The Refuge (17 page)

Hill Farm, as it was already called when I bought it just before my marriage, is high on a mountain plateau and faces east. Towering forested spurs wall it in to the north and south. The sun sets early on it behind the main crest which runs north and south like a dark, gigantic wave, but until afternoon subsides into final darkness, it receives from the east a cool reflected light that casts no shadows and seems, indeed, to become brighter than before during the hour or more of sunset and dusk before night falls like a caress over the land.

By driving at a speed uncomfortably fast for my liking, I managed our arrival there while there was still a little of this beneficent luminosity falling shadowless from the high eastern sky. In that direction, the vast coastal plain below was ocean-blue and cold, with lights pricking through the misty air as far as vision reached, to south, east and north. Nearest at hand, twelve miles or more away below, the street and aerodrome lights of the old town of Richmond glittered in rigid stillness; far off, Parramatta was a haze of bright crowded points of illumination, and beyond that, fifteen miles more in the concealing distance, the huge sprawling glow of the metropolis outshone the advancing night that had already hooded the Pacific in a starry darkness.

My last hour in the office had brought upon me a feeling of unreality. Irma, introduced to the monitor as a friend of mine, remained in the wireless room during and after the B.B.C. news broadcast, while I hastened through what I had to do. No one but the monitor, a small, grey-haired woman of modest demeanour, realized that she was still in the building; probably no one else except Peter, the pert and cheerful copy-boy who had brought her to me, knew she had come at all. Throughout the place, the haste and self-consideration of Friday afternoon spread like a fever, almost supervening upon the fretful fever of the times themselves; throughout the building and through the whole city. The irrepressible Australian week-end optimism in the streets made the dirge-like cries of the newsvendors on the corners sound hollow and desperate. This air of adventure and unreality began to pervade my whole mind.

Scott’s manner of receiving my rather diffident warning over the telephone—he did not know I was ringing from within the office: it was a chance I felt I must take—was in keeping with the character of the man and the paper he edited in more than name only. His interests were world-wide, and he had a long vision of national and international affairs as they developed. Like most thinking men among us (and every newspaper has a few such), he was at once ready to believe that what had never been ruled out as a possibility—namely, a
rapprochement
between the apparently antithetical Foreign Offices of Berlin and Moscow—might well become an accomplished fact before, as he put it, ‘our overloaded stomachs are ready to digest any further morsels of that sort of meat.’

‘I felt bound to pass it on to you,’ I said, ‘because it sounded of particular significance that we here should hear of it so far in advance—if it is far—in Australia itself, and not from overseas sources’.

‘You can’t give me your source of information, I suppose?’ he said in his booming voice, which usually made it necessary to hold the telephone receiver away from one’s ear. I looked at Irma standing near, her body inclined forward as she listened with deep concentration frowning slightly but with no other expression; I felt her light, even breathing on the back of my wrist and inhaled half-unconsciously her faint unknown perfume, and shook my head as though Scott himself could see me. (Clearly I could envisage his tanned yachtsman’s face with the crest of white hair and the look of benevolent anger he always wore, whatever was going on.)

‘No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Even speaking to you is rather a breach of promise. My informant is quite clear of any political involvement, but you know that with these foreigners there is a deep-rooted fear of the police—particularly the secret police. I find that the very fact of not seeing even a hint of anything like Gestapo or N.K.V.D. activities in Australia only makes them the more sure such things do go on.’

‘Yes. Well—we’ve had rumours of this from London already, of course. It’s one of those occasions when one man’s guess is as good as another’s. It may be as well to let them know at that end what you tell me, especially if what you tell me has come on the red tape.’ This was his way of referring to what scanty news we had direct from Russia, from our own men there.

‘We can at least get a few things ready here, too,’ he shouted thoughtfully. ‘Thanks, anyhow, Fitz. Sorry we can’t check your sources, but I suppose we’ll know the worst soon enough . . . If the whole thing wasn’t so calamitous and final I’d like to get in early with it. Still, it’s not a time for scoops, I suppose—not even for scooping the
Herald . . .
Goodbye.’

The unreality took hold of my mind as I put down the receiver and looked again at Irma. I wondered for a moment whether it was not all some mad prank being played upon me by someone who knew my temperament; until I remembered the card she had kept for so long. She was standing erect, very close to me, still now with the stillness of overmastering decision. We remained for a few seconds staring steadily at each other, like a couple of conspirators committed to something far more fateful than a plan of escape and disappearance. It almost seemed to me as though, unwittingly, we had somehow pledged ourselves to a deep and timeless association of the mind and the spirit—as though, even if after this moment we were never to see each other again, we should live out our days in the obscure conviction of a frail yet indissoluble union.

Such an experience; for all its brevity, was new to me. It was all part of the unreality of that hour, and had not the slightest effect upon my subsequent thoughts and actions up to the moment I left the office finally, soon after five o’clock. We stood so close that when I looked down and saw without surprise that our hands were joined and clinging idly together I did not know whether the childish, unfettered gesture had been hers or my own. Her fingers were cold, and I could feel a faint trembling, too slight to be visible, running down her arms from her whole body. For the first time I realized, in spite of my self-absorption, that since she had come into that office she must have been in a state of the most intense nervous strain, which she had managed to conceal or disguise the whole time. She knew my connection with the police; she was risking everything, she must have felt, on one chance meeting a year old, and on a vague promise made then and perhaps forgotten, or—worse—regretted.

‘Courage,’ I said to the chilly air above her head, and for a moment she leaned heavily towards me, resting her forehead against my breast and gripping both my hands with hers in a clutching grasp. Then she freed me of herself entirely, stepping back to look up at me.

‘It is you, my friend, who will need courage,’ she said gently. ‘You must pardon me—I am very tired.’

Then she moved quickly back to her chair and sank into it and crossed her knees, taking her cigarette-case and lighter from her shoulder-bag and motioning me sharply to the other chair. No sooner had I sat down than the door behind me opened—she must have been watching it all the while, listening—and the wireless monitor stepped briskly into the little room.

After her unflurried apology, I introduced Irma to her by the first name that came into my mind, and explained that she would wait there for me. Then I went out, forced to admit to myself that my heart and mind were by now considerably disturbed by the interview just concluded. I am by no means of a nervous temper, and even in those distracting days I knew I had a fair command not only over my outward expression but also over those inner tides of ebb and flux which most men feel when abrupt changes outside themselves find inward echoes and responses; when new circumstances which the mind alone can fully comprehend and assess prove to have the power also of calling, as it were by surprise, upon the secret life of the emotions.

These unknown quantities in the ratio of behaviour to outward events I believed I could, if not know, at least control, to the end that I might live and work well. But it must be remembered, as I myself was remembering with a sensation of physical pain, that until a few minutes ago I had not been in such familiar proximity to the youth and beauty and compelling bodily power and subtly exhaled essences of womanhood for more than nine years. I had already assured myself that complete celibacy caused me no bodily distress now. Was I to have to reconsider that assurance, and perhaps to start out on that hard and secret road to physical peace all over again?

It was, somehow, unthinkable; and as I opened the door of my locker in the general room to take out my hat and overcoat I swore to myself that it would not be so. I would avoid the occasion. I had had, I believed, all that one man could hope for from the mysterious hoard of woman—love, and a boy-child, and perfect companionship; in return I had given faithfulness of heart and mind. Oh Jean, Jean, I thought desperately, let me feel again the reassurance of your imagined touch. Blind me with the fair clouds of your hair. Let the memory of what was so good bring quiet in a bad moment.

Evidently I had said some of this audibly, for over the door of the locker on my left, open like my own, a voice I knew said sternly and gaily, ‘What’s that you’re muttering into your beard there, Fitz?’

The speaker was Tim McMahon, at present doing State political rounds, and a more amiably dangerous man I never knew. As it was Friday afternoon, he was as usual already drunk, in his unobtrusive way. His beaming, bespectacled face, the perfect mask of innocence for one who could recite more recondite scandal, of a personal sort, from the Australian political sphere than anyone I ever heard of, regarded me affectionately as we closed our locker doors (his causing a heavy
clink
of bottle against bottle). For some reason which he probably understood as little as I did, he considered me his closest friend. As far as I knew, he had no other, for men were wary of him. It had begun when he was at last recalled quietly from Canberra, where for years he had surveyed the Federal political scene in weekly articles that varied between the brilliant and the useless, and whence he had sent us, time and again, items of news almost too scandalous not to be true, and far too libellous to use—much to Scott’s regret, for Scott was a bold man who combined a conservative policy with a love of truth-telling and a bitter contempt for most politicians. McMahon’s own usefulness there was deemed to have ended when he began repeating news-items in subsequent dispatches. His weakness for liquor, like the weaknesses of most members of that large staff both at home and overseas, was known well enough. The day came when complaints of him were received from more than one Minister in the Federal capital. Because these were of a personal sort, he was replaced. In common with most publications, the
Gazette
held that a man’s private life was his own affair until it affected his work, when it became the concern of his employers. In Sydney he could be watched.

McMahon, however, seemed pleased to be recalled, pleased to be given the comparatively less important assignment of State Parliament; but at first he was naturally lonely in Sydney, where he had never worked since his engagement by the
Gazette
some years earlier. (He was a Melbourne man.) As I was in the office a good deal during the earlier part of the day, I saw him often, and occasionally gave him lunch or a drink—usually both. Like others of his sort, he seemed never to have much money, although he was a high-salary journalist and had been for years. His borrowing habits soon became known, and few men now cared to find themselves alone with him between pay-days. However, I was obliged to enjoy his company—and perversely enough it was worth enjoying, even when he was not sober—more than most; and although he never offered or attempted to project our association outside the varying limits of our working day, he did linger near my table, or sit nonchalant and laughing in my visitors’ chair, for long hours sometimes when we should both have been finishing our work, entertaining me against my will with his scandalous and witty reminiscences. Hours meant little to him; like many a lonely journalist I have known, he was never quite happy away from the office itself, where he was to be encountered at any time, on most days, from morning till late at night.

The fact, too, that like him I had had a Catholic upbringing was soon known to him—he had this unashamed flair for the personal in every human contact he made—and without trading on it, in that predominantly Protestant atmosphere of the
Gazette
of those days, he took it, as so many Catholics since the time of Henry Tudor have taken this irrelevant matter of religious denomination, to be a secret additional tie between us.

Today I not only had no time for him: I definitely and actively wanted him away from me, out of the building and away from Irma’s neighbourhood, for though I liked him I trusted him no more than one can trust a cat. He followed me to my table, disappointment in his round thin face where every feature was of a pinched, classic neatness, almost feminine, from the small square jaw and the little, tender mouth topped by a restrained moustache to the round brow with its widow’s-peak of dark hair, and the almost wistful directness of his blue eyes behind shallow lenses in dark frames.

I took up the telephone book without a word, and quite rudely turned my back upon him while I looked for the number of the garage where, for most of the year, and year after year now, my car stood on chocks, polished and unused—‘part of the furniture’ the garage men called it, patting it in a friendly fashion as newer and smarter models came and went.

McMahon for once took my crude hint, and wandered away among the brown wooden tables of the general room. I asked for the car at the side entrance in an hour’s time, and then stood fingering in my pocket the receipt slips for Irma’s luggage which I had got from her at the last minute, and wondered what to do next. The luggage would wait until the car was at hand. There remained the C.I.B.—particularly Hubble—and a vague feeling that I ought to let Barbara know what I was about. For some reason or other, I felt as though I were about to say goodbye to these two people, like a man making preparations for a long journey.