The Refuge (36 page)

That night, and every night for the next two weeks, I slept badly, turning from dream to dream, tormented by uncertainties and doubts as never before in my life when they turned, as they soon did, from Irma to me as their object. There was an increasing desire in me, confusing thought, to leave the
Gazette,
Sydney, the State, the country itself: in fact, to cut and run from some incomprehensible situation poised implacably on the eve of development, dragging Alan with me to avoid calamity. It was a pity I did not give way to this one unreasonable desire of my life. Only the knowledge, in periods of normal mental control, that running away inevitably brings one face to face with the thing fled, the faster the sooner, and in a condition of exhaustion to boot, prevented me from taking some action which with part of my mind I knew I should quickly have regretted.

At the end of that fortnight, Alan came home from school for the May holiday; and Irma arrived unannounced and unexpected from Melbourne to spend a short week-end with her old friend Miss Werther.

When Miss Werther telephoned me that Saturday morning with her bubbling news, all confusion was swept from my mind so suddenly, so completely, that I felt weak and had to sit down. The feelings of threatened calamity that had shadowed me day and night since the evening of Barbara’s dinner went away like a cloud on a change of wind. In its place shone as it were a light of warm pleasure, emanating from a positive source of determination. Everything now seemed supremely simple. Alan was here. Irma was here. All that I most loved was now at hand, within call.

The relief of mind was momentous. I heard with joy the monotonous squealing cries of the pearl-grey gulls beyond the breakwater. In the kitchen Miss Molesley and Alan were washing the breakfast dishes in a cheerful communion of which the short clatter of plates and cutlery made a part. Through the closed leaves of the French windows I watched the knife-headed, knife-winged gulls, dagger-beaked, black-capped, red-eyed, ceaselessly hunt the grey water under the smooth grey of the sky, looking down and from side to side as they flew in a way that gave their quick, unhurried flight the perfection of absolute self-assurance maintained in complete unconsciousness of effort.

Miss Werther’s amiable lilting voice, excited and hasty on this occasion, still sounded in my head.

‘You must come to dinner, won’t you, please? Come early this afternoon. You will have so very much to talk about. Ah—what a happy surprise this is for me, Mr. Fitzherbert.’

It did not seem to me, at the moment, that I would have so very much to talk about. I felt it would be enough to see Irma again and be in her presence. As for conversation, to be easy in such a reunion at least some community of experience is needful, some mutual knowledge and shared continuity of thought; and between Irma and me, separating us solidly still like a wall which will transmit the futile rappings of attempted communication, but nothing more, there were over six years, mostly of war and strain and desperate self-preservation amid the inexhaustible, crashing debris of a whole world’s slow destruction.

I looked into my mind, to see whether the manner of our ancient and unreal parting after one hour—the first hour and the last—of joined embraces of body and mind would add its weight to the great bulk of this separation; and I found that it would not. It mattered no longer, except as a beginning (not an end), and beginnings, however awkward, take on with time’s passing a charm of the half-forgotten, the wishfully-distorted, and all memory of them is hazed and coloured by years of less and less anxious thought. It seemed to me, indeed, that we might start very well from that point of departure. If this meeting should prove, in spite of all my intentions, to be barren, then we would have a conclusion, six years old, ready-made, its purpose nearly completed now, in which momentarily to resume our roles, and withdraw.

If there were no barrenness, if imagined promise were to be realized, as I had determined it should be, then the point of departure became a point at which openly to resume what had never been abandoned—the nourishing of our mutual interest and attraction. There was now the difference made by her old, oblique confession of her love, and by my own admission, to myself at least, of mine. As for any future, I did not think of it. I merely felt that now, since we were about to meet again, free from the alarms and distractions that had once made us stiffly cautious of one another, there could be no more reserves of thought or speech, no more real separation.

Alan had his day planned, and Miss Molesley could enjoy one of her few worldly self-indulgences—that of preparing and eating dinner alone with him. Long ago my mother had explained to me that Moley’s joys were of the spirit, which made her an admirable companion for my mother; she never sought, yet never rejected, enjoyments of an earthly sort, but was mostly careless of them. I could not quite reconcile this with her firm addiction to card-playing. It may have been that to her the ages-old mysteries of the numbers in combinations in which she allowed no element of chance somehow proved in innocent visual forms the existence of the divine logic in which she happily believed.

Her care for Alan had for a long time made my own life easier to order. I felt once more the cat-like comfort and security of having a home which someone was running for me. She did for Alan most of the things a good mother would have done, without exciting or embarrassing him with any of a mother’s formidable shows of outlived but persistent gross affection. Deprived of Jean, that charming being now no more than a wraith in my memory, he could have had no better tender—he had only known and accustomed himself to a father considered by a lot of people to be ‘a little strange’, ‘a cold fish’, or ‘a reserved type’—you could take your pick. As I recalled to mind these descriptions of me that had come to my knowledge over the years, I could smile with not very happy satisfaction at the success of the mask I had contrived and worn—even though the sight of it in Barbara’s mirror so recently had filled me with exasperated fury at I knew not exactly what. The thought was in my mind, as I sat watching the gulls reel and recover for ever against a sky the colour of themselves, that this mask would soon be lifted, if only for a brief space.

Miss Werther lived comfortably at Edgecliff, within easy walking distance; it would take little more than half an hour to get there. I chose my way by Darlinghurst Road and the Cross. The day was still grey and windless, pressing down over the city with a belated warmth that presaged rain; but not even the weather, and the huge Saturday-afternoon reaction of faint, half-drunken melancholy that rose like a vapour from the vacant metropolis sprawling to north and east and south to meet the descending sky, could affect the Cross’s air of violent, intimate life. The clamour of taxi-cab horns rises above the swimming tide of voices that speak, one would say, all languages known to man, above the sound of the passage of feet that have trodden the streets of every country of the world. Not only Sydney, but Australia itself seems shut out from this place where the rest of the world is at home; yet figures show that Australians predominate. The thing is, they do not perambulate as naturally as do the Europeans and Asiatics here; they must, like me, be going somewhere, if it be only to the nearest bar or café, while the others are happy merely to be walking, to see and be seen, up and down the same few hundred yards of pavement, by brilliant fruit and vegetable stalls, flower shops clogged with colour too solid to have meaning here, dress-shop windows as passionately austere as the caged homosexual faces peeping round their enclosing, excluding curtains; libraries, antiques-dealers, cheap open-fronted cafés; and the shops, not closed today in spite of the Sabbath, selling kosher and imported foods.

It resembles a jovial nightmare, with undertones of rough passions and vitiated lusts and purchasable laughter. It never wholly sleeps; and just as at night there is a lurking illusion of unburied day, so by day there pervades it something of the less fettered freedoms of the night, and time becomes a different, wayward thing in which the hours can pass like minutes, the minutes like days.

Above all, it bestows the desirable gift of anonymity. All there are forever strangers whose caught fragments of speech, dropped on the air like scraps of innumerable torn-up letters, have no relevance and no more meaning than that of the detached words themselves. Here it is possible to hide, indefinitely and in a fashion not over-restricted, from all authority, but not from one’s own kind. It is possible here to die by violence in a locality where a scream may be a laugh or a laugh a scream, and where the muffled cries beyond the partitions may be of love or of death, and go unheard, or, heard, unconstrued. The strange air belongs, as though conditioned through the years by alien throats that have breathed it in and alien lungs and tongues expelling it in the airy transience of speech, and as though localized by the intensely personal quality of life here.

In one short block down Bayswater Road, all this has vanished, and even the receding sound of it is obscured by the noise of east-bound trams and the scurry of passing traffic heading eastwards for the immense stretch of richer and superficially more sedate residential suburbs marching in from the Pacific coast, set down but not crowded between the coarse and violent worlds of the city and the beaches. The traffic passes through the Cross without touching or being touched by it; and it is this feeling of a graver, potentially dangerous stream of wholly law-abiding life going by without pausing to intrude that gives the Cross itself, and the area of which it is the vigorous heart, much of their air of nonchalant, secure isolation and intimate privacy. It was this that had attracted Irma, as it attracted every other educated alien arriving for the first time at the port or the aerodrome of Sydney; it was here she had lived her obscure year of uncertainties and stifled impulses; from here fled, and almost here in the end returned.

Edgecliff is beyond the curiously desolate brightness which, like all waterside public reserves (mad name!), Rushcutters Bay Park has when the weather is fine; a brightness that on grey days becomes dulled and unreal, like the throng of racing and pleasure yachts spiking with their bare masts the high northern horizon from where they lie moored in the bay itself. No one cuts rushes there now. The swampy inlet of the harbour, where the convicts of a century and a half earlier bent to embrace the reeds under an alien and undreamed-of sun, has long since been reclaimed for sports and embraces of a happier kind. It lies sunk without character between two dwindling hillsides of roofs and windows, one sloping down from the east, the other from the west. Its north boundary is the harbour whose waters it scarcely clears, and the main artery taking the life-stream of traffic to and from the city arrests it on the south.

This day I saw consciously none of these things. Indeed, I was climbing the hill to Edgecliff from the bottom of Bayswater Road before the sense of increased effort woke me clearly to my whereabouts: as so often happened when my time was free, I had passed through the very centre of the Cross without realizing it, lulled in profound thought by the familiarity of the way.

I was, in fact, deliberately making myself wary of anticlimax, the empty reality that follows vivid and interrupted dreaming. Only the memory of my morning’s feeling of determination remained. What I had determined upon I still could not have said, other than that it was something the opposite of flight—not pursuit but a stand. My days of acting wholeheartedly the following, enamoured swain were past; they had been gone long before I met Irma the first and the second time. Rather this determination, it seemed as I walked, was in effect a change of my whole mind, from an attitude of rejection to one of readiness to accept whatever might come to pass between that strange young woman and me. As I realized this, the memory of the morning’s feelings reverted to an awareness made stronger yet, calmer yet, and yet more relieved; and in spite of the steepening hill into Edgecliff I lengthened and quickened my step.

Miss Werther’s flat is approached by a ramp leading down below street-level. Between the wicket gate and the entrance door which is for her private use stretches a narrow suggestion of a formal garden, as wide as the frontage and six or eight feet deep, symbolized into two standard rose trees without flowers, in two rectangles of smooth buffalo-grass lawn flanked on all sides and divided in the middle by strips of pale concrete roughened to make a secure footing in rainy weather. Her door, on the right of the ground-floor facade, had the word
ONE
neatly done in brass, screwed on its single panel in separate brass letters, and below it a small brass plate inscribed modestly in black, like a doctor’s,
Linda Werther—Agent.

All these details I took in as I approached, that day, and I have never forgotten them: I could reach out my hand now, formally gloved, and touch with one leather finger-tip the snub black bell-button in its brass setting that showed minute traces of cloudy polishing-fluid round the sunken screw-heads. When this door was opened, it opened on a new life for me.

Irma had opened the door, wide.

Without a word, she stood back to let me pass, and closed it again, shutting us into a long, lighted hallway which appeared to run the full depth of the building, opening into a sunroom made, it seemed, all of glass from ceiling to floor. Through the glass, between pillar-like flutings of opened curtains, one saw at once a high-walled garden further screened by tall young maple trees whose remaining leaves, tenacious in the mildness of the early winter, were as bright as any of the scattered groups of dahlias that had lingered into May in the coastal warmth, and hotter in colour than the chrysanthemums blazing coldly yellow and white in the dead light against the warm tones of the brick wall.

All this I thought I had seen in that first instinctive glance investigating strange surroundings, but it is more probable that I saw it so clearly only later; for at the moment all I seemed to be aware of was Irma, silently there with me, her face very pale and her smooth hair very dark in the airy hallway, taking my coat and hat and gloves like a servant, but unlike a servant not looking at our hands, not for a moment looking away from my own look bent upon her; until she turned abruptly, and put the things down on a semicircular wall-table under an ancient, misty mirror, behind her. In the mirror’s depth her eyes still met mine, with a slightly mad look.