The Tenets of Civilisation and Various Wonders Not to Be Talked Of

Following the Sacco and Vanzetti riot and the realisation that her deep rift with Florence was to remain, even though they were talking again, Edith felt she must go to some place quiet to think. Her thumb wasn’t healing quickly either. She asked for a week of her leave but Nancy Williams suggested she take all her annual leave which was anyhow overdue, and she agreed.

She’d been shaken by the stone throwing at the Palais Wilson more than she thought she should be. It was as if all the transgressions and the foolish daring of her life since coming to Geneva had goaded the angry crowd. The stone-throwing crowd had become oddly fused with the molestation at the Molly Club, as if she herself were somehow to blame for it. And it was true that by going out of bounds she was partly to blame. She’d gone out of bounds in other ways and places too. All these things had come together with a wobbly underlying logic which she couldn’t interpret but which had made the stone-throwing riot into a storm against her as a person. As mad as it sounded, it was as if on that night she’d been stoned as a witch or as a scarlet woman.

For a time, perhaps since the time of the Molly Club incident, she’d had a numb indifference to her psyche and to her body. She’d fostered an optimism in herself that it all didn’t matter, that it was ‘the Continent’, that everything would feel familiar and normal in the morning, or by next month. There’d been too much drinking going on in her life too, which, perhaps, she’d needed to sustain her numb indifference, or her waiting for the return to ‘normal’. She was frightened now that she could not return to normal or that, for her, there was now no normal.

She’d also noticed that her drinking sometimes allowed her to enjoy a despair about the world and herself. The relief of desperation. She was frightened of this enjoyment.

Florence had made overtures, but Edith felt that a decision was required on her part as to whether there was value in her returning to friendship with Florence, and she’d decided there was not. She remained amiable towards Florence but politely evaded her invitations and did not return invitations, allowing the friendship to wither away. And this winter, she’d been disgusted to see Florence wipe her nose on her glove.

It was time to attend to herself. To mull on her life. To perhaps find her standards again.

It was time to think out how she felt on consequential matters, to take time away from the daily procedures and office panics of the League, to turn away from her overfull days. Maybe to consider going home. And what to do with Ambrose. Was he getting in the way of something more serious with a man? Or did she want to use it that way? Was a man like Ambrose best for her? Even Caroline had said to her recently that she must stop concerning herself only with the tactics of life and design for herself a life plan.

Recently she’d felt on the brink of being over-challenged by all things. Most days she felt no justifiable method for doing whatever it was she was doing from one moment to another. Mary McGeachy had reminded her that she did have inherent capacities and that her judgements in League affairs were based on her dining-table education in mercantile life from her father, and in public life from her mother and father, and from her uncle. Yet so many situations at the League seemed to lack practices. They spent so much time making the rules. It was more what McGeachy called ‘the hunch’, which determined what Edith did. Unless someone told her, she rarely had a confident idea of whether she had done well or badly. Oh yes, she was good then at vindication. She never faltered in finding the reasons for what she’d done — although you only needed reasons for having done something when what you had done turned out to be a failure. If it worked, everyone could see the reasons for it. Sometimes it was as if she were inventing the theory after the event, tidying up her behaviour behind her with methodical explanation and with words of good order.

Maybe it was time to go back to Australia. To visit her mother’s grave. And what about being, herself, a mother? And other Questions.

She went to Chamonix for a week, in the footsteps of Shelley and Ruskin, to the supposedly healthy ‘gentian zone’, where the gentian flowers grew. Where Ruskin wanted to go when, ‘Lost in various wonder and sorrow not to be talked of’. Although he seemed to be mainly worried about his liver and his teeth: ‘If those would keep right, I could fight the rest of it all’, she’d read on the way down in the train. She thought she knew what he meant. She had a problem with a recurring hand rash. Some days she thought if that could be cured, then she could cope with the rest. Or maybe when she could cope with the rest, it would then be cured? Perhaps she should apply the gentian lotion of her childhood.

It was her first vacation without Ambrose, but on the following week-end, Ambrose, Jeanne and some of the others were coming down. Per Jacobbson from the Scandinavian Club was going to teach them all to ski. If her thumb had healed. She imagined that she might be more a cross-country skier although she suspected that if a sport had not entered her life by now, it was not likely to enter it.

She resolutely brought only one book, Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. She had reserved a deluxe room at the Hôtel Mont Blanc. After settling in, she moved the writing table to under the window and opened her day book, her personal journal. She’d filled three such books in her time in Geneva. She poured herself a Scotch from Jerome’s flask. She always held the flask for a second against her face in recollection of that aberrant night. She drank from the silver travelling cup which she also carried in her luggage, carefully packed in a specially made leather pouch, and she said to herself, glancing at the mirror, ‘Now Edith, mull.’

She went to the mirror to look more closely at her face but stopped that and returned to her desk.

She dated the page with her fountain pen.

Firstly, she copied her last poem into the book from the sheet of office paper on which it had been composed.

The Pirouette of Knowing

Look into the eye of the eye

to the egg of the eye

look until you reach the pirouetting ego

of the egg

and its staggering dance

leaden-footed dance

made so by a politic not yet known

engaged in a cause for those

who know not their cause

the unknowns and the know-nots

pirouetting inside a Palais

proposed to be

within reach

of the wretched

but which, itself, has no reach

no-ledge for the grasping.

Knowledge without reach

is a no-ing, not a knowing

is a retching not a reaching.

(unsubmitted)

It was a little stern and needed more work but was not so bad. Maybe she would try to have it published in something like The Nation, which Caroline had shown her.

She decided to begin the mulling with a list of civilised tenets because of what she’d heard herself say in the Club de la Presse. She worried about mixing with journalists. They were so often damaged by their way of life, maybe from living so close to world anxiety and then having to make the anxiety into sense, into words, knowing always that they had got something wrong, yet never knowing until the next day what it was they’d got wrong. But as Ambrose said, it was diplomacy inter pocula.

Recently, she’d said in front of some of them that surely at the bedrock of everything — what the League stood for and what it pursued — were ‘the civilised tenets’. No one had disagreed. But no one had taken it up either. The journalists hated talking like that because whatever good they believed in on that night would be proved false by morning.

After she’d said whatever it was she’d said in the Club de la Presse about ‘civilised tenets’, she’d looked across at Robert Dole. He had the look of a man who liked her, maybe more than that even, was an admirer. But he had the look also of a man who had thought his way through to another wiser place. To a wiser but not a happier place.

Exactly. That was how Robert Dole always looked. And his look said he was waiting for her to join him there, at this wiser but not happier place. Since the unsettling encounters they’d had back during the preparatory commission, his behaviour towards her had changed. After the Sacco and Vanzetti night, he’d been considerate with her during his interview and had agreed with her about the petition, and had moved her when he read Vanzetti’s statement. Now when he disagreed with her, he did not do so in front of people as he had in the past. In fact, he now shielded her. As he’d left the club that night, Robert Dole came across to her and said with a smile, ‘Trietschke said, “Civilisation is soap”. Good night,’ causing her to smile.

She was being coy with herself. Robert Dole was, in truth, preoccupied with her. She’d been surprised at times to hear him come to her defence. Sometimes he came to her help and gave her position more lustre than she ever could. Maybe he agreed with her?

And, she knew, without her permitting anything to happen about it, that he desired her carnally. She feared that if she allowed herself to desire him, it would mean that she would be induced by him to go through a black curtain to the wiser but not happier place where he seemed to dwell. He came from a different ilk of men to those she knew.

What further restrained her, one way or another, was that she’d found herself in enough strange, intimate places with men, and needed a pause, perhaps, in that part of her life. Before it got totally out of hand. She again counted up the men with whom she’d had some carnal association, fearing that somehow, unobserved by her, the total had crept up. She’d now had three carnal experiences in life — or maybe two and a half— including one lover — Ambrose — and not counting her ballgowned skirmishes back at university, the outcome of which seemed at times in recollection difficult to appraise, experiences which were lost somehow in the layers of the fabric and studs and buttons of those nights. There had been one serious and fairly correct young man in Melbourne but they had parted ways as it became clear to her that she would go to Europe and to the League and not to live in a house in South Yarra. And she did not know whether to count Jerome or to simply to see it as a ‘Paris escapade’.

She had no intention of becoming a loose woman, and she considered that perhaps carnal experiences with three men before marriage was the boundary line between a modern woman and a loose woman.

She wrote down on a fresh page the word ‘Intimacy’ and then ‘(i) bizarre (ii) decorous’. Maybe these bizarre places she’d visited were good to visit but could not be encompassed as part of, or within, an orderly and natural life. She’d tried to tell Florence that was why they were on the Continent, to go off the rails a couple of times. But truth be known, she could not really account for that tumble into the outlandish in Paris or the nature of her carnal life with Ambrose.

But anyhow, it all belonged to her youth which was rapidly passing.

She decided to add ‘Youth’ to the heading ‘Intimacy (i) bizarre (ii) decorous’. She inserted the names of ‘the men so far’ in the section called Youth and then ruled a line. She then added ‘(iii) married’.

She stopped then, realising that she had no rules for the handling or classifying of carnal experience. Proceeding from the mild to the stronger? As with the eating of cheese? It certainly had not happened that way. What, indeed, were the ‘stronger’ experiences? Nor did she have a life plan about what she expected from carnality. Indeed, she did not have the knowledge with which to make such a plan, although she certainly had more knowledge now than when she’d arrived on the Continent.

Thinking of Robert Dole and about finding herself in bizarre carnal places was not, though, why she was in Chamonix. Or not entirely. That was an altogether different question to mull, requiring, she reckoned, its own week-end. A week.

She turned the page, deciding that ‘Intimacy (i) bizarre (ii) decorous (iii) married’, was a subject for another time.

She wrote: ‘How should we live?’

Robert Dole both unnerved her and heartened her — heartened her by his persistent interest in her but that same interest unnerved her, so that sometimes she wished he were not in the same room, be it committee room, conference hall, or café. That he was not there watching her from a distance. She hadn’t spoken directly to Robert Dole about civilised tenets but his bent, private smile to her when she had mentioned civilised tenets in the club that night, and his parting comment, meant that she’d better work out what she meant by civilised tenets before she raised it again in front of him.

Edith decided that she saw the word as ‘civil-ised’ and wrote it down that way. She recalled her Latin — civicus, civilis, civis, civilitas — civilian, civility. The relations between the state and its citizens and the way citizens behaved towards each other. Especially the way strangers behaved to each other.

Urbanity. The real test, though, of our political urbanity might be how we handled those who disliked us. How we could continue to work with, and be sociable with, people we knew disliked us. That was the test.

In talking of civilised tenets, she had not meant simply what the League was ‘for and against’. She’d been caught out before on that. War, yes, but what if it were a League of Nations militia which waged the war? Opium, yes, but some of them dabbled with the smoking of opium. Liverright was fond of saying that because a thing was bad on a large scale it was not necessarily bad on a personal scale and that one’s personal conduct didn’t change a thing in these matters. That one could enjoy what one believed should eventually be forbidden or erased from human conduct. Obscene publications were an example — Ambrose with his strange collection which she’d found alluring when she’d dipped into them. Traffic in women and children — oh yes, they were all against that, but she knew some took advantage of the situation as it was at Geneva’s ceinture de chasteté. And how could one explain the remarkable demand for the reports of that committee which had sold better than any other reports of the League? What about the Molly Club? She supposed that was a private matter and hurt no one, even if indecency of behaviour was involved.

It was time to stop going to the Molly with Ambrose, even if, against her better judgement, she’d been back only a couple of times since the incident.

What are the values to be pursued?

Are some choices, some values, not available at some times?

Maybe the difference between a brutish and a civilised person was that a civilised person in times of strife or war might take an uncivilised action but it would be with reluctance. The civilised person would be aware that they were crossing a border. She knew from League reports and from accounts of history, that all people had the potential for villainous behaviour. She was not certain within herself whether she knew yet how to discern inherent evil. Working for the League had not given her the experience in discerning evil that she might have had in other places.

The best political arrangements were those which did not place ordinary people in situations in which they had to make difficult choices, because often they would choose badly and behave badly. She was also sure that people needed to be given time to study and think about politics.

Formalities and procedures were the wisdom of human organisation and were in themselves civilising instruments. She knew that now. When she was younger she’d opposed all red tape. Not any more. Red tape was often just a way of causing a pause in the impatience of things so that everything could be properly checked and considered. She realised that when enthusiasm and dedication had been expended, an organisation had to leave in their place a bureaucracy. She’d also come to know, sadly, that idealism did not ensure that things were done well or efficiently.

The League had the task of making the manners of the world. To create the conditions which allowed people to behave well. To remove those conditions which coarsened people, making it easier to be civilised. She wrote that down.

She remembered a picnic back home, beside the Clyde River, on her first vacation from university in Sydney when her friend George McDowell had said that most of the formalities of life were there to overcome the problem of human nervousness, that people were shy of each other. ‘Remember,’ he’d said, ‘that at most times, nearly always, everyone is nervous. In crisis, doubly so.’

She confessed then that she was addressing herself to Robert Dole. Not writing to him but ‘addressing’ herself to him, using him as a hypothetical opponent. He wasn’t much use as a hypothetical opponent because he’d changed to being this new something-else, smiling at her privately from across rooms. She pushed him aside.

After her second Scotch, finding herself staring at the page, Edith decided to leave the loftier categories and think of the more everyday civilised tenets. She suspected that others had done the work of the loftier tenets and that she would come to their thinking in the reading and learning which still lay ahead of her. She doubted that it was her destiny to elucidate these things.

She was then conscious of a distinctive sadness which she had not experienced or identified before. It was the sadness of knowing that one would never be ‘a great thinker’. She thought she might have liked to be that but deep in her heart she knew she wasn’t. She felt she had a chance still to become ‘great’ in other ways but not as a thinker. She saw around her at the League how the unrealistic striving for greatness of this philosophical sort when one did not have the capacity, developed into a hell of self-deception, posturing and ridicule. She prayed she would never fall into that delusion. Which didn’t mean that she couldn’t find her own pattern of connections and insights, for her own pleasure, and perhaps for the enlightenment of others. But erudition either made itself known in conduct and action or it gave to one’s life private meanings. An erudite person wasn’t someone who could ‘quote’ or who could pass examinations.

The first of her civilising tenets was the competence to be able to — she was going to write ‘to make colloquy’, but it was more than that. It was to be able to discourse without guile and without rancour. It was not only avoiding what Dr Johnson called ‘talking to win’. She was talking about discourse which was conducted with a generous capacity for concession. She knew that some argued that advancement in thinking could only be through conflict — the holding of position followed by the conflict and then, the moving on to a third position. Well, there were times when she forgot her tenet of conversational calmness and became heated. Or as Ambrose would say, ‘a trifle shrill’. But conversation should be as quiet and as calm as a library.

As George had pointed out to her, making generous allowance for nervousness and the mistakes of nervousness — even in statesmanship — was part of being civilised. She knew very well that nervousness made some very clever people seem awkwardly voiceless and she knew that the very eloquent did not always truly know, but were simply very plausible. Some people caused her to talk stupidly, even when she agreed with them. Mrs Swanwick, an English delegate, was one of those sorts of people. She knew now to avoid them, or if she couldn’t avoid them, how to remain silent. Mrs Swanwick caused her to talk against herself.

Yes, conversation and the conduct of conversation was the pivotal part of all civilised life. Conversation had ultimately to do with politics. She believed that the League of Nations would bring about a new way of people talking to each other. David Hunter Miller said that already the conference had replaced the diplomatic note. That the League was a continuous conference. She was learning, though, that a political negotiation was different from a conversation.

Conversation was sometimes an ‘event’. Like going to the theatre. Wine was good because it contributed to people being decent in conversation. Up to a point. Of course, conversation could be just a way of touching someone, of being with someone, and content didn’t matter then. Somehow she felt that gossip was good, despite its sometimes scandalous and political purposes. She thought she knew when it was being used as secret mail to circulate political and professional mischief and when it was simply a harmless revelling in human imperfection, a revelling in the relief that no one was perfect. Gossip showed that life was not the way that formality, convention and manners pretended. Truth — telling about the world, if not about the person under discussion, occurred in gossip but it was also to be found in the obverse of gossip — in the exchange of confidences. The exchange of confidences was sometimes a form of courage. Florence would never experience that courage and its rewards, although maybe she was the sort of person who inflicted its punishments.

How did you avoid the errors that came from being young? She supposed you could avoid some by imitation of older models, by having wise mentors, and through reading — borrowed, but provisional, wisdom. She wanted to know what it meant to be forty or sixty or whatever. Ambrose said the only advantage he could find in being older was that he was better at guessing the time and the temperature. She talked with older people. She would like to talk more with Under Secretary Bartou and get to know him. She was talking more with Dame Rachel too. Or Dame Rachel was going out of her way to talk more to her. Why weren’t the wise things of life self-evident?

She needed to manage her ignorance with more flair, to conduct her ignorance gracefully in conversation. She needed to be able to talk well on a subject in which she was ignorant, to be able to turn her ignorance into a graceful accessory to conversation, not by make-believing that one knew, not by pretence, but by revealing her ignorance in an interesting way. She tried to talk about the philosophical difficulties and the working difficulties of finding information and of testing it — the whole difficulty of ‘confidently knowing’. She was a believer in statistical investigation to reduce the bumph and the theoretical waffle of life. She had nothing but scorn for those who dismissed statistics as another way of lying. They were people overprotective of their theoretically dressed-up prejudices. Dole believed in statistics. He said statistics would be the news of the future.

She was learning that curiosity was a great resource and one of the higher traits of character, although she was still aware in herself of the unwillingness of the mind to move from where it was secure out into the darker waters and to enter, with happy curiosity, into its ignorance. Especially when she was engaged in public conversations.

In her case, being graceful also meant learning to make grace from her unfinished self, from her provincial inexperience with life, from the gaps in her sensibilities.

Edith turned to a new page of the creamy paper.

She would leave ‘colloquy’ for now. She would like to join a Society for the Study of Conversation if one existed. Maybe she’d start one.

The detail of one’s life.

To be able to shape the detail of life, if not into a work of art, then at least to make of one’s life a work of conscious arrangement. As William Morris said, ‘Have nothing in your home you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.’ Although she would have to say to William Morris that she had a few things in her rooms which were just curiosities. And one monstrosity — the Wilson chair with its fourteen adjustable positions, well, eight, really; she said fourteen as a joke. That may have to go. She found some hotel stationery in the desk drawer and began a list of mundane things to do when she went back to her rooms in Geneva. She wrote down a reminder to have all her clothing thoroughly cleaned. She found that how one’s clothes smelled to oneself was important.

The French had taught the world that the arrangement and design of food was important. The arrangement of appetite, the ordering of competing appetites. She supposed the English middle classes had also introduced the notion of disciplining and withholding the appetites, of withholding the lesser appetite for the enjoyment of the greater. She supposed arranging the appetites was connoisseurship. Too often, though, some of her friends just withheld, postponed indefinitely whatever challenge of appetite they feared, and hence the challenge of some of life’s pleasures. Or did some of the challenges of life and of appetite have to be let pass?

On the question of good taste, she had dilemmas. Somehow good taste in Australia was so much easier because the choice, say, of tea, was so much more limited. She even thought that in Europe there were more colours to choose from, but that couldn’t be correct. She had discovered that Europe had not only more options but also more ways of deciding which options to take. She no longer thought that good taste was intuitive.

Maybe good taste and good living were about making good choices within what was materially available to you, within your assets and within your learning to date. She believed that it had to be an act of personal ‘creation’, a fashioning of self. You had to make choices, too, which combined with other earlier choices and choices to come. Although, maybe you didn’t know the pattern in advance, more that it shaped up as the result of all the decisions you made. It was both. It was a matter of interacting parts. You began with a vague blueprint from your mother and father and then life presented you with options. You made choices which reshaped the blueprint and so on and on. But that could hardly be called a ‘plan’.

She firmly believed that what you surrounded yourself with and exposed yourself to helped to make you, although it didn’t always seem obvious how it made you or into what.

She hadn’t yet got straight in her head where people fitted into the blueprint. Did one ‘collect’ friends as one did objects? Were those you gathered around you really ‘gathered’ or did they just happen? Did you make the best of what was available? Friendship was trickier to make than gardens or a collection of objets d’art. She supposed that in the case of her rejection of Florence, she was beginning to make choices.

She felt that you had to have friends and family in your life to be truly fulfilled, or if you did not have family you could have vocation and friends, or if you did not have vocation she supposed you could have a cause, or public life, or maybe even a recreation or hobby would do. She wondered whether Robert Dole was interested in these lines of talk, the knowing of one’s preferences about tea? She thought she could argue the importance of this with him.

If only she could get her preferences straight. She had to be able to see where those preferences came from. Oh, of course, as Liverright or Caroline would be quick to point out, they came from her ‘class’. Where had her class got them? From the heightened life experience that good income offered? From the education which her class had offered to her? And how to explain differences of opinion and taste within her class?

Edith wished the dinner chime would sound.

She began to draw up a list of the tendencies in her taste.

The Aesthetic of Happy Latency. She believed that Miss Dickinson’s chair had a happy latency which would sponsor a chain of other cheerful and assertive details. Likewise, those things she had gathered around herself in her rooms and, to a degree, in Ambrose’s apartment. A central object which suggested others which might join it.

The Aesthetic of the Elemental Surface: say, in the choice of stone against concrete — she brought to mind the rage for concrete and a house in Paris which she’d been shown, decorated on the outside by concrete in the shape of tree branches. She had been appalled by the use of concrete to imitate nature. Why not grow a vine? She did not believe that concrete trees were the future. The natural spoke of connections directly with the lair and the hunt, the earlier days of the race. For these reasons she liked leather and fur and burning wood fires which reminded her of the days when the race lived closer to the animal kingdom. She liked a city to have places where animals and birds and plants could exist as a reminder of nature. She believed that more animals should be allowed to roam the streets. Not savage animals, but certainly wild ones. Deer, for example. She opposed those who argued that trees had no place in the streets of a city. She liked to eat dishes which were made from animals and birds and to wear clothing made from the fur and the leather of animals. She felt that a person should know the skills to catch the living things that they ate, even if it were no longer practicable for all people to exercise these skills. She had only ever shot one rabbit.

She was, however, against the use of natural objects such as sea shells and stones as decoration, feeling that they should be appreciated only in their natural location, although she enjoyed the temporary arrangements of fruit and vegetables in kitchens and flowers on tables. The rage for dwarf plants was also a deforming of nature. She wasn’t interested in les jardins de salon.

The Aesthetic of Dress was too complicated for this list. She had known since she was a young woman that her underwear was meant to be seen at some time in one’s life by a man and should be chosen with that in mind and be very fine but that it should first please her. She should every day be pleased and pleasured as she put her underwear against her body. Much of her taste in jewellery, clothing, and cosmetics had, though, come unquestioned from her mother, changed here and there by the demands of fashion.

The Aesthetic of Play Within Unequivocal Boundaries. She believed in the formal occasion, where all the rules were known to all. The casual was too demanding, the rules too ambiguous for relaxed pleasure. The casual required blatant behaviour to ensure that understanding had occurred. The formal allowed subtlety to play within its firm boundaries.

The Aesthetic of Ancestry. The old contained within itself a history and was, thus, another connection with the life of one’s personal lineage or the lineage of the race. She found also that design and buildings and things from other times calmed her in these days of change. She liked to be surrounded with objects from other times — maybe they reminded her that the world had survived crisis and upheaval before, parts of it, at least. Although she had much reservation about cathedrals, about which so much was made. She had never said it, but she believed as a Rationalist that they were a wicked waste of human effort and she always avoided entering them.

The Aesthetic of Many Shapes and Spaces. She was for large rooms with high ceilings, as well as for nooks, for alcoves, attics, terraces, balconies, pergolas, and cellars.

The Aesthetic of Proper Reticence. The work of one’s hand — objects knitted, sewn, carved or written — had to be left to speak for itself and should not be paraded, although there was a special pleasure in showing what one had made at fairs and so on.

The Aesthetic of Touch Within an Object. She was for the craft-made against the factory-made because, in the handmade, you could find the touch of the person who made it. To touch the object was to touch another person, not a machine, and each thing was different.

The Aesthetic of Rarity. She was for the rare rather than the readily available in all things. That might be snobbish but it was more that the possession of the rare object was an accomplishment. It could be achieved by identifying what it was you wanted and then having the money to buy it, or by searching for it, or by having it made. And rare possessions were a way of expressing one’s sense of specialness but not superiority. Of reminding oneself that one was different in some ways from other people, even if only in minor ways.

The Aesthetic of Insignia and Bonds. She supposed, also, that some things that one had around one were to express bonding with others of the tribe. Chosen and collected things did both — expressed one’s difference and one’s sameness. She liked badges, medals, decorations, emblems, regimental ties, and even regimental pyjamas. This was related to the Aesthetic of Ancestry.

The Aesthetic of the Earned Memento and Trophy. Jerome’s flask. She laughed aloud about that. Oh dear. She laughed again when she remembered the stationery stands.

The Aesthetic of the Outside of the Inside. She liked sometimes in a restaurant to be seated at the window at night and to see the reflection of the restaurant in the window ‘outside’ as it were. She had not resolved, though, in her own mind whether, in choosing a place to live, you had to ‘accept’ the view from the window or whether you searched for a ‘good view’. She believed that if you thought about it there was a relationship between outside and inside. It should be harmonious although she had doubts about the value of looking out on a major scenic attraction such as Mont Blanc. She feared that people who dwelt on major scenic attractions were either searching for the sensational or engaged in private worship of the Lord’s work. Neither of these motives served her.

She thought that one should be able to look at an objet d’art and know the material from which it was made, and something of the properties of that material, be it brass or bronze or copper or whatever. If wood, which wood and the properties of different woods. She thought that one should be able to identify and know the history of its decorative motifs. Should be able to determine at least which century, if not which half-century, it came from. Whether it was a replica or an original. Which culture produced it. Who, in some cases, designed it.

With a quiet, comic despair, she acknowledged that she could rarely do all of these things. Finding the time for attention to detail was her difficulty.

She heard Robert Dole’s voice in her head. Of course, while in general, her list was, she acknowledged to him, the more expensive path in life to follow, her preferences were not to do with expense. She could see that some people who made choices to buy something delightful ‘that cost next to nothing’ mentioned price to show that they had taste enough to buy for reasons other than price.

She put all that aside and turned the page and wrote ‘The Unconsidered Particulars of Life’.

‘You should read Erasmus. Read Swift on ordure, that is where you should start,’ Robert Dole had once shouted at her, in the days when he had still been inclined to shout at her. ‘Read about the unconsidered particulars of life, the way we eat and the other unmentionable personal functions.’ She remembered that he’d left that particular conversation in an alcoholic despair. In those days he’d behaved as if he thought that he could break through to her by saying severe things and that once he had ‘broken through to her’, everything would be all right and they would both go to heaven. He had not been attacking her as such, she had come to realise, rather that he’d been trying to reach her on another more intense axis, to take her mentally by the hand and drag her through the curtain, down other passageways. He wanted to win her over. To win her?

She would not let him break through the hedges of her temperament just yet, but she knew why he wanted to break through and why he believed it mattered to both of them. Maybe one day she’d be strong enough to do that. To go to his wiser but not happier place. In the meantime, it was important for her to have restrictions or she would lose her poise. She then recalled, with a smile, that she had once shouted back — only once? — at Robert Dole after he had gone on about ‘what she should read’. She’d had enough of being told what she should read. She had shouted at him that while he was reading Aristotle or whoever, she had been doing ‘something else’ maybe just as valuable to her. Maybe looking at an insect under a microscope. Or helping her uncle with his electioneering on muddy roads, listening to disgruntled farmers. Or sitting on a stump in the hot bush, eating a sandwich of corned meat, looking at the ants and lizards which gathered, as if from nowhere, to eat with them. Every use of time required a forgoing of something else.

Anyhow, she’d also told him that she found that people who’d read Aristotle didn’t seem to behave any more wisely than those who hadn’t. He’d said, ‘How do you know who’s read Aristotle?’ She’d said that she had a pretty good idea. They had both laughed.

She remembered also at Caroline’s farewell party. She’d been the last to leave and had sat with Caroline until sunrise to watch what Caroline called ‘the embarrassing dawn’. Edith had said to Caroline that she often felt that Caroline sounded as if she’d ‘read everything’.

Caroline had replied, ‘I read too fast, as if I am trying to catch up. But catch up with whom?’

Edith said she believed the ghosts of philosophers past moved in all conversations and attitudes and also in novels; even if we cannot name the philosophers and even if we have not read them, they are transmitted through the atmosphere of our times. ‘But Bartou says that only the reading of history can save us from political hysteria.’

‘Did he say what would save us from people who haven’t read history but who gain power?’

‘As a matter of fact, he did say something once about that.’

‘And?’

‘He said that only superior political cunning and dexterity would save us from dangerous leaders. If you are not interested in making history it is sometimes best to get out of the way of history.’

‘Typically Swiss.’

They had fondly held on to each other and watched the embarrassing dawn and Edith had wished that Caroline was not leaving the League.

After the exchange with Robert Dole about the unconsidered particulars of life, she’d gone to the American Library and had begun to read Erasmus. He’d lent her his copy of Swift. She’d understood then why he’d shouted that at her and what it was that he wanted everyone to face up to. Robert Dole wanted people to regain their humanity by facing themselves as they were in all their frailty, dirtiness, and primitiveness.

At some point, she’d told him how she wanted her life, her personality, to be a big house with towers, attics, a conservatory, a gazebo, garden mazes, and yes, of course, a cellar, and to have secret passageways and hide-outs.

‘And a WC?’ he’d joked.

‘Yes, and a WC,’ she’d replied impatiently.

He’d said that he’d be interested in visiting the secret passageways and so on, implying that he doubted they existed yet. She couldn’t tell him that she had, indeed, begun such construction in her life.

But in compliance with his challenge, she began her list of the Unconsidered Particulars of Life. She could see it was a concession to him in her imaginary conversation. What was there to say about her monthly cycle? Or about the business of the morning lavatory, her fleshly blemishes and excrescences? She pondered the morning lavatory, those days when she saw that it floated and on other days that it didn’t float. What did this mean? There were days when it seemed to take a long time for her body to finish, when she was impatient to get on with life and the affairs of the day and simply broke off, as it were, before it was properly finished. She did not like doing this, fearing it would damage her health, but she was sometimes an impatient woman. And when she strained to get it done, she worried about this. Were these the things which Robert Dole wanted her to note in her manual of life? To ‘face up to’? There were the days when, after some effort, she looked in the bowl and saw next to nothing. Why did it sometimes smear the side of the bowl and have to be cleaned off, yet on other days it did not? Was it better to have one long solid piece and if so, how did one accomplish that? What about many scrappy pieces which were not as satisfying or, she felt, as healthy, as the long, solid, single pieces? Did men do it differently? There were days when she was almost shocked at the size of it, when it hurt coming out of her, as childbirth might. When the pleasure of the pain of the size of it would cause her to recall the one time when Ambrose had put his member in there fully, that pleasure and that pain. She had let him do it so that she might know what he felt when such things happened to him. She supposed that she might also do it again, for pleasure. Those mornings when she enjoyed the movement and feel of it coming out of her body — was that perverse? She always washed her anus before the sexual act but that was for fear of bad odours, not as a preparation for any sexual act involving it. How she hated someone knocking on the door of the WC in the pension while she was there. At the toilets at the Palais, she always hoped that she was alone when she had to do it and always wondered who the person was in the next cubicle and whether they were listening and, at the same time, telling herself that, at her age, she shouldn’t worry about these things, but still, it was true, she did wish to be unheard. What about enjoying the bidet’s spray of hot water? What did enjoying that mean? As a little girl, Edith’s mother had taught her to wipe from front to the back away from her other opening. She’d read with interest that in the fourteenth century people did it in any dark corner. That it was thought unacceptable to talk to a person who was so engaged. Only gradually did the examining and discussion of other people’s dung become unacceptable as well.

Enough. Enough of considering the unconsidered particulars.

She looked at the page and worried that one day someone might read it. Would Robert Dole be proud of her if he ever read her appraisal of the unconsidered particulars? Was there an aesthetic to be applied to the unconsidered particulars of life? She wasn’t up to doing that.

Looking back over the pages she saw that she had not gone very far with her list of civilised tenets which she might use to respond to Robert Dole. She reread her poem. It was a failure — a grappling with an idea rather than the charming portrait of an idea.

But there, thank goodness, was the dinner chime. She could go down and be self-indulgent.

She washed her hands and did her face. Maybe civilisation was soap. Maybe it was also self-indulgence.

To hell with Robert Dole.

Somehow the self-scrutiny had not been the dark night of the soul which she’d felt she needed. Yet she sensed that she’d begun to expel toxins.

On the stairs she noted that it was snowing, that she was now on holidays, and that she had a good appetite. She would order the menu gastronomique. Wine would dissolve what was left of her anxiety. She would stop making lists and stop making agendas for herself. She would not spend a week harassing herself and her soul. Instead she would give over to sloth and indulgence. She wished that she had brought more books. Light and silly books. The hotel would probably have some in its guests’ library.

She observed that she was glad to be alone.