The Refuge (8 page)

We were seven men and three women in our party (I could seem to hear the voice of every news-editor in town automatically intoning, ‘Get the women’s angle. That’s what we want these days—the women’s angle.’), and as they came up one by one, some carrying cameras, heads were turned and blank or suspicious or dully curious eyes looked us over before the faces were turned abruptly away; for most of the passengers must have been on deck, and there was a subdued noise of excited speech in many languages as these creatures neared the end of their bitter flight, and studied with passionate excitement the shores of final refuge.

Sydney in that year was a hundred and fifty years old, and the ordinary troubles of the Press were being aggravated by what was called—with almost American infelicity—‘the sesquicentenary celebrations’.
Post urbe condita ann. CL—
if indeed the city ever had been actually founded; and it is still one of the world’s ugliest, beyond the lovely approaches from the sea, as those who work in the heart of it know. It developed without plan from the original huts near the water’s edge, spreading southwards in a tangled sprawl of narrow streets, and westwards to the complex shoreline of the inner harbour; and south and west the factories appeared as time passed, right in the path of the strongest prevailing winds, so that the ineradicable grime of smoke and dust from the enclosing semicircle of high chimneys spiking the horizon is never absent from the exterior and interior surfaces of the cramped and hideous Victorian buildings which scowl above the hopelessly overcrowded traffic lanes. Macquarie and his ex-convict architect Greenway had all too short a term together in their intention to make the town as beautiful as its site must once have been. When they were gone, no other inspired mind followed them with authority to pursue their quest for grace and space; the town became a city irresistibly and without plan, and from the south and west the dirt settled upon it. The men of the good Queen’s era built their mean buildings behind grotesque and hypocritical façades, and the ownership of street frontages passed securely and unalterably from one generation to the next, so that today it is impossible to walk in comfort on the street sidewalks, or travel in comfort on the roadways—or, indeed, to be comfortable and at ease anywhere at all in the public places. Greed, more potent and less patent than even the sincerest show of civic pride, has kept the main streets to a mediaeval narrowness across which office boys can throw paper darts from window to window, and typists and their employers can observe other typists’ clothes and
maquillage
with unstrained critical eyes. And over all, indoors and out, lies the dark and metallic film of unconquerable grime.

Nevertheless, from the mighty bosom of the harbour the skyline to the south and west is mildly fascinating. With unrestricted ground space it has no cause to tower like the incredible aerial skyline of New York. The clouds may lie low over it without obscuring it, and on mornings such as this, when the wind is fresh from the ocean outside the Heads, the blue haze is gone from the narrow ravines of the streets, and the whole scene has the accurate unreality of a detailed stage backdrop. As I looked at it over the heads of the new arrivals crowding the port rail, the weak August sun rose above a seaward bank of heavy cloud and veiled it in an illusory mist of gold, chilly and pale, and in our wake the grey water coldly sparkled under the following wind.

The
Empire Queen
’s purser, busy and harassed, with four interpreters adding to the confusion of his last half-hour before the ship berthed, yet made time to go hurriedly through my passenger list with me. After the brisk air of the open deck, the atmosphere below was thick and stale and still, tepid as used bath-water. While I made notes of half a dozen names of possible interest, a melodious gong sounded through the broadcasting system the call to the second breakfast sitting, and the crowd round the gilded grille of the purser’s office thinned somewhat. At such moments, when the journey’s end is near, meals are subtly reassuring to the traveller who feels a strange and alien world at hand beyond the ship’s rail. It was now I, watching the faces and listening to the excited greetings of those who were making their way to their familiar seats in the saloons, who felt like a stranger among the powerful and evanescent friendships of that long voyage into the unknown. The imminence of final separation, after the closed and intimate and unworldly life on board, and the strong community of their alien origins regardless of nationalities, were for the last time uniting them as though, like an army on the eve of invasion, they were wholly of one mind in a simple and desperate purpose. There was about them, in their eyes and speech, a kind of gay defiance of whatever fate awaited them in the crude, traditionless, uncultured country of their choice. I did not doubt they sat down with good appetite.

Ten minutes after that tuneful gong had sounded through the amplifiers, the lower decks had an air of emptiness and desertion as positive as the whole ship would have when, lying at her berth in the still and torpid water of the inner harbour, she was finally emptied of her human freight. Without any certain objective, I made my way down the stair opposite the purser’s office to the second saloon deck, where the atmosphere was even more like used bath-water, slack with steam and the smell of oil, cigarette smoke, linoleum, soap and crowded humanity. Here the cabins, most of which had their doors hooked back as the stewards, in a sudden passion of attentive service, made ready to take up what they could seize of the fantastic assortment of luggage, were of four or six berths, according as they opened inwards, or out upon the second-class promenade deck. Much of the baggage had a cheap smartness about it, the
ersatz
smartness of poverty, or of wealth disguised as poverty, which characterized so many things—and people—arriving at these shores from Europe in those days of fear.

I walked aimlessly aft along the starboard-side corridor, with the bathrooms and toilets and stewards’ offices on the right, the open cabin doorways on the left. There was a softly-vibrating silence and a noticeable smell of women passengers, their cosmetics and clothes and bodies, mingled with the steamy, astringent odour of hot sea-water and the smell of the imperfectly aseptic toilets. No doubt I noticed this atmosphere more than the passengers would. I was already beginning to find it intolerable, and hastened my steps towards the after companionway which would take me up to the air of the winter morning, when a glance inside one of the cabins made me pause; and so it was I first saw Irma.

She was sitting on the deck of the cabin, on the bare linoleum, with her feet stretched out straight before her, her knees together and her face hidden in both hands. Her dark hair, cut so that it hung like a mediaeval page’s almost to her shoulders, fell forward over her fingers and wrists, and what made me pause, instead of passing on more hastily still, was that as she rocked back and forth she was moaning to herself like someone suffering the pain of a badly aching tooth. It was of toothache, in fact, that I immediately thought; and some impulse entirely foreign to my character, something I can still only describe and think of as a fatal prompting of chance, made me turn towards the doorway and say, ‘What is the matter, mademoiselle? Can I help you?’

I was surprised at myself, and she too was surprised, as she showed by taking her hands from her face and springing easily to her feet in an uninterrupted single movement, like a dancer or an acrobat. Erect, she stood quite still.

I saw she was wearing pyjamas. Later I learned that she wore pyjamas at all possible times of the day, hurriedly changing into them the moment she came in from the street, and sometimes even wearing them out of doors when she walked at night about Kings Cross, visiting friends. I have never considered them proper garments for a woman, even to sleep in; certainly not to wear, uncovered, by day, when they give a grotesque emphasis to whatever bodily beauty they affect to conceal; but her they suited unaccountably. It was not until the last evening of her life that I remarked on what seemed to me their impropriety, and that was only because the pyjama suit she had then put on—a new one added to her large collection only that day—went beyond all bounds of decency, being of completely transparent white nylon.

This morning the pyjamas were wholly decent, and over them she wore a knee-length house coat of some thick warm stuff like felt, dark green and cut in the Chinese style with a high collar closely fastened by a gold button the size of a florin. I imagine she had been up on deck with the rest of the passengers, to observe by dawn’s light the end of the run up the coast past Botany Bay to the dramatic turn and entry into the huge harbour between the vertical cliffs of the Heads. Below decks in that atmosphere of fug such a coat was unnecessarily warm, even though these people from Europe feel the mild Australian cold more than they ever felt their own white icebound northern winters.

I had looked at her apparel, from the thin black leather slippers to the gold medallion at her throat, in one glance and entirely from habit. Even in those early years of my profession I had had to look at many dead bodies, and clothes had come to have a deep, probably an abnormal, significance in my eyes. In the two peaceful years of my marriage, which had ended with my wife’s death eight years before this when I was still a junior on the
Gazette
staff, I doubt whether I could have described any of her outer clothing with comprehensible accuracy, and her other garments remained to the end something of a mystery, though I suppose I could have enumerated them by name after looking at the clothing advertisements and the shop windows. We had both come from Catholic households which were strict in the matter of personal privacy, when we married. Always we had undressed separately, never had we beheld each other’s body wholly naked—it would have been unthinkable. All this had much bearing on my subsequent association with the young woman who now stood before me.

When my gaze reached her face a second after she had gained her feet on the deck, I saw that it had been distorted by emotion, the wide full lips stretched in apparent anguish over startlingly white teeth, the eyes of curious opaque grey-blue staring at nothing under contracted brows. But abruptly, even as I looked, all expression vanished, and her youthful countenance became like a mask; even the eyes, those habitual traitors of the mind and spirit, contrived to express nothing. I had a moment to observe the cool adolescent perfection of her face and head as she brushed her dark hair back with the back of one wrist, before she spoke.

‘Police?’

The word came, seemingly despite herself, in a sort of gasp.

‘No, no,’ I said, smiling to reassure her, as well as at the mad thought of an Australian policeman with a van Dyke beard and moustaches; for in spite of her lack of expression her voice had betrayed a stabbing alarm. ‘I happened to be passing, and thought perhaps you were in pain
—souffrante, vous comprenez
?’

‘Pain?’ she said, ignoring my offer of a French translation. ‘No pain . . . Oh—pain! Yes, here is pain.’

She put her right hand to her heart so that under the thick stuff of the house coat her breast stood out innocently above the spread thumb and forefinger. Still I could detect nothing of feeling in the mask of her face, which I now saw was not only elusively beautiful but also tragically young for the habit of such immobility. Despite myself, I was moved by this attitude, and by the strange combination of beauty, youthfulness and self-command. When I was a youth myself we did not know such girls.

‘I am frightened,’ she said with a sort of indifference, as if we knew one another well, and never taking her regard from mine. Her English was precise, like the strange control she always had over her body’s attitudes and movements, no matter what was happening to her body: the perfect and natural control of a full-grown animal whose physical dignity you cannot destroy or pervert. She spoke in the light voice of a young girl, sweetly and with a marked but not distorting accent which she never quite lost; even among a crowd of her fellow-refugees her voice, with its buoyant quick precision, could be heard apart, idiomatic yet forever strange. Only in moments of deepest and most tender passion did it become slurred, as though by an extreme exhaustion which her body’s vigour frankly denied.

‘There is nothing to fear now,’ I said, and at once the words sounded foolish. How was I to know what would be fearful to her, what indelible terrors of memory and what vaguer terrors of anticipations she and all those in her position brought with them from Europe’s mounting nightmare of the flesh and the spirit?

‘You are in Australia now. You are safe. What is your name?’

Self-assurance had come back to me. It was not I, after all, who was the stranger here, but most of the people on this ship, who would disembark and disappear, for the most part, from official ken, and become woven into yet never quite lost in the Australian fabric like the minute individual threads in a tremendous tapestry. I was on my own ground, a newspaperman, a police roundsman, used to asking every sort of question, knowing the most difficult of the ropes, familiar with all sorts of violence, passion and death, securely employed and well paid, with a growing son and an outgrown sorrow for background. As this remembrance passed swiftly through my mind, I stepped through the cabin doorway and looked down into her face. She had not answered my question. I repeated it gently.

‘Irma,’ she said, turning her head away. ‘Irma Maartens—Nederlander. Dutch.’

‘Why were you frightened?’ I said, making my voice as casual and kindly as possible; for something in her mask-like face, something no mask could have concealed, something like the very essence of feminine beauty which is not of flesh or feature but emanates from the depths of intensely conscious being, had as it were gripped me by the throat and stormed imagination, and in that instant I felt what today I still believe to have been a perfectly sane impulse to take her face between my palms and kiss her closed lips. So strong was this impulse that I instinctively stepped back from her again, placing her out of my reach. Whether she correctly guessed what had been in my mind—she with her already shamefully extensive knowledge of men’s passions and compulsions—I did not know; but she smiled, sudden and faint, and her face was no longer so rigidly on guard.