The Refuge (2 page)

The cast of characters we meet is limited: Fitzherbert himself; his love object, the impossibly glamorous mid-European refugee Irma, trailing a concealed Communist Party back story in her wake; his teenage son, Alan; and his female confidante, Barbara, who plays the dialogue-sustaining role assigned in Greek tragedy to the nurse or family retainer, conversing, disclosing, moving the drama’s action relentlessly on.

None of this would be sufficient to lift
The Refuge
beyond the realm of quirky thrillerdom: Agatha Christie’s
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, done with a garnishing of literary style. But Mackenzie has a further aim, intriguingly realised in the sweep and atmospherics of his book. Wartime Sydney and the Australia of the setting constitute the ‘refuge’ of the title. Irma is fleeing persecution in Nazi Europe, but she is also bringing the sophistication and the complexity and the paranoia of Europe in her wake. She is a character from the fictive world of Victor Serge or the real world of the exiled Trotsky. Murky agents are on her trail; she must seek shelter, she must hide her unforgettable face away.

Lloyd Fitzherbert, a distinctly provincial, establishment Australian with pedigree and fine principles, finds himself swept up in this net. His investigations and questionings quickly bring him into contact with sinister-seeming party apparatchiks. One foreign pursuer pays a call on Fitzherbert in his newsroom:

With great indignation, Fitzherbert winds himself up to resist this sinuous intruder and all the machinations and conspiracies he represents:

And Fitzherbert sends him packing. But the worm is already deep in the virginal Australian rose. Foreign spirits, sultry and intoxicating, have drifted in upon the tide, and they are spreading through the old, staid country, hinting at elusive, hidden knowledge, sowing temptation and confusion as they go. Lovely Irma has seized on Fitzherbert as her refuge, just as he believes he has found refuge from the drab succession of his life in her. In the Indian summer of their romance it is clear to him: refuge is what people give each other. She is the bird in flight, and she has come to ‘her final refuge within the cave of my mind, the walls of my arms’.

But those walls do not remain a solid place of safety, given Fitzherbert’s slow realisation, in his repeated dealings with his new love and her milieu, that all emotions are ambiguous, that there is no rational or appointed order in the flux and flow of the wide world: ‘It is not hard,’ he concludes, ‘to love that which will destroy the lover, and earthly love and fear are in essence equally strong, equally self-destructive.’ A few pages later, Irma is dead by his hand, her body is adrift in the harbour, and the seagulls are once more on the wing against cloud cover the colour of themselves. The refuge has failed. Australia has lost its simplicity; the equations have come out to their inevitable solution: the tale is at its term.

Much has been at stake; much has been resolved. This is a novel of lingering looks and breaths on the skin, of imagined closeness and wide distances between characters. From its opening pages on, it is also a duel: between eye and object. Our reporter first meets the woman he will love and kill on a passenger ship in the harbour. She is in his mind from that day on. Time drags: eventually, she comes to him, in appeal. He rescues her: he abstracts her to his retreat in the Blue Mountains, another space of shrouds and life-threatening edges. There, she is safe, away from the world. They talk through the night, and the book’s central scene unfolds—a scene that really must be read through without pause, both attentively and with tenderness. It has few parallels in modern writing: it is mature and sophisticated, and naïve and adolescent. It is a description of intimacy and intimacy’s limits; of longing, gazing, and the way the self can lose its boundaries and become unmoored. Such conversations are only possible by night, and are probably best confined to fiction. Another such is the endless-seeming talk between the heroine and the doctor in Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood
, a strange jewel of the 1930s that
The Refuge
resembles in its baroque linguistic glow.

Irma confesses herself to Fitzherbert, she tells him all her secrets, she offers her body up to him. ‘I knew that such a moment could never again in my life come upon me with this fierce, unpardonable surprise.’ His choice is abstention, and honour: it is also possession in words, and obsession. Better to write than to live; better to know one’s thoughts and feelings with analytic precision than to be caught up wildly in the flow of love. This is the choice that is no choice. The memory of it tempts him until he betrays it. His depth of feeling compels his surrender. Like all tragedies,
The Refuge
is the tale of a hero who is trapped. His gifts and the strengths in his character are what destroy him.

Books can reach out beyond their frame, and dictate, in some sense, the lives their authors lead. By the time he had reached his fortieth birthday, Kenneth Mackenzie was living at Kurrajong, beside the flank of the Blue Mountains. He was drinking; his world was in disarray. He was the author of majestic books that were received with puzzlement; he was a Bohemian in an austere new post-war realm. The
Australian Dictionary of Biography
entry devoted to him signs off in sombre tones: ‘His financial situation and personal life were fast deteriorating.’

In January 1955, Mackenzie made a visit to a friend in nearby Goulburn, and was arrested for drunkenness. That same night he was, though a strong swimmer, ‘accidentally drowned’ while bathing in Tallong Creek, a fast-flowing watercourse that few would choose for an early evening dip. Death by water—refuge, release, a literary end.

The Refuge

Author
’
s note from the first edition:

The Refuge
is a work of fiction. All the characters, except those mentioned by their given or assumed names—Neville Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, General D. MacArthur, H. E. L. Townsend, Jesus,
et alia—
are fictional characters. Thus there need be none of the misunderstanding which prevented the publication in Australia of
Dead Men Rising.
I trust that even the oldest-established legal firms in my own country are in no doubt about this matter.

K. S. M.

Sydney, 1953

To
G. A. Ferguson, Esquire
in friendship

‘All treaties are by their natures false, since they pretend on either hand . . . a willingness to gratify the other’s desire that they may the sooner gratify the one’s: save only that which a man enters upon with his own soul, to be true unto her.’

Michael Paul,
The Anatomy of Failure

It was, I found, the most difficult night telephone call I had ever made.

No one would describe me as a nervous man. Years of police reporting give a necessary control of all emotion, not merely a command of the show of it. I have seen men hanged, and the raped and mutilated bodies of young women, and children’s bodies that fire has burned, and drowned people on whom fish have been feeding; and for such sights great calmness of spirit is essential. One does not even allow an inward weeping for pity, or for shame at being oneself a man. One looks, and makes notes, and forgets. Nervousness does not come into it.

Yet this telephone call . . . To all the world it was but a routine night call to the headquarters of the criminal investigation branch of the State Police, and all I had to do was to lift the receiver and say ‘C.I.B., please,’ and the girl would say ‘Yes, Mr. Fitzherbert,’ and put me through. Or—though it was less desirable—I could use my own direct line, which I prefer to keep clear for incoming calls, for it is the one the police themselves use, ringing me personally instead of the office switchboard. The digits of my home number are the same—1939—and thus, if I am not on duty, they have merely to use the other call-symbol; the number is, of course, unforgettable.

The general reporters’ room was fairly busy still, though the country edition must have been just going to bed, for it was eleven o’clock. The tide in the harbour would be flooding westwards towards the bridge under a lowering sky. I had waited for that hour, with, as I thought, no feelings whatever. The management had not yet given me a private room and an assistant for full-time duty, and my table was in the big room with eighteen others; I walked about, sometimes, between nine and eleven, talking to one man or another, and sometimes sat at my table thinking, hoping that perhaps my own telephone would ring first. But they never bothered me about suicides unless there were peculiar circumstances, or unless it were very late, when they would ring me at home and I would get into touch with the office from there if there were a chance of catching the final or the city edition. If it was not late, they knew I would ring them as usual, at eleven o’clock.

I am certainly not a nervous man. What I had done I had done without fear or fumbling, cleanly, knowing the way—though it was not easy—and the most probable picture it would all make to the police mind, which is as a rule impatient of suicide. Now, however, I found that my hands were sweating profusely, my throat was dry, and in the lower part of my abdomen there was a trembling, jumping sensation; and I felt again the terrible emotion of triumph mixed with and outweighed by black and utter despair, guiltless yet horrified. I forced myself to think of Alan, to remember that what I had done was done for his salvation, not my own, and that I had him to live for; that now he was safe, that dear and beautiful boy.

It was after eleven. If you knew the office sounds in that vast building, you could hear from deep underground, far below street level, the presses running off the country edition, well away by now. At the airfield, the
Gazette
aeroplanes, two of them now, would be warming up out on the runway in the silvery blaze of light. One suicide more or less must mean nothing at all to the men and women of the Australian countryside, who are familiar with death in many forms by the violence of fire and water and the blind malice of accident . . .

By water. The perspiration tickled the roots of my hair and beard. I took up the house telephone receiver, and said to the girl on the switchboard in my usual voice, ‘C.I.B., please, Molly.’

‘Yes, Mr. Fitzherbert.’

At this, I felt the excitement and sickness leave me. It was a strong physical sensation, like that of an urgent bodily function timely performed. I sat on the edge of my table swinging one foot and watching the reflection of the ceiling light overhead come and go on the polished toe of that shoe. Often enough I had waited like this for Hubble or one of his men to answer my routine night call, and had been content to wait, assured and at ease. Tonight, it seemed that a long time passed before the harsh click at the other end of the line was followed by the sound of a typewriter working at speed under heavy hands, then by a familiar voice.

‘C.I.B.’

‘Fitzherbert here, Sergeant. Anything doing?’

That question was the climax of the whole business, and—as happens with so many climaxes—I had not realized it was upon me until I spoke. The sweat ran a little way down my wrist even before the sergeant answered; on my shoe the light was still, and the voices and typewriters in the general room where I sat sounded suddenly loud and many.

‘Hullo, Fitz. Nothing much in your line. A gent drove his car over an embankment half an hour ago in Chatswood. Minor injuries. I’ll give you details in a minute. A bit of a do at Kings Cross—the patrol car’s there now, if you can wait half an hour. No details yet. No sign of the chap who got out of the Bay—yes, Manser. Still loose. I’ll let you have some reassuring words about that, too . . . And that’s about the lot. Dull life, isn’t it?’

Sergeant Hubble I liked. He had put more than one good thing in my way, and given me valuable leads without betraying the trust placed in him by his organization. Tonight, however, his cheery and casual voice was that of a stranger, that of a man I was trying without words to persuade to tell me something he did not know, though I knew it. A sudden compelling desire to prompt him had to be suppressed so strongly that I found my teeth were clenched painfully, my body rigid with a species of helpless anguish.

‘Just a minute, Harry,’ I said. ‘I’ll have that Chatswood smash. Is it worth a picture?’

‘Not unless you’re light on. A ten-foot drop, not much damage, no one of importance—not even a pinched car. Are you right?’

Moving into the chair, I changed the receiver to my left hand so that I could write. In his most official voice, deep and clear above the bang and rush and ring of the typewriter in the room with him, Sergeant Hubble gave me the story, and then some pointers about the escapee, Manser, who was also a nobody—not even a dangerous criminal. Because the public (which has a perverse and nervous sympathy for those who evade that justice the public itself has decreed) enjoys reading about such evasions, as well as for the reputation of the force, the police are extremely touchy in the matter of these escapes; and this was the fourth in the State in less than three months. My paper’s policy has always been to play up the police efforts in such cases—in all cases, in fact, from murder down—and in return we have had a most satisfactory co-operation from those strange, suspicious, arrogant and often frightened men whom I have known to be as brave as at times they have been brutal. I listened and made notes; or perhaps I should say Lloyd Fitzherbert listened and made notes, in a neat shorthand on a tidy block of paper, while I, the secret self of that efficient, experienced and even esteemed police roundsman of the
Sydney Gazette
, stood aside watching with renewed anguish of mind the swift performance of a routine night task. For I had not heard from Hubble what I must hear if I hoped to sleep that night (or, said the subdued, unreasoning voice of despair, to sleep ever again); and, thinking of the tide in the harbour, how it must now be approaching its fullness, I knew it was time; it was time . . .