The Refuge (43 page)

The tablet dissolved almost at once as the match boiled the solution. Carefully he let it cool and began to draw in and press out the hot fluid into the syringe, warming it, filling it at last with all that the spoon contained. Then, holding the fine needle downwards pointing to the floor, he felt with his left hand at Irma’s flaccid left arm inside the elbow.

‘Take her hand and turn it palm-upwards and pull it out to you,’ he said. He felt for the vein with his eyes closed. I had seen the injection given, but not without a sphygmomanometer. As if divining my thought, he opened his eyes, keeping a finger in place above her straightened elbow. ‘I’m taking a chance, without the wind-bag,’ he said with a cold look upwards at me; and delicately, between two fingertips stretching the satiny skin taut sideways, he pushed in the needle without bothering to swab a patch. I felt her hand like warm lead in my own, and watched the plunger steadily go down the marked glass barrel of the syringe until it fitted into the inside of the head. Lightly his hand withdrew the needle from the vein, while his other hand felt for the swelling that would tell him he had missed or completely penetrated the vein walls. I could see no change in the surface contour of that rounded upper arm which was like humid satin against the lips. The risk had succeeded.

‘You will have to help me, Fitzherbert,’ S— said without a glance, bending over her and raising one eyelid casually with a fingertip. ‘You don’t know when she took it, of course? No one ever does in these cases. Get more water and a bucket—cover the carpet with something if you don’t want a mess. And hurry. We’ve got to be quick here.’

When I came back, he had stripped to his shirt-sleeves and was rapidly rolling them up.

The following hour was grotesque but too impersonal to be in the least moving. I found myself admiring the controlled ruthlessness with which he used his great strength, while I was feeling the drag of exhaustion at my shoulders and the backs of my legs. At last, when he had wiped the dew of sweat from his face for the last time, and for the last time examined the pupils of the sightless doll-eyes, he said, ‘She’ll do, I think. It was lucky you found her. Half an hour later . . . You’d better have a nurse. I can’t manage a hospital bed even if you wanted to risk it, which I take it you don’t. Your friends the police wouldn’t help you here because it’s just the thing they’ve been waiting for to pin on me. I don’t think you want to tell them. But I can get you a nurse for twenty-four hours for observation.’

‘If possible, I don’t want anyone,’ I said. ‘Can I be trusted to do whatever is necessary?’

For the first time since he had come bounding up the stairs, he looked at me steadily.

‘I take it you can be trusted just as fully as I can—in everything,’ he said evenly. ‘Did it occur to you just now that if this young woman should have died—accidentally—not even I would have been willing to sign a certificate? In fact, not I of all people. Even with the farewell note she left, you would have been in an unusual position for a man like you, Fitzherbert.’

I had thought of it, and of the inevitable discovery of my legal relationship to Irma.

‘A note?’ I said. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said dispassionately, getting into his waistcoat and coat. ‘Every pretty woman who tries to kill herself with a slow-acting poison leaves a note. You don’t
see
it because it’s in your pocket, probably . . . Very well, young man. Stay with her yourself. Be better—I don’t trust even my own nurses all the time. Watch her pulse and respiration.’ He tore a leaf from a notebook and began to write on it with a gold fountain pen. ‘Send someone straight away to a chemist with this, or they’ll be closed. When she starts to come out of it, for god’s sake don’t excite her in any way. Give her a dose of this. If either pulse or respiration starts misbehaving, ring me at once. I’ll be at home all day. But I think she should be all right now.’

I said with some hesitation, ‘I would like you to let me give you a cheque.’ He had played my game with absolute fairness, according to my own ideas, and I felt suddenly weak and at a disadvantage. Now he was staring at me out of his bold, expressionless eyes of an oldish man still hard and cold as iron, and for a moment I understood why he had gone for so long unpunished for his misdeeds, from the harbouring of injured felons to crimes of a far more serious nature.

When he spoke his voice was as soft as a snake in dead leaves.

‘You wouldn’t think of soiling those aristocratic fingers by handling my money, now, would you, Fitzherbert?’ he almost whispered. ‘Well, strange as it may seem, I feel exactly the same way about yours. When you are as old as I am, you too may just possibly find you have grown sick of the odour of sanctity . . . Well, there’s nothing more I can do here.’

He packed his bag, and washed and dried his hands in Irma’s bedroom, and was gone; and I realized as the door closed upon him that it was his strength and indifference together which had enabled me to come through the last hour without a thought of myself. I took from my note-case that neatly-written note, and read it again, but could not bring myself to destroy it, although I felt this should be done, if only out of compassion for the inert sleeping creature under the blankets on the wide bed. As for the phial with its little stack of white tablets, I forgot about it until, undressing late that night, I found it still lying neatly in my outside coat pocket, and automatically locked it away in the drawer with the useless revolver and the now-meaningless letters.

All I wanted to do was to get away and hide myself until I felt I had regained a proper degree of self-control; for as I looked at her lying there, with her dark hair spread like a fury over the pillows and her swollen lips in her face of hollowed wax, I began to tremble, and it was all I could do to hold back my tears.

After ringing Miss Werther on the lounge-room telephone to ask her if she could come, I sought out Moley, who had just come in from her Saturday morning shopping, and, for once not caring what she might come to think, sent her out in haste to the nearest chemist with S—’s prescription.

Then I went back to Irma’s flat, to sit beside her and listen to her easy breathing and to the baffled screams of the gulls etched upon the sound of the west wind pawing the window-frames; to sit beside her, and to wait—I did not quite know for what.

The waiting begun in physical exhaustion and mental bewilderment that Saturday afternoon never really came to an end. Other things screened it, but it remained, like a listener behind a curtain.

When she had recovered, with the rapidity of natural good health nursed by Miss Werther’s unexpectedly matter-of-fact presence, from the amount of drug her blood had retained, we were obliged to look at one another for a time like strangers. Even in the mountains, where by arrangement with our respective employers we were able to go for the remainder of the week following, there was a change in our association. I realized that there comes a moment when the heart finds it has done with ecstasy, when the wonder of the mind is dimmed by the sadness of suddenly-recognized incomprehension; when ‘I love’ becomes ‘I will keep faith’ and ‘I know’ is modified and ennobled to ‘I believe’.

For some days she was shy of me, as though too soon I had surprised a secret in her. She would have me near her but would not willingly look at me. I thought at first it was shame, either for a thing imperfectly done by her who would always choose perfection, or for the faulty impulse itself, that had made the attempt fail; but these things seemed not to weigh upon her at all, and as for the intended self-annihilation, she appeared—as did every other would-be suicide I ever knew—to think no more about it than if it had been something someone else had dreamed. In the end, when my compassion for her seeking death had stilled to a simple, grateful relief at the sight of her alive and no less beautiful, I began to realize that whatever thing she had found suddenly intolerable, that bright morning, was withdrawn, not banished; that she did not know whether at some unknown future moment it might become intolerable again.

If so, I should be just as helpless as I had been this time; for I knew enough about attempted suicide to know that nothing—least of all the expressed determination to make the attempt—could be surely regarded as symptomatic of the state of mind in which the attempt itself becomes as inevitable as a thing already done. I had not known, and I never should know, when that state of mind might abruptly develop and command her.

Until we left for Hill Farm, ostensibly taking Miss Werther to look after Irma, that kindly little Jewess’s presence in her flat relieved my own part in the whole affair of the likelihood of appearing suspect either to Moley or to Alan. She, good soul, sincerely embodied what the politicians describe as ‘grave concern’; he, on his side, was aware only that his delightful friend and neighbour had been taken ill in some mysterious way.

‘Woman trouble,’ he said to me that evening. ‘We are learning something about these things this term. I wish I had been here, I might have been of some use. What were the symptoms?’

‘Would you not have been embarrassed, Alan?’ I said. ‘I believe medical men do not really like having their friends for patients, whatever the layman thinks.’

He tossed his head in a way that had lately become a habit with him, and laughed at me across the warmth of firelight between us.

‘No woman could embarrass me,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I like them too much, they interest me too much for embarrassment to come into it. Not having grown up with a mother may have had something to do with it. You know what I mean, Father. I know nothing much about them, and yet sometimes I feel I know everything about them. Yes, you can smile. I’m too young, I know. They don’t
frighten
me, that’s what I mean. Perhaps starting life at S. Johns had something to do with it. The beautiful ones are usually too vain to be frightening, and the plain ones too frightened to be anything but—pathetic.’

I set my teeth on my pipe-stem.

‘One thinks a lot about these things,’ he went on confidentially. ‘They may not always be our better halves, but biologically speaking they’re our other halves. All the same, from what I can see they’re the bane of a doctor’s life—even most of the women connected with the profession, hospital staffs and women doctors and so on. Not that doctors could ever do without them. But I’m beginning to realize the practice is rather a—a priestly thing. There’s a good deal more than just skill and learning and memorizing in it. Just as there is in law. The interpretation is what matters. All the greatest doctors since Aesculapius have been more than just learned men, haven’t they? A sort of communion comes into it. A sort of communion with the spirit of life itself. Or am I talking nonsense to my clever old Pop?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said; and I thought of the force and power of Doctor S— that morning, wondering what some of his Macquarie Street patients would have said could they have seen him sweating there in his shirtsleeves, his hard, expressionless face bent like an iron mask to the labour. Something more than skill and learning had been at work there. It was like watching the actual performing of a miracle. His last remarks, about his money and mine, came back to me, and I felt unaccountably humble at the memory.

‘Or Jesus himself,’ Alan was saying with more assurance. ‘The modern Apollo—half-divine, the greatest healer in recorded history. A doctor must have faith, like a priest—that’s what it is. So no wonder they tend to find women a nuisance.’

‘I hardly follow you over that last jump,’ I said. ‘Do you mean you think women don’t have faith?’

He turned to me fully with a rather disarming look. ‘Not the impersonal selfless faith I was talking about.’

Donna was once more heavy with young—Ike’s doing again, Jack told me.

‘They trick me,’ he said. ‘They git off into the bush, and come ’ome opposite ends o’ the clearin’. A man can’t keep up with ’em—not at my age.’

‘Next season,’ I said, ‘we’ll take her to a stud somewhere, if I can find the pedigree. You can sell the pups. She might as well earn her keep, with a family history like that.’

He grinned more widely round his pipe-stem, with a flicker of his eyes.

‘What about ole Ike? You goin’ to deprive him of his greens? They’s good as man and wife—better,’ he added hastily. ‘She don’t argue.’

Irma stepped back from the little golden swollen creature when she flung herself panting upon us, with a movement of disgust she had not been quick enough to conceal. That alone showed she was not as perfectly in command of herself as she was used to be.

‘Ignore her,’ I said. ‘She sees no difference in herself, you know, except perhaps that she feels all dog again. Complete.’

‘Does one need—that, to feel complete?’ she said with sudden amusement in her old sidelong free look. ‘Would you like me to look like that?’

‘It was a speculation, not a proposition,’ I said, and her laughter set Donna to barking and capering and biting at my idle hand with gentle teeth.

The cold west wind lasted until that night, when during the dark hours, waking from time to time to listen to Irma’s peaceful breathing, I heard too the more frequent hollow stillnesses between weaker and weaker gusts. By sunrise it had dropped completely. The sky was exhausted of it, void and clear as a dome of pale blue china.

‘Summer comin’,’ Jack told me. ‘I reckon she’ll be a wet ’un again.’ But he could not say what made him think so. He only pointed to the ants. ‘See ’em movin’ higher and puttin’ away all the tucker they can git. They ain’t often wrong.’ But really he could feel each coming season in his blood, like an animal or an insect.

Irma spent that day in a long chair among the trees of the orchard where she could watch us and hear our voices while we worked a bean crop with the hoes. In the dapple of light and shadow under the thick leaves of peach and apricot, apple and plum, her face glowed like transparent gold. Sudden gold lights shone in her dark hair drawn down from her smooth crown in two plaits that rested on her serene young bosom. I noticed always the change in her, and longed to question her about herself alone in the flat that Saturday morning; but she seemed to have forgotten the affair, and was idly gay and tender and at peace with herself. My eyes of a troubled lover discerned, however rightly, an ebb and flow of the faintest melancholy, as though for a while she had stepped out of a natural role to observe her own playing of it. I could make nothing of this. I wanted to put to her the one question that haunted me:
Why
?; but if knew she would not, perhaps could not have answered me intelligibly. So there was this veil of invisible gossamer between us. At night, in the darkness, it seemed to drop aside, leaving her wholly at one with me again when her head lay on my breast and her hand held mine firmly with the warm, authoritative grasp of a sleeping child’s.