The Refuge (32 page)

It was of course a shameless performance, but I have never been sorry for it. He was a sort of man one would actually regret having treated decently. While I spoke, rapidly and in a low voice with my released anger roaring in my ears like a far surf, he seemed to become smaller and more puppet-like, and by the time I had finished and was reaching for the house telephone, he was on his feet looking thoroughly frightened. I am quite unused to causing people to show fear or even to feel it; for all my deliberate reasoning to the contrary, I was still sore and sick at the thought, prompted by the innocent Miss Werther, that it was fear of me that had made Irma resume her blind flight which had brought her into my life in the first place. I realized with disgust that perhaps in her distracted mind there was little to choose between this wretched incompetent creature and myself now, even though she had said she loved me. It is not hard to love that which will destroy the lover, and earthly love and fear are in essence equally strong, equally self-destructive.

I lifted the receiver and said clearly, ‘Get me police headquarters please, Inspector Grimes of the Aliens branch,’ without letting him see I was holding down the trestle-bar. When I turned from the instrument I was rewarded with my last sight of him, walking with his padded shoulders slightly hunched, like a man who fairly expects a knife-blade in the back, through the doorway of the general room, and so out of my life.

I was glad to realize that my anger had vanished with him. I am not given to violence. From childhood I had been trained to believe, and later to understand, that violence achieves nothing against its object, while at the same time it inflicts a self-defeat upon him who gives way to the urge to do it. I had come to have a contempt for warmongers and a horror of war-making as a deplorable but ineradicable human characteristic, as inalienable in the human race as the compulsion to love. All the time now I was confronted with the evidence of this characteristic, day by day for six years, eight years, ten years—it seems for ever. My son grew up to know little of any world but a world at war, wholly or locally, from the time when he first understood what the word meant. Our glorious Russian ally—as one or two men like Winston Churchill always anticipated—grew to become a nursery terror of nightmare proportions in the United States of America, and in time the acknowledged potential enemy of the whole western world. Even in my own country the echoes of a frenzied violence sounded, as they sounded more loudly in other dwindling places of true freedom on the earth’s surface.

Without foreseeing all these things at the time, I sat there at my table and told myself I should be ashamed of the recent impulse to which I had nearly given way; and yet I was not ashamed.

It may have been that I felt a blow had been struck for Irma against fate in the person of a dapper and venomous representative of her persecutors. I may even have felt convinced that her safety was now more secured than it had been, flee though she might to the outer limits of oblivion. Whatever it was, I was pleased with myself as the anger left my blood, and happier in thinking of her than I had been for a long time.

Just before she lost consciousness for the last time, not very long after she had been confessed and received the benefit of extreme unction which is one of the kindliest ministrations of my Church, my mother’s fingers stirred in my hand and I saw she was looking at my face. It was a strange, traumatic look such as one might turn upon something as recognizable, evocative and lifeless as a mask of clay. Her eyes were aware of the surface of my face and nothing more; they moved from my hair to my lips, rested on my own eyes without entering them, strayed from side to side measuring the width of brow and cheekbones, and in fact went over my face several times as though not her eyes but her hands were searching it in the dark, as she sometimes used to do when she sat on the edge of my childhood bed, before saying goodnight, after she had put out the nursery light. In those days I would laugh softly at the moth-like touch in the warm secure darkness. Now, when she was about to die, I found it infinitely moving and pitiful, and to hide from her indifferent eyes my sudden grief at this foreseen yet unimaginable parting I raised the hand I held and passed it over my face in the way she had been wont to do.

‘So like Alan . . .’

That was the last thing she said, and I hardly heard the words; for she spoke with the dragging voice of a dreamer or a drunken person, and I remembered she had been given an opiate to make death’s coming less of a surprise to her fading consciousness.

This happened early in nineteen forty-five, and to this day I could not swear to whether she meant I was like my father or like my son, named Alan after him. The years of war had played havoc with her mind and body, for though she tried to conceal it I knew she had never recovered from the incredulous sorrow of my father’s death, and had little energy left from this concealment with which to resist the succession of days and years of peculiarly personal horror the war flung at her. More than once in moments of thoughtful privacy with me she had seemed to confuse me with my father, and had said things, incomprehensible to me, in an idiom he evidently would have understood.

There was little I could do for her, beyond ensuring that her failing bodily resources were properly cared for by a trained nurse poorly disguised as a genteel companion and housekeeper—for nothing would persuade her to separate Miss Molesley from Alan or Alan from me; and in any case she needed the skill and impersonal handling of a qualified nurse. All her life she had been regular in her observance of Church ritual, confessing herself modestly once a week and attending two Masses, as well as occasional special services on certain saints’ days, and vespers irregularly but often during the summer evenings, Like many intelligent women, she found a profound pleasure and self-fulfilment in the temporal and spiritual aspects of the Mass, and I took to attending her when I could, though our only regular engagement to worship publicly together was still the habit, which was rather an impulse than a habit, of joining in the lovely midnight ceremony of Christmas Eve.

She never mentioned my increased assiduity in going with her to church, and I wondered whether her occasional moments of confusing me with my father might not have been encouraged by having me with her far more often when she went to her devotions; for at such times during their marriage he had been with her always. Never during their long life together did he allow her to see the growth in himself of the scepticism which, he told me, was beginning to embitter his last years, and for which, as for my mother’s slow bodily weakening, I could do nothing.

He felt himself to be spiritually sick, yet he was not sure . . . His moments of doubt, which he attributed once in my hearing to having been over-zealous in his youth, became more frequent though never quite intolerable as he grew old (he was forty when I was born); and, while they made him impatient, of himself and of the value he came to set upon reason at the expense of faith, they never spoiled his enviable sense of humour. ‘I believe, my boy, I shall be glad to die and clear up this matter once and for all,’ he said to me. It was the sort of thing which, in his tender consideration for her, he never said to my mother; and so, though she never knew it, in the end he had begun to grow apart from her.

‘
Women have the divine gift of faith in a degree which we shall never understand. If we perceive it in them, we should recognize and honour it, and attempt no more, lest we find that like earthly beauty it is the outcome of perfect bodily functioning.
’

I found that in one of the
Unselected Letters
, a series of unfinished notes and fragments of thought which he began half-heartedly to put into publishable shape just before he died. Indeed, this scepticism of his had seeped more deeply than I realized into his whole life; that is to say, I never realized how obscurely distressed he himself was while he lived through those last few years of enforced retirement from the Bench and the judicial work which he had loved with a love he described as ‘both unseemly, my boy, and infinitely chaste’. All the important developments of his life happened belatedly. He had taken silk late, and married late, as marriages are made in Australia; my mother was thirty-five when she bore me, and he himself had only recently been appointed to the magistracy. When he was fifty-five he was appointed to the Supreme Court, from which he retired nine years later. Only his death, at seventy-two, was perhaps a little premature for the rest of us.

Unlike some of his colleagues and contemporaries, he held that the courts of law were no places for the parade of judicial wit, however sedate and austere; he maintained that a judge who was deliberately witty might be thought to betray boredom rather than an alertly following mind, and as a result he sometimes entertained us at dinner with remarks which, he said, he could have made while the court was sitting—if he had thought of them. These he noted down tidily in scattered notebooks under a proposed title,
Best Left Unsaid.
He never had a book published in his lifetime; and when, some months after his death, I carefully went through all these random writings of his I found that the only connecting thread was that widening lode of scepticism, which never became cynical because in him thought was balanced and profound as well as sharp and sensitively probing, but which nevertheless reflected the secret distress of his spirit. For this reason I made no attempt to carry out his part-serious, part-ironic plans for publication, and put the papers away until after my mother’s death, when, having culled them again, I stored the gleanings at Hill Farm, and with a little harmless grieving (for he was a good and gentle man) burned what remained.

It seemed to me that my mother, at the end, must have meant that I was ‘so like Alan’ the husband. The Fitzherberts, judging by old likenesses and copies of earlier portraits, had been pre-potent for generations. Not only the white skin and dark hair persist: the cranial and facial structure has changed little and imperceptibly if at all. Apart from this, I could not have been said to be very like my father. I never had his sense of humour, certainly never his easy wit with which he was always so careful never to hurt any human being except, in fun, himself. I was an only child, but he was not. As a younger son in a family of somewhat eccentric intellectuals, with a father and an elder brother and a sister who were for the most part talking over his head or making sly game of his serious church-going, he nursed his wit in the first place as a sort of defence of both himself and his mother, whose unfeigned piety he had inherited too young, and whom her brilliant barrister husband treated, I believe, to a good deal of verbal bullying mixed with sardonic courtesy in place of affection; and it was only later that his native good temper took conscious pleasure in being witty for what to most people was wit’s sake. In fact, he considered good wit a gracious aspect of good living, and symptomatic of a proper sense of leisure.

I inherited the aspirations but not the quality of his mind, which belonged to a more leisurely age than mine, and the inevitable, unconscious loneliness of a solitary childhood made me, too early, prone to a gravity that by no means became my years. He was the only one of the three children who had married; nor had I cousins of my own generation on my mother’s side, for she too was an only child. This small, restricted trio of relationships in my childhood made me quite incapable of forming easy attachments for the rest of my life. Human associations, as I knew them, were so tender and precious that it was impossible to believe they were not also very rare; until I married, most of the few friendships I did form for young men and women of my own age I myself overbalanced and let fall, by weighting them too readily, too soon, with too much value, too openly. I was that most embarrassing of creatures, a serious-minded young man.

In Alan, as he grew older and bloomed in the glowing warmth of adolescence, I saw more of my father than of myself. Of this I was continually glad; by it I was on occasions elated, for he promised to have his grandfather’s wit and temperament, without the underlying bitterness that blossomed, pathetic and barren, in the old man as we last knew him. In the year of my mother’s death and the war’s official ending in most parts of the world, he was fifteen, white-skinned where the sun had not lightly browned him, dark-haired and with the wide-set eyes which have been the Fitzherbert’s most persistent characteristic in a skull that seems never to have changed from its earliest depicted shape: so wide from temple to temple that the top of the head looks flattened, above a face that narrows from high cheek-bones to a long chin which deceptively makes the base of the lower jaw look narrow too. ‘The family jaws’ and ‘the family forehead’ must have been mentioned as often and as matter-of-factly in the hearing of my forefathers as they were in mine. It was almost certainly the reason why, for generation after generation, except for a time in the foppish days of the eighteenth century, the males of the line wore beards. A beard saves such a face from appearing to be a sly caricature of good looks, with every feature exaggerated. It gives a mildly piratical air that does not lack dignity and is not unduly noticeable.

Alan had the family forehead and eyes, but a better line of jaw and mouth more full and mobile, less repressed-looking, than his forebears’. His eyes in their wide-apart deep sockets under perfectly-marked eyebrows had an increasing penetration as he began to find and keep the inexpressible secrets proper to his age, the secrets no man has ever learned before; but above all, the arched brows gave them a delightful look of merry humour never overshadowed by the broad thoughtful pallor of the forehead above them, from which his dark hair was brushed aside in a thick curve. To me he looked what he was—a scholar and an athlete in the making, one who thought his own incommunicable thoughts and dreamed his own dreams untroubled by early introspection or any sort of doubt or fear. He was never lonely. He filled me with delight, the mere thought of him filled me with a delight that paid in advance for anything I might do for his sake.