The Refuge (3 page)

‘And that’s that,’ Hubble said at last. ‘Make what you like of Manser. He’s been sighted, which means we ought to have him by tomorrow night at the latest. They’re coming in now from the Cross after putting two men and a woman in Darlinghurst for the night. I think it was only a bun-fight. Ring you back. So long.’

He hung up before I could speak again; but that did not matter, for I had nothing to say that could be said to a police sergeant, however friendly. The nauseated sensation came over me again, and the dark and as it were drunken despair of mind. I put the receiver back on its trestle and sat looking at it. This period was one I had only half-foreseen, knowing it must be lived through but not realizing that a nervous exhaustion such as I had known only once before in my life—when Alan was born and my wife of less than two years’ marriage died—would make the endurance of it so hard.

Behind me, the last man on late duty was packing up to go. In the big room, with its barren spread of now vacant tables under the insufficient ceiling lights of white glass, the air was as stale and vitiated as that of an empty theatre after a show. It felt warm, in spite of the bleak May night outside in the streets; I knew that once again the air-conditioning system was out of order on our floor, and the general room, windowless, set in the middle of the building and surrounded by corridors, became at such times almost uninhabitable, and smelt of lavatories. My mind in a sort of frenzy underlined the physical discomfort; I felt I must go out and breathe the cold air of the emptying streets which by comparison would seem sweet. Only when I had typed out my notes taken from Hubble, and was about to carry the copy to the sub-editors and go on down the imposing lower staircase to the street door, did I realize that I was still waiting—I could not yet leave that telephone lying silent as if in exhausted sleep on its rest, not for more than a minute or two. When I did leave—probably at about midnight, perhaps later, if the call I must hear had not yet come—Hubble could briefly be let know I was to be found at home within half an hour; within fifteen minutes . . . A taxi would do it.

The subs had their heads down above the broad table which ran like a great brown polished horseshoe from one door to the other in the inner wall of their room. Unlike the general reporting staff, they could seldom leave their seats at that table during the eight long hours of duty. It was safe to put them into a room with windows overlooking the street—safe and healthy, I suppose. Now for the most part they were absorbed, for it was a busy time, with the cables still coming in from daytime Europe. In the corner annexe which also overlooked the street, the overseas teletype machine kept up a continuous solid rattle and ring, working away on its own as though moved by a human conscience inside its heavy metal case. I left the door open into the passage so that I could hear my telephone if it rang, and took my copy to the basket in front of Blake, the chief sub-editor, who was reading a page-proof. I did not wish now to talk to anyone, but Blake did; he had got the main body of the so-called final edition away, and as usual at this time of night he was bored, and boredom made his thin, sharp, white face with the ginger-red Chaplin moustache and penetrating green eyes look to be consumed with anger. However, as I knew by now, he merely wished for a cup of coffee upstairs in the staff dining-room, and a break away from that table where he must spend more than half the night, five nights out of seven.

Until I put my copy into it, the wire basket was empty. The chief cable-sub was getting paper direct from the teletype machine at the hands of a gum-chewing boy whose face in the harsh light was almost as white, though by no means as thin, as Blake’s. Blake snatched the few sheets out of the basket, glanced at them, called out ‘
Bill!
’ in a sharp tenor voice that perfectly matched his own red-and-white colour, and sank back in his wooden armchair to look at me at last.

‘Nothing big, Lloyd?’ he said. ‘We’re short of crime. No, seriously. How about going out and committing a nice juicy murder? A man with your experience, you ought to be able to get away with it.’

Such is the untrustworthy state of a mind battling with strong emotion that for the flashing part of a second I was impelled to answer by saying, ‘I have done that once since sunset, and once is enough for a lifetime.’ Instead, I laughed, though I had not meant to, nor to laugh so loudly. The room seemed to echo with it, but no head was raised, no face turned. Only Blake looked slightly surprised, and his thin mouth relaxed into a smile of sudden, complete charm.

‘Oh come,’ he said, ‘it’s not as funny as that. In fact, it’s not funny at all, I know. I did once see a film—or maybe it was in a book I read—where the ace crime reporter goes out and commits the perfect crime, just to make news. Hollywood and the Johnson office being what they are—to say nothing of the deep-seated moral rectitude of the film-going public, or so they say—the poor blighter wasn’t allowed to get away with it. I forget what happened, but I know he was duly and fittingly punished.’

All this was spoken at nervous high speed, and ended with a snap-to of his thin lips, unsmiling again. Blake was said to have been one of the really crack officers of the Australian army during the recent war. Looking at him sitting there bored and impatient in the urgent stillness of that room, I could easily believe this to have been so: with his profound and unconscious personal charm which only his friends were allowed to see went all the secret signs of an impersonal ruthlessness, perhaps cruelty, so perceptible to me that sometimes when I was with him I felt that for him the state of war never had been and never would be ended. He had about him always the air of immediate command, even—as now—in his times of greatest boredom.

My eyes saw him, part of my mind was yet again summing him up, but all the time I listened for the bell of my telephone; and I found I was feeling cold in every part of my body. That laugh had done me no good; it was as though it had come near to shaking loose my grasp on something on which I must retain my strongest hold, or perish. I had turned to go, to cross the room to the door, cross the passage to the big room opposite, with its faintly foul atmosphere, and once more sit at my own table, waiting, when Blake with a muttered exclamation in a tone of impatience and disgust rose from his chair and like a boy vaulted the shining curve at the very centre of the subs’ table, and stood beside me, as still as though he had been there all the time.

‘Come up for some coffee,’ he said. ‘You don’t look your usual self tonight, Fitz. Too much petty crime, no doubt. Come and have a cup of coffee—my shout.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m waiting for the C.I.B. to call me about some trouble at the Cross.’

‘How much?’ he asked instantly, seeming to forget about his cup of coffee. ‘We’re full.’ However much he might pretend, and jump about like a schoolboy, he was never off duty in that office; he had translated his war into an alert battle against space and time—literally—and this he pursued with a vigour of mind equal to that of his lean, trim body. It was thanks to him more than to any other individual that, in spite of the whims and vagaries and occasional rather petulant modifications of policy higher up, the old
Gazette
had become more concise, cleaner in outline, more readable and so more influential than it had ever been.

‘Three or four inches, I imagine—no more,’ I told him. ‘Keep it for the city if you like.’

‘We’ll whittle a bit more off that Chief Secretary on the sanctity of the kangaroo, if necessary,’ he said. ‘With a little less publicity he might show a little more sense. I don’t know why Scotty insists on using him—except, of course, that he’s always good for sending the correspondence columns mad. Can’t your ’phone call wait ten minutes?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’ve all gone home in there. I must stay about for a while.’

He marched away briskly, but with one hand trailing limply along the curved rail enclosing the well of the main staircase, so that it was as though two men, one soldierly, one idle and bored, walked with a single step round and out of sight. I went back to the general room, and just as I reached my table the telephone bell rang. The sound of it gave me a very strange feeling, mixed I think of relief and fear—a fear not for myself but lest even now I should not hear from the police what I could have told them myself hours earlier: for the waiting was becoming almost more than I could bear, I found. Nevertheless, I let the bell ring three times.

The receiver seemed to leap from the trestle to my ear and my mouth. It surprised me to hear my own voice saying with what might have been the weary calm proper to the hour and place, ‘Police rounds. Fitzherbert speaking.’

‘Yes, Fitz—about that Kings Cross rumpus.’ It was Hubble again sounding amused. ‘Have you a boy named Alan, A-L-A-N? If so, he’s in the cells at Darlinghurst. Have you?’

‘Good gracious,’ I said; and I did not know what to think, or indeed how to think at all. The message I had been challenging fate to let me hear was gone from my mind in an instant.

‘Keep calm—if you’re ever anything else,’ Hubble said, laughing. ‘It’s all rather funny. No real damage to anyone except a dog. Here’s how.’

He then told me that a dog-fight had started in one of the better-lighted back streets of Kings Cross, that square mile of passions and violence and bright colours which never quite sleeps. Alan, on his way home from a show I had persuaded him to go to, as a break from hard study (I said), came on the scene just as the man who owned one dog started kicking in the ribs of its opponent; whereat the woman who owned the second dog set upon the man, who took to her with his fists. Alan, it appeared, tackled the tough in his turn, only to find himself up against not merely the man, but the infuriated woman as well. The two dogs apparently pursued their own fight uninterrupted in the half-darkness between lamps, and as for Alan, only the fortunate arrival of the district police night patrol on a routine cruise saved him from probable serious injury; for the man, they found, was wearing a knife.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Harry. I don’t think we need to do much about that, do you? How is the boy? Can I get him out?’

‘You can,’ he said. ‘We’ll let him off with a caution to keep the peace. Listen—I thought you Fitzherberts were gentlemen?’

‘We are,’ I said; and like a tide the immediate past flowed and fled over me again, and again I was in imagination prompting him to tell me what no one but myself seemed yet to know. It was with real physical discomfort that I withheld myself from shouting at him,
There is a dead woman in the harbour tonight, waiting for you to find her. A dead woman, do you hear? A dead woman, a dead woman . . .
It would not really have amused him to think I had gone mad, since we were good friends.

He was speaking again. His voice steadied me, the uproar in my mind quietened, and I remembered Alan with a sudden tender yearning to have him beside me.

‘If you’re free, I’ll pick you up in a minute,’ Hubble said. ‘I’m off at zero—five minutes from now. We can collect the younger Fitzherbert too, and I’ll run you both home. How’s that?’

‘Who takes over?’

‘Smithy.’

‘Leave a message for him to ring me at my home about anything at all, other than drunk and disorderly, and I’ll accept your offer very gratefully. I was going soon, in any case.’

While I listened, he wrote the message for the man next on duty, reading each word aloud as some people do: ‘Ring Fitz
Gazette
at home for anything above d. and d. . . . Right?’

‘I shall be at the front door in five minutes,’ I said.

When we had hung up, I suddenly saw the night stretching ahead of me, vast, sleepless and terrible. To rid my mind of that vision, I deliberately thought of Alan, whose affair pleased rather than fretted me. It was pleasing to think of what he had done for a mongrel dog (I supposed) in a back street. He would be let out of the cells, and come home with me unaware of what had happened since he left in the morning; I would keep him close, so that even if it were for the last time he might sleep soundly in the room next to mine, the laughter of the whole escapade still lingering about his sleeping mouth, as I had seen it many a time since childhood. He was good, and he was handsome and strong in his body, upon which neither I nor anyone else now had any claim. I felt again that inward melting sensation rather like the heart itself weeping, when I thought of him. His strength was youth, and youth had been his only weakness; and not long ago I had taken care of that, at the same time losing him altogether . . . This thought brought my mind back to the vision of night stretching ahead, as certain and as mysterious as a wet and unknown road stretching beyond the delimiting headlights of a car driven by a stranger. It led somewhere, that was sure. There would be dawn, turning the harbour slowly from light-pricked nothingness to an unfolding mystery of black and silver; aslant the twin bluffs of the Heads, which I could see almost entire from my high bedroom windows, day would break in melancholy tones of yellow and grey and the scraping cries of seagulls above the leaden water would herald the winter sunrise—grey and cold, no doubt, but day indeed, with its feeling of renewed security and purpose; and at some hour between now and I knew not when the telephone would ring, the final message would come.

Only an infinite patience was needed, a patience of the soul itself to withstand yet a little longer the terrible onslaughts of memory and imagination; and I had always been a patient man, never a nervous subject, never . . . until tonight, when something seemed to have been weakened in me, as though by the final spasm of a supreme effort.

In the street it was raining, very softly, little more than a breath of bliss on the night air. Already the city was quiet. Between the clanking rumble of late trams, near at hand and far away in distant streets, I could just perceive—it was both more and less than hearing—the pulse of the presses, deep underground in their brilliantly-lighted chambers of ferro-concrete, a pulse so slight that only one who sought for it would have detected it. Nevertheless it was the pulse of a most violent life, roaring in a muffled scream down there in the earth, where one of the greatest morning papers south of the Line was being printed by hundreds of thousands between now and dawn. Night after night, for more than twenty years, I had been aware of that sound, that terrific activity, and from the first I had never been sure of the rightness and sanity of its purpose, nor ever felt myself to be truly related to it.