The Refuge (26 page)

When he was twelve years old, after four years of living rather aloof both from me and from the whole wartime society of those days, he left S. Johns for Shore, as the great Church of England grammar school is called, as a boarder. I chose that school, rather to my mother’s distress, when Alan was still a child, for the fact that its final products were boys who had not suffered the rather stifling religious indoctrination of the no less notable Catholic schools, and whose manner and faintly awkward social grace had always appealed to me. My father, after turning the matter over in his mind without comment, told me he thought the choice a wise one, especially when he understood that, as at S. Johns, those whose parents expected it could go to Mass in the ordinary way without being stigmatized or even singled out because of it.

For his own part, my father had never tolerated the idea of putting me to a boarding-school, and I have suffered the lack of that experience all my life. I wanted Alan to be not my own son so much as his own man, above all things, and as soon as might be. When he left S. Johns, in the fullness of summer a fortnight before Christmas, when the whole land was hot and glowing with colour and sun, my mother ‘gave’ us Miss Molesley—Alan still called her Moley—and I invited her to be my housekeeper permanently, and found her a good room with a view in one of the quieter streets near the Cross and a few minutes’ walk from my flat. The war, and the death of her only brother, had aged her noticeably, but she was still an agreeable woman, an intelligent and economic cook in a country where women are no longer always either or both; and Alan was as dear to her prim old virgin’s heart as though he were indeed what she called him—‘little brother’. As one addicted to the teachings of theosophy, she used the expression easily, but with an especially tender inflection for the boy scarcely one-quarter her age. (Me she had called ‘Judge’—to my mother’s secret and half-amused indignation—ever since my father died.)

Moley looked after us both, during the holidays, when Alan slept in the big bedroom next to mine at night and by day was freely busy with his own concerns and his successive hobbies. She would wait until I returned, no matter what the hour, and then walk fearlessly and unescorted back to her room through a district that was coming to be known as dangerous. When assignments kept me away at night, as happened occasionally, she used the day-bed in the living-room with its tall windows overlooking the great curve of the harbour north and east to the Heads. It was on these nights that she taught Alan card games. She was a great addict to the cards, and to dramatic and soft-spoken tea-cup reading now and then, when we were
en famine.
In spite or because of the great difference in their ages, and also because of the fever and passionate unrest of the world that throbbed and threatened in the near distance, they drew very close to one another again after the years of separation; and I was content to see it, for Alan was at a time of life when it is good for a boy to have as companion and mentor, if he has not his own mother, a loving, trusting and unsuspicious woman of much older years, when he is not among his own kind. The point of departure between us two, the point of no return, had come, and gone, even sooner than I expected it, and gradually I found myself in the last year of the war faced with a return to my earlier ways of solitude and underlying loneliness.

It was not that Alan withdrew himself. He seemed if anything more friendly and confiding, and sometimes I caught him looking at me with thoughtful surprise, as though for the first time he were seeing in my familiar form the problematical and unknown. No—there was no withdrawal from the innocent and merry intimacy in which we had for some years dwelt like conspirators against time and the world; rather it was as if, with the inexhaustible energy of his youth, he raced ahead, looking back to see at what speed I followed, or if indeed I followed at all.

I was particularly aware of this at the end of his first public-school year, when he came home for the summer wild with plans for sharing the holidays with one or two of the new friends he had made.

At the beginning of the last week of term, early in December, he called me by telephone at the office in the early afternoon. The air-conditioning plant had broken down again during a brief spell of abnormal heat, and the big room was full of still air that seemed to have been breathed several times. I had been at work on a difficult story since mid-morning, writing, telephoning, going out to an interview, writing again and once or twice checking the story, as it progressed, with the police. In order to make the most of what remained of that day’s quiet inside the office, before the majority of the editorial staff came in at two o’clock, I did not go out to lunch but remained doggedly at my table. I was hungry, thirsty and half-stifled by the soft heat, smelling of petrol fumes and hot tar, that had drifted in from the glittering black streets to the very core of the building, when my telephone rang once again. It was Alan.

‘Hullo, Daddy, isn’t it hot? Daddy, are you—do you want to come to the school break-up?’

‘When is it, Alan?’

‘Tomorrow week—um—Thursday.’

I could imagine him, looking vaguely about while he waited for my answer. His voice did not deceive me with its calm affection; the change from ‘are you coming’ to the less encouraging ‘do you want to come’ had told me what was in his mind—what had been in my own mind, safely settled, for weeks and months in fact. I remembered my own over-sensitive boyhood days; I remembered what I had once said to Barbara; I remembered and agreed that boys do not necessarily enjoy being seen with fathers who look thin and pale and wear beards. I had my answer ready, but it needed to be given gracefully. The time for small studied pretences between us, devised to ease each other’s minds, had come.

‘Just a minute, while I take a look at my diary.’ I put down the receiver and took up the little book to riffle through some few pages near the mouthpiece, muttering softly to myself. Then I spoke again. ‘No—I’m sorry, Alan, but it can’t be managed this year. Do you want Grandmother to deputize for me?’

His voice had not shown any trace of concern in the first place, not even when he firmly told me the exact day; but now, irrepressibly, it lifted with a faint, bouyant relief that made me smile into the listening mouthpiece of the receiver.

‘No, it’s all right, Daddy, thank you. It would probably knock her out. And anyhow, the fellows here are a bit shy of female company.’

‘Good gracious,’ I said, laughing, ‘don’t be too influenced by the fellows or their opinions. It’s entirely your own business. You have to live at the school, after all. I just thought that perhaps on speech-day—’

‘That’s it,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Sorry. I forgot the word. Speech-day.’

‘—I thought you might like to have some member of the family there to see you get all your prizes . . .’

‘Oh, pooh! I’m only getting one, anyhow.’

‘What one are you getting?’

‘English composition.’

‘Good lord—well, I’m glad to hear it. Only don’t be a writer, will you?’

‘No fear. One in the family’s enough, you always say. I’m going to be a doctor.’

‘The only difference is that you cut up abdomens instead of paragraphs.’

‘Oh—’ He forgot all gravity and the telephone too in a burst of laughter. ‘Can I tell the fellows I thought of that? No—perhaps I’d better say it was you.’

‘Tell them what you like, my dear chap, if you think it’s worth a fib. So you’ll be all right on your own?’

‘Yes, if you can’t come. It’s pretty dull, I think, anyhow. Who wants to listen to a lot of old speeches?’

‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

‘Cricket. Inter-House matches. But I’m not playing—only watching.’

‘Do you like it? Playing, I mean.’

‘I like batting or bowling or—yes, I suppose it’s all right. I don’t like watching terribly much.’

‘I had a House Master with a rather untidy moustache. After the finals of the inter-House cup for cricket it was always much shorter and neater.’

‘Why? I don’t get it—oh! Did he cut it?’

‘He used to chew and gnaw at it all through play. He never wanted any tea that evening.’

‘Oh—’ His laughter bubbled in my ear again. ‘You mean he was too full of hair?’

‘Is that a pun, or did you pronounce the aitch?’

‘Well—you started the fooling. Gosh, I’ll be home in eight days.’

For no reason, unless because I was tired and hungry and on edge with the heat, I felt some tears gather at the back of my eyes as I heard the frank jubilation in his voice, and traced for my own pleasure a subconscious link between ‘fooling’ and coming home.

‘Yes. Well, I must not keep you from the cricket, and I hope your House wins.’

‘So do I, thank you, Daddy.’

‘Do you want any money, or have you still some of your pocket-money left?’ They were allowed only a limited amount of pocket-money, which I knew never lasted the full term.

‘Oh sir,’ his voice was prim with affected irony, ‘I always want money . . . Yes, I do want a little, if you have a few bob to spare.’

‘I wish you would say shillings, Alan, not bob. I shall post you a few bob today.’

‘There—you said it yourself! Thank you, Daddy . . . Well, goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Alan, until next week.’

‘Goodbye.’

At S. Johns, during his last year there, he had learned to talk without shyness over the telephone to me. As a result, I could enjoy speaking to him at his new school with a pleasure I could not analyse or describe. Always I left the ringing-up to him, though sometimes, on a free evening alone in the flat, I had had to put aside firmly the temptation to ring him up myself. I knew the very time at which to catch him, between evening tea and the hour of preparation boys of his age put in, before racing off at the shrilling of the electric bells to dormitory prayers and the luxurious horseplay and relaxation of undressing for bed. If there were any idleness in his days, it would be at this time. I never did use the telephone, except once, later, on the evening my mother died; but that was quite another matter.

We had, in truth, reached a phase in our relationship in which, for me, such constant caution and self-restraint were necessary that the exercise of them in his presence made me secretly shy of him. By telephone, talking was easier. I did not have to look and be looked at; I did not have to refrain from telling him to say ‘shillings’ rather than ‘bob’ and to try, for the sake of his appearance, to give up biting his nails when he was reading. Alone at my end of the telephone, I could allow to show in my face, no doubt, the pleasure I invariably felt at the thought of his youth and youthful beauty of body and mind.

In those years, the interminable years of a war whose fantastic echoes will never cease to sound somewhere in history’s corridors, I had no deep personal preoccupation other than with this boy; no wife, no sweetheart or mistress, no love given to myself above all others. When one does not receive, it happens often that one is more able and eager to give; and so I gave him my love. There was no need to stifle or discipline my emotions. They could be hidden. The things I felt, the feelings his memory or his presence aroused in me were always good feelings which would not have harmed him had they been shown; but the disparity of our ages and my own rather undemonstrative bearing made it unlikely that he ever knew more than that I loved him as it is good for a son to be loved, and proper in a father to love an only son. ‘Passing the love of women’ had once seemed to me a grossly exaggerated phrase characteristic of the worst in biblical prose, but sometimes in these days, with healthy mental and spiritual values going the way of most material values, wherever the mind turned, wherever the ear attended, I thought that phrase might have a meaning I had hitherto not tried to find.

By then it seemed easy for almost any other affection to exceed the love of women. War does that to a community: it allows the expression to be mistaken for the emotion, the gesture for the feeling that once profoundly prompted it. As I kept my habitual watch over the society which in turn kept me, by its insatiable curiosity and hunger for excitement, alert and profitably employed, I could not help thinking again and again how much the young American soldiery had helped forward the moral devaluation, and how unintentionally, above all in the matter of sexual conduct. They were frankly lustful young men, and in spite of a mass-produced veneer of song and dance and exaggerated courtesy towards women—particularly older women—their lust had not even the grace of an animal’s. They had apparently been trained from childhood by their monied masters, the industrialists of the sciences and the popular arts, to be obsessed by the life of the body, exaggerating its needs, valuing its outward and inward well-being with a relentless consciousness and to a degree that seemed to me insane. No appetite, they seemed to say, should be denied for a moment longer than could be helped by any means or stratagem; and of every appetite a man should be proud. The word moderation seemed to have come to mean, in their connotation, a state of vitiated abnormality which should quickly be corrected with the aid of drugs, vitamins, serums and stimulants of every kind. As for restraint, that was not a word they used at all.

It may have been the war which emphasized these common characteristics. Certainly, as the world’s highest-paid soldiers, they spent their money with an abandon which came naturally to them, and which was soon expected, especially by the young Australian women, who, now that their brothers and lovers were gone away to fight elsewhere, seemed to crowd the streets of the cities in surprising numbers. Many of these had become women physically since the war’s outbreak. Robbed of even the knowledge of the more diffident, naive eroticism of the young men of their own nation and generation, they fell readily into the smooth hands and habits of mind of the foreigners who had come to rescue their country from the Japanese.

Our office policy was to avoid or smother all criticism of our glorious ally across the Pacific. The police, however, were more outspoken, and occasionally even Hubble, that mild man, surprised me by the passion and articulateness of his diatribes: for what I have described as ‘unAustralian’ crimes had increased both in variety and in numbers. What dollars could not buy could be taken by other means. Their over-large pay and allowances, and the way they spent, came nearer than anything to demoralizing the whole civil life of the cities into which they swarmed, on their way north to death and glory, in the train of the battle-hardened Australian divisions from the Middle East theatres. The
Sydney Bulletin
summed it all up succinctly, as usual, with a drawing of an American soldier helping an Australian wench out of a taxi-cab at Kings Cross: in the two lines of caption, the girl sneeringly asks the cabby, ‘What’ll you do when the Yanks are gone?’ to which he replies tersely, ‘What’ll
you
do, sister?’