The Refuge (46 page)

Exciting and interminable though their foregatherings were, they seemed to have no real effect on Irma. She would stretch like a cat when the last visitor, sibilantly vocal to the end, had torn himself away from the doorway, the stair-head and the street entrance—all points that had somehow developed a powerful magnetic attraction for these foreign hands and elbows and feet; and then, calm and warm with a kindlier warmth than that of the humid summer midnight, she would sit down beside me on the floor with her head against my knee and tell me how little ‘all that’ seemed to matter to her now. When I asked her once what they would think did they know of our marriage, she laughed until she was all but helpless; and when she could speak at last, with tears running from her upward-drawn eyes, she said, ‘My dearest friend, they would then not
think
I was mad—they would
know
I was.’

‘Would it make them stay away?’ I said casually; for in truth I began to grudge them the hours that might have been mine. She gave me the familiar, mischievously sidelong look I did not see so often now, and laughed again, but differently, with an underlying sadness that puzzled me to remember.

‘Nothing,’ she said soberly, ‘nothing in the world would make them do that . . . You see, I am one of them.’

Though at the time I denied it, her calm assertion stayed in my mind as self-criticism by the loved one can do. For me there had always been in her a core of absolute steadfastness very different from the inherently volatile natures of the strange people who had taken to gathering about her. As I had never lied to her, but given her an absolute and soul-searching frankness which—I suspect now—must have bored her extremely when she thought of it, if she did so more than seldom, so I took her for the embodiment of truthfulness, to such a degree that even when it would have eased my mind to believe that she lightly lied, or mockingly exaggerated, I yet could not entirely believe, since that did not accord with my image of her.

And in this I was misled: that always, always it was my own image of her in which she appeared to me, until long after Alan’s return and our glad resumption of the more regular life that now more than ever seemed to be shaped by the slow turning of the academic year. Not until the end did I find it possible to admit—and then only with my mind, not with my unschooled heart—that she might be other than what I, with absolute faith, imagined her to be. To the end, and beyond, I loved her in a way I think sanity will not pardon, nor my god condemn.

The only accusation of betrayal I make here is directed against myself. A man finds it hard to forgive his own guilt of self-deceit, and if others are involved, they become only the more worthy of compassion, the more bitter and unforgivable and forlorn the guilt seems.

On the night of the eighth of May in that year, when it became abruptly evident that my life both as a father and as a husband must have ended some time since, without my having known it—when, to put it brutally, I found myself in the peculiar position of a father cuckolded by his own son—my first impulse was towards incredulous laughter at the impossible. If I did not give way to it, neither did I give way to the passion of anger which slowly took its place, and which burned down to ashes in its turn like a fire with only a handful of hollow sticks to feed on, and no one to tend it.

It was four years almost to the day since Irma had so unexpectedly arrived from Melbourne to spend a short week-end with her faithful friend Miss Werther. In terms of the range of human emotions, that is a long time; in terms of thought and memory not so long. As I walked homewards, looking at the bright autumnal stars revealed by the withdrawing clouds from which a little rain had been falling before midnight, I remembered with unusual clearness my thoughts and feelings that late afternoon, up to the moment when I saw my own leather-gloved finger extended to press the bell-button at the door of
Linda Werther—Agent
in Edgecliff Road; up to the moment when, having closed the door upon us in the airy hall with its framed view of bright garden beyond, and having taken my things to put them on the wall-table under the dim mirror, Irma withdrew her eyes from mine in the reflection, and turned, and was in my arms.

Perhaps the picture was unusually clear because I was tired from too much work, too much concern over the subtle, irresistible change that seemed to have come into our passionate and calm relationship in the two apartments overhanging the restless waters of the great harbour. Change there was without doubt, yet I could not put my finger upon it as I had upon Miss Werther’s door-bell, nor would the definition of it have again opened a door between us. I could not see it except, so to speak, out of the corner of my eye; when I looked boldly and fearfully for it, it was not there. For us, I thought, all was the same. We still laughed and were silent together, in mutual love and possession (I thought); the summer pause, when love had seemed only a stillness like too much peace, had softly returned to a forward movement without direction but also without end, and to seal the wholeness of my life Alan had come back to make us three once more.

In all this could be seen no alteration but a slow ripening; yet my sense of alteration, unable to fix on anything that would focus and contain it, spread like a haze over the sun and robbed my world of its full clarity and colour.

No one expected me tonight. One of those special assignments that sometimes came the way of senior members of the staff had taken me by air to Brisbane that morning, and through a mistake I could not trace I had been supposed to stay north overnight and return the following day. This had turned out to be unnecessary as well as undesirable—these days I was loth to be away from home a minute longer than I must—and through the Brisbane office I had had the good fortune (it was no less than that) to be offered a seat in an R.A.A.F. bomber going as far as Richmond on a return-to-base flight.

From Richmond, where the aircraft was put down ‘blind’ (as it was later explained to me over a hurried drink in the Mess), a staff-officer going home late took me as far as Kings Cross in an official car. Everything had been comfortable and pleasant, and also exhausting, as I found when I stretched my legs on that final walk along the few quiet streets beyond the Cross to my door. It had also been too sudden and hurried for me to have sent a telegram ahead of me, had that been possible.

What happened next had nothing to do with the day just ended, and if I remember the two experiences together it is with the same sense of disconnection with which one might look at a motion-picture record of oneself, being incredibly both actor and onlooker at the one moment.

Half-way up the last flight of carpeted stair, I could see that both my door and Irma’s were open—mine wide open as if left that way by someone in haste or expecting to return at once, and hers no more than a few inches ajar, sufficient for me to know that what light was showing came from the open door of her bedroom on the far side of the dark living-room, from the reading lamp by the bed, which sent out into the larger room a flat, low radiance that reached the opposite wall and was reflected dimly towards the door.

Unconsciously I hurried my mounting step, thinking of illness, and then, aware again of my own wide-open doorway, stopped with a feeling that something was wrong not with anyone there, but with me. In the warm silence at the top of the stairs I heard nothing for a moment but the beat of my heart’s blood in my ears; and then, with a thrill of unreasoning fear that changed itself even as it came to fearful recognition, I heard from beyond that scarcely opened doorway a low moaning sound that was suddenly cut off as though by a hand on the slightly parted lips from which it issued.

Then I heard the voices.

‘Irma, my darling, my darling, I must stay with you. I can’t go now.’

‘But yes—you can.’ To my immense surprise this ambiguous reply was full of stifled laughter. It was followed by a slight rustle of movement, a murmur of unintelligible words, and then Irma’s voice again, low but quite clear and in perfect control.

‘So. Be more gentle, my friend. Now.’

‘Teach me to be more gentle, then. Teach me.’

For a few moments, while my mind tried to make its escape from these impressions, I had not allowed myself to recognize Alan’s voice as the other. Now I did, with a wild urge to laugh to which I did not give way, lest it shock them, my two beloveds. They were in the dark entrance hall, out of the line of that faintly-reflected light which revealed only a vertical section of the pearl-grey wall the colour of the seagulls’ wings. There was not even a shadow on it. I was near enough to hear faintly not only their murmured words but the hushed quickness of their breathing, and without volition my feet began to descend the stairs, backwards, feeling for each step like the feet of a man being thrust slowly and irresistibly backwards towards an abyss. Some attraction beyond my power withheld me from turning my face from that vertical line of pallid light, and I was still staring at it when it was eliminated by the abrupt soft closing of the door.

As I turned at the half-landing to continue my descent more safely, I saw that the light in my own flat was still burning with cheerful welcoming brightness. I had a momentary, impatient urge to go up again at once and turn it off; but I did not do so.

If it had been difficult not to stroll away up the dim street laughing loud and long, by the time I found myself sitting fully dressed on the edge of a barren bed in a strange hotel bedroom it was equally touch and go whether I gave way to the disgraceful rage of jealousy that threatened to overwhelm me.

This too would have been laughable to anyone who, unlike myself, had realized that I was jealous not of Alan but of Irma—not of my son but of my wife. Now that the situation was sufficiently clarified to point a need for some sort of action, I think I should already have realized this; but I did not, my upbringing tried to convince me that in these confusions of deceit and betrayal it is always the man who is to blame; and when I say my upbringing I mean of course my mother’s, who always thought what was held to be the correct thing. My mother, did she but know it, would have been entirely in favour of the crucifying of the man she spoke of as her saviour. So of course would most people who call themselves Christians, if they had been alive and in Palestine in those exciting times.

Fortunately, in the end cool reason asserted itself successfully against the feather-stuffed arguments of upbringing, but not before I had experienced the bewilderment of a conviction that it was somehow quite wrong to think of thrusting the boy aside with a violent shoulder and reclaiming what was my own from his ignorant grasp. Denied the poisoning satisfaction of solving the immediate problem this way, my mind for more than an hour was denied any satisfaction at all. I was so obsessed with the thought of that woman as a victim, of men and circumstances, that it took me at least that long to understand that she, my beloved, was not in his grasp, but rather that he—my beloved—was in hers. Persuading reason to proceed in this direction was for a long time like the attempt of a drunken man to drive a horse at a wire gate. The gate, like the spurious instincts nurtured by upbringing in the dung of fear, merely had to be set aside: clearly the way led beyond it. In the end I got down, so to speak, and opened the gate.

It is easy to talk like this afterwards, when all is over. It was not easy to think at all, at the time, and I sat rocking myself on the edge of the bed that did not want me, fretting and whimpering like a punished child to whom for the moment punishment is all. Like such a child, too, I searched for comfort and indignation among the strangely weightless arguments of self-righteousness. I thought, have I not spent altogether more than half my life doing, at no little cost, what I faithfully believed was best for those two people, who had with the soft closing of a door ajar become discernible to me as the strangers they must always have been?

And sometimes I thought simply, Oh god, what is to become of me now?

Gradually, however, the horse of reason persuaded the fuddled driver that the way led beyond the invisible steel of the gate, and that he must incommode himself if he wished to go further; but the way itself was not yet clear to be seen.

Any ordinary mind would long since have realized that I was, in matters of the body, over-fastidious. The only person I knew who sensed this and fully approved of it, at least as it affected my relationships with women, was old Jack. I remembered, with a desperate hope of buoying up my self-esteem, how he had said, ‘You ain’t no fool.’ After all, that was a criticism not of Irma but of all women (I told myself in confusion, as the winds of passion blew this way and that); and surely it expressed approval of me, as a sort of corollary?

I began to try to think what Jack would do in my place—only to have to ask myself, what was my place? I was a man whose second wife is seducing his first wife’s son. The son does not know the circumstances at all, because of a piece of short-sighted cleverness based on his father’s excessive physical self-consciousness; he not only supposes that his step-mother is an unattached young woman but also that he is the instrument of seduction . . . And if I did not like the taste of that undiluted dose of bitter truth, I must nevertheless swallow it.

It made no sense to me, put simply—that was the only trouble. Generations of dead Fitzherbert men and women scowled and shook their ghostly faces at all attempts to be so simple. With steady finger-bones, they pointed to the society of my own day as if to indicate that they could never have clone their part in building it upon such preposterous foundations as simplicity and truth. There was, moreover, no such thing (they seemed to say) as simplicity in human relationships. All relationships were only a matter of holding chaos at arm’s length by the exercise of a constant, tremendous effort. One moment’s self-deceit, and chaos claimed its own.

I knew well what old Jack would do in my place. He would go away. I could hear him telling me, with a twinkle of amusement at himself, ‘I’d git for me life.’