The Refuge (4 page)

The
Gazette
had long had what seemed to me an influence out of all proportion to its own, or any other’s, value as a daily newspaper. Its history proved beyond argument that the very real power of the Press is based chiefly upon the ignorance of its readers; yet the
Gazette
had brought about changes in State and Federal Parliaments; it had forced the setting-up of Royal Commissions and caused the downfall of Ministers; the divorce laws, the gaming and betting acts, the licensing act, the administration of public transport and the care of public health and education—with all these it had ever busied itself, as well as sponsoring many charitable causes, to the tune of millions of words and allegedly in the interests of the people and the nation; with an air of having said the last word that could be said, it considered music, letters and the kindred arts, talking pictures, wireless programmes, sport, and the whole political and economic scene; periodically it announced an increase or a decrease in the incidence of crime and other popular diseases; and its comments on international affairs were occasionally quoted round the globe.

And I—I had never felt myself to belong to it wholly, as most other men did, with a sort of contemptuous pride. It is likely that I was never of the stuff of which true newspaper men are made. I was not, above all, sufficiently a nervous man. By upbringing and by tradition I had never learned to yell loudly or to get drunk, to relieve any nervous tension induced by the often freakish exigencies of the life; and so, as the years passed, the need for such relief had diminished and gone, and I had achieved a certain stillness of the spirit which had long stood me in good stead, in the sort of work I was required by the
Gazette
to do. As Sergeant Hubble had implied not long since, the Fitzherberts were considered to be gentlemen, among the motley throng who had somehow come to be known—to all but themselves—as gentlemen of the Press.

Even as I thought of Hubble, he drew his car up softly alongside me where I was standing near the glistening edge of the sidewalk, looking at but not seeing my own shadow thrown by the light of the main entrance behind me into the more weakly lighted street.

‘Hop in, Fitz,’ he said. ‘Sorry we’re late. Last-minute job that won’t take a moment. Doc Maybee’s in the back there, going to examine a body. You may as well come along.’

I crossed the glare of his headlights to get in beside him on the front seat. For a moment the light blacked-out everything. At the same time my mind seemed to stand still abruptly in its forward movement. I felt it all again—the sweat, the nausea, the overpowering sensation of pervading coldness. So this was it! I had no doubt, no doubt at all; and I found I could not speak, not even to ask a casually curious question that would have needed no thought. Hubble turned from Martin Place into George Street, going north towards the bridge, and towards the city morgue behind the coroner’s court. After a silence he spoke to me again.

‘Fish bait. The vulgar boatmen’ (his term for the water police) ‘netted this one in the harbour off Woolloomooloo. Coming in with the tide, I suppose. They tell me it’s a real beauty—a woman, and not a mark on her. Luck, eh? Only the colour’s wrong for a drowning, it seems, though there was enough water in the lungs. The doc’s going to have a look-see, then we can go. You can do me a service by asking in your rag for help in identification. It appears she’s wearing only night attire—not even a handbag. Inconsiderate, these suicides. By the description I had over the ’phone, she’ll be missed by more than one male tomorrow, if not before. I wonder why they do it?’

Missed, I thought. Missed by Linda Werther, by Kalmikoff, by Alec the caretaker, by the girls at
Chez Madame,
by a whole crowd of exclamatory foreigners, people who, like her, had come to the country as to a refuge, and had turned much of it into a moral and aesthetic and material bargain-basement. Missed by Alan, by me . . .

Yes, she would be missed soon enough, but—if I knew them—not for long by many among us.

‘Old or young?’ I said at last, to show I had been listening. In the back seat the police surgeon yawned. The car slowed down, turned in the empty street, and came to a halt facing the way we had come, in front of a lighted open doorway. Through the mist of rain under the sickly green pallor of the overhead street lights, this front entry to the house of the dead looked almost warm, almost comforting against the crowding shape of midnight.

‘Young and beautiful, from what I hear,’ Hubble said, easing his big body away from the steering-wheel and backwards through the open driver’s door. ‘We’ll see in a minute. Let’s go.’

‘You don’t want me,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait, if you are not to be long.’

‘Come on, come on,’ Hubble said, with a sort of cheerful impatience. Maybee now stood beside him. ‘It may be murder, for all you know, my boy. Then how would you feel tomorrow, if some of the other lads got it and not you?’

He was amusing himself. He would never have allowed me to be scooped if he could have helped it, and we both knew this. Hubble never let me miss anything. But at that moment, outside the lighted doorway beyond which lay the unwanted dead of the city, dead by accident or by design, I felt my body weighted as though its flesh were lead, as though I must be lifted from the car if I were ever to leave it. The feeling of nervelessness affected even my hands and feet. Hubble and the doctor stood together on the sidewalk.

‘I am rather tired,’ I said, ‘and one cadaver is much like another, after all.’

Hubble, with the light, quick movements of many fat men who have lived active lives, was round the front of the car, at the door on my side, opening it, pulling me out with great firmness.

‘Listen to him,’ he said to the empty street, with laughter in his strong voice. ‘This is a corpse, boy. Cadaver, indeed! This is something to put in your paper.’

I imagined I heard again the tenor voice of Blake: ‘We’re short of crime . . . The ace crime reporter goes out and commits the perfect crime . . . How about going out and committing a nice juicy murder? A man with your experience . . .’

We walked along the lighted passage. Under the brim of his hat Hubble’s face was benevolent and without other expression; in his heavy overcoat he looked enormous. No doubt from habit, he held me by the arm. Quite suddenly his touch made me feel uneasy, and I disengaged myself from his light, friendly grasp. He looked sideways at me, smiling with lips and eyes round his plump red cheek, as we stepped among the echoes of the dark and empty courtroom, from lighted doorway to lighted doorway; and we were there.

I had been thinking very rapidly over what would now ensue. If I had made any plans, done any but the most elementary things in advance, to cover myself, they would not have included arrangements for a visit to the morgue. If I had foreseen this moment, no degree of imagination could possibly have warned me of the feelings which, I found, must accompany it. Clearly, I would have to identify the body; a thing which, did they but know it, I could have done in utter darkness with the fingertips of one hand, or—to be melodramatic—with my very lips. Identity having been established, I must tell all that was necessary to be known of my relationship to the dead woman; and we should need to go to the flat next to my own, where Hubble would find an almost-empty coffee cup and a note—a genuine suicide note, too—addressed to me. The time had come, with the sudden shock of a thunderclap, to act my part; and I perceived very clearly the difference between passive and active participation in such a scene.

Certainly, I had foreseen much of this, but not, as I say, the emotions that went with it, which must be not only hidden but inwardly suppressed, lest they confuse my mind in its present task of making some show of emotions I did not quite feel. As the grey-haired attendant opened a door in the refrigeration unit and began to slide out the tray, I silently made a great call upon that stillness of spirit which is beyond all physical and nervous and mental strength.

I must have closed my eyes for a moment, for suddenly, as Hubble said ‘Ah!’ with deep appreciation in his resonant voice, I looked—and she was there, there before me again.

Her head was turned away, with closed eyes and parted lips as though in sleep. I knew the pose; it wanted only the light of dawn gleaming like pearl upon her shoulder and cheek and arm, and I should have forgotten where I was. However, there was now only the hard overhead glare of an unshaded electric bulb, merciless and brilliant upon her eternal serenity. The dark hair clinging to the skull and swept by some not-unkind hand in a loose coil beneath her right cheek and that shoulder and arm would have lost its subtle human smell mixed with the perfume of geranium—the hair she had cared for with such absorption each night, each morning; now it must smell of salt water and the undying bitterness of the ocean in which she had drifted back to us. Shining but lustreless, clinging close with moisture, it gave her averted head a sexless, formalized appearance belied by all else about her; for the cover had been folded down to her waist, and her hands, closed listlessly as in sleep, were exposed in all their final helplessness, and the ‘night attire’ mentioned by Hubble over the telephone was a loose suit of white nylon pyjamas in which, even when it was not made completely transparent by sea water, she (as I had told her with an irritation I could not control) might just as well have gone entirely unclothed. This very evening I had told her that . . . poor soul, poor doomed and destructive creature with whose fate I had tampered too much.

Her bosom through the fantastic material was actually emphasized, and there, too, was the faint, childish thumb-print that was her navel, the sign of mortality more pathetic and pitiful than any other in the whole estate of the flesh. But what was to me most suddenly disconcerting was the utter absence of movement, of the subtle stirring of breath.

I had not realized how she would look. I suppose I had expected horror, the terrible nibbling depredations of leather-jackets and other small harbour fish, such as I had seen too often before, with the bleached bone and bloodless tissue exposed. Instead, here was beauty, more than she had ever seemed to have in life, even in her most harmless moments when she slept. Now that face, quite free of all expression, robbed me for a moment of breath and caution. I went away and sat on a wooden chair. Hubble and the doctor looked at me: even while I rested my face in my hands I could feel their regard of surprise and wonder.

‘Can’t you take it?’ Hubble said, watching me closely.

‘I know her,’ I said.

There was a short pause. Then ‘Hell!’ Hubble said softly, with great emphasis. He came to where I sat hiding my face in both hands, and rested his own plump hand, gentle now and giving no inkling of its tremendous strength of a former professional wrestler’s hand, on my shoulder.

‘Take it easy then, Fitz,’ he murmured. ‘Take it easy.’

‘It is the surprise,’ I said. ‘I was not ready. I feel rather tired, that is all.’

‘Take it easy,’ he said again. Maybee had turned away and was looking down with an expression of deep thoughtfulness at that averted face. Through my spread fingers I saw him extend his hand and delicately raise one peaceful eyelid; then he went round to the other side of the tray, took from his pocket a pencil torch, raised the eyelid again, and shone the minute beam of light full and steady on the dead, unseeing eye. I felt a passing relief that her face was turned away from where I sat. My view was of her cheek and ear and wet dark hair, and the police surgeon’s swarthy and morose face peering, peering with a look of angry concentration into the terrible emptiness of the exposed eyeball. With what seemed an enormous effort, I restrained myself from jumping up and rushing at him to dash the little torch from his hand, to cover again that bared torso with its look of indescribable virgin innocence, and to hide beneath the sheet that lovely sleeping face of clay.

Hubble removed his hand, and I let mine fall on my knees, and looked up at him.

‘My identification will be all you will need,’ I said; and the time had come to speak with an exquisite care I feared might be beyond me. ‘She is known as Irma Francis or Irma Martin. She has lived in the flat next to ours for three years. Martin is an Anglicized form of Maartens—Dutch. Francis was a professional name—she modelled women’s clothes at a shop in town here. Actually I believe she was Lithuanian, part-Jewish, with a name no one but her Lithuanian friends—if she had any—could have pronounced, even had they known it, which I understand they did not. She claimed to be Dutch, anyhow. Irma Martin. Or Francis. A mannequin.’

The room was very cold, but again I felt the perspiration prick my hair and beard, and the palms of my hands were damp again. Yet this was not because of any fear. I must suppose it was caused by the not inconsiderable effort of telling Hubble all he needed to know, yet telling nothing he would not have found out for himself.

‘Her legal name,’ I said slowly, looking up steadily at him as I spoke, ‘is Irma Fitzherbert. As you said, the Fitzherberts call themselves gentlemen. We were married three years ago, with two old men, strangers picked up outside the registrar’s office, for witnesses. Besides them and the registrar, you are the only person who knows of this. My son does not know. Her friends did not know. We each had reasons for not appearing to be more than old and close friends. I can tell you about that some other time.’

‘So long as it has nothing to do with—this.’ He gestured with his elbow, keeping his hands in his pockets.

‘Nothing more I could possibly tell you has anything at all to do with it.’

It was my first lie, but for the moment I did not realize that. In spite of that inward stillness beyond life and death, beyond fear and desire, I felt my voice tremble on the brink of uncontrol; and at once I saw there was no danger to myself in allowing it to become uncertain. Hubble was staring into my face with a mild look of mixed incredulity and compassion. It was one of the few times when I had known him to look anything but cheerful or officially expressionless.