The Refuge (42 page)

‘There is no limit,’ she said sombrely, ‘to the terrible things men and women will do to each other for love.’

By my view of her tilted head, her backward, slanting eyes looking up at me with unfathomable appeal, I was reminded as irrelevantly as ever of Donna at Hill Farm, and this in turn made me think, with a sensation of physical thirst, of the thin, pure air there, the smell of wood smoke, the deep brick fireplace, the grey sheepskin rug on the hearth; cleanliness, silence, peace, Donna gazing up . . .

‘
You ain
’
t no fool.
’

I had no reason just then to hear the dry, unemphatic words. I must have been half asleep with my hand resting heavily on the dark smooth shape of her head reclined against my knee.

‘Let us think,’ I said, ‘how we can get away to the cottage tomorrow without telling too many lies. Will you come?’

She put her head far back, and smiled faintly while I examined the novel appearance of her face upside-down. I had never thought of looking at it from such an angle before; it showed up the light, broad bone-structure with foreshortened exaggeration.

‘I shall go to Linda’s,’ she said. ‘You shall go to Hill Farm. With you will go a mysterious dark lady named only Mademoiselle X.’ (She pronounced it ‘
Eeecks
’ with complacency.) ‘In effect, myself.’

Subterfuge in any form still delighted her. She even took a mad pleasure in walking behind me in the street with no sign of recognition, surreptitiously digging me in the back in a crowd and, when I turned, apologizing charmingly as to a stranger. I never knew what she would be at next when that mood of incomprehensible gaiety overcame her. I once overheard a Viennese medical friend of hers tell her quite seriously that she was a slightly manic-depressive type, but I could never believe this, for her self-control was too good: she acted rather as she planned to act than as though forced by an inner compulsion superior to her conscious will. Next day, however, I was to remember that Viennese doctor’s pompous words.

Our rare week-ends at the cottage, contrived with difficulty, always delighted her in prospect, as they did Miss Werther, who was invariably a useful party to our going. Each time, Irma amused herself by thinking up some new fable to cover the fact of our leaving town together. It made her as light-hearted as a child.

‘What about Alan, though?’ I said. ‘Has he engagements?’

‘Ah yes,’ she murmured. ‘One must not forget Alan.’ Then she laughed softly. ‘You shall do the lying to Alan, my friend. It is your penance for having such a charmingly credulous son.’

‘Charmingly credulous’ was not how I would have described that young man, now approaching his eighteenth birthday. It was probably one of her occasional mistakes of language, so rare these days as to be at once noticeable. If so, it was nothing for comment, and I only remembered it a long time later.

In the wild brilliance of morning, waking in my own chaste bed, I felt cleansed and absolved, able to forget yesterday’s heavy thoughts of death and violence and the gross madnesses that can arise like evil spirits from the smashed seal of intolerable sexual repression. At nine o’clock, when I knocked at her door, Irma was up but not dressed. Of Alan there had been no sign. Moley said he was gone when she arrived, and added that the teapot was still hot and that he had had breakfast. There would be no occasion for evading both lies and the whole truth, face to face with him, and felt relieved of my ‘penance’ when I had written him a note to tell him I was off to the mountains for the week-end, and would see him soon, on Sunday evening.

‘No need to do penance, after all,’ I said to Irma while she poured coffee. ‘Alan has disappeared.’

‘You are joking?’ she said sharply, putting down the pot with a startled look. I thought, she is up too early after a late night listening to a story I should have had enough sense not to tell her. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I only meant he has gone out early, before eight o’clock.’

‘He goes all day today in a boat, a yacht,’ she said dreamily. ‘How lucky for him, such a wind. How I hate it, blowing, blowing.’

She spoke without particular feeling. I watched her graceful movements about the table for a while, and left her when she had smoked a cigarette and put out the butt in the dregs of her cup. We were to meet in an hour’s time; as I went out the door I saw her go towards the telephone as though to ring Miss Werther, only to halt and turn to look after me just as the door was closing. Afterwards I tried to think of anything unusual in her behaviour, but there was nothing—only that hesitation by the telephone. She was not used to hesitate over anything, great or small, on which she had decided.

We were to meet in the city before the week-end rush of Saturday noon, and get out of town with a clear road. I walked to the garage to get out the car, and drove it to a corner parking area, the site of a demolished office building now hedged in on two sides under the sky by the naked walls and blind-looking inward windows of more lasting buildings. At the office, warm and stuffy after the racing wind in the streets outside, and full of the sour, fusty smell of paper and printing ink and ancient city dust, there was nothing that really needed doing, no one about but the cleaners at their lonely tasks among the echoes. For an hour I sat smoking, thinking over the past six days more coolly now, and filing notes and copies of a few documents I had collected. Hubble, when I rang for him, was not in town.

The time passed slowly. For some reason I felt a vague, uneasy depression rising in my breast—perhaps a nervous reaction, I thought, from those last days of suppressed horror, with which the dead, drained atmosphere of the office contrasted without bringing relief or ease. Written down in full, the inexorable reconstruction of a combination of incest, rape and murder would have seemed like the nightmare imaginings of a Freud gone mad. Since my marriage I had become rather less resigned to observing the extreme aberrations of human behaviour. They sometimes haunted my dreams at night. Scott would have said I was becoming soft . . .

The feeling of depression gathered into an ache of uneasy fear. I felt as a man may feel who has left something of vital importance unattended to until too late. As though it might have had something to do with her—there was nothing I did now that seemed not to have something, in some way, to do with her—I telephoned Irma’s number at the flats, but she did not answer. That was natural: she was almost due at the street corner in Parramatta Road where she had decided to wait for me; but in a sudden access of nervousness I at once rang Miss Werther’s flat. When the amiable Jewess told me Irma had not rung her up, panic seized me by the throat as though it had been waiting in the back of my mind for just that moment, just those words.

Only a partial and inaccurately-collated memory of my next movements comes back to me now. I must have acted with great swiftness and precision, for in retrospect I seem to have transposed myself without pause from my office table to the door of Irma’s flat, to be in the same moment putting down my telephone receiver and turning my key in the lock of her door; whatever happened between those two sets of actions was evidently of only secondary importance to my immediate, absolute knowledge that something was dangerously wrong. I do recall thinking that whoever drove the taxi that pulled in as though expected at the front entrance of the office as I ran out must have been divinely sent, divinely trained, for with more skill and knowledge than any police driver I ever knew he managed to avoid all main streets and crossings between Macquarie Street and Darlinghurst Road, and had me at my address in a very few minutes, according to my watch.

The door opened, and I closed it before I called out. My voice sounded dully through the silence of the familiar rooms. A sixth sense told me that the place was not empty, that somewhere there was life in it, and for the only time in all my experience of assorted horrors I knew the sensation of the hair slowly stirring and trying to rise on my scalp. Then I moved.

There was after all no mystery and no horror about it. Irma lay across the wide bed with her knees on the floor, her face turned sideways and her arms outstretched in a pathetic attitude of striving, as though to climb upon that low elevation had been a little beyond her. Her averted face wore a faint, frowning look as if she were disappointed or confused.

I looked round the room in a moment of mad helplessness. There was a folded paper on the dressing-table, held flat by a small half-empty glass tube I had seen once before, marked
Poison
in red type easily legible from where I stood inside the door. The whole scene, like so many in which she had figured, was extremely formal and correct in detail—so much so that I choked down a wild upthrust of laughter as I felt frantically for my pocket-book.

Between the calling of her name and the finding of the telephone number I wanted, not a full minute could have elapsed. I was dialling the number in the next room before I realized I was not still looking at her; even where I stood I could still hear her heavy, grievous breathing sag and lift, sag and lift, somehow far less real, less credible to the sense than the windswept screams of interminable disaster of the scattered gulls above the harbour outside.

‘Fitzherbert,’ I said to the cautious, suave voice that followed the lifting of a remote receiver. ‘This is private and urgent. Please come straight to my address—you know it. You will need apomorphine and a pump . . . Yes, taken orally. I will wait for you on the landing. Please hurry.’

Providence so far was in my favour. The suavely cautious voice was that of the one man I could trust implicitly in this business: he lived a minute’s distance away, in Macleay Street; he had been at home. Only my habit of keeping a list of certain ‘silent’ telephone numbers known to a few of us outside their subscribers’ personal circles had saved me now—that, and the prior fact that by accident I knew more about this Doctor S— than was good for him; more, perhaps, than was good for me, since he knew I knew it. It was the sort of knowledge of which the police, who shared it, would have been glad to have proof. I never intended to admit to anyone that I could easily have supplied such proof (as S— also knew); the enforcement of the law was not a thing I was qualified for, in any case; I certainly had not foreseen a time when my information would possibly be the indirect means of saving a life.

I had to believe it would be that. It was necessary not to think otherwise, to think in order not to give way to the panic fear which danced somewhere in the back of my mind as I felt the unfamiliar dead weight of the body of my love trying to slide from my arms, when I used all the strength of which desperation is capable to raise her up against the pile of pillows and cushions I had flung against the headboard of the bed. What made it worse was that her eyes were half-open, and seemed to look over my shoulder with that sidelong glance, at once mischievous and shy, of a knowing school-girl, taunting me horribly with her clever escape. Through her bright loose lips the heavy breaths came and went, exhaustedly.

The kettle on the kitchen stove was still quite hot. It gave me a moment’s hope that not much time had passed before I found her—everything depended on that. A rinsed coffee cup stood inverted on its saucer on the metal draining-board of the sink, tidy like the whole flat; even this last thing she must do tidily, oh god, I thought, lighting the gas under the kettle and almost running back to the bedroom to snatch the folded paper and the little glass tube and stand over her for a few seconds like an executioner, before I went out again to the door, and out upon the landing. There I took one long look at the words written so neatly on the white paper.

Lloyd darling, I have no world of my own and can
’
t can
’
t live in yours any more. I look at the water of the beautiful harbour and it calls me . . .

It ended ‘
Goodbye Fitzi darling—
IRMA
’ after a line or two more which I did not quite understand, though there was not much sound of hysteria in the words set down so tidily. My mind shook at the use of her most intimate pen-name for me—‘Fitzi’—even while in one glance it memorized the rest. I put it quickly into my note-case and slipped that back into my pocket as I heard the entrance doors open and close with a springing thud in the distance below, and the rapid bounding steps of S— on the carpeted stair.

In the few seconds while he was running up, I wondered what the sea had to do with us now. It seemed a fantastic possibility, or merely a possibility in a world of insane fantasy, that she had meant to get down and into the harbour by the service staircase we all used in the summer to reach by the quickest way the seawall and the swimming pool; and that the drug had worked more quickly than she realized it would, before she could even fling herself on the low bed to snore away life alone. If it had been her idea to go down by the wall that made a walk to the old unused boathouse, with its water-stair never used since the flats replaced a private mansion fifty years before, it would have been in accord with her tidy ways, it would have emptied the flat and the world of her very neatly. But I never knew she listened to any call of the sea outside our windows. I realized with shame and terror that there must be many things about her I never knew, after all.

‘In here, Doctor,’ I said to the suave, wooden-faced S—, who had not lost a breath for all his haste. I recognized that peculiar controlled tension of a doctor in a hurry. When we stood at the bedside in the sweet-smelling room, where I suddenly felt like an intruder, a stranger, I showed him the half-emptied phial of tablets, and told him I believed she had taken them in coffee. He dumped his bag on the bed beside her, and brought out a hypodermic needle which he sterilized with methylated spirit, asking me at the same time for a silver spoon, hot water and matches. I brought these as he emptied the barrel of the syringe on the carpet with a splutter and hiss of air as the plunger went home. Then he shook a tablet into his cupped palm and took the spoon.

‘Pour a little boiling water—scald the bowl,’ he said. ‘Have a match ready.’ With his eyes on Irma he whipped a bottle of saline solution from his coat pocket, took the spoon, dropped the tablet into it and covered it with the saline. ‘Light a match and hold it under the spoon.’