The Refuge (19 page)

‘Yes, Mr. Fitz,’ he said, impressed by these mysterious goings-on so obviously that I forgot my own nervous irritation and had to hide my smile from him.

‘All right, all right,’ I said, ‘there’s a couple of shillings waiting here in my pocket for your trouble. Now be off with you—and listen—if anyone wants you, say you’re doing an urgent job for me. It won’t keep you late.’

When he had gone, skipping up the shadowy concrete stairway rising round the lift-well, I looked at Irma’s luggage. There was a small cabin-trunk, as well as two suitcases and a heavy coat; nothing more. It seemed unlikely that she could have lived the life she had lived for a whole year with so little. There was something pathetic in the thought. I stared at the luggage, and at my own parcels—two
batons
of bread, coffee, fish, a dressed fowl, two bottles of white wine—and wondered momentarily if it were not all a dream, the whole afternoon and these last minutes of it, so far was it all from my life as I had taken it up on waking that morning. Then I began to wonder what Irma was doing up in that little cold room alone, and why I should find myself in this fantastic, nerve-wracking and yet fascinating situation. No criminal investigation in which I had ever taken part had seemed so improbable; and it was made all the more unreal, yet somehow all the more convincing, by one sound familiar to the hour above all others—the beginning of the tramp of feet in the street outside.

This sound, to one who is not part of it, is like the sudden rise of a tide that as suddenly ebbs. The feet and the voices surge in ruthless crescendo between the darkening walls of the narrow streets with the lighted windows of shops at their base. At first the onlooker, absorbed in thought perhaps, waiting in a backwater of time, does not know that he hears, but abruptly becomes conscious of the sound and its significance: the leeching from the city itself of all that which, living, keeps the city alive. As the exodus increases, when men and women in their hundred thousands spill from the entrances of the drab buildings into the drab thoroughfares, so the sound increases; and with it the sense of release, in that vitiated air that smells of petrol fumes, metal, tar, humanity, tobacco smoke, food, heat and grime, becomes almost irresistible, and the moored onlooker feels impelled, as if by a mob’s panic, to turn, leave his place, and join the hurrying, intent throng. With every second that passes, he sees himself left behind, left behind like a strayed sheep at a crossing; he feels homeless, lonely, unwanted, of no significance to the stream of human life and affairs, and a sense of gloom and defeat emphasizes the creeping melancholy of his situation.

I stood in shadow, and listened to the beginning. Already on the doors of the lifts in the lobby behind me the drivers, physically disabled men, were hanging out their
Automatic
signs. One leaf of the double doors of the dark office building opposite was closed; and at my back, as I stood staring into the street watching lights go off and others come on in unforeseen places, there sounded on the shadowy stairway the footsteps of the first people to leave the business offices upstairs.

It was my car I looked for in the street outside, with a futile and increasing anxiety as the minute-hand of every timepiece in the city moved upwards to twelve. When there were still three minutes to go, I saw it slide in to the kerb opposite the door-way, and the driver, whom I had known for years, edged himself across the seat and got out by the near door, leaning in again to remove the ignition key.

When he turned and, seeing me, raised one hand in casual salute, I beckoned him over and together we quickly stowed the luggage, and the coat and the clumsy parcels in the back seat. We had just finished this to our satisfaction when the boy Peter appeared on the darkening stair looking down over the smart hat of a small round woman who was descending the last steps in front of him carrying a big travelling bag. When he caught my eye, he made a short indicative gesture, and grinned with some embarrassment. I approached the round woman, who was glancing about her with eyes as black and polished as ripe berries, and whose face even in its present watchful expectancy was full of signs of laughter. Indeed, when she saw me she laughed outright, her dark red lips curling back like thick rubber bands from teeth as white as Irma’s own, and perceptibly larger; and as she came sailing forward with the light step of a fat woman whose insteps bulge above the cut of her shoes without apparent discomfort, she was holding out one plump hand on which the fingers were being eternally strangled by rich rings that sparkled in the pallid ceiling lights of the lobby, and saying with an air of merry joy, ‘Mr. Fitzherbert? Ah—Irma told me. I am Linda Werther.’

‘Go up to the wireless room off the library,’ I said to the amused boy, who was hovering, ‘and show the young lady there the way down here, will you, Peter? Tell her her friend is waiting.’

Miss Werther, dark-eyed and happily smiling, turned to me in the impulsive, enveloping way those people have, and said with subdued intensity, ‘Mr. Fitzherbert, Irma told me all, over the telephone. How terrible it is for her—terrible—here where she thought she was safe at last. You know her well, Mr. Fitzherbert?’

‘I don’t know her at all,’ I said, looking down at the Jewess’s distressed, smiling face and wondering what I had let myself in for. ‘She came to me for help, and I suggested this cottage of mine in the mountains. That is all.’

‘But it is perfect,’ she said. ‘It is the
only
thing, Mr. Fitzherbert—she must get away from cities for a while. Too many accidents happen in cities. Every day, if you read the papers . . .’

‘I help write them,’ I said gloomily.

‘Yes—ah, of
course
!’ she said, laughing heartily. ‘So you know . . . Irma is a real refugee, you see—not like me. I came here when I could have stayed, but there was nothing left to stay for. The accidents had not started in Germany then. But Irma, she came because she must. To her, Australia is the refuge. Forgive me if I say I think it was also a refuge from herself. She was taking life the hard way. You know her story?’

‘Only in broad outline,’ I said, ‘from what she was obliged to tell me this afternoon. You must understand, Miss Werther, that this sort of thing is all very unusual to me. I have no experience of playing St. George, you know.’

She exuded optimism and confidence in a dark world, just as the diamonds on her fingers and ears and bosom gave out a mad light where there seemed to be none to awaken them. In spite of my distaste for many of her sort I have seen and met, I could not help but begin to feel a wary liking for her rich, simple cheerfulness, and a sort of respect for the shrewdness with which, as I knew, she was watching me out of her black, shining eyes while she talked with such subdued feeling about Irma.

‘St. George?’ she said. ‘Ah yes—of course. The man that rescued the lady from the dragon.’ Her voice was like a nudge in the ribs; she assumed an air of great slyness, deliberately. I turned to look at the last visible flight of the stairway where it emerged downwards from behind the lift-well.

‘I only remember him,’ I said, ‘as a symbol of a sort of chivalry I seldom have time or cause—or inclination—to practise.’

She was unabashed. She put her jewelled, throttled fingers on my sleeve where I let them rest, thinking that I should, after all, be grateful at this moment for her mere existence.

‘You are too modest,’ she said. ‘Though you say you don’t know her, Irma has mentioned you to me sometimes since she met you on the boat. She always said how kind you were to her that day, obviously a gentleman. Forgive me laughing. It is at what she said: “Not at all like what one supposed Australians to be, and not at all like what one finds they are”.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘she has not met many Australians in the world she seems to have lived in here.’

‘No, how right you are. We are so ready to judge, we Europeans, without knowledge. We expect to find all the world is Europe. When we find it is not, we make a little exclusive Europe of our own, speak our own languages, and have the cheek—it is nothing less—to think of the people of our adopted country as the foreigners, the interlopers.’

She said all this in a very lively way, as one who had said it before—as one whose appeal perhaps lay partly in her willingness to admit, on behalf of the foreign community, what most of us had already seen for ourselves, with varying degrees of anger, amusement or indifference. I could only guess: whatever her mannerisms might be, however well-developed her inevitable façade, they did not really conceal a shyly confident good-hearted quality which made me begin to find her not preposterous but likeable. I was pleased that Irma, so much younger, volatile, more unpredictable, would be in her care and her cheerful company. How would old Jack receive her? I frankly could not say. Judging by her whole appearance, one would have supposed that to pack a travelling bag, however capacious, and at a few minutes’ notice leave everything for a wild and unknown destination, must have called for a generous sacrifice of the creature comforts to which, clearly, she was used. The shining black fur of her long coat, whose name I did not know, absolutely smelt of ten-pound notes in large, soft quantities; yet there had been no moment when she showed either surprise or uneasiness, any impatience whatever, since she had arrived. From her manner of unforced gaiety and friendliness, she might at that moment have been judged ignorant of Irma’s very existence.

‘With her it is not so,’ she was saying in her lilting and accented colloquial English. ‘She is truly cosmopolitan, but she has known so much unhappiness and fear, you see, that she really feels she has no world of her own anywhere. A world of one’s own is a place of safety. She has been so lonely, and so brave . . . You see, Mr. Fitzherbert, it came to this, that no one would what you might say
claim
her—she seemed too dangerous for everyone, in Europe, even in England. That is why she comes here, and then—
pfft!—
on the same boat are three bad types, who know all about her. It is too much. Certainly, they come on other business, to make trouble with the leaders of your workers, that is well known, but also they do her all the harm they can, on the side, and so—all through this country too her record is known here and there, people are afraid. She is called a traitor. For myself, it does not matter, and I have friends, too, who do not know or care. For us, she is a woman. But even so, there are too many people, Party members, who know about her, and so she is never at peace, in her own mind. She has nothing—no religion, no lover, no family—no future, you might say—yet because she is brave this does not break her heart. The worst you can say of her is that she must always act first for herself, and most of us do that. If it were me, I should go mad.’

She drew the distressing picture with cheerful, dispassionate precision, making Irma for the first time a third person in my mind, and so real that I was increasingly impressed by the clear accuracy of her mind behind the flowery, bejewelled and ornate exterior. Over her tilted head I had been looking at the stair so unseeingly, my mind so filled with the growing portrait of that unfortunate young woman which my companion’s lilting, murmured words built up, by stroke after stroke, that when Irma herself did appear at the turn of the stairway, coming quickly down with my boy following, it seemed as though she had been there in the very flesh all the time Miss Werther was speaking.

The two women embraced one another in their different fashions, but briefly, before Irma stepped back and turned to me. Her face was like a wooden mask now—not expressionless, but stiff with the strain of waiting there alone in a strange office, held there by her desperate determination to risk, as she thought, at least her freedom if not her personal safety by trusting me and taking my word. Later I learned that she did not know, until the boy came, whether I would not return with the police, or whether, instead, I might simply have washed my hands of her affairs after all, and have left her there to wait until she was asked to leave the building. It was the sort of thing that could happen to her. She had had similar experiences, but this—if it had happened—was to have been the last of them; and it was then that she showed me the innocent-looking little ampoule of potassium cyanide which they called ‘the death capsule’. She had had it all the time, that day, in her glove, fitted into the tip of the thumb. She showed me how, as the glove is casually removed, the glass ampoule falls unnoticed into the palm of the hand and can be slipped into the mouth in the middle of a yawn. I had seen the result of the swift working of that particular poison. In a sweat of retrospective horror I took and threw the shining little thing into the waters of the harbour . . . That was long afterwards, however.

Now, the tramping of feet outside on the pavements was rising with the roar of traffic and the yelling interjections of the newsvendors in their final frenzy of the day to an obliterating tide of sound. All over the city, young women of Irma’s age were leaving the doorways of buildings and stepping into friends’ cars. It was the natural moment for our departure. I dismissed the boy with a few shillings and thanks—indeed, I could not have hoped to manage the business so unobtrusively without him—wondering at the same time whether the watcher at Wynyard were still loitering there; and then, just as we were about to walk quickly to the car, the women following me, McMahon came in, bumping lightly against the door-frame as he turned out of the crowded street, lightly but with sufficient speed to send him straight into my arms. His hat fell off, and in the dim light from above, his face, blandly drunk and smiling already in senseless apology, was revealed. I heard Irma step behind me with the ghost of an exclamation, and then McMahon drew himself free and upright, and said in his soft voice, with that damnably accurate perception of the practised drunkard, ‘Ah—the little Communist lady. Pardon me, Fitz, old boy old boy—sheer clumsiness if you know what I mean, I mean.’

I picked up and returned to him his hat, murmuring in a voice I could barely keep from sounding thoroughly cross, ‘For heaven’s sake, Tim, keep out of the office and go home. Don’t be a fool. Take my tip and go, or you’ll find yourself going for good.’