The Refuge (34 page)

‘There’s them as do, and there’s them as don’t, and I be one of them as do don’t.’

His summer laughter followed me into the cool sanctuary of the bathroom like a breeze.

Like most people who tend to be over-serious in their whole daily life, I have always been easily taken by surprise by circumstances which to another, livelier mind would not be surprising at all.

I was surprised in this way that it should have been Barbara who at last gave me first-hand information about Irma. Nothing could have been more natural, one might say inevitable, than that it should be she, of all people in the office, who saw the girl again before any of us—she who spent so much of her working time thinking and writing about new clothes for other women, and looking at the show of them. It was quite usual for her to go by air to Melbourne for the private showings of spring and autumn fashions, taking her own photographer with her and managing to make of it a short two-day or three-day holiday in the city she liked so much better than she liked Sydney.

At the end of April, when I was already allowing myself to look forward to Alan’s first-term holiday, Barbara flew up from Melbourne one Thursday forenoon, and telephoned me from her home across the harbour, where she had gone direct from the airport to recover from the effects of air travel, which invariably made her feel sick for some hours after landing.

‘Try to get over for dinner,’ she said weakly over the telephone. ‘We’re having a new dish, and you can have it whenever you say, if you’re busy. I want to show you something and tell you about Melbourne before I get all tangled up in the office again.’

At five o’clock I took a cab from the office, and was with her twenty minutes later, where she lay pale but alert under a rug on the cane lounge in the sunroom of her high Seaforth home. That room looked south and east fairly down beyond Middle Harbour to the vertical gateway of the Heads veiled today in an evening ocean haze; and the plains of blue water, darkening in the last full daylight, were stippled with the last of the failing north-east wind, the dying wind of summer.

‘Lloyd,’ she said, when her elderly Irishwoman had talked herself backwards from the still room that seemed made only of glass and polished wood and air, ‘I feel as though I’d been away a terribly long time, this time. Give me your hands—no, both of them, my dear boy—I feel very old at the moment, Lloyd, and I need your youthful support.’

She pressed my fingers against her forehead, first one hand and then the other, with her own warm fingers.

‘Nothing ever does any good,’ she said wanly, against the inner side of my wrist. ‘I’ve tried sedatives and glucose and goodness knows what else, and the only thing that ever helped me was a flask of whisky during the flight itself—and then I felt worse afterwards than usual. I think we should have a drink now. Brian will be here to dinner. The latest is, he doesn’t want to leave the R.A.A.F. now, having come through with a whole skin, the lunatic. In that cabinet there by the door—whisky and a siphon. I wish Con could see him now with all those ribbons and things. I do feel so proud of him, even if I don’t understand much about it. Con was a great one for colour in uniforms. He said it was the Scotch in him, and when I asked him what Scotch he simply laughed and said, “Imported.” Do you suppose he meant whisky or immigration?’

After fifteen years she still spoke of it as though it were yesterday’s conversation. I reflected, as I mixed two drinks, that I could not any longer feel that way when I remembered Jean. Men are more faithful to an idea, women to a remembered reality. Alan had at length replaced her as fully as possible in my life, and if there were still an emptiness, like unacknowledged physical hunger for food, to be felt in me at times I was too used to that now to be troubled any more by it—ever again, I thought with satisfaction.

No sooner had this satisfaction declared itself so complacently than I was called upon, with divine irony, to pay for it, when Barbara, having swallowed some of her drink thirstily, sighed and spoke again.

‘Do you ever hear from Miss Martin, Lloyd?’

‘No, only from her friend whom she writes to sometimes.’

‘If it’s not an impertinent question, how do you feel about her now?’

‘I hardly know if I feel anything, Barbara.’

‘I had to ask, because you never do show much—you don’t let on, as Molly says. One has to guess . . . Besides, I saw her and spoke to her in Melbourne, and I’ve brought back an off-the-record photograph she allowed us to take to show you. I hope you don’t mind. It was my own idea.’

‘How was she?’ I watched the day going peacefully away over the ruffled fields of dark water; it seemed at that moment the only peace left, in the world or in my senses. When I looked back at her, Barbara was smiling, and there was a faint return of colour to her face.

‘Very well. Really beautiful now. She has taken part of Melbourne by storm, all in a matter of weeks—the rich part. There is nothing of your refugee about her now, I assure you. All the same, I felt when I spoke to her, or rather when I listened to her, that she was still in search of a refuge. You know—that not-quite-happy feeling some beautiful girls seem to have?’

‘I know. We all have it, probably, but only the beautiful ones show it, because we look at them so much more carefully. We try to find what it is that we have not, and in the end we find what we ourselves have that they have not.’

She shook her head a little impatiently but with a look of laughter.

‘That drink has made me quite intelligent again, and it’s no good you being clever just to avoid the issue. The subject was Miss Martin—she’s known as Irma Francis professionally, by the way—and I still say she’s not as happy as she ought to be, considering her success.’

‘And I,’ I said firmly, ‘still say that is true of anyone you like to name. Frankly, I think you’re trying to draw me, Barbara, and I don’t quite know why.’

‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘I am, and I should have known you better, I should have known it was impossible as well as unfair.’

She took from the cane garden-table beside her a manilla folder which I had noticed was bulging with photographs, and put it on the rug over her knees.

‘I wasn’t really trying to draw you out, you know,’ she said. ‘Or was I? Dear me—the worst thing about a woman of my age is, she seldom knows what really goes on in her. The honest truth is—and this is the honest truth, Lloyd—I am so fond of you after all these years that I think I’m just slightly jealous of this girl. You don’t mind?’

‘I would be flattered if I could believe it.’

‘Not at all—it’s she who must be flattered, since it’s true . . . Oh dear—just for once, Lloyd, relax and give me a kiss. I’m still rather up in the air after that damned ’plane trip.’

She pulled me by the shoulders, and needed little effort, to get me near enough so that we could kiss one another warmly; and I had to think hard to realize that it was the first time we had ever done that, in a world where kissing is so easy as to have no longer the value even of a betrayal. She smelled very warm and sweet, very feminine, as though she had stepped out of a warm bath not many minutes before. I was aware of her long after she drew back and unconsciously rubbed her lips with the back of her hand.

‘One gets to like it, I believe,’ I said. ‘The French have a proverb about it—they say that kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt.’

‘A man made that up, I’m sure. For a beard too, add pepper. Lloyd! Don’t look so shocked.’

‘I was not feeling shocked. I was thinking nothing so nice has happened to me for a long time.’

‘Well, here is something nicer still. I don’t so much mind giving it to you now.’ She slid out the photograph that lay uppermost on the pile in the folder. ‘Look at this. That is your reward for being sweet to me, and don’t say I’m not generous.’

The likeness was a seated full-length with a matt surface that gave it a positively tactile quality. Irma looked sideways at the camera and so at me, and Louise, Barbara’s photographer, had caught her in such a lively way that the direct, sidelong look along the high cheekbones made her seem about to turn her head fully and smile, no matter how long one continued to gaze at the face so perfectly portrayed.

Bones do not change. She was perhaps a little thinner, or perhaps only the studio lighting made it seem so; and there was delicate emphasis, not alteration, of the hinted shadows in temple and eye and cheek. I had never had such an opportunity to examine her face in detail at my ease, and my heart was overcome with a surge and thrust of infinite longing, infinite melancholy (encouraged no doubt by Barbara’s kiss still warm and full on my mouth), as I observed the fine generosity of her almost-smiling lips on which the light shone moistly, and the slanting set of her eyes that were not quite sorrowful like the eyes of an Oriental, and not quite sly, but rather could be said to resemble the eyes of a fearless wild animal. They too seemed about to smile.

This upward line of her face had been emphasized since last I saw her, I thought, perhaps for the occasion, perhaps by the firm touch of time. Her hair was long now, drawn smoothly back from brow and temple to show her ears, and coiled and rolled into a large dully-gleaming knot lying on the nape of her neck with the appearance of solid metallic weight that subtly enhanced by contrast the modelling of her throat and ears and the whole enigmatic yet mobile face. Her skin in the unglazed surface of the print seemed to glow from within, warmed and informed by her life.

Barbara, leaning back on the head-rest of her lounge, was looking at me as earnestly as I had looked at the portrait.

‘She let Louise take that as a favour,’ she said amusedly. ‘It isn’t for printing, of course. She still won’t be photographed if she can help it. It’s probably only a pose or a habit now.’

‘I never saw her in evening dress, of course,’ I said.

She laughed so delightedly that she took me completely aback.

‘Lloyd, you ass, that is a nightgown, and a very marvellous thing too—what we call a creation. Look again.’

I felt myself blushing like a boy. It was so, of course; my eyes had been intent only on the turning, me-recognizing face, and I saw now how the gown revealed in a half-concealment the white fullness and candour of her bosom, the arch of the unseen protecting ribs narrowing to the line of waist, spreading again to the weighted hips and thighs from which the stuff of the skirt fell in a shimmering rhomboid, like water in the sun, to the rug on which her slippered left foot rested before her. She leaned back on her left hand; in her right, slightly raised, was an elaborate hand-mirror into which she gave the impression of having glanced one moment earlier, and from which, as she let it sink to her knees, she was about to turn her face fully. The whole pose was formal, a stock pose of the shops, but I had never seen it caught before with such an effect of arrested or incipient movement.

‘Louise has excelled herself,’ I murmured.

‘Well,’ Barbara said, ‘I think so, but she’s a perfect subject, as you can see. Continental-trained—we don’t see many of them here yet, and none of our girls can quite catch that air of actually owning the gowns and things she wears. It’s not a matter of looks—Miss Martin is not a perfect beauty, like some of the Melbourne and Sydney girls. That’s why her face is so interesting. She has irregular features, as you’d find if you measured them as an artist does, but she also has life and character. That’s what counts. She must love the work—or else she is so well-trained that she can’t help it. Whatever it is, she’s made a name for herself in Melbourne in a very short time by selling everything she’s shown, so far as I could gather. She must be earning good money. There’s competition for her in the trade, I know that.’

It was like listening to the story of a stranger.

‘As far as looks go,’ I said, ‘she does not seemed to have changed much. She looks older, of course, and yet in some peculiar way she looks younger. It may be professional habit, but I see no sign of the not-quite-happy look you talked about. She looks, in fact, almost mischievous here.’

‘She had reason to look mischievous. But let me tell you from the start. After the show I introduced myself while we were all having cocktails—it was like most of those affairs, half-business, half an informal party, with buyers and the Press and various friends and relations. The models changed and came back to meet us, and Irma—everyone calls her Irma now—she was almost mobbed when she came in with some of the others—women as well as men, and myself among them. She took it very well. Just once I noticed her face change, when some man took her familiarly by the arm, and she rapped out in a low voice, “You would do well in America, sir.” You couldn’t tell whether she was angry or frightened—she tilted her head back and opened her eyes very wide—I could only think of a nervous horse. But most of the time she was smiling and talking with the rest of them . . . I’m trying to give you a picture of the goings-on.’

‘You are succeeding.’

‘She has peculiar eyes, Lloyd—you may have noticed them. A most unusual sort of blue, but quite suitable to that type of face with its slanting lines. The way she has her hair done in that photograph made her far the most remarkable-looking female in the room. I watched her, I suppose, more than was good manners—I was thinking all the time of what you’d told me about her and you—and really I think you acted very wisely. Now don’t misunderstand me, Lloyd. I am speaking my mind. I have a feeling she might not have been good for you. There’s something about her that is not—not
you
, if you know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, all right, you needn’t agree with me. Anyhow, I must have stared too obviously, for I suddenly found she was giving me a nice cool steady stare herself. I felt quite embarrassed. I felt my age and a bit more—like an inquisitive old woman. Women can look at one another in that way. The only thing to do was to introduce myself and explain what I supposed she thought were my bad manners. And in any case, I was curious because of you, as I say. I mentioned you straight away—said I was sure you would like to know I had seen her, after all this time. Of course it was clumsy. She looked away and said, “Oh—do you think so?” and she was blushing. Again I didn’t know whether she was angry. I felt perhaps I’d made a much worse mistake this time. When you think of it, it would sound condescending in those particular circumstances. I didn’t mean it that way. I was just trying to be friendly, Lloyd.’