Public Life (2): Return to the Molly

Leaning back in her office chair, Edith said that she would not, not, not go back to the Molly Club. Standing against the filing cabinet, hands in the pockets of his tweed suit, without his jacket, his waistcoat affecting fob watch and chain, his regimental cuff links visible, Ambrose stared out at the snow slush in the Palais courtyard.

‘That I appreciate. And consequently, you’re “parade exempt”, Edith. Attendance not expected. I thought that you should know about the meeting, that’s all.’

‘How did they contact you? How did they get your name!?’

He shrugged. ‘When I went back for the coats there was a notice. And Follett, the owner, talked with me.’

For no good reason, Edith felt that what Ambrose said sounded like an evasion. She had no reason to think it was evasion. He had no reason to be evasive. What did she care if he had been back every night? But when it came to this matter he always sounded evasive. He had explained the two ‘sisters’ from England as having been part of his old gang from London which meant that he had indulged his predilection before her. Perhaps she considered Ambrose inherently dubious, in the deepest sense. If his sexual rudiments were unstable, did not all of him become questionable? No, that was unfair. It was because of the loathsome incident which made the Molly Club and anything about it seem to her so murky. She felt that much more was going on than she was being told or that she understood. The loathsome incident had stirred up a nest of spiders in her mind.

Anyhow, it was his peculiar mania. She simply shared his secret and participated in it in their private life. She did not really belong in his darker covert life outside the bedroom. If, indeed, he had one. If it wasn’t all in her distraught head. But she continued to wonder whether he’d been back there without her, and if so, what he’d got up to there.

It was that she was jittery and moody about it all. Nothing sat well with her at present. Her work was scrappy.

He went on, ‘We — those who have been to the club — we, they, feel we should stand up to them.’

‘Stand up? We? I thought you had been to the club only that once.’

‘Oh, you know, go on as usual, I mean, but with a little more precaution.’

‘It doesn’t need me.’

‘Quite right. They feel that to bow down to them would be giving up too easily.’

She nearly said, harshly, that the Action Civique were just trying to clean up the town, to keep Geneva decent. Not that it needed to be much cleaner. And it probably needed a little indecency. With effort, she curbed her antagonism and reversed her first sentiments and forced out a joke. ‘I suppose Geneva needs all the indecency it can get.’

Ambrose gave a short laugh, but coloured. ‘Indecency?’ he said, as though he’d never thought of his behaviour as indecent. He glanced at her to see if she might not also have been sarcastic. ‘I suppose it does.’ He regained his humour. ‘And we’re just the people to maintain Geneva’s sense of indecency.’ He also forced out a laugh.

‘Indeed you are.’

The thing she found sticky and displeasing was that all this had nothing to do with the League. She wanted no outside untidiness or demand in her life. The League was too urgent. She had no time for other things, let alone messy and murky things.

‘It’s a matter of standing up to them,’ Ambrose repeated, trying to sound righteously firm, ‘to go peacefully about our business.’

She sensed then, that for all his releasing of her from the matter, he was still trying to persuade her to be involved.

‘One day you must explain to me what precisely that business is — that the Molly Club goes about.’

‘If only I knew, dear. Words fail.’

He looked at his watch, came over and kissed her, and said he would be off. ‘Don’t you worry.’

After he left, she went to the window wondering if it would snow again. A snow-covered European city was still a wonder to her and it made her feel she was living inside a toy village. She watched the smoke tumbling lazily from the apartment chimneys. But the snow denied what happened in the buildings that it covered with the false white innocence of snow. The snow was oblivious of her hurt.

She found it bewildering that she shared the indignity of that night only with the shadowy incognito people of the Molly Club who she would never see in daylight. Or see again. Or maybe she did see them. Maybe they worked here at the Palais, maybe she saw them in the mornings stamping the snow from their shoes, brushing it from their shoulders. Maybe she passed them daily in the streets and byways of Geneva because, truth be known, she would not recognise them without their costumes, the cloak of inversion, and heavy make-up. She paused, but they must recognise her, she had not been disguised on that evening. She didn’t know what to make of that thought.

She saw how a few natural women, like her, were permitted, chosen maybe, to be a court to their behaviour, to be an affectionate, indulgent audience of natural womanhood, to sanction them in their play.

Approached from another position, maybe she had a democratic obligation to go to the club and stand up to Action Civique. The Molly Club was not part of the toy town. It could be argued that it was all very well for her to be fighting for world order and peace with letters and memos. What about the threats of disorder now, here and now, in her own life or at least, in Ambrose’s, her friend’s life? In the town in which she lived. But which was the disorder? The travesti who contradicted their nature? Or the Action Civique? If Ambrose were there she would have made a joke about it. The difference, she forced herself to note, was that there was no violence in what Ambrose and his effeminate pals did. It was the arrogant young men in uniforms with clubs. The other night at the Bavaria, Herr Stresemann had told her that duelling in student corps was fashionable again in Germany in the Borussia Corps and so on. Getting their cheeks slashed to prove their aristocratic manhood. Stresemann himself had slashed cheeks but he was a man from another century. Even Bernard Shaw, whom she usually admired, had seen something impressive in Mussolini and his uniformed youths.

She saw that if she continued to think like this she would have to go to the meeting. Didn’t she already give enough to the bloody world? She again felt close to tears as waves of recall from that night at the club passed through her.

Throughout the day she felt she was dodging the moral dilemma of attending the Molly Club meeting by hiding behind her personal hurt. She was then more annoyed that she should be troubled at all by it as some sort of moral dilemma.

What would it be, this meeting? Would the meeting be businesslike or would they all dress up again and carry on? But for the first time since the dreadful night she recalled the other ungruesome parts of the occasion. Her fears about her fur coat. The two Englishmen dressed as sisters, preening and giggling, and saying some very funny things. She remembered the younger one getting the cocoa at Ambrose’s apartment when they were safely home, and how close they had all felt that night. And then the naming of the river. She became tearful again.

Curse it. She would call Ambrose and say she would go to his stupid meeting.

 

And again she helped Ambrose with his costume and make-up at the dressing table in his apartment. He sitting there in stockings, suspender belt, knickers, and chemise, enlivened by the clothing, delighting in the application of powder, lipstick, and mascara. The painting of his nails.

She had groaned out aloud when he timorously told her that he was going to the meeting dressed as a woman. He explained defensively that it was considered essential that they go to the club as they usually would go, and not to bow down in any way by dressing in everyday clothes.

She had again questioned his use of ‘usual’, but without pursuing a reply.

‘I take it that they don’t know about the meeting — the Action Civique?’

‘I doubt that they would. I don’t see how. It’s a private meeting. It’s hardly likely to be written up in the Journal de Genève. At least, I hope not.’

‘Ambrose, I can’t go if they are going to turn up and all that is going to happen again. I just can’t.’

‘I cannot see how they could possibly know. And there will be precautions.’

‘What precautions?’

‘Doormen and so on.’

‘Why are you dressing up, then? Won’t that be provocative?’

‘I am not going to parade through the streets. Nor, I doubt, are any of the others. We are dressing up as an act of self-respect.’

She refused to allow herself to see that it had to do with self-respect. The contradictions defeated her.

He turned away from the mirror and took her hands. ‘I speak as a doctor and I think that going to the club again might be good for you. It might be what is known in psychology as cathartic.’

‘What is “cathartic”?’

‘It might help banish your phantoms from that horrible night. By challenging them, they go away.’

She wasn’t so sure. Couldn’t it also revive the phantoms?

He went on, ‘I don’t mean confronting the Action Civique — I mean confronting the place where it all happened.’

She could see that he was being brave. She knew that she should also be brave. ‘It’s all right — I’m coming with you.’

‘Thank you, Edith. I mean that. Thank you.’ He stood and kissed her cheek.

He sat down and turned back to his face, back to plucking his eyebrows. ‘Back to the important things,’ he joked.

She managed a smile. ‘I agree with the amber bracelets, rings and earrings. They will work well.’

‘I think so — with the green dress.’

When he dressed as a woman he wore a reddish wig so that he could take advantage of her wardrobe and jewellery.

‘I’m curious about something, Ambrose,’ she said, as she stood behind him, fitting his wig.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you really feel desire in your rectum?’ she said good-humouredly.

He smiled back at her through his reflection in the mirror. ‘As a matter of truth, Edith, I do. Just here.’ He touched his rear. They both spluttered with laughter.

‘What do you really feel?’ she said.

‘Oh, it’s rather nice. I would rather like to think it is what you feel.’

‘I suppose we will never know if it is like what I feel.’

‘We do know one thing. We know it’s satisfied by the same shape of thing.’

They both laughed.

‘Only very occasionally though,’ he added, seriously, ‘do I feel this.’

‘By “very occasionally” do you mean occasionally every day? Or every month?’

He made eyes at her in the mirror. ‘Or occasionally every waking minute. No, seriously, every few months or so.’ He took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. ‘But best of all, I want you, Edith. That’s the best.’

She also wondered to herself if she ever wanted to have physical love his way.

 

At the door of the club, the shuddering recollection of the dreadful night went through her and she had to will herself down the steps. Entry was more supervised this time. They knocked, the peephole opened and they were scrutinised. Ambrose said something about the meeting and gave his name to the face at the peephole. This time he did not wear her fur-trimmed coat but wore his own everyday coat and hat over his dress, and they came in a taxi. Ambrose, discreetly, did not talk during the ride in the taxi. The bolt was drawn and the door opened to admit them. In the club the manager-owner, Mr Follett, dressed in women’s clothing and wig, recognised Edith and came over to her. He took both her hands and thanked her for returning and said something about her courage on the night.

Dressed as a woman, he was rather flamboyant.

‘I took what seemed the only course of action. At the time,’ she said to him. And for my distress, she thought, I now have a river named after me, which is one of the nicest things which has ever happened to me. The worst and the best that had happened to her in life so far had sprung from the same sordid source.

‘You did more than that,’ Mr Follett said sincerely.

The club was set up for a meeting with chairs in rows, rather than as a nightclub. Mr Follett seated them and brought them drinks.

She wondered how many of those in the club had witnessed her indignity that night. She knew Ambrose hadn’t seen it and therefore it was likely that others hadn’t seen it, but she would never know who knew and who did not know. Looking around, she saw others in the club who still bore signs of their injuries. Two had arms in slings.

The weirdness of the evening was heightened because of the formal seriousness of the discussion by men dressed as women and a couple of women dressed as men. Again, a few natural women like herself were there as themselves. Mr Huneeus was not present. She found that she was relieved to be in a meeting where, for once, she had no duties, and was almost invisible. Pity it was that she was not fully invisible.

‘We appreciate your presence,’ Mr Follett said, addressing the meeting, speaking with a normal male voice. It was all too bizarre.

‘We made every endeavour to contact those who come to the club. As you would have seen at the door now, we are using the peephole more strictly — in future all guests to the club will have to be identified — and we have a mirror to view the street from the club. And we will have, not one, but two doormen, who will be armed with stout clubs.’

There were noises of approval. Everyone looked to the door and to the two unsmiling doormen who looked powerful and competent in bow ties and dinner suits.

One of the travestis said, ‘I lay claim to the one on the left.’

Another said, ‘I lay claim to both.’

There was some laughter, but the doormen didn’t smile.

‘Please, this is a serious meeting. Some amongst us are in the position to try discreetly to make sure that such a thing does not happen again. And to punish, in various unseen ways, those responsible for what happened that night.’ Mr Follett then gave a malevolent smile, and added, ‘Those so punished may never know they have been punished.’

There were knowing noises from members of the audience, and a light clapping of approval.

Edith was fascinated by this statement. It made graphic the fact that, in life, there were people who made decisions for or against us, who might be acting from punitive or other concealed reasons, about which we would never know. There were hidden gods. There were perhaps many such gods in any one person’s life. ‘For obvious reasons, we do not wish to bring police attention to the club.’

‘I, myself, would be glad to invite any attention I can get,’ said the travesti who had claimed both the doormen, in a stage falsetto voice. He was becoming the meeting comedian. Lessening tension. A few laughed. Mr Follett smiled, and said, ‘Olivia, you get too much attention,’ and then went on seriously: ‘To put it another way, we do not wish to become a police file.’

He suggested that in future people leave the club in groups. Ambrose asked if he could speak. He rose to his feet and said in his normal male voice that it was important the club members show they were not intimidated. They should go on with the activities of the club. However, it was also important that club members not provoke the Action Civique by flaunting their behaviour. Comings and goings, for instance, should be discreet, and he suggested with respect, that patrons leaving the club wear regular overcoats and hats, and so on.

‘Darling, I wouldn’t know how to be discreet,’ Olivia said, drawing laughter, ‘it goes against my nature.’ Edith sensed that the audience felt Olivia was overtaxing its willingness to joke about the matter.

For the first time that evening, Edith also smiled. She realised that the sense of bizarreness which she’d felt up to now had dissipated and what was around her, and where she was, had become unexceptional, almost prosaic.

Mr Follett said he noted and he hoped others noted, and he hoped that Olivia noted, Carla’s point, which he endorsed. Edith was surprised that Mr Follett knew Ambrose’s nom déguisée and it awakened the feelings she’d had about Ambrose’s evasiveness. That Ambrose had more to do with the club and everything about it than he’d told her. But she also decided to cease worrying about the club and Ambrose’s murky connections. This was to be definitely her last visit.

Those who had been injured would be compensated from a members’ fund which the club was starting with a donation of 1,000 francs. There were other details.

Free drinks and hors d’oeuvres were then handed around and Mr Follett’s assistant manager announced that a diverting spectacle had been devised and would be performed.

Those club members who were to perform left the meeting to prepare themselves. The chairs were pushed into clusters, tables brought out, and the meeting dissolved into a social evening. The Negro orchestra appeared and took their places. Other people were arriving now, perhaps having chosen to miss the meeting.

‘Can we go now?’ she asked Ambrose.

‘Let’s see the show.’

‘I’m not sure I want to see the show.’ She wanted to leave but remembered the menace which still hung about the club. Irritated, she realised she would have to wait for Ambrose as an escort.

The lights went down and the orchestra began to play. The curtain rose on the small stage.

There were uneasy giggles and appreciative gasps, as three of the cast danced on stage, costumed as Action Civique.

A voice in the audience shouted out in mock horror, ‘Oh no. Who asked for an encore?’

Edith felt a clutching of her stomach as she saw the armbands, the black leather caps and the batons again. Ambrose gave a small sideways glance at her, as if checking to see that she was all right, and he took her hand.

Then on stage danced three pretty travesties who joined with the Action Civique actors in singing popular songs. After the singing, the female performers went into a salacious cabaret routine of grappling, resisting and dancing with the Action Civique, and then baring themselves, offering themselves. Edith was both riveted and chilled. She watched as those dressed as Action Civique went through a re-enactment of the lifting of dresses with the batons and the touching of the genitals with’ the batons, much, much play with batons, but with the travesties circumspectly keeping their backs turned to the audience.

They played out a funny sketch full of sexual innuendo where the Action Civique were vanquished with a repeated chorus line about ‘men who needed batons’.

Edith thought that the spectacle had been well rehearsed. There were cries of ‘show us’ and eventually, as the finale, the girls did turn around, lifting their skirts and dresses to show their underwear and glimpses of their tucked away bulges.

Edith was glad the lights were down, because she had never seen anything as salacious as this. Taking another drink from the waiter, she drank deeply, seeking calm from the alcohol. She had heard of shows in Berlin and Paris. The atmosphere in the club was no longer prosaic. It was, she thought, very much an atmosphere of the times. During other events, she had felt that she was of the times. Being in Geneva she sometimes felt that, too. And now, in this cabaret, she felt it. The darker side of the times.

There was excessive applause from the audience, and the cast came back and took a bow, the Action Civique and the ‘girls’ of the cast linking arms. The lights came on.

Mr Follett thanked the audience again but said that as it was not a regular night for the club, the club would be closing now and he wished them all good night. He reminded any club patron who had suffered injury and medical expenses to give details to himself or to the assistant-manager.

She was relieved that the night was over.

As she and Ambrose stood up, Mr Follett came to them and said quietly that he would like to invite them upstairs to his apartment, for a nightcap drink and a chat, when the others had gone.

Edith rushed to say that really they had to go, and found that her voice wobbled from the drinks she’d had.

Mr Follett said, ‘You are a heroine of mine, you were very brave. I insist you honour me with your presence.’

Edith managed to say graciously, ‘We were all heroines on that night.’

But she again felt an embarrassed worry about how much he had seen on the dreadful night. She now worried too about compromising the League by any closer involvement with the Molly Club. She glanced at Ambrose, hoping that he would extricate them from the invitation by saying that they had to go. He didn’t. Instead, he enthusiastically accepted.

They waited, drinking, while the last few patrons, reluctant to leave, clinging to the evening, were eventually ushered out by the doormen, good-naturedly protesting as they went. Mr Follett went about putting out lights and collecting ashtrays. She and Ambrose finished their drinks in the emptied club and she felt, standing there, how the empty nightclub seemed to rebuff the presence of only one couple, as if one couple alone did not belong in a nightclub.

His duties finished, Mr Follett came to them and led them by an interior stairway at the back of the club up two flights to his apartment. He knocked on the door in a way that announced his arrival to whoever was inside the apartment. The door was opened by one of the young men who had acted as Action Civique in the show, and who was still in costume, and they went in. She and Ambrose were introduced and she was again praised for her courage. She said she would prefer now for that to be put behind them all.

‘Agreed,’ said Bernard Follett. ‘Bernard Follett says that to laugh is to demolish.’

She thought, but did not say, that sometimes humour simply dodges.

It was a luxurious place, with well-chosen furniture and objets d’art. While Mr Follett fussed about drinks, she occupied herself by examining a bright blue screen which divided the room and which was decorated with golden peacocks whose tails reached from the top of the six-foot-high screen down to the floor in an oriental style.

She turned from the screens and screwed herself up to being sociable. The company of the smiling boy dressed as Action Civique caused an unsteady apprehension, an entwining of the pleasant and the unpleasant. He was a living sculpture of a threat and of her dread, now turned to a matter of play-acting, to a social ornament — for when she allowed her gaze to focus on him as a person, she could see that he was muscular and very handsome.

Music came from a gramophone. The Firebird. Bernard Follett began dancing with Ambrose, and she, by pressure of circumstance, danced with the Action Civique boy, who called himself Patrice.

The pairing into dancing couples seemed to happen so easily, so inescapably, although it became obvious to her that Ambrose was an attraction to both Bernard Follett and to Patrice. This at first surprised her but she had to remind herself that Ambrose, well, was very familiar to her, but that to them he was ‘fresh’, and when she looked at him through their eyes, she could see that he made a very attractive travesti. She also reminded herself that these men were not necessarily interested in a woman as a woman.

Patrice took something of a polite interest in her, although she felt she had to share it with his over-the-shoulder interest in Ambrose, but this interest was sufficient for her, for that night, and for the circumstances. She did not want, in any way, the burden of amorous attention.

The record on the gramophone came to an end and she considered that she might let herself become drunk. Or she might not. She might get up from the sofa where she had now flopped, find her coat, and take her leave. Or she might not. But if she was simply contemplating ‘getting up’ while remaining seated, she was almost lost — that was a sure indication that her will was oozing away.

She might let herself be kissed by Patrice. Their eyes kept meeting each other’s lips as they talked. Or she might not.

She would go now. Rising to her feet she asked Mr Follett to telephone the taxi depot and arrange for a taxi to be sent to the club.

‘Of course.’ He offered no argument.

Ambrose said he would go with her.

‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Have a night out.’

‘You don’t mind?’

She smiled and shook her head. Their eyes met and registered that she was ‘resigning’ from the club. She was backing away from the club and all its works.

‘I’ll see you at the office,’ she said. This told him that she was going to her own rooms.

He took her hand. ‘Thank you, Edith. Again.’

Follett helped her into her coat and walked down the stairs with her to wait for the taxi.

The doormen were still putting things away.

‘It is all right,’ she said to Follett, ‘I will wait here on my own.

Follett told the doorman to see her to the taxi and he said good night and left her.

Shortly after, her taxi driver came to the door of the club and the doorman called to her.

In the taxi she wondered whether such things as the Molly Club had happened in her parents’ times. Her mind attempted to visualise what Ambrose might be doing back in Follett’s apartment.

As she lay back in a late-night bath she thought to herself that she wouldn’t be surprised if the night had indeed been, in Ambrose’s word, cathartic. However she did not think that she would go back to the Molly Club.

Next day at lunch she asked Ambrose whether he’d had ‘a good time’.

He smiled diffidently. ‘Oh yes. Nothing wrong with a little Greek revelry. Once in a while.’ She smiled, but without the confidence of knowing fully what she was smiling about. Nor did she wish to know more.

‘As long as it’s without moderation,’ he added.

She asked him if he thought that there had been such clubs as the Molly in their parents’ time.

Ambrose looked at her with his frown of amusement. ‘As shocking as it may be, dear Edith, I believe that it happened also in our parents’ time.’

‘You think they were as wicked as us?’

‘I do believe they were. Some of them.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Oh? I’ve seen the forbidden books of their time. And I hear tell.’ Ambrose prattled on. ‘We could die of etiquette. In fact, I knew a chap who died of etiquette. Death from good form, the coroner said. Need to break out now and then.’

She could tell that he was trying to be sure that she felt ‘right’ about it all.

What she felt glad of was that she had ventured into that dark world not as a place to live, but as a locale she had now visited and where she’d been able to glimpse more of the nature of things. Or perhaps, the de-naturing of things.

About three weeks after this strange night, Edith was walking along the rue de Berne when she saw the young man who had assaulted her. He was unloading boxes from a truck outside a store. He looked hot and miserable. She took off the glove of her right hand, walked over to him, and slapped his face.

His hand went to the slapped cheek and his eyes were dully uncomprehending, stunned.

She walked on, her knees a little shaky, but quite coolly replacing her glove. She thought that a few people had seen it. Not that it mattered.

The young man and she were not, in playground parlance, ‘even’ but it was something of a retribution.

It was said that revenge should be undertaken unemotionally if it is to be successful. She was not sure what her emotions had been at that moment of small revenge.