The Refuge (28 page)

Aloud, I reminded myself that I would surely have heard. ‘She would be traced to Sydney.’

‘That’s it! You are with the police. No, no—she has just gone off alone again, she used to say it was the only real safety, to be absolutely alone. But of course that is not always so easy . . . I know she will write to me. I know she is still alive and well, somewhere. It is such a big country, isn’t it?’

On that inconclusive thought we parted, and I took my confused feeling of regret and concern and an underlying, uncertain joy elsewhere; and though I nursed the thought of Irma’s regard for me I could get little pleasure from it in the end.

In truth, now that she had spoken of love, I was not even sure if it were love I wanted from her. Once more I remembered that I had made my choice, with a conviction that seemed to have little connection with my dazzled senses at the time, and nothing at all to do with them in retrospect. The choice, made, was irrevocable and absolute, a living part of my history now. But love, I thought, can die; in a hundred different ways and even from simple starvation it can die and crumble like a dead old leaf.

Nevertheless, now that all was over between us—all the little, it might seem, that had ever been—I did nurse and hug to myself the knowledge that she had said she loved me. Sometimes, when I recalled my own behaviour, it was an embarrassing knowledge, prompting a self-contempt which bruised and bewildered, for I still did not see how I could have acted otherwise; yet for once she was innocent, and I, of all people who had reason to play the Samaritan, had stepped aside from her as though she were a harlot offering to trade.

Sometimes, though, as the weeks and months passed, and the war’s apparent false start left us as it were in mid-air, frustrated, still at stretch, I thought that knowledge wonderful in the extreme. The only escape from the unreality of the actual, in Europe and here at home, was by way of dreams—the dream of work, the dream of fulfilled wishes; and I dreamed like any boy. She was my girl. We had known each other but a few hours in all, we were strangers still to each other’s history and each other’s self that had shaped it, yet in a short hour of being tested we had indicated to each other a whole new world of possible experience.

The image of her was becoming clearer as she receded in space and time—clearer, yet more complex. Thinking of her age, even in a day when girls become mature,
rangées
, so much earlier than their mothers did, I was repeatedly arrested by the view I had had of her independence of action as well as of mind. She made her own decisions, and without hesitation moved on them. Even allowing for the practice she must have had, in a world where she knew she could count on no sure support from anyone at all in the event of a serious mistake, this complete self-sufficiency was disturbing in one so young, not merely because it was an incalculable quantity but because, as I mused on it, it gave her in imagination an air of extraordinary loneliness. Without consultation, she could leave her job and her lodging; she could come to me and confess things which, to her mind, were too dangerous for any unknown, irresponsible person to hear; she could summon her friend without warning to go into hiding with her; she could leave both the temporary refuge and the friend in a matter of hours, and disappear god knew where, on a train of whose departure she must have known in advance, at a station which, as far as we could tell, she had never heard of before . . .

The whole series of actions argued a deal of cool, determined forethought and preparation, without a word to anyone. I began to think, indeed, that none of my own part in it had been quite by chance; I began to suspect, without much argument, that she had summed me up, from her own point of view, with flashing quickness on that morning aboard the
Empire Queen
, and to realize that she probably knew more about me than, had she told me, I would have believed she possibly could know.

Her one miscalculation had been concerned with my response to her whole-hearted offering of her love, not—as I now saw—merely as a return for kind services but because it had unexpectedly become the inevitable ending to all that had gone before it. Flight demands eventual surrender—to something, no matter what. She, poor child, gave herself up to love. I was to be her captor and turn a key on her in her prison of peace. It was her one miscalculation, and a bad one, for which only her youth could be blamed. No wonder that, as Jack had said, she ‘nearly through a fit’ when she found I had gone wordlessly away, leaving her not even another chance. I supposed, with a wretched sinking of the heart, that she had gone willingly back to her bed that night because already she was setting much store by the bright morning soon to come.

Such thoughts bring no ease. They are like the tongue’s worrying at an aching tooth: they incessantly identify the source of pain and do nothing to lessen it. I kept coming back, for a comfort that was each time colder, to the fact that I had been faced with a tremendous decision and had made a right choice. It did no good: it was true, but for many weeks and months the virtue seeped out of it like water from a cracked jar, leaving only a dry emptiness and the formal, useless shape of the jar itself.

In those weeks and months it was easy to turn the mind to private concerns. Part of my mind held scorn for the way I succumbed to that false easiness. Another part, the vast uncharted emotional regions where many a stronger and wiser traveller has lost himself for ever from integrity, welcomed my wanderings with lure upon lure as I followed the witch-fire of imagination and desire. I see now that the self-controlled repressions of the preceding years, ever since Jean’s death, had built up a structure of support which was not as strong as I had tried to make it. It was based upon a negative base: what I had used for foundations were more often denials, not—as I had thought—assertions. It was like the young Queen Victoria’s strenuous ‘I
will
be good’ which had the irresistible ring of ‘I will
not
be naughty’; and it was just as vain.

All this distracting activity in my mind made me understand later how tremendous the decision had been; and understanding sealed as it were the cracked jar, and poured back into it not virtue but acceptance and resignation, which I am told smell hardly less agreeable to god. I say acceptance, because it is necessary to reason to accept an accomplished fact; but instead of resignation one might say relief, because I was realizing at last that if I had chosen Irma instead of my concept of myself (which included and largely was Alan) I should have abandoned that alternative for her as wholly as I had abandoned her for it. There could have been no compromise, not only because it is against my training and my nature to compromise but also because, with her, compromise would have been impossible. There would, of course, have been the appearance of it; but Alan and my aspirations to the impersonal, Olympian viewpoint would have been set aside in my mind together, the one to grow untended and, by my standards, without love, the other to be in all honesty forgotten.

I began to suspect, at last, my own limitations. I was still too unmatured to dare to devote myself to more than one heart-felt cause. Singlemindedness, like self-sufficiency, imposes its own penalties. It too is an ultimate loneliness.

So, it appeared, we were both destined by our decisions to be lonely. This thought, arrived at in due course, sent me back to the cottage like a homing dog to a deserted mastery. Three weeks after I had driven from it into the south-east, aslant the winter daybreak, I was back there with a fast-beating heart and a belief, a mad hope somewhere unacknowledged within me, that she might have returned, secretly impelled like me to come back to the point of departure, with that dreadful human hope that, just this once, one may be given a second chance.

I went in a fought-down frenzy of haste, like any schoolboy to an uncertain assignation. Once more I drove at an illegal speed, outside the busier thoroughfares, and once more an irrelevant gaiety welled up in me, like the urge to sing on a fine morning, as I cleared the last straggle of suburbs and wheeled the car fast into the opening plain, where fewer and fewer houses were to be seen, and where the mountains marched towards me like a wave that changed as it came from dark blue to green, from flat to a cleft and tossing complexity of austere pride.

Today, however, morning was at my back and I travelled towards a pale and hazy sky. By the time Richmond was left behind and the river crossed, the mists were coming down upon the highest crests, with imperceptible speed; and as I turned off north-west on the unsurfaced country road of red gravel and hardened clay I saw the nearer ranges in a sudden magic of definition, their over-clear green turning black again by contrast with the white and heavy vapours that rolled down into the innumerable valleys and ravines and narrow gullies before a descending curtain from beneath which they seemed to have escaped like forerunners. Their whiteness and apparent lack of all movement as I climbed steadily nearer turned the revealed depths of the immense eastern mountain forest into the likeness of a stereoscopic photograph, and along the lowest edge of the curtain individual trees stood out, stark charcoal drawings that were slowly swallowed up from below until only the solid-looking, craggy tops of them could be seen, like islands about to sink back into a white ocean.

The cottage, I knew, would be mist-bound already, and I concentrated my thoughts on the road itself, and on seeing my mail-box on its tree to guide me to the turn-off. A fog formed on the windscreen before I realized I had plunged into the thin lowest fringes of the mist; in another minute, with the windscreen-wiper jerking and clicking inexorably across the glass, I could see only twenty yards ahead of the car between the looming and vanishing trunks. My headlights now seemed to exaggerate the unnatural silence of the misty mountains closing behind me, and what had been bright day when I left the city was now a pallid greyness, a vision of the silence itself, on every side, beneath huge trees whose leaves were already dripping as they turned the ocean of vapour into water upon their chilly surfaces.

Donna met me at the gate. As I put up the rails behind the car, thinking of why I had come, I knew with absolute certainty that I had come for nothing after all; yet still that hope which was only a wishful dream made me hasten to cover the last few hundred yards. One look at the cottage when it became properly visible in the mist might have sufficed. Its withdrawn, motionless look was now that which houses take on when mist or rain comes down heavily upon them, shutting in and intensifying the life they contain. No sound, no light came from it, but more than this it had no soul.

Having let myself fall into the clutches of excitement and anticipation so wholly, I could not stop now. When the car was put away, and no one appeared in answer to the sharp, lonely rapping of the horn in the darkness of the barn, I made for the cottage as though committed to a definite and pressing purpose, though I had none; and as I passed beneath and between them, the leafless fruit trees opening late in the mountain air their budded flowers along each polished twig dripped moisture like tears on my bare head and my beard; and Donna danced along at my side with joy and impatience, tenderly mouthing my hand each time it swung back as I walked.

The kitchen was clean and empty, and smelled faintly of wood-smoke and ashes and the split wood Jack always kept there in a deep recess by the stove. It was a sad, cold smell. Nothing was out of place—dishcloth, soap-saver, brush, all were on their hooks on the window-frame over the sink, dry, unused this many a day. The silence of the mountain mist was inside the house; nothing lived there except the bitch and myself, both listening, both knowing there was nothing.

In the big room, the pale curtains kept out the paler daylight. I flicked them aside with the backward wrist-movement of years of habit that sent the wooden rings to the ends of the rods with a small dead rattling sound. Immediately the profound and empty silence of the mist, so different from that of the mountains themselves at night, resumed its full occupancy of the place; and suddenly in the careless garden of shrubs in front a thrush began to sing with accurate and penetrating sweetness. I listened until it stopped and flew away, unseen the whole time, through the blank world of the mist. I did not know what to do next.

There was a clean fire laid as usual in the ruddy depths of the brick fireplace. The polished floor between the rugs reflected vaguely every surface that caught the humble light from the windows, and the windows themselves, rectangles of barely discernible grey. All trace of use was gone from the room. I stared at the sheepskin rug before the hearth in disbelief.

In the front bedroom, the two beds had been stripped and made up again with clean linen, as the visible creases in each pillowcase, each turned-over sheet, mercilessly showed. I did not even know which one she had lain in, wide awake in the dark in a strange place; neither of them, in its military neatness, seemed ever to have felt the weight of that strong, warm body whose strength and warmth I instantly felt again across my knees and in the crook of my left arm. Jack, as always, had cleared the whole place of every sign of living, moving human beings, and women at that, no doubt as soon after they were gone as he could find time to do it. I imagined him at work, his rope-soled espadrilles hushed on the floors whose polish they scarcely clouded, his pipe-stem gripped firmly in toothless jaws behind the stretched lips that made him appear to be smiling to himself the whole time. I remembered how he had told me he had once been to sea for a year or two, in his various ways of escape from his now rather legendary wife; I supposed it was there he had learned this habit of ascetic tidiness which, in that cottage, could make the rooms beautiful without flowers. Whatever he did he did in the same way, tidily and thoroughly and without seeming to think about his actions. His fenced fields, with the furrow running dead north and south across the gentle slope of the plateau, were each complete and four-square, with the rabbit-netting in perfect condition even at the gates. The kitchen garden, sheltered from the south beyond the barn and the partitioned shed he and his cows shared, each in her season, was a model of clean economy and fruitful industry; yet I could not remember ever having seen him actually at work in it. ‘The truck-garden’ he called it almost scornfully; yet once, months after I had been talking idly to him about the use of herbs in cookery, and their reputation for being important to health in our almost Mediterranean climate, when I had forgotten the whole conversation, he took me to that small patch of enclosed ground and indicated a warm corner with the wet stem of his pipe: ‘There’s your ’erbs. Writ to Yates—all they ’ad.’