The Refuge (30 page)
The sudden Japanese threat in nineteen forty-two caused a long period of panic recruitment complemented by a panic wave of enlistment which together swept civilians of all ages and occupations, men and women both, into the ranks of the fighting services and the administrations behind them. During all those six years of war I and my colleagues were hard-worked and more highly-paid. Private relaxation became almost a public affair. We gathered together among ourselves more closely; pleasures were less decorous among the decorous, more uncontrolled among the carefree and the distressed; and as goods and necessities lapsed from plenty to scarcity—particularly those goods that helped to heighten the relief of worldly pleasures and for which there was thus an ever more urgent demand—what began to be called the black market came openly into being, and insidiously took its place in our lives and thoughts, prompting few protests because it was based—as it still is—on fear: the fear of being thought mean, or poorer than the next fellow, and the fear of not having what the next fellow had for his greater worldly comfort. Its persistence to this day makes it clear that it was never a wartime vice, to pass inevitably away after the ending of warfare, so much as it was from the beginning a characteristic if not of the whole nation then at least of the three eastern major states facing America across the troubled Pacific. Fear, the driving force behind most human endeavour in the democratic society of today, was keenly heightened, intensified, in those bloody and uncertain, shameful and despairing years; and mankind has so progressed, and improved its state so far, that the only soporific to comfort fear is money—more and more money, acquired no matter how.
I was fortunate in having a very modest private income assured to me by my father (‘to himself at least, my boy, a man must cut some sort of a decent figure’) whose active value varied with the times while its face-value remained unchanged; and I lived in such a way that even with the increased costs of Alan’s schooling I was able to save money and invest it for him in my turn. The knowledge that money is available, rather than the possession of it, is of considerable importance to a growing boy, and I was glad to think he would not have to suffer the small, distorting heartbreaks of any degree of poverty.
In my own mind, as in the minds of most thinking people in those days, the subsequently much-publicized and even more neglected ‘four freedoms’ had already been clearly defined as a proper objective for the whole activity of living. Secretly almost from myself, I had added one more—a freedom from love, as human beings mostly know and show it: as a misty shape of overpowering emotional claims, amorphous and terrible, upon the consciousness of the loved one, from the simple beginning—‘You must love me, for I love you’—to the last dreadful expedient, when the beloved seems about to escape finally from the talons of love, of spectacularly-acknowledged renunciation, in itself the boldest, most desperate and selfish claim of all.
I did not want to be loved, I thought, even by my son. By making provision for his freedom from at least the sharper material wants, and so perhaps from many worldly fears, I hoped to have enabled him, as he grew older towards manhood, to meet me when he chose and on his own terms, as two friends with disparate worldly interests may meet upon the common ground of humanity and warm mutual examination in speech and silence. I myself had always felt the lack of someone to whom I could talk and stammer out the record of my growth without making of confession a hostage to my freedom (it was what I meant when I spoke to Barbara of my own dear father as so often being ‘not there’), and it seemed possible that if I were supremely careful of my mind and heart, that they should not too much show in me, Alan might not suffer that lack, which is a fruitless, wry suffering not good for the soul.
This intention was always alive in me, even when I was with him. It survived many dark disturbances of mind when I was alone, and made tolerable even the black depths into which a man may find himself being drawn, now and then, when nervous exhaustion for a time spurs on self-criticism towards the shades of nightmare insanity, and the whole past of his life seems to stand in question, and to be damned as worthless. Even at such times, hearing the plash and suck of the blacked-out, starlit water of the harbour against the stone wall of the swimming-pool below my bedroom window, thinking that there, if anywhere, lay the gentle peace of oblivion and the merciful end of thought, I could think of Alan and not, in imagination, drown; I could sometimes recall Scott’s seemingly contemptuous epigrammatical obituary on a newspaper colleague who had committed suicide by drowning: ‘Water is no solution,’ and see the truth of it beneath the surface twist of wit, and know that death in that way would be for me not only the unholy thing my Mother Church so rightly held it to be, and not only a cowardly act of courage, but also comparable to that gesture of love’s ostentatious renunciation which I detested, and which would have placed upon the boy’s eager young shoulders a burden that must, like time itself, grow heavier as he grew older and more nearly understood what I had done, and why.
Looking back, I see and know that my sorriest lack in those years was of a wife. It is not that I wanted consciously a wife who loved me; my own private fifth freedom would make that plain. I had once been loved, with a young and joyous devotion as profoundly moving and impelling towards god as the music of Bach, or the smell of spring roses in the cold air of a starlit dusk, or a child’s face in the absolute innocence of sleep.
I had been given that love, and in moments of gloom I would fearfully imagine that the gift had exhausted the giver to death like sleep after a splendid toil. It was not this that I wanted ever again. I could not have borne it. What did I want, without knowing it, was a companion in the sleepless nights, a voice to answer mine if I cried aloud the many hidden cries of ordinary daily speech, and the untroubling presence always of a being not my own, a body and mind and soul all feminine to complete my masculine identity; in my care yet not of me; not for me, yet not withheld in ignorance that I too was a complementary being.
Twice in the weeks following my useless visit to Hill Farm, where Jack lived on in amused solitude far from the talk and stresses of war, I had to speak to other people of Irma.
I do not include there McMahon’s occasional monologues, for since the declaration of hostilities he had seemed to lose his former prying interest, and besides, he had much to do in keeping track of his excited State politicians, and in finding, in unpublishable detail, who was feathering his nest most warmly. Some of his stories were scarcely credible, shocking even to me in their revelations of small pettiness and insatiable self-interest; and I let him see this deliberately, for the more astounded and disgusted I became the more satisfaction he found in retailing his useless information; and the less likely he was to remember Irma.
Her name was first mentioned, after weeks in which it had sounded only in my own mind, by Miss Werther. That kindly and amiable person rang me at my home, where I could talk and listen without interruption. Even in the brief exchange of our greetings the lilt of her voice suggested that she had interesting news. As I sat back at my table in the firelit lounge room which was also my home office I could imagine vividly her black, polished eyes shining brighter with pleasure.
‘It is about Irma I am ringing,’ she said, ‘of course. Why else should I trouble you in these terrible times? Mr. Fitzherbert, I have had a letter. She is in Perth—very far away, is it not? Yes, but there she is, teaching French and German in a school for girls. And she lives at the school. I am so happy, Mr. Fitzherbert, you can imagine how happy this makes me. Are you pleased?’
‘Yes.’
‘Her name is different. She is now Miss Irma Francis, a French orphan. How clever she always is, you know. I myself could never have gone on so long. It is the gift of youth. She sends you her warmest greetings.’
‘Thank you—if you write please give her mine—my warmest greetings.’
‘She hoped you might write to her. I will give you her address. Have you a pencil and some paper there?’
My hand was trembling as I changed the receiver to my left ear; and it surprised me. I had not heard her name for so long.
The address, I found with a tremor of excitement, was that of a ‘select’ private academy for young ladies—a girls’ school—not far from Fremantle and overlooking Melville Water, one of the spacious salty lakes made by the Swan on its approach to the sea. I knew it at once, for the house, large and gracious and old in wide grounds, had belonged to an uncle of my mother’s. I had even lived there for a time as a child, during the other war, when wartime duties parted my father from us for long periods, and that kindly old man had asked my mother to cross the continent and run his diminished household for him; for he was a widower. Of all this I knew little at the time, for I remember only a childhood sense of ceaseless pleasure and well-being while the old world fell finally to pieces over our heads. My most welcome memory is of the sweet smell of pine needles in hot sunshine, and the smell brings back childhood now more vividly than any other reminder. In the gardens there were always flowers in bloom, always birds singing in the pines and the giant fig trees, doves by day and magpies day and night when the moon was near and past its fullness. On the smooth croquet lawn the painted hoops were as white as the white
click
of yellow mallets against coloured wooden balls, and in the near distance, beyond the privacy of the bookleaf cypress hedge, so lemon-scented in the sun after rain, Melville Water stretched blue and glittering between and above the peppermint trees’ dull green to the thicker blue of an horizon of low hills . . .
It all came in a thrilling flash as Miss Werther gave me the address. I had not thought of it for years, and now it was the more intimately pleasing, in a way I could not describe, because I had been there before Irma was born, and because she was there now where, in the midst of hellish war, I had been so innocent and so happy.
In a country always poor in school-teachers, it was little wonder that she had had no difficulty in finding that employment, with her easy command of languages and her modest demeanour; and later I realized that because of the discipline she herself had had to learn, and because she also had that small, complete air of authority on occasion—an authority rather of intellect than of will—she must have made a very good teacher indeed.
All I did at the moment was to throw the amiable Miss Werther into a passion of delight by telling her of my knowledge of the school when it was my home. This gave her immense satisfaction, and I felt grateful to believe how much and how unselfishly she cared for the fortunes of that young woman who had come to my country for no material gain but as to a refuge for the harassed spirit.
We ended our conversation with an agreement to meet for coffee soon so that she could show me the actual letter. I had not said I would write, and though I was often impelled to do so I never did, for what could I have said that would have made sober sense in a sedate girls’ school thousands of miles away on the other side of the continent? Nevertheless, at last and for the first time since I had known her I was able to imagine her moving in her smooth, youthful way against a real and (however altered) familiar background of walls and trees and dark-panelled halls, with the blue of Melville Water shining beyond the bookleaf cypress.
The second mention of her name was made by a man who was a stranger. We never found out who he was, though his ill-intentioned purpose in approaching me was fairly evident.
I had never seen him before, and I never did see him again. It is possible that McMahon knew who he was, but that too I let remain uncertain.
He was announced by a boy as ‘Mr. Martin’. The name itself was so often in my mind at that time that for a moment it meant nothing, spoken aloud, and I must have shown instinctive suspicion, for the boy repeated it, adding doubtfully, ‘That’s what he said, Mr. Fitz.’ It was, in fact, the boy’s tone of doubt, of allowing that it might not really be ‘Martin’, which brought me to my senses and the immediate present. The name is common enough among the groups of less usual christian-surnames, but I knew only one Martin, and that was not a man.
‘All right—show him in, please.’
When the boy brought him, I was already and by instinct on guard. The visitor’s hint of a stiff bow, from the waist, as his name was pronounced, made me more suspicious still. I seemed to have no doubt at all that the visit was to do with Irma; and in the same instant, in a flash of exact memory, I could hear Barbara’s voice telling me of McMahon’s private connection with the Communist Party.
‘Sit down, Mr. Martin,’ I said without rising.
‘Can we go some place where it is private?’ he said, rolling his dark eyes slightly at the crowded room.
‘You can speak here as privately as you can in Pitt Street.’
It was so exactly a repetition of the opening words between Irma and me on her visit to the office, all those months ago, that I could have laughed. This time I had no intention of using the wireless room, for something about him had already turned suspicion into dislike in me. It was always so—anyone in any way connected with Irma I accepted or rejected in a matter of moments, at the first meeting. While I tried to rationalize my feeling of dislike, I looked with care at the cause of it.
He was, quite evidently, a foreigner, very dark of eyes and hair, very pale of skin, the hair worn long and sleekly combed from a straight forehead horizontally lined and somehow too small for the rest of his face. His lips were red and wide, but petulant, not humorous, as he waited in vain for me to get up and go somewhere ‘where it was private’. His large eyes were the eyes of a liar or of a professional stage dancer; someone to whom words themselves meant nothing; and I observed already that he had difficulty in keeping his white, black-haired hands from gestures as he said softly, with a look meant to be full of mystery and promise, ‘It is a very personal matter.’
