The Refuge (27 page)

Meanwhile, we had another glorious ally in the Soviets, whose entry into the field came before America’s by some months; and at the beginning of nineteen forty-two, with both Russia and America the declared enemies of Germany and her satellites, it was possible—and somehow terrifying—to conceive of eventual victory. A pattern of black and white, spread with apparent carelessness around the globe’s surfaces of land and water and in the air above them, began to be discernible; black indicated our enemies and their distribution, and it seemed, on the whole, that the pure white masses—the Western allies, and Russia in the east with China at heel casting a shadow over Japan—were rather better placed, in terms of time and movement. We said to ourselves that, in any case, the aggressor is always at an eventual disadvantage, psychologically and in other ways. It was possible to conceive of ultimate victory; but nobody thought of peace, which was just as well.

After their brief disappearance, the men and women of the Communist Party returned to their former places full of health and strength and with strong and healthy finances, and a natural air of having at last been vindicated. If I had ever hoped to see Irma again, this reinstatement of many who wished her ill seemed to give reason for letting any such hope go from my mind.

By ringing Miss Werther, I had traced her as far as Blacktown station, and there she vanished.

‘I wondered if you would ring,’ the amiable Jewess said in her lilting voice. ‘We have something to talk about. Forgive me if I don’t keep you just now on the telephone. Could you come to my office in Castlereagh street, in the shop? Yes? When can you come? I want to thank you for your kindness—to both of us.’

I arranged to visit her the same afternoon, the afternoon I had had that memorable conversation with Barbara; and at a few minutes after half past five she let me into the shop herself. Her eyes and lips wore the remembered gay smile as she crossed with light steps a square of deep, expensive-looking carpet to open the glass door. When I had entered she closed it, letting down the white Venetian blind inside so that we were screened completely from the street. I prepared myself to be thanked again for my ‘kindness’, and recalled Irma’s averted face, her arm linked with mine, her hand on my fingers, the firelight on the delicate skin of her ankles, and her remote voice . . . offering a return for kindness.

It was all so recent then that my heart began to beat heavily in my breast, and for one brief wild moment I wondered whether the little fat Jewess leading me through the front display room to a smaller, less formal room behind it, and across this to the screened doorway of a roomy office, were about to produce to me Irma in person from behind one of the olive-green velvet curtains, as easily and gaily as she would have produced one of her own expensive hoard of furs. But she only moved a deep armchair slightly away from the shaded lamp on the office table, and with a graceful movement of one fat, ringless hand invited me to be seated. She herself took a plain bentwood chair opposite me, full in the light.

‘Now,’ she said nervously, ‘Mr. Fitzherbert, I think it is best I tell you Irma told me what you talked about that night at your cottage. It was all very sad. She does not understand men like you. I don’t think she understands any of the really good things in human nature, if I may say so. All her life it has been violence, fear, greed, ambition and one voice shouting down another. Whatever she said to you that night she said for the best. You must not judge her. She didn’t know any better, you see. She started life too young. There are some values she never learned to respect.’

She was looking at me intently, her polished black eyes shining tearless and nervous in the light. I had a vivid memory of Irma, all woman, body and mind, knowing so much and yet so little—like a girl in the dawn of physical maturity, like a flower that shows what seems to be the grown seed even before it blooms.

‘She talked only of you, the next two days, Mr. Fitzherbert. She has had one love affair in Europe, and it ended in a terrible way, a man who was killed by the Gestapo in Holland. She was too young for all that, you know. It terrified her, because it was the first time she had loved anyone, since her father died. She thought it was mostly her fault he was killed, and so it was in a way, but only partly. She ran away to England, then to here, because Nazis and Communists were both after her now. And you know all the rest, I think. Ah—I am so sorry—would you like a glass of sherry? Yes, please do.’

While she took from the table cupboard a small tray already set with Belgian wine glasses and an exquisite sherry decanter that did not match them except in beauty, I wondered what was the purpose of her preamble; and when she had poured the pale wine, and set the two glasses within our reach, she continued.

‘She can never have been a really good Party member, Mr. Fitzherbert. She was young, everybody was becoming afraid of the Nazis, it was something to do to help, and of course all very exciting. They made a sort of pet of her in Berlin, and gave her small missions, and even made her dress like a boy. Poor Irma, she was only a child. She loved it. She believed everything they taught her, everything, especially the things about love having no private place in a society where everything, all ownership, even the human body, was to be in common. That was how she learned first of love—she was only fourteen. What a wonderful society it would be, would it not?’

The abrupt and contemptuous irony of her voice surprised me. It reminded me that I had never really understood how so many Jews could embrace the common-ownership doctrine of the Communist ideology.

‘When she fell in love at last with this Maartens, a much older man, she was afraid for the first time of her own Party, and did not know what to do. Well, that was solved for her. The Party in Berlin, for safety’s sake—you know she had been pretending to be a genuine Nazi Party member too, by order—the Party let the Nazis know she was Maarten’s mistress and that Maartens, as a Communist district leader, was trying to spy on them through her. If she had not heard about this just in time and got away, they would have got her too.’

The picture her words evoked made me feel sick. The idea of the body of a woman one has held in one’s arms, however innocently, being ‘got’ by a cleverly-driven car in a dim midnight street is extraordinarily horrible, especially to anyone who has seen the still-living victims of fatal accidents trying to drag themselves out of the reach of an incomprehensible violence that has already done its work on them. Miss Werther drank some wine, watching me rather nervously still.

‘I tell you all this, Mr. Fitzherbert, so you will know what I am going to say next is reasonable . . . Irma wanted you to know she loves you.’

My movement was involuntary, and she affected not to see it as anything but a movement to take the wine glass from the table and raise it to my lips.

‘She thought when I saw you again—for she was sure you would get in touch with me—I could tell you this if I thought it was wise. You see, Mr. Fitzherbert, she tried to tell you that night but it went wrong somehow. The memory of that other love affair, when she was young and ignorant, frightened her when she saw how she was feeling about you. She couldn’t help thinking there would be more trouble. Also, you are so—what the French call
gentil
, you know? She was half-afraid of you at the same time because you are different from the other men she has known. It was the first time she thought of her past as perhaps disgraceful to you—that there had been other men. Because she was a good Party member, devoted to the pure beauty of dialectical materialism . . . How terrible her situation becomes, you see, when she realizes what her confused feelings about you really are. And then, in the morning, you are gone, and everything falls to pieces.’

She let her closed hand fall suddenly open in her lap, in a most eloquent gesture of helpless disintegration.

‘Like that . . . She does not know what she has done. She knows now she loves you, but all she can think of, every time she tries to get it clear, is that you are somehow in league with the police, and that you know very much about her—all she herself has told you. As you do not want her she sees you cannot love her, so she begins to think you may feel you should let the police know about her, so they can find her if they need to. This makes no difference to what she feels about you, Mr. Fitzherbert. It even makes it worse, so to speak, but now she is afraid again as well.’

‘But good heavens,’ I said as calmly as I could, ‘she must know me better than that. I gave her my word.’

‘Do not forget her training, Mr. Fitzherbert. To the Communists, one’s word is only something for someone else to take. Giving it means nothing. Also you are mistaken. She did not know you. I do not know you. You are not that sort of man.’

I did not know what she meant; but as I took breath to explain she interrupted quickly.

‘Please—do not be offended. I tell you only the truth. You are an Australian, and you look like perhaps a European—French, or Spanish, or even English. You do not behave either like an Australian or a European. We talk about you, and all we know is that without doubt you are younger than you seem.’

I muttered something about being more honourable than they had seemed to think, too. For the first time, she laughed, in the way I had liked when we were together before, in the quiet security of the cottage.

‘Without doubt, if possible,’ she said. ‘It was not a question of honour—women, Mr. Fitzherbert, leave honour to the men, you will find. It’s a word they don’t use among themselves, women. It was, frankly, a question of what to do next. I offered to come to town and see you. She believed if you said anything it would be the truth, and I said I would ask you what you were going to do, and what you thought best for her to do.’

‘I was coming back the next week-end,’ I said more roughly than was fair; for I was so confused and unhappy that it made me angry. ‘I went away to give her time to settle down without me about the place, since my presence seemed to remind her of her foolish idea that she owed me something for doing what any decent man would have done in my place. Also I had a good deal to think about.’

‘She offended you then, Irma?’

‘No . . . You must understand I am not merely what I probably seem to you two people—just a man in a newspaper office with a useful house in the mountains, empty and safe. No, I have a background very different from Irma’s—particularly different in that fear never had much of a place in it for long. I have two lives to care for, my son’s and my own, each dependent largely upon the other. Do you see what I mean? Very few things that she would think exciting have ever happened to me. I am even a Roman Catholic by birth and upbringing, though not a very good one now, I suppose, in the priests’ view. Most of my friends are older than I am, and I myself am twelve years older than she is. As for my feelings, I am no casual lover—I haven’t enough experience in the art of subterfuge, for one thing. But now I know my feeling for her is the same as hers for me, if what you say is right. Where is she?’

In spite of my resolve, in spite of everything, I heard myself asking the question harshly, in a voice unlike my own. It startled me, as it surely startled her. Her nervous look returned; she made a small placatory gesture with her two hands, and shook her head and swallowed audibly before she answered.

‘Mr. Fitzherbert, I do not know. I do not know. When the train came to Blacktown she said, “Help me get my things out, quick,” but when I went to get out with her she said, “No, Linda, no. Go back to Sydney. You are all right,” and she gave me a push, so hard that I fell back on the seat, and slammed the door. When I got up the train had started. I looked out—there she was, not even looking for me, like a lost child always looking the wrong way. That is the last I saw of her—looking the wrong way.’

In the lamplight I saw two tears brim over her dark-lashed lower lids from her polished black eyes, and slowly thread their way down her cheeks while she felt for a handkerchief. Her fat chin trembled a little; she looked very pitiful suddenly, no longer the rich little Jewess secure in her prosperous business, but a refugee from all that is incomprehensible and tragic in life.

‘Forgive me—I am very fond of her. It makes me sad to think what will become of her, poor Irma.’

‘She told you nothing of what she meant to do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you know if she had ever travelled that line before?’

‘She told me she had never been out of Sydney before. She said how strange the country looked to her—very hard, she thought it was.’

‘I suppose we can safely suppose she is still alive?’

Miss Werther gasped, and put her plump hands to her throat. ‘I tried to take it from her. She said, “Don’t be silly, Linda. I am not going to use it—yet”.’

‘I do not know what you are talking about, Miss Werther.’

At that, she seemed to break down completely, wringing her outstretched hands together and shaking her beautifully coiffured head from side to side with her eyes closed.

‘The poison. She had it with her always. The little glass bit of sealed tube. They called it the death capsule, in Europe. You bite it, and you are gone. I tried to take it, but she saw me. “Don’t be silly, Linda” was what she said. Ah, Mr. Fitzherbert—you must understand—all that talk of suicide is very easy for the young.’

‘All what talk of suicide?’

‘You never heard it?’ She recovered herself sufficiently to scrub at her eyes with her handkerchief and then look at me more confidently, though her mouth still trembled.

‘Ah well . . . you knew her so short a time, I keep forgetting. All her talk about you, after you went, made me feel you had known one another ever since she came here. Forgive me. You see, when she was very blue, depressed, she would talk of ending it all. Like many of those people, she still carries the poison—cyanide—with her. It is very quick. She has it with her always, like other people have a little mascot . . . But no! she is too young, and suicide is not for her, not in this country. Surely? It is so easy to talk.’