Read Online Grand Days by Frank Moorhouse - Free Book Online

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    She sat there staring at the encyclopedia in painful consternation. What if she had claimed to know Zembla in the meeting? As, in fact, she nearly had. She would have been a laughingstock. She would have been the laughing stock of the League of Nations. It would have dogged her days for ever. She may well have been laughed out of the Secretariat. She saw it now as a particularly cruel jape. Maybe this man Liverright had not foreseen its potential consequences or maybe it had been a test. Perhaps they’d all planned it before the meeting. Was Ambrose part of it? While she was filled with relief at having somehow escaped, she was, at the same time, alive to the terror which came from having been so close to professional disaster. She also felt wary and isolated. She felt slightly queasy. She wiped perspiration from the palms of her hands with her handkerchief. She had nearly ruined her career. She would be very careful of this man Liverright — more wisely, she should befriend him. But she would not forgive him for having placed her at such perilous risk. She would also determine if it had been preplanned and whether Ambrose was part of it all.
    After sitting for a minute, she took a deep breath and went on with her work. She took down the staff lists and counted the staff in Translating and Précis-writing and saw that they would fit neatly into the Annex. The Way of Numbers.
    Back in her office, she laboriously rewrote the minutes of the meeting into a new notebook, this time deleting the word Zembla which she had written down beside Liverright’s name, redrawing her map of the meeting, in case anyone should ever, at any time in history, look into her notebook and find the word Zembla there. She put the first notebook in her handbag to be disposed of somewhere far from the Palais. Or maybe she would keep it as a memento of her first day. She would see.
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    At 6.36 Ambrose collected her from her office and together they walked across the lake to the Bavaria Brasserie where he saidmost of the younger set and quite a few journalists gathered in the evenings. Delegates also dropped in during Assembly, he said.
    She wanted to blurt out her question about whether the jape had been preplanned by them all but held back, waiting for the time to be right.
    Ambrose said hello to people and introduced her to some, but it was all a blur. Through her mind kept going the phrases, here I am in Geneva, at the League. Here I am in the famous Bavaria. Here I am. But the jape had spoiled something of her arrival by making her feel guarded towards all the new faces. It was spoiling her feelings about Ambrose.
    They settled down at a table on their own.
    He asked her what she liked to drink.
    â€˜What should I be expected to drink?’ She looked around her at what others were drinking.
    â€˜What should you drink now you are a lady of Geneva?’
    â€˜Yes.’ She wondered if she would become a woman who drank cocktails.
    â€˜What would you have drunk back in Australia?’
    â€˜Sherry usually.’
    â€˜Quite acceptable here in Geneva.’
    â€˜But what would the French order? It is, after all, part of the French civilisation.’
    â€˜Oh, the French? They aren’t like us. The Frenchman would order a port as an apéritif . They drink other vile things made from artichokes and meadow weeds. Stick to sherry and you’ll come through all right.’
    She was about to take his advice but instead when the waiter came she remembered Dubonnet which she had never tasted, and she asked Ambrose to order her a Dubonnet.
    Ambrose raised his eyebrows.
    â€˜I have to explore my new world,’ she said. ‘All my life I’veseen advertisements for Dubonnet in French magazines. I always dreamed of trying it.’
    She sipped her Dubonnet and to her surprise, could not tell whether she liked it or not. The glamour of it and her new surroundings overwhelmed her taste.
    â€˜How is