The Refuge (24 page)

‘I see,’ Barbara said. ‘I wondered at the time why I got a special memo asking me to send anything to do with Russia to the editor before getting it set.’

‘So you see,’ I said, ‘how one would be ready to believe other things, in retrospect anyhow, such as her insistence that she was in personal danger from some European Communists pretending to be refugees who arrived by the same ship. At first, I admit, it sounded suspiciously like a motion-picture melodrama or an Oppenheim thriller—what are you laughing at?’

‘I was just thinking of the picture your words gave me—the poor child telling you all this, and you clutching your beard and looking more and more aloof. Do go on.’

‘But I don’t clutch my beard,’ I said, taking hold of it; and so we both laughed, and I realized it was my first easy laugh for many dreary days.

‘Well, that was what made me suggest my place in the mountains. We managed to get away—she and a Jewish friend of hers named Linda—good lord!’

‘What is it?’

‘Miss Werther. I had forgotten her. I should have rung her up. I imagined she must have gone too—what a fool!’

‘Just a moment,’ Barbara said. ‘You haven’t told me the rest of story. How did you get away. Do you want to use this phone?’

‘It can wait now,’ I said. ‘Only one of the copy-boys could have guessed that we left this building together. It was rather a fantastic business, but she wanted it that way. She had been trailed, she thought, since she left her lodgings that day, but had put her watcher off, she believed. Our only moment of danger was when Tim McMahon came in just as we were about to leave. He was rather tipsy. He thought he recognized her—he did recognize her, I mean, but he was not sure whether I knew her or not. He’s been trying to find out ever since.’

‘McMahon,’ she said. ‘You know, of course, that he’s in very deep with the local Communists?’

‘But Barbara—he’s a Catholic.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Con happened to tell me a few things about Tim McMahon once, when he was in a bit of a rage over one of his bad Canberra articles. What I say is quite true. He’s not a Party member—no, he’s something worse. A sort of under-cover man.’

I was trying to remember the various monologues McMahon had treated me to lately, and to review them in the light of what Barbara had told me. He might have been doing his best to find out not what I knew about Irma but whether I knew where she was. After all, the man was not always drunk, and often, I felt sure, not as drunk as it suited him to pretend to be. I had learned to recognize him sober by a seemingly natural mannerism of his, of removing his spectacles and slowly polishing the thin convex lenses round and round, revealing in full by this action a face that looked curiously blind and anxious, the helpless face of a man incapable of duplicity. I imagined I had noticed him doing this more often of late; and he had assuredly returned to that one subject by direct or oblique ways which in another man would have been boring. McMahon, even when he was being a nuisance and an unwelcome interruption, was never boring. He himself saw to that. One could not help listening to him. I realized it was possible that he had mentioned seeing Irma apparently with me to someone to whom there might have been more in it than there was to McMahon himself—at first. It would need but a word, to a good Party sympathizer (‘See if Fitzherbert knows where she’s got to, Tim.’), to put him on his mettle and on Irma’s trail where it appeared to vanish as it joined mine.

‘He came in, rather unsteady, and bumped into me, and his hat fell off. There may have been more to all this than I realized, after what you’ve just told me. He muttered something about “the little lady Communist” as though they knew one another—by name and sight, at least. What I’m wondering now is why she didn’t say anything to me about him later? As we drove off I noticed in the mirror that she seemed to have had a bad shock, but I thought it was just the strain of getting away quickly. I must try to find out more about him.’

‘I may be able to tell you enough,’ she said, and I realized suddenly how seldom and how impersonally she spoke of other members of the staff, even to me. It was this that made one feel so safe with her, this that with her fine habit of tolerance towards others helped to make her a woman of such quality.

‘I was thinking of Irma’s point of view,’ I said. ‘Miss Werther may be able to tell me, if she is in Sydney after all. I do not want to get anyone involved with McMahon through my own ignorance, you understand. These things can be so messy . . .’

‘Tell me the rest of your adventure,’ she said.

‘We got to Hill Farm, and had a very pleasant evening. They seemed to settle down well, and old Jack quite took to them, I was glad to see. Evidently there are women and women, after all, even for that famous misogynist. We went to bed fairly early. At half past one she woke me by making up the fire in the big room—it was a cold night. She had not been able to sleep. We talked for a while in whispers, sitting by the fire.’

It all came back vividly, painfully, as I spoke about it at last: her face in the firelight, her fingers on my hand, the weight and warmth of her across my knees, the swelling heat of her lips against my own, and the eventual silence.

‘She seemed to think I expected some return for helping her. I had not even thought about being kind. She apparently thought of it all as deliberate kindness, and she—she could think of only one way to repay me that was within her power. I understood well enough what she meant. I said it was too much to accept . . . You don’t think me shameless to talk like this? I am trying to explain what happened later.’

‘Go on,’ she said with a sigh, looking down at her hands on the table intently.

‘You know, I suppose, that all new human contacts are somehow embarrassing to me, as well as being very interesting. One tries not to let either the interest or the embarrassment show. As for casual love affairs, I can understand their attraction without ever feeling it—without ever seeing myself give way to it, I mean. That night, everything that might have been propitious for another man was wrong for me, the way I am apparently made. She had come to me for help, and I gave the best I could think of. She was in my own house, and also, in a way, quite at my mercy. That evening she had been exquisitely lovely because she was happy. And above all, she made the offer—it was no suggestion, it was a pathetically generous offer—she made it herself. For anyone else, to take her at her word would have been not only easy and delightful, it would have seemed the only decent—yes,
decent
—thing to do. For me it was not like that. There were other considerations, very deep ones. Say if you like I am made unnaturally, but understand that for me to have taken her at her word—and I assure you I really react no differently from the way other men do at such times—to have taken her at her word then, of all moments, would have been exactly the opposite of decent. I expect you, as a woman, to see that it would have been calamitous, another chapter very like previous ones, I gather, added to her unhappy story. Added, as usual, by her own helpless contriving. I feel sometimes that that girl craves for one thing only—complete extinction . . . For my part, it would have been a self-betrayal. You will not laugh at this, I know. My personal ideals may be ridiculous in a world like ours, but to my best ability I am loyal to them.’

‘My dear boy,’ she said softly, looking up wide-eyed, ‘I will certainly not laugh. Do go on—we are friends.’

‘It is because you are the truest friend I have that I talk like this. Someone must know—I must tell someone.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘I am loyal to those ideals, and nothing can be, or seem to be, so selfishly, bitterly cruel to other people as this kind of loyalty. It appears to benefit only the person practising it. It appears to. But I tell you, Barbara, it is most difficult to sustain, in the welter of human contacts and relationships, because of the way a man is made. Self-indulgence gets more friends than self-denial, and always has. This loyalty needs constant protection against many of the common human characteristics of the man himself, and demands many sacrifices. The sacrifices are not chosen by the loyalist, they are merely unforeseen and not understood by the victim, whose very misunderstanding as often as not makes the sacrifice a voluntary one—and, as I say, an unforeseen one. One thing always happens then. The loyalist is held to blame.’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘I admit for a moment I did feel a bit shocked. I knew what she must have felt. Now I see what you mean.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that is what happened. I could see no other possible choice.’

‘That was what you meant about running away?’

‘That was it, in a way. I suppose I did start my departure from that moment. I left before daylight. Since then, all I know is what old Jack had to tell me,’ and I took out and handed to her the note I had carried about with me ever since, reading and re-reading it with less and less surprise, more and more misery. That perfect picture (did he but know it) of the two women hearing for the first time the appalling cry of the screech-owl that lived higher up the mountain above the plateau was what moved me more than most of what he had to say; that, and the mention of how the younger one ‘nearly through a fit’ when she found I had gone secretly away. Yet quite evidently there was nothing else I could have done about it.

‘That is all I know,’ I said. ‘She has gone completely this time, as far as I am concerned. The trail is lost unless Miss Werther knows—if she did not go with her. I don’t suppose she did. It would be impossible to guess where Irma would stop, if she stops at all. As for me, I would not say I had fallen in love with her. I just cannot forget her.’

‘You see why she left the cottage, I suppose?’

I shook my head unhappily: no.

‘Why, because of you, silly,’ she said. ‘Your behaviour was unfamiliar. Nothing more—not insulting, as you seem to think, just unfamiliar. To anyone like Miss Martin the unfamiliar would be highly suspect. She probably found she couldn’t believe in you fully—you know the expression, too good to be true—and what a woman can’t believe in she doesn’t trust for a moment. So she went. Poor child—but what else could she do? You must see, Lloyd, she wasn’t in your position. She didn’t have a choice, she had no ideals left to fortify her, the only sacrifice she could make was the one you repudiated, however kindly. I only say this because I want you to feel you see her side of it as well as your own.’

‘I have been trying to do that for over a week, and now you have done it for me. It makes it no easier for me, personally, to know that I can do nothing for her now. The whole thing is complex. I ask myself whether to hold on to one’s personal ideals is not just an extreme form of vanity, an insane egotism, and yet, you see, if I did not remain loyal to mine I cannot see what good I would be to anyone else in the world—and of course by that I mean Alan. When I reach that point in this interminable argument, the moral question arises whether such an attitude to a son is not unnatural in a father, whether it is not perhaps sowing seeds of future trouble when the boy is grown and aware of me and able to think a bit for himself. To this I answer myself, in the persons both of interrogator and of witness, that a part of my self-discipline, even now, is to learn to make no demands upon him whatever. To do without love. I do not want love, I want him to be free of me from the beginning. In fact, Barbara, I had to choose that night between the boy and the woman, and I chose the boy. Habit. I would always choose him, so long as I could be of use to him. That is why—now I see it plain enough—the choice was inevitable.’

‘You don’t suppose that by choosing the boy you reasserted to yourself your right to a claim on him?’

She surprised me.

‘It could be so,’ I said. ‘If it actually was so, then the best thing I could do for both our sakes would be to go out and shoot myself.’

‘Don’t be extreme, Lloyd,’ she said mildly. ‘I imagine you are doing what you think is right and good the whole time. Wasn’t it the counsel of Polonius to his son, “To thine own self be true”? Isn’t that the advice you’re trying to follow?’

‘I don’t know, Barbara, I don’t know. One question’s answer seems merely to ask yet another question, until I feel I am getting nowhere. It could easily be that I set far too much store by what I dare to suppose is my future importance to Alan. Yet supposing I were—not there, so to speak—and he wanted me, and later I learned of it, later when it was too late. You see, I am obsessed with the feeling that I must always be there, the whole of me. So often my father was not there when I did need him, without knowing it. Alan is spiritually unarmed. Most naturally optimistic boy-children are like that—taking knock after knock and unable to help coming up smiling. I cannot bear to think of that as his future—I would be so deeply to blame, if I did the easy thing and went after my own interests regardless of him. He will remain unarmed until he gets his first real wound—and god have pity on whoever gives it to him.’

Barbara said nothing for a while, but sat looking at the pale fingertips of one immaculate hand. At last she looked up with a slight smile to say, ‘I can’t help wishing you could take this business of fatherhood a bit less seriously, a bit more easily. I can’t help thinking a certain amount of harmless irresponsibility on your part might be for the ultimate good of you both. Take that as the passing thought of a mere woman, if you like, but do take it, and bring it out one day for consideration.’

‘You are giving me Eve’s counsel, lady,’ I said mildly, ‘and you know what came of that.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and her shrewd eyes flashed suddenly, ‘Adam’s awakening to true wisdom through what is called sin or suffering by some, and self-realization by others. Adam’s separation of himself from his god, so that he learned to worship something other than himself. That’s what came of Eve’s counsel, and much thanks she’s had for it—nothing but the execrations of every Adam ever since, poor thing.’

‘Don’t let us talk about it,’ I said. ‘Tell me about yourself instead of about Eve. We must be topical. How are things at home?’