The Refuge (40 page)

To my surprise and gratification, Irma did not make what had come to be the inevitable comment of those who saw us together for the first time; a comment which, because it was irritating and invariable, we now treated as a private joke: ‘absurdly alike’. Fatuous and inane phrase, it probably concealed some obscure resentment in the minds of those who gave tongue to it.

Going down together, we overtook her on the stair, and Alan met her simply as the new tenant of the flat next to our own (‘and it is sincerely to be hoped that she doesn’t have too many rowdy parties,’ he said later with a grin). She went down and out into the light and air before us, and waited there, trim and demure in her tailored suit whose skirt the wind from the harbour was pressing sideways against her knee. Alan murmured in my ear with unsuspected knowledgability, ‘Melbourne, London or the Continent—definitely not Sydney, would you say?’ ‘I am not up in such matters,’ I said aloud, and we joined her in the cool winter sunlight of the August morning.

It seemed to me a propitious meeting. They took to one another easily, for the boy had a youthfully gallant way, saved from being familiar by a suggestion of embarrassment, with women—even with Miss Molesley most of the time: his presence always caused her to sing modestly to herself as she went quietly about the flat—rather, Irma told me, like the manner of young French or Italian men, ‘but without their way of pretending at once to share a naughty secret with one’. This easy friendliness in him often had the effect of making me feel more aloof and reserved than I really was, and that in turn amused him, and afterwards he would tease me with amiably mocking imitations of myself meeting a girl in his company; but I never minded this, for once in an expansive moment he told me that, ‘beard and moustaches, stick and gloves and all, you are far the most presentable parent I know, my dear sir’.

Even Irma, I think, did not realize my happiness that morning. I was walking in bright sunshine and a following wind with the only two people in the world I knew how to love, the only two people who cared to love me. I felt I was twice as rich as anyone we passed. There was a temptation to turn to them in the warm fullness of my feelings and say, ‘Love one another, for I love you both.’ It would have been a sort of whole-hearted gift, wholly to be understood in value by myself alone. Three years later I remembered that temptation during a night spent in an hotel bedroom, but then it was a temptation no longer, for the gift was by then not in my benefit to bestow.

Irma walked between us. Not until she was seated in a taxi which Alan had with characteristic good fortune seen unengaged and hailed for her did she look at me fully; but the quality of that brief, mysterious glance, its flash of absolute recognition and a sort of hot impatience, made me stand there still when she was gone, as though she were looking at me yet. Alan’s voice freed me from the long moment of captivity.

‘You see, sir, I was right—definitely not Sydney, nor Melbourne, nor London either.’

‘I have heard Highland Scottish accents very like that,’ I said, ‘and for that matter there are Highland women with just such fey expressions of the eyes.’

‘Don’t prevaricate, boss. For an ace crime reporter, you miss one thing. You never saw a Highland lassie who would dress that way, even if she could.’

‘How is it you are so well up in these esoteric matters?’

His laughter filled his eyes and mouth and turned the faces of passing women towards us as we entered Darlinghurst Road.

‘It was you yourself, and Jack, who were always telling me how important it is to be observant in all things,’ he said. ‘And then, of course—one gets around, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said with affected severity. ‘But I don’t want you to get around so regularly that you find you are literally travelling a circle.’

He pressed my arm unexpectedly, giving me the full warmth of his attention as unselfconsciously as a child in that strolling, hurrying crowd. Irma, whose one swift look was still dazzling my own mind, had passed completely from his.

‘I like it when you impart a moral precept in public,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You look like a Conradian conspirator. I don’t mean to be rude. It becomes you, Father.’

‘I should never have dreamed of speaking to your grandfather like that, now I come to think of it.’

‘Now you do come to think of it, how can you be sure he wouldn’t have enjoyed it—’

I guessed he had been about to say ‘—as much as you do?’ and he would have been justified. His cheerful boyish swiftness, even if it was—as one of his older masters had told me—a little above his years, always pleased me; but for the moment I was saddened, with the rich melancholy only possible to one who is at present wholly happy, almost too happy. What he had lightly suggested of my father was only too likely, and I was realizing it too late. It was the old man’s very worldliness that had always held me a little apart from him; that, and his stupendous memory for legal citations, made me slightly in awe of him even in his gentlest moments, which I suppose were frequent enough. He had somehow kept me from the world, perhaps for the very reason that he himself had such an observant, inquisitive, insatiable passion for it until his last years, when with an equal passion of contempt he threw it aside. He reminded me of a drunkard who will in some moment of sobriety make his children swear never to take a drink. It was not that he had ever tried to encourage me to forswear the world. He would have considered that an impertinent error in a parent. What he did try to show me, not unsuccessfully, was the world’s faithlessness to men of good faith; and so convinced was he of this faithlessness of mankind to the individual man that in the end, as I have said, it seemed to destroy his own faith in the faithfulness of god to mankind.

If this were his tragedy, I had no doubt contributed helplessly to it by my own small apparent lack of faith in him. It was not so, but it might well so have seemed to the old man. I had never teased him as we walked the street on a sunny morning. My love had been too grave, too unaccented by the lighter syllables of human intercourse. There, as I went along the public way beside my own son, I prayed it might not be too grave still, for him in his turn.

‘You are very broody, sir,’ he said, scattering the shadows of these thoughts in his own rightful fashion—for if I wanted his company I should seek it on his terms, not mine. That word had left childhood with him and become useful now as a way of telling me I was being unduly silent and serious. It always did me good. For the rest of that walk, down William Street and across Hyde Park, we discussed the coming year at the University. Never doubting the certainty of being able to matriculate in November, he was already more concerned with textbooks than with the New Year publication of examination results; and we made our way to the shop of Angus & Robertson where, as booksellers to the University, they might be expected to indicate the basic requirements of a first-year medical student. His supreme self-confidence so near the time of the matriculation examinations would have amused his grandfather . . . Perhaps because of my happiness, I had the old man much in mind these days. Even as we passed into Hyde Park, crossing College Street from Boomerang Street under the stony benignant gaze of the exalted clerics above the gates of S. Mary’s, I recalled how he had always raised his hat to the unseen high altar in the great dark-grey cathedral behind us (‘as an example to the less faithful, my boy, and a warning to the over-devout’); the faint mockery I detected in his eye as he did so was only a mockery of himself as one who sometimes, even then, doubted the infallibility of the divine majesty symbolized within.

When Irma and I met later in the Botanic Gardens for a luncheon
al fresco
in the shelter of a grassed bank flooded with sunshine, almost her first words were of Alan and me as child and parent. The encounter had meant a good deal to her—more by far than I realized at the time.

‘But you are not alike,’ she said. ‘It is not that you seem too young to have a son so old—so—what do I say?—
rang
é, assured. The temperaments are different, and maybe it is this that makes silly people find you too much alike. They are confounded by the physical. There, you resemble each other.
Here
, and
here
,’ touching her head and then her bosom, ‘no . . . What a gay boy!’

I knew I was not ‘gay’ as she meant it then; I did not know she was used to enjoy such gaiety as one enjoys an
hors d
’œ
uvre,
as a promise of the meal to come.

‘
You
are my meal,’ she said, explaining this, with tremendous approval, some time later; and by then we had been married long enough for me to hear such remarks without even a mental demur; for her enthusiasms for life had, since our union, become so warm and her consciousness so relaxed and all-embracing that together they swept me away on the full tide of being, and I understood at last, in my very bones, what was intended by the abused expression ‘a new man’. I was truly a new man, in that I was for the time no longer my own man. Irma claimed my body with the genial appetite of certain female spiders; but my soul she left alone in increasing content.

Because of that animal power of spontaneously reacting anticipation, she was naturally graceful in the ways of love, which she could lift from gravity to the butterfly realms of delight, from silence to laughter and so by a sudden progress to blind ecstasy, peace and oblivion. She seemed blessed with that chastity of mind which makes of the commonplace a thing of suddenly-revealed beauty, and to every gesture of intimacy gives innocence and a sort of inspiration. In advance, just as a wise surgeon may use premedication before beginning his delicate, god-like task of transfiguring an imperfect human body, so she, with the wisdom of instinct, lulled to sleep the last sick doubts and self-questionings of my mind; and when it awoke it was transfigured. I can say of her no better thing than that she gave freely what I could receive, and took what I could freely give. Because I had known, in all my thirty-eight years, of no such profound experience, with all it brought of self-discovery and a rather belated flowering of native manhood, I found it inevitable—but neither dangerous nor strange—that with me she became as it were a divine obsession. To this I gave myself so wholly that it went beyond or beneath consciousness. She was an essential part of me: she was of my essence.

So secure and destined was this love that the worldly details housing it seemed to settle and arrange themselves without any pressure of ours. Each of us worked at the work we knew, in worlds so disparate that our hours together could never be surely foreseen, even on week-end days, because of the uncertainty of calls upon my own time. Alan, in the room next to my own, slept the deep sleep of the enthusiastic student whose days were full of learning and laughter, serious sport and light-hearted play. He never woke at my return home, near or after midnight, and I fell into the habit of going directly to Irma’s door, which opened to my key to reveal to me beyond the farther end of the entrance lobby her reclining figure stretched on the blue floor-rug, with an electric radiator at her feet in the winter nights, and, winter or summer, her head pillowed near the concealed speaker of her big, powerful wireless receiving set which, night after night, brought her the foreign-language broadcasts of the B.B.C. and the native tongues of half Europe and Asia. Only when I was kneeling at her side could I hear the subdued voice, meaningless and agreeable, going on and on in the midnight silence of the curtained room.

With a bodily assurance that sometimes awed me, sometimes moved me to an inexplicable compassion, according to my mood and how I had been thinking of her, she pulled me down firmly against her without much changing her own relaxed position, and ran her fingers through and through my hair and across my forehead until I could remain still not a moment longer under the light, dragging touch. She never mentioned the broadcasts; I never even knew, unless by overhearing some chance closing announcement, where they originated. For the most part she turned off the receiver when I was at her side, rarely motioning me to silence while she listened a little longer. I never did understand what satisfaction she had from this perpetual listening, night after night, stretched on the blue rug in the dimly-lighted room, listening absorbed to the faint mosquito voices babbling near her ear of a world which had hunted her at last into the refuge of my arms.

Sometimes, it is true, she commented aloud later, as if to herself, on some antipodean happening which seemed to me obscure and aimless at the time, yet which, to her, apparently swelled with a dark significance and portent. In such instances what she foretold with a lightly prophetic air of having seen it all before often came to pass, in some way or another. She could not withdraw herself completely from the world of her childhood and her wild youth; her knowledge of European politics and temperaments and emerging personalities was ingrained. I wondered how much of her waking time she gave to thinking of the Australian present, how much to the European future, which obsessed her somewhat as she herself obsessed me. The more secure she felt with me, as she came to see she was really and essentially a part of my own life, the more fearlessly she let herself examine how that world went on in its desperate forward struggle, without her; but now her comments and speculations were without heat any more; she had extricated herself from the cauldron during the very years it had been boiling at its most furious rate. After the boil-over, the bubblings and slow fermentations and exhalations that followed one another or coincided on its repellent surface she could observe now without emotion, without bitterness, without distaste. She had left no one of her own there; her observations were aloof, cool, and sometimes even amused. She reminded me of one playing a game of chance with no stakes offering to stir the faintest passions.

Alan and she became fast friends during that first easy year of our marriage. Gradually, as we all settled into the positions determined by this new life of each one of us, we gathered more freely together, and I began to envisage the day, a few years hence, when our marriage itself could be openly admitted. Miss Molesley she set out with secret deliberation to charm, in a fashion that showed me yet another aspect of her character. She treated her with an almost Oriental respect as a sort of Number One Wife (though Moley did not know of that gracious sinocism, and would certainly not have suffered its application to her own modest duty to me and Alan), as an elder and therefore a wiser woman to be, if not consulted, at least listened to without interruption or demur. I did not learn for some time that she and Irma had fallen into the way of taking a cup of coffee together in my flat on some of the mornings I was not at home, until I noticed a remarkable difference in the coffee Moley herself began to serve us when there was occasion. That wholly admirable creature, to whom I owed so much of Alan’s material well-being, then confessed that it was ‘your friend Miss Martin’ who had one day offered to show her various European ways of blending and brewing the ground beans. With a straight face she quoted Irma—who had in turn been quoting a hard-faced, temperamental little old Dalmatian
maître de cuisine
of her acquaintance—as having insisted that ‘the coffee she boil, the coffee she spoil’. Coming from the colourless, old-maidenly lips of the good Moley, it sent Alan (who had heard it and mocked it before) hastening abruptly from the room with his table napkin muffling a choking fit.