The Refuge (45 page)
The resolve made my mind easier. When Alan left me at the airport with some time to wait, I was content to be alone in the middle of the excited crowds of travellers and their friends, coming and going, with the prospect before me of many hours of absolute solitude in a city where I was not known to more than a couple of dozen people by sight. Irma, in the care of Miss Werther (whom I had advised of our return, independently of Irma herself) and sometimes of Alan too—particularly of Alan, I thought with a warm tenderness for them both—would be as comfortable, I tried to think, as she was in my own care.
It was a comfortable thought in itself, at the beginning of a journey.
Had I but realized it, my departure for Melbourne at such a time, with so much unsaid between Irma and me, was a fatal mistake. I might have saved the whole fabric of existence had I not gone. However, I have admitted to being a creature of habit, and it has been one of my habits to comply rather than to argue with the decisions of my editor and our employers, even when I might have been sure of a sympathetic hearing. Since childhood, my feeling, or rather my conviction, has been that I was never the sort of person of whom the unreasonable is demanded, either by men or by circumstances. So I must also admit that whatever has been my good or ill fortune has for the most part been the direct outcome of my own will in action.
When I returned, a day later than had been planned, from the southern capital the dice must already have been thrown, the fall against me. Whatever followed followed inevitably, but only one person—Irma—was in a position to see this, and I think she did not see it. It took me another six months to learn, very suddenly what had happened to me, to all of us; but after that there was no waiting: certainty and a course of action became clear in my mind in a night. To what end that course led has already been shown.
For a moment, it seemed that everything I had ever done, every ambition I had ever had, for the happiness of the only two people I loved was turned from an honest intention to a ridiculous and insanely selfish attempt to shape their destinies to accord with mine. This cannot be done; but I had committed myself too far, and whatever I had done I could not undo; I could not go back, and to go forward was impossible for three of us together. The only one who mattered now was Alan, who had barely begun his life of usefulness as an alleviator of earthly pain, a healer of fleshly ills. Of the other two, the one he needed least was the one who must give him up—must give him up without seeming to do so . . . without knowing of a renunciation . . .
After my return, there promised to be no more interruptions to the irregular routine of life as we were living it, together and apart, in these two adjacent flats above the moody ocean of the harbour. Alan was studying hard, perhaps too hard, for his third-year examinations, which seemed to him a sharp turning-point in the whole long way towards graduation and qualification as a medical practitioner. Things had gone well with me financially, thanks to a broker who was a personal friend, and not through any shrewdness of my own. I could afford to think of offering Alan post-graduate work abroad after he had done enough hospital-walking here; my own wants were small, and Irma, for whose clothes and housing I paid, had insisted from the start on paying her own household running expenses, maintaining severely and unshakeably that her freedom of movement and her privacy were more than those of a married woman, and must be bought by the one enjoying them, to keep their savour. She would have kept herself wholly, but this, like some other ideas of hers, was difficult for me to comprehend and impossible to endorse. ‘Very good,’ she said at last, with a mocking sigh. ‘I’ll save the money for my lonely old age.’ After that, she would not let me speak of it again.
My ignorance of her secret self must have depressed her. Once, in an hour of great weariness at the height of the summer, when the wet heat foretold by old Jack’s ants lowered like a steaming threat from zenith to horizon, I suggested that we could, with properly circumspect preparation, at last make known the fact if not the date of our marriage. I would not have confessed it, but I was tired and irritated at times by what seemed to me an increasingly unnecessary deceit of all who made up our world. I wanted to claim her openly as my wife and companion. It seemed to me that Alan, who had lately been unusually aloof with both of us, would be pleased.
She would not have it. Her finality surprised me. Why? She could give no reason save that she was happy to live as we did. I gave way to the oppressive heat and my exhaustion, and murmured something like ‘What about me?’
‘My friend,’ she said almost sharply, ‘you are happier than you know. The change you suggest would soon make you realize it.’ She paused, and her look of animation left her face, which became composed and thoughtful as she said, ‘Anyhow, a marriage such as ours was not meant to suffer the anticlimax of the breakfast-table. It would blunt the edges. And then—there is Alan.’
Very well, I said after some consideration, he could move now to quarters of his own, near enough to take whatever meals he chose with us, but still apart, in his own place. It would please him to feel that his comings and goings were known only to himself; he was too old now to have to think himself accountable to anything but his own conscience.
She looked at me and laughed softly, shaking her head with that air of ancient sagacity that had never changed over the years since first I saw it aboard the
Empire Queen.
‘My darling, you will never part with him.’
It was the nearest we ever came to a quarrelsome disagreement.
Ironically enough, it was I myself who began to feel insecure that summer, and to feel the need of some sort of a refuge of my own. The more evidently satisfied she became with our way of life, the more my sense of the unreality of it all increased. She had never been so gay, or seemed so lovely; she throve on the intolerable heat, of which even Alan, who was in a subdued and almost irritable state sometimes, complained. I put down the change in him to excessive work as well as the hard summer. After the new year, when without much enthusiasm he went off for a holiday on the south coast with three young men and four girls of his own year, I sent Miss Molesley away for three weeks, the probable time of his absence, with enough money to go wherever she liked within a day or two’s journeying, on her first proper holiday since the war’s end.
I had the flat to myself, and as much of Irma’s company as my hours of work allowed. For once the wall dividing our two flats seemed as it were to melt, though something less tangible remained between us, tantalizing and bewildering me when I was away from her. We had never spent so much time together—we could waken side by side in the hot light of the early January mornings without the need, now, to part at once and meet again. This was secrecy of another kind, against an alien world for whom we did not care; and if Alec in his cool den below-stairs suspected what we thought was well and gracefully hidden we did not care, and he never made a sign. (It would have been too much for Emmy, who had become Irma’s devotee at a distance, to learn of such goings-on, anyhow, and his job depended on her presence there.) Once he had conquered his inclination to suspect Irma in all things as ‘one of them reffogees, Mr. Fitz’, he had let his good nature bustle him into a defensive liking for her which she found enchanting. She could no more do wrong than I could, he seemed to say with his shrill, deprecating laugh.
I know well enough now that it was Alan’s absence that set us more profoundly at peace with one another. After the examinations, and over the Christmas and New Year holidays, he had seemed to be with us the whole time, unable to settle his mind to any one thing, like a man afraid that a plan he has launched irrevocably will fail. For the first time in his life he suffered those onsets of a black and furious depression which for generations seem to have been a family characteristic of ours and are common enough in many people of vastly different mentalities. He could not understand these experiences, and for reasons quite other than those I supposed he sought Irma’s company evening after evening, whether I was at home or not. Because of the summer lassitude at the end of each day, I was often enough content to sit or lie still and read, or work on a collection of articles on juvenile delinquency and its origins in the home, which I wanted to put into shape for a book. It was pleasant to know that those two, secure in each other’s care, were what Alan called ‘doing the beaches’ in the car, or sitting absorbed in some theatre together, or, most often, visiting or being visited by the friends Irma seemed to have made again during the last few months in surprising numbers.
While he was gone, disporting himself outside time on some southern, cooler beach with his own friends, she paused as if to take breath and refresh her energies, and let herself sink contentedly under the spell of the heat she loved. Incredulously, perceived that those hot months were like a prolonged spring to her; between November and April she took on a sort of tropical bloom and a passionate and coolly untiring energy. Her skin was in texture and almost in colour like that of a ripening apricot. The sun never hurt her, for she exposed herself to it the year round; and I remember with what a pang of delight and wonder, like a boy’s, I had seen her on the screening stone balcony outside her bedroom windows stretched supine, nude and indescribably chaste, the ivory and rose and black and delicate gold of her weighted body scanned like music by the blissful light, and in the bar of shadow at the foot of the wall her face, as quiet as though, open-eyed, she slept. By summer’s end she was radiant with the warmth she had bathed in every morning, so that to touch her was like touching the skin of someone newly dried after a bath; but yet there was none of the summer’s soporific heaviness in her vivid body, and it was almost as though she had taken into herself for a secret, delicious gain the energy I had lost to the sun as the sweating weeks went by.
She had this energy, and hoarded it for her own purposes. It was a thing as much of the mind as of the tissues of mortal flesh, and I do not remember one moment’s sadness in her as she made this pause like some solitary explorer who, having completed one journey into an unknown interior, pauses to let experience overtake imagination before launching himself body and soul upon his next mysterious quest.
Among her visitors, who all seemed to me recently-acquired friends, the most familiar to me was the Russian refugee violinist Kalmikoff. He was a type, a heavy, indignant man with a face somewhat like that of Josef Stalin, but without the Georgian’s eyes of humorous peasant cunning and intelligence; his curved Hebraic nose overhung with a sort of angry melancholy a thick dyed moustache, and the same conflict of melancholy with angry scorn could be seen in his fleshy eyelids that seemed too heavy even for the large eyes whose dullness occasionally flashed fire when he spoke from the heart—which was seldom.
He appeared to be obsessed with Irma, not as a woman but as one who had behaved like a fool and who might yet be saved from the consequences and rewards of her folly; for, having somehow escaped after the war from the realms of the Russian proletarian dictatorship—as they cosily called it—he became a weighty and overbearing apologist of Communism in the country he had chosen as a refuge from what he regarded as Communism’s relentless pursuit of himself. He had all the unreliable fanaticism of the late convert, all the intolerance the apostate harbours towards another’s apostasy. Irma seemed to him a free person. He could not bear it.
He was a type, and there are hundreds, thousands like him in the country now, bravely and securely giving battle against the native optimism, the tolerance, the slowness to suspect, to hate and to condemn which are the damnable characteristics of their forbearing hosts, whose money they take while deploring the system under which it is made. Kalmikoff himself was, like so many foreign Jews, a man with a considerable air of culture overlying that capacity for fear which has made so many of his race successful in material ways. While Irma obsessed him as the biblical shepherd is said to have been obsessed by the strayed lamb, he amused her in a perverse way. ‘Keep to your fiddle, Kalmikoff,’ I heard her say more than once, choosing the moment mercilessly; at which he would seize his encased violin—it never left his side—and raise it aloft to dash it on the floor. It never crashed down. He was too much a musician, and in any case he never could face a real and simple issue. She laughed at him, and he shouted dully at her, and now and then they fell into a second or two’s agreement about the egotistical American dream known as the Marshall Aid Plan—though for very different reasons. Kalmikoff, with that turgid and elaborate humour only possible to the humourless, repeatedly referred to it as the Marshall Truman Western Bloc-Aid Plan (a pause while he trundled his heavy eyes round the room to collect laughter), but I knew that Irma saw it as a threat to what little we had all left of Europe’s native spiritual integrity and cultural dynamism; nevertheless, because it was much in the news in those dead, vivid days, she appeared to agree on reasons as she did agree on the opinion, that it was a bad thing.
Sitting apart by the wide-open windows, I was able to watch her excited mobility during the interminable, inexhaustible and tireless arguments she and the ponderous violinist had far into the summer nights; and I envied her and her friends their amazing ability to distil from the squashed pulp of a whole harvest of words the intoxicating, volatile stimulation they gulped down with such unquenchable thirsty relish. Of one thing only I was certain: not one among them meant to do anything about the existing evils and urgent changes they took to pieces with exclamations of fury or approval. In this habit of using up their whole supply of reforming energy in passionate talk of reform, they had one thing in common, at least, with the people of the nation that has given them refuge from all but themselves and their indispensable, irritating fellow-refugees. In a sort of waking dream, myself a refugee from the unbearable futility of the too-oft-spoken word, I could see how easily they might become a nation within a nation (not only because so many of them were Jewish), as explosive within the land that was nourishing them as would be so many dangerous and ineffective messiahs born in a merely mortal world.
