The Refuge (22 page)

In the same instant as I knew this, my choice was made.

I thought out all this afterwards, certainly, in the long and leaden years of war and separation. At the time I was aware only of the profound confusion of mind and spirit when, of all the three aspects of being, only flesh saw clear the way and leaped up strong to pursue it. The rekindled fire at our feet was a springing reflection of the fire burning up again, after a long time, in the secret places of my body and my imagination, burning so well and eagerly that I felt no shame, only an agony of regret, pang after pang of futile longing for what was within my grasp; tearless and bitter as the juice of desert aloes whose bitterness is that of an earthen desolation.

It needed no words to let me know what was in her mind, but she did speak, with her face still averted from me.

‘I do not know what to say to thank you for this kindness and as you know, there is nothing I can do in return, nothing. Only one thing, and for a woman it is too easy to be enough.’

‘It is also too easy to accept, believe me. I would not impair the value of your generosity so readily.’

‘You want me—you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then take what you want. It is so little—if you knew . . .’

‘I do know, but it is not so little to me.’

‘It is yours.’

She moved very slightly towards me, and I saw her face at last, and realized, confusedly, that she had been hiding tears. Without hesitation now I took her in my arms, in the silence that followed our quick whispered exchange. She came to me irresistibly, and I supported her so that she was half-sitting, half-lying across my knees, her head and shoulders in the bend of my left arm. For a moment she remained arched and rigid; then as her form sagged against me she reached up with her free hand to pull my head down near her lips, and began a whispered babble of words.

What she said I would not recall if I could. Even at the time, even when she spoke in English, I did not understand one half of it. It was like the endless nightmare spate of words uttered in delirium, and seemed to have little to do with me myself; I remember thinking oddly, as a man will on occasion think of anything to save himself, that her breath bearing such words as I recognized should rightly have scorched me, instead of striking so gently warm and sweet upon my cheek, and that her still form should have been contorted to give a final force to her soft, frantic speech. With my ear near her mouth I found, when I opened my eyes again, that I was looking at the shadowy hollow of her bosom where the silken pyjama jacket had fallen open as she lay back in my arms; and if I closed my eyes it was not so that I might not see but that I might see for ever, and for ever breathe the delicate, warm perfume of her hidden breasts; for it is by such mortal things, and not by nobility or badness of character, that a woman in the end becomes unforgettable.

Minute after minute, for I know not how long, she whispered her urgent confessions of desires and despairs, now and then pulling me closer with her arms across my shoulders for emphasis. It did not matter that I understood so little, and that little unwillingly. It was enough that she was making a full, incoherent confession of all that life had done to her, all she had done to life. She was a soul in torment, I thought; and I held her in my arms as though that were the most natural thing in the world, as though we had always been together so. Of all her hurried whispering, I retained (of course from vanity, and as a kind of solace to my aching flesh, to the immense regret that had come with my inevitable choice) only one phrase, which she repeated two or three times at intervals: ‘Only you have’—I think the word was ‘abstained’; that at least was its meaning. ‘Only you have abstained,’ she said, not knowing of course that my abstinence, if so it could be called, was in fact a positive choice in favour of what I believed to be my own salvation; not knowing consciously, it seemed, that every part and fibre of my body at that moment craved her with a need that, had I spoken, would have cried aloud. In fact, had she not lain so still in my arms, whispering on with such apparent necessity to speak, I do not think whatever resolution I still clung to would have withstood her. But when, for the third or fourth time, she said, ‘Only you . . .’ I turned my face so that my lips came against her rapid mouth. I did not want to hear any more, and I kissed her so that she fell silent and began to tremble like someone in a fever. With my free hand I caressed her face and hair until the trembling ebbed, became spasmodic like the sobbing of an exhausted child, and finally ceased. Her fragile eyelids lay so still upon her eyes that she seemed to sleep; and only by a deeper breath now and then, by a sigh, by the slight movement of her fingers behind my shoulder, did she show that sleep had not in fact come upon her.

So for a long while she lay in my arms. The fire sank down and I could not move to feed it. All sense of time’s passing had gone from my mind, and my body had put aside its craving unawares. Like a boy with his first love in his incredulous embrace, I wished that the timeless moment were timeless in very truth, and that our two selves at one, with nothing given, nothing received, might rest in this waking dream.

‘
Your lady friends is gone, I took them to the buss stop in the cart yes-day, they might of bin headin west or back Sydney way, didnt say. The young one nearly through a fit when she found you was gone without sayin but the other she just larghed she reckoned you was no fool whatever you done. The night you left the skreetch owl come down the mountin, that scared em a wile til I told em what it was, said it was a sine of rain not a murder or a
gohst
!!! If you can get Horderns to send new shoes for the cultivater, arent any in Richmond yet and I got to get on with the top field.
’

Ten days after my visit to Hill Farm, on the twenty-third of August, the warning I had received that Friday afternoon was justified when it was announced that Russia had signed her non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.

Even in the midst of the uproar and the lamentations, fully aware that this was a death-knell, the exploding of a detonator which would quickly set off the main charge, we pursued our affairs within and outside the office with deliberate conscience and sanity, in what looked to have become an insane world.

The full enormity of what was to come in the end was, to many of us, grimly adumbrated in the behaviour of the German Chancellor to Sir Neville Henderson during those last unreal days of peace. We had glimpses of a man either whipping his very soul to a frenzy of baseless personal resentment, a bull before the charge, or in the grip of a power which he had conjured up only to find, too late, that he was at its command, not it at his. I believed, then as now, when there has been time to look back, years in which to think again almost soberly, that it was the latter; yet in the later part of the war, just before the invasion of Normandy in strength, a dream came to me which I have never forgotten. In this, between the usual ragged beginning and the apparently rational and quite irrelevant change into other dreaming, I found myself talking (in English) with Hitler on the stage of an immense and empty auditorium, a quiet conversation of which, when I awoke, I could recall only one remark, made by the Chancellor in conclusion. He said as he turned away, ‘I am an Austrian. My mission is to destroy the people of Germany, and I am doing it.’

It was a good dream, and for some days afterwards I experienced a recurring inner excitement, a sense of almost exultation, whenever I thought of it. Had it come in September of nineteen thirty-nine, it might have made those first days of declared war less like the unpeopled nightmares of sleep which they evoked. As it was, sleeping and waking were nightmarish indeed. We felt we were so far away; we felt the helplessness none of the threatened nations could have felt, for we were, as it seemed in the beginning, helpless without being threatened.

The quick, fantastic changes in everyday life could be accepted with an effort of will; the disappearance of office colleagues and private friends, or their mysterious transfiguration into people not only in uniform but in the grip of a flushed and bustling excitement, trying to pretend they had not changed, was comprehensible and, at odd moments, enviable to those of us who dressed and lived and worked as we had always done. At that time, because of Alan, because of my age, and because my office intimated firmly that such action would be opposed, I made no effort to approach any of the services; in truth, after the first moments of instinctive consideration while Mr. Menzies’s voice still sounded in my ears, I scarcely thought of such a thing again until nineteen forty-two, when the Japanese seemed likely to invade this continent from the north. Scott had me in to explain to me the attitude of the management, which was, roughly, one of repressive exhortation to the whole staff: a combination of ‘Do your bit if you think you must,’ and ‘The
Gazette
must come out as usual.’ There were not so many young men on the staff in those days, and it was possible without lack of a show of patriotism to stress the importance of publication at all costs, while at the same time drawing up a list of official correspondents which should silence criticism when added to the list of those who had already joined up.

Scott, in his booming voice and with a face of jovial anger as usual, spoke very kindly to me, explaining that not only had I not been considered for a correspondent’s assignment but also as time went on my present usefulness on the spot was bound to increase largely: ‘for crimes abroad breed crimes at home, my boy, as you will find for yourself.’ And so, of course, it did turn out, in ways none of us foresaw then.

For Alan’s sake, above all other considerations, I was heartily glad when Scott told me that my name had been forwarded to Army and manpower authorities as that of a staff member indispensable to publication of the paper. After that night at Hill Farm, I was aware of changes taking place within me, and Jack’s letter, in the middle of the week following my secret departure before sunrise the following morning after some hours of sleepless thought, seemed to speed these changes forward. Like a man who has survived a severe physical ordeal, with all its excitement and fear, I felt for some days a lassitude of body and spirit, and a slowly decreasing bitterness of regret, a growing conviction that by the very sorrow and shame of the choice I had made the choice itself was in a sense endorsed as right. Of Irma I could not think clearly at all. She seemed to be lodged as it were within me. She was too near. I was seldom unaware of her in waking hours—never, it seemed, for a moment—but I could not think of her objectively yet, and did not dream of her at all.

The dreams came later. For the present, I found myself impelled to go over and over my impressions of that last hour we had spent together. I thought she was young and wise enough not to be offended, as an older woman would likely have been offended, by my seeming rejection of her modestly-proffered ‘return’; but she was painfully bewildered, like an honest man to whom it is pointed out that the coin of the realm which he has tendered as legal payment does not ring true. Even in my desperation, I tried to explain, with slow words which sounded unconvincing enough, I know, when they were spoken, that I was not made for the enjoyment of evanescent loves of the flesh, and that while I believed I loved her now I must force myself to realize that I hardly knew her, or she me, and that a bodily union with neither background nor future, and with only desire in common between the two indulgeants, was to my mind an act of ignorant self-gratification in human beings, just as surely as it was one of the utmost naturalness in all other animals. Men and women were different, I said; and generously she did not laugh. I showed her how I had desired her, with what hungry fires, and she seemed to believe me, though without comprehension yet; I told her how I had become a sudden field of battle between two ambitions, of which the one that in that moment had seemed the stronger had withdrawn, not vanquished but out-argued and disarmed. I told her, as clearly as I could, all that was in my heart and in my mind: the dead but not forgotten love I had had for Jean, the living love and compassion for my son, and the strange feelings, of pity and passion, she herself had aroused violently in me, and which I had never before felt for any woman, nor—I had thought—would ever feel again.

And she—she let me talk, lying back in my arms with closed eyes while above her I whispered to the dying glow of the fire which from time to time settled itself more comfortably with an answering whisper and shift of coals. She let me talk, always of myself, my life, my body, my spirit—seldom of her, never of what she might feel and think, never of her hungers, her fortune, her destiny; and there in my arms her loneliness must have increased with every word of mine, inconceivably burdensome.

It was this thought, not the nature of my final choice, of which I was later ashamed; for she said nothing, pleaded nothing, made no move again to woo my consciousness away from myself towards herself. She lay there still and listening, and I have often wondered whether, for all her tiredness of body and mind after that long strange day’s excitements, for all her feeling of the ultimate futility of every well-meant gesture and every larger human effort, she perhaps found it in her heart to laugh at what could only seem my elaborate self-justification for the subtlest and grossest discourtesy a man can offer a woman who has proffered him herself.

If she did laugh, and with whatever scorn or bitterness, she gave no sign of it. In the end, after we had sat together huddled over the fire as it died, and after I had assured myself that she was warm enough—and god! how delicately warm, how resiliently alive and weighted she was—I persuaded her to return to her bed, and so went back to my own.

It was then, lying sleepless in the dark which pressed its icy kiss on cheek and brow, that I began to feel that sense of unease and shame at the thought that my talk could only have increased by many degrees her awareness of her own loneliness. The more I thought of it, the more grievous did it seem, until I felt I could weep for what I had done; yet—and there was no consolation in the thought—I thought I could not have done otherwise. It was incumbent upon me, by the vow I had made to be to Alan more than a father only, to save my own soul: that was what I was faced with, all my waking hours; and a casual taking and giving in love, under the stress of loneliness and fear and desire, could not but seem a step back, not a forward step towards the strength needed for any act of true salvation. I had a treaty with my own soul, to save it. For years I had suffered my own loneliness unassuaged; I had not known the consoling arms and the generous body of love; I had mastered spontaneous little desires, and quelled imagination with the sturdy weapon of deliberate thought. Every physical appetite I had considered and gone about to command, even the incomparable lust for sleep. I did not see how I could, even if I would, cast aside this discipline in one breathless and unthinking moment, not for all the young and melting womanly beauty in the world.