ethical or other restraints.

Out in the general office, the staff were behaving like nurses by not crying and not panicking, going about their business with the appearance of normality—although in a few cases, she knew that relatives and friends were increasingly in the war zone.

Later that morning, Lester came into Avenol's office without an appointment, passing her by in the outer office without a comment or glance.

There had been no communication between the Secretary-General and his Deputy for months.

It occurred to her that Lester might need a witness, and she went into Avenol's office on some pretext and was hardly noticed.

Avenol was arguing against Lester's demand for an evacuation plan for the League.

Lester said that it was time for the Secretariat to have a plan to move to safe ground and to go on working.

As she pulled files from Avenol's personal cabinet and dawdled, she realised she enjoyed the invisibility of a clerical worker—she came into focus only when he needed her for work or to relax and talk with, but at all other times she was invisible.

Part of the furniture.

She heard Avenol accuse Lester of funk. ‘The French are more disciplined: the safety of families has to be ignored. In France the family and the head of the household go down together. So it will be with the League.'

Emotionally, she found herself rather agreeing with Avenol.

Lester kept saying that a plan for evacuating the families, at least, was necessary.

Avenol refused, ‘For the families of the
haute direction
to be seen to be scurrying for safe haven is bad for the morale.'

‘All right then,' Lester, said turning to leave. ‘That is easy then: if there is no plan then I accept no responsibility.'

Edith thought Lester was rather petulant.

Avenol stood and walked with Lester to the door—not, it seemed, from any politeness but from a need to continue to make his point. ‘We must accept the fate of the Swiss people who are our host nation. We accepted their protection in peace: now let us join them in their fate.'

Edith found herself impressed by Avenol's rhetoric and dissatisfied with Lester, even if the rhetoric made no real sense.

She also knew that rhetoric was something of a sign that the person using it was unsure of what to do.

After Lester had left, Avenol noticed her in the room and said, ‘You heard? You agree?'

‘I do agree,' she said. ‘For the League to run is to invite all to run.'

‘Lester is a scared dog.'

She didn't comment.

She looked at him. He was leaning back in his Napoleonic pose.

‘Do you have your haversack packed with chocolate and tinned food?' he asked her, his voice carrying a note of derision about the idea.

‘I should, I suppose. But I don't,' she lied.

Her reply pleased Avenol. ‘All the English have their haversacks of chocolate, clean underwear, wax matches, candles, and soap.'

He laughed to himself.

That evening in their dark banquette at the Molly Club where she and Ambrose were continuing to meet, Ambrose said he believed that by the new offensive against the neutrals, the Germans had begun their decline.

‘Overstretched,' he said.

She wanted to believe it but so much of what they'd all said over the last few months had turned out to be wrong.

She felt they were sunk in half-information, misinformation, fantasies, and the distortions of fear—and that all their intelligence could not find a way out.

The Molly had lost a few of its regulars, those she'd known only by their party names—‘Madame de Stael', ‘Maisy', ‘Delores' and so on, fluttering about in the dim light in dark flirtations. The one or two South Americans, she knew from accents alone, were still there, protected, they hoped, by neutrality and commerce.

Bernard kept on with the cabarets and their satire became even more grim.

Newcomers continued to arrive—still more refugees—and sometimes they too came in the masks and garb of the anonymous night. How did they come to know of the Molly? How did people from across Europe know of it and its strange ways? Coming down the stairs for the first time, uneasily, warily, until absorbed into the low hubbub and occasional screaming laughter and hysterical humour.

Sometimes, she noticed, Bernard seemed to be expecting the newcomers, or knew them, or had been warned of their coming. How did it all work?

And more often now, Bernard would be found in the Club annex or in one of the small upstairs rooms, deep in serious discussion with people she did not know.

She returned to the war, the never-ending discussion. ‘The taking of the neutral countries has cost them very little militarily,' she said to Ambrose.

‘But the Germans now have to garrison these countries.'

‘That's true.'

The exchange was typical of the sort which she and others
wanted
to believe. She could recognise them now.

Ambrose leaned in and said, with special emphasis, ‘It is not the
loss
of blood—it is the presence of blood which will undo the Germans now.'

‘Explain, darling,' she said. ‘No enigmas tonight.'

‘Roosevelt has Belgian and Dutch blood in his family line,' he said, with a flourish.

She giggled at yet another example of Ambrose's miscellany of little-known facts. ‘I hope, dear, that you are perfectly correct,' she said. ‘I keep forgetting that you are an expert on bloodlines.'

Bernard came over, his usual stylish, feminine self. ‘My darlings! What's the gossip?'

‘Bloodlines, Bernice. But there is no gossip. All gossip has dried up.'

‘Of one thing I am certain in this most uncertain of worlds: there is always gossip.
Par example
, you are now very close to M. Avenol—mysteriously close to him. And
she
has already told me of the bloodlines theory. We'll see.'

She looked at Ambrose.

Ambrose shook his head at her, denying that he had passed on anything about the conspiracy.

Bernard was astute and an ally, but he could not be made one of those in the know.

As usual, she reported to her co-conspirators on the Saturday morning at their prearranged rendezvous in McGeachy's apartment on the rue Bourg du Four.

They seemed amused but not worried that she found herself somewhat in accord with Avenol.

‘He seems to me to be keeping his nerve,' she reported.

‘You know, I think he uses artificial aids,' Lester said.

‘A drug of some sort?' Bartou asked, surprised.

‘Some serum or other. It's a feeling I have—his manner, it seems to swing.'

She said she had seen no evidence of this. She found it an unlikely idea.

Lester rather uneasily announced that his wife, Elsie, was packing to leave that night.

‘The children are in Ireland,' he reminded them. ‘One parent should be there.'

‘Of course,' said Aghnides.

As usual the loss of anyone was seen as disturbing, a loosening of the timbers of the ship.

Lester said that all Americans had been instructed by the Consul to leave Switzerland.

The Sweetsers' farewell party was that night.

Lester seemed to be implementing a policy of evacuating families regardless of Avenol.

She reported that Avenol was not doing anything untoward, and that he was taking the usual steps to allow staff to return to their home countries, arranging internal matters. ‘We have booked alternative accommodation for the Secretariat in France, in case of an invasion of Switzerland,' she revealed.

It was accepted without much comment.

The talk then turned to the continued German advances.

She did not report that she had a growing inner conflict about being a traitor to her office—that is, to Avenol's office. There was an ethic about what one owed an office, both in the sense of the position and in the physical sense of the bonds of the people who worked together.

Such qualms seemed self-centred in the threatening atmosphere which surrounded Geneva like a fog.

Avenol and she began to draft a protest for Council against the German invasion of the neutral countries.

As she dutifully took down the draft, she felt now how impotent the words of a League of Nations protest were against the relentless rolling forward of the German tanks with their fresh, clean, crews in their new uniforms.

Later that morning, Avenol went to talk with M. PiletGolaz, the Swiss President. He returned grey-faced.

‘Forget the protest. Tear it up. The Swiss think that such a protest coming from the League on Swiss soil would provoke the Germans. Worse, the Swiss wish for us to leave. They want us off their soil.'

Until now this had been a hypothetical discussion among hundreds of alternative hypotheses about the war and what would happen to the Swiss.

If Germany no longer respected the neutrality of Holland and Belgium, why would it respect Swiss neutrality?

‘They say we jeopardise their neutrality. By our very existence we invite German or Italian intervention in Swiss territory. They are in terror of the Germans. Or awe,' Avenol said, in a voice which showed confusion. Showed perhaps the very terror and awe that the Swiss felt.

He asked her to book a call to Léger at the Quai d'Orsay and to the places in France where she had arranged options on accommodation for such a contingency.

Late in the day, calls came through from the French government in Paris agreeing that the League might make its headquarters in France.