The Refuge (6 page)

This time I led the way, and Maybee stayed in the darkness of the rear seat, smoking in silence. The caretaker’s small flat was on the floor below street level, and while Hubble waited I went down the single unlit flight of stairs, and rang the bell. It was a bad hour in which to wake a man out of his first sleep. For some time there was no answer. I tossed up my keys to Hubble and told him to go up to the third landing and let himself into the flat next to mine. A deep silence filled the building, for it was almost one o’clock, and though we who were tenants lived near the Cross we had, for the most part, suburban habits. Irma was the only one, besides myself, who had kept late hours; and now, of course, time would never again mean any more to her than she meant to time, or to me. She was gone, and sometimes during this long night my own desire to live had wavered, as though willing to be gone with her; and only the thought of Alan, so young and proud and bright with happiness and intelligence, had steadied and fed the flame of that desire when it seemed to weaken within me.

I realized now, as I listened to Hubble’s ascending steps soften into silence on the carpeted stair, that never again would I return home in the hours after midnight to find her lying on the blue rug, open-eyed and quite motionless before her low-tuned wireless receiver, listening to foreign broadcasts; never again would she pull me down on to the floor beside her, roughly and without a word, and invariably begin to rub my hair with almost ruthless fingers until, although refreshed by this and by her bodily nearness, I could bear neither without moving for a moment longer.

Standing down there in the dark, I felt very tired. No sound of movement could be heard from Alec’s little flat, and I pressed the bell-button a second time, holding it down a little longer. The abrupt opening of the door inwards, away from my face, startled me, but in spite of the sensation of profound weariness, I had command of myself; and in any case, I am not a nervous man. Alec’s daughter, prepared I think to be indignant, stood against the light of the small entrance hall, wearing like a cloak a woollen dressing-gown that partly concealed her winter pyjamas. She was still half-asleep.

‘It’s Lloyd Fitzherbert, Emmy,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d like to see your father for a minute.’

‘’S asleep, Mr. Fitz,’ she struggled to say. ‘Won’t I do?’

Alec had no wife alive, but had got his job of caretaker on the understanding that his daughter shared the work and the living quarters with him. He once told me she was better than any wife, as she would not bother to quarrel with him and took his mild orders obediently; and it is certain that this was one of the best-cared-for buildings in the whole rabbit-warren of a residential district in which it unobtrusively stood. It is no less certain that I never knew a young woman, as generally presentable as Emmy, who gave such an immediate impression of having no private life of her own whatever.

‘I think you had better get him up for me,’ I said; and though we spoke only in casual murmurs, our voices seemed to echo up the stair-well with a ghastly hollowness, like the voices of conspirators in a cellar.

She went away from the door, and I heard her call her father in a hushed and regretful tone, and heard his sudden answer in the brisk voice of a man who wishes to be thought wide awake and expectant. A minute later he came himself, owl-eyed in the light, hitching his dressing-gown about his shoulders.

‘What’s trouble, Mr. Fitz?’ he said in a surprised voice.

I told him, and explained that I wanted his master-key. I did not tell him Hubble had used my own duplicate and was already in the flat next to mine.

‘Don’t go to bed for a few minutes,’ I said. ‘There is a police detective with me who may want to ask you a few purely formal questions, as you are in charge here. It is for him I want the key.’

Speechless, he took a ring of keys from somewhere behind the door, looked at them and pushed them about until he could isolate a particular one. I saw he was well awake by now; when he spoke at last, it was with his own peculiar intonation and emphasis which always put me in mind of some radio comedian I had once heard on a B.B.C. programme.

‘
That
one is
her
key,’ he said in his queer falsetto voice. ‘There
is
no
master
key, Mr. Fitz, but
that
one is
hers.
Or . . . should I
say—
er
—was
? Dear me. This is
indeed
a dreadful
thing,
and
you
and your
boy
and
her
such
friends.
Dear me, what a dreadful
thing.
I do
hope
, Mr. Fitz, it doesn’t get in the
papers
, I mean to
say,
the
flats
, you know—it’s the
letting
what I’m
thinking
of, Mr. Fitz. People don’t
like
it, goodness knows
why
, but they
don
’
t.
’

‘We’ll keep the address out of it, Alec,’ I said. ‘Just wait for a minute or two, and I’ll call down to you if Sergeant Hubble wants you.’

‘As you
say
, Mr. Fitz,’ he said rather doubtfully; and I left him there in the doorway with his pinched, precise face turned up as he watched me go with some anxiety, and began the climb up that so-familiar stairway to the third landing and—as I hoped—the beginning of the last act in this drama of my own devising, which would be almost at an end when I brought Alan home. It was a heavy and an interminable ascent, for while my will led me up and on with desperate determination, my whole body was in open rebellion now, and I had actually to resist a strong urge to sit down on the top step of the first flight and lean my forehead against the coldness of the pale-green wall. Only the knowledge that Hubble was in her flat, alone, drove me on without a pause. When I reached the landing I saw the lighted doorway, and saw his bulky shadow move slowly across the slab of light on the corridor carpet outside it. Without hesitation I went in to join him. One look about, as I entered the big room from the entrance lobby, assured me that all was as it should be. Hubble, very solid and serious in his heavy overcoat, stood still now in the middle of the deep-blue carpet. His regard met mine without suspicion, with—I thought—an expression of simple compassion at last.

‘There’s a note for you on the radio,’ he said. ‘I want you to tell me, for the sake of formality, if it’s her handwriting. If you have any letters of hers you’ve saved, you’d better show me one. Just formality, you know. The note about settles it, I think.’

I took up the note with both hands. In these matters you cannot be too careful, particularly under the very eye of the police; and that folded sheet of paper, did he but know it, already had my finger-prints on it, as well as Irma’s. I did not enjoy this active deceiving of a man who had long been my good friend, but I had determined that it should be he, and no one else from his branch if possible, who would be with me at this moment, for now much depended upon his casual goodwill towards me. It must be understood that I was thinking throughout not of myself and my own safety, but of Alan. Once determined upon, once begun, the business must not be botched through any over-confidence of mine, for the boy’s whole well-being depended upon me now.

Our friends, as well as those who love us much, are of course our easiest dupes. I had recently tasted this duplicity myself, and was as yet no judge upon it; but it was then that, by the action of that terrible and subtle poison, part of my inner self had withered and died, in a space of minutes, like green leaves in a quick fire. Not for the world would I have had Hubble experience, through my own action, anything like this.

I read the note. Though I knew it by heart, I read it again with an irresistible fascination now, for now, after so many months, it had true and fatal meaning. That meaning I myself had infused into the half-hysterical words so clearly and neatly written:

‘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 all night and day even when I sleep. So I am going. This time it is true. I thank you for loving me so kindly and I kiss you

Goodbye Fitzi darling
—
IRMA
’

After handling the paper a little more, turning it over as though seeking some added word, some more definite explanation of that least natural of all human actions, suicide, I held it out to Hubble.

‘You’ll want this, I suppose,’ I said. ‘It’s certainly her handwriting.’

Without speaking he took it, folded it, and put it neatly into his large wallet. Then he walked to the window, and from the light folding table that always stood there, at which we had taken so many good and happy meals, he lifted up the empty glass tube by sliding a pencil into it. Turning back to the room, he waved it briefly at me.

‘Morphine hydrochloride,’ he said conversationally. ‘Quarter grains. I wonder how much there was in this? Did you know she had the stuff?’

‘I knew she used to have it. She used it with a needle, she told me, years ago when she had some painful trouble—I think she brought it into the country with her. A great many of them—the refugees—did that. They carted the stuff about with them wherever they went in Europe, after nineteen thirty-three, I believe—only it was usually one of the cyanides. In small glass capsules that could be hidden, or even swallowed unbroken and recovered. You will know all about it, I expect. She had one of those too, but I threw it into the harbour. About the morphine, she told me she had lost that years ago. She must have come across it again since. I could not disbelieve her, anyhow. Possibly she got more. They used to get those things easily enough from Jewish chemists in Europe. You know what the casual traffic in it was like here after nineteen thirty-nine. They were the people responsible, the refugees. And it all began because they were frightened even of Australia. They made sure they had a way out. Apparently she did too. If I had known she had that . . .’

I left it to him to finish the sentence, for although not a nervous man, I am a bad hand at telling lies.

‘If you’d known, she might be still alive, you mean?’ Hubble said softly. ‘Well, Fitz—maybe. But in view of that note I doubt it. She meant business, Fitz. But why in God’s name do they do it?’

I sighed. He was not, in his manly kindness of heart, to know that it was a sigh of relief, as well as of utter weariness and that sick despair which I could neither understand nor fight down. All was now ended—all but the task of getting Alan home and telling him, somehow without lying, of Irma’s fate; and such was my unforeseen relief at Hubble’s last remarks that this task did not now seem so hard in prospect. Often before tonight I had consoled the boy’s grief and hidden my own caused by the sight of his; I could do it again, I could do it as long as I lived, for this love knows no exhaustion, asks no return; it is like the spring of water near Hill Farm, in the mountains: no man has ever known it to falter or dry and cease from flowing.

‘I’ve looked round,’ Hubble said. ‘There’s that coffee cup on the radio—can you find me a bottle of some sort, I’ll take the dregs for Maybee. It’s likely she took the stuff in that.’

In the kitchen, off the small passage that opened upon the service-staircase outside, I looked about for a small container. The complete tidiness of the place, scrubbed and immaculate as though never used, gave me again that subtle feeling of pleasure I had always had when looking at the indications of her manner of living; for she was tidy and clean to a truly exquisite degree, yet in so casual a manner that one never seemed to catch her at it. This was especially true of her person, though her natural physical perfection was nothing at all like the aseptic and repellent American magazine-advertisement sort, but arose and emanated rather from an abundance of good health and her use of leisure for being idle than from the pursuit either of health or of leisure so miserably characteristic of the age. I never knew a woman with her capacity for immobility and ease. Like her strange, animal ability to sleep at will, from which I think it sprang, it was at first disconcerting, though in time I learned its virtue and lost my earlier desire to make her move and speak; to ask—like any love-sick boy—‘What are you thinking about?’ Her reply, which in another woman might have sounded foolishly affected, was the simple truth: ‘I think of nothing at all. My mind is a blank, so do not talk to me, darling.’

I could hear that voice with its light, strong, un-English inflections and accent as I opened the doors of the cupboard under the shining sink. It was so clear in my hearing, memory was so faithful and vivid, that an inadvertent thrill of intense, unreasonable happiness passed through my nerves and seemed to lodge like an obstruction in my throat, bringing a sting of tears, while I bent down to search for one of the small brandy flasks she kept for replenishments, to lace her morning and evening coffee with the spirits. I had forgotten she was dead.

‘Fine,’ Hubble said, when I took the little flat bottle in to him. ‘Did she drink much of this, by the way?’

‘Two tablespoons a day,’ I said. ‘One in the morning, one in the evening, always in coffee. She considered it a sort of tonic medicine. Otherwise, she drank wine sometimes with meals. Not always. She was as abstemious as—as I am myself.’

Hubble laughed softly as he drained the porcelain coffee cup with delicate precision into the flask.

‘What a nice sober couple you must have been, then,’ he said. ‘Personally, I could do with a drink right now.’

‘When you are ready,’ I said, ‘we can go next door and you can have some whisky, if that will do. I have the caretaker waiting, if you want to see him.’

‘Fine,’ he said again without much interest. ‘Better see him, I suppose. He may be able to give us some idea of the time.’

While he took the empty cup and its saucer to the kitchen to rinse them—for, like some fat men and not all police officers, he was a neat and tidy fellow in all things—I looked in at the bedroom. It was, of course, just as I had seen it last, like the rest of the flat, not many hours before. On the white dressing-table lay her hairbrush which I had picked up from where it fell out of her hands; and I thought I could see still on the bedcover the faint imprint of her half-conscious form, though I had smoothed the ruffled material after I got her off the bed and into a chair in the big room. Neither of us would ever wake again in that firm and comfortable bed, as until recently we had so often done when the light of dawn warned me that it was time to go softly back to my own flat. I supposed that to the rest of the world it would have seemed a fantastic marriage, had the facts of it been known; but as it was it suited us both very well, for there was something innocently clandestine about it besides the freedom of movement made possible by those two separate and adjacent establishments, each of which one of us commanded without question.