The Economics of Self
They were all at the Café Landolt after a meeting of the Fourth Committee and they were all down. Brazil and Spain were pulling out and this had seriously reduced the budget, although the effect probably wouldn’t show up until 1929, and for the first time, League endeavours were being cut back. Coming after the crisis of Germany’s admission, Edith had felt shaken by Sir Eric’s confidential circular on finances which she’d seen on Cooper’s desk.
Maybe the other member states would not make up the loss of Brazil and Spain, and unbelievably, there were the nations which had become late payers.
For the League, it was the worst year to date financially. She sensed that others were also unnerved.
Edith thought those gathered there in the private room at the Café Landolt were definitely the best and brightest of those now working at the League — well, at least of the younger Secretariat members. Those there in the Café Landolt wouldn’t be the first retrenched, if there were ever retrenchments, something else which had been unthinkable until recently, but it seemed to her that it was partly up to them, the younger members of the Secretariat who would one day run the place, to come up with some answers to the League’s finances.
Edith was doubly depressed. She had been servicing the meeting of the General Transit Committee on Calendar Reform and was sick to death of arguments about fixing the moveable feasts and the simplification of the Gregorian calendar. Frankly, she didn’t care one way or another and was willing to accept that thirteen equal months of four complete weeks each might be best for the world. It was obvious that for the world to work together it had to have one calendar. It was just as obvious that all cars should travel on the same side of the road in every country so that people could use one set of road rules wherever they were. The League could not achieve agreement even on that. Sometimes she despaired. China had its own calendar and was totally opposed to calendar reform and the Pope didn’t want to fix Easter. Though if China didn’t pay its dues, why should anyone listen to them? Of all the work the League did, why did the calendar reform attract an anonymous donation of $10,000? She knew why, of course. It attracted cranks.
Through the haze of the café and the haze of her tired eyes and the mind haze of the Moselle wine, she saw Cooper expounding. She wondered if she ‘liked’ Claude. She was having trouble with the word ‘like’ and ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. At times, she would find herself thinking that a particular person was foolish but she would make an immediate correction and dismiss this judgement, saying to herself that within all people could be found something of value to any given colloquy.
Maybe she was suppressing her natural reactions to people, no longer permitting herself to say she liked or disliked. It was also in her nature to expect people to perform better than they could, and she expected that all people could rise up to the circumstance. Sometimes she suspected it was a form of sickness in her, this inner tension. It was a sending of telepathic messages to other people, for instance, during a discussion, urging them to be better, or to recognise that they were not qualified to speak, or had not informed themselves sufficiently.
Often at the League, people did behave better. In committees, especially, everyone tried harder and often surpassed themselves, often did better than she would ever have expected. Though when things went badly she felt that it was hurting her to suppress herself so. Sometimes she wanted to yell at a delegate on a committee, or to take over the chair. All that life spirit which she put into connecting and seeing the other persuasion. She wanted the right to express animosity and the atmosphere of the League did not allow it. She had also suppressed her urge to ‘apportion blame’. Too often she had had to avoid blaming anyone for what had happened in the world. She felt it was about time blame was apportioned.
She now made herself listen to Cooper, and that itself was an example. ‘Making herself listen’ to someone. It was a necessary discipline, although when she had time she would dearly love to examine herself to see whether making oneself listen hurt the spirit.
Cooper was talking about investing in the stock market. He was saying that the League could invest, or that one of the funds — say, the provident or building fund — could be invested, or a staff syndicate formed which might channel profit back into the League.
She reflexively opposed this. Maybe it was her dislike or, well, her not being empathetic to Cooper that caused her always to take the opposite position to his. ‘We are not an organisation of financial speculation,’ she said, taking a drink of Moselle.
‘Quite right,’ said Joshi, who might be a world authority on malaria but who would certainly change his mind according to the way of the wind.
‘On the contrary,’ Ambrose quipped, ‘as an organisation we are the greatest speculative venture in history. It could be said that we are purely a speculation.’
He won some laughs, and she smiled across at him.
Disregarding the laughter, Cooper said in his boring way that it would give the League another back-up financially.
‘By us — do you mean the League or those of us here?’ someone asked.
‘Maybe both,’ Cooper said. ‘We could try to get Council to do it, but if not, we could set up our own fund to safeguard us, the staff, from financial disaster if everything crashes. After all, some of us gave up good jobs to come halfway around the world to work here.’
Sitting beside Edith, Florence was reading the Continental Daily Mail, ostentatiously expressing abstention from the proceedings while still hearing what was being said. She worked in Finance but said she knew nothing of ‘shocks and snares’. Nor would she do anything that Cooper proposed.
It was not alien to Edith to consider investing, although her father and mother had only a small investment in the stock exchange. She could remember her father being opposed to simply gambling on the stock market but not to investing in it. Gambling, he said, produced neither goods nor services and therefore must be taking from the labour and intellect of the economy without giving anything in return. ‘I like to make things,’ he would say, ‘or I like to make things happen — one or the other. There is nothing else worth doing.’ Consequently, as far as she remembered, he invested mostly in new companies and didn’t make much money from it.
She sat there and changed her position slightly about Cooper’s scheme, although not about Cooper. What came to her was that she found herself warming to the idea of being ‘a woman who owned shares’. She imagined herself talking at dinner parties about her share-holding and she imagined having wonderfully printed share certificates in a bank strongroom box which she could examine, which said Amalgamated Oil, Trans-Pacific Railroads, Brazilian Gold Mines, and Consolidated East Africa Coffee. Maybe not Brazilian Gold Mines, given their behaviour at the League.
She and those there at the Landolt were supposed to be experts at organising the work of committees, yet tonight they were breaking all the rules by not having a position paper, an agenda, or anything. She suspected that even Cooper was not an expert on the stock market. They shouldn’t be meeting in the Landolt either. It was the wrong atmosphere in which to inaugurate serious projects. The meeting was a professional shambles.
She looked over at Ambrose who had borrowed Florence’s paper. He and Joshi were looking at the financial pages.
Ambrose owed her six hundred francs.
‘You seem to have views on the stock exchange, Berry,’ Cooper came back, friendly mockery in his voice. ‘Maybe you’d like to say something?’
Cooper was guessing that she wouldn’t know anything about the stock exchange, which was correct, despite her background.
She needed a Way, one of those Ways from days past when she had such things. She decided to go the Way of the Fool, to seek the protection of conceded ignorance. ‘As a matter of fact, Cooper,’ she said, pausing to take a drink of Moselle, ‘I know bugger-all about the stock market.’ She just stopped herself saying, ‘And so do you.’
This caused laughter of relief which told her that some of the others knew bugger-all about the stock market. She hadn’t sworn in public since university days.
Joshi slapped his hand on the table with appreciation. ‘I also know bugger-all about the stock market,’ he said laughing, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. ‘I know bugger-all about motor-cars. I know bugger-all about Persian carpets. I know bugger-all about the game of bridge. My professors at Oxford said I know bugger-all about medicine.’
He roared with laughter at his own joking confessions. He kept on going. ‘However, I do know a bloody lot about tennis,’ he said, ‘and I know too bloody much about mosquitoes.’
More laughter.
Amid the laughter, she continued with her private reflections and it crossed her mind that owning shares might make her ‘independent’. What was the idea of independence about? Apart from earning her living, why did she feel she needed more? She had her mother’s inheritance, the gift of money her mother had sent her some months back. It then occurred to her that the ‘inheritance’ showed that her mother had been almost financially independent of her father. She returned herself to the conversation.
‘Where, then, should I begin to explain the stock market?’ said Cooper, savouring the chance to lecture, addressing them as he might a school class. He explained the stock market to them.
‘The secret to my plan,’ said Cooper, seeming to swell with his sense of himself, ‘is that we are well placed to hear — not about individual companies, but we have a bigger ear. We see all those statistics before anyone else, about crop production and the assessment of ore potentials and so on. Predictions of the future of things, of wars and the talk of wars,’ he said. ‘Even the weather affects the stock market and we at the League hear lots about weather prediction.’ He explained about the business people and delegates and experts from the countries of the world who came in and out of Geneva. ‘They’re the people we have to pump.’
Edith did not like the idea of pumping people. She felt uneasy about the use of the League’s information, even if it wasn’t confidential. This was not the use for which it had been gathered. She felt the conversation was getting close to breaching the proper conduct of officers.
There was definitely another inner voice speaking to her about this stock market business. She thought it might be the voice of avarice. She was always pleased to find some inkling of vice in herself. Sometimes she felt too saintly working at the League. Which was probably why she sometimes let herself be decadent with Ambrose.
Although she was not being won over to the plan of involving the League, she was curious to know about the stock market. Her friend from back home, George McDowell, would probably know and he had said he would visit her in Geneva as part of his world trip. John Latham was in Geneva with the Australian delegation to the Assembly Maybe he could advise her.
Assembly time was a fifth season for Geneva. The city overflowed with delegates, journalists, and visitors from all over the world. A new social season at least. It disturbed and changed Geneva just as much as the climatic seasons.
The meeting broke up with an understanding that those present would ‘think about it’.
As she and Ambrose walked home from the Landolt, she listened to Ambrose enthuse about the idea of the syndicate. ‘I must say that I rather like the idea of “playing the market”,’ he said.
She found herself annoyed by his enthusiasm, and by the way he was ignoring his debt to her. He made no mention of it.
They reached his apartment.
‘Coming up?’ he asked. ‘It’s Friday.’
She again noted how much she made the decisions within their love affair. ‘Not tonight, dear Ambrose. No.’
He walked on with her to her pension and there they kissed, and he went away without demur.
Slowly rubbing the night cream into her face, she pondered the motley feelings she had about Ambrose owing her money. At first she’d been happy to be needed by him. It had been a tangible expression of their bond, and yet now it dissatisfied another part of her.
That ‘borrowing dulled the edge of husbandry’, came to her at the dressing table. Also something, she supposed, her father had said. She liked the play on the idea of husband. Ambrose — no husband he. She should look for more, though, from life than an adventurous lover. She was, deep down, more emotionally ambitious than that, but it would have to wait. She had other things to do. A world to set right. And now, perhaps, she had the stock market to ‘play’.
She sat for some moments then in lascivious wanderings, her fantasy settling on recollections of Jerome in Paris. The fantasy led her hand which held her bone-handled hairbrush down between her legs, and with the cool handle of the brush, and with her eyes shut, she pleasured herself.
The meaning of Ambrose’s debt to her persisted even after this dalliance with fantasy. As she went on to brush her hair, she observed that the problem with lending money to a friend was that a strange burden fell onto the lender.
Were you a good enough friend to lend money? In asking for the money back, the lender then ran the danger of impugning the honour of the friend who had borrowed it, of suggesting a fearfulness about the money being repaid.
But to avoid asking for the money caused the debt to become something that the friends couldn’t talk about. It created a perilous spot in the friendship.
The repayment was not only in money, it involved the borrowing friend’s ‘gratitude’ which could unbalance things, too. Too much gratitude was uncomfortable for both people. Gratitude represented an unspecified and unagreed ‘emotional interest’ on the loan and with the limits of gratitude being so poorly defined it was difficult to ever get it out of the system of the friendship.
She massaged cream into her feet, the final act of the day, and tried, as always, to get to the bed without her feet touching the floor. Since she’d been about fifteen and conscious of her body and its care she had done this, trying to fly from the dressing table to her bed without touching the floor. She’d told herself repeatedly over the years to use her bedroom slippers, to break the childish habit of hopping barefoot to the bed, but she never had.
In bed, before sleep came to her, she enjoyed the idea of becoming a modern woman who knew about stocks and shares.
She took time off to go to the Assembly meeting in the Salle de la Réformation, to hear John speak. She went to hear him at the Assembly as an Australian, to ‘support the home team’, and for an hour or so she allowed herself patriotic feelings, silently barracking for the Australians to acquit themselves well. She was proud that Australia was an international presence in its own right.
She was glad that the three hundred seats in the press gallery were almost fill to hear John speak.
John had argued well against the French delegate M. Louchcur, who wanted blank votes included in the count when deciding whether a majority had voted for the candidate nation. M. Loucheur called blank voting ‘inertie courtoise’. He said that some Assembly members cast blank votes to avoid the discourtesy of voting against the candidate country, which perhaps national foreign policy might in other circumstances require, but allowing them at the same time to indicate that they had no opposition to the candidate.
John said that courteous inertia was an inconclusive argument and that nations should show the courage of their convictions. There should be more plain talking. People should vote yes or no.
Proudly, she liked his style and she agreed with his defence of plain speaking.
She caught up with him after the meeting and they went for tea at the Hôtel de la Pair where the Australians were staying. She had talked with them on the day they arrived and had helped them book into the hotel. She congratulated him on his call for plain speaking.
He said that as a politician, or as a diplomat, he hoped that he never had to engage in double talk or to wear his underpants the wrong way round. She laughed and asked him why he would wear his underpants the wrong way round.
He said, with a small smile, that some diplomats claimed it was a way of avoiding divine punishment when telling a justifiable diplomatic lie. ‘It is another way of crossing your fingers,’ he said, tickled by sharing it with her.
For John, it was probably a risqué thing to say. She said that she could never think of him as a double-talker.
‘Remember though that evil men will always pretend to be frank,’ he said. ‘I think there’s an argument to be made for “delaying the truth”. I remember at the Peace Conference I wanted to release something to the press — I was a secretary to the Committee on Czech-Slovak affairs. I forget the substance of the communiqué. The Chairman, Paul Cambon, said to me, “Your communiqué is quite precise. And if it is published tomorrow, hundreds of men will die in fighting.”’
‘How could he be so sure that it would result in fighting?’
‘It is judgement. In fact when the final draft of those provisions was released, fighting broke out in Czecho-Slovakia.’
‘Delaying the communiqué only delayed the bloodshed.’
‘Any delay offers hope of avoidance. By all means, publicise the agreements — no more secret arrangements — but deliberate in confidence.’
She thought then about how she would describe to herself her ‘secret arrangement’ with Ambrose, often thinking that if she ever had to face a judge in the Court of Proper Life Conduct she would say, ‘What we did together was part of my coming to understand life, and as a caring for another human being in his confusion. I didn’t do it as an act of simple carnal pleasure.’ The judge would then say, ‘How then do you explain your carnal pleasure?’ She would say that her carnal pleasure was ‘after’ she had entered into the situation for other more virtuous reasons.
Edith?
Yes, she had done it as a vice — out of carnal curiosity and arousal. There, that was out — admitted to herself, at least.
She attended to their discussion.
‘I heard an argument about what the different armies of the world mean by “surrendering”,’ she said. ‘Some soldiers hoist a white flag. Some throw down their arms. The Prussians raise their rifles butt end up. The French required them also to kneel.’ She laughed. ‘And the Russians embrace those to whom they are surrendering.’
He laughed. ‘Beware the embrace of the Russian bear.’
She told him that there was really no international agreement on even this matter. She was trying to impress him by showing the sort of things she heard and talked about here in Geneva.
She said that confusions such as this made her sympathise with those who tried to govern. She said she was more and more amazed that government was possible. She said she was impatient with those people who scorned politicians.
‘I am amused by the League talk of electing “semi-permanent” members of Council. It all sounds very much like our talk about a “temporary permanent” parliament house at Canberra, don’t you think?’
She told him Ambrose’s joke about semi-virgins. He liked that.
‘I worry about the League speeches sometimes,’ he said. ‘I was talking with one of the British delegates, Mrs Swanwick, after Count Apponyi’s speech …’
Edith made a gesture of dislike at the mention of Mrs Swanwick’s name.
‘Mrs Swanwick not to your taste?’
‘Not at all. I agree with her on most things but I can’t abide the woman.’
‘I think I know what you mean. Anyhow, I said that in his speech Apponyi had been brave by withholding nothing and Mrs Swanwick came back at me saying how sad it was that to tell the truth in Geneva was considered “brave”.’
A typical Swanwick remark. She leapt to find a position away from that of Mrs Swanwick. She no longer believed that ‘empty rhetoric’ was empty She had come around to seeing that rhetoric was useful, even if unfelt by the speaker, because it contained within it the expression of what was ‘acknowledged’ as being desirable. That a hypocrite was affirming virtue by paying ‘lip service’. Next time the virtue might be harder to disregard. Rhetoric contributed to the formation of a future consensus.
He kept talking and she listened as she went over her thoughts, wondering whether she should say them to John. She decided she might as well speak and see what he thought.
She said, ‘Even if the speaker doesn’t believe it, and even if the country has no intention of doing it, the important thing is that they feel compelled to say it and to say it in those words to the international community.’
She felt she was perhaps overstating her position and she threw in something light. ‘I do admit that I’ve heard too many speeches which begin with the words, “When mankind first emerged from the primeval mud …”’
He laughed. ‘But that’s quite an observation,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it reduce the weight of your praise for my plain speaking? Aren’t you saying that there is more than one way to “speak” diplomatically? Are you becoming a diplomat, Edith?’
She detected in his voice a tone which began as teasing and then turned into bemusement as he realised that he’d been pulled up.
She was unprepared for the impact of his interest. She was flummoxed too, by his observation of the contradiction and her devaluation of her earlier praise of him.
Suddenly she saw that maybe John was wrong about courteous inertia. The French were perhaps wiser on this. There was nuance and that was what she had to learn. The blank ballot was a courtesy containing a comment, a nuance. A yes vote which was cast without conviction was perhaps the true hypocrisy. The courteous inertia created a third type of vote.
It crossed her mind then that there were perhaps other ways of voting than yes and no. The League needed more ways of voting than yes, no and abstention. Inertie courtoise was already one. She remembered now that at a League conference she’d attended, someone had wanted to be counted as absent when they were present in the hall. They wanted to be listed as absent during the vote. They did not want to abstain, nor vote yes or no, nor put in a blank vote. Being technically absent was more than avoiding making a decision at that time — it was saying that you were not ready even to confront or acknowledge the issue at that time. Intellectual absence.
There was also the French use of the word ‘voeu’ — an expression of a wish rather than a decision.
Within conversation, too, she realised there were many ways of ‘voting’.
She felt this was a personal breakthrough in her thinking, une prise de conscience. She felt she had to digest it before putting it out into conversation, especially with John who was now in her mind clearly wrong. Simple plain speaking was not always the scrupulous way. It tried to pretend that everything could be expressed. But the greater fault in politics and discussion was careless imprecision. Diplomacy was closer to the truth because by creating honest silence it tried to avoid saying things which were untrue through imprecision. Diplomacy could create the ‘semi-silence’.
Or it avoided saying things at that time, before anyone was ready to say something. It was a way of maintaining verbal relationships while at the same time holding off superfluous statement and unneeded position-taking. The raisings of unnecessary disagreement. Which, she guessed, was also the value of card-playing.
As she registered her thinking, she realised that she was changing her position on something rather important. She felt nicely nervous.
‘I liked what Briand once said about it all,’ John went on. ‘He said that at the end of all diplomatic proceedings, all tedious speeches, and all the consecutive and simultaneous translations of dusty communiqués there are people in anguish.’
She could agree with that wholeheartedly. ‘Briand is my hero,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ He gave a wry smile.
‘After you, of course.’
‘You don’t have to place me ahead of Briand.’
She did not want to be a challenge to John. Deference and affection, nicely blended, stepped between them. Disagreement, if it existed between friends, did not always have to be expressed or pursued. It could be left forever peripheral to the friendship or even in silence. Everything didn’t have to be said. She turned the conversation and sought his advice on the stock market but he seemed to be unacquainted with its workings. He said that some of his friends were making large amounts of money on the share market. He advised her to buy property. He said that owning property was good for the personality ‘simply by the span and variety of responsibilities which it brought’ — legal questions, maintenance, improvements of it. He said that owning property also involved you in a community, questions of governance at a local level, belonging in a neighbourhood. ‘Moneymaking isn’t bad for the character,’ he said. ‘It’s perhaps the most harmless employment there is. Compared with politics.’
He did tell her to beware, though, of stock market ‘pools’ and so on. When she questioned him further about these stock market pools he retreated and was uncomfortable, having been caught going conversationally slightly too far on too little knowledge. He was usually cautious about stepping too far from the path of his certitudes.
She again changed the subject to avoid discomforting him. She realised that she was manipulating the conversation to protect his pride. For the first time she was having trouble achieving a conversational ease with him. She thought of something soft and unthreatening to say. ‘Do you remember your advice to me about ordering soup on trains?’ she said smiling, her voice turning back through the years to that of the girl she had been then when he had given her this advice in Australia. Her voice again had a girlish lightness.
‘I do remember. Never order soup on trains,’ he said with mock judicial certitude.
‘I broke your rule. On the PLM train from Paris to Geneva, I ordered soup.’
‘And you spilled your soup?’
‘No! There was no spilling. I think trains have improved.’
‘Perhaps the soup is thicker?’
‘The suspension of the trains is smoother, I think. Or the tracks are more even.’
Ye gods, here she was contradicting him again. She was finding it difficult to play the younger person. ‘I learned a new rule for eating on trains which I will pass on to you. In return for your advice to me, even though I disregarded it.’
‘What’s your advice to me?’
‘When dining on a train, order all courses.’
‘Why so?’
She summoned up her girlish voice. ‘As an antidote to boredom!’
‘I am rarely bored,’ he said, somewhat ponderously.
She told John about her first meal on a train coming up from Paris with Ambrose Westwood.
John smiled. ‘I can see you are learning the rules of a more opulent world than mine. You’ve left behind my sober colonial precautions about eating soup.’
Oh dear. She glanced at him to be sure that he was joking but sensed that maybe there was vulnerability there, maybe he regretted not being part of the cosmopolitan world. He was part of it, of course, though not as fully as she was, perhaps, living in Geneva.
‘Geneva is hardly opulent,’ she said. ‘It can be rather cheerless.’
‘It’s opulent compared with dusty Canberra, I can assure you.’
‘When do you move there?’
‘Next year, it seems.’
She wanted to flatter him. ‘Please, John, don’t get me wrong. You gave me much good advice and not only on the eating of soup. And you could never be described as colonial.’ She took his hand and smiled at him. ‘Maybe a little out of date in your knowledge of the suspension of trains.’
Here she was bringing him up to date on trains. She wanted him to be the wiser one. She wanted to be girl to his man. She then found herself asking how much older he was than she, and whether she should be taking his hand. She let it go. He was a married man and there had never been any suggestion of impropriety. Until now, though, he had seemed to be almost of another genus to her, a mentor, not a man as such. He had become a man as such.
He asked her to do the ordering — ‘My French is rusty’ — and complimented her on her French and her ‘aplomb’ and also on her accented English. She said it was because her mouth had to make French sounds every day. They drank their tea and ate their cakes and talked of the health and fortunes, of the births, deaths, and marriages of mutual acquaintances back home.
He asked her whether she read much in French. She said she tried to.
He told her that when he was in Paris for the Peace Conference one of his jobs had been to read the Paris newspapers each day.
‘Not a bad job,’ she said.
‘There were forty-three daily newspapers in Paris then,’ he said wryly.
The Australian substitute delegate, Freda Bage, came into the salon then and joined them.
Two days later a message came to her to telephone John at the Hôtel de la Paix. She did and he said he wanted her to meet James Jackson Forstall, an American who could answer all her questions about the stock market.
She went again to the Hôtel de la Paix for tea, this time in the suite of James Jackson Forstall, a hearty American in his forties.
‘You will probably not know this,’ John said, smiling in the direction of Forstall but talking to Edith. ‘This man is buying La Pelouse for the Secretary-General’s residence. As a gift to the League.’
She didn’t know that. La Pelouse was a fine mansion in which Sir Eric lived and she’d been there for League receptions. It impressed and warmed her that this American should be buying La Pelouse for the League.
John said that he sometimes believed that the United States had two foreign policies. ‘The one that comes from Washington and the one that comes from people like James and Rockefeller and Carnegie.’
Mr Forstall liked that.
John told Forstall that he’d mentioned the skulduggery of pools. ‘But I’m afraid I don’t really know the ins and outs of it all. I said you could enlighten us, Jim.’
‘I hope, young lady, you’re not contemplating setting up a stock market pool?’ Forstall smiled at her. She said it was about time she understood something about the stock market. Everyone else seemed to be talking about it these days.
Forstall said, ‘If you do set up a pool, you must include me. That’s all I ask.’
‘I will when I know what one is and if I like the sound of it.’
The men laughed.
Forstall said that people could manipulate the stock market by forming a pool — which was really a group of share buyers getting together to distort things.
‘They buy and sell shares in a company with no apparent pattern — for no reason, you see. Their pattern of selling is based on nothing. What it does is that it makes that particular stock “active and higher” and so makes people interested in the stock. Speculators outside the pool then begin to buy up the stock because of this activity. They believe that someone somewhere knows something about this stock that they don’t. The stock continues to attract more speculators and the price continues to rise. Then comes “pulling the plug”.’
Edith wrote down in her notebook the expression ‘pulling the plug’.
‘At a carefully judged moment, the pool manager feeds the stock held by the pool back onto the market. They unload their shares in that company at a profit and then the price collapses. That’s called pulling the plug.’
‘Isn’t there a law against it?’ she asked. ‘This pulling the plug?’
‘If the Democrats ever get their way, there will be.’
‘How could you tell whether a stock was being manipulated?’ John asked.
‘You can’t. Unless you knew the company being manipulated, and knew that any active trading in their shares was without reason.’
‘Or unless I were part of the pool.’ She smiled at him.
Mr Forstall chuckled. ‘I like this girl, John.’
At this point John excused himself. ‘I want to chase up an Assembly medallion for myself. You stay on, Edith.’
She did not particularly like the idea of staying on alone in the suite with Forstall and said she must go as well. It was more that she felt a little intimidated by him; he was not from her milieu. It was easier to appear bright in a threesome than in a couple. Forstall looked at his watch and suggested that they move down to the lounge.
She agreed to that.
In the lift he said to her, ‘Put your notebook away. Learn to let the mind take notes. Don’t try so hard to remember. The mind will retain what it needs to remember to survive. Never took a note in my life. Never wrote down a damned thing.’
He placed her hand under his arm in a friendly way as they walked into the bar.
Over drinks — Mr Forstall having a Coca-Cola, she having a gin fizz — he told her not to be scared about pools and other talk of traps and pitfalls. He said that they were excuses for the faint-hearted. ‘The reality of it all is that people invent things, people still get companies going, people want to make things and do things, and to do this they need money. In the end, as haphazard as it may seem, people with money exercise judgement to find people with good ideas. Good things are made and people find reward.’ He said that most money was still to be made by venturing in small companies.
Stocks, he said, were influenced by rises in the interest rates charged by banks on money, by foreign wars, by domestic upheaval, by apprehension in a country and by rumour. ‘Remember that Nathan Rothschild said that the time to buy is when blood is running in the streets.’
‘How then do you get to the stock exchange?’ she quipped.
‘By telephone,’ he replied, joining her playfulness. ‘Stay off the streets. The great mystery is judgement — something which I seem to have.’
He told her that if everyone knew as much as everyone else and was equally smart, you could never have a chance of making money on the market. ‘Everyone would invest only in those shares which would yield the greatest return, that is, the same shares. But people are not equally informed or equally wise. So it is always in a state of play. The secret is to be able to identify the overvalued share and the undervalued share.’
He had given her too many ‘secrets’ to keep in her mind. She tried to follow his advice about memory, but every time he mentioned the word ‘secret’, she tried too hard to remember it. She realised Mr Forstall had a love of secrets and mysteries.
‘Any analysis of stocks is always incomplete. Except mine.’ He laughed. ‘No, I too have taken some whippings. What I mean is that you can never know all there is to be known. And there is never an equality of knowledge.’ He told her that it came down to two rules which were mutually contradictory.
He was also, she noticed, fond of reducing the world to one or two rules.
He said she could choose either of these rules. ‘I give you these with my blessing. May you prosper whichever path you ride along. The first fork is this: take more trouble than the other investors in gathering information. This is one approach. It means working like the devil day and night to find out. You listen, you read, you prowl around and you poke about. It then becomes a vocation. It means you study the world and all its madness every waking moment.’
She thought that maybe she did that already.
He took a sip of his Coca-Cola. ‘Or you can do another thing, you can ride along another trail. You can put together a collection of shares bought pretty much unaimed, you understand? You close your eyes and fire. Then open and see what you hit. Sit back and see how they go. You’ll probably make money just as well this way. Maybe never as much as the first way.’
‘My father favoured new companies.’
‘Is he rich?’
She thought about this and was fazed by the question. She didn’t really know. ‘He isn’t poor.’
Forstall enjoyed the answer. ‘He isn’t poor. I like it! We call that “venture capital”. Did you know that?’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘Sure you can get big returns on that. But you meet some fancy talkers, some big dreamers, some impractical asses. Brilliant but hopeless people. But you can also meet the young geniuses. My advice: if venture capital is your inclination — mix them. That’s James Forstall’s advice: mix them. Old and new, big and small, north and south, dreamers and mechanics.’
Edith decided there and then to buy an unaimed bunch but she didn’t know whether or not to wait for blood to be running in the streets.
‘Should I wait for blood to be running in the streets?’
He chuckled and then his face clouded for a second or two. ‘If you wish to become a Nathan Rothschild, you can, sadly, always find some place in this unhappy world where blood is running in the streets. But at times the stock market bears no relationship to the economy or to the real world. Sometimes it becomes a world unto itself.’
He looked deeply into her eyes, a look she was coming to know in men. ‘You could let me invest for you.’
She thought this attractive and easy. But no, it was her mother’s money — she would have to play a part in its management. She would have to have stewardship. ‘If I am to understand this business,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to learn by venturing.’
‘So be it. Now tell me — which trail will you take?’
‘A random bunch.’
He smiled but she didn’t know whether it was in approval. ‘Tell me all about yourself,’ he said, ordering another drink for her. ‘How’d you meet Latham?’
‘He is a friend of my father’s, through the Rationalist Society. I did science at university but decided I was not really a scientist. I liked insects and flowers but not science. I was good at birds too, owls especially. I had an interest in politics through my father and uncle — my uncle once stood for a state seat but lost. I helped him put leaflets in letter boxes, went to rallies, worked as a helper. John offered me a job as his assistant when he was elected — if I would learn to type. So I went to Melbourne — federal parliament is there. I learned to type, but working with John was not all typing. He’s been arguing for Australia to have its own Department of Foreign Affairs.’
‘And you ended up in Geneva?’
‘Thanks to John.’
‘Where did you get your French?’
‘School, university — but really I learned it from the family who lived next door when I was growing up. They were French. I grew up with their daughters. That is where I really learned it. And my parents knew the French writer Paul Wenz who lives in Australia and we always spoke French with him.’ She silently supposed that he wouldn’t have heard of Paul Wenz and that she was talking too much.
‘The League is the future. You know that?’ Forstall said.
‘I believe it to be.’
‘My country has to join the League — hell, we should be running the League.’
‘No country should run it.’
‘There will always be a leader in any herd. You just have to be sure that leader is benign — not out to hurt anyone — and wise — that is, knows what it’s doing. Or if not, at least controllable. My country can become wise, if it works at it.’
As they parted, he said, ‘I’ll give you another piece of advice about the buying of stocks and about life. It’s Gypsy wisdom. The Gypsy tells his son to get up on a horse and ride it so that he can see how it looks. The Gypsy’s son says to his father, “Should I ride to buy or ride to sell?” Do you follow that?’
‘I think I do.’
‘You probably already know that people who are trying to gain influence ride the truth differently than those who are trying to hold influence. There are different ways of riding the truth.’
As she walked home, she made another leap in her thinking. Given that she were to invest her mother’s gift, she would use any earnings from the shares for eccentric causes. Or if she made pots of money, she would, like James Forstall, give something to the League. A library or a radio station. Her investment of her mother’s legacy would be a memorial to her mother. That was what she thought. This decision seemed to nicely complete her musing about the money she had and the stock market. As a first step she would place her mother’s gift at the disposal of the Landolt syndicate for now, invest it in Cooper’s scheme. Although the financial situation of the League looked better as the Assembly adopted the budget for the coming year.
That week-end, in bed with Ambrose, she talked to him about the stock market.
‘The question is,’ she said, ‘do I wish to lead a humble but decorous life or do I wish to lead a life of dash and of risk?’
‘Dash! With dash, Edith! With pure caprice.’ Ambrose was always championing caprice in her life. In everyone’s life. He often quoted Emerson: ‘I would write on the lintels of my doorpost: whim.’
Perhaps that was why she liked James Forstall’s idea of buying some shares ‘unaimed’ — maybe this would give expression to caprice in her life.
She said to him, ‘And I dare say that you are for me a caprice.’
‘I like the idea of being your caprice,’ said Ambrose, and then, ‘I am going to play the market, too.’
‘What with?’
‘With whatever boodle I can scrape together.’
He must have sensed that at that moment his debt to her entered both their minds, because he said, ‘I will repay that loan, you know.’
She raised herself in the bed and looked at him. ‘I know you will repay, my sweet,’ She did not know this at all and was surprised to hear iron in her voice, as much commanding the repayment as assuring him of her trust.
‘I’ll repay you from my stock market winnings,’ he said.
This tipped her from feeling generous to feeling that he was trying to fool with her in an unpleasant way.
‘I do not think, temperamentally, you’re the person to play the market, darling. I really don’t.’ Her voice had hardened.
The atmosphere in the room had lost its playfulness.
She was about to say to him that he lacked ‘the nerve’ to play the market. More, that he had a predisposition, she thought, to lose. To say this to him, though, would not just be being candid with Ambrose, it would be nasty, and she tried to stop it coming out, but out it came. ‘You lack the nerve.’
He sat up, his voice changed a little, back towards being fully masculine. ‘Oh, I think I have nerve.’
That was true. ‘Perhaps the stock market requires a different nerve. Needs a different sort of courage to the battlefield.’
‘The nerve to play with money isn’t what I call nerve,’ he said.
She couldn’t stop herself. ‘There’s no nerve required if you play the stock market with someone else’s money.’
A silence came between and around them.
He pulled to the other side of the bed, his back towards her. ‘For God’s sake, if it’s the four hundred francs I owe you …’ he said, more to the wall than to to her.
She sensed in herself a pause, during which she considered whether to say that the amount was, in fact, six hundred francs. She did.
‘Whatever.’
‘And you lack the judgement. You would lose.’ She didn’t say, and you will always lose. It was good for him to hear the truth at last, to know what he was.
‘I accept that I am not particularly clever about money.’
‘Oh, stop simpering,’ she said. ‘Be a man.’ This statement caused a cold silence.
‘It hasn’t bothered you before,’ he said, again his voice wavering towards the masculine. ‘You seem to like someone who isn’t a man. Maybe I am something more than a man. Maybe you wouldn’t care for a man who was only a man.’
His insult did not land home.
‘I know what I am. And I know what you are.’ As she heard herself say it, she realised that it was a serious insult, and that it could very well have been cruel.
They’d never said things like this to each other before.
He pulled back the covers and got out of the bed. ‘You should’ve spoken sooner. It would have been more honest for you to have spoken up. Much earlier.’
He sat at the dressing table in his nightdress. She let him burn in his humiliation.
She began to get a glimmer of understanding about why the outburst had happened. It was not all aimed at him — she had wanted to be cruel to the world.
It had not come out as pure cruelty It had posed as fake principled behaviour. It was also said to relieve herself of what she felt about Ambrose — about his deficiencies. But he would not grow strong from knowing his weakness. Or what she thought were his weaknesses. Having been callous released her from her irritation and she didn’t feel a need to go further with her cruelty.
Nor could you insult someone into awareness of their faults.
She thought about ‘imperfect friends’. Maybe that was all she had. Maybe that was what she was. Was anyone ever a ‘perfect friend’? As a child she’d believed that all insects were perfect, ladybirds for example, but under the microscope she found that even insects are flawed, crippled.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘For what?’ he asked in a small, defeated voice.
‘For the suggestion that you lacked nerve.’
‘Others decide if we are brave. I don’t think I have it.’ His voice was self-pitying.
She had no antagonism now. She wanted things to be calm and intimate again, not only for his sake, but for her own peace. ‘I said I’m sorry. Come back to bed.’
He did so.
As he entered the bed she pulled him toward her and kissed him as he began to sob. She stretched out a hand and turned off the bedside lamp.
‘It’s all right, darling,’ she said to him, feeling contained and clear-seeing and controlled. ‘I’ll be the one who worries about money.’
Through his crying, he said, ‘I’m really hopeless about living — living outside some institution, some organisation.’
‘You’re not. In so many ways you’re a remarkable person.’ That was true. ‘Maybe not so good with practical living.’ She did not really think that she’d go on worrying about money for him as well as for herself, not through life. She made that silent reservation.
What was she to do with Ambrose?
‘You do good things for the world,’ she said. ‘Now hush.’
On the day he left, John sent her a note containing a warning which he’d meant to give her before. He said that in his experience, successful people rarely knew the reasons for their success. When they contribute their success to these or those factors, they were often wrong.
‘This is simply a gentle warning against the well-meaning wisdom of successful people like James Forstall. Good luck.’
But then who could explain what they did and why?
On the day it had been decided that the Landolt crowd would make up its mind about investing in the stock market, Edith was the only one who came to Cooper’s office.
‘Where are the others?’
‘Not interested,’ said Cooper abruptly, eating an oatcake biscuit.
‘None of the others are interested!?’ she said.
‘You’re the only one.’
Cooper said not one of the others had been interested at all and he himself had lost interest. ‘Have a biscuit.’ He pushed the plate of biscuits to her.
Oh.
She sat there in his office, looking at him. She realised that although he’d put up the scheme, deep down he too lacked nerve. He had never had the nerve to carry it through.
For want of something to say, she asked, ‘Are you waiting until blood is running in the streets?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow.’
‘Never mind.’
How odd.
This made her different from the others in the crowd.
How odd.
How different? Different how?
‘You can have the name of my brother’s broker in London,’ Cooper said, reaching for his address book, ‘if you want to go ahead yourself.’
‘It’s all right. Mr Forstall has given me the name of a broker.’
Cooper was piqued and surprised. ‘Oh,’ he said, restraining himself from asking further about her knowing Forstall.
She found she was relieved that they weren’t setting up a syndicate. She would manage it herself and for her mother. She would do it with caprice. At least for her first splash. After that she would take advice. She did not have the time in her life to study both the stock market and the troubles of the world.
That is how she came to invest her mother’s gift in the stock market. Her first investment was in Firestone Rubber because they were investing in Liberia, the nation run by former Negro slaves from America. She wanted to help Liberia but she also wanted to commemorate another caprice — her night in Paris with Jerome.