The Refuge (12 page)

Conroy’s death left her with insufficient means to pay for more than food and clothing for herself and her three young sons. She owned the house they lived in, but there was not enough money to educate the boys. No real alternative to finding work could be envisaged, except marriage, which was then, as it continued to be, unthinkable to her. Her slight connection with the
Gazette
’s chief proprietor, and with the paper itself through her dead husband and through occasional work she had done for us as a contributor of special articles on everyday social and domestic problems, made it not unnatural that she should for rather more than charitable reasons be accepted as a new member of the staff which I myself had joined only a few months earlier.

I see now that the secret and intensely personal loneliness we must each have been enduring, which held us helplessly aloof from anything like intimacy with our new colleagues, did also perhaps inevitably urge us to take special notice of one another; for, of course, we soon knew something of each other’s story from hearsay. I do not doubt she learned mine with less impatience and disinterest than I did hers. She was by nature compassionate, and death at a blow had enlarged the springs of her sensibility as surely as it had frozen mine at their innermost source. Years later, she told me she thought she had never seen any man so desperately in need of pity and at the same time so remote from pity’s approach. It may well have been so, for I still had a horror, based on ignorance, of easy and casual human associations; I was, I suppose, afraid of the insensitive mutual intimacies to which such associations too often led.

For my own part, I never did tell her that my first impression of her had been of a woman secretly flaunting her widowed motherhood in a circumscribed world marked
Men Only.
I never told her because before long I was hotly ashamed of myself, not only for the cheap and unkind thought but even more for what it revealed of my appalling, unimagined egocentricity. Indeed, the eventual realization of this egotism so confounded me that sometimes, sleepless in the bitter vacuum after midnight, I caught myself groaning aloud and giving thanks to god that Jean had not lived to learn of it.

Or, I would think, had she? and was that why she had from the first treated me with a passionate and as it were wondering and watching tenderness such as I had never known? Later, when Alan had first learned to walk, and believed that this was the sum of all human learning, the final achievement of man’s highest ambition, I felt what I think was a similar tenderness in myself, compassionate, wondering and watching. It differed from hers mostly by the addition of a faint uneasiness lest physical harm come to the infant in his gay extreme of confidence on the brinks of unimaginable abysses; but later I thought: Perhaps to Jean in her womanly native wisdom I was much like that child—in my egotism which was childlike because it was unconscious and absolute; in what might be seen as the supreme conceit of my unthinking assumption of my right to love and adore her. The wise lover must surely have at times a lively doubt of the perfection of his selfhood? Looking at her, I had none—never . . .

Looking at Barbara across the buoyant roses and the telephones that seemed to lie on their trestles for ever ear-to-ground, like black men listening for mysterious tidings, I had doubts and to spare.

‘The worst thing about this Munich business,’ I felt moved to say at last, ‘is not the immediate sense of its ignominy—I for one do not care what France and America will say. It is the feeling that what you and I always thought of as a secure and robust social structure is really very shaky, on its higher levels at any rate.’

‘Not shaky, Lloyd,’ she said. ‘Simply just for the moment at the mercy of someone else’s ruthlessly mad conviction. As people, the British—you and I and most of them in this building and this city and this country, say—are very slow and unwilling to be ruthless, and we don’t feel too proud of ourselves when at last we’ve been forced to be. Whereas the Germans seem to me to prize ruthlessness in fact as much as the Americans do in theory, now that they have been taught for so long that it’s the only means to all worth-while ends. No end ever justified wrong means. We know that. Your father would have agreed that to justify the means by the end aimed at or even achieved is to throw aside what we call the law . . . Just because we’re not equally ruthless, I wouldn’t say we’re shaky.’

‘To me it’s shaky,’ I said. ‘And I do not mean the British empire, or any other empire or commonwealth of nations or what you will. I mean human society as you and I and all mankind have always known it. I mean the world of men—shaky in a way that the world of birds or animals or fish has never been, could not be. But perhaps I am being rather too heavy about it.’

She laughed as though I had suddenly said something pleasant.

‘You’re never heavy,’ she said, ‘but sometimes you’re rather—what shall I call it?—grave, and far too profound for a simple mind like mine. Con used to say that women arrive at a remarkable number of correct conclusions by thinking with their livers. When I said, why their livers? he said, “Well, any of their organs that happens to be unnaturally affected at the moment.” Of course I took the opening to point out to him that the brain is also an organ, but he said that was different—a woman never allowed her brain to interfere with what she called her thinking. He said we think organically, not cerebrally. He was really very nice about it.’

I was used to her talk of her dead husband, whom she called ‘Con’ very naturally still, as though he were away on a journey. It occurred to me now that, in spite of what the world inclines to think of female journalists, and to think with reason enough that they are febrile, nerve-ridden creatures functioning on the energy produced by the friction of fear with vanity, there are—as every newspaper man knows—worthy and admirable exceptions, where the woman fulfils her exacting, distressing, often ridiculous assignments easily and gracefully, and writes good level copy. Such an exception was Barbara. She was a woman of quality.

‘I believe women think as well as men do,’ I said. ‘The purposes of their thinking may differ because living is such a personal business for them, but not the mechanics of it. Still—I have been told,’ I said, ‘that I have an exaggerated respect for women.’

‘I think you don’t know a great deal about them,’ she said gently; and at that moment one of the telephones—as though the intensity of its recumbent listening had been at last rewarded—rang sharply for attention. She took it up at once without haste.

I watched her face while for some seconds she listened, and I had never seen it change so suddenly from calmness to an unfamiliar look of astonishment and anger. Finally she said, ‘No thank you, Mary—it’s not only impossible in fact, but it seems to me impossible even to think of it . . . Goodbye.’

I had never heard her speak so before. My astonishment must have been apparent, for when she had returned the receiver to its rest she looked over at me and laughed apologetically.

‘Did I sound as bad as that?’ she said. ‘Well, I’m not sorry, my dear. I’m not sorry. That, believe it or not, was—Yes, Nan, come in.’

The door behind me had opened, and the girl who went past me to the table said rather breathlessly, ‘Hullo, Mr. Fitz—excuse me, Mrs. Conroy, Mr. Franklin would like to know whether you can personally cover a party tonight at Lady Solomon’s?’

Barbara looked suddenly very tired again, very sick at heart.

‘Why didn’t Mr. Franklin ring me, child?’ she said quietly.

‘He was just going out when the call came, and I was near his door, so he asked me to ask you. He said to say he was sorry he hadn’t time to run along himself, but would you do it if you haven’t anything else important? He’ll be out for half an hour.’

‘All right, Nan, thank you. I’ll see him when he comes in.’

‘Thank you, Mrs. Conroy.’

The girl, a brilliantly pretty youngster of eighteen newly employed in the office, smiled at me as she went out. Her lips and eyes were all innocence and cleanness. She was on Barbara’s staff as a cadet. On that day of all days, I felt a pang of compassion for such beauty of youth and girlhood caught up in the excitement of the hour; and then I thought of Irma Maartens, irresistibly and for no reason other than that she too was eighteen. The comparison was ridiculous, but it made me realize how far the refugee girl had gone in her eighteen years; she was nothing like this—by contrast, she seemed aloof and ageless, invulnerable in the completeness of her femininity—but only eighteen, I thought. I wondered how she was thinking today, and what her own particular despair was like. That she would indeed despair of the world, if only for a moment, after the triumph and disaster of Munich, I never paused to doubt.

‘Now I’m in a proper fix,’ Barbara said ruefully, as the door closed upon the shapely figure in its delicate haste. ‘There’s more than mere coincidence here, Lloyd. I was just going to tell you that the caller I shocked you by being so rude to was Lady Mary Solomon, who considers herself a friend of mine as well as being some sort of a relative. Oh, Lloyd—I shall have to go. But I can’t now! What am I to do?’

‘Go to Franklin and tell him you’re tied up for this evening,’ I said recklessly. ‘What did she want?’

‘That’s just it,’ she said in exasperation. ‘She asked me to go to this party, don’t you see? Her exact words were—and this is what made me so mad—“Barbie darling, we’re having a whopper of an impromptu party at home tonight to celebrate the Munich victory, and you simply must come. Absolutely everybody will be there. I got in first on the ’phone the moment the news came through.” Do you wonder I was rude, Lloyd? I don’t care how many millions they’re worth—I just can’t do that sort of thing, I just can’t.’

Her distress turned again to anger, the anger of which I had not known her capable; her eyes, ordinarily so kindly watchful, became dark with pain.

‘What do they think we are?’ she said bitterly. ‘Do they think we’re all—all
fools—
like themselves, living from one minute to the next, without two consecutive thoughts to string together to make a third? Ready to dance round the open grave of our own children? Drunk with ignorance? Whatever in the world do they think—or do they?’

‘Barbara,’ I said, shocked in spite of myself, remembering the last time I had had to listen to wild metaphors springing from the lips of a woman, that morning on the
Empire Queen
, and wondering if perhaps all intelligent and educated women had to relieve their feelings in that unpleasant way instead of simply stamping and swearing and making a noise. Now she had turned her head away not to let the sudden tears be seen, but I had seen them as she turned to face the light of the spring afternoon lingering above the street outside the high windows.

I got up to go and finish a report that wanted some police confirmation. I am no good as a comforter, I thought. It is against every instinct as well as against reasoned habit to show what I feel, and Barbara’s distress, coming at such a time, had distressed me in turn. I was of no use there. No doubt she was thinking of her boy Brian, thinking he too and she with him shared in the general reprieve; no doubt Lady Solomon, who ‘considered herself a friend’, was not unreasonable in supposing that Barbara, the mother, along with the majority of the citizenry, would be very willing to make celebration. The Munich victory. It surprised me, that expression.

‘Where are you going?’

Her steady voice made me pause at the door. The tears were gone from her tired-looking face; she was smiling.

‘What is the good?’ I said. ‘We cannot really comfort one another—no one can comfort anyone in real need of comfort at a time like this. We must face it—I mean the fact that each one of us is alone, Barbara. Even Lady Solomon, whether she knows it or not. We cannot alter other people, or their lives, or their destinies, by offering them sweets to take away the bitter taste, any more than they can alter us. You and I happen to have children whose whole lives, as we foresee them, mean more to us, we think, than our own lives do. But do you not see how we do our utmost to shape those lives as we think best, we who say we cannot alter another human destiny? Who are we, anyhow, to know what is best? They are just as much individuals as we are. How can we interfere? The most we can do is to cherish them and love them. Our thoughts and beliefs cannot come into it. They will grow up to have different thoughts from ours, different ideas of how a society should work and enjoy itself and preserve itself. You wondered, a while ago, what our children would think of us for being—however unwillingly—a party to the Munich agreement, in the sense that each one of us is in some degree responsible for the world we live in, and what happens in it. Well, I doubt whether our children will think of Munich at all, outside the textbooks. Do you or I worry ourselves about the Versailles Treaty? No—not even as an episode in world history which has made a Munich victory possible. It does not affect our hearts. Munich will not affect our children’s. The best we can do is act in such ways that they will know we never intended evil or craved for power over others. To cry out aloud against the rest of society is as unfruitful of any lasting good as it would be to withdraw personally from that society altogether. It happens that to cry aloud sometimes relieves the heart of what seems—but is not—an intolerable burden of grief and pity. As for the cry itself, it does not get us very far, and I think we may be sure our children will never hear even the echoes of it when they are old enough to listen.’

She was looking at me very intently. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘There is no more I can say. There is probably nothing I can say which would be new to you. Why do you look like that?’

‘When you talk as you were then,’ she said, ‘you make me think Con is in the room with me. If only you did it more often—No, don’t be impatient. I don’t want you to think I expect you to be like him, except to clear my mind when it needs it, as it does quite often these days. I think it’s good for you yourself to talk like that. My dear, you are altogether too silent.’