The Refuge (39 page)

‘Oh—don’t waken her,’ I said. ‘Don’t try. Don’t try.’

I should not have spoken. He let his hand slowly fall to his side and looked at me over his shoulder curiously.

‘She’ll love to hear of this
fracas
,’ he said; but his smile was suddenly doubtful and almost frightened.

‘Let us go in,’ I said. ‘It can wait.’

I opened our own door hastily, and he followed me in and paused in the small entrance lobby to hang up his coat, while I withdrew the key and slipped home the latch, shutting the door finally upon our life up to that moment. Going as usual straight to the kitchen, he left me standing there heavy and useless and not sure of what to do next. I wanted nothing so much as to get to bed and drug myself to sleep.

‘Come and sit down for a moment, Alan,’ I said from my table, when he came out of the kitchen with a glass of milk and a few sweet biscuits in his hands. ‘I have some bad news for you which you may as well hear now.’

In the light I saw that there was a bruise already darkening on his cheekbone beneath his left eye. The milk and biscuits, the childish supper of every night he had ever spent in the flat with me, moved me almost to tears by its very incongruousness with what I knew of him, with what he had unwittingly done to me. On my knees my hands began to sweat and tremble. I did not see how I was going to get through this thing decently; I felt sick, horribly sick now.

The look of faintly guilty alarm that had come instantly into his face when I finished speaking gave place to an expression of equally sudden concern. With a gentle precision he put on the table the glass he had been holding, and laid the brown biscuits in a small pile beside it.

‘You don’t look quite yourself,’ he said. ‘Let me pour you some brandy.’

‘Whisky,’ I murmured, but he went on as if he had not heard.

‘The thing about bad news,’ he said—too lightly, poor boy, for he was unpractised in deliberate deceit—‘is that until it’s told it always seems worse than it is. Drink this slowly, the doctor says.’

Again I saw the faint, worried smile come and go on his firm young mouth, while his eyes were steady in their helpless anticipation of trouble, brilliantly blue in their clear whites under the dipping shadows of their brows. I drank the nauseating mixture of brandy and water and thought how I, who knew what was to be told, was desperately perturbed while he, ignorant for one last moment of what I was going to say, and obviously expecting to hear me speak of something which for the rest of my life I must forget I ever knew, was as essentially calm as I was trying to appear to be.

‘It’s about Irma,’ I said, when speech could not be put off any longer. With a start, he stood up from where he had been sitting on the table’s edge, and in silence took the empty tumbler from me and turned away. I too stood up, making the movements slowly like an old man. His face when he looked at me again was paler than mine had ever been, surely.

‘I have to tell you, Alan,’ I said, ‘that she is gone from here . . . gone . . .’

‘Dead,’ he said, making the word ring softly in the silence of the lighted room where so often we three had all been merry together. Quite surely, she was in some way with us then, making a small face at the sound of the meaningless word on the young lips that had kissed her own; but she was freed of all union with either of us now. I seemed to hear as I had so often heard her dispassionate unEnglish voice saying lightly, ‘You Australians,’ and I looked about the familiar place like a stranger, but saw no trace, nothing that had been hers except the two of us, father and son in an irresistible communion across the glass top of the table.

‘She was found drowned,’ I said, and under his breath he cried ‘Oh no—drowned! She could swim like a fish.’ The half-emptied glass of milk in his hand worried him; he set that too on the table.

‘Sit down, my child,’ I said, addressing him as remotely as a confessor so that he could taste and recognize the taste of grief in decent loneliness; and we both seated ourselves like very gentlemen, without meeting each other’s look and so admitting death’s fatal intrusion between us.

‘Where was this? What happened?’ he said, and I said, ‘I can’t tell you, Alan. I cannot say. No one will ever know.’

It sounded as I meant it to sound, a simple statement of ignorance. I feared nothing, for I had nothing now to betray: it was done.

While he sat opposite, staring at the tumbler as I stared at him, with a sort of disbelief, I told him how it was that I had by accident been there to identify the unknown woman in the city morgue earlier that night, with Hubble and the police surgeon. I told him of our entry to her flat and of what we had found there—the note, the empty glass tube from which the remaining tablets lay at that moment in the locked drawer under my hand, unknown to anyone, for use should I fail myself one day. There was nothing more I could tell him that he needed to know. The picture, itself fragmentary, gave an impression of completeness, of an irrevocable end.

Three times during the short recital he spoke when I paused, without moving his frowning gaze from the clouded tumbler before him.

‘I can’t seem to believe it,’ he said the first time, his white face strained and tearless. ‘She was the happiest person I ever knew.’

Later he said impulsively, still without looking up, ‘It must have been ghastly for you, Father,’ and it was then that I understood a simple thing: the shock though not the keenness of his grief had been dulled as it struck at him by his enormous—and irrelevant—relief in finding, as he must suppose, that after all I was ignorant of the relationship that had bound the two of them together in secret.

In the end, when I had finished all there was to say now, and was wondering how life was supposed to go on from this point of finality, he slipped lower in his chair and turned his head to look directly at me. In his candid eyes of a young and honest man was a look of such pain and confusion that I could not meet his gaze. When he spoke, his voice was low, but it tore at my mind like a cry in the profound silence.

‘I never believed anyone I knew could die—like that. I always thought god—looked after good people.’

I opened a drawer and took out a box of mild sedative powders.

‘Take two of these and go to bed now. You look worn out. As you go to sleep, try to tell yourself we, the living, have a duty—to go on living as well as we may. You in particular have a duty to humanity which you are learning how to perform now. Think of all the lives you will save. Think of all you have yet to do.’

‘Sleep,’ he said, as though it were the only word he had heard. ‘Just now I wish I could never wake up again, ever.’

‘Listen,’ I said, giving him two of the powders, ‘there is one lesson very hard to learn—that we can never really know what is in another person’s innermost mind, Alan.’

‘Not even you and I can,’ he said with finality, and I saw that nothing I could possibly say could touch and comfort him yet. At the door he turned, as if to give me his usual affectionate good-night; but instead, leaning against the frame for a moment with his fingers ruffling up his thick hair over his frowning forehead, he said in a strained, angry voice, striking at me as any wounded animal in the frenzy of its pain will strike at the gentlest hand, ‘I think you ought to know she was the first person I ever really loved—the first person I ever knew who really loved me. That’s what makes it so—’

The open doorway was empty. Whatever his last word might have been I never knew, for only his own mind could have heard it. Hearing his step receding, fighting a terrible impulse to go after him and ask what he had meant, I stood holding on to the table, looking at the untasted biscuits, the unfinished milk—a child’s supper abandoned—and over and over in my mind repeated themselves the trivial words of absurd protest, not against him but against the fate I had devised so ably for my own enactment:
What about me
?
What about me
?
What about me
?

Irma and I were married six months after her first visit to Sydney since her departure more than six years before. The ceremony was a civil one, very simple and final and somehow suited to our long-delayed union. Two ageing men taking their ease in the November warmth of early summer in Hyde Park, opposite the office of the city registrar, seemed to be waiting there especially to act as witnesses to this and other small worldly events to which their years made them indifferent. They showed neither surprise at my proposal nor recognition of one another’s existence; one of them, looking up at me with a bleak glance, permitted himself to remark that ‘he hoped I wouldn’t regret it like he did’, and the other said, ‘Sure, sonny.’ Afterwards, tucking away their
pourboires
hastily, they returned across the swarming square to the park, apparently to different parts of it too, without a backward glance either at each other or at us upon whose worldly union their laborious signatures had been set like those of a couple of worn-out demi-gods.

That moment, as we descended the steps of the yellow sandstone building alone and unremarked, was a concluding moment of a whole part of the life of each of us. It had about it an inevitability that robbed it of surprise.

After the far more elaborate church ceremonial of my first wedding, I had felt myself a different person, not altogether easy at the thought of the (to me) immense responsibility I had now sworn to assume, for the bodily and spiritual well-being of the nineteen-years-old girl walking with such modest joy beside me with her hand in its white glove resting formally upon my arm. Today, there was nothing but a sense of relief that all formality, down to the first and only witnessing of the strange signature
Irma Fitzherbert
was ended; a sense of relief and satisfaction at the conclusion of an episode which, by intruding briefly upon our two separate lives, had brought them officially closer together. Unofficially, not even the eventual night of this day could (I thought) make us more intimate in the end than we had already become; and although I was quite wrong in this, by the time I remembered the thought it no longer had the least significance.

All had been arranged secretly; all was to be settled and made secure before Alan came home from the end of his final year at Shore, where this same day he was sitting for the last paper in his matriculation examinations. Our reasons for this secrecy were several and simple—most of them. Irma’s naturalization papers, which were issued on the strength of the false papers with which she had entered the country, would not have stood up to any extended investigation. She also meant to continue working at the fashionable
Chez Madame
salon, where she had been welcomed back with surprise and complacency, at what seemed to me an excessive salary, and where the single state was still strictly
de rigeur.
For my own part, with a fastidiousness by no means unreasonable to either of us, I had refused even to contemplate the thought of Alan living in the same household as his father and his father’s young bride. There was also, I think, a very slight uncertainty in my mind as to how he would accept even the thought of me having married a second time. One does not expect reason to overawe the instincts of the very young, especially the muddled instincts connected with such a person as a dead and of course forever virginal mother.

In effect, when the flat next to my own fell vacant a month after her first visit and I took it without hesitation and without even consulting her, she was delighted. Fortune was favouring us from the start, she said, crossing her fingers contentedly. Like me, she had grown used to living alone, and there still remained in her the ghost of her former conviction, which she had explained to Miss Werther, that only in solitude could one find real security. Subterfuge, too, had been a part of her most exciting years, and she did not find it hard, I think, to see in the arrangement of separate, adjacent establishments much that was innocently exhilarating. From the beginning, she was inclined to treat the whole affair as a grown-up game to be played straight-faced, harmful to no one because no one would know of it but ourselves, and providing us with a secret such as the intimacies of the body never quite had for her.

She began to move into the flat on successive week-end visits, until the time when her Melbourne commitments ended after the spring fashion-shows; for she had taken up no further engagements down there since her earlier visit to
Chez Madame
. She was living almost as she chose, at no one’s beck and call, and revelling in it while it lasted. She made herself a familiar figure to Alec, the caretaker, and his daughter Emmy, who explained that she was ‘very high-class’ and would be an ornament to any building. ‘I hope you mean as a tenant, Emmy, not a statue on the roof?’ ‘Oh go on, Mr. Fitz, I mean on the inside.’ Finally she met Alan.

Alan at that time was nearly seventeen, well-grown, beautiful with health. Though he had never distinguished himself in any sports he played tennis and Rugby football with an agreeable intelligence and dash, like so many boys of his age, without setting much store by these achievements; and all his life his two great athletic pleasures had been swimming and—thanks to old Jack—riding. All these activities went well with his (to me, incomprehensible and rather frivolous) love of dancing, and enabled him easily to ‘cut a figure’, as my father would have said. Indeed, that shrewd old man would have been in his own fashion delighted with the boy as I was, secretly, in mine. Unlike me at this or any other age, Alan was instinctively at home in any company, and had already made without forethought or conscious intention a secure social life for himself among his own kind. His school holidays now were days and nights of pure pleasure, of music, dancing, innocent love-making, gaiety, wit and frequent late rising in the mornings. All this seemed good, to me; he was shaping just as I had hoped and planned for him to shape—away from me above the surface, so to speak, while his roots and mine touched beneath it in more and more casual, inevitable and ripening communion, openly remarked by neither of us and probably scarcely realized by him. I could think of us as two trees of the forest, of which the older, the parent, first shelters and at length makes room for the younger.