The Refuge (18 page)

Above all there was Alan, and at the thought of him the old loneliness and longing for my own kin ached like a healed wound in threatening weather. I seldom left town for long between one annual holiday and the next, except on occasional police assignments, and until this year had never gone away even for a weekend at Hill Farm without first seeing him at my mother’s house.

Now, however, things were different, for at the beginning of the year he had been enrolled at S. Johns, the Townsends’ unique (as it then was) co-educational school in Vaucluse as a boarder, and had long since learned to be happy there—so happy, indeed, in the company of boys and girls of his own age and social origins that my jealousy at our parting soon gave way to a lonely contentment at the rightness of my own and my mother’s decision to send him there. He was in any case an extraordinarily happy child, from the days of his earliest infancy, and though it sometimes made my throat ache to think he must live his life without having ever known the arms and the breasts and the tender lips of an earthly mother, I felt a deep joy in watching develop the innocence and optimism of his nature towards a replica of Jean’s own. Being myself inclined sometimes to moods of black gloom and despair, both of myself and of my kind, I could observe with admiration his freedom, so far, from a single moment of self-doubt or self-consciousness, and the sturdy growth of his child mind towards what promised (and indeed proved) to be a healthy and cheerful independence of thought sweetened by much spontaneous and untutored affection for those with whom he lived. He was in fact all Jean in his nature and temperament, and all Fitzherbert in his physical appearance.

Townsend and his wife, who ran the domestic side of the small school between them, discouraged visits by parents. Boarders came home for one week-end each month, and there was only one full-scale holiday each year, covering the Christmas and New Year celebrations during eight flying weeks of summer. May and September holidays were observed by the usual termination of class studies, but the children remained at the school as though it were their own home—as indeed it seemed to them to be—and the course of social training which to the Townsends was designed for the greatest good both of the individual child and of the future community was preserved without serious interruption the year through.

Alan had been there for six months, and I knew he was already benefiting from the well-disciplined informality of that environment. Without doubt, for all her affection and good-will towards her only grandchild, my mother had had some repressive effect upon him. Her love, starved now of almost all other outlets, would have seen to that . . .

I rang S. Johns and spoke to Townsend briefly, asking after the boy and letting him know I would be out of town overnight. He seemed surprised and impatient, as he always did when I made these, to his mind, unnecessary calls to warn him of my absences. His attitude towards parents was one of suspicious tolerance, at best, and of blunt and outspoken criticism when they threatened any interference with his thoughtfully-devised ‘system’.

I rang off, supressing a great longing to hear the boy’s voice lightly saying my name, and went up to see Barbara.

Still overwhelmed now and then by the recurring thought of what I had learned from Irma, I believe I was fully intending to tell her what I had told Scott. If I was, it was for different reasons—mainly because of the habit of friendship’s confession; for we had become over the years such firm friends, so easy in each other’s company, that many of the staff, I think, supposed us to be lovers. Our innocent intimacy was of the sort that makes all but the most personal secrecies impossible. Matters that affected our professional and private lives and the lives of our children we discussed with the day-to-day ease of brother and sister, with the same sense of kinship and the same lack of much emotion; and at that time the precarious balance of our civilization on the crumbling cliff-top of incalculable disaster was indeed such a matter.

However, I changed my mind abruptly when she looked up with her invariable smile of welcome and I observed—not without a soft wrench of envy—the expression of calm anticipation in her face, and realized that she must have been thinking with contentment and joy of the two days of freedom before her, and of herself surrounded by her sons—for Brian was at home on a short leave. That look of almost animal well-being, when the flesh itself is informed by the mind’s contented purpose, is so peculiar to motherhood that only in the face of a priest who once befriended me in my university days have I seen anything comparable with it in a man, on whom, as it happened, not a child but a fatal cancer was feeding.

Barbara had no bodily ailments that I ever knew of, but she had some of the mental sickness and the sickness of the heart from which our generation suffered in those unbearably threatening days of August in that year. It was like waiting for a blow which we knew must fall, but which would not. Now, in the last hour of her usual working week, she had shrugged off the worry and the fear, setting them aside as firmly as she was setting aside the week’s completed tasks. I could not spoil her rare moment of pleasure in seeing herself as once more all woman, all mother.

‘You are off, Lloyd?’ she said with cheerful surprise. ‘Free? Come over and have dinner with us at home. Brian will be there, and the boys haven’t seen you for an age. Do us all this favour.’

When I said it was not possible, she seemed unusually disappointed. Then she smiled and remarked teasingly, ‘I know—it’s that rather startling young woman I saw you with.’

‘It is, in fact,’ I said. ‘I’m taking her up to Hill Farm with me tonight.’

‘It must be her clothes,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet anything you don’t know how particularly well dressed she is. I was almost going to ask you where I could have seen her before. Is she Australian?—no, forgive me. It’s no affair of mine, except that her clothes are perfect and she wears them perfectly. Did you know that?’

‘I have not your trained eye in such matters,’ I said, feeling suddenly depressed. ‘The fact is, I really am taking her and a friend of hers to the mountains this evening, and I can’t stay long now. I need not tell you the whole story at this time, but briefly, she is in danger and wants a hiding-place, and I could only think of the farm. To tell the truth, I’m not very happy about it. I don’t know how Jack will take it. You know how he is about women. I don’t want to lose him . . . I could think of nothing else except protective custody, and when I did suggest that, she was pretty badly frightened.’

‘Dear me,’ Barbara said, ‘that sounds bad. I suppose my place wouldn’t be any good?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘She has to run for it, you see—right away from Sydney, if what she tells me is true—and I have some reason to believe her. As for your question—no, she is not Australian, she is a refugee I happened to speak to about a year ago, when I was doing a boat for Bob Roberts. She tells me she has been a mannequin here for some time. That is all I know about her life here—a mannequin or model and an occasional designer somewhere in town.’

Barbara nodded.

‘I knew I had seen her before,’ she said slowly. ‘She’s first model at a rather posh place called
Chez Madame—
a really lovely creature. I remember her particularly because she has never let herself be photographed. I must say your taste is good, Lloyd.’

‘I assure you this is none of my choosing,’ I said irritably. ‘But that would be the girl.’

‘Why no photographs? Usually the particularly lovely ones are particularly vain.’

‘She was probably frightened,’ I said. ‘Off and on for the past five years she has been running for her life—literally. She is doing it again now, she believes.’

‘Oh, the poor little thing . . . Tell me, is this part of the general European picture?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It has come near home at last—a rather unusual sample of it, for this country, but common enough over there, I gather. They take their politics rather more seriously than we do. And now I must go and see my police friends. I just came to let you know I shall be at Hill Farm until tomorrow evening or perhaps Sunday—I cannot simply set them down there on old Jack’s doorstep and disappear. You see how it is. And thank you for this evening’s invitation.’

‘Let me know if I can be of any help,’ she said earnestly; and, as I was closing the door, she added, ‘And take care of yourself as well as of other people, my dear.’

On my way to the main staircase, I called two of the boys from where they sat chattering on their long bench, waiting impatiently to become special correspondents, and gave them Irma’s cloakroom receipts and some money.

‘Bring whatever it is to the side entrance not a minute later than five to five, will you? I shall be in again about then. One of you please wait with the luggage until I come. Divide the change up between you, and keep sober.’

I got on rather well with our copy-boys. Because of my van Dyke beard and moustaches, they at first thought me rather a comic figure; because of their confident youth and friendly impudence when no one else was near, I thought them comic too. As each of us knew what was in the other’s mind, and no harm was meant, we rubbed along very satisfactorily. It is an unfortunate newspaper man who cannot get on happily with his office subordinates. They were still alternately thanking me, hinting at corpses in trunks, and telling each other to shut up when I went down the staircase, past the front business office, and into the street.

A taxi took me to Phillip Street and the C.I.B. The tremulous August afternoon was fading, the air already turning cold. I had a flashing glimpse of the gilded globe high above the entrance to the
Sun
building, where our afternoon colleague was running off final extras: it was catching the last of the city’s sunlight, while a dozen floors beneath it the news-editors were sorting out late cables and home news under the shaded glare of desk lights. Over the whole city was spreading the care-freed Friday afternoon mood. Seeing so many week-end suitcases being hoisted into trams and taxis, I was reminded of the need to buy food as soon as I had seen Hubble.

He was sitting, as in imagination I always saw him, with his shirt sleeves rolled up, leaning his elbows on the table and smoking. His pipe was drawing well and his brow was clear and untroubled as a boy’s. Like many professional wrestlers’—and in his youth he had won belts—his body looked ill-proportioned while he was seated; as soon as he stood up you saw that, unlike a lot of them, he had the height to carry his weight, almost majestically I sometimes thought; and he had brains and intelligence enough to carry the weight of his present exacting job as a senior member of the criminal investigations branch. He might have been ten years older than I was. The shining fairness of his short-cut hair at the temples might have been silver. No one, in either case, could have said with any certainty.

‘Hullo, Fitz—how’s crime?’

It was his unvarying greeting. To the clerk busily typing at a small table near him he indicated the door and added, ‘See if Mr. Inkpen has finished with that Dodds letter, Bill, and put it back in our file if he has, or we’ll lose track of it. I won’t be long.’

When the constable had gone out, I told him why I had come.

‘As near as that, is it?’ he said. ‘It’s something outside my own sphere just now, this political stuff, but forewarned is forearmed, eh?’

‘To coin a phrase, yes,’ I said. He gave me a sharp look, then slung one large knee over the arm of his groaning swivel chair and let his head fall back as he laughed. I knew, however, that he was watching me and thinking of what I had told him.

‘Where did you pick this up?’ he said abruptly, putting his knee down again and leaning forward.

‘I’m not free to say—and you need not think you can catch me out with your trick questioning,’ I said. ‘It comes from a refugee, an ex-Communist who still hears things from Moscow occasionally on the grape-vine. You know what chance there is of keeping a thing as big as this secret in countries like Russia and Germany. It actually came out during a personal conversation. Needless to say, we ourselves cannot do much about it either, until it is official, but, to borrow your phrase, forewarned may be to some extent forearmed. Like you, I don’t see myself connected with it—yet. Both of us may be in it if this pact does happen, if we do find ourselves at war with Germany by next month, and if our own government acts quickly. As far as I am any judge, the whole of the immediate future depends on the relationship between those two countries. I imagined your people would like to know it is talked about here. The country’s full of aliens.’

‘Lousy with ’em,’ he agreed, taking up his pipe again when I lit my own, which I had been filling while I spoke, ‘And now tell me, my dear Watson, what’s really on your mind?’

‘Nothing more.’ He was always surprising me in this uncanny way, though I knew him well. I believe it was partly habit, partly shooting in the dark; I knew he had more than once found the trick useful when he saw himself stopped in an investigation by his own ignorance of where he was heading, at a certain moment; but invariably his instinct, his choice of the exact instant for asking that direct question, was infallible.

‘Nothing?’ he said. ‘I thought you looked paler than usual—worried.’ His own plump red-brown face of a healthy and active man still showed no trace of worldly care.

‘Not unless you can give me something to worry about.’

‘The trouble with you and me, Fitz,’ he said amiably, ‘is that we don’t trust each other like partners in crime should. All right. Have it your own way.’

It had not taken long, but I was anxious now and felt a need for haste, like one approaching the real purpose of a mission. By the time I got back to the side entrance of the office, carrying several food parcels that did not fit together anywhere, it was ten to five.

Fortunately, my boy was already waiting inside the unostentatious steel double doors beside a small collection of travelling luggage.

‘Go and stand somewhere near the inquiry desk,’ I told him. ‘A fat woman will be asking for me at about five o’clock, probably carrying a suitcase. Bring her here, will you?—tell the girl I asked you to meet the woman. Is that clear?’