Dark Palace (63 page)

She and Loveday followed his pointing hand. He was
pointing to the second gallery high up and away from the great hall and the delegates and missions on the ground floor.

Tightly and coldly, in a voice scarcely concealing a raging indignation, Loveday asked the sergeant to take him to the Acting Secretary-General of the United Nations, Alger Hiss.

‘At this time, sir, that is not possible. You are holding back the line—please stand aside.'

Edith and Loveday looked back and saw impatient faces of mission staff behind them. She recognised none of them.

They backed off out of the queue and the sergeant became occupied by the next person on the line, and Loveday and she went from his attention.

Edith broke back into the line and took the sergeant's arm and asked where the entrance to the top gallery was.

‘You have to go out of the building and around to the side.'

He too was trying to keep his patience.

‘Are you sure there's no mistake?' Edith said. ‘Will you check with the Secretariat? Could you find Arthur Sweetser for me?'

‘Ma'am, I have no time to check anything—the whole business is about to start. I simply read tickets and direct traffic.'

She went to Loveday, who was like some floundering insect in a stream, being edged towards the side. ‘I'll try to find someone who can rectify it,' she said. ‘It's some sort of stupid error.'

‘I'll take my seat until I hear from you,' Loveday said.

She wrote down the number of his place in her notebook and he went off towards the visitors' gallery, struggling against the flow of arriving delegates.

Edith pushed through the queues waiting to talk with the besieged Marine clerks at the reception tables. Ignoring the other people queued for attention, she confronted a different Marine sergeant.

Standing before him, she took out her
lettre de mission
from the League, her League
carte d'identité
, and anything that in any way officially identified her. She laid the papers on the desk in front of this sergeant, explaining the significance of each document.

She then asked the sergeant to check the League of Nations seating allocation.

The clerk went through his list. ‘League of Women Voters?'

She told him again. ‘League of Nations.'

The sergeant did so and confirmed that one seat had been allocated in the top gallery.

Edith asked that the allocation of seating be changed. ‘My name is Edith Berry, and I am
Chef du Bureau
to the Secretary-General.' In a sense, she was.

She pointed to her papers.

The sergeant glanced at her papers.

He refused to touch the papers as if fearing that his touch would give them some official recognition.

‘I'm sorry, lady, these papers mean nothing to me. And I can't allocate seats.'

Edith demanded to see someone who could alter the allocation.

‘The officials are all inside the conference hall. Maybe you could take it up with them tomorrow.'

‘I want to take it up with them right now,' she said. ‘I demand to see someone senior from the Conference Secretariat, from the steering committee.

The sergeant broke contact with her and began talking with another delegate. She stood there for a minute but his attention did not return to her. ‘Excuse me—could I have your name, rank, and status?' she said.

He ignored her, now occupied with another person who also held official papers in his hand, written as far as she could see in Arabic.

Manoeuvre according to circumstances, Napoleon said.

What manoeuvre remained to her?

She couldn't very well lean across and take the sergeant by the collar, which she felt impelled to do.

Then, at last, she saw a familiar face in the crowd.

Judge Manley Hudson from the Court of International Justice. ‘Thank the gods,' she said. ‘At last some authority.'

She gathered up her papers from the desk.

She even made a private joke as she pushed her way to him, ‘At last, justice,' she thought.

‘Manley!'

They warmly grasped each other's hands.

‘Edith—I am so glad to see you.'

‘Manley, I urgently need your help. We're having dreadful trouble with seating. Alex is up the back row in the gods. He isn't even on the conference floor. Sean is back at the hotel because we haven't been given enough passes.'

Judge Hudson's face was close to rage.

‘The Court has no tickets at all,' he said with anger. ‘We have been excluded. The Court is excluded entirely.'

‘What's happening here!' she cried. ‘Why are they doing this!?'

Just then Gerig came up and greeted them. She hadn't seen Gerig since the World's Fair. From what she knew, he was now with the American delegation to the conference.

He seemed pleased to see them both.

She told him the situation. ‘There's been a huge blunder! We have no tickets—not the League—not the Court—none of us.'

Gerig was uncomfortable. ‘Not my area. I'm really hugely busy with the US delegation. But I'll do what I can.'

‘What's the problem, Benjamin?' Judge Hudson cried out to him. ‘Why are we excluded like this?'

‘I fear it's the Russians, Judge.'

‘The Russians?!'

‘They are down on neutrals. The Irish, for example, who they think were too nice to Hitler—that excludes Lester.
They're down on Olivan from the Court because he's Spanish and they don't like Franco. And, of course, they are down on the League for expelling them in '39.'

‘That misses the whole point,' she almost screamed. ‘The people you mentioned are internationalists. Lester stood up to the Nazis. He gave his whole life to internationalism.'

Gerig showed extreme discomfort. ‘I'll get the American delegation to take it up with the Russians—believe me, we have nothing but goodwill to the League people. I must go in now. But, Edith, I'm afraid that it might be one of those things where if I interfere they will do the opposite.'

He looked about and then said conspiratorially, ‘Don't place too much trust in Hiss.' He moved away but stopped again, turned and called, ‘Oh, where are you all staying?'

Edith told him the California Hotel.

‘I'll call when I have some news.'

She stood there glowering, trying to think of a manoeuvre, but her indignation began to congeal, like cooling wax, into cold hard defeat.

Manley looked at her helplessly like a child.

‘I don't understand,' she said, bitterly. ‘How did we become the enemy?'

‘I have to go,' he said simply, and walked off as if in a drugged state, going out of the building and down the steps into the street.

She wanted to go after him and help him but she felt she should somehow still do something to save the situation.

The foyer of the building was beginning to clear. The first conference of the United Nations was about to begin.

From inside the auditorium she heard a booming voice give the familiar preliminary announcements of the conference housekeeping arrangements. The sort of announcements she herself had made at many, many conferences, in many halls, in many countries.

She was now an outsider.

Bells were ringing.

If you want an audience, start a fight, she thought.

She looked around for someone to fight with.

And then Edith realised that she had no fight left.

Close to tears, she put her papers away in her handbag and found her way to the entrance to the top gallery where Loveday was.

As Loveday must have, she climbed the two sets of bare grey concrete stairs with iron-pipe railings.

At the top she was allowed as far as the door to the gallery but the Marine would not permit her to go inside.

She looked for Loveday.

He was seated in the second back row. He was seated as far from the rostrum down on the floor of the conference room as any seating could be.

He sat alone and crushed.

He had some conference proceedings paper in his hand.

She pulled back from the door, not wanting to catch Loveday's eye.

All those years. All the sweat and tears.

This lone figure represented all the thousands and thousands who had worked for the League, those people who'd come across the world from every nation to lend a hand in Geneva.

All this now diminished to a lone representative of the League at the back of the hall.

Thunderous applause broke out as the conference was declared open.

All those present stood and clapped except Loveday who remained seated.

Edith had never felt so cold. She had never felt such true and deep bitterness.

In the strange disembodied voice of the public address system, she heard someone say, ‘We are plaiting a rope for a ladder to a ledge of a cliff on a mountain in a range of mountains.'

The words made her feel ill, she was close to vomiting.

She walked down the concrete steps, hearing the clapping from the conference hall recede behind her.

Back at the foyer of the California Hotel, which itself seemed a reproach and a continuation of the humiliation, she wondered what she could say to Lester.

From the lobby telephone, she tried again to call Sweetser but knew that it was a hopeless time to call.

She took the elevator to Lester's room.

She knocked on the door.

She heard Lester call out, ‘Yes! Who is it?' in a rather expectant voice, a voice hoping for good news, for the bungle to have evaporated.

‘It's me, Edith,' she said, trying to forewarn him of what she had to tell by her tone of voice.

He opened the door. He was straightening his tie, putting on his jacket.

‘All sorted out?' he asked, smiling at her.

She gave a small hopeless smile back. ‘Ambrose not with you?'

‘Sent him away.'

‘Alex is seated. Gerig is looking into it. I couldn't get any sense out of the military clerks at the Opera House.'

‘We still have no seating, then?'

She felt tempted to lie to him. ‘I'm afraid not.'

He looked into her eyes with disbelief.

They went into his room. There was an unopened bottle of Irish whiskey on the table, a bucket of ice, a soda siphon, and glasses.

She decided to report accurately as a good officer should. She was not a nursemaid, she was not a wife. She could not shield him from the world.

She told him precisely what had happened.

‘Oh,' he said.

He stood there with his back to her and then sat.

He looked up. ‘Thank you for everything, Edith. Thank you.'

‘Would you like me to stay with you?'

‘I would like to be alone.'

Back in their room, she lay on the cool sheets of the bed, naked, with the lights off. Ambrose sat in the armchair still in his new suit, drinking.

The room was very warm, the air-conditioning seemed not to be working.

‘What will become of us?' she asked.

They sat for a moment in silence and then she answered herself. ‘Remember when the League moved from the Palais Wilson to the new Palais des Nations?'

‘Yes, I remember it—the move was massive.'

‘I told you that back then we invented a new administrative ploy—a new category for official documents.'

‘I don't remember.'

‘Whenever some document couldn't be found, or we didn't want to find it, we said it was “lost in the move”.'

‘Yes, I remember now. You said that everyone began using it. Until you finally forbad it.'

‘You and I, dear Ambrose, have been lost in the move.'

She watched his profile as he sat there in the half-light and she saw him nod.

‘I've never thought of myself as tragic,' she said, ‘but I do now.' She reached for her drink on the bedside table.

‘God, it's hot in here,' he said.

He began to take off his tie and then his suit. He hung it carefully in her wardrobe.

He then went to the bathroom and returned carrying a clean towel.