The Refuge (38 page)

‘You made me jealous. Do you like making people jealous?’

‘I don’t know—sometimes, a little bit.’

She was looking at me seriously again, with a grave, speculative expression, as though all this had shed some small new light on me for her. After a while I began to realize that she was in fact not seeing me at all.

‘Mr. Sampson,’ she said severely, ‘was very honourable, but he could not help touching one now and then. At night. I had many pleasant afternoons with him—the beaches, the country, the mountains—for he had a car. But when it began to get dark he began to shut up his talking and start touching. So.’ She negligently reached out one hand and touched my face, my neck, my hands hanging loosely clasped between my knees, and my knees themselves. ‘It was the—the same old thing, but all rather honourable, you understand. So is a spider honourable to spin its web, and I felt as though a spider web was being spinned all over me, from here—’ she gestured lightly ‘to here, here to here. One of these nights, I thought, poor Mr. Sampson is going to complete his web, and I am going to be well and truly in the middle of it.’

She tightened her lips, and looked at me for a sign of comprehension. I was busy trying to sympathize with the very comprehensible activities of poor Mr. Sampson, and hating the thought of him.

‘So—goodbye poor Mr. Sampson. When he finally understood to leave me alone, and said goodbye, I cried, my friend. What do you think of that?’

‘What can I think? You wanted him back at once.’

‘No no . . . I cried because I liked being touched kindly—but not by poor Mr. Sampson.’

The silence that fell between us was effortless and serene. Beyond her averted face I could see through the glass walls the autumnal privacy and colour of the garden within its high enclosure of warm-looking brick. A curse of sparrows descended upon the smooth expanse of grass between the tree-lined brightness of the borders, like a settling of grimy leaves blown in from some far city street, and at once fell to scavenging and quarrelling with brutal appetite. In the fading grey light the flowers held their colour close, without radiance, like flowers in a water-colour painted with conscious boldness by an indifferent artist.

At my side, Irma had fallen into some reverie of her own, very remote from me and the immediate present. I could not keep my eyes from her for long at a time. With her feet tucked neatly under her, her head bowed above the taut, convergent arches of her thighs, she sat quite still in that extraordinary immobility of an eastern sage; but it was not a held pose, it was like the perfect stillness of some animals, certain birds, that have no sense of time passing, and to whom the world is in motion only when they are themselves static. It is an immobility that gives a fleeting impression of a profound wisdom secretly held; but I learned later that it was her own way of thinking most freely, by letting her whole body relax its weight. In sleep, too, she lay in the same way, in a perfect stillness that seemed not breathing, and that frightened me for one bad moment, the first time I observed it.

When she raised her head and looked swiftly at me and the room full of clear grey daylight all about her, I knew at once, with a small tremor of disappointment, that it was not of me she had been thinking, as I had been of her. In a voice of comical dismay she exclaimed ‘Oh!’ twice, and quick as a cat was standing beside me, ankle-deep on the rich rug under my feet.

‘Forgive me—I get them now.’ Her unEnglish accent was momentarily more marked, as though she had been thinking in some other tongue; she noticed it too, and mocked herself, nodding vigorously: ‘Yah, Ay git zem,’ and went away laughing, to return a few minutes later wheeling a service-tray on which there were bottles and glasses and several kinds of unfamiliar small savoury foods.

‘There. Linda is perfect,’ she said largely, with emphatic satisfaction, as she seated herself and pulled the service-tray to her knee. ‘All this she did while I was lazy after luncheon. Come—eat. It is all good, I assure you. Nothing but the best for darling Linda’s friends, always. And there is to be no dinner for—oh, hours.’

I drank some whisky of a brand I thought had long since disappeared from any market, legal or illegal, and tasted with a gravity that amused her immensely the various little highly-flavoured delicacies (‘to eat when one is in love,’ she remarked enigmatically) on the plates, while she drank one glass, and then another, of an unbranded wine that looked like claret, for which she had not so much developed as recovered a taste during her sojourn in South Australia, its home, and which she told me was an authentic
vin du pays
of the purest quality. A claret, yet not a claret—did I understand? Yes, I understood. Then what a pity I should be drinking whisky, which in this country was surely only a drink for the night. Did I drink whisky often? No? Then what? Nothing?

‘You Australians,’ she said dispassionately.

The afternoon waned in the walled garden outside like a chord of music struck and held, fading. I was in such a state of content by now that I could have wept with compassion for the rest of the world. Men who have been drinking heavily for days reach, I believe, a similar state of mind at some unforeseen moment. I had reached it and as suddenly passed beyond it simply through the breaking within me of a drought that had, I saw, dragged relentlessly on for years. I shut my eyes the better to savour the fullness and depth of this strange melting sensation, which reminded me not irrelevantly of what I had supposed the earth to be feeling once, at Hill Farm, when rain had at last broken a drought of almost eighteen months’ duration; when cracks a finger’s breadth had opened in the baked and apparently lifeless ground, and young trees whose tap roots were not plunged deeply enough where they grew apart from the protection of the mountain forest died where they stood, under a merciless succession of brassy suns and wizened stars . . .

After all, nothing had happened dramatically between us after that first irresistible coming-together in the airy silence of Miss Werther’s hallway. It was as though we had lived long side by side in this room with its walls of clear glass and its opened curtains like fluted columns of thick blue stone supporting on the tiled floor the high white ceiling. We had descended two steps to get there, and it was this that made the ceiling seem unusually high: the floor was lower than that of the rest of the apartment, and the sun-room itself with its tiles and more recently added glass had probably once been an open veranda or
loggia
on the same level as the enclosed garden outside.

Nothing had happened, but at some time, before the coming of approaching night, before the return of the fat and amiable Miss Werther who had so ingenuously flung us together here in peaceful solitude where the outside world could not penetrate, something, no matter what, had to happen, or I should never be able to leave this place, to return to my own life, my son, my home, my own particular privacy and order, womanless and imperfect now in my memory.

I looked again at Irma, and found her regard once more bent questioningly upon me.

‘What did you want to know?’

‘Why you came.’

‘Ah—you know that. Did not your friend tell you about me? Did she not give you the picture?’

‘To both questions—yes.’

Characteristically, she did not ask, ‘What did she say?’ but went on in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘Well, what else could I do but follow her here, my friend? Do you know what? When she went away I suddenly thought to myself, “Now she has seen me and knows all, that Mrs. Conroy will certainly make off with him at last—after all those years!” That is what I thought, and it troubled me. Did she?’

‘Good lord,’ I said, laughing with a sort of exasperation, ‘no! To begin with, she is a woman of nearly fifty—’

‘To begin with, to begin with,’ she said, and she positively giggled like a delighted child. ‘Listen to him, the man, giving his reasons on his fingers, one-two-three. No, my darling, my beloved, say only, to begin and end with, she is a woman.’

Her voice broke from hysterical laughter to tears as bright as happiness. She moved over to lean against me, her arms about my shoulders, her face against mine, laughing and sobbing softly at the same time.

‘So am I a woman,’ she said in a stifled voice, while her recent words of reckless sudden endearment rang in my ears,
my darling, my beloved, my darling
, again and again like bells falling downstairs, uttered with conviction and relief; and again I held her in my arms across my knees where in the abandon of the moment she had thrown herself. There was so much that was innocently animal about her, warm and fond; and because at such times the mind, humbly abashed perhaps at what it beholds, has a clever habit of substituting less disturbing and more familiar images for present actuality, I had a passing mental picture of Donna at Hill Farm greeting me with reckless yet fully-controlled enthusiasm, hurling herself upon and all over me when I sat in my chair by the fire in the big room, nuzzling and licking and tenderly nipping at my hands and face in the passionate re-establishment of all her old claims to my person and my attention. It would hardly have surprised me if the young woman in my arms, the weight and warmth and resilience of whose body were just as vital and as little to be tamed as Donna’s at that moment, had licked and nuzzled me in the same way. She was like another person; yet even while I heard her and felt her in my hands she was gone again—not far, but apart.

I am glad to think now, though then I did not know, that it was always to be like that. She had scarcely any habitual attitudes or poses. This was in part the secret of her mystification of me; for I had been raised and trained myself further to observe a recognizable external pattern of conduct, just as one continues throughout life to pronounce the words of one’s whole vocabulary according to usage; whereas, with her, conduct was similar to her use of language, perhaps conditioned in the same way as her English was, coloured and sometimes made wayward by the idioms of the other tongues she knew so naturally. Unlike any animal I can think of except a cat, she remained unpredictable to the end. There was no training her beyond what she already was, even if one had wished to do so; and what she was was a woman in complete control of her faculties who, like most women, always knew what she was doing with herself.

If, as it may seem, she wronged what she had made of me, and with me of us both, it was no more than seeming. She never wilfully did injury to a single soul—never, never. That is why, having lost her utterly in possessing her wholly, I cannot forget her.

Nor—though the memory has nothing of the other’s stifled but persistent anguish—can I forget how Alan took the news of her death, that early morning.

He came home with Hubble and me in a sustained mood of unabashed good humour, which seemed even to be increased and justified by the policeman’s half-jesting lecture to him, where he sat jammed between us in the front seat, about the obligations of his father’s son—of all people—to keep the peace. I did not hear all of what Hubble said. While I looked unseeing through the glass at Darlinghurst Road opening to our steady advance, until we had passed through the false and faded noon of light and shadow at the Cross, they kept up a friendly conversation on my right, with Alan calling Hubble ‘Sir’ now and then, and once, with a grave face, ‘Inspector’, and Hubble equally gravely correcting him in a way that might well have silenced most young men of nineteen or so. Hubble, I realized numbly, was thoughtfully keeping his attention from me; and as we drew near our home, the home now reduced by half by the hopeless emptiness of the flat next door, I marked his mood with dull misgiving, and was half-inclined to let him sleep it away, thinking he would be perhaps sufficiently calmed or even dulled by sleep then to be spared the suffering of too much immediate shock.

However, the thing was decided for me by Alan himself, for when we reached the landing and turned towards our own door he hesitated at the other as we came abreast of it, and bent his handsome young head to listen. Knowing how soon and how completely I was probably going to lose him, I looked at him as it were for the last time then, and the twisting and gnawing of two griefs in me were given pause for that moment by a welling-up of indescribable pride robbed of vanity by the same underlying, humble compassion I had felt for him since first I saw him, red and black-haired and crumpled, shortly after Jean had passed on her life to him. As I looked, I thought—with the utter futility of all such thoughts—‘If only Jean had lived, none of this would have happened.’

He was tall, and never so pale as I had always been, for his youth was a different youth from mine, much of it spent out of doors in the sports he enjoyed with the deprecatory nonchalance proper to his present conscious attitude of an intellectual young man of good family. In spite of having lately indulged in what could only be called a back-street brawl, he had managed to put his clothes in their usual somewhat fastidious order, and smooth away his black hair neatly from the bland expanse of his brow. At the moment his eyebrows, dark and straight and rather thick, of the sort held to denote an intense, single-minded power of concentration, were drawn together in a frown of listening. Standing near him, in that long moment which marked an end and a beginning of our relationship, I caught the faintly bitter, aseptic smell of laboratory chemicals that had not washed out of his skin and his hair (Irma’s habit of pretended disgust had been to cry, with stiffly repelling hands, ‘Go away, go away, my dear doctor, how you stink!’ It was strangely heartrending to remember this, and at the same time to think of her lying both in his eager young arms and in the cold and final embrace of metal-bound, insulated darkness.)

‘Not a peep out of her,’ he said, after a few seconds; and he stared at the flat nickelled setting of the keyhole as though it were keeping from him some trivial mystery he felt he had a right to know. At even this late hour she was usually awake, waiting for my coming. He drew his hand from his overcoat pocket, one knuckle raised to knock.