The Refuge (37 page)

I had not thought of anything to say for this moment, and I left it to her to speak first. I had not even imagined the moment itself in advance, for I had never been here before; it would have been as impossible as imagining the moment and the circumstances of one’s own death. When she turned quickly back to face me, I heard the faint catch of her breath between her parted lips, but she too remained silent, calm and erect and pale—only the transforming mirror had made her look mad—and so we stood facing one another without embarrassment, perhaps feeling only an unusually intense and frank curiosity, perhaps not even that, for I know not how many seconds.

At last, and unsure whether we had paused or not, or whether I had but imagined this to prolong the sensation of my own surprising delight, I held out my hand and said her name. Her blank expression gave place to a look of sober amusement and pleasure as she put her firm warm fingers round the back of my hand and her palm against mine in a grasp at once frank and secretly intimate.

‘Yes,’ she said, laughing a little, ‘yes—it is me—Irma. You needn’t look so
surprised
, my dear friend. Here I am.’

With her head thrown back and the faint colour discernible again under the fine skin of her slanting cheekbones, she had an air of offering herself to my scrutiny with enthusiasm. Our hands still clung firmly together in a clasp it seemed neither of us was willing, as I was certainly unable, to end. I could not have freed my hand from hers, for I was holding her whole self in mine. I drew her towards me, and she came readily, and all that I had supposed to have been between us—years of war, years of separation under the shadow of a clumsy and ill-reasoned parting—all this might never have been, as her body touched mine from breast to knee, and her face loomed slowly enormous and disintegrating and vanishing as her eyelids closed over her blind eyes a moment before I too shut out all sight in absolute, perfect awareness of her immaculate and naked being held once more in the strength of my left arm.

Possession is not wisdom, which comes completely, it seems, only after complete renunciation. I do not properly possess wisdom myself because I have never been able to renounce my aspirations to it as ultimately the one worthy prize in this life. As in the profound mysteries of the simple act of love’s physical consummation, there is a moment when the experience so urgently sought, and the striving after it, are magically fused in one flash of unearthly identity; only to be flung apart in that same moment by the piercing thunderclap of achievement.

Not to possess is to know, and be wise; to possess is to embrace the whole, and, by doing so, to cease to be embraced by it. I take it that is what my Lord meant to imply, when, as it is reported, he said that unless men become as little children—full of the absolute wisdom of the defeated new-born—they shall not know the only heavenly kingdom, that of the mind governed by the spirit.

By her death I possessed Irma wholly for the first time, and in that false possession was deprived of her wholly. I foresaw and accepted this, for with it went my final renunciation of something I could not help but hold more dear, if only because it was something virginal, uninfringed, unique—a young man’s mind. What had been infringed was, after all, a trivial thing: no more than the treaty she and I had made together four years earlier.

It was possibly made earlier still—ten years earlier, when first one and then the other drew apart from the tentative first embraces of a mutual possession which must surely, then, have ended more quickly in mutual destruction. I choose to believe, and must subconsciously long have felt, that there was an agreement made between us, unknown to either, when we first stood face to face in the airless cabin of the refugee ship
Empire Queen
, and that to her though not to me some inkling of it may have been mysteriously apparent when she as she thought lightly claimed me with a meaningless kiss as her ‘first Australian friend’.

Except in moments of unselfconscious passion, neither of us ever took kissing easily, and as we were both, in different ways, as much the creatures, the willing servants of habit as are even the most eccentric men and women, it was too late to change, should it have seemed necessary. In the airy silence of Miss Werther’s hall there was no movement, that day, of simple passion such as sets two people clinging helplessly mouth to mouth as though to draw the very life from each other’s parched and famished lips. Nothing so simple as that at all, though for one agonizing moment, six years before, there had been, as there was to be again. This reunion, inevitable and unpredictable in even its largest movements, merely flung us together as sea-borne bodies are flung ashore by some wave at last larger, more strenuous than the offering and withdrawing waves that have supported them before it.

We seemed each to lie in the arms of the other, but I found I was taking the weight of us both, standing there before the old and misty mirror which, when at length I opened my eyes, showed me her head and shoulders supported by my left arm and my right arm firmly about her waist. Over her raised shoulder, the complete self-abandonment of her pose, with her back to than ancient glass and her eyes closed secretly in her pale, averted face resting upon the dark stuff of my coat, I saw my own wrong-sided image of head and shoulders; and the mask was lifted. It so surprised me momentarily that I looked away and back again, hardly recognizing in the shadowy, contented countenance reflected there my own. It had to me an almost indecently frank look of surprised happiness. I felt like acknowledging it with an ironical salute.

Irma must have sensed immediately the slight shift and focusing of consciousness in me. She had at times an almost animal awareness, both more and less than physical, of what the other person’s mind intended, and a way of anticipating it that was at once exasperating and delightful. (It gave her a consummate skill in the delicate art of all love-making.) When I looked down at her face upon my breast I saw now that she had begun to smile, still without opening her eyes, as much as to say with deep satisfaction, ‘I could have told you it would be like this.’ Like all true expressions of profound emotion, hers at that instant managed to convey two opposites—a sense of triumph, a sense of defeat.

With one accord, in a transitory new world where instinct ruled reason absolutely, we drew apart in space—if not in time—and I was able to study her with a more objective view at last. The six years since I had seen her had made her almost mature in appearance, as though her beauty, strange and informal, were settling finally into the mould it would show forth at the time of her death. As Barbara said, she was no perfect beauty; the lines of her face contained some subtle contradiction, and what one took for beauty was as much an inward-burning warmth as any outward show, for all the exciting Slavic modelling of brow and cheekbone under the delicate humidity of the skin. There were new lines at the outer corners of her slightly upward-drawn eyes, and a new firmness and repose about her mouth which modified its shape of secret voluptuousness to a cool maturity I found much to my liking. When, standing away from me, she had ceased to smile, it wore still that expression of faint, unconscious melancholy which I had glimpsed in the cabin of the
Empire Queen
; but this expression too had softened as though little by little her memory of the past were fading, to give place to confidence and hope.

The veiled, calm scrutiny she gave my own face apparently satisfied some last question in her mind, for with that impulsive movement I so well remembered she laid her hand upon my arm, almost as though she needed to prevent me from going away again; and she said with a new intimacy in her faintly accented voice, ‘Come—let us go into the light,’ and as she said it I remembered her ‘Can we go where it is private, please?’ that had really started all this, that mid-August afternoon in my office in the city. My mind was already busy, collecting our beginnings. I saw again the direct look, rather of command than of appeal, in her blue-grey eyes, with which I had so readily complied once before, and I surrendered myself now with satisfaction to this modest and assured authority in one so much younger than myself.

We were alone in the apartment. Miss Werther, with a frank delight I could well imagine, had already been engaged to play bridge all that afternoon, Irma told me with a faint, humorous grimace; she would return in time to give us a late dinner—did I mind late dinner? There would, of course, be things to eat and drink before that. I did not mind; in the circumstances in which I found myself, seated beside her on a sort of divan of Manila cane, a huge affair which might have been meant to live on but which sprawled easily without crowding the spaces of the lightly-furnished sun-room, I cared nothing for what happened to time or domestic details. I was wholly taken up with looking at Irma, as she was by being looked at by me, in a mild sort of ecstasy, as though she were something I had created myself. Probably I wore something of the same expression of absorbed speculation I had seen on Alan’s face at times when he would sit, for thirty minutes on end, regarding some completed piece of his own handiwork, in the days when under Jack’s tuition he first had learned how to use his hands and other small tools delicately, to make models of ships and aircraft that must have seemed to his freed imagination atremble with perfect life—as Irma seemed to me now.

It was apparently not easy for her to tell me much about her life in the years of war. Each successive set-back, or near-disaster, for either side, had come at her like an unexpected blow in the half-dark. To women, I had noticed, war remains to the end a series of mystifying and reasonless happenings unconnected by any thread of purpose. They are unable to find relief from the intolerable expectation of the next thunderclap of battle joined, as a man can, by considering the whole future as a near-impersonal problem capable of being solved, or at least guessed at. She was herself a child of Europe; she knew the capital cities, the villages, the life of the peoples of that continent far better than I knew those of my own much younger one. Every movement of the warfare on land became increasingly imaginable to her in its setting as the storm of conflict moved up from North Africa through Italy by land, westwards with a gathering force of brutal, revengeful frenzy from the punched-in elasticity of the Russian borders, and coolly, relentlessly north, east and south from the misty bomber-bases of the British islands. Secure from violence now in the land of her refuge, she could not think of it as ever having been truly endangered by the slow southward flood-water movement of the Japanese; the shameful fall of Singapore and the shocking loss of the whole of one of Australia’s few infantry divisions she had accepted as inevitable, in view of what was known privately of the futile and apparently corrupt self-complacency of the local administration there; and she could not turn her thoughts from the chaos into which her native countries were being thrust by the desperate hands of ‘the three enemies’, as she called the Western allies, Germany, and Russia; ‘for Russia, you understand,’ she said with that memorable air of gentle patience, ‘is already the enemy of all that is left of the world.’ She had wanted only to draw her growing sense of temporary security about her, like a fabulous cloak that had the power to make her invisible; and as it came to seem less temporary, as she was more and more casually accepted, even welcomed, by the kind-hearted (though to her mind politically and economically backward) people of the enormous western State that contains one-third of the continent, so she drew it the more closely about her, avoiding altogether the mere chance of contacts with the refugees from Europe who had by now become the country’s major import, and beginning to lose her sense of foreignness in the enjoyment of the modest, lawful exercise of her own personal authority, as a teacher and a confidante of those young girls.

She knew Miss Werther had read me her letters; she had always hoped I myself might have written, and always understood how I, like her, finding so much unsaid between us must feel I could say nothing. Linda in her replies never failed to mention my interest in her welfare.

I asked her at length about poor Mr. Sampson, a name in her letters I had reason to remember, and she laughed and looked sidelong at me, her half-closed eyes shining.

‘He was very young, you understand, only a boy.’ Again she laughed gaily with that sidelong glance of youthful mischief that made her look like a sly schoolgirl.

I remembered very well the unease I had felt about poor Mr. Sampson, and the relief that followed it when we learned that she had left Perth for Adelaide. There had been little mention of new friends in her letters; I gathered that she sometimes went out with men and women she had met—people who were never more than names, seldom recurring in the letters. But once she explained, with suitable punctuation, that one man had proposed marriage to her, ‘
—but imagine my surprise, for he is only a boy, 27, and he does not know me though he thinks so, poor Mr. Sampson!
’

This letter, which I could not put out of my mind for weeks, had been followed at the end of that year—nineteen forty-three—by her announcement that she was going to a new post in Adelaide; her only regret seemed to have been that she would be leaving behind her the fabulous ocean beaches of blue-green surf and blazing white sand on the Western Australian coast. Nothing more of poor Mr. Sampson; and when once more she moved on it had been to Melbourne, ‘to take up my real profession again’—much to the excitement of Miss Werther, who from time to time made plans to fly down there for a week-end, but never did go, in the end, chiefly I think because she felt Irma was now so near, only four hundred miles away, that it was needless to worry about her any more than if she had been back in Sydney.

‘Well?’ I said, smiling at myself and my remembered unease and jealousy of a long time past.

‘I only put him in for you.’

‘The devil you did!’ I said involuntarily. Her half-bashful confession made me realize more than much direct description could have done that by then she was already a different person from the girl I had last seen prostrate with misery and exhaustion at Hill Farm. I could not look often enough at her, sitting beside me demurely cross-legged on the soft divan, looking rather Oriental and mysterious altogether in that attitude, in her usual suit of pyjamas covered by a house-coat of corduroy velvet, smokey-blue to match her eyes, and, as before, fastened high at the throat with a medallion of large and bizarre design.