The Refuge (41 page)

By winning over Moley, Irma also won, by unspoken consent of the other two, a right which she carefully never over-used to come into our home when we were all three at leisure. Unlike mine, all her evenings were free. I took to spending more of the daylight hours in the office, less of the nights, as far as was possible, and this modification of my times of absence seemed to suit us all. When he had no night lectures or private engagements—and he seemed to engage himself less often now that he had Irma to talk to and take about a little—Alan came home for dinner; when Moley and Irma joined us for that meal we sat down four very happily; and occasionally—but not too often—Irma had us to her own table, where, when Alan was absent, I dined privately with her, though I was supposed to be in town. It was a small and harmless subterfuge to which we came to look forward very much.

Belatedly, as such things go in Europe, she had taken to exercising her natural skill as a cook, now that she had space and the means to do this. As a married woman—married however secretly—she would feel ashamed, she said, not to be able to handle every household detail herself; and she explained that in Europe the first requisite of a good wife was a good table, which remained the standard by which a man’s friends and family judged the wisdom of his choice.
Du reste—
with that inimitable sidelong look—‘it does not matter if she beat hell out of her old man’; and as for the other good things of marriage, the pleasures of the bed and of parenthood, all faded (a wise, long nodding of her head, as though I had contested this), but the pleasures of a good table, never.

Though her savage little old Dalmatian friend—he was, in fact, Austrian, but in Australia that was no better than ‘German’, and long before the war he claimed Dalmatian citizenship—told her with scorn that the only good cook was a man cook, and would demonstrate his contention in her own kitchen by bringing ingredients from which he prepared notable strange dishes in a passion of curses, song, and lamentation that caused Alec to go uneasily up and down stairs several unnecessary times; and though she herself believed this inherently and from experience all over Europe, yet she gave us from time to time a meal that caused Alan to look at her with surprise as well as his habitual frank admiration for a beautiful woman, while Moley’s normally sedate, observant silence at table became noticeably more ruminative. All this filled my heart—as it was meant to do—with pleasure and a pride I dared not express until, in the depths of the night long afterwards, she became again my own dear, her head pillowed upon my breast and her hand in mine as warm and firm as a child’s.

For a long time, few of her former acquaintances came near her. She was a habit they had lost, just as they tried to lose their other unAustralian habits, and after hearing her talk of them in her matter-of-fact way I admit I was glad it was so, though when they returned to her, later, I neither could nor wished to make any sign of protest. Part of our happiness came about through our expressed desire never to assume any ‘rights’ involving the will or the tastes and opinions of the other; and because we were no longer children this was a desire that could be satisfied without reservation, too. She knew how much of my thought was devoted to Alan, and in her calm way acknowledged that there my duty lay; for her earliest training had nourished in her, wisely or not, the conviction that in these matters a woman gives way to the rights of the male, and no amount of shrewd indoctrination of the theories of sexual equality in the social system had caused that conviction basically to weaken.

Yet she had a profound sense of possession, and looking back even so soon on the last, hopeless situation that developed I am urged to believe that it was this, more powerful than reason and conscious will, that moved her. Beneath the lighthearted jesting assertion to me, in the blissful aftermath of love’s self-abandon, that I was her ‘meal’ there must have been a stark and evident truth which we were both too blinded by the splendid show of love, in our different ways, to see. Because of Alan, she had once gone hungry.

She had never dealt in half-measures, never really known compromise. It was not likely that she ever forgave Alan, in the deepest honesty of her unconscious being, for having once had a stronger claim upon me, body and soul, that she had had. I never knew how much she still needed her freedom, that freedom of spirit which she had hunted in flight, like a jack-o’-lantern in a dark swamp, all her life, and which to the end she never hunted down. How near it she came I shall never know, for I do not know where her impulse to possess and engulf me would have rested satisfied. It may have needed my own death, rather than hers. These things I think of with a bitter humility and in no spirit of judgment; for how can one dare to judge, how can one be other than humble before that which has taught one not only the meaning of happiness but the belief that happiness does have a meaning, after all?

I should say, as an epitaph in honour of her own goodness, that she alone regenerated and confirmed in me my earliest faith in god. A woman can do that for a man. In the light of this truth, how can her least noble worldly actions appear as anything but shadows that attest the light’s source?

Most sorrows can be concealed from most people, but joy has a quicksilver way of showing itself. It weakens the effort needed to conceal it by prompting a slightly unbalanced self-confidence, like too much alcohol in a healthy man.

The two women who knew I had joyfully resigned myself to my obsession by Irma were of very different temperaments, and already had their own opinions about it. Miss Werther, irrepressible now and convinced it was—as in a sense it was indeed—largely her own doing, was filled with an embarrassing satisfaction at the sight of us together—embarrassing, anyhow, to me, though not to Irma (‘You do not understand, my friend—she is a witch, who wishes us well. In the villages at home, I would have given to her our bridal linen.’).

Barbara’s reactions were not so simple nor so ingenuously shown. For some reason she had seemed to avoid our former easy intimacy, since that evening when I last dined at her house across the harbour. If I had told anyone about my marriage, I should have told her, as the only other living being, after Irma, whom I considered to have any sort of claim on my full confidence. For obvious reasons and some not so obvious instinct, I kept silent with a regretful effort; but I could not keep from her my changed state of mind, for she was a woman, with a woman’s awesomely discerning eye for such things. She was also a friend, and as such she could mention the matter naturally.

‘I was at
Chez Madame
a week or so ago,’ she said, one afternoon in March. The day was humid and stifling, and for some minutes the only sound in the shaded room audible above the rumble of traffic below the windows was the click and whirr of the swinging electric fan.

‘It was the first time I had seen Irma since she left Melbourne, though of course I knew she was here again. I looked at her, and I’ve been looking at you, and if I may say so you remind me of a couple of children in love!’

Among other things, I was learning from Irma never to feel, and certainly never to show, surprise at that sort of frankness in a woman which, in a man, would seem both brutal and insolent. It was not Barbara’s sort of remark, either; if I had changed, so had she. She seemed to have withdrawn a part of herself from the perpetual gift of self she still offered in the name of friendship. There was about her an elusive air of self-criticism, regret—I do not know; and at the same time she as it were pressed my confidence nervously to the last drop, meeting me with a newer eagerness as though I were the possessor of some secret she longed to learn.

Inevitably, with the one-eyed vision of a man deeply in love for the first time since his youth, I sometimes compared her, against my will and most unfairly, with Irma; and her goodness and quality were for a moment cancelled out, preposterously, by the evidence that she was a generation older. By contrast with Irma’s, her quiet poise was the outward sign of a weariness of body and mind, not the powerful, trained control of vital energy and profound passions. Such moments to me were of sheer misery and bewilderment. Fortunately they were but moments, transient. I could not long have borne the spectacle of my dearest and most faithful friend’s image distorted in the glass of my own unaccustomed emotions. I should have had to beg her forgiveness for merely thinking of her so, without my heart.

‘What do you expect me to say?’ I murmured. ‘I can think of only two things. One is that you are still what you have always been to me—indispensable.’

‘And the other,’ she said lightly, ‘is what?’

‘The other is that this—this other matter has not sprung from nothing. For seven years I never forgot her nor made any approach to her of my own accord. For six years not a word, written or spoken, passed between us, and what little was ever said to me about her was as often as not disagreeable. McMahon—’

‘Oh, forget McMahon, for heaven’s sake. He’s gone, anyhow.’

‘McMahon,’ I said stubbornly, ‘painted a vicious, lurid picture of her history and her character just when I was concerned that she should be spared further misery in the only country left to her for a refuge. Many things have been put forward in her disfavour. You yourself thought I was wise to have parted from her when I did. You were probably right, but the point I am making is that I had every reason not to remember her, not to waste time remembering her. Yet I did. And at the same time I kept faith with myself, with Alan. I think anyone knowing him as he is now would admit that that job was done with love and thought, even allowing for the good material, I worked at it conscientiously, for seven years.’

‘Like Naboth’s vineyard,’ she said with all her old tenderness.

‘If you like . . . Anyhow, the thing I want you to remember is that I have not acted like an unpredictable youth—I was never that, more’s the pity—and I have had time, eternity, for thought.’

Leaning forward to put her hand over mine where it lay, rather surprisingly, clenched into a fist on the table, she said kindly, ‘Poor Lloyd. I’ve never thought of anything or wished for anything but your own happiness, where you and I were concerned. If you’ve found it at last, I’m glad—and good luck, and god bless you, Lloyd.’

We were at one again, content with each other’s occasional company as before; yet it was not to her I turned when Irma tried to end her own life.

The question one instantly, arrogantly asks of such an act as attempted self-destruction is always
Why
? I was, after all, too good a Catholic and too much an egotist to have thought of asking, say,
Why not
? That, I think, is the question my father would have preferred to ask. Always, of suicide, that death of most mysterious and faith-shaking form, one craves for denials of reason, not logical explanations. Murder we accept, but the other we deny . . .

It was towards the end of the second year of our marriage, and in my simplicity I thought my own happiness was become as nearly absolute as would ever be possible in a world over which was spreading a slow chaos of inhumanity more terrifying than that of any warfare. The carnal growls of the victors eyeing each other over the mauled corpse of Europe were mingled with and echoed by the occasional drunken bacchanal screams, across the timeless Pacific, of the self-styled cultural, spiritual, political and economic leaders of what they called, with witless irony, ‘the free post-war world’ of the forgotten four freedoms. In the midst of this self-obsessed destruction of mankind by man, from which the true spirit of man must shrink and turn away its helpless face, the innocent love and faithkeeping of two insignificant people seemed a thing of beauty, a banner of salvation in a world of eloquent and smiling madness.

I believed Irma thought as I did, but I knew she was sometimes saddened, sometimes maddened by those interminable foreign broadcasts to which she still listened. Yet by no sign apparent to me was it intimated that her mind had diverged at some unknown point of the way to disappear into a blind cleft in the rocks, a trackless wandering where, unheard by me in my confident progress hand-in-hand with what was now only an illusion, she could cry aloud some anguish of the spirit too simple for simple words, too profound to be imparted in the strangled whispers of transient passion, too incomprehensible for hope to console it.

The October morning was brilliant and windswept in a newly-rinsed world of clear distances and familiar details made vivid again by the swift and glassy air. After nearly a week’s absence on a hideously entangled case of rape and murder ending in a two-day man-hunt by the police through the forests of the north coast inland, a case whose every successive detail, at which even now memory shies aside, had sickened me as it was brought to light by the cool and insatiable methods of police investigation and reconstruction, I had returned late at night to the city the previous day, and after a conference with the booming, angrily genial Scott made haste to get home where I could put aside the very clothes I had been wearing, and so perhaps divest myself of some of the mad, clinging horror.

My own flat was dark and empty, but Irma was waiting for me, lying as usual on the thick blue rug by the wireless receiver, in a suit of white silk pyjamas covered by the inevitable house-coat, this time of a dark red velvet I had not seen before. She was magnificently, strikingly beautiful as she rose to her feet in that one strange fluid movement that seemed so effortless, and stood looking at me with the half-startled, half-mischievous look I had never quite got used to. Then she came quickly towards me.

‘No—don’t touch me,’ I said. ‘I have just finished with something particularly foul. When I have had a bath and change, I shall come in again. Will you wait?’

‘Of course.’ She watched me go with a surprised, studious attention. When I returned, half an hour later, supper was set ready for me, and a small fire chattered softly in the grate, teased by the west wind rushing across the moonlit roofs of the city. While I ate and drank, and she sat on the floor sipping her evening drink of hot, sweet coffee laced with brandy, I did an unusual thing: I told her a good deal, though not all, of the case the police were about to conclude. I was tired, yet I felt a sick and sleepless need to talk. When I had done, she leaned her head against my knee, looking up.