The Refuge (7 page)

Standing there just inside the doorway, breathing her most intimate atmosphere for the last time, while she lay cold and lifeless in an airtight refrigeration chamber, a body among other unwanted bodies each in its narrow deathly little cell, I decided that Alec should arrange with the owners, if possible, to purchase the entire furnishings of the flat for what they cared to pay, so that like certain others in the building it could be rented furnished. I would probably never enter or see into it again, and I was not inclined to have anything more to do with what had belonged to her, even though many of the material things I myself had given her cried out softly to be remembered and taken away. Miss Werther could look after it—that would be better still, better than Alec. For the rest, all was ended tonight, all, and there must be no loose threads. On this I was absolutely determined, just as I was determined that Alan too should never come in here again. There must be no loose threads for him either, for youth can become entangled in such things more easily even than maturity, to its own confusion.

I became aware that Hubble had returned to the room behind me and was waiting, so I switched off the bedside lamp at the door switch and closed the door. As I turned to him I saw again that look of simple compassion in his blue friendly eyes.

‘Shall we go?’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more, I think.’

The place suddenly felt dead and empty, as though no one had ever lived there. I looked at none of it as we let ourselves out; I would have welcomed the suggestion of a haunting ghost, but there was no ghost, nothing but a still emptiness containing nothing, expecting no one.

There was still much to be done, and I clung to that thought. When Hubble was settled in my flat, I went down and called Alec from the first landing, apologizing for having kept him out of bed for so long. He followed me up in silence. No doubt the thought of meeting a policeman professionally in some way outraged his law-abiding soul. But Hubble was all kindliness and brevity now, when he questioned him.

‘I heard
her
wireless,’ Alec said in a more confident tone. ‘That would
be
at seven p.m., sir, because I had just gone
up
to
look
at one of the off
-peak
hot-water
tanks
, and it was coming
down
I heard
it
, quite a while after Mr. Fitz, I should say Mr.
Fitzherbert
, had gone off to the office, which is why I remember, for as you know Mr. Fitz and Alan was very friendly with Miss Martin, poor thing, and they was always in and out of one another’s flats when at home. Oh—I hope I do not divulge unwanted information, Mr. Fitz?’

‘Go ahead, Alec,’ I said. ‘Did you hear the wireless stop?’

‘No, sir, but one of her
friends
came, and when he
knocked
he could not
get
an answer, so
he
came downstairs to
me
and says was Miss Martin
out
? and I says not that I am aware of, because mostly I hear the tenants
come
and
go
, and he says “
Well
,” he says, “she does not
answer
her door so I presume,” he says, “she has gone
out,
though
she
was
expecting
me.” So I said to him, “
Well
.
.
.”’

‘What time was this?’ Hubble asked gently. Alec, interrupted, looked confused for a moment; his fixed stare over Hubble’s head wavered and came back to the present.

‘About eight o’clock I think it was,’ he said.

‘And what was the visitor like?’ Hubble asked.

‘Like, sir?
He
was one of these
foreigners
, very foreign in his way of
speaking
, with a big dark mo and glasses.’

‘Kalmikoff,’ I said. ‘He’s a musician, an irritating fellow she seemed to have known for years. One of those fugitives from Communist Russia who become rabidly communist the moment they reach a country of refuge. Like most of them, he is quite futile and harmless—irritating to talk with, but an excellent musician. You may have heard of him, even if you have not heard him play. He is a violinist.’

‘I may have heard of him,’ Hubble said. ‘As for music, I know nothing about it. Did he stay or go?’ he asked Alec.

‘Him? Oh—
he
went away, sir, and rather
angry
I should say
he
was, muttering to himself in some foreign lingo.
I
went upstairs again, but Miss
Martin
had turned her wireless
off
, and if she has gone
out
, I thought, why,
she
has been pretty quiet about it. Most likely she didn’t want to see
this
chap, I thought, but too kind to say so. She was always very kind in that way, sir. And that is all I know.’

His information could not have satisfied me more if I had dictated it to him myself. Fortunate fellow, he would return to sleep not knowing that when he had heard her wireless tuned to Radio Luxembourg—the only foreign station I knew how to find—Irma was already dead in the early darkness of the placid harbour beyond the breakwater; while I, not she, had heard his quick steps softly pass that door and continue the descent towards dinner and a peaceful evening with the papers and the commercial broadcasting programmes. Before Kalmikoff banged at the door, before Alec returned to listen, I had gone by the way I came after my earlier and more ostentatious departure.

‘Thank you,’ Hubble said. ‘This is quite helpful. And now you had better be off to bed—catch up on your beauty-sleep, lucky man.’

Alec made a sudden clucking noise, his queer way of laughing, and went towards the door, saying, ‘
Beauty-
sleep. That’s a good one. Wait till Emmy
hears
that one. Good night, sir, good night Mr. Fitz
herbert
. . .
Beauty-
sleep!’

He let himself out and clucked softly downstairs. Hubble smiled at the closed door while I set out whisky and a soda-water siphon on the book-table beside my reading chair where he sat, and poured us a stiff peg each. As he took the tumbler, he motioned with his head at the telephone on my work-table in the corner near the windows.

‘Hadn’t you better ring your office?’ he said. ‘Then we’ll go and get that boy of yours out of the clutches of the law. He must have cooled off enough by now.’

‘What about Maybee?’ I said. ‘Would he join us?’

‘Don’t bother him. He’s most probably asleep, if I know the doc. A hard-working, hard-tongued chap, but one of the best. Now.’

I went to the table and unlocked the only drawer in the whole place that had a key to it. It contained my small revolver, which I had bought and had licensed in my early, youthful days on police rounds, and had never used; and weighted down by this were some half-dozen letters from Irma which for reasons of somewhat weakly sentiment I had kept, meaning always to destroy them yet somehow never being quite willing to part with them or anything else that had been hers. I had never looked at them again. The most recent one, more than three years old, I took out and carried to Hubble where he sat holding his glass near his mouth, enjoying the whisky and at the same time smoking his pipe for all the world as though he were seated by his own fireside. I was pleased to observe the finality of his relaxation; it made my own mind easier, and I filled and lighted a pipe for myself. Then I went back to the table and sat down, and took up the telephone receiver to speak to Blake. As I did so, it occurred to me that I had never had and now never would have that telephone call on which my whole future had seemed to hang; and this I took as a warning not to count on the preconceived mechanics of a carefully devised situation when such a situation depends however lightly upon tides and men and other factors not mechanical.

‘Thanks,’ Hubble said, coming over when I had given Blake the brief story. (‘Can’t you do better than a bloody suicide, Fitz? Give us blood, man,’ Blake said when I had finished.) ‘That puts it beyond doubt.’

He was holding out the letter, looking down at me, his fat, strong face serenely quizzical and apologetic. We met each other’s gaze for some seconds; then he smiled.

‘Don’t forget what I said earlier. One day you can tell me the whole story. You can answer all the questions you know I haven’t asked you . . . And now let’s go and get that precious boy of yours.’

It was then that I decided to write this down, as time allowed, partly to ease my soul of a burden I had not even then foreseen, partly to help memory shrug off the weight of what is now past and irrevocable. Until I die, it can remain in that locked drawer with the useless revolver and the now meaningless letters from the woman I loved, for whose death may God forgive me in the end.

The harbour in the early morning of a winter day, when the eastern sky is cloudy, is like music. I am reminded—against my will—of the opening of Brahms’s great E-minor symphony: there is a cool, voluptuous quality in the light of air and water, and an underlying rhythm much like that of the horns playing their slow and serious melody above the faint
pizzicato
of the strings. Sunrise is the moment when the strings themselves take over the melodic line and shed a clear light upon the triplets in the
tempo
.

It is not encouraged, by true musicians, to associate the sound of music with any visual impressions. Hearing the music, one should see the score; seeing the score, one should be able to hear the music and nothing more. With this I cannot but agree, in theory and argument; yet despite myself music has its visual associations and brings its own visions, so that even now as I imagine the sensuous fourfold first theme of the first movement of the Franck violin sonata I feel that speechless constriction in the throat, that faint tingling in the palms of my hands which a sudden sight of Irma unawares always gave me.

These sensations developed much later when I began to realize and admit what I felt about her. Nothing so personal and intimate touched me on the occasion when I saw her for the first time, although that first meeting remains as vivid in memory as any later one—more vivid, perhaps, since for my part no emotions were involved. I was merely a newspaper man doing a colleague’s job, and not liking it much.

That was in August of nineteen thirty-eight, years ago now, when many of us knew that war in Europe was inevitable, this year or next year, though none of us could have foretold its direction or development or who all the participants would be. The shipping editor of the
Gazette
was ill for some weeks, and each day one or other of us who were senior staff men was invited to take some of the weight of the job off the shoulders of his junior assistant. Socially and economically, shipping was still more important than airways; most of the people who made news still arrived in Australia by sea, and the
Gazette
’s cover was thorough.

It meant very early rising as a rule, usually—in my own case—after late night work, and it was not relished; but ships arriving from Europe even then were bringing refugees by the score and the hundred into this country, and were certainly well worth watching, though few of the new arrivals from the dangerous antipodean Old World (which seemed to us to be very old indeed, and increasingly ill-tempered and grotesque) would say much. Many of them had left families still living in the Nazi shadow, and dared not talk, for the remote young continent was fairly well watched by German agents. Most of the newcomers had themselves spent the years since nineteen thirty-three in secret terror or open flight. Australia was their last refuge. They were not going to spoil things here right at the start by indulging that inclination to personal publicity which was, we found, perhaps the most obvious if not the most deep-rooted of all their common characteristics. (Their next most obvious one, it quickly became clear, was an established contempt for Australia and Australians, even before they had descended the ship’s gangways; and this was sometimes so open and arrogant, with such a display of ignorant self-conceit, that there were occasional regrettable scenes between members of the well-disposed host nation and their seemingly unwilling and curiously resentful guests.) By far the greater percentage of them was Jewish, and not notable for emotional stability or outward control, though I always knew the hard inward core was there.

With other journalists and our photographers, I went out in the Press launch to meet the
Empire Queen
as she came into the harbour. It would have been a Brahms early morning but for the bitterly cold north-east wind coming straight in through the distant Heads and ruffling the steel-grey of the enclosed sea to a troubled darkness streaked with white. It was blowing not hard but steadily, without a pause, as though it had never ceased to blow since the dawn of time. The big passenger vessel, later sunk while acting the futile role of armed merchantman in the Indian Ocean, had just entered the Heads from the cold unease of the winter Pacific outside. For once, we were early on the job, and had to wait, rocked in a sickening swell, until a police launch pulled away from the gangway on the port side to give us room. I had been informed, the night before, that three rather important Communists were aboard in the guise of refugees; this had come from Melbourne, where it had been discovered, or at least confirmed, only after the ship had left two days ago, and I wanted to be in time for any scenes that might develop after the plain-clothes men had gone aboard. I might have saved myself the trouble of being first up the slippery and unsteady gangway, as it happened, for, having identified their men, the police separated to help the Customs officers who had begun a routine search of the vessel for contraband. Passengers’ luggage would wait until it was unloaded into the sheds at Darling Harbour, on the other side of the bridge which, from where we were, looked like a delicate, fantastic silverpoint drawing against the pallor of the western sky. Its huge single arch now had a faery quality, and the dim, incessant rumble, like sustained and remote thunder, made by the electric trains and trams roaring across it without a stop from south to north, from north to south, seemed to come from another world. The screaming of the scavenging gulls in our wake, and the occasional whooping sirens of the tugs ahead, were sounds much nearer, more proper to our dead-slow passage through the white-flecked dark water between distant foreshores green with dark trees or pale where the red-and-white of story-book buildings came down to the harbour’s very edge.