The Refuge (44 page)
It is hard even now to believe what I certainly never suspected then: that in those few days of halcyon weather there had begun a sort of Indian summer of our life together. Two people about to part who do not desire a parting draw closer to one another than at a meeting, which loses more immediate import the more it promises of a future. Neither of us, I believe, consciously foresaw any future other than a secure and happy one, and I for my part had not realized that it was possible for her to go from me utterly where I could not follow; but she, in some deep place in her mind, must already have known that this, to me a possibility as unlikely and as certain as her very death, some day, was for her inevitable and not very remote. She clung to me like the departing traveller whose imagination outruns time. Not seeing it, I thought only that she was more dear, more tenderly passionate and passionately tender than I had believed even she could become in the security of her final refuge within the cave of my mind, the walls of my arms.
Jack looked at her as he had looked at the ants, with mild, unhurried calculation. He seemed even pleased at our frank alliance, which—to shock him—I was tempted to tell him was quite legal; but his gaze, turned casually upon Irma where she lay under the shining, laden trees in air that swooned with the smell of ripening fruit, or sat between us happily at the yellow pine table in the kitchen (where she had somehow persuaded him to join us for meals), gave away nothing of what he was thinking. Never again did he tell me, ‘You ain’t no fool’, but evidently his quiet observation of her had reassured him about something—like his observation of the ants, informing him of some probability, good or bad mattered not—and now and then when they happened to be alone together I would hear his quiet drawling Australian voice, interrupted by her quick, unEnglish interjections of sharp surprise—the unforgettable, startled way she said ‘Yes?’ that goes on and on in my mind—and her sudden laughter thrilling the still and limitless air.
I am sure she, like the traveller, did not desire any parting; in fact, sometimes it seems certain that what happened did happen because unknown to herself she sought some yet closer, impossible union with me. She had, however, grown old too young. Unlike Donna, she had passed beyond hope of that sense of completeness which for a woman is in the end the only pure worldly happiness, however come by. By the time I might have persuaded her that a child of ours was the one seal heaven itself would ever set upon our earthly destinies, it had become too late for me to talk of such a thing; or so I felt. I had taken too long to convince myself of it, in the first place: it was unnaturally difficult for me, for too long, to imagine her carrying and bearing and suckling a child, for my one intimate experience of a woman doing so had ended in a personal tragedy for the child and me which, having been too young at the time to comprehend it, I felt might happen again. Also, no doubt, her quality of being perpetually virgin, new, unknown even by myself, made me reluctant to move forward our marriage from where it stood arrested, as it were in the midst of its consummation, by the worldly secrecy surrounding it.
No human relationship, of course, can remain long suspended in timelessness. Like a bird in flight, it depends on movement, its own or the supporting air’s, or it must fall and disintegrate. Only man in relation to the god of his faith can dispense with the awareness of time passing, or of his own passage through time. At noon on our third day at the cottage the ’bus passing inaudibly in the valley beyond the southern spur walling the plateau left in my mail box a telegram recalling me to my office in the impersonal, authoritative way to which all newspaper men have to accustom themselves. We had to leave that afternoon.
Irma was not as disappointed as I had feared, or hoped, she might be. It was almost as though she had expected this abrupt ending of our sojourn; her casual shrug of the shoulders, when she handed me back the telegraph slip covered with an awkward, legible handwriting of some country telephone attendant, seemed to acknowledge the inevitability of such endings. There was neither surprise nor regret in her face, and I recalled how much of her life had been spent in going somewhere else. There was always, in one form or another, a poor Mr. Sampson waiting for nightfall to begin spinning his tenuous web from which one must break free; or there was a telegram, or a word of warning passed from mouth to ear, mouth to ear until it arrived to set one in motion once more. Even then I did not see how futile it was to suppose she would ever enjoy an absolute peace, an absolute security, for long. She was the bird in flight, which must move or be moved, or fall into nothingness.
We reached the city at sunset, when the thickest traffic had emptied from the warm streets, into which the tall dark walls of the deserted shops and offices distilled a duality of lights and deepening shadows all faintly blurred and misty in the early summer evening. I left the car in a side-street while I went up to see Franklin, the chief of staff; but I was too late—he had gone home. On my table, conspicuously placed, was a memorandum from Scott, asking me to go to Melbourne by air that night, if possible, or first thing next morning, to do some special articles to tie up with a particularly sensational underworld feud down there which had been threatening to break out openly for some months and had done so the night before. At Hill Farm we did not interest ourselves in news of the outside world, and I was unaware of any details. Nothing could more firmly have ended that brief escape from earthly reality into a deeper reality of the mind than this assignment to study and report on some of the simpler, more uncivilized passions of that outwardly most civilized of Australian cities.
Irma looked at me in the driver’s mirror with a faint grimace of resignation by which I knew she was again shrugging her shoulders as she had done over the telegram. We travelled up the coloured width of William Street to the evening brilliance of the Cross without speaking. It was the dragging, inconclusive end of an episode which had begun with a yet more dragging inconclusiveness barely one week before. In the mood of depression I was already fighting off, the thought of home was far more appealing now than the memory of Hill Farm behind us. I felt again the existence of that thin barrier between us, that veil of gossamer whose origin I could not divine. I was heading for privacy and security myself now, taking her with me like a man afraid to enter them alone for fear of finding even there the barrenness that had so inexplicably descended upon the world.
Amid this confusion of thoughts and undisciplined emotions of fear and love, the image of Alan rose clearly like a standing tower in a ruined plain. I could, I thought, leave Irma in his care, and take at least a little comfort from knowing that something of myself, of my body and mind and spirit, mysteriously divorced from me yet inalienably of me, would remain to keep me in her mind while I was gone.
In Darlinghurst Road I drew in to the kerb so that she could go to one of her shops and buy fresh food. One keeps little in the cupboard in that place where the food-shops stand open day and night brilliant with invitation. To Irma this was so natural that to have remarked on it would in itself have been remarkable but with Miss Molesley it was different, a fascinating, suspicious and faintly disreputable hospitality of the streets, which at a wink might vanish like some fairy-tale invention. She still did her marketing on Friday and Saturday mornings, as she had been taught to do, with an air of facing an agreeable but tricky adventure. Irma shopped every day of the week, like most habituées of the district, and took a lively pleasure in it, sometimes engaging in brisk conversations with fellow-Europeans on this or the other side of the counter, in various languages, and coming out into the street with a look of tolerant surprise to right and left, as though she had just returned from another country.
This evening she wasted no time, but even so she was cheered when she returned to the car. It was the hour when faces are changed in the glare of the neon signs to green and blue and red and yellow masks, momentarily unrecognizable in their flat planes of light and darkness. The warm air was languid and muddled with the smells of food and flowers and petrol fumes overlying the pervasive smell of lively humanity. We drove off unnoticed among the crowding cars and taxicabs, and so came to our own street falling away beneath occasional dim lights, spaciously roofed with starless deep blue, and to our own empty entrance, unseen, unexpected by a soul. When I had switched off the headlamps, and the wall that closed the street had vanished against the darker northern sky, she put her hand upon mine on the wheel.
‘It was very lovely,’ she said. ‘Let us say goodbye here if you go tonight. It will not be for long, no?’
‘Three of four days,’ I said. ‘I shall probably be back on Tuesday.’
We said goodbye, I with the familiar ache of every parting from her, she with I know not what feelings; for I believe she did not yet understand her own heart, nor foresee where it was leading us.
We said goodbye, and after I had turned the car I too ascended the well-known silence of the stair, and at my own door stepped as always now from one side of my life to the other, like a man crossing a room to an opposite window that opens upon a different world, while the room itself, his external habitation, remains unchanged, accustomed to his movements, arranged to make them free.
Alan was reading by the empty fireplace. He looked up from the page, where his finger marked the point at which my voice had interrupted him, with an abstracted look in which for a fraction of time there was no recognition at all. Ever since childhood he read with an exclusive absorption hard to reconcile with the otherwise lively awareness of his senses.
‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘you’re early,’ and then he jumped up so quickly that the heavy volume thudded on the floor a yard away. ‘You’re back,’ he said with immense surprise, and bent down to pick it up kindly as if it had been a cat. With his face still away from me, he asked, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘The office wants me to go to Melbourne,’ I said. ‘Is Moley here? I have to be at the airport in two hours.’
‘I’ll tell her,’ he said, and put down the book and went quickly away. Looking closer, I saw he had been reading a work of Krafft-Ebing, who like Sigmund Freud is still only a name to me; and as I went to change and pack a suitcase I was thinking somewhat dispiritedly that like me he lived in more than one world, and—as thought took its own determined course—that, while this multiplicity of the mind’s existence and ambition continued, to talk of peace between nations, or even between the people of one nation, or of one city, or one household sheltering two generations or more, was a self-contradiction; for if the whole were the sum of its parts, and those were in disunion, however imperceptibly, then the whole (no matter how tightly wrapped in words) would remain disunited, and the statesmen and pseudo-philosophers talk in vain.
I thought, ‘I must be getting a cold,’ and looked out the warm undergarments Moley had long since given up expecting me to wear. Melbourne’s climate is even more erratically unpredictable than Sydney’s, for all that it boasts a lower average annual rainfall. On my table ready for cutting were the last few days’ papers which I had not seen, including this day’s; I put the lot in my briefcase to read in the aeroplane on the trip down. They would give me enough to think about until I was in touch with our Melbourne office and the local vice-squad and C.I.B. chiefs. I knew what I was expected to do, and had my own ideas on how to go about it; and it must be said for the
Gazette
that, if it did take no cognisance whatever of a man’s free time, between annual holidays, it also left him alone to do in his own way most of the jobs assigned to him.
Alan stood in the doorway when I looked up.
‘You are muttering, Father,’ he said rather diffidently. ‘Anything I can do? It’s like their cheek—giving you time off and then sending you to Melbourne in the middle of it. How is Irma now? Is she coming to dinner?’
‘Bless me, I never thought of that,’ I said. ‘Go and ask her, will you?’ but I knew she would not come, after that strangely melancholy parting in the darkened car. Yet when he came in to say, ‘She says she’s just going to bed,’ I was disappointed. In the end, he and I dined alone; Moley had excused herself to go to some meeting from which she could not get back until after I was gone. With a sudden upsurge of gaiety and self-derision, Alan waited not ineptly upon us both, and we spent an hour alone together, for the first time for more than a fortnight. Peace of mind returned to me in that peaceful hour of the boy’s optimistic companionship.
‘If you had time to drive me to the aerodrome,’ I said, ‘you could leave the car at the garage on your way home. We can leave early, and you need not be late back. Irma would probably be glad of your company. I think she found Hill Farm more dull than she realized.’
My own words surprised me: they were true. She did think Hill Farm was dull—not too dull to be borne, but dull nevertheless. She had never lived away from cities, all her life. I only slowly awoke to the inevitable implication in what I had said—that it had been dull in spite of my own company. After that Saturday morning, the whole of life must seem like a heavy anticlimax for a time, I supposed. She had imagined herself dead. Perhaps I should have given more thought to her helpless shrinking from the approach of Donna so full of life, her richly-bulging flanks concealing her usual shapely form; perhaps that pregnancy was more staringly significant than I had realized when I told her to ignore it.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘go and see her, anyhow. You always know how to make her merry.’
That too was true; but it did not explain the long, considering look he gave me when I said it. I opened my lips to tell him the whole story of the previous week-end, but closed them again because I did not care to speak to him of it without thought of every word. At last, ‘We seem quite to have taken her into the family,’ he said thoughtfully. We rose together from the table, which he began to clear while I went to the bathroom for my toilet kit. It occurred to me as I looked hurriedly at my dark, hollow reflection that I seemed to do a lot of peering into mirrors these days—I who had not had even the excuse of doing it while shaving, for most of my life. It suggested—the face I peered at without recognition suggested—that some sort of self-doubt had arisen or returned to trouble me, coming upon me in the midst of my happiness. I looked back along the line of days, but for all their unevenness no one stood out warningly to say,
It began here
, and a common thread of purposeful delight led through them up to the very moment where I was. With a sudden firmness I resolved to do what I had resolved to do several times in the past two years: to ask for some sort of long-service leave, on the grounds that I felt I was beginning to grow stale after more than seventeen years of studying and writing about crime. It sounded simple. I would make it so.
