The Refuge (13 page)

‘As I said,’ I reminded her, ‘words and cries don’t get us far, in my opinion. Now listen to me, Barbara. What I would do if I were you would be to ring Lady Solomon and say that after all you would like to go to her party. She may not have understood that you were being rude—sometimes those wealthy people don’t, though nothing is more vulnerable, to my mind, than the sense of invulnerability large quantities of money give the average person. Make some sort of explanation of your telephone conversation if you must. Thus you will have nothing to explain to Franklin, who is more important to you than Lady Solomon, I imagine. You will also be taking the correct bitter draught for such a time, if you go. Nor will you need to stay very long. Your photographer will be doing most of the work on the spot, won’t she?’

‘Perhaps you are right,’ she said slowly. ‘I think you are. Perhaps the flagellants were not as mad as I’ve always thought. A little self-discipline . . .’

‘That is not it,’ I said. ‘We have a far harder thing to do. We have to live with the belief that this is only the beginning. Let them give their parties. I suspect the future is going to wipe out Munich even for you and me and all those like us.’

At the time, as our minds and feelings then were, it was an easy thing to say. Heard in memory, after the dark years and all the shames of war, it merely sounds like an example of politico-philosophical cant of the worst sort. But that was how our feelings were that late September day when spring was blooming round us like a cold flower, from earth to heaven; that was how we felt, despite the most determined efforts of self-control. It is clear now that to have said ‘even for you and me’ was a mighty piece of egotism; but that was how we had been driven, by the state of the whole human society in its heart and its head and its corporal body, to feel: that there were not only good and bad people, but people blessed with degrees of goodness.

I had confidently put myself on the side of the angels, like the vainest of all the blessed Saints surrounding my Lord.

It happened that, after all, the winter of nineteen thirty-nine did not seem so frighteningly oppressive as the same months of the year before it. Seeds of panic dropped in our hearts and minds in that year did germinate and flourish, as though the autumn and winter rains from April onwards had softened them like other seeds in their resting-place of summer; but with them grew, as it were, the herb resignation, the mild bane so recommended by some sorts of Christian as an anodyne against the darker passions of misanthropy and despair.

As winter increased through June and July and in August hesitated, we witnessed a sterner repetition of Germany’s parade of incredible armed power during the—to us—antipodean summer in Western Europe; and again we were afraid, but this time with the more courageous fear of certainties.

My refugee acquaintance aboard the
Empire Queen
, whom I still sometimes remembered with all the vivid unreality of a brief dream, had not been wrong, that earlier August morning. For the Germans, even more than for Britain, Munich, as it now appeared, had been
reculer pour mieux sauter
in very truth. Lady Solomon had indeed had a victory to celebrate, provided she had been indifferent as to whose victory it was; the Berlin-Moscow pact of the twenty-third of August confirmed her in that, as surely as it showed war to be not only inevitable but imminent. Up to the time of the pathetic Henderson reports from Germany we had looked at one another daily in the turmoil of the
Gazette
office, where by now a kind of gay madness began to be evident, and silently or aloud had wondered,
What week
? but afterwards, through the latter part of August, through the mists and moonlight of the first slow turn of the year towards spring, we were wondering merely,
Tonight—or tomorrow night?
We did not know, from moment to moment of each working day, when the wireless and the clattering teletype machine sweating in its annexe off the sub-editors’ room would bring the one word
War
, an end and a beginning.

The days of the Russo-German pact I remember for two things. The second, which can be dismissed as of little importance now, was that on the Wednesday following the signing of the treaty between Hitler’s and Stalin’s governments, when much of our surprise had been replaced by reorientated speculation, I saw on the corner of Bligh and Hunter Streets, on my way towards Philip Street and the C.I.B., the bright pink street-poster of the
Bulletin
, most admirable of Australian weekly papers, and read with a shock of disbelief the three words in heavy five-inch type:
HITLER PLAYS FALSE.
A shadow not of rain-clouds seemed to fall over the early afternoon, and the corner-newsvendor’s monotonous clamour of the latest scare-headlines from the incoming European cables seemed suddenly more monotonous, trivial, meaningless than ever before. At that moment I had an impulse, rare enough with me, and without object or reason, to do immediate violence in some overpowering way to the consciousness of my fellow-men: to shout into the stuffed ears of mankind,
Stop.
Had I done any such thing, in any degree, the echo (as I knew even then) would have come back:
Too late.

The other episode, which proved to be the most important personal event in my life since Jean’s death nearly nine years ago, took place some days before the non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany was made known. At first it seemed no more than an incident, surprising certainly but with no ominous aspect apparent to my ever-increasing self-preoccupation, my striving to discern in myself and my own life what was common to the self and the life of all men, and to come by that ultimate discernment to an ultimate understanding of the passions which must govern human behaviour; for through this understanding of common human passions I hoped to arrive one day at wisdom.

This ambition was not always in the forefront of my mind. It did not interfere with work or ordinary behaviour, nor did I bore and exasperate friends by talking about it; but it was there, like my religion, and it had the effect of making most of the immediate personal contacts and incidents of my days seem of no great importance. Overbearing all our intercourse at that time, in any case, was the talk of war; behind that, the thought of it.

When, therefore, one Friday afternoon in mid-August a boy brought me an envelope containing only my own business-card I supposed some colleague was playing a meaningless jest on me until I turned the pasteboard slip over and saw the words
Irma Martin
and
Empire Queen
inscribed in an impeccably neat hand on the back. The card was quite clean, and smelled now of some perfume I did not then recognize. The boy waited, grinning cheerfully when he caught my glance up from the card; and I thought briefly how reserves and barriers were already being broken down among us by the looming shadow far away beyond the equator to the north and west, and thought too that before all was over this gaily impudent lad would be in a uniform, perhaps in a grave or at the bottom of the sea.

‘Where did you get this?’ I said.

‘Lady out there gave it to me, Mr. Fitz.’ he said. ‘She said you would know her.’ He added gratuitously, ‘Some dame.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that, but bring her along, will you, Peter?’

When he went away I glanced from habit at the stark face of the office clock on the wall above and to the left of my table. It stood at 3.20, and this was a Friday. Half an hour earlier I had left Barbara’s room, even more unwillingly than usual, for we had had some agreeable conversation, about her boy Brian and more particularly about Alan. He spent part of his summer holiday with me at Long Reef, and now thought of my flat as ‘our place’, rather than my mother’s house in Cremorne where he had been reared for eight years by a middle-aged companion-housekeeper whom he called Moley, and by my mother. Thoughts and talk of Alan, and of all the delicate problems of childhood and parenthood, more certainly than anything else moved my mind from preoccupation with the imminence of world calamity. I had found it hard enough to come back to the realities of the day’s engagements—a boring coroner’s-court session that morning to be written up briefly; talks with various people in the C.I.B.; a cabled special from New York, about drugs and juvenile delinquency, to read and return to the news-editor—and now to be obliged to talk to a young woman who, in memory, had suddenly become disturbing, for reasons I could not explain to myself in my surprise, made me feel thoroughly impatient. I wanted to return to the warm, dreamlike world of my own and Barbara’s children.

What did the young scallawag mean by ‘Some dame’?

When I was a boy, the expression would have been meaningless. The whole of the language was becoming corrupted by the drug known as the American way of life, by heavens. I looked round the room, which was emptier than usual because it was Friday afternoon. A typewriter pattered and stopped and pattered on at a table hidden from me by a concrete-and-plaster column, and a few men were talking noisily near the door; but many of them had done most of their work for the week and were out for a quiet afternoon drink before putting in the last hour or so of their day in tidying up details. Occasional fragments of conversation, punctuated now and then by a telephone bell ringing, by an arrival or a departure, let me know that as usual the talk was of war; but the atmosphere of the room was one of tired week’s-end peace. I heard the footsteps approaching, the boy’s and that young woman’s, and did not turn in my chair until the lad announced her presence.

‘Lady to see you, sir.’ Evidently she had given no name.

Even as I was about to turn and rise from my swivel chair, the picture came in a sudden, embarrassing flash, like the unexpected opening of a door upon privacy, and I did not want to look at it: the badly ventilated second-class cabin, the young woman wearing over her apple-green pyjamas a heavy, dark-green house coat cut in the Chinese fashion, the high collar fastened with a large gold button; the quick step forward, the upturned young Slavic face with wide-open eyes, the unexpected, unnecessary kiss, too swift to be astonishing, full upon my lips . . . Like a small dream it had been, and like a dream it remained. I turned and got up, watching the boy go before I allowed myself to look at her squarely.

She was looking round the room, guardedly and quickly, like an animal in strange surroundings. I remembered that look later, when I placed it correctly: it was just so I had seen accused persons look when led into open court. Her face was expressionless and almost rigidly blank, taut and hollow like a mask, and her smile when I greeted her did not show in her eyes as they at last met mine.

‘How do you do, Miss Maartens? Please sit down.’

‘Martin, please,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Irma Martin.’

Of course. It had been Martin on the back of my card; I glanced down at it to make sure. She must have found herself a job, or a reason for concealing her previous ‘adopted’ name that had been a memorial to her dead gentleman.

Instead of taking the wooden chair my various visitors of those days used, she stood where she was, resting one hand on the back of it. All around us the earnest or desultory talk proceeded, the raised voice of someone speaking on the telephone on a bad line, the occasional sound of feet in the corridor outside. Had anyone told me then that years later I would wait in this big, fusty, familiar room for news of her death, I would only have believed it because I seemed always to be waiting for news of death and violence and lawlessness.

‘Can we go where it is private, please?’

The words seemed to force themselves through her half-smiling, mirthless lips, as though they had nothing to do with her. Many of my callers asked the same thing; to most of them I gave the answer I now gave her.

‘We can talk as privately here as if we were in Pitt Street.’

Still she remained standing, her other hand holding a leather handbag swung from a shoulder-strap against her right side. She looked as though she were about to go, as though she regretted already having come; but her eyes held mine with such a direct look rather of command than of appeal, and so entirely without embarrassment, that I resigned myself to an interview in the wireless room, off the library, which was for my private use in emergencies—that is, if it were not occupied by the wireless programme monitor listening to news broadcasts. Wondering what the devil the mystery was all about, I led her between the tables towards the door. Not until later did I realize that she had not asked a second time for privacy, and that it was her look I was complying with. If I had, I might not have been so ready to go. As it was, I took her along without further argument.

All I knew about her at this time was that she had arrived a year before, with a shipload of other refugees, that her name was not Martin nor even Maartens, and that she had been a
couturi
è
re
and ‘secretary to a gentleman’ (her own vague expression) in Europe under the Hitler shadow. I supposed then that she had merely been the ‘gentleman’s’ mistress. I also knew, from her own account, that she had once been a member of the Communist Party, but not that she had also been a Nazi Party member. Because of my ignorance, what followed during that afternoon’s interview seemed to me at first both melodramatic and suspicious in the extreme. Only the fact that my year-old memory and my present observation of her disturbed me in some obscure and nervous way, which I did not yet try to understand, withheld me from passing her on to some unoccupied colleague—and the fact, too, that when I had given her my card it had been with an offer to help her if ever I could, if ever she needed it. That was, after all, a year ago, and in those days of August, nineteen thirty-nine, a year could seem an inconceivable nightmare stretch of time.

I led the way along the corridor to the library, feeling fairly sure that the wireless monitor’s room would be unoccupied, since we did not receive the next news-broadcast from London until four o’clock. On the way we passed Barbara coming towards us with her quick, confident step of a much younger woman; she and I greeted one another with our eyes—we had been talking intimately together barely half an hour before—but I understood later that she must have observed Irma with womanly shrewdness and accuracy during the few seconds of our approach. (She told me, for one thing, that the girl was noticeably well-dressed, though my eye had merely recorded, from habit, that with a black skirt and jacket she was wearing a white blouse done up to the throat with silver buttons, and that her small lop-sided black hat suited her pale face well.) It was not until we were seated in the small, quiet wireless room, with the big cabinet receiver silent against the wall between us, that I had much opportunity to look at her at all. Then I realized that she was afraid.