The Refuge (47 page)

If I did that, it would be a coward flight from inevitable catastrophe—a running away from my son’s eventual spoliation and abandonment. I knew Irma—I knew her as no one else living knew her; and now, in the shrieking electric light of that hotel bedroom, full of death and departure and the empty postures of love, I was obliged to admit to myself with shuddering, whimpering humility, with rage, with shame and with truth how fatuously slight was my claim upon her; if, indeed, I had any claim upon her at all. She was right, she could do as she liked. For if I had done anything to make easier her life, I thought, how much more she had done to beautify and expand and make rich and human my own. And in spite of this, she was a stranger. Her love was the bird in flight, like her whole being; she must move on; for her there was no refuge after all, no place in her own heart where she could stay still. Poor Irma, poor child. She would be better dead.

It would have been better if I had let her die, that wild and brilliant morning months before. She knew best. I should have sat by and listened to her snore out her life, and then crept away and in the final test of courage resumed my own. None of this—my mind immediately said ‘foulness’—none of this foulness of fermenting passions could have happened then. But I had wanted her, as before god and man I wanted her still. It is always the same, said reason: what you want and obtain ceases to be what it was, becomes its opposite. The most fair becomes the most foul. The more embracing the possession, the more irrecoverable the loss. In self-abhorrent imagination I shared her adulterous bed. I had meant to be pure in thought and deed, and marriage had seemed to me the only purity of bodily love. Why, else, had I not taken her six years before, six months before, when she would have been mine for not even the asking? I could have quelled that liquorish heat in her, those battling limbs, that arched, triumphantly defeated torso again and again, and gone my way and been not even obliged, if such had been in my mind. But no—I must have what they had told me was purity in the eyes of my stern-faced, loving god, and in choosing purity I had now drawn down upon my own flesh the impurity of the damned. I too would be better dead.

Lying back, half-on, half-off the bed, with one arm across my eyes to keep them dark from the light which I was afraid to turn off, I tried to imagine my own death and its effects on those two strangers; but instead, since this was impossible, I sought a vision of Alan lying dead at my feet, dead in his bed, dead in a hospital, in the street, in the restless waters of the harbour. Each time I forced my imagination to look at his face, it was hers I saw, her voice I heard saying with tender irony, ‘My darling, you will never part with him.’

I could not think of Alan as dead because clearly that was not yet his fortune. He was too young, too unripened in mind and body, with too much good yet to do; this that had befallen him, how long ago I did not know or dare to think, was a slight thing, and none of his doing. I approved the courage and restraint of his passion, even while the thought of what that had been fed upon, under my very eyes and with all the encouragement my ignorance could have given it, was a sheer choking agony that made me sit upright again to wipe away the sweat that chilled me as it sprang prickling from my skin. Courage there was, and restraint there must have been, for again and again I had obliged him to keep her company, I had thrown them together until the sight of her, the mention of her name, the mere passing of her doorway each day, must have been such painful pleasure and sweet temptation as only a virgin youth could know, and only a strong heart and a noble mind endure as he must have endured it.

And she—how clearly in the end one sees these things—she had inevitably felt towards him at once a vague and indeterminate resentment as the son and the robber of her lover’s youth, and that sweet, gratifying attraction any older woman must feel for his virginal innocence, his erect and manly youth. Both these feelings, so interchangeable as to be without separate identity, could be assuaged in the way she had described as ‘too easy for a woman’; and in that assuagement, doubly confirming its instinctive rightness, was also her complete and final possession of me.

From this point, and I saw it at once, she must go forward alone.

It is a formidable thought, to those who like myself believe in god as the principle of good informing our lives, that there is always to hand the means of taking or despatching the life of another human being.

It is always there—if it be no more than one’s own two hands it is there. For the most part there is a saving lack of motive; sometimes, though rarely, of opportunity. Without the motive, the means can have no power nor the opportunity occasion; but with the means always at hand a man might destroy his whole family one by one within an hour, as men have done, without any preparation whatever, though never without that conscious or sub-conscious forethought in which motive, the spring of action, is forged with such dreadful secrecy.

The remarkable thing about this secrecy is that the mind can keep it even from its own knowledge. I have discussed cases of the sort with my friend Hubble. My own contention is that a man committing a homicide has always been capable of committing a homicide, no matter how unlikely the circumstances surrounding the deed itself may be. This,
per se
, as Hubble laboriously and exactly pointed out, argues the absolute assumption of some degree of premeditation, no matter how honestly and credibly both the murderer and the circumstances deny it. In the minds of all of us, pressed down, sealed up, forgotten if it ever was known, is the vision of another’s death at our hands, which in same way, at some time, consciously or not, we have seen and recognized; and the face of the dead is the face of love.

More than any other noumenon, the strange, unearthly identity between death and love has obsessed the dreams of men since unrecorded time. Love and sacrifice, love and death, love’s own self-annihilation and the annihilation of its object, in the moment of its perfect bodily expression, are part of all consciousness. For men and women, to love is to destroy; to be loved is to invite destruction.

The means are always at hand, if death is to solve a problem from which life offers absolutely no escape. As dawn with fearful slowness revealed the murdered stone face of the building opposite the hotel bedroom window, with first only a curdling of the darkness into barely-seen rectangles and lines of shadow, and finally a dismal greyness of Victorian architectural detail impossible to look upon as the work of man, I found that the last hours of the night had with similar slowness brought me face to face with the one conceivable choice—a choice between Irma and myself, as to which one of us Alan could less unhappily do without.

For it was he, of course, who alone mattered beyond the moment. In the fruitless consummation of our love, Irma and I in ourselves had already ceased to count; our marriage, barren of all but an uncertain worldly security for her and offering her no refuge from her dreadful craving—as I had told Barbara—for absolute extinction, and for me a division of self into two irreconcilable parts, came not as the beginning of love but as the end. Whereas I had Alan, to call upon my duty and my care, she had nothing—certainly not him: for in possessing him she must lose him as I must lose him in denying him her. Thus, even lost to both of us, he alone had significance still; my importance as a guide would lessen quickly now; Irma meant nothing, retained nothing. Not even a last refuge remained for her to seek when she withdrew from my encircling arms, from my heart’s cave, and left them empty again.

I undressed to the first sounds of traffic in the street below, loud and sadly echoing in the grey coulisses of the empty city, and huddled myself together between the clean yellow blankets. In the hotel itself, sounds began—the clanking of mops in buckets, rushing of water from taps, and somewhere remotely below the scraping crunch and ring of coke being shovelled into a furnace, and the voices which at that grey hour sound so wide-awake and purposeful. Warmth spread slowly through my cramped and rigid limbs, relaxing them. In the glaring light that had saved me all night from complete darkness I fell at last into a short sleep from which a girl in a black dress and a white apron woke me, with a tray from which she took a cup of tea. Sitting there in the normal light of morning, I drank the cup off slowly, and the tears ran weakly and briefly from my eyes as I thought how often Alan had stood with me at that hour, leaning in the frame of the open French windows while with half-closed eyes he assessed the promise of the day across the eastern harbour. I cried to myself in the weakness of waking again, wishing he were still a boy at school, wishing that the promise those years had seemed to hold had been sustained always on the verge of a wondrous fulfilment, wishing that every action of my life had not so positively curved downwards to this moment of timeless and intolerable loneliness.

Given the motive, means and opportunity will always present themselves. Precision of thought and action and the ability to see the thing whole, from beginning to end, are all else that is needed. Afterwards, forget what you can and let the pitiable memory of what cannot be forgotten be a punishment more divine than any devised by mankind in its futile dream of self-protection. So long as there are men there will be murder.

It is probable that I had always imagined Irma dead, for reasons other than that I loved her. It may even be that I substituted my love for her death from the beginning. When, in speaking of her refugee friends, she had said ‘I am one of them’, it had been true, and my heart if not my mind acknowledged it. In her own way, in my own microcosmos, she was one of the despoilers of my young and eager and unblooded country, a land as old as earth itself and as young as Alan. She had come into my world shyly, hungrily, seeking a refuge in which to pursue her own obscure and worthless ends; but she had pursued them as one herself pursued, in beauty and with ineffable grace and lonely, unflagging courage.

This quality of courage seemed to be embodied in the cast of her face. The Slavic cheek-bones, the flying grey-blue eyes, the full firmness of mouth and chin gave it a look of ancient bravery like that of a face on a centuries-old coin. I looked at her in the soft lamplight of early night, as with a smile she took from my steady hand the cup whose contents would kill her. In the poised unreality of that moment before she began to drink it (so strong, so sweet, its aroma blending headily with the fumes of the heated brandy) I knew how real had always been my admiration of her, the delicate and controlled and noble animal set apart by some subtly exaggerated womanhood from all other women I had known.

As she raised the cup to her lips she raised her eyes to mine in a long, meditative stare, and in that moment I believed that by virtue of some ageless instinct she knew what she did when, mouthful by mouthful, without a word passing between us, she drained the cup almost to the dregs. With her left hand she held the saucer in her lap. I reminded myself automatically that I would need to wipe it and the cup’s handle. Its pure whiteness enhanced the fine secret glow of her skin under the delicate artifice of the nylon pyjamas she was wearing for the first time that evening. For once, because I was too intensely aware of how alive she was to be able to keep silence, I had expostulated earlier with her about this pyjama suit, which by its clinging weight and transparency revealed more of her person than it concealed. But she had silenced me by saying gently, ‘It is for you alone, my friend, I promise you.’

With a sense of its meaningless irrelevance, that yet was somehow relevant to I do not know what moment of our past happiness, I comforted myself with a conviction that at least no one but myself should see her alive in it. If I had said so, she would have agreed, but I did not say it, for I could not tempt her now to a lie; the unreality of the hour, too unreal to bear the stress either of fear or of pity, would have made my own words meaningless too . . .

We were in the bedroom together. She tried, clumsily for the first time in my experience of her, to get the hair-brush against the smooth hair she had not uncoiled. Later I picked it up where it had fallen softly on the floor rug; now I had to get her on to the bed, where I laid her down, alone, terribly alone. She said something which I still think was ‘Now are you satisfied?’ and the full realization of what I had done came to me then as she seemed to fall asleep.

By my watch it was an hour since the tide had turned; I had heard its coldly amorous slap and kiss on the stones of the breakwater that led like a path straight into the unused boatshed with its old water-stair opening out of its floor and a ribbed ramp going down on either side beyond the stone steps. That was now my destination.

It never occurred to me that I might be heard or seen as I took her down the service stair by which I had returned in the darkness an hour earlier, by which I would again return and leave soon. I was impersonally occupied with an extreme care for her person as we descended; had her hand or her foot struck the wall or the safety railing I would have felt it with tremendous concern. And nothing untoward happened. No door opened as we passed; no faint impact trembled through her warm indolent body as step by step we went down together into the night lying secret and immense upon the rising tide.

I felt that in the safety of my arms she had, after all, come to no least harm.