The Refuge (33 page)

At the same time, he made me wary of love. As he came nearer to me once again, and, paradoxically, became also more individual and apart from me and all others, the practice of that warm indifference at which I had always aimed stood me in good stead. By the end of the summer holiday which he turned fifteen, he showed signs of being willing to treat me as a friend, with a sort of respectful familiarity which I tried—and tried in vain—not to find flattering. A negative, tacit insistence on his association with friends of his own age and interests, which my continual absences at all hours of the summer days and nights made easy and unemphatic, merely added to this quite filial familiarity an unexpected but charming, amused yet tender show of sympathy for ‘the breadwinner’. He did not chatter, but he had sudden impulses to talk without ceasing for half an hour on end, about anything that had apparently been occupying his thoughts; and sometimes before, sometimes after these bursts of gay, irrelevant speech he would sit looking at me thoughtfully in silence, as though asking himself ‘Should I tell?’ or ‘Should I have told?’, or follow me about the flat idly without a word, uncertain in his own mind of something said or unsaid.

When he awoke, in those early mornings, he awoke wholly, apparently with forward-looking not retrospective thoughts, into a vitality of mind and body he must have found hard to check in that comparatively restricted space—what he wanted was a place of rivers and fields and mountains, as I knew from observing him during the occasional weeks and week-ends we spent at Hill Farm in the winter and spring months. In the flat that first summer of official peace I would hear him, through the lifting veils of my own sleep, busy in the kitchen at the coming of first light soon after four o’clock those December mornings. Later he brought cups of tea to my bedside where I slept in the corner of shadow between the eastward and the northward windows—a pleasure I had seldom known, outside country hotels on rare occasions of duty, for fifteen years. With his cup in his hands he surveyed through half-closed eyes the blinding brilliance of sunrise upon the harbour beyond the wide-open French windows and the stone balustrade outside, while doves bargained monotonously with each other in the garden of the building next door, and the gulls screamed their arrogant slate-pencil exasperation near and far above the sparkling water that reflected a blind stipple of flights up on the white ceiling.

It was a waking pleasure to watch him, angular and smooth in his swimming trunks there in the blaze of hot eastern light. Morning after morning, in the changeable summer days of that December and January, I found myself coming by varied ways of thought to the same point of unanswerable query: what would women see in him, a few—a very few—years from now? I saw him leaning in the frame of the open windows, his thick dark hair wet and brushed neatly aside, his deep, candid young eyes moving their regard, which changed so subtly as it moved, from me to the spectacle of sonorous and vivid day roughly cupped in the huge twisted hands of the harbour outside, and back from the day to me; I saw the duality of adolescence—the speaking, smiling boy, ageless and vivid as the morning light that swept across him into the room, and within the boy who seemed so conscious of me and the outside world the other, the brooding self, unconscious of its house of flesh, of the world, and of time.

There can of course be no certainty of what women will find, or fail to find, in some sorts of young man. Social manners change with the generations; circumstances of upbringing differ from father to son, and of the probable relationship of a man to women not much can be foresaid. Good looks, of which Alan would surely have more than either my father or I had had, seem to count for little, if there is not informing them a strongly masculine spirit, erect and positive in the presence of a woman. The existence of this spirit may not always be discernible in the middle years of adolescence, even in a country where bodies and minds mature early, at sub-tropical speed; but I imagined I could detect it sometimes in the boy: in his new, unostentatious modesty with Miss Molesley concerning such matters as his linen and the privacy of the bathroom, for all that he passed most of the year in the boldly-outspoken world of boarding-school boys—or because of that, it might be; in his masculine sensitiveness at this age to words and tones of voice, his frequent choice of solitude, and his carefully unemotional friendliness and affection towards me.

It was necessary to forget my own rather circumscribed and unnatural boyhood in order to approach an understanding of the boy’s present being and probable development in the society he would live in; and I found it hard to force myself to forget. It was necessary also to realize that the very fact of having been reared by strange hands among the bull calves of the coming herd would likely give him a normal physical, animal appeal to women, which I had certainly never had, during and following the sequestered, segregated years of my own first youth. This profound difference of our social selves each from the other put beyond likelihood all chance of friction between us. We thought and spoke one language most of the time, but beneath the surface of word and gesture and appearance there separated us a distance not only of time but, more mysteriously, of kind.

He was perhaps more nervously masculine than I had ever been. I knew I had never had much direct physical appeal to women—not enough of the bull there, and too much of the sacred hart; if they had been attracted, it was by the ordinary observances of cleanliness, good clothes, the manners my father had taught me, and my own pleasure in hearing them talk. My friendships, such as there had been, were rather of the intellectual sort, with speech and thoughts for currency. That was why the years-old attraction I had felt in myself for Irma and in her for me had taken me, against my will and judgment, by storm.

I wondered what would happen between that girl and me, were we to meet again now, after the long silence and the memories of six years, a silence and memories without calm. I wondered if my heart would beat again, as it did sometimes beat in her company, like a boy’s who again and again, half-disbelieving, sees his girl at his side; and whether she herself had changed with the violent, fretful changing of the times. I knew I myself had aged as a man does age when he watches a son grow towards manhood, and feels his sympathy and understanding of the coming man deepened by the keen remembrance of his own boyhood, his own dreaming youth with its decreed innocence and ignorances, its moments of instinctive foreknowledge, its gradual awareness of truth and error, right and wrong, as conscience is born like a kernel in the seed of the ripening fruit. These experiences a man relives, if he should take upon himself the task of true parenthood; and they, by a sort of paradox, both age him inwardly and make him younger; the rod of the husband becomes the more pliable bow of the father, and there is an enlarging of thought from its absolute discipline to a compassionate curve of reason.

Irma, the girl, would now be a woman of twenty-five. With an unholy pang of physical jealousy which I had felt more than once, and cursed, during these last years, I wondered what men had had to do with her, what flowers and scars must distinguish from the sapling I had known the maturing young tree she would now have become. All I did know of her was occasional word heard from Miss Werther. The amiable little Jewess had prospered during the war years, thanks to a native foresight in buying such stocks of furs as would have made any ordinary dealer lose sleep—and buying them before the war began. From time to time she rang me at my flat, and her lilting voice with its seemingly indestructible tones of kindly good humour brightened the moment always with the same words: ‘Mr. Fitzherbert, there is another letter . . .’ She would briefly outline the contents, and always there came the final almost reproachful ending—‘She sends you her warmest greetings and hopes some day you may have time to write.’

Well, in six years I had evidently had no time; and in six years her greetings could still remain her warmest. I had never written, for what could I have said? I saw her letters later, over cups of coffee or at some luncheon table, as each one arrived, half a dozen in a year perhaps, letters as fluent and neat as the handwriting in which they were set down. Of our eventual reunion and its outcome I could foresee nothing, or I might not have gazed with such dreaming content and self-commendation at the boy leaning his shoulders back in the white frame of the open French windows, with bright morning hot and eager as a promise behind him.

‘Sir,’ he said with a sort of tender impudence, ‘you are very broody this morning.’

‘If you had a boat,’ I said, ‘you could get round the harbour and see it at its best, from water-level. You could also visit some of the islands.’

‘Too much like hard work.’ He had picked up that expression from old Jack, for whom he had a respectful admiration that pleased me and amused Jack. He had few social and even fewer of the intellectual affectations of his age; sometimes I heard him telling Moley how he wanted his clothes pressed and his handkerchiefs folded, but he never minded copying Jack’s haphazard ways of speech, which he apparently accepted uncritically as part of the man. It was Jack who had taught him things I never knew myself: how to milk and handle a cow, and how to ride; to think of a dog as your equal in vital importance to itself, and your superior in natural dignity; how to sharpen tools and use them with a loose wrist; many useful things that trained body and mind to work together. Their association, which continued day-long and into the dusk whenever we were at Hill Farm, contented me deeply; in practical matters Jack was the ideal mentor for Alan, making fun of his mistakes as I would never have done, and sharing with him long periods of industrious silence in the paddocks or the barn or high up among the great trees that hid the mountainside. He learned to lay an axe to a tree as I had never learned, swinging the four-and-a-half pound head in such an exact imitation of Jack’s own classic style that because it was correct and easy, and he was very young, it became a habit. He could skilfully set rabbit traps in runs his own eyes assured him were used often, and conceal his revulsion under Jack’s cool miss-nothing gaze when he had to kill the hysterically screeching creatures next morning; but after the first experience of this necessary extermination of the pest he could never eat a rabbit dish again. It was no matter: he was learning, and to Jack’s delighted question: ‘What’s this? Mean to tell me when you’re a doctor y’ain’t ever goin’ to kiss a woman again after you cut the first one up?’ he could reply with a lofty air that made the old man choke with amusement, ‘Women are quite a different kind of animal, you see—don’t you always tell me so?’ It was the first time I had ever seen Jack laugh. In return, he spent half a day teaching the boy how to sharpen a knife and work leather. From Jack and Miss Molesley he even learned to cook. During all these fascinating exercises his classroom studies were set aside so completely in his mind that any chance scholastic allusions that might escape me as the three of us sat by the fire for a short hour before bedtime were met with a momentary blind incomprehension in his drowsy eyes.

Thus he had grown, in the tutelage of many masters of whom old Jack, his ancient sly sagacity untroubled by the remote chaos of a world he had done with, was not the least worthy; he had learned by the time he was fifteen to use his head and his hands together. To me his life, what I knew of it, seemed full and wholly good.

‘What then?’ I said, preparing to get up and change, and join him in the pool below where the water of the rising tide looked agreeably bitter and clear and cool against the cemented stone.

‘I was going to Ken West’s for the day—when you’ve gone to the office—to play tennis, if I may, please.’

‘Very good.’ I put my feet to the floor. He came to take away the empty cup from the top of a pile of books on the night-table, and to my surprise he ruffled my hair with his hand as he passed me. It was one of those rare gestures involving contact between us at which he was far more adept than I would have been had I ever risked volunteering them, a thing I had long ago ceased to do; for boys of that precarious age seem able to tolerate only the rough touch of other boys without embarrassment; and in Alan’s case there was also an inherited unreasonable wariness against actual physical contact with those of his own blood. I had felt the same with my own father, and to a less degree even with my mother; the old man once told me, when we were discussing the more inexplicable aspects of heredity, that one way his father had of reprimanding him had been by grasping him by the back of his neck with his naked hand. ‘After that, even to shake hands with him in later life was always a conscious effort, don’t you know?’ he said, adding thoughtfully, ‘Yet there was never a cleaner or a more honest man, according to his own standards, which were high enough in all conscience.’

Alan’s casual brief touch, daring yet innocent of familiarity, was like that of a friendly animal that has no cause yet to fear your weight of years or your human intellect. I did not look at him or speak, but smiled for him to see, thinking how it was very much a gesture not of his age but of the times and his generation—such a gesture as I, for example, would never have thought of making towards my own father, though I realized (by far too late, alas) that it would doubtless have pleased him, after his own brief surprise, as it had pleased me now.

While I closed the Venetian blinds to darken the room against the heat of early morning, and changed into swimming trunks, I listened to him in the kitchen whistling above the sound of running water; and at the opening of a door I heard him stop in the middle of a bar to say with sudden glorious gaiety, ‘Hullo Moley my dearest old darling. Why don’t you slip into a two-piece swim-suit and come for a paddle with the pater and me?’

Her reply had the comfortable, timeless security of a habit whose origins were forgotten by all but Miss Molesley herself; and even she could not exactly tell me how she had come by the one remark above all others that had confounded Alan since earliest childhood with its air of mad profundity.