The Refuge (5 page)

‘As for this, itself,’ I said, satisfied that my voice was still noticeably shaken, ‘I cannot tell you anything about it. I do know she had been subject to fits of inconsolable depression and would talk rather wildly about killing herself’ (this I had heard from Miss Werther, long ago) ‘probably because she had been through such hell before she escaped from Europe.’

‘A Communist,’ Hubble said quietly, as though to himself; but I was not sure of the ground there; I felt I should answer his comment.

‘She had been a Party member, in Europe, and had left the Party. She told me only a little of it, but quite enough to explain her occasional states of mind that were like a sort of insanity. Yet when I saw her last, late yesterday afternoon, she was perfectly happy and cheerful.’

It was true. As I handed her the cup of black coffee, which she took very strong with much sugar and a tablespoon of brandy in it, she had been laughing . . .

‘She talked so easily of suicide, now and then, that I firmly believed she could never do it. I was sure she was incapable.’

Above all, I must not let him know she had once tried to take her own life.

‘It is a hard thing for me to consider,’ I said. ‘As you know, my Church considers it one of the basest sins—something inconceivable to the ordinary mind.’

‘How long have you known her?’ Hubble said suddenly.

‘A long time, I suppose. I saw her first on the ship when she arrived with other refugees in nineteen thirty-eight. Quite a while afterwards, I met her again by chance, at a friend’s flat. Little by little we became friends, at first because I was sorry for her, and later for other reasons. I was able to be helpful to her once or twice. Three years ago she agreed to marry me. That is all.’

‘That’ll do for now, Fitz. I’m dam’ sorry you had to find it out like this. If I hadn’t insisted on dragging you along . . .’

He touched my arm and turned away.

‘Anything unusual, Doc?’

‘One of the opiates, and a hell of a lot of it,’ Maybee said. I could clearly hear their murmured talk, subdued for my sake in that place where lowered voices mattered no more. With a quick, casual movement the surgeon unfolded the cover and flicked it upwards, so that she was gone from sight completely, and there remained only the hinted outlines of a lifeless anonymity stretched out under the harsh glare of the light overhead. I knew I should never see her again.

‘They got water out of her lungs, Doc.’

‘They might have. One breath, perhaps. This stuff had about done its work when she went in, I’d say at a guess. Better fix it for tomorrow, Hubble.’

Hubble murmured something hurriedly, and then raised his voice a little to speak to me.

‘Would you like us to go on ahead and wait, Fitz?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I had better come with you. We ought to go up to the flat straight away, if you don’t mind. There may be something.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘The doc will want a p.m., you know. Mind?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘can hurt her now. Why should I mind? It is all part of the job.’

I saw the look of slightly puzzled embarrassment about his steady eyes and full, firm lips.

‘Queer devil,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Perhaps you’re right, Fitz. Part of the job. Perhaps you’re right. But look—what about that boy of yours?’

‘Later,’ I said. Now Alan would have to know—tonight; by far the worst was yet to come, I thought. ‘He’s in good hands where he is. Let us go to the flat first. He need not know about this yet. They were tremendously fond of one another, in spite of the age difference. It will be a shock to him.’

More than anything else in this affair, I had plagued myself with thoughts of how Alan would take it. At the moment, it seemed to me best that he should stay where he was, safely locked up where I could find him when it was time. A growing anxiety to return to the flat next to mine, in the company of this friendly and intelligent police sergeant, this professional detective, now quite obsessed me. As we went out the attendant came back wiping his lips; when he gave us good night as he passed, I could smell he had been drinking tea, and that made me hungry, for I had had no proper meal that night. In the passage, I heard behind us the tray slide home into the cold blackness, and the soft and final closing of the airtight door. They were sounds I heard with something of relief, something of reawakened old despair. Then we stepped out into the greenish-black air of night in the empty street. The small rain was still falling.

In the car, driving back along George Street towards the centre of the city, Hubble and Maybee were silent, until the sergeant, as though reaching the end of a train of thought, said suddenly, ‘Now then—your story, Fitz. “The body of a young woman clad only in pyjamas was found by Sydney Water Police late last night floating in the harbour off Woolloomooloo Bay. The dead woman was later identified as Miss Martin or Maartens, also known as Irma Francis, age so-and-so, a Dutch migrant who had worked in Australia as a professional mannequin. Medical examination indicated that the dead woman had taken a large quantity of a—a sleeping-draught, and police believe she may have entered the water while not fully aware of what she was doing. This theory is borne out by the fact that death was caused by drowning. Detective-Sergeant Hubble of the C.I.B. is in charge of investigations.”’

After a pause, he said with a coldness I guessed was affected, ‘Is that in the best
Gazettese
? I think it tells the truth without bringing in personalities.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That will do very well. To tell you the truth, I was wondering how to put it.’

‘And some day,’ he went on, as if he had not heard me, ‘you can tell me the whole story.’

His voice now was as cold and heavy as a stone. I took a deeper breath, but he was too quick for me.

‘Don’t interrupt, Fitz, until I’ve said what I’m going to say. Whether you like it or not. Firstly, I don’t mind telling you it looks a dam’ funny way for any woman, especially a young and beautiful one, to put her own light out. Apparently she had enough of whatever drug it was to do her business, so why the water? Did she think of the water first, and take the dope to make it easier and to make certain? That’s possible, I know. We’ve had these double-header jobs before and they’re always puzzling. But usually they use a rope for their second string, so to speak. You know that yourself. Was she worried about what she’d look like afterwards? Suicides nine times out of ten are what you writers call consumed with vanity. They are. If she had that in mind, she forgot the fishes and sharks
et cetera
in our lovely harbour. It’s only luck that they got her so soon, that she’s not unrecognizable at first glance. How long would you say she’d been in, Doc?’ he said in a louder voice, without looking away from the upward incline of William Street, now almost empty of traffic, which we were ascending at some speed towards the sleepless brilliance of Kings Cross.

Maybee said glumly, ‘Hard to tell. Anything from two to six hours, at a guess. My guess is no better than yours. All I can tell you is that she must have been alive when she went in, if they got water from the lungs. Whether she was conscious or not is another matter. The p.m. may give us some idea. You can make that for eleven o’clock if that suits Weatherall.’

‘Right . . . How would she get in if she wasn’t conscious? The answer is either A or B. A says she might fall in. B says she might have been pushed or dropped in.’

I felt compelled to interrupt at last.

‘B would be murder.’

‘Right.’

‘Impossible.’

He laughed through his nose briefly.

‘Fitz, Fitz, nothing’s impossible when you’re dealing with human frailty. You of all people should know that. Had she any enemies—people, foreigners, who might want her out of the picture? You know what these refugees are. Had she?’

‘Ten years ago I would have said “perhaps” to that,’ I told him. ‘Anyone who leaves the Party always has enemies, depending on how important the apostate may have been as a member. She was . . . just a member, I imagine, and on the other side of the world. No, I know of no enemies in the last few years, none at all.’

Except herself
, I might have added, and it might or might not have sounded right to Hubble in his present state of mind. I said no more.

‘Well,’ he said, with a sort of reluctance, ‘I suppose you’d be the one to know. All the same, I agree with what you said. When they talk a lot about suicide they seldom do it . . . Look here, Fitz, don’t misunderstand me. I’m sincerely and deeply sorry about it for your sake. But for me it’s a job—just another job. I have to get these things out clean with no tangles or implications or loose ends. The fact that you and I’ve been friends for donkeys’ years mustn’t be allowed to make any difference. When I say I hope for your sake it was suicide, don’t get me wrong. If it had happened to be murder, your own part in the story would have had to come out, and I quite realize you don’t want that. Jesus—how the Sunday papers would go to town about you. What was it they called you that time—“the neatly-bearded and aloof Mister Lloyd (‘Sherlock Holmes’) Fitzherbert, bright boy of the
Gazette
’s secret sleuthing department”, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s more for the boy’s sake,’ I said, ‘than for my own. He knows nothing of the marriage, and I think it would upset him a good deal if he found out about it now, in that particular way. Some day I shall have to tell him, of course . . . Not that you could call it much of a marriage, in any case, I suppose.’

In the back seat the morose police surgeon laughed suddenly and harshly.

‘You people will never face the facts about women,’ he said, ‘all you bloody gentlemen and policemen. No man on night duty and on call at all hours should ever think of marriage. Who’s ever known a happy doctor’s wife? Unless she had a second string to her bow, as most of ’em have. It’s so obvious. It’s only at night that women have any use for a man. Bloody nuisances in daylight. Ask any house-frau.’

We reached the Cross. Light seemed to swallow us; the coloured glare of the neon signs made the face of humanity into a livid mask. By contrast with the empty city streets we had just left, the place was still restless with life, sleepless and hectic, a gleaming nightmare of faces and eyes seen as it were through greenish-red water, drowning. We had turned cautiously left into Darlinghurst Road, the street of greatest activity at any hour. At this time of night people were walking in the roadway without care, and the clearest sound, rising above the throb of engines and the scraps of music like torn flags in a wind, was the intermittent blare of taxi-cab horns. When we were forced to halt for some seconds at the Springfield Avenue corner, the voices reached us; and I thought again, as always, how there must be less English spoken in this quarter than in any other equivalent area in the whole country. As the world’s most thickly-populated district of comparable size, it had long ago become a refuge within a refuge. Every foreigner who landed from Sydney harbour or stepped to earth at Mascot aerodrome knew of the Cross already, and went there as though drawn by an irresistible passion, there to fade—if he chose—into a consoling anonymity until, like the beetle or the butterfly from its chrysalis, he was ready to emerge, full of plans for conquest.

Irma had come here from her ship, she told me; and I knew she had never lived anywhere else in Sydney, never sought or thought of another refuge until she was driven to it; for here she felt at first she had reached her Ultima Thule, the end and the beginning of the world. Like thousands of others in the years just before the second world-war and during it, she felt the safety of the place, its air of plenty, the security of many tongues, most of which she herself knew, and the more animal security of the herd actuated by one itching idea, which was, as I had learned with dismay and a sort of shame, to outwit the Australian hosts in every way, at every turn in every affair, however small. It was when I myself had become a dupe, a voluntary victim of this almost unconscious intention striking at my most real life, my integrity and my very self—it was then that I had been driven, by a force beyond analysis and so beyond proper control, to act.

‘Thank God for the Cross,’ Hubble was murmuring; and he seemed to have forgotten the matter to which he had been giving such cold, intense thought two minutes earlier. ‘Where would we poor policemen be without it? Crime—I dote on it. Don’t you?’

‘Like you,’ I said, ‘I live by it. If it interests me, it is for reasons you would not understand.’

‘Ho-ho-ho.’

At the end of Darlinghurst Road we turned right, and the car’s headlights swept through sudden comparative gloom and silence. Through the cleared half-moon of glass before me, on which the windscreen-wiper was working with awkward urgency, I could see the wet street above which the night brooded, heavy with rain. We were going downhill now, to the maze of dead-end streets at water-level on the city side of Rushcutters Bay; we were nearly home. Again the despair, the fruitless sense of completion, the loneliness, came upon me, as for days past they had done hereabouts when in the small hours I made my way back, usually on foot from the Cross, to my own flat night after night, knowing that only a wall divided from each other the only two people I had ever fully loved, disinterestedly with my mind as well as with my heart and, indeed, all my flesh, all my spirit, my whole self. Now the two flats would be empty.

‘Right at the end still, isn’t it?’ Hubble said doubtfully.

‘Right at the end, on the right.’

‘On the very edge of the water.’

‘Almost in the water. The harbour-side foundation is carried straight ahead to make a tidal breakwater for the swimming pool belonging to the building.’

We ran gently down the last incline, almost as steep as a ramp, and stopped before the dimly-lighted front entrance. When he cut off the engine, a profound silence enveloped us, emphasized by the faint contracting clicks of hot metal cooling under the bonnet. This was one of the quietest parts of the whole city, for the streets were all
culs-de-sac,
and there was no passage for through traffic within half a mile. Cars could not even approach at speed without risk, and the noise of accelerated departures up the steep street was always a diminishing noise; nor did we whose flats faced north-east, looking out across the vast beauty and peace of the outer harbour, hear any sounds of street traffic at all—nothing but the hush and splash of the ocean, landlocked and serene, against the breakwater and the boat-house piles, the grating screams of the grey gulls shearing for ever across the sky’s huge disclosure, and the mild and distant sounds of the ceaseless traffic of the sea as the ships came and went, by night and by day . . . Yes, it was a place of peace, where the spirit could, if it would, be still.