Public Life (1): Cry Me a River
Over drinks in his apartment one winter’s evening, Ambrose tried to prepare her for the Molly Club by explaining that it was frequented by those in Geneva who ‘do not quite like being the way God had made them’. At least, did not like it all the time.
She understood what he referred to and yet again inwardly uttered something like, ‘Ye gods, what am I doing with this man?’
She said something about he being one who liked to go in the opposite direction to the way God intended.
He said that he didn’t see it as a matter of willpower. Or a quarrel with God. ‘But it is fun.’
He said that he would need her guidance on what to wear, but he would be honoured, ‘Is “honoured” the correct word? Honoured if you would accompany me to the club.’
Was ‘honoured’ indeed the correct word? She replied, ‘I am trying to imagine this club.’
‘It is a decent sort of place. Spotless.’
‘Spotless.’
‘Spotless but not blameless.’ He was joking to win her participation.
‘You’ve been there already?’
‘I entered it, so to speak, in mufti. I had a poke about. Looked around. Sniffed it out, so to speak.’
The nature and practice of her and Ambrose’s affiliation was still something she could not describe to anyone she knew. Perhaps not even to herself, not precisely. It was assumed, she supposed, that they were a romantic duet, but she was sure that it was gossiped about because they had not, for instance, talked of engagement. The people at her pension well knew that she did not spend the week-ends in her own bed although she had now forgotten what explanation she’d originally given to Madame Didier. In their moments of secret-sharing and personal confidences, Florence sometimes made discreet forays into the matter but Edith was aware that she had to conceal Ambrose’s behaviour from even the closest of her friends for the sake of his career and for the sake of her own appearances and her self-regard. Really, though, apart from his penchant for dressing up in women’s clothing, he was terribly correct. She was, in fact, sometimes quietly proud of being associated with such a typical Englishman and even his vice seemed somehow part of it all. Perhaps that was being unfair. That they slept together, unmarried, was no longer such a remarkable thing, especially in Geneva — the times certainly seemed to wink at it, if not condone it. M. Avenol, the Deputy Secretary-General, had a liaison which was not actually conventional: a wife in a clinic and a mistress in his residence. So she and Ambrose dined, they danced, they were occasionally invited semiofficially as a couple. But try as she might, she still found herself baffled at times by Ambrose’s feminine posturing, though it never displeased her.
For a while after the bad quarrel they’d had about this matter of character, he had not practised his dressing-up or introduced it back into their love life. Their physical love life had, in fact, faltered for a time. But gradually it had come back and with it their old ways, and again she had found herself helping him buy women’s underwear and other things so that he could dress up.
Her reactions to his dressing up were not predictable. She was attracted to their long embracing and the feel of his lips and hands, and his private parts. She enjoyed the intimate privilege of knowing about his clandestine self. He told her that she was the only woman he had ever told about it. But sometimes it did nothing to encourage her desire. At those times, that he was dressed in satin underwear was of no consequence. At other times, she became aroused by the whispering of depravity and she could feel sexually entranced, perhaps when tipsy with champagne, and then she found his coming to her bed dressed as a woman something of a mysterious arousal. He was then another person, perhaps a stranger, and that person resembled her, and while it was not quite a mirror of herself, it was a sexual gyration which could intensify her. He was nearly always properly aroused as a man but sometimes he became unmanned and soft and they fondled until she had been satisfied and she liked that too, and he seemed also to like it, even though afterwards she saw only traces of male staining. But this dressing up had until now all taken place in his apartment. Had not gone out into the streets of Geneva.
To go to this club which he’d found, and mix, she imagined, with other men dressed as women did not appeal to her as such, apart from intriguing her curiosity.
‘Surely you don’t plan to walk through the streets and so on to this club!’
‘It’s only two streets from here.’
‘It’s not the fatigue of walking, darling; that is not what I am worrying about.’
‘Do you think I look so unfeminine? Would they know?’
‘The Genevese?’
She considered this. He was quite presentable as a woman, with his slender build and smooth complexion. He was not naturally hairy. His feet and hands were not mannish. In the streets the Swiss never looked at one, at least, not detectably. She believed, however, that they had a way of looking without being seen to look. Hence their world-famous interest in the science of optics.
‘Isn’t it against the law? Don’t we risk a scandal?’ she asked. ‘What about the League?’
‘I don’t believe it to be against the law. Nothing in office rules either.’
‘Is it formal evening wear?’
‘Oh — anything goes, really.’
She did not like the sound of that. ‘Do you mean a costume party?’
‘You could say that. But not fancy dress in the sense of a fancy-dress ball.’
She was having difficulty imagining what it would be ‘like’. Her last fancy-dress ball had been as a child in the School of Arts at Nowra. She’d gone as a grasshopper. Maybe she would go to this club as a grasshopper.
‘You could wear the muslin,’ she said, as some sort of an answer. She was thinking of something rather simple for him to wear. She realised that she was drinking from an empty glass. The conversation was making her tense.
‘It’s too folkioric.’
‘You can have my tulle evening gown — the one with the gold and silver sequins.’
‘I hoped you’d say that.’
‘I knew you would. But what does it leave me to wear?’
‘You look stunning in the black lace. And I could hardly wear a V-neckline.’ He was right, the tulle had a square neckline.
‘How do you know about these places?’
He looked at her vulnerably. ‘One just hears, I suppose.’
‘Are there such places everywhere?’
‘I suppose there are. I haven’t been everywhere.’ He stared out of the window. ‘Yes, I suppose there are.’
‘I am sure there is no such place in Sydney. Definitely not in Melbourne.’ She rose and poured herself another sherry.
‘Maybe not Sydney or Melbourne. I wouldn’t be so sure though. About Sydney. Or Melbourne.’
‘Oh, I’m sure. And I’m sure that if there’d been such a place, the men I knew would not have been habitués.’
He became silent, and she saw how he could be taking her remark as a reproach, as implying that Australian men had a more dependable masculinity. She saw that it had drifted them closer to the unpleasant shoals of their quarrel a few months before.
‘I don’t mean it in any derogatory way,’ she said. ‘I just mean Australian men aren’t like that. The ones I know, I mean.’
‘Maybe Australian men are different; perhaps they don’t care for lace and silk. Suppose it could be so. Pioneers and so on. Living rough.’
‘I’m sure they like lace and silk on their women.’
‘Not on their men, you think?’
She leafed through L’Illustration. ‘Not on their men.’
‘I wouldn’t be an attraction down there, you think?’ He was lightening it up, rowing away from the shoals.
‘I think you’d be better appreciated here in Geneva. Or Munich, frankly. You’re more a Weimar person.’ She smiled at him, feeling her patriotic moralism receding. Uncharacteristically, he worried away at the implied admonishment.
‘You think I’m a little … disordered … as a person?’
That might very well have been the word she would have used. ‘I think you’re a little feminine and I don’t think femininity is a disorder. No, you’re not “disordered”, dear.’
‘If it’s not in the right body, femininity is a disorder.’
She moved to sit near him and to touch him, to reassure him, regardless of what conflicting notions moved in her about this matter — she was too tired to fight. ‘We have to live with it, if it’s in the wrong body. If we find we are the one with that body,’ she said, trying to ease him.
‘Some of us have to live with it.’
‘And some of us have to live with those who have to live with it. The secret is, I suppose, for all those involved, one way or another, to enjoy it.’
‘I like your answers,’ he said, returning the affection.
‘I’m sometimes too good at making answers,’ she said. She thought about her wider life. Was she glib? Was she too good at self-justification? ‘I think Cooper believes I’m too good at finding clever answers.’
‘Will I wear a flower on my shoulder? Or is that out of fashion?’
At least when they reached the club entrance Ambrose behaved like a ‘gentleman’, despite his female attire. At the club stairway he went ahead of her, down the stairs into the menacing, dark cellar and its door with a peephole, wearing her new fur-trimmed double-breasted coat, while she wore her second best overcoat. There was no street sign announcing the presence of the club.
Even with her assistance, he had taken hours to get himself ready. He looked quite stunning, she thought, with fashionably flat breasts. He’d insisted on wearing her violet corset, ‘for the nice tightness of it’. His wig was a good fit. She had convinced him to reduce the amount of lipstick. ‘Let them find out you’re a siren — don’t advertise it,’ she’d told him. He had applied philtres d’effarement to his eyes to make them more striking.
‘I thought a siren was just that — someone who advertised it,’ he’d replied.
In the low, kind lighting of the surprisingly large club, which had a small orchestra playing Negro music, she saw every possible combination: there were men dancing with men, women with women, and men dressed as women dancing with men, and dancing with women. And inclinations, about which she was not sure.
She ran her eyes over the musicians. The atmosphere caused her to think, unreasonably, that Jerome might be there. But of course he wasn’t.
Edith sat at a table waiting for Ambrose to return from looking around for another ‘couple’ whom he had planned to meet at the club. She felt insecure, because once in the club, he’d begun relinquishing the male role of looking after things, and she’d had to find a table. She wasn’t going to look after things. Not in a club like this, where everything was inverted. It was his club, not her club. What happened at the toilet door? Who went where? She supposed they didn’t care. She suspected that when the time came, she would care. She would care dreadfully.
She found that she kept averting her eyes from the surroundings, but she ventured to look around her again. She was relieved to see that some of the clientele appeared normal, in dress at least, although God knew what was occurring in their minds and hearts. Most of the ‘men’ were in tuxedos or dinner suits. But then, so were some of the ‘women’. The more she looked, the more she realised that it was a very mixed club indeed, and perhaps more normal, not as confused as she’d first thought. Surely there could not be too many confused people in Geneva?
Ambrose, quite adept in his ankle-strapped high-heels, returned without his two friends and without her fur coat.
‘Where is the coat?’
‘I put it in the cloakroom.’
‘I hope their honesty is more reliable than their sexual character.’
‘How witty, Edith.’
A waiter put down the cocktails which she’d had to order for them.
Ambrose asked, ‘Do you want me to put your coat in the cloakroom?’
‘You may put it in the cloakroom when I am sure I’m staying.’
She drank deeply from the cocktail. She might as well lose herself in drink.
‘You must stay.’
‘Can I have the cloakroom ticket?’ She held out her hand to him. Ambrose took the ticket from his handbag, on loan from her, and handed it to her. ‘In case you decide to disappear with a man in a dinner suit, never to be seen again,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to lose my fur coat. I can afford to lose you, but not the fur coat.’ She hoped he didn’t take that as a reference to the money he owed her.
He was looking around, as if searching for attention.
She went on, ‘I suppose — if you did disappear — that I might eventually see you again years later, say, one night at Monte Carlo, in the casino — but I couldn’t bear it if you were there in my fur coat.’
He chuckled.
As she and Ambrose joked, it occurred to her that she did not quite know how the evening was meant to turn out and she thought she’d better ask. She had difficulty phrasing it. ‘Do you intend to be approached by these … men?’ she asked.
‘Asked to dance, you mean?’
She meant that and more than that.
‘Asked to … whatever.’
He looked at her, perhaps surprised at her implication. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I want to be admired.’
‘Don’t we all.’
‘I admire you, Edith.’
‘You look far better than I do tonight.’
‘Not true — you’re being charitable.’ His voice implying that he would love it to be true.
‘You look better, darling, because I got second-best choice of my clothing and jewellery. And handbags. And coats.’
‘Touché,’ he said, then went on, awkwardly, ‘In reply to your first question — you know that I don’t care for men. I prefer to be with women. As a rule.’
‘As a rule?’
‘Yes, as a rule.’
Once someone used that expression it meant that there were no rules. She wondered if there were rules at all in this place.
By the time they’d finished their first drink, Ambrose was asked to dance by a man. He was nervously delighted, and he beamed at her over the man’s shoulder.
Shortly afterwards, she was asked to dance by a man. She put her coat in the cloakroom, and they danced. She found that dancing relaxed her.
As she danced past Ambrose and his man, she remained comically impassive, pretending not to acknowledge him.
After the dance she was escorted back to their corner table where Ambrose was already seated, thankfully without partner. He was sitting elegantly, remembering to keep his knees together.
After thanking her partner, who then went off, and sitting down, she said, ‘In our discussion about Australia the other day, about what Australian men might or might not wish to wear, I think I was being a little naïve.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean, there must be men in Australia who dress as women. Australia isn’t that different.’
‘I think that’s probably closer to the truth.’
‘You do?’
‘I think so. A little closer to the truth. Simmel or someone said there were not enough sexes.’
‘Oh, did he? Of all things, I hate being naïve, or maybe patriotic. Just as bad.’
‘It’s youth. Savour it. You’re given bonuses to compensate for being naïve.’
‘And I think two sexes are quite enough. Make quite enough problems. Well, two sexes and a half.’
Ambrose laughed. ‘Very good, Edith. A little slow, but first class.’
‘And what are the bonuses of youth?’
‘Youth.’
‘That’s circular.’
He thought. ‘Oh, litheness. That’s one.’
‘Litheness is little better than agility. It’s a rather gymnastic bonus. And in my case, it goes with red hair and freckles.’
‘Freckles are a rustic form of beauty, Edith. And I would describe your hair as rousse.’
‘Agility and freckles. Topnotch. And I’m hardly a youth. And giving the colour of my hair a French word no longer impresses, nor does it change a thing: its colour is fading. I would gladly give up my agility if I could also lose my naïvity.’ Thankfully her freckles were fading too; the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
He looked at her. ‘You’re allowed to be naïve — for one more year. I think those are the rules. After that, you are just considered wrong-headed, not naïve.’ He smiled across at her. ‘Edith, I think you’re a handsome woman. A graceful woman. And I like your freckles.’
‘Thanks. So are you.’
‘I wish you meant it.’
She did mean it. ‘I do. You are among the most beautiful here tonight.’
‘Thanks.’ Ambrose sighed, and looked around. ‘Among the men? Or both men and women?’
‘Don’t push for too much, darling.’
She still didn’t know what was supposed to happen at the club that evening, between them. His earlier answers were not complete. She knew she should ask him, while there was time, although she wished she’d had it out with him before coming to the rotten club. ‘Ambrose, I’m confused,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for another lover tonight … a man lover?’
She felt boorish, but it had to be asked. Anyhow this club was well on the other side of refinement. Boorish behaviour could hardly matter.
‘I want to be with you,’ he said.
She sensed that he was being honourable. She coaxed him to answer honestly. ‘Come clean, Ambrose.’
‘Well, if I really did attract a man, and that is unlikely …’ Modestly, he made a woebegone face.
She made a motherly, tell—the-truth-now face back to him. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘tell me.’
‘Oh — it might be fun to be with a man for the night. I suppose.’
She thought about this. What did ‘be with a man for a night’ mean to Ambrose? ‘Maybe you’d better elaborate,’ she said, fiddling with her drink.
He gathered himself, made his voice confident. ‘Yes, I might like to have a sexual act with a man.’
His answer seemed to somersault onto her lap like an angry cat.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I see.’ She didn’t see at all, really, although she did see that his wish excluded her. They rested there in a conversational crater. She was not sure how much further she wanted to go with her questions.
But he went on, sounding as if he was wanting to spill it all out. ‘No, not by a man. I think that most of all I want to have a sexual act with a man dressed as a woman.’
She was still excluded.
‘I think that’s what I want,’ he said, now satisfied with his reply.
She made herself imagine the difference, the difference between him in a sexual act with a woman, and in a sexual act with a man dressed as a woman. They would be both responding sexually to the feminine image. She was still not sure, though, what Ambrose meant — did he mean that he and his lover-dressed-as-a-woman would both pretend to be women? Or that they both behaved like men, or what? What did they do with their male parts? So many quandaries. Instead, she said, timidly, ‘I see. At least, I think I do.’
What was really foremost in her mind was that she did not want to be abandoned by Ambrose in this club. As she stared across at his made-up face, the cut of the wig hugging his head, the long pearl rivière necklace, the pretty shoulders framed in the square neck of the evening dress, she felt lost. Lost in the passageways of his sexuality, its turnings and its corridors and its doors — leading to where? Here in the club it was different from being back in his apartment when they played with clothes and make-up, sexually. She was part of it then — indeed, in control of it. In the apartment, she felt that wherever he went in his fantasies, ultimately she was with him and she knew that it all came to be focused on her and in the service of her bodily pleasure.
‘Can I be really straightforward with you?’ he said, drinking from his second cocktail.
There in the smoke of the club with its low lights, its glitter-ball, its bizzareness, and the Negro music, she felt she had no way to restrain him, that the whole atmosphere extended the right to absolute, and even flammable, self-revelation and conduct and, anyhow, what was there about him that she did not already know. Probably too much. ‘Tell me. I thought I’d heard it all. Tell me the rest.’
‘Are you sure you want to know?’
‘How can I be sure I want to know? Stop being so coy.’ Her toughness was false. Her breathing was not quite right.
He leaned a little towards her, which emphasised the innermost nature of what he was about to say. ‘I feel a definite need sometimes — I feel a real physical need sometimes, in my rectum.’
She took this in. The low lights of the club concealed her blushing. For an instant, she thought he meant to go to the toilet but then the intended meaning swiftly arrived.
‘Rectum?’ She said the word. She wondered whether she had used this word before — maybe she’d used it to a doctor, maybe in science at university; had written it, maybe in a physiology examination. The word did not seem at all clinical there, then, in this club, with Ambrose dressed so appealingly, even voluptuously, the word coming from his pretty red lips, altered in midair to sound brightly lurid. She honestly didn’t know what to say next.
He went on, ‘Desire — I feel desire in my rectum. Sometimes. A passionate desire for a man.’
She felt herself mentally staggering back from this revelation. Obviously she hadn’t heard all. Where was the end to ‘all’? With what she thought was admirable calm, she said, ‘It’s all right if you do, if it happens. If a man wants to escort you home.’ She was astonished to hear herself saying conventional phrases such as ‘escort you home’. Who was going to see her home? She supposed Ambrose would be gentlemanly enough to call the depot for a taxi. ‘Or, a man dressed as a lady.’ But then who did the escorting?
‘You don’t mind … if it happens?’
‘As long as you let me know what’s happening. I suppose. As long as everything is decorous.’ The word quailed in the atmosphere of the club. She was hesitant now, not being at all sure how far she wanted to go with the conversation, but an insensible, prurient curiosity pushed her along. ‘I suppose that a man dressed as a woman might be able to give you something that I couldn’t. Some stimulation that I couldn’t give you.’ She regained composure and altered her voice to a bantering toughness. ‘Heavens, darling, I wouldn’t want you to miss out on any of life’s pleasures. Who would wish that on anyone!’ But her tone hid her dismay, as Ambrose and some strange companion dimly acted it out in her imagination, despite the fact that some of the pieces of the puzzle were missing.
‘You’re very magnanimous,’ Ambrose said very seriously, reaching over and taking both her hands. ‘You are a very magnanimous person, Edith. Very.’
‘I am your friend, Ambrose.’ She strove towards a joking tone. ‘I suppose I am entitled to give the bride away.’
She knew then as she made the joke that they would never marry, not that it had ever been discussed.
‘I don’t always yearn for it,’ he rushed to say, ‘that sort of thing. I don’t lie about every day yearning for a man dressed as a woman, or wanting you to be a man dressed as a woman. I don’t always want those sort of thrills.’
‘Good.’
‘I want you, just as Edith, most of the time, nearly all of the time.’
‘That’s good.’ She was still struggling to comprehend all this and not to show any dismay. She’d heard of physical sex via the rectum as a birth control measure. She and Ambrose had never done it. When men had physical sex with other men, she had thought that they probably fondled each other and used their mouths. But the rectum, now that she thought about it, seemed obvious.
At this moment, Ambrose’s two friends arrived. Ye gods. They were men dressed as women — one very young and one not so young. They were British and on holidays, old friends of Ambrose from London.
‘We’re travelling as two sisters,’ the older one said, as if it were an especially clever thing to do.
The younger one seemed sulky. He went by the French name of Laure. Edith gave him marks for his choice of name.
Edith found it difficult to talk to them ‘as girls’, yet they probably didn’t want to talk about themselves as men. It was all very difficult. She sensed they did not wish to talk about their occupations, for instance. From some of their cryptic remarks, she thought they might be British Foreign Office. She let Ambrose talk to them. Their chat sounded to her like a feminine burlesque. They talked about the places where they’d be able to pass themselves off as girls. They seemed to enjoy talking about make-up, hair, and the pumicing of legs. She speculated about how they might have come to know Ambrose, how they came to share the same predilection. She would ask later. She wondered about Ambrose’s feminine voice, now heightened by their company — from his mother, his sister?
She was relieved when a man came to her and asked her, in French, to dance.
The three men dressed as women pretended to be put out that she had been asked and not them. There was much giggling.
The man was swarthy, maybe even dark, but in the low lights of the club it was hard to tell.
As she danced with him, he seemed morose, maybe slightly drunk.
She asked him, in French, where he was from.
He replied, ‘Azerbaijan.’
She guessed he was an émigré. Geneva was a home for these émigré people, in flight from fallen countries like Azerbaijan. She tried to recall what she’d read about Azerbaijan. It had been refused membership of the League because its boundaries were obscure.
‘You’re an émigré?’ she asked.
‘I am a castaway.’
‘I am sorry about your country. You will return to it one day.’
‘I do not have hope.’
She wondered why he was at this club. Maybe his masculinity was also castaway.
He asked her before she could ask him. ‘Why do you come here?’
‘Oh?’ She looked around as if she had just found herself there in the club by mishap. ‘Oh, I have a friend — a friend who comes here.’
‘You are not a lover of women?’
‘No.’ She nearly answered that her friend was a man but it was tripped up by a new thought — when she coupled with Ambrose which sex was she loving? Where was she in all this ambiguity? Did she make love to his ambiguities? ‘No, not at all,’ she said, wanting to have this man’s approval and attention.
He said, ‘I relax in this place because here all is lost too.’
‘I suppose so. How, though, do you mean, “lost”?’
‘These people are outside of it all, lost from the ordained paths.’
She was having trouble with his accent and his French but she followed his thinking.
‘I am lost from the soil of my nation. But these people,’ he nodded his head at the club crowd, ‘they are lost from the natural world. This is a netherworld.’
She too, glanced around, seeing it through his eyes, and yes, it was a netherworld. She changed the subject. ‘It is difficult here in Geneva — being an émigré?’
‘I am more than an émigré — I am also government in exile. With me, the government of my country resides.’
He said he wanted to drink — would she join him? He did not dance well and she was glad to leave the dance floor. They went to his table where he had a bottle of cognac. He said that here in this club he was doubly exiled. ‘I am a man of normal feelings. And here, here I feel double exile and that takes me beyond the pain of the first exile. I am a normal man in pain.’
She saw how he was using the bizarre atmosphere to dilute his pain but she still did not trust his normality. Was she looking for a normal friend, here in this club?
She looked across at Ambrose who was dancing with the younger travesti. The older travesti now looked sullen.
Edith felt the evening was slipping the reins of her personal order, and she felt she might very well fall, fall down some trap door into a dark, sensual chamber. Maybe a silken chamber in Azerbaijan. Did they have silk? She tried again to recall what she’d read about Azerbaijan. Nothing much was coming up. She knew that after the Soviets had taken them over, they had applied as a government in exile to be accepted by the League but had been refused because of the border problem.
Ambrose and his young dance partner stopped where she and Mr Huneeus were sitting.
‘Introduce us, Edith,’ Ambrose said, in a jealous falsetto voice, standing there holding the hand of the younger man.
She stumblingly introduced Ambrose by his female name of Carla and the young Englishman also by his nom déguisée.
‘Mr Huneeus is an émigré from Azerbaijan,’ she said, thus recklessly granting him his claim, she observed.
It turned out that the younger one knew much about Azerbaijan and displayed his knowledge. This pleased Mr Huneeus.
After some small talk, Ambrose and the young man danced on.
When they’d finished their drink she felt it was safe to invite Mr Huneeus to join the others. He gathered up his bottle of cognac and the glasses. She was uncertain whether Mr Huneeus was now attached to her for the evening, and what he might construct on their remaining together after the dance. But what did she care? Here in this club her own etiquette seemed inapplicable, rules of behaviour were either nonexistent or they were ‘unspoken’. What, she asked herself, are ‘unspoken rules’, and from where do they come? No, she was sure that even in this inverted world, there were rules. She knew that you couldn’t always see the rules simply by looking at people mixing together, but she suspected that strict rules always commissioned social life even when there was a claim to social illicitness. She had no intention of bothering to learn them.
Ambrose exchanged inquisitive glances at her, curious and maybe unsettled by Mr Huneeus’s presence. It wasn’t possible to answer him, and she then realised that she couldn’t answer herself — what was she at the club for? Why was she in the company of this Mr Huneeus? Was she also laying herself open to the turn of events? Was Mr Huneeus a ‘turn of events’?
She hadn’t had quite enough to drink, nor was she yet quite relaxed about the nature of her surroundings, to be free to throw herself into the turn of events. She knew about a timidity within herself when it came to allowing things to just happen. A threshold over which she had to be led, preferably blindfolded, or which she had to make herself jump like a shy horse. She landed well, though, she thought, on the other side. When and if she made the jump. On those two or three occasions in her life that she had made that jump.
During a toilet absence of Mr Huneeus, Ambrose, in a lapse back to his everyday self, leaned across to ask her if she’d told Mr Huneeus about their being League officers.
She said she hadn’t.
Ambrose said that it might be wiser to avoid the subject, and then said, ‘But if it comes up, so be it.’
Edith wasn’t sure that so be it at all. Émigrés always had problems to be solved and always looked to the League to do the solving. Problems of constitutional legitimacy. Problems of missing treasury gold. She did not wish to be used as an intercessor for the forsaken Republic of Azerbaijan.
‘And has he become your escort for the evening?’ Ambrose asked, in a quite different voice from that which had talked about their being officers of the League; he had returned to the effeminate voice belonging to his role that evening. It carried a suggestion of jealousy, but it lacked sharpness. His was a played-out jealousy, some sort of obligatory courtesy. As well it should be, given his own early musings and declarations of desire.
Before she could answer, there was a commotion at the bottom of the stairs, where the foyer opened into the club.
About ten youths with black armbands entered the club, most wearing black leather caps, black leather gaiters, and many carrying batons, pushing aside the doorman, and causing a scared lull in the exhilarated noise of the club. The lull was immediately followed by a louder nervous resumption of the noisy chatter, competing with the music — as if the club guests were pretending that nothing was happening.
But as the youths pushed and shoved their way deeper into the club, the noisy chatter and laughter died down. Soon the sounds of conversation had died away, leaving only the music of the orchestra playing on bravely, but ignored, with the dancers slowing to a shuffle, then stopping, and then standing, holding their poses while the music went over and around them, but unable to move.
Edith recognised the uniformed youths as Action Civique, a Swiss youth group friendly to Italy and the Mussolini government.
‘Action Civique,’ Ambrose said to his two friends. ‘Not nice.’
Mr Huneeus returned from the toilet and looked at the youths with distaste. He seemed to know the Action Civique too. ‘A bad lot,’ he said to Edith.
Some of the youths were speaking Italian in a bombastic, showy way, as part of their political exhibition.
The orchestra continued to play but at a faltering volume.
The Action Civique went around the room, stopping in front of some of the travesti and using their batons to lift the front of their low-waisted skirts and dresses like theatre curtains, running their batons lewdly up the stockinged legs to their groins, but not going as far as violence, interested only in embarrassment and the parading of the power which flowed from their uniforms, their batons, and their political arrogance. Some of the travesti pretended, with bravado, to like the attention of the young men and bravely played up to it. Weirdly, this play-acting in the face of threat seemed, then, almost natural to the atmosphere of the club, almost part of the evening. The frightened behaviour of the travesti with their exposed stockings and knickers unveiled the threatening nature of it all.
The owner of the club came through the crowd and approached the youths. He offered to provide the youths with tables and with drinks but they roughly pushed him away. As the owner reeled back from the shove and fell against the some of the standing couples, the music from the orchestra trailed off and the club became quiet under the revolving glitter-ball.
Of all things, Edith feared first for her fur coat but decided then that the youths were not thieves, and reminded herself that despite their Italianate political posing, they were, after all, Swiss, which she found vaguely reassuring. And that they belonged also to some political organisation and, presumably, had some sort of discipline.
Edith and Mr Huneeus and the others sat down and tried to resume an imitation of conversation but the youths reached their table and stared down at them, especially at Mr Huneeus.
For some reason, Mr Huneeus stood up, not respectfully, but as an assertion of himself. The leader of the group moved very close to Mr Huneeus and said, in Italian and then in French, ‘Your papers!’
Mr Huneeus seemed now quite dark and foreign in his heavy-weave double-breasted suit.
‘I am here as guest of the Swiss federal government and you have no right.’
‘Your papers.’ The leader pushed Mr Huneeus’s stomach with the baton. ‘In here, we are the government.’ One or two others stood behind their leader, their batons resting in the palms of their hands in a practised way.
‘I am the Deputy President and the Ambassador-at-large for the Republic of Azerbaijan. I request that you honour that.’
Edith was impressed by this information from Mr Huneeus, and wondered whether the Action Civique would respect his position.
‘You have no place in this country,’ the leader pronounced, and hit Mr Huneeus across the mouth with the baton, hard enough for a hard cracking sound to be heard. Blood came from his broken lips and he tried to stand his ground, staggering, ignoring the bleeding.
‘Now look here!’ Ambrose said, rising to his feet and stepping forward. ‘Easy on.’
His English male voice came through the lipstick and make-up ludicrously and ineffectually. Edith felt embarrassed for him.
The leader lifted Ambrose’s dress to reveal his lace underwear and then jabbed at his genitals with the baton. Ambrose instinctively recoiled and pushed his dress down, his hands covering his genitals. One of the youths gave a cry of triumph at the unmasking. In a diminished voice, Ambrose said, ‘Please stop!’
She saw that Ambrose had lost his male authority, his English authority. She felt that even she might have more authority as a woman than he did now as a man dressed as a woman. But she felt that her limited authority could not save Mr Huneeus. Nothing could be done by speaking or appealing to them, and instead she stood up and moved in front of Mr Huneeus, shielding him, and said to the leader, ‘Stop this. Ambassador Huneeus is with me,’ hoping still that the use of his title might help.
The leader looked her over and then took hold of her dress on both sides of her body and pulled her skirt fully up, revealing her underwear, and put a hand on her crotch.
She pushed his hand away, and pulled her skirt down, in a firm movement which was something she realised that the travesti had not done. The leader stood perplexed, having touched her enough to know that she was a woman, feeling maybe that to touch her further would be not so much an abuse of power but an impropriety, something of which his mother would not approve. Or perhaps it entered his mind that he might have committed a criminal offence.
Another of the crowd of young thugs, however, seemed not to be so restrained and came forward saying, ‘Is she a woman?’
The leader said yes, trying to push her away now, to get around her to Mr Huneeus, but she stayed protectively interfering with his efforts, but weakly, defencelessly.
The second man pulled Edith away, and said, ‘Let me carry out a search.’
She struggled with him but another youth moved in to hold her arms. Another two grappled with Mr Huneeus who was trying to come, now, to her rescue, and Ambrose and his two friends were also grappling with youths. As the scuffling began to spread, the second man put his hand up inside her skirt and she felt his hand inside her knickers, felt a finger probing, trying to find her opening.
Mr Huneeus cried out in rage and lunged free from those holding him. In trying to protect her, he was again struck on the head with baton blows.
She kicked out a foot and screamed, and felt her kicks connecting with the youth’s legs who simply grunted from the kicks and moved off, resuming an uneasy laughter, smelling his fingers, offering his fingers to his colleagues — ‘Pure woman.’ Now some of them acted as if the smell was repugnant. All this happening under the glitter-ball and in the bizarre decor of the club made it seem even more nightmarish.
Had they really dared to touch her there? She heard herself cry out again.
The leader said to the others to leave her alone but she saw that he now had little command.
The club seemed to erupt, with scuffling breaking out at the other end of the club as well and with others going to their assistance, attention turned from Mr Huneeus and from her.
She caught Ambrose’s eye, and cried out in English, ‘Let’s run for it!’ She reached down and took off her shoes and Ambrose followed her example and took off his shoes also. Ambrose took her hand, she took the dazed, bleeding Mr Huneeus by the arm and pulled him with her. The other two came good and acted as a sort of running guard as they pushed their way towards the door through which other people were also beginning to flee the enveloping mêlée.
The scuffling spread through the club with the Action Civique using their batons and clubgoers using chairs and other objects which came to hand. Glass was being smashed. The black musicians had taken their instruments and disappeared from the stage.
At the bottom of the stairs, before running for the street, Edith thought momentarily of her fur coat but kept on going.
She, Mr Huneeus, and the three men dressed as women rushed up the stairs, burst into the chilly air of the street, and ran.
With her arm around Mr Huneeus, he holding on to her and to Ambrose, they ran for it, along rue de Ia Cité and down towards the lake and Ambrose’s apartment.
They all paused on a corner about a block or so from the club, all holding on to each other, breathless, Ambrose had both his shoes and wig in his hand, Mr Huneeus, more breathless because of age and weight and maybe his injuries, was coughing. The soles of Edith’s stockings were holed, her feet were hurt.
They limped up the stairs to Ambrose’s apartment, and once inside, fell into chairs, heavy with exhaustion from their fear and running, safe behind the locked door.
Ambrose changed out of his dress into a silk house robe and took up his doctor role, attending to Mr Huneeus’s smashed lips and cut head, and to the older of his English friends, who was beginning an asthma attack.
The younger friend went to the kitchen and prepared cocoa which Edith found an incongruously practical thing for the young man in a women’s evening dress to be doing.
After regaining her breath, Edith went to the bathroom, and, alone, began to sob from the indignity of the molestation and from the panic of it all. She was burningly aware that her indignity had happened in front of these unknown Englishmen and Mr Huneeus. She kept splashing cold water on to herself. She doubted that she could go back out to the others in the drawing room.
After a while, Ambrose came looking for her. ‘Edith? Are you all right in there?’
She thought for a moment that she did not have the will to open the door, but he remained outside, calling to her, and she did open it and he came in looking worried. She held on to him.
‘Should we call the police?’ he said, but without conviction. She saw that he was caught in their private predicament as well as in the urge for justice. She saw instantly too, that the police would be too much for her to take at this time or for any of them to take.
Mr Huneeus was lying down on a couch, covered with a blanket, suffering from shock. He kept saying that a bodyguard usually accompanied him. That he would, tomorrow, instruct his bodyguard to track down these thugs. They would be dealt with. Dealt with.
She wanted to believe him; she thought it probable that someone like Mr Huneeus would have a bodyguard. She believed it and felt good about it and she wanted him to track down the thugs and beat them.
While Mr Huneeus rested, the four of them sat around, the English couple in their women’s clothing without wigs, the older one inhaling from a preparation, all retelling, cursing, and sharing observations now in their fully male voices — as survivors from a shipwreck, all solicitous of Edith. They were all made very close from what they had been through. She no longer felt any antipathy towards the two Englishmen. She kept shivering and Ambrose fetched a rug which she draped around her shoulders. The couple asked if they might stay, and Ambrose fixed a bed for them in the guest room and they said good night, kissing Edith and holding her in a strong embrace.
After dozing for a short time, Mr Huneeus awakened and said a formal good night. Ambrose, who had a telephone, called the taxi depot. As Mr Huneeus prepared to go, he handed her his card. She fumbled in her handbag and found her card which she gave him, without any thought of protocol or the League or any of that. He read it, bowed formally to her and to Ambrose.
In bed she began to cry. As Ambrose comforted her and they talked there in the dark, she realised that Ambrose had not seen, or had not registered, what had happened to her. He spoke of the brutish behaviour towards Huneeus but did not mention the behaviour of the youth to her.
‘And there was what they did to me.’
‘Are you hurt too?’ He half sat up in the bed.
‘Not bodily.’
‘You were very brave.’
She wondered if she should tell him. ‘I mean the other thing, the thing they did to me.’
He was silent, as if trying to recall. ‘I don’t follow.’
For a flashing second, she thought that she might have imagined it all, that it was her mind enacting a primeval terror. ‘They molested me.’
Ambrose turned on the bedside light and looked at her. She could tell that he was disturbed, was perhaps worried that she was hysterical, that she was caught in frenzied fantasies of womankind. Or that she was using the language loosely.
‘You were molested?’ His voice now had the protective concern of a doctor. She began crying. ‘I didn’t see this. Was it at the time you tried to protect Huneeus?’
As she cried she suffered a peculiar opposition of feeling — relief that he hadn’t seen and that maybe others hadn’t seen, and yet also a yearning for pity.
‘How were you molested? I mean, talk to me as a doctor.’
‘I’m all right. In a way I’m glad you didn’t see it. Maybe others didn’t see it either. I don’t want to describe it. My head aches, but it’s more from humiliation.’
He held her. ‘I didn’t see what happened in the confusion. I don’t want to sound disregarding.’
She liked that he was a doctor, and she relished a sense of protection. ‘It’s all right. Turn off the light. Let’s sleep. I need to sleep.’
‘I’ll get you a sleeping draught.’
‘No, don’t bother. Thank you.’
He ignored her, and left the room, returning with a mixture in a glass. He held her head as he would a child, and helped her drink it and she felt comforted by him there in his regimental striped pyjamas, and as a doctor.
For the first time since coming to Geneva, she wanted to go home to Australia.
She did not go to the office on the Monday but by Wednesday her spirits had returned, her agitation had settled somewhat, and, though still deeply sombre and occasionally shaking, she went into work.
In her office, there was a formal note from His Excellency, Mr Huneeus, and flowers from him which had been put in water by one of the women in the bureau, but they were wilting. The note invited her to come to his embassy on the Tuesday of the following week. She wondered tiredly if the invitation implied amorous interest by Mr Huneeus. She felt affection for him from their having shared a horror and survived, but she did not want to encourage any amorous affection. She pushed the matter aside for now.
Ambrose had gone back to the club and retrieved their coats and hers was on a hanger behind the door of her office.
She decided to have Ambrose accompany her to the Embassy of Azerbaijan. They discussed whether Mr Huneeus would recognise Ambrose as a man, and decided that, given Mr Huneeus’s condition on the night, he probably would not, and that if he did, he would choose not to refer to the strange circumstances under which they’d met.
It was a rambling, clean office in Servette, and she surmised that Mr Huneeus and others lived in the upper apartments. On the wall was a framed portrait of the President, a group photograph of his cabinet, a framed copy of the constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan, and a national coat-of-arms.
Mr Huneeus sat at a green-covered desk. His lips were still swollen. There were three other men and one woman in the room. A map was spread on the desk. A rubber stamp and inking pad. A document. An ink well. A wooden rocking-blotter.
He rose and, as a traditional greeting, hugged them both. If he recognised Ambrose, he did not indicate it by any word or gesture.
Speaking with some distress and further distortion because of his lips, he said that it was to be a formal occasion after which they would retire to a less formal reception.
He handed a sheet of paper to one of the other men who read from it in French, as if reading a proclamation, using a deep, loud voice: ‘I wish to announce to the world that the Deputy President of Azerbaijan, with the powers vested in him, in gratitude for the efforts of Edith Campbell Berry to save the Ambassador-at-large and Deputy President of Azerbaijan from bodily harm, in recognition of her gallant and courageous efforts to extricate all from a situation of certain danger, the Republic of Azerbaijan hereby declares and irrevocably assigns, the name of Edith to the River Akara in the sovereign republic of Azerbaijan and that henceforth this river will be known as the River Edith.’
Edith was suffused with emotion and began to shake. From where he’d been standing in the background, Ambrose came up behind her and she felt his arm supporting her, as tears rose to her eyes.
Mr Huneeus took up the rubber stamp, inked it, stamped the proclamation, signed it and blotted the signature.
He rolled up the proclamation, tied it with blue silk ribbon, and handed it to Edith, again formally hugging her and kissing her on both cheeks.
‘I am overwhelmed,’ she said, feeling truly overwhelmed, tears now coming to her eyes and flowing. ‘I cannot say how moved I am.’
One by one, the other men and the woman came to her and hugged her, and kissed her on both cheeks.
Ambrose said softly, ‘Well earned, Edith,’ and gave her a hug and kiss.
‘Come.’ Mr Huneeus gestured to her to look at the map, and he traced with his finger, the river. ‘This is the River Edith. It is a fine, clear river, it flows through forests and snow-covered mountains to the Caspian Sea. It is untouched and unspoiled.’
Edith had another burst of crying then, briefly, but dried her eyes and pulled herself together like a good diplomat, though remaining on the brink of tears. She realised that it was not her courage alone that was being attended to. She knew from his words that Mr Huneeus was also attending to her hurt.
He said, taking her arm, ‘Come, now we will feast,’ and he led her to a drawing room where traditional Azerbaijan food was laid out. Champagne was served by a member of staff dressed as a waiter, but who did not move as deftly as a waiter.
She was toasted. The champagne seemed to her to be from the waters of the river. She felt cleansed by its clean taste, and cleansed by the image in her mind of the clear, fine river flowing through forests and snow-covered mountains, and she felt herself healing, felt the sullying being taken from her by the river and by the sincere and serious honour which these people had bestowed, even if, as she suspected, their authority was doubtful.
‘I hope,’ she said, tightly holding her champagne glass, tears again in her eyes and her voice, ‘I hope one day to visit my river, in the free Republic of Azerbaijan. I toast the free Republic of Azerbaijan.’
They all toasted the free Republic of Azerbaijan.