The Refuge (35 page)

She spoke almost pleadingly. ‘Naturally,’ I said, taking my share of the lie.

‘The only thing I knew about her was that she had been frightened and lonely—a long time ago. When I spoke to her I could see she was neither, any more. On the contrary, she apparently has a large acquaintance down there, a lot of foreigners among them, mostly women. Her poise has nothing to do with her job, either. Models are a vain crowd for the most part, and nothing is more easily thrown off balance, if you know how, than a vain woman. But in Irma’s case there’s no vanity at all. She was much more composed than anyone else there. I made the best of my blunder and left her. Five minutes later, there she was standing beside me as though she’d risen out of the carpet. Is all this of any interest to you?’

‘Yes, the way you tell it.’

‘If you weren’t such a gentleman you’d point out—and it’d be quite necessary—that it all came from my own feminine inquisitiveness, which in turn came from my sort of possessive feeling about you. You see, I’ve worked it out for myself. Damn it, why do you think I’ve been lying here feeling so particularly wretched all the afternoon, not caring what became of me? At least you must admit I’m trying to be completely frank with you.’

At the moment I did not follow her wholly. Only in memory, afterwards, did what she was saying take on any special meaning. Looking now at her, now at Irma’s portrait of a girl forever about to turn and speak, I heard her with my ears only, while in my mind the scene relived itself, vital beneath its seeming insignificance.

Irma suddenly appeared at her side, not as though she had approached but as though she had materialized. It was an unconscious trick, inexplicable, proving that ordinarily the eye sees only a fraction of the masses and movements within its range. I never got used to seeing her in one part of a room at one moment, and finding her at my side, or disappeared, the next instant as it seemed, Barbara, to whom she was quite a stranger, was startled.

Irma smiled her upward smile that could make her face as radiant as a child’s with pleasure, and surprised my dear Barbara still more by saying with an air of gay conspiracy, ‘Now I think we may talk more privately. Too many people listen. Please call me only Irma. If you remember me by any other name, please do not use it here.’ While she was speaking, she led her to a seat in the corner, and sat with her back to the noise and the faces.

For quarter of an hour, strangely uninterrupted, they talked about the models from overseas which had just been shown, and Barbara found that unlike most mannequins she could speak with intelligent and critical authority about the clothes she and the others wore.

‘I didn’t realize yet that she was quite a brilliant designer herself, and that two of the most interesting new suits we had seen were her own ideas. Everyone who saw them was busy saying, “Typically Parisian, my dear—unmistakable” and trying to place the unfamiliar name, some invention of her own. I said it myself, and of course we were all quite right—they were typically French, because she had meant them to be. One doesn’t necessarily have to be German to play Beethoven.’

While they talked Barbara studied her, and became more fascinated by her; and the more fascinated the more uneasy she felt, without yet realizing, she said ruefully, why this should be. It was like having before her every piece of a jigsaw puzzle but being helplessly incapable of imagining the finished picture. It needed only one movement, and the whole thing would assemble itself. It was Irma who made the move, by saying abruptly, ‘Tell me, Mrs. Conroy—how long do you know Mr. Fitzherbert? I know him so little, whatever you may think.’

Barbara, embarrassed again by that ‘whatever you may think’, said we had worked together on the same staff for nearly fifteen years. Irma regarded her steadily for a moment, and then, smiling and shaking her head, said with her sudden air of ancient, gentle authority, ‘It is quite strange. You both belong to the same world, you are both lonely people, and yet you are still just—friends. After fifteen years. Why did you want to see me, then—me, particularly?’ And at that the simple puzzle fell together with overwhelming inevitability.

Like most newspaper people of ability and worth, Barbara had trained herself never to rely on instinct before reason, even forcing herself to set aside some of her native womanhood to do so. Irma, on the other hand, arrived at and accepted causes in lightning flashes of instinct alone, and had acted on her conclusions often long before reason caught up with and endorsed them. This she had had to do many times in her earlier years, when as likely as not her freedom, or even her life, depended upon her being quick and certain of what she meant to do. This, unintentionally and as it might be by innuendo, she had now done again. Barbara, confused as a girl but outwardly composed in a manner suited to her years—she was forty-nine—turned the completed puzzle around to face Irma, and reversed their positions by saying with a calmness she did not feel, ‘I am so fond of him after all these years that I wanted to see for myself the woman he could fall in love with.’

To this Irma merely nodded, as who should say perfunctorily, ‘I understand’, and a moment later excused herself and disappeared among the increasingly noisy crowd of men and women in the room.

‘Do you know, Lloyd, I spent half the night thinking over what had happened,’ Barbara said. ‘I felt rather a fool. You must understand that all this talk about how I feel about you means nothing more than what it says.’

‘We probably feel the same about one another, my dear,’ I said.

‘Oh, no doubt—no doubt.’

I may have missed the irony in her tone. I was full of a sudden tenderness and confidence towards her, which was perhaps isolated in my mind by having drunk a second glass of whisky while we talked.

‘I can only say I can’t imagine how I would have come through these last fifteen years without you, Barbara. That is the honest truth. I have depended on you more than I ever knew, more than I have on any other woman I ever knew. You never have to feel a fool on my account. You know I find it hard to show affection in the usual ways that come easily to most people, but that is only because I have been purposely training myself, because of Alan. The affection has always been there—the love, if I may use that word. Not many men and women have had the pleasure we have had, of being able to speak the truth simply and unhesitatingly to each other always.’

I had taken her hands while I spoke. When she withdrew them from mine it was to raise herself from her reclining pose with a faint sigh. In the near distance the front door was opened and closed vigorously.

‘Brian,’ she said to herself; and to me, ‘I know. But you have to remember that even friendships like ours are different for a woman—I suppose because a woman is always liable to be wanting a little something more, without knowing exactly what it is . . . If I did feel a fool that night, lying awake listening to Louise asleep in the other bed, it was mostly because I’d had to go all the way to Melbourne in a wretched aeroplane to find out from Irma—of all people!—the simple harmless,
harmless
truth in my own heart. That’s what seemed so foolish. Anyhow, I was determined to see her again, to make the whole thing clear. I can’t stand tangles and misunderstandings. Life is complicated enough even when it’s as simple as mine is. So I went early to next day’s show, and saw her by herself. We persuaded her to pose for Louise, and once she had agreed she quite sold herself to the idea, and started worrying about what to wear. I don’t mind telling you I was very much amused by her choice, until she asked me did I think it would offend you, as it was to be a memento for you? I said the garment was too lovely to offend even a saint. She looked perturbed and asked if you were that sort of a person. Certainly not, I said—I hope I did right? Anyhow, I asked her, merely from curiosity, why she chose it, apart from the look of it. She laughed a little, and said, “It is just a garment without period—it means nothing at all. Tell me, why do women wear such things?” and I reminded her that many womenlook a good deal more attractive in them than out of them. She accepted that quite seriously. Louise wormed her way into the
Sun-Pic
office and made this print. She was rather sad about scrapping the plate—I have an idea she made more than one print, just between ourselves, for her own files. Irma looked at the print a long time, and said, “Please give it to him with my warmest greetings”—just like that. And that’s all . . . Do get me another drink. I’ve been talking too much. Oh dear, I feel so much better.’

Brian joined us. He had changed into a tweed coat over his uniform shirt and trousers; when Barbara told him to get his tunic so that I could see all the ribbons on it, he only laughed.

During dinner, Barbara and he chaffed one another gently in a very mother-and-son way that was not even meant to conceal a deep mutual affection and interest. As always, I was made to feel myself one of the family by being involved in their badinage every now and then; and it was easy to laugh when Brian said in his light, quick voice of a young air-force officer to whom authority is habitual, ‘Mother, I have a suggestion. You and Lloyd should get married one of these days,’

He went on, ‘You may laugh, but what could be more natural? I think it’s a jolly good idea. You both do the same work, you have the same interests—rather heavyweight ones, I always think—and Fitz needs a woman to look after him now that he’s getting on. You can tell by the worried look.’

‘How old do you think I am?’ I said.

He considered, looking at me shrewdly.

‘I did know, years ago, but I’ve forgotten. About forty-five, I should guess, sir.’

‘You compliment me, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Thirty-seven. The “sir” only makes it a worse mistake.’

We laughed at his embarrassment, without meeting each other’s gaze; but the whole time I was wondering what Barbara had ‘made clear’ to Irma, and I knew I would never ask her, from an obscure conviction that she would tell me the truth and complicate our easy relationship in some way I could not quite define to myself.

Into my mind had come that expression of Jack’s, in his clumsy writing and his deft speech: ‘
You ain
’
t no fool
.’ This afternoon Barbara had unconsciously endorsed this when she said, ‘
You were wise to go away from her . . . There is something about her that is not you.
’

The only two people in the world who knew they could say whatever they thought right to me without presumption had independently applauded what I still thought was an act at least of temporizing, if not of self-mistrust or even cowardice. Realization of this had come to me while I was washing before dinner, with Barbara’s conversational, patchy, puzzling picture of Irma obsessing my thoughts like an undecipherable message, and Louise’s formidable portrait of her shut in my brief-case in the hall. Smoothing hair and beard and moustaches, all showing silvery hairs now, in the glass over the hand-basin, I stared as impersonally as a stranger at my own eyes reflected there, and with exasperation saw nothing—the reflected face meant not a thing, it was like some unconvincing mask bolted immovably into place over all that had ever gone on within me, all that was fretting within me now.

What was it, and was it in me or in Irma, that had made those trustworthy and wise people who had only an intelligent humanity in common to put into almost identical words a common thought? ‘
You were wise to go away . . .
’ ‘
You ain
’
t no fool
.’ Were they praising what they assumed, in their own respective integrities, was my modest knowledge of some weakness, vulnerability, worldly inexperience in myself? Or had they some impression of Irma very different from all those of my own?

I felt a moment of crying fury against . . . I knew not what. Was it against this wooden, intently-staring face in the mirror? Or the suspicion that the human character is ultimately not only unknowable but basely and worthlessly so? Or merely against the futility of all intentions to live and accept life in others without confounding feeling by outfacing it with judgments, without confusing and debasing judgment by making it drunk with feeling, when the two were of worlds apart?

The short roar of fury fell silent in my ears. I recalled for no reason, with a disgust as sharp as when he said it, a remark of McMahon’s in the week following Irma’s disappearance, when he pestered me with seemingly idle monologues about her: ‘Any woman with eyes like hers gets a reputation for being as sexy as hell, old boy.’ At the time I had not noticed it more than various other of his unembarrassed personal remarks, but I had heard it well enough, for it came back to me now, rude, trivial, the sort of remark so easy for a man like McMahon to make about a woman like Irma, but at the same time overpowering. It might explain why both Jack and Barbara felt the same doubt about her, in relationship to myself; or more likely the same doubt about me . . . as though I had barely escaped some humiliating misfortune at her hands.

While they talked with unhurried, affectionate banter among the candles burning, I was told, in my honour, I was so engrossed with thoughts of her that I believe at one time I actually decided, while Molly was garrulously handing round the dessert, to go to Melbourne and see her, come of it what might. At least there would be a clarity; the action would precipitate whatever sediment was clouding our minds and our lives. By now my frank obsession, sprung from years of neatly-repressed impulses and desires, included a doubt of Irma, herself. The reality did exist; how did I know that I had not been for years cherishing an elaborate and detailed fiction? This possibility, and all it implied of cruel lack of self-realization in me, of cruel self-deceit and deceit of others, so alarmed me that I almost choked on the spoonful of iced pear I put into my mouth as I thought of it. Brian’s brisk slaps on the back at least let me groan aloud to ease the moment of its horror.

‘I’ll run you over, if you really have to go,’ he said kindly—he was not going to ‘sir’ me any more, for he had to go himself to some meeting in the city; and in the car as we went he talked more intimately to me than he ever had talked of his ambitions and the worth of his war-time experience as a navigator. Ordinarily such confidences would have warmed and pleased me, but now I was cold, cold, with even the slight optimism of the whisky I had drunk faded to a dullness of mind, and some sort of frightened, lonely ache like an obscure physical sensation at my heart.