FOUR
THE RATIFICATION

Ten days after my visit to Hill Farm, on the twenty-third of August, the warning I had received that Friday afternoon was justified when it was announced that Russia had signed her non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.

Even in the midst of the uproar and the lamentations, fully aware that this was a death-knell, the exploding of a detonator which would quickly set off the main charge, we pursued our affairs within and outside the office with deliberate conscience and sanity, in what looked to have become an insane world.

The full enormity of what was to come in the end was, to many of us, grimly adumbrated in the behaviour of the German Chancellor to Sir Neville Henderson during those last unreal days of peace. We had glimpses of a man either whipping his very soul to a frenzy of baseless personal resentment, a bull before the charge, or in the grip of a power which he had conjured up only to find, too late, that he was at its command, not it at his. I believed, then as now, when there has been time to look back, years in which to think again almost soberly, that it was the latter; yet in the later part of the war, just before the invasion of Normandy in strength, a dream came to me which I have never forgotten. In this, between the usual ragged beginning and the apparently rational and quite irrelevant change into other dreaming, I found myself talking (in English) with Hitler on the stage of an immense and empty auditorium, a quiet conversation of which, when I awoke, I could recall only one remark, made by the Chancellor in conclusion. He said as he turned away, ‘I am an Austrian. My mission is to destroy the people of Germany, and I am doing it.’

It was a good dream, and for some days afterwards I experienced a recurring inner excitement, a sense of almost exultation, whenever I thought of it. Had it come in September of nineteen thirty-nine, it might have made those first days of declared war less like the unpeopled nightmares of sleep which they evoked. As it was, sleeping and waking were nightmarish indeed. We felt we were so far away; we felt the helplessness none of the threatened nations could have felt, for we were, as it seemed in the beginning, helpless without being threatened.

The quick, fantastic changes in everyday life could be accepted with an effort of will; the disappearance of office colleagues and private friends, or their mysterious transfiguration into people not only in uniform but in the grip of a flushed and bustling excitement, trying to pretend they had not changed, was comprehensible and, at odd moments, enviable to those of us who dressed and lived and worked as we had always done. At that time, because of Alan, because of my age, and because my office intimated firmly that such action would be opposed, I made no effort to approach any of the services; in truth, after the first moments of instinctive consideration while Mr. Menzies’s voice still sounded in my ears, I scarcely thought of such a thing again until nineteen forty-two, when the Japanese seemed likely to invade this continent from the north. Scott had me in to explain to me the attitude of the management, which was, roughly, one of repressive exhortation to the whole staff: a combination of ‘Do your bit if you think you must,’ and ‘The Gazette must come out as usual.’ There were not so many young men on the staff in those days, and it was possible without lack of a show of patriotism to stress the importance of publication at all costs, while at the same time drawing up a list of official correspondents which should silence criticism when added to the list of those who had already joined up.

Scott, in his booming voice and with a face of jovial anger as usual, spoke very kindly to me, explaining that not only had I not been considered for a correspondent’s assignment but also as time went on my present usefulness on the spot was bound to increase largely: ‘for crimes abroad breed crimes at home, my boy, as you will find for yourself.’ And so, of course, it did turn out, in ways none of us foresaw then.

For Alan’s sake, above all other considerations, I was heartily glad when Scott told me that my name had been forwarded to Army and manpower authorities as that of a staff member indispensable to publication of the paper. After that night at Hill Farm, I was aware of changes taking place within me, and Jack’s letter, in the middle of the week following my secret departure before sunrise the following morning after some hours of sleepless thought, seemed to speed these changes forward. Like a man who has survived a severe physical ordeal, with all its excitement and fear, I felt for some days a lassitude of body and spirit, and a slowly decreasing bitterness of regret, a growing conviction that by the very sorrow and shame of the choice I had made the choice itself was in a sense endorsed as right. Of Irma I could not think clearly at all. She seemed to be lodged as it were within me. She was too near. I was seldom unaware of her in waking hours—never, it seemed, for a moment—but I could not think of her objectively yet, and did not dream of her at all.

The dreams came later. For the present, I found myself impelled to go over and over my impressions of that last hour we had spent together. I thought she was young and wise enough not to be offended, as an older woman would likely have been offended, by my seeming rejection of her modestly-proffered ‘return’; but she was painfully bewildered, like an honest man to whom it is pointed out that the coin of the realm which he has tendered as legal payment does not ring true. Even in my desperation, I tried to explain, with slow words which sounded unconvincing enough, I know, when they were spoken, that I was not made for the enjoyment of evanescent loves of the flesh, and that while I believed I loved her now I must force myself to realize that I hardly knew her, or she me, and that a bodily union with neither background nor future, and with only desire in common between the two indulgeants, was to my mind an act of ignorant self-gratification in human beings, just as surely as it was one of the utmost naturalness in all other animals. Men and women were different, I said; and generously she did not laugh. I showed her how I had desired her, with what hungry fires, and she seemed to believe me, though without comprehension yet; I told her how I had become a sudden field of battle between two ambitions, of which the one that in that moment had seemed the stronger had withdrawn, not vanquished but out-argued and disarmed. I told her, as clearly as I could, all that was in my heart and in my mind: the dead but not forgotten love I had had for Jean, the living love and compassion for my son, and the strange feelings, of pity and passion, she herself had aroused violently in me, and which I had never before felt for any woman, nor—I had thought—would ever feel again.

And she—she let me talk, lying back in my arms with closed eyes while above her I whispered to the dying glow of the fire which from time to time settled itself more comfortably with an answering whisper and shift of coals. She let me talk, always of myself, my life, my body, my spirit—seldom of her, never of what she might feel and think, never of her hungers, her fortune, her destiny; and there in my arms her loneliness must have increased with every word of mine, inconceivably burdensome.

It was this thought, not the nature of my final choice, of which I was later ashamed; for she said nothing, pleaded nothing, made no move again to woo my consciousness away from myself towards herself. She lay there still and listening, and I have often wondered whether, for all her tiredness of body and mind after that long strange day’s excitements, for all her feeling of the ultimate futility of every well-meant gesture and every larger human effort, she perhaps found it in her heart to laugh at what could only seem my elaborate self-justification for the subtlest and grossest discourtesy a man can offer a woman who has proffered him herself.

If she did laugh, and with whatever scorn or bitterness, she gave no sign of it. In the end, after we had sat together huddled over the fire as it died, and after I had assured myself that she was warm enough—and god! how delicately warm, how resiliently alive and weighted she was—I persuaded her to return to her bed, and so went back to my own.

It was then, lying sleepless in the dark which pressed its icy kiss on cheek and brow, that I began to feel that sense of unease and shame at the thought that my talk could only have increased by many degrees her awareness of her own loneliness. The more I thought of it, the more grievous did it seem, until I felt I could weep for what I had done; yet—and there was no consolation in the thought—I thought I could not have done otherwise. It was incumbent upon me, by the vow I had made to be to Alan more than a father only, to save my own soul: that was what I was faced with, all my waking hours; and a casual taking and giving in love, under the stress of loneliness and fear and desire, could not but seem a step back, not a forward step towards the strength needed for any act of true salvation. I had a treaty with my own soul, to save it. For years I had suffered my own loneliness unassuaged; I had not known the consoling arms and the generous body of love; I had mastered spontaneous little desires, and quelled imagination with the sturdy weapon of deliberate thought. Every physical appetite I had considered and gone about to command, even the incomparable lust for sleep. I did not see how I could, even if I would, cast aside this discipline in one breathless and unthinking moment, not for all the young and melting womanly beauty in the world.

But the shame persisted. I had been wanting in something, and had tried to conceal the lack with words; and the more I thought of it, there in the darkness, in the poised, watching silence of the timeless mountains, the more convinced was I that she had not been deceived, that what I had lacked, somewhere, somehow, was charity. Yet I knew now that I loved her, not only with the heart.

Thus while the long hours before dawn moved slowly on, and the earth turned eastward with ponderous, unthinkable speed, I decided to go away, for I did not see how the two of us could be together in the company of others, this coming day, so soon after the half-achieved communion of the night.

I determined upon going, leaving the two women to be at peace together, leaving Irma to compose her mind while at a distance I tried to do the same. This seemed wisest. Then, after a week had gone by, and time had passed its healing touch over us, I would return, to find what I might; and the thing which—as I knew in my heart—had by no means been concluded there in the warmth of the dying fire might come to proper issue.

There, however, I was wrong.

Jack’s note when it came on the following Thursday confounded me. For days, in fact ever since before my arrival back at my flat that Saturday morning, I had been imagining the reunion of the coming week-end, wondering how I would ever pass the time that must be passed. I would arrive once more in the dusk, this time to find the cottage not empty with a cold and polished expectancy but brimming with light and life and the clear, lilting tones of the two faintly foreign voices. Even in the darkness of my departure, as I looked back to where it stood between the fruit trees and the starry pallor of the eastern sky, I must have been imagining how it would be, because during the unhurried drive down to the city, towards the faint coming of dawn far out above the Pacific that sank unseen with my descent to the plain, I was aware of a compensating element of pleasure underlying the weary discomfort and self-criticism of my thought; and this stayed with me, and grew as clearer thinking made room for it, all through the next few days, until Thursday.

For a moment I was as confounded by Jack’s note as a child is by the calm removal of a treasured plaything. I was at once indignant and inconsolable. It was in that moment that I finally, wordlessly admitted, by what I felt without thinking, how much the image of Irma, her voice, her silences, the lightness and neatness of all her movements, the feel and weight of her abandoned person in my arms, and her self within this sensible show—and even the immortal soul within the mortal self—had come to mean to me. Imagination had been secretly feeding love more quickly than the reality could have done. The result, as I deciphered old Jack’s calm, untutored pencilling, was devastating.

Now, being poorer and richer in heart, and also wiser, I can perhaps look back with the feeling of a smile at my reactions then, and at what I felt, a week later, when I saw that Bulletin poster on the street corner. For all my aspirations towards what seemed to me the aloofness essential to living and working well, I was young still, and my youth gave itself away—the beating heart, the indignation as at a betrayal, and the deeper, more helpless feeling of deprivation and despair. Irma must have had her own reasons for such a sudden retreat. (Later I found out what these were, and they were simple: with my unexpected, unexplained departure, she felt once again unsafe. I had behaved unpredictably after all—twice in a matter of hours, by two improbable withdrawals from her—and all her uneasiness returned. She felt she must disappear yet more completely, and as two days passed, then three, without word from me or about me, her speculations again became fearful. The thought that returned to obsess her, until it assumed unreasonable proportions, was that in my work I was mysteriously connected with the police. On the third day, after Jack’s return from another fruitless visit to my mail-box nailed to its tree at the junction of track and road, she decided to move; and with her, decision was always action, as I might have known. By noon on the fourth day, she was gone, dragging Miss Werther with her as far as Blacktown on the way back to the city, where they parted, and the Jewess last saw her waiting, severe and unapproachable and somehow pathetically childlike, for a train that would take her beyond the mountains, which now, since her visit to Hill Farm, began to look to her like a bastion enclosing security. She seemed to think that by crossing them she would out-distance fear, and be safe.)

At the time I did not know her well enough, or know enough about her history, to have followed her reasoning for myself. The main obstacle to my understanding of what seemed her obscure motives was also simple: it would have taken much to make me believe that it was now I of whom she was now uncertain and miserably suspicious to the point of fear. In my mental arrogance I would not readily have believed that after she had been rescued, so to speak, by me and comforted by me, held in my arms and caressed and kissed by me, she could doubt my integrity or my feelings for her. What I would not have taken into account, the very thing that must have weighed most in her measuring of the situation, was the fact that—with whatever goodwill to us both mattered not—I had rejected an offer made for the first time in her life with utter unselfishness, and by a fierce stroke of irony for the first time declined. She was above all a woman, intensely conscious of the fact too, and however well her mind had been trained in the vicious schools of political cunning she had attended, this awareness of her essential self must have fretted instinct when reason might have thrust it aside. In effect, I was not to be wholly trusted; but at the same time no amount of argument would have convinced me that that was her chief reason for vanishing westward while I pleased myself, in the midst of a world poised above chaos, with dreams of our less troubled reunion in fewer days than—had I but known it—there were to be years between our parting on the genial hearth and our next meeting.

I was driven further towards desperation by McMahon. Since his tipsy collision with me in the side entrance that afternoon, he too had been from time to time obsessed with the thought of Irma, for reasons very different from my own. It seems he had seen her once in the back bar of the Newcastle Hotel in George Street, not far from the Quay, when he was hobnobbing with one of his numerous sources of political scandal in what then was the only saloon bar in the city which would serve women; and this man, a self-styled Communist I gathered, had had much to say about Irma into McMahon’s neat, uninquisitive-looking ear. Some of it was the truth, much of it hearsay and guesswork, and not a little of it simple malicious invention; for it was apparently true enough that the girl was jealously or nervously disliked now by many Australian members of the Party which she had flatly and unequivocally abandoned. Moreover, with her exotic appearance—and in the dark and shabby back bar of the Newcastle, crowded with those second-rate artists and writers and musicians and artists’ models who seemed to enjoy the glamour of being mistaken for politically intelligent thinkers, she must have looked exotic and exciting indeed—she should have been more approachable than she was; for such was her aloofness that it was even rumoured (among those who could have thought of few more slurring accusations) that she was a virgin, who had won more by unhonoured promises than her Party sisters had by enthusiastic performances.

Possibly she had seen that they were talking about her, for before he could think out some means of approaching her in person she had disappeared. Now he was sometimes quite sure, sometimes uncertain, that he had seen her in my company. Even had he known that she had vanished, shepherded by little fat Miss Werther, into the back seat of the waiting car there, it would have meant little to him then, for he did not know that the car was mine, and I took care he never should learn this. According to his state of mind, he now taxed me with having secret acquaintance with her, now settled irresistibly in my visitors’ chair for a discussion of her rumoured history.

I was nonplussed. Any too-emphatic denial, any indignation at his friendly, careless gossiping, would have made him really suspicious. That is the sort of man he was. That is why he had made such a name for himself: he missed nothing—nothing but an objective view of his own shortcomings. He was, even to me, potentially dangerous. I soon understood why it was that his political contacts talked so freely to him: they felt an urgent need to divert his attention from themselves . . .

He did me one service, however. He did talk of Irma, and so enabled me to think once more of her as apart from me, rather than a part of me. She began to stand as it were one step away, at once more vivid and more unattainable than she had ever seemed. I found the contemplation of her, thus, more painful and less soothing than one would have expected. Heard of from the neat lips of the mildly-intoxicated, friendly McMahon, who was in fact ignorant of any real connection between us, she became intolerably real, being imagined, and, being absent, wellnigh intolerably desirable. More than once I had to plead an engagement, and leave him, the room, the office itself. I was unwillingly and ridiculously in love with a girl of nineteen.

This state of mind, rather like the exultation of despair, persisted up to and beyond the ill-omened twenty-ninth of that month, August—up to and beyond the declaration of a state of war between Australia and Germany which followed Mr. Chamberlain’s announcement to the empire; it survived the voice of the Australian Prime Minister that evening of the third of September, and my own few minutes of still almost incredulous horror as I realized that Alan must now grow up in a world at war. Without interrupting work or the times of waking and sleeping, it existed along with these, so entirely that I could be said to have been living two lives. Only Barbara, and Hubble, whom I did not count as important now that Irma had disappeared even from my own ken—only they knew that something was changed in me; but only Barbara guessed what it was.

Although we spoke intimately, we did not make intimacy a personal matter; and so I was surprised when, on the afternoon of the first day of September, the official first day of Spring, after a not unusual silence during which each of us had been occupied with private thoughts, she spoke abruptly about myself.

‘Lloyd, I know it’s not my business, but I’ve been wondering—are you in love?’

Her tone was light and apologetic, as though she felt she must ask the question and be done with it, lest, unasked, it stand between us. I too had known that my preoccupation with thoughts of Irma had set up from time to time a barrier as it were of glass; but I was surprised at the direct question—surprised but not disconcerted, because after listening to McMahon on several occasions I now had a desire, the more suspect to me the more it grew in urgency, to speak of her myself, to cleanse my memory of some of the things that neat, dangerous, friendly little man had said.

Warily—and it shows my state of mind when I say I was already capable of being cautious even with Barbara—I pretended not to understand.

‘I mean with that girl,’ Barbara said.

‘You mean with Miss Martin, the model?’

‘I mean with Miss Martin the woman. Oh come on, Lloyd—forget I spoke.’

Her affectionate mockery was disarming. I had known her for more than eight years; with Irma I had not passed eight hours. How could I dissimulate further? Nevertheless, as the affair was not yet by any means clear in my mind, I avoided an answer as straight as her amiable question deserved.

‘Barbara, I don’t know what it is to fall in love. Miss Martin has made me feel pity and indignation on her behalf. She has thrown herself on my mercy—if you allow the exaggeration. What sort of a man would I be not to be moved by all this, and affected by having done all I could to help a fellow-creature who was afraid?’

‘Who was afraid?’ she said. ‘Then she isn’t any more?’

‘Heaven knows,’ I said. ‘I do not even know where she is, now.’

‘You mean she ran away even from you? Oh surely, Lloyd . . .’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean I ran away from her, if you like to put it like that.’

Barbara said ‘Oh’ and paused, and then said it again in a different way. I saw she was half-smiling.

‘What do you mean by that?

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that you’ve answered my question, and also I’m sorry I asked it. As I said, it is no business of mine. Forgive me, Lloyd.’

‘Nothing to forgive,’ I said. I looked at her directly, and was moved to see how good she was. The conversation drifted.

‘One sometimes asks a question thoughtlessly, and realizes too late it was a piece of juvenile impertinence.’

‘Not between you and me, Barbara.’

‘Well, thoughtlessness between you and me would be a pity, in any circumstances.’

‘I don’t think you did ask a thoughtless question. I think you wanted to know, and I can even answer it in a way. The girl seems to have become a temporary obsession, that’s all. I cannot get free of the thought of what sort of a world it must be that can create such a set of circumstances and place someone like that in the middle of them—like a moth in a spider’s web.’

How well it sounded then, and how ignobly near the truth it was, I thought afterwards.

‘What do you think of the girl herself? Is she—you know—as innocent as the moth?’

‘No,’ I said, driven to frankness. ‘To me that is the tragedy of the thing. She is a warning example of the double meaning of Henley’s claim to be the master of his fate. As for being the captain of one’s soul, that is so much nonsense. It always puts me in mind of a Manly ferry. No. This young woman, Irma, has herself to blame for her present state. That is not either tragic or abnormal, I know, in human life. What is, is this—that she had long since cut herself off completely, as she thought, from the sort of life she had been forced to life. She wasn’t forced in the beginning, but who is going to condemn a child of fourteen, barely fourteen, a precocious child at that, familiar with most of the major cities of Europe ever since she could remember first being dragged about the continent by her mad musician of a father—who is going to condemn someone like that, a mere child, for making a wrong choice from the generous fullness of her heart, and not realizing it for three or four years? Yet the fact remains that she did choose to become a Communist at that age, and now she is paying for it. The life she thought she had done with is catching up with her, even in Australia. She regards this country as her last refuge, and suddenly finds that for her it is no safer than anywhere else in the world. To you and me that might seem unbelievable, even at a time like this, but not to her. And not to me now, after I have heard what she had to say. You will be interested to know that my belief in whatever she told me was prompted in the first place by her warning, ten days before it happened, that there would be this Russo-German pact. I believed her then sufficiently to pass the information on to Scott and the police for what it was worth.’

‘I see,’ Barbara said. ‘I wondered at the time why I got a special memo asking me to send anything to do with Russia to the editor before getting it set.’

‘So you see,’ I said, ‘how one would be ready to believe other things, in retrospect anyhow, such as her insistence that she was in personal danger from some European Communists pretending to be refugees who arrived by the same ship. At first, I admit, it sounded suspiciously like a motion-picture melodrama or an Oppenheim thriller—what are you laughing at?’

‘I was just thinking of the picture your words gave me—the poor child telling you all this, and you clutching your beard and looking more and more aloof. Do go on.’

‘But I don’t clutch my beard,’ I said, taking hold of it; and so we both laughed, and I realized it was my first easy laugh for many dreary days.

‘Well, that was what made me suggest my place in the mountains. We managed to get away—she and a Jewish friend of hers named Linda—good lord!’

‘What is it?’

‘Miss Werther. I had forgotten her. I should have rung her up. I imagined she must have gone too—what a fool!’

‘Just a moment,’ Barbara said. ‘You haven’t told me the rest of story. How did you get away. Do you want to use this phone?’

‘It can wait now,’ I said. ‘Only one of the copy-boys could have guessed that we left this building together. It was rather a fantastic business, but she wanted it that way. She had been trailed, she thought, since she left her lodgings that day, but had put her watcher off, she believed. Our only moment of danger was when Tim McMahon came in just as we were about to leave. He was rather tipsy. He thought he recognized her—he did recognize her, I mean, but he was not sure whether I knew her or not. He’s been trying to find out ever since.’

‘McMahon,’ she said. ‘You know, of course, that he’s in very deep with the local Communists?’

‘But Barbara—he’s a Catholic.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Con happened to tell me a few things about Tim McMahon once, when he was in a bit of a rage over one of his bad Canberra articles. What I say is quite true. He’s not a Party member—no, he’s something worse. A sort of under-cover man.’

I was trying to remember the various monologues McMahon had treated me to lately, and to review them in the light of what Barbara had told me. He might have been doing his best to find out not what I knew about Irma but whether I knew where she was. After all, the man was not always drunk, and often, I felt sure, not as drunk as it suited him to pretend to be. I had learned to recognize him sober by a seemingly natural mannerism of his, of removing his spectacles and slowly polishing the thin convex lenses round and round, revealing in full by this action a face that looked curiously blind and anxious, the helpless face of a man incapable of duplicity. I imagined I had noticed him doing this more often of late; and he had assuredly returned to that one subject by direct or oblique ways which in another man would have been boring. McMahon, even when he was being a nuisance and an unwelcome interruption, was never boring. He himself saw to that. One could not help listening to him. I realized it was possible that he had mentioned seeing Irma apparently with me to someone to whom there might have been more in it than there was to McMahon himself—at first. It would need but a word, to a good Party sympathizer (‘See if Fitzherbert knows where she’s got to, Tim.’), to put him on his mettle and on Irma’s trail where it appeared to vanish as it joined mine.

‘He came in, rather unsteady, and bumped into me, and his hat fell off. There may have been more to all this than I realized, after what you’ve just told me. He muttered something about “the little lady Communist” as though they knew one another—by name and sight, at least. What I’m wondering now is why she didn’t say anything to me about him later? As we drove off I noticed in the mirror that she seemed to have had a bad shock, but I thought it was just the strain of getting away quickly. I must try to find out more about him.’

‘I may be able to tell you enough,’ she said, and I realized suddenly how seldom and how impersonally she spoke of other members of the staff, even to me. It was this that made one feel so safe with her, this that with her fine habit of tolerance towards others helped to make her a woman of such quality.

‘I was thinking of Irma’s point of view,’ I said. ‘Miss Werther may be able to tell me, if she is in Sydney after all. I do not want to get anyone involved with McMahon through my own ignorance, you understand. These things can be so messy . . .’

‘Tell me the rest of your adventure,’ she said.

‘We got to Hill Farm, and had a very pleasant evening. They seemed to settle down well, and old Jack quite took to them, I was glad to see. Evidently there are women and women, after all, even for that famous misogynist. We went to bed fairly early. At half past one she woke me by making up the fire in the big room—it was a cold night. She had not been able to sleep. We talked for a while in whispers, sitting by the fire.’

It all came back vividly, painfully, as I spoke about it at last: her face in the firelight, her fingers on my hand, the weight and warmth of her across my knees, the swelling heat of her lips against my own, and the eventual silence.

‘She seemed to think I expected some return for helping her. I had not even thought about being kind. She apparently thought of it all as deliberate kindness, and she—she could think of only one way to repay me that was within her power. I understood well enough what she meant. I said it was too much to accept . . . You don’t think me shameless to talk like this? I am trying to explain what happened later.’

‘Go on,’ she said with a sigh, looking down at her hands on the table intently.

‘You know, I suppose, that all new human contacts are somehow embarrassing to me, as well as being very interesting. One tries not to let either the interest or the embarrassment show. As for casual love affairs, I can understand their attraction without ever feeling it—without ever seeing myself give way to it, I mean. That night, everything that might have been propitious for another man was wrong for me, the way I am apparently made. She had come to me for help, and I gave the best I could think of. She was in my own house, and also, in a way, quite at my mercy. That evening she had been exquisitely lovely because she was happy. And above all, she made the offer—it was no suggestion, it was a pathetically generous offer—she made it herself. For anyone else, to take her at her word would have been not only easy and delightful, it would have seemed the only decent—yes, decent—thing to do. For me it was not like that. There were other considerations, very deep ones. Say if you like I am made unnaturally, but understand that for me to have taken her at her word—and I assure you I really react no differently from the way other men do at such times—to have taken her at her word then, of all moments, would have been exactly the opposite of decent. I expect you, as a woman, to see that it would have been calamitous, another chapter very like previous ones, I gather, added to her unhappy story. Added, as usual, by her own helpless contriving. I feel sometimes that that girl craves for one thing only—complete extinction . . . For my part, it would have been a self-betrayal. You will not laugh at this, I know. My personal ideals may be ridiculous in a world like ours, but to my best ability I am loyal to them.’

‘My dear boy,’ she said softly, looking up wide-eyed, ‘I will certainly not laugh. Do go on—we are friends.’

‘It is because you are the truest friend I have that I talk like this. Someone must know—I must tell someone.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘I am loyal to those ideals, and nothing can be, or seem to be, so selfishly, bitterly cruel to other people as this kind of loyalty. It appears to benefit only the person practising it. It appears to. But I tell you, Barbara, it is most difficult to sustain, in the welter of human contacts and relationships, because of the way a man is made. Self-indulgence gets more friends than self-denial, and always has. This loyalty needs constant protection against many of the common human characteristics of the man himself, and demands many sacrifices. The sacrifices are not chosen by the loyalist, they are merely unforeseen and not understood by the victim, whose very misunderstanding as often as not makes the sacrifice a voluntary one—and, as I say, an unforeseen one. One thing always happens then. The loyalist is held to blame.’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘I admit for a moment I did feel a bit shocked. I knew what she must have felt. Now I see what you mean.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that is what happened. I could see no other possible choice.’

‘That was what you meant about running away?’

‘That was it, in a way. I suppose I did start my departure from that moment. I left before daylight. Since then, all I know is what old Jack had to tell me,’ and I took out and handed to her the note I had carried about with me ever since, reading and re-reading it with less and less surprise, more and more misery. That perfect picture (did he but know it) of the two women hearing for the first time the appalling cry of the screech-owl that lived higher up the mountain above the plateau was what moved me more than most of what he had to say; that, and the mention of how the younger one ‘nearly through a fit’ when she found I had gone secretly away. Yet quite evidently there was nothing else I could have done about it.

‘That is all I know,’ I said. ‘She has gone completely this time, as far as I am concerned. The trail is lost unless Miss Werther knows—if she did not go with her. I don’t suppose she did. It would be impossible to guess where Irma would stop, if she stops at all. As for me, I would not say I had fallen in love with her. I just cannot forget her.’

‘You see why she left the cottage, I suppose?’

I shook my head unhappily: no.

‘Why, because of you, silly,’ she said. ‘Your behaviour was unfamiliar. Nothing more—not insulting, as you seem to think, just unfamiliar. To anyone like Miss Martin the unfamiliar would be highly suspect. She probably found she couldn’t believe in you fully—you know the expression, too good to be true—and what a woman can’t believe in she doesn’t trust for a moment. So she went. Poor child—but what else could she do? You must see, Lloyd, she wasn’t in your position. She didn’t have a choice, she had no ideals left to fortify her, the only sacrifice she could make was the one you repudiated, however kindly. I only say this because I want you to feel you see her side of it as well as your own.’

‘I have been trying to do that for over a week, and now you have done it for me. It makes it no easier for me, personally, to know that I can do nothing for her now. The whole thing is complex. I ask myself whether to hold on to one’s personal ideals is not just an extreme form of vanity, an insane egotism, and yet, you see, if I did not remain loyal to mine I cannot see what good I would be to anyone else in the world—and of course by that I mean Alan. When I reach that point in this interminable argument, the moral question arises whether such an attitude to a son is not unnatural in a father, whether it is not perhaps sowing seeds of future trouble when the boy is grown and aware of me and able to think a bit for himself. To this I answer myself, in the persons both of interrogator and of witness, that a part of my self-discipline, even now, is to learn to make no demands upon him whatever. To do without love. I do not want love, I want him to be free of me from the beginning. In fact, Barbara, I had to choose that night between the boy and the woman, and I chose the boy. Habit. I would always choose him, so long as I could be of use to him. That is why—now I see it plain enough—the choice was inevitable.’

‘You don’t suppose that by choosing the boy you reasserted to yourself your right to a claim on him?’

She surprised me.

‘It could be so,’ I said. ‘If it actually was so, then the best thing I could do for both our sakes would be to go out and shoot myself.’

‘Don’t be extreme, Lloyd,’ she said mildly. ‘I imagine you are doing what you think is right and good the whole time. Wasn’t it the counsel of Polonius to his son, “To thine own self be true”? Isn’t that the advice you’re trying to follow?’

‘I don’t know, Barbara, I don’t know. One question’s answer seems merely to ask yet another question, until I feel I am getting nowhere. It could easily be that I set far too much store by what I dare to suppose is my future importance to Alan. Yet supposing I were—not there, so to speak—and he wanted me, and later I learned of it, later when it was too late. You see, I am obsessed with the feeling that I must always be there, the whole of me. So often my father was not there when I did need him, without knowing it. Alan is spiritually unarmed. Most naturally optimistic boy-children are like that—taking knock after knock and unable to help coming up smiling. I cannot bear to think of that as his future—I would be so deeply to blame, if I did the easy thing and went after my own interests regardless of him. He will remain unarmed until he gets his first real wound—and god have pity on whoever gives it to him.’

Barbara said nothing for a while, but sat looking at the pale fingertips of one immaculate hand. At last she looked up with a slight smile to say, ‘I can’t help wishing you could take this business of fatherhood a bit less seriously, a bit more easily. I can’t help thinking a certain amount of harmless irresponsibility on your part might be for the ultimate good of you both. Take that as the passing thought of a mere woman, if you like, but do take it, and bring it out one day for consideration.’

‘You are giving me Eve’s counsel, lady,’ I said mildly, ‘and you know what came of that.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and her shrewd eyes flashed suddenly, ‘Adam’s awakening to true wisdom through what is called sin or suffering by some, and self-realization by others. Adam’s separation of himself from his god, so that he learned to worship something other than himself. That’s what came of Eve’s counsel, and much thanks she’s had for it—nothing but the execrations of every Adam ever since, poor thing.’

‘Don’t let us talk about it,’ I said. ‘Tell me about yourself instead of about Eve. We must be topical. How are things at home?’

‘All right,’ she said, recovering herself with her usual disconcerting ease. ‘I don’t care for all this nonsense about the maternal show of bravery and a stiff upper lip. Brian is ready to go, and we’re going to do without his visits for as long as we have to. My main trouble is with old Molly. All the Irish is coming out in that woman—the crying Irish, with occasional unconvincing bursts of the fighting Irish. You’d think he was her own only son, instead of mine and one of three, by the way she goes on. I sometimes wish Con hadn’t been so fond of her for the shameless fun he used to get out of playing up to her. I could do with someone a little—firmer—in fibre just now. Ever since Con died she’s set herself against my way of bringing up the boys. It’s still going on. Patrick and Terence still lean her way a bit in their weaker moments. I wish they could have gone to that school of Alan’s.’

‘The only thing I have doubts about, as far as Alan is concerned, is that Townsend’s system may give him the idea that there is a virtue in not conforming mainly to the social pattern. I may be wrong. I foresee him going through a period when he has more imagination and intelligence than he can cope with at his age. When he is twelve he will go on to Shore, I hope, and live with boys only. I cannot say I care much for the idea of boys and girls living in close proximity for the first years of adolescence.’

‘I wish I had a daughter,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to become one of those mothers people mean when they say, “She simply lives for her boys.” That awful gaiety, Lloyd!’

‘I know what you mean. They are, in fact, sexually abnormal, and it seems to me about time our society recognized the fact, instead of praising it under the name of devotion. Not many people know the real meaning of the word. It is misused to hide a number of gross crimes of conduct.’

‘How stern you look when you talk like that,’ she said. ‘Like a sea-captain ashore—still stern and dependable even as a pedestrian.’

‘Especially the pedestrian part,’ I said. She waved that aside. ‘What I want to know is, what are you going to do about yourself?’ she said.

‘Work.’ I got up to go. ‘Tell me one thing. Why have there been none of the usual interruptions today?’

Her easy smile lightened her answer: ‘I had a feeling it might be the last talk of this sort we’d have for a time, so I told them in the other room I simply wouldn’t be in if you came. I bet that made them smile knowingly—or are they used to us by now? Tell me, Lloyd, just what do the people here think of you and me? I’m really shamefully out of touch with the rest of the office, most of the time.’

‘I never bother to wonder what people think here,’ I said. ‘Ours is not the only innocent friendship in the place, though I doubt whether any of the others is as good and as lacking in self-interest.’

She laughed. ‘You do keep yourself untouchable, don’t you. I hope you always can. I hope you’re always spared the self-betrayals the world offers us so often.’

A minute or two later I left her. The next time we met, during the following week, her son had been sent to an advanced training unit. We were officially at war with Germany, and the final over-running of Europe had begun. Her feeling about our last talk had not been wrong.

For the men and women of my profession, or trade as my father had insisted upon calling it (‘for come, my boy, admit you will be trading in the human passions, from intelligent curiosity down?’), the six years of active warfare could be described as years of prosperous discomfort.

There was almost an over-supply of news made ready to hand. ‘The war angle’ applied to everything, from women’s fashions to stock-sales at Homebush and crime in Darlinghurst. The idea of violence and death, incomprehensible still, became commonplace and meaningless, its mysterious fascination now only a legend. We knew they were impressive years. What we did not realize, because of their often brilliantly-lighted darkness, was that they were to impress and alter beyond remembrance the whole mind and manner of the civilian community.

The men and to a less degree the women in uniform were impressed and altered under our very eyes, even before they had gone abroad. We expected this. They became men and women of another race, unconscious initiates into the mystery of how to be a sheep proudly, hardly less strange though of course more nearly related to us than were the plump, heavy-drinking, over-courteous young Americans with their—to us—astonishing, naively uncouth adolescence who came to the country later, on the heels of General MacArthur.

The war, the idea of it, claimed them at once. As they dressed differently, so they thought—when they did think—differently; and the others, the men and women of the civilian front, showed them a startling degree of humility that was to continue for the duration. Once more, as in my own childhood, the voice of the fighting man was heard up and down the land, like a drunkard’s in a church hall during a welfare-society meeting. It was heard and listened to, suffered with every appearance of enthusiasm, and obeyed with a readiness that must have been gratifying to those minds that could be called normal only in such abnormal times. The old values, the old words, the thoughts of the philosophers and the poets, were for a long time forgotten, or, remembered, remembered mostly with impatient scorn. This was war, the killing season. Man’s life and soul, it seemed, could be divided into those of the man of the time of peace, and of him of the time of war, two men without a bond between them. The bombs fell, the guns dinned, the blood ran brightly, and the future of the race was not worth imagining.

Through it all, the news flowed in along overburdened channels of wire and air, coming from all over the continent and all over the world. There were no silly seasons now, those times in the newspaper year when it seems impossible to fill the paper, when news-editors become irritable, and the youngest cadet suspects an underlying futility in his joyfully-chosen profession . . . or trade. On the contrary, most of us were over-worked, and some received more money than was good for them. Money had begun to change hands with its inevitable wartime carelessness, because no costs were being counted anywhere, except in the hearts of a few men and women; and the whole country’s sudden preoccupation with secondary production, factory work, not only denuded the land, the whole source and security of Australia’s existence, of men and the girls they should have married, but also set free a flood of currency which, like the workers, swirled into and round about the capital cities so that from very early in the years of war the face of city existence was suddenly and ominously changed.

The Americans, when at last they came in interesting enough numbers, were never absorbed, as they were to some extent later in Europe, where fragments of their roots still clung, for here the native-born community, barely eight million strong, would have been too small even in peace time; and now, with hundreds of thousands of younger men and women—approaching one-eighth of the population in the end—in uniform and often engaged overseas, the friendly, boastful youngsters from across the Pacific, eager as adolescents in their sexual curiosity, their uncomprehending enthusiasms and their schoolboy passion for food and drink, were conspicuous to the very end. Wherever they went, in Australia as in other parts of the world, they never quite achieved popularity with the people, despite their efforts, despite what they and we were told; but the years of advance publicity spread by talking-pictures and imported gramophone records and wireless programmes made them in one way or another invariably spectacular; and the impression they in turn made upon the life of the bigger cities has endured—sometimes tragically. We were to discover the secret of the American way of life—that it offered the greatest ease for the least effort; or, as one of their officers told me with a wink as rich and heavy as a slice of fruit-cake, ‘pleasure without payin’, son—pleasure without payin’.’

But they paid—they paid for everything, willingly and twice over, and nearly overthrew our own domestic economy by the effect their full pockets and liberal ways had upon prices.

I had quite a lot to do with them, both on and off duty; and, though I found it was possible to accustom oneself to the curious hollow unreality of what they claimed, with sharp, parrot-like cries, to be that American way of life, I could never overcome a depressing shyness of those who lived it and took it with them wherever they went—and they went everywhere. Nor could I ever believe, in spite of what I had read and heard about that country, that the young men, and the men not so young in the higher posts, who invaded our already chaotic life to its further gross confusion were characteristic of the powerful nation they were said to represent.

However, they were news. Their presence affected the papers themselves, and their staffs. We chose to trace to it the most startling development in latter-day Australian newspaper history, when The Sydney Morning Herald, the property of generations of Fairfaxes, older than the Gazette, abandoned its old-style, conservative ‘open-up’ lay-out (based on that of The Times of London, of which it had long been a devoted if not always impressive understudy) for the modern American front-page presentation of the morning news. As well as recurrent and inevitable special articles about the young American soldier abroad (including a couple of my own in which I was allowed to hint at the effect these foreigners were having on Australian crime methods and statistics), we printed for their benefit and that of their numerous Australian friends (and even more numerous parasites) more and more news from the United States, of a sort we had not bothered to use before. It meant a recasting of our American offices. At the same time, America wanted more news—of the acceptable, ‘we’re-over-there’ sort—from our own end, and their papers mostly had their own representatives, as well as those of the big press agencies, in Australia, so that even the newspapers felt within their walls the full impact of the invasion.

It is said that out of it all, out of the increased tragedies and mis-marriages and other youthful crimes (including the soft debauchery of a surprising number of adolescent girls in the cities) good came, in the firmer drawing-together of the two young nations; until today they are like suburban neighbours of different ways of life but with a street, a fence and some opposed windows in common—friendly enough to borrow each other’s gardening tools and repair outfits, so to speak, but still no more than deliberately amiable strangers, with nothing more in common than a common regard, on the part of each, for what may be gained at least cost to face and fortune from the other.

The war years saw the commencement of this superficially enthusiastic playing at good neighbours, while to us the Australian way of life, in climates ranging from the tropical to the temperate—but no lower, except in the snow playgrounds and pastures of the eastern Alps—still seemed preferable, in spite of the heightened clamour in our midst. It was a way of living more like that of the pure British convict stock from which a large part of the population had descended, and its snobbery continued to be concerned with origins and traditions belonging to the British islands from which our ancestors had departed, no matter how ungracefully, as pioneers of a new nation. When, towards the conclusion of armed action, British fighting men from the three desperately-tested services passed through on their way north and east, they were greeted not with caution but with the joy and fury that so often characterize a reunion of blood brothers. It was then that the tragedy of the American way of life suddenly showed clear; we saw that they were a sovereign people without a sovereign, with no fixed object for their love or their hate save only one another, not even a cultural heritage, like that of France, to bind them together gladly at the foot of Democracy’s empty throne. By contrast, to our people the British on their way through were as irresistible as a breath of fresh air in a bedroom through the opened window of morning.

Through all this, my own work increased considerably, and I had no assistance in it, for by nineteen forty-two we were seriously short of staff, when the Japanese approached from the north and the most unlikely men suddenly appeared on the streets in uniform. That was no bad thing, for it helped me to keep the piling horrors of warfare as made by my own generation at a certain distance from the point where recognition of them would have threatened sane behaviour. Sane I knew I must keep me, for Alan’s sake if for no other reason; for in a convulsed world he was growing nearer to adolescence, nearer to that moment where, as I foresaw it, our ways must separate to run apart for a time on near-parallel lines separated by a whole generation; that moment when—also perhaps for a time only—our half-wordless intimacy of the blood must end, and we must begin to speak new languages, I his, he mine.

During his four years at S. Johns school, about which the brief controversies now rose less often and more quickly subsided, he had developed into his true self in a way that was delightful and astonishing. He was not to be called precocious; Townsend and his wife did not encourage such false growth; but he bloomed fully and freely into a kind of boyhood which filled me with a hot pride I was ashamed to reveal. The perfect, normal health of his flexible young body was repeated in the health and quality of his mind. He never lost what he found at that modest, eccentric school-home—a sort of brightness as it were of the spirit cupped in the cupped hands of secret reserve and quiet generosity. Above all, he had neither malice nor deceit in his heart. I never knew him to lie, or to countenance with amused composure lies in others of his age. The one thing in his character which gave me most unease was his habit of single-minded optimism. It appeared, indeed, when he first learned to walk; and the impulsive fears for his safety which I then suffered I underwent, for always-differing reasons, a hundred, a thousand times subsequently. Then and always, he saw the end and smilingly took for granted the rightness and inevitability of the means—not always wisely, not always successfully. Failure in an enterprise stunned him into temporary incredulity and slow, unchildlike, old-man’s tears; success turned him silent and brilliant, or dreamy-eyed at the tremendous thoughts of further conquests of the world of matter and energy. He had from infancy a habit of sitting silent on the edge of his bed in the dark of early evening. Once, when I thoughtlessly asked him what he was doing, he told me without self-consciousness or what would have been a pardonable irritation, ‘Just thinking.’ It seemed to be a conscious, planned act of thought, after the manner of the religious who withdraws from habits and surroundings at certain times of the day consciously to commune with divinity.

When he was twelve years old, after four years of living rather aloof both from me and from the whole wartime society of those days, he left S. Johns for Shore, as the great Church of England grammar school is called, as a boarder. I chose that school, rather to my mother’s distress, when Alan was still a child, for the fact that its final products were boys who had not suffered the rather stifling religious indoctrination of the no less notable Catholic schools, and whose manner and faintly awkward social grace had always appealed to me. My father, after turning the matter over in his mind without comment, told me he thought the choice a wise one, especially when he understood that, as at S. Johns, those whose parents expected it could go to Mass in the ordinary way without being stigmatized or even singled out because of it.

For his own part, my father had never tolerated the idea of putting me to a boarding-school, and I have suffered the lack of that experience all my life. I wanted Alan to be not my own son so much as his own man, above all things, and as soon as might be. When he left S. Johns, in the fullness of summer a fortnight before Christmas, when the whole land was hot and glowing with colour and sun, my mother ‘gave’ us Miss Molesley—Alan still called her Moley—and I invited her to be my housekeeper permanently, and found her a good room with a view in one of the quieter streets near the Cross and a few minutes’ walk from my flat. The war, and the death of her only brother, had aged her noticeably, but she was still an agreeable woman, an intelligent and economic cook in a country where women are no longer always either or both; and Alan was as dear to her prim old virgin’s heart as though he were indeed what she called him—‘little brother’. As one addicted to the teachings of theosophy, she used the expression easily, but with an especially tender inflection for the boy scarcely one-quarter her age. (Me she had called ‘Judge’—to my mother’s secret and half-amused indignation—ever since my father died.)

Moley looked after us both, during the holidays, when Alan slept in the big bedroom next to mine at night and by day was freely busy with his own concerns and his successive hobbies. She would wait until I returned, no matter what the hour, and then walk fearlessly and unescorted back to her room through a district that was coming to be known as dangerous. When assignments kept me away at night, as happened occasionally, she used the day-bed in the living-room with its tall windows overlooking the great curve of the harbour north and east to the Heads. It was on these nights that she taught Alan card games. She was a great addict to the cards, and to dramatic and soft-spoken tea-cup reading now and then, when we were en famine. In spite or because of the great difference in their ages, and also because of the fever and passionate unrest of the world that throbbed and threatened in the near distance, they drew very close to one another again after the years of separation; and I was content to see it, for Alan was at a time of life when it is good for a boy to have as companion and mentor, if he has not his own mother, a loving, trusting and unsuspicious woman of much older years, when he is not among his own kind. The point of departure between us two, the point of no return, had come, and gone, even sooner than I expected it, and gradually I found myself in the last year of the war faced with a return to my earlier ways of solitude and underlying loneliness.

It was not that Alan withdrew himself. He seemed if anything more friendly and confiding, and sometimes I caught him looking at me with thoughtful surprise, as though for the first time he were seeing in my familiar form the problematical and unknown. No—there was no withdrawal from the innocent and merry intimacy in which we had for some years dwelt like conspirators against time and the world; rather it was as if, with the inexhaustible energy of his youth, he raced ahead, looking back to see at what speed I followed, or if indeed I followed at all.

I was particularly aware of this at the end of his first public-school year, when he came home for the summer wild with plans for sharing the holidays with one or two of the new friends he had made.

At the beginning of the last week of term, early in December, he called me by telephone at the office in the early afternoon. The air-conditioning plant had broken down again during a brief spell of abnormal heat, and the big room was full of still air that seemed to have been breathed several times. I had been at work on a difficult story since mid-morning, writing, telephoning, going out to an interview, writing again and once or twice checking the story, as it progressed, with the police. In order to make the most of what remained of that day’s quiet inside the office, before the majority of the editorial staff came in at two o’clock, I did not go out to lunch but remained doggedly at my table. I was hungry, thirsty and half-stifled by the soft heat, smelling of petrol fumes and hot tar, that had drifted in from the glittering black streets to the very core of the building, when my telephone rang once again. It was Alan.

‘Hullo, Daddy, isn’t it hot? Daddy, are you—do you want to come to the school break-up?’

‘When is it, Alan?’

‘Tomorrow week—um—Thursday.’

I could imagine him, looking vaguely about while he waited for my answer. His voice did not deceive me with its calm affection; the change from ‘are you coming’ to the less encouraging ‘do you want to come’ had told me what was in his mind—what had been in my own mind, safely settled, for weeks and months in fact. I remembered my own over-sensitive boyhood days; I remembered what I had once said to Barbara; I remembered and agreed that boys do not necessarily enjoy being seen with fathers who look thin and pale and wear beards. I had my answer ready, but it needed to be given gracefully. The time for small studied pretences between us, devised to ease each other’s minds, had come.

‘Just a minute, while I take a look at my diary.’ I put down the receiver and took up the little book to riffle through some few pages near the mouthpiece, muttering softly to myself. Then I spoke again. ‘No—I’m sorry, Alan, but it can’t be managed this year. Do you want Grandmother to deputize for me?’

His voice had not shown any trace of concern in the first place, not even when he firmly told me the exact day; but now, irrepressibly, it lifted with a faint, bouyant relief that made me smile into the listening mouthpiece of the receiver.

‘No, it’s all right, Daddy, thank you. It would probably knock her out. And anyhow, the fellows here are a bit shy of female company.’

‘Good gracious,’ I said, laughing, ‘don’t be too influenced by the fellows or their opinions. It’s entirely your own business. You have to live at the school, after all. I just thought that perhaps on speech-day—’

‘That’s it,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Sorry. I forgot the word. Speech-day.’

‘—I thought you might like to have some member of the family there to see you get all your prizes . . .’

‘Oh, pooh! I’m only getting one, anyhow.’

‘What one are you getting?’

‘English composition.’

‘Good lord—well, I’m glad to hear it. Only don’t be a writer, will you?’

‘No fear. One in the family’s enough, you always say. I’m going to be a doctor.’

‘The only difference is that you cut up abdomens instead of paragraphs.’

‘Oh—’ He forgot all gravity and the telephone too in a burst of laughter. ‘Can I tell the fellows I thought of that? No—perhaps I’d better say it was you.’

‘Tell them what you like, my dear chap, if you think it’s worth a fib. So you’ll be all right on your own?’

‘Yes, if you can’t come. It’s pretty dull, I think, anyhow. Who wants to listen to a lot of old speeches?’

‘What are you doing this afternoon?’

‘Cricket. Inter-House matches. But I’m not playing—only watching.’

‘Do you like it? Playing, I mean.’

‘I like batting or bowling or—yes, I suppose it’s all right. I don’t like watching terribly much.’

‘I had a House Master with a rather untidy moustache. After the finals of the inter-House cup for cricket it was always much shorter and neater.’

‘Why? I don’t get it—oh! Did he cut it?’

‘He used to chew and gnaw at it all through play. He never wanted any tea that evening.’

‘Oh—’ His laughter bubbled in my ear again. ‘You mean he was too full of hair?’

‘Is that a pun, or did you pronounce the aitch?’

‘Well—you started the fooling. Gosh, I’ll be home in eight days.’

For no reason, unless because I was tired and hungry and on edge with the heat, I felt some tears gather at the back of my eyes as I heard the frank jubilation in his voice, and traced for my own pleasure a subconscious link between ‘fooling’ and coming home.

‘Yes. Well, I must not keep you from the cricket, and I hope your House wins.’

‘So do I, thank you, Daddy.’

‘Do you want any money, or have you still some of your pocket-money left?’ They were allowed only a limited amount of pocket-money, which I knew never lasted the full term.

‘Oh sir,’ his voice was prim with affected irony, ‘I always want money . . . Yes, I do want a little, if you have a few bob to spare.’

‘I wish you would say shillings, Alan, not bob. I shall post you a few bob today.’

‘There—you said it yourself! Thank you, Daddy . . . Well, goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Alan, until next week.’

‘Goodbye.’

At S. Johns, during his last year there, he had learned to talk without shyness over the telephone to me. As a result, I could enjoy speaking to him at his new school with a pleasure I could not analyse or describe. Always I left the ringing-up to him, though sometimes, on a free evening alone in the flat, I had had to put aside firmly the temptation to ring him up myself. I knew the very time at which to catch him, between evening tea and the hour of preparation boys of his age put in, before racing off at the shrilling of the electric bells to dormitory prayers and the luxurious horseplay and relaxation of undressing for bed. If there were any idleness in his days, it would be at this time. I never did use the telephone, except once, later, on the evening my mother died; but that was quite another matter.

We had, in truth, reached a phase in our relationship in which, for me, such constant caution and self-restraint were necessary that the exercise of them in his presence made me secretly shy of him. By telephone, talking was easier. I did not have to look and be looked at; I did not have to refrain from telling him to say ‘shillings’ rather than ‘bob’ and to try, for the sake of his appearance, to give up biting his nails when he was reading. Alone at my end of the telephone, I could allow to show in my face, no doubt, the pleasure I invariably felt at the thought of his youth and youthful beauty of body and mind.

In those years, the interminable years of a war whose fantastic echoes will never cease to sound somewhere in history’s corridors, I had no deep personal preoccupation other than with this boy; no wife, no sweetheart or mistress, no love given to myself above all others. When one does not receive, it happens often that one is more able and eager to give; and so I gave him my love. There was no need to stifle or discipline my emotions. They could be hidden. The things I felt, the feelings his memory or his presence aroused in me were always good feelings which would not have harmed him had they been shown; but the disparity of our ages and my own rather undemonstrative bearing made it unlikely that he ever knew more than that I loved him as it is good for a son to be loved, and proper in a father to love an only son. ‘Passing the love of women’ had once seemed to me a grossly exaggerated phrase characteristic of the worst in biblical prose, but sometimes in these days, with healthy mental and spiritual values going the way of most material values, wherever the mind turned, wherever the ear attended, I thought that phrase might have a meaning I had hitherto not tried to find.

By then it seemed easy for almost any other affection to exceed the love of women. War does that to a community: it allows the expression to be mistaken for the emotion, the gesture for the feeling that once profoundly prompted it. As I kept my habitual watch over the society which in turn kept me, by its insatiable curiosity and hunger for excitement, alert and profitably employed, I could not help thinking again and again how much the young American soldiery had helped forward the moral devaluation, and how unintentionally, above all in the matter of sexual conduct. They were frankly lustful young men, and in spite of a mass-produced veneer of song and dance and exaggerated courtesy towards women—particularly older women—their lust had not even the grace of an animal’s. They had apparently been trained from childhood by their monied masters, the industrialists of the sciences and the popular arts, to be obsessed by the life of the body, exaggerating its needs, valuing its outward and inward well-being with a relentless consciousness and to a degree that seemed to me insane. No appetite, they seemed to say, should be denied for a moment longer than could be helped by any means or stratagem; and of every appetite a man should be proud. The word moderation seemed to have come to mean, in their connotation, a state of vitiated abnormality which should quickly be corrected with the aid of drugs, vitamins, serums and stimulants of every kind. As for restraint, that was not a word they used at all.

It may have been the war which emphasized these common characteristics. Certainly, as the world’s highest-paid soldiers, they spent their money with an abandon which came naturally to them, and which was soon expected, especially by the young Australian women, who, now that their brothers and lovers were gone away to fight elsewhere, seemed to crowd the streets of the cities in surprising numbers. Many of these had become women physically since the war’s outbreak. Robbed of even the knowledge of the more diffident, naive eroticism of the young men of their own nation and generation, they fell readily into the smooth hands and habits of mind of the foreigners who had come to rescue their country from the Japanese.

Our office policy was to avoid or smother all criticism of our glorious ally across the Pacific. The police, however, were more outspoken, and occasionally even Hubble, that mild man, surprised me by the passion and articulateness of his diatribes: for what I have described as ‘unAustralian’ crimes had increased both in variety and in numbers. What dollars could not buy could be taken by other means. Their over-large pay and allowances, and the way they spent, came nearer than anything to demoralizing the whole civil life of the cities into which they swarmed, on their way north to death and glory, in the train of the battle-hardened Australian divisions from the Middle East theatres. The Sydney Bulletin summed it all up succinctly, as usual, with a drawing of an American soldier helping an Australian wench out of a taxi-cab at Kings Cross: in the two lines of caption, the girl sneeringly asks the cabby, ‘What’ll you do when the Yanks are gone?’ to which he replies tersely, ‘What’ll you do, sister?’

Meanwhile, we had another glorious ally in the Soviets, whose entry into the field came before America’s by some months; and at the beginning of nineteen forty-two, with both Russia and America the declared enemies of Germany and her satellites, it was possible—and somehow terrifying—to conceive of eventual victory. A pattern of black and white, spread with apparent carelessness around the globe’s surfaces of land and water and in the air above them, began to be discernible; black indicated our enemies and their distribution, and it seemed, on the whole, that the pure white masses—the Western allies, and Russia in the east with China at heel casting a shadow over Japan—were rather better placed, in terms of time and movement. We said to ourselves that, in any case, the aggressor is always at an eventual disadvantage, psychologically and in other ways. It was possible to conceive of ultimate victory; but nobody thought of peace, which was just as well.

After their brief disappearance, the men and women of the Communist Party returned to their former places full of health and strength and with strong and healthy finances, and a natural air of having at last been vindicated. If I had ever hoped to see Irma again, this reinstatement of many who wished her ill seemed to give reason for letting any such hope go from my mind.

By ringing Miss Werther, I had traced her as far as Blacktown station, and there she vanished.

‘I wondered if you would ring,’ the amiable Jewess said in her lilting voice. ‘We have something to talk about. Forgive me if I don’t keep you just now on the telephone. Could you come to my office in Castlereagh street, in the shop? Yes? When can you come? I want to thank you for your kindness—to both of us.’

I arranged to visit her the same afternoon, the afternoon I had had that memorable conversation with Barbara; and at a few minutes after half past five she let me into the shop herself. Her eyes and lips wore the remembered gay smile as she crossed with light steps a square of deep, expensive-looking carpet to open the glass door. When I had entered she closed it, letting down the white Venetian blind inside so that we were screened completely from the street. I prepared myself to be thanked again for my ‘kindness’, and recalled Irma’s averted face, her arm linked with mine, her hand on my fingers, the firelight on the delicate skin of her ankles, and her remote voice . . . offering a return for kindness.

It was all so recent then that my heart began to beat heavily in my breast, and for one brief wild moment I wondered whether the little fat Jewess leading me through the front display room to a smaller, less formal room behind it, and across this to the screened doorway of a roomy office, were about to produce to me Irma in person from behind one of the olive-green velvet curtains, as easily and gaily as she would have produced one of her own expensive hoard of furs. But she only moved a deep armchair slightly away from the shaded lamp on the office table, and with a graceful movement of one fat, ringless hand invited me to be seated. She herself took a plain bentwood chair opposite me, full in the light.

‘Now,’ she said nervously, ‘Mr. Fitzherbert, I think it is best I tell you Irma told me what you talked about that night at your cottage. It was all very sad. She does not understand men like you. I don’t think she understands any of the really good things in human nature, if I may say so. All her life it has been violence, fear, greed, ambition and one voice shouting down another. Whatever she said to you that night she said for the best. You must not judge her. She didn’t know any better, you see. She started life too young. There are some values she never learned to respect.’

She was looking at me intently, her polished black eyes shining tearless and nervous in the light. I had a vivid memory of Irma, all woman, body and mind, knowing so much and yet so little—like a girl in the dawn of physical maturity, like a flower that shows what seems to be the grown seed even before it blooms.

‘She talked only of you, the next two days, Mr. Fitzherbert. She has had one love affair in Europe, and it ended in a terrible way, a man who was killed by the Gestapo in Holland. She was too young for all that, you know. It terrified her, because it was the first time she had loved anyone, since her father died. She thought it was mostly her fault he was killed, and so it was in a way, but only partly. She ran away to England, then to here, because Nazis and Communists were both after her now. And you know all the rest, I think. Ah—I am so sorry—would you like a glass of sherry? Yes, please do.’

While she took from the table cupboard a small tray already set with Belgian wine glasses and an exquisite sherry decanter that did not match them except in beauty, I wondered what was the purpose of her preamble; and when she had poured the pale wine, and set the two glasses within our reach, she continued.

‘She can never have been a really good Party member, Mr. Fitzherbert. She was young, everybody was becoming afraid of the Nazis, it was something to do to help, and of course all very exciting. They made a sort of pet of her in Berlin, and gave her small missions, and even made her dress like a boy. Poor Irma, she was only a child. She loved it. She believed everything they taught her, everything, especially the things about love having no private place in a society where everything, all ownership, even the human body, was to be in common. That was how she learned first of love—she was only fourteen. What a wonderful society it would be, would it not?’

The abrupt and contemptuous irony of her voice surprised me. It reminded me that I had never really understood how so many Jews could embrace the common-ownership doctrine of the Communist ideology.

‘When she fell in love at last with this Maartens, a much older man, she was afraid for the first time of her own Party, and did not know what to do. Well, that was solved for her. The Party in Berlin, for safety’s sake—you know she had been pretending to be a genuine Nazi Party member too, by order—the Party let the Nazis know she was Maarten’s mistress and that Maartens, as a Communist district leader, was trying to spy on them through her. If she had not heard about this just in time and got away, they would have got her too.’

The picture her words evoked made me feel sick. The idea of the body of a woman one has held in one’s arms, however innocently, being ‘got’ by a cleverly-driven car in a dim midnight street is extraordinarily horrible, especially to anyone who has seen the still-living victims of fatal accidents trying to drag themselves out of the reach of an incomprehensible violence that has already done its work on them. Miss Werther drank some wine, watching me rather nervously still.

‘I tell you all this, Mr. Fitzherbert, so you will know what I am going to say next is reasonable . . . Irma wanted you to know she loves you.’

My movement was involuntary, and she affected not to see it as anything but a movement to take the wine glass from the table and raise it to my lips.

‘She thought when I saw you again—for she was sure you would get in touch with me—I could tell you this if I thought it was wise. You see, Mr. Fitzherbert, she tried to tell you that night but it went wrong somehow. The memory of that other love affair, when she was young and ignorant, frightened her when she saw how she was feeling about you. She couldn’t help thinking there would be more trouble. Also, you are so—what the French call gentil, you know? She was half-afraid of you at the same time because you are different from the other men she has known. It was the first time she thought of her past as perhaps disgraceful to you—that there had been other men. Because she was a good Party member, devoted to the pure beauty of dialectical materialism . . . How terrible her situation becomes, you see, when she realizes what her confused feelings about you really are. And then, in the morning, you are gone, and everything falls to pieces.’

She let her closed hand fall suddenly open in her lap, in a most eloquent gesture of helpless disintegration.

‘Like that . . . She does not know what she has done. She knows now she loves you, but all she can think of, every time she tries to get it clear, is that you are somehow in league with the police, and that you know very much about her—all she herself has told you. As you do not want her she sees you cannot love her, so she begins to think you may feel you should let the police know about her, so they can find her if they need to. This makes no difference to what she feels about you, Mr. Fitzherbert. It even makes it worse, so to speak, but now she is afraid again as well.’

‘But good heavens,’ I said as calmly as I could, ‘she must know me better than that. I gave her my word.’

‘Do not forget her training, Mr. Fitzherbert. To the Communists, one’s word is only something for someone else to take. Giving it means nothing. Also you are mistaken. She did not know you. I do not know you. You are not that sort of man.’

I did not know what she meant; but as I took breath to explain she interrupted quickly.

‘Please—do not be offended. I tell you only the truth. You are an Australian, and you look like perhaps a European—French, or Spanish, or even English. You do not behave either like an Australian or a European. We talk about you, and all we know is that without doubt you are younger than you seem.’

I muttered something about being more honourable than they had seemed to think, too. For the first time, she laughed, in the way I had liked when we were together before, in the quiet security of the cottage.

‘Without doubt, if possible,’ she said. ‘It was not a question of honour—women, Mr. Fitzherbert, leave honour to the men, you will find. It’s a word they don’t use among themselves, women. It was, frankly, a question of what to do next. I offered to come to town and see you. She believed if you said anything it would be the truth, and I said I would ask you what you were going to do, and what you thought best for her to do.’

‘I was coming back the next week-end,’ I said more roughly than was fair; for I was so confused and unhappy that it made me angry. ‘I went away to give her time to settle down without me about the place, since my presence seemed to remind her of her foolish idea that she owed me something for doing what any decent man would have done in my place. Also I had a good deal to think about.’

‘She offended you then, Irma?’

‘No . . . You must understand I am not merely what I probably seem to you two people—just a man in a newspaper office with a useful house in the mountains, empty and safe. No, I have a background very different from Irma’s—particularly different in that fear never had much of a place in it for long. I have two lives to care for, my son’s and my own, each dependent largely upon the other. Do you see what I mean? Very few things that she would think exciting have ever happened to me. I am even a Roman Catholic by birth and upbringing, though not a very good one now, I suppose, in the priests’ view. Most of my friends are older than I am, and I myself am twelve years older than she is. As for my feelings, I am no casual lover—I haven’t enough experience in the art of subterfuge, for one thing. But now I know my feeling for her is the same as hers for me, if what you say is right. Where is she?’

In spite of my resolve, in spite of everything, I heard myself asking the question harshly, in a voice unlike my own. It startled me, as it surely startled her. Her nervous look returned; she made a small placatory gesture with her two hands, and shook her head and swallowed audibly before she answered.

‘Mr. Fitzherbert, I do not know. I do not know. When the train came to Blacktown she said, “Help me get my things out, quick,” but when I went to get out with her she said, “No, Linda, no. Go back to Sydney. You are all right,” and she gave me a push, so hard that I fell back on the seat, and slammed the door. When I got up the train had started. I looked out—there she was, not even looking for me, like a lost child always looking the wrong way. That is the last I saw of her—looking the wrong way.’

In the lamplight I saw two tears brim over her dark-lashed lower lids from her polished black eyes, and slowly thread their way down her cheeks while she felt for a handkerchief. Her fat chin trembled a little; she looked very pitiful suddenly, no longer the rich little Jewess secure in her prosperous business, but a refugee from all that is incomprehensible and tragic in life.

‘Forgive me—I am very fond of her. It makes me sad to think what will become of her, poor Irma.’

‘She told you nothing of what she meant to do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you know if she had ever travelled that line before?’

‘She told me she had never been out of Sydney before. She said how strange the country looked to her—very hard, she thought it was.’

‘I suppose we can safely suppose she is still alive?’

Miss Werther gasped, and put her plump hands to her throat. ‘I tried to take it from her. She said, “Don’t be silly, Linda. I am not going to use it—yet”.’

‘I do not know what you are talking about, Miss Werther.’

At that, she seemed to break down completely, wringing her outstretched hands together and shaking her beautifully coiffured head from side to side with her eyes closed.

‘The poison. She had it with her always. The little glass bit of sealed tube. They called it the death capsule, in Europe. You bite it, and you are gone. I tried to take it, but she saw me. “Don’t be silly, Linda” was what she said. Ah, Mr. Fitzherbert—you must understand—all that talk of suicide is very easy for the young.’

‘All what talk of suicide?’

‘You never heard it?’ She recovered herself sufficiently to scrub at her eyes with her handkerchief and then look at me more confidently, though her mouth still trembled.

‘Ah well . . . you knew her so short a time, I keep forgetting. All her talk about you, after you went, made me feel you had known one another ever since she came here. Forgive me. You see, when she was very blue, depressed, she would talk of ending it all. Like many of those people, she still carries the poison—cyanide—with her. It is very quick. She has it with her always, like other people have a little mascot . . . But no! she is too young, and suicide is not for her, not in this country. Surely? It is so easy to talk.’

Aloud, I reminded myself that I would surely have heard. ‘She would be traced to Sydney.’

‘That’s it! You are with the police. No, no—she has just gone off alone again, she used to say it was the only real safety, to be absolutely alone. But of course that is not always so easy . . . I know she will write to me. I know she is still alive and well, somewhere. It is such a big country, isn’t it?’

On that inconclusive thought we parted, and I took my confused feeling of regret and concern and an underlying, uncertain joy elsewhere; and though I nursed the thought of Irma’s regard for me I could get little pleasure from it in the end.

In truth, now that she had spoken of love, I was not even sure if it were love I wanted from her. Once more I remembered that I had made my choice, with a conviction that seemed to have little connection with my dazzled senses at the time, and nothing at all to do with them in retrospect. The choice, made, was irrevocable and absolute, a living part of my history now. But love, I thought, can die; in a hundred different ways and even from simple starvation it can die and crumble like a dead old leaf.

Nevertheless, now that all was over between us—all the little, it might seem, that had ever been—I did nurse and hug to myself the knowledge that she had said she loved me. Sometimes, when I recalled my own behaviour, it was an embarrassing knowledge, prompting a self-contempt which bruised and bewildered, for I still did not see how I could have acted otherwise; yet for once she was innocent, and I, of all people who had reason to play the Samaritan, had stepped aside from her as though she were a harlot offering to trade.

Sometimes, though, as the weeks and months passed, and the war’s apparent false start left us as it were in mid-air, frustrated, still at stretch, I thought that knowledge wonderful in the extreme. The only escape from the unreality of the actual, in Europe and here at home, was by way of dreams—the dream of work, the dream of fulfilled wishes; and I dreamed like any boy. She was my girl. We had known each other but a few hours in all, we were strangers still to each other’s history and each other’s self that had shaped it, yet in a short hour of being tested we had indicated to each other a whole new world of possible experience.

The image of her was becoming clearer as she receded in space and time—clearer, yet more complex. Thinking of her age, even in a day when girls become mature, rangées, so much earlier than their mothers did, I was repeatedly arrested by the view I had had of her independence of action as well as of mind. She made her own decisions, and without hesitation moved on them. Even allowing for the practice she must have had, in a world where she knew she could count on no sure support from anyone at all in the event of a serious mistake, this complete self-sufficiency was disturbing in one so young, not merely because it was an incalculable quantity but because, as I mused on it, it gave her in imagination an air of extraordinary loneliness. Without consultation, she could leave her job and her lodging; she could come to me and confess things which, to her mind, were too dangerous for any unknown, irresponsible person to hear; she could summon her friend without warning to go into hiding with her; she could leave both the temporary refuge and the friend in a matter of hours, and disappear god knew where, on a train of whose departure she must have known in advance, at a station which, as far as we could tell, she had never heard of before . . .

The whole series of actions argued a deal of cool, determined forethought and preparation, without a word to anyone. I began to think, indeed, that none of my own part in it had been quite by chance; I began to suspect, without much argument, that she had summed me up, from her own point of view, with flashing quickness on that morning aboard the Empire Queen, and to realize that she probably knew more about me than, had she told me, I would have believed she possibly could know.

Her one miscalculation had been concerned with my response to her whole-hearted offering of her love, not—as I now saw—merely as a return for kind services but because it had unexpectedly become the inevitable ending to all that had gone before it. Flight demands eventual surrender—to something, no matter what. She, poor child, gave herself up to love. I was to be her captor and turn a key on her in her prison of peace. It was her one miscalculation, and a bad one, for which only her youth could be blamed. No wonder that, as Jack had said, she ‘nearly through a fit’ when she found I had gone wordlessly away, leaving her not even another chance. I supposed, with a wretched sinking of the heart, that she had gone willingly back to her bed that night because already she was setting much store by the bright morning soon to come.

Such thoughts bring no ease. They are like the tongue’s worrying at an aching tooth: they incessantly identify the source of pain and do nothing to lessen it. I kept coming back, for a comfort that was each time colder, to the fact that I had been faced with a tremendous decision and had made a right choice. It did no good: it was true, but for many weeks and months the virtue seeped out of it like water from a cracked jar, leaving only a dry emptiness and the formal, useless shape of the jar itself.

In those weeks and months it was easy to turn the mind to private concerns. Part of my mind held scorn for the way I succumbed to that false easiness. Another part, the vast uncharted emotional regions where many a stronger and wiser traveller has lost himself for ever from integrity, welcomed my wanderings with lure upon lure as I followed the witch-fire of imagination and desire. I see now that the self-controlled repressions of the preceding years, ever since Jean’s death, had built up a structure of support which was not as strong as I had tried to make it. It was based upon a negative base: what I had used for foundations were more often denials, not—as I had thought—assertions. It was like the young Queen Victoria’s strenuous ‘I will be good’ which had the irresistible ring of ‘I will not be naughty’; and it was just as vain.

All this distracting activity in my mind made me understand later how tremendous the decision had been; and understanding sealed as it were the cracked jar, and poured back into it not virtue but acceptance and resignation, which I am told smell hardly less agreeable to god. I say acceptance, because it is necessary to reason to accept an accomplished fact; but instead of resignation one might say relief, because I was realizing at last that if I had chosen Irma instead of my concept of myself (which included and largely was Alan) I should have abandoned that alternative for her as wholly as I had abandoned her for it. There could have been no compromise, not only because it is against my training and my nature to compromise but also because, with her, compromise would have been impossible. There would, of course, have been the appearance of it; but Alan and my aspirations to the impersonal, Olympian viewpoint would have been set aside in my mind together, the one to grow untended and, by my standards, without love, the other to be in all honesty forgotten.

I began to suspect, at last, my own limitations. I was still too unmatured to dare to devote myself to more than one heart-felt cause. Singlemindedness, like self-sufficiency, imposes its own penalties. It too is an ultimate loneliness.

So, it appeared, we were both destined by our decisions to be lonely. This thought, arrived at in due course, sent me back to the cottage like a homing dog to a deserted mastery. Three weeks after I had driven from it into the south-east, aslant the winter daybreak, I was back there with a fast-beating heart and a belief, a mad hope somewhere unacknowledged within me, that she might have returned, secretly impelled like me to come back to the point of departure, with that dreadful human hope that, just this once, one may be given a second chance.

I went in a fought-down frenzy of haste, like any schoolboy to an uncertain assignation. Once more I drove at an illegal speed, outside the busier thoroughfares, and once more an irrelevant gaiety welled up in me, like the urge to sing on a fine morning, as I cleared the last straggle of suburbs and wheeled the car fast into the opening plain, where fewer and fewer houses were to be seen, and where the mountains marched towards me like a wave that changed as it came from dark blue to green, from flat to a cleft and tossing complexity of austere pride.

Today, however, morning was at my back and I travelled towards a pale and hazy sky. By the time Richmond was left behind and the river crossed, the mists were coming down upon the highest crests, with imperceptible speed; and as I turned off north-west on the unsurfaced country road of red gravel and hardened clay I saw the nearer ranges in a sudden magic of definition, their over-clear green turning black again by contrast with the white and heavy vapours that rolled down into the innumerable valleys and ravines and narrow gullies before a descending curtain from beneath which they seemed to have escaped like forerunners. Their whiteness and apparent lack of all movement as I climbed steadily nearer turned the revealed depths of the immense eastern mountain forest into the likeness of a stereoscopic photograph, and along the lowest edge of the curtain individual trees stood out, stark charcoal drawings that were slowly swallowed up from below until only the solid-looking, craggy tops of them could be seen, like islands about to sink back into a white ocean.

The cottage, I knew, would be mist-bound already, and I concentrated my thoughts on the road itself, and on seeing my mail-box on its tree to guide me to the turn-off. A fog formed on the windscreen before I realized I had plunged into the thin lowest fringes of the mist; in another minute, with the windscreen-wiper jerking and clicking inexorably across the glass, I could see only twenty yards ahead of the car between the looming and vanishing trunks. My headlights now seemed to exaggerate the unnatural silence of the misty mountains closing behind me, and what had been bright day when I left the city was now a pallid greyness, a vision of the silence itself, on every side, beneath huge trees whose leaves were already dripping as they turned the ocean of vapour into water upon their chilly surfaces.

Donna met me at the gate. As I put up the rails behind the car, thinking of why I had come, I knew with absolute certainty that I had come for nothing after all; yet still that hope which was only a wishful dream made me hasten to cover the last few hundred yards. One look at the cottage when it became properly visible in the mist might have sufficed. Its withdrawn, motionless look was now that which houses take on when mist or rain comes down heavily upon them, shutting in and intensifying the life they contain. No sound, no light came from it, but more than this it had no soul.

Having let myself fall into the clutches of excitement and anticipation so wholly, I could not stop now. When the car was put away, and no one appeared in answer to the sharp, lonely rapping of the horn in the darkness of the barn, I made for the cottage as though committed to a definite and pressing purpose, though I had none; and as I passed beneath and between them, the leafless fruit trees opening late in the mountain air their budded flowers along each polished twig dripped moisture like tears on my bare head and my beard; and Donna danced along at my side with joy and impatience, tenderly mouthing my hand each time it swung back as I walked.

The kitchen was clean and empty, and smelled faintly of wood-smoke and ashes and the split wood Jack always kept there in a deep recess by the stove. It was a sad, cold smell. Nothing was out of place—dishcloth, soap-saver, brush, all were on their hooks on the window-frame over the sink, dry, unused this many a day. The silence of the mountain mist was inside the house; nothing lived there except the bitch and myself, both listening, both knowing there was nothing.

In the big room, the pale curtains kept out the paler daylight. I flicked them aside with the backward wrist-movement of years of habit that sent the wooden rings to the ends of the rods with a small dead rattling sound. Immediately the profound and empty silence of the mist, so different from that of the mountains themselves at night, resumed its full occupancy of the place; and suddenly in the careless garden of shrubs in front a thrush began to sing with accurate and penetrating sweetness. I listened until it stopped and flew away, unseen the whole time, through the blank world of the mist. I did not know what to do next.

There was a clean fire laid as usual in the ruddy depths of the brick fireplace. The polished floor between the rugs reflected vaguely every surface that caught the humble light from the windows, and the windows themselves, rectangles of barely discernible grey. All trace of use was gone from the room. I stared at the sheepskin rug before the hearth in disbelief.

In the front bedroom, the two beds had been stripped and made up again with clean linen, as the visible creases in each pillowcase, each turned-over sheet, mercilessly showed. I did not even know which one she had lain in, wide awake in the dark in a strange place; neither of them, in its military neatness, seemed ever to have felt the weight of that strong, warm body whose strength and warmth I instantly felt again across my knees and in the crook of my left arm. Jack, as always, had cleared the whole place of every sign of living, moving human beings, and women at that, no doubt as soon after they were gone as he could find time to do it. I imagined him at work, his rope-soled espadrilles hushed on the floors whose polish they scarcely clouded, his pipe-stem gripped firmly in toothless jaws behind the stretched lips that made him appear to be smiling to himself the whole time. I remembered how he had told me he had once been to sea for a year or two, in his various ways of escape from his now rather legendary wife; I supposed it was there he had learned this habit of ascetic tidiness which, in that cottage, could make the rooms beautiful without flowers. Whatever he did he did in the same way, tidily and thoroughly and without seeming to think about his actions. His fenced fields, with the furrow running dead north and south across the gentle slope of the plateau, were each complete and four-square, with the rabbit-netting in perfect condition even at the gates. The kitchen garden, sheltered from the south beyond the barn and the partitioned shed he and his cows shared, each in her season, was a model of clean economy and fruitful industry; yet I could not remember ever having seen him actually at work in it. ‘The truck-garden’ he called it almost scornfully; yet once, months after I had been talking idly to him about the use of herbs in cookery, and their reputation for being important to health in our almost Mediterranean climate, when I had forgotten the whole conversation, he took me to that small patch of enclosed ground and indicated a warm corner with the wet stem of his pipe: ‘There’s your ’erbs. Writ to Yates—all they ’ad.’

He was thorough without even a show of effort, enthusiasm or boredom. It must have been nothing to him to sweep and dust and wash and polish away all traces of a couple of women he had never seen before and would never see again. Staring at the natural grey colour of the sheepskin rug, beaten so free that it appeared never to have felt the weight of human bodies, I could imagine him doing it, and thought how good a thing it would be if one could clear and clean out the mind in the same way.

In my own room at last, I changed into working clothes before going to the kitchen to light the fire in the mercilessly-polished stove. Stoves, I thought foolishly, are polished so that they shall radiate as little heat as may be, and no doubt the same effect is achieved with what is commonly called a polished mind: the more polished it is, the less warmth it gives out. How polished was my own mind? Or perhaps it did not matter—perhaps there had never been a fire there anyhow; until now?

Before the kindling wood began to crackle as it took the flame, I heard the muffled thudding blows of an axe higher up the mountain, dulled and unechoing in the white mist. The scene that came into my mind showed me Jack in soiled sandshoes and trousers, the belt tight below the swell of his ribs under the white sports-singlet he wore when he went wood-getting. With his pipe held strongly, he would be addressing himself—there was no other word that so accurately described his attitude—to a dead tree while his grey horse and his black dog Ike waited at a proper distance, too familiar with it all even to look his way. His axemanship was characteristically clean and quick. It reminded me of yet another allusion to his past he had as it were let fall some time, between mouthfuls of food perhaps, or slow puffs at his pipe. He had done a bit of timber-getting, he said, but—using his favourite and most deceptive expression with a sharp, un-smiling glance at me across the intervening space—it was ‘too much like hard work’. He had the shoulders and hips and nimble feet of a good timber-man; and I had seen him looking with shrewd consideration at my few acres of forest above the cleared upper end of the plateau where it melted into the steeper slope of the soaring mountain. He told me it was wood for the taking, easy to get and easy to get out. In the end we decided to let it stand a few years more. Now it could wait for I knew not how long, until the war was over.

I was thinking about Jack, listening to his axe thudding, so that I should not too clearly remember Irma in this kitchen, her face in the tender lamplight rosy and golden with the colour in her cheeks and lips and the revealed lobes of her ears, and the shining candour of her slanted, sly-set eyes looking frankly at me across the yellow table as she laughed with us. How happy she had been, and I too, with Miss Werther between us at the end nearer the stove trilling away in her lilting voice, apologizing to me every now and then for a sudden spontaneous remark in German, at which Irma had frowned and shaken slightly her dark, smooth head with a glance at me inviting the other to remember: ‘He does not understand you.’

Well, I thought now, as I rinsed and filled the heavy iron kettle, it is there, but it is over, finished, and I have made my choice and shall stand by my decision. Yet when I had set the kettle on to heat, I could not resist looking again through the whole place, Donna at my heels. She followed me about with a look of patient contentment on her bright brown-eyed face, between the golden fall of her ears that gave her the appearance, in some moods, of an intelligent blonde film actress. I even looked round the small bathroom next to the larder; but everywhere was a clean impersonality, with not a trace even of myself or of Jack, not even a dark, unidentified hair, a fingerprint, the ghost of a breath on the mirror’s icy surface that mockingly showed me myself only, and in reverse at that, so that it was not even I whom I saw staring self-consciously back at me.

When the fire was firmly in, I took another axe and set off along the north headland by the bank of the little hurrying creek towards where Jack must be chopping. Before I had gone far, the thudding blows ceased to sound through the obliterating mist, and after a pause of seconds I heard it—the groaning brief crescendo of noise as the felled tree tore its dead branches free from the arms of its living company, and flung itself slowly and for the first time and finally down upon the earth that had nourished it for half a century, and upon which, standing upright and defiant and beautiful, it had lived and at last begun to die, high above the scanty scattered life sprung from its own seed.

When we came to the place, old Jack was sitting on the clean stump, smoking imperturbably and looking with mild amusement and distaste at the prostrate silver trunk and the branches that had not smashed in the fall raised now in frozen, rigid gestures of self-defence. It was a large tree. When he saw me he nodded amiably, his lips stretching wider and his sea-blue, lizard-like eyes narrowing in a real smile.

‘Thought I heard the car. Just come in time. Must of knowed sumpin,’ he said moistly round his pipe-stem. I paced the trunk and looked over the branches, trying to see the thing as two or three months’ supply of good firewood. There was all of that. Above us the mist drifted in the green tops whose canopy showed no wound; for the tree had been too long dead, and the seasons had healed over the gap it might once have left, dying.

Later, we got to work with the saw, and in this exercise, when I had remembered how to perform it with least effort, I slowly found a peace of body and mind I had not known for a long time. Perhaps this was the secret of old Jack’s imperturbability, this dissolving of the mind’s tangles of desire and foreboding in unceasing bodily labour, at no matter what, without haste and without end. The snarling hiss of the cross-cut blade, sharp and well-set, rubbed out thoughts and names, and even memory let fade the remorseless pictures that have no words. We lunged rhythmically at each other eight feet apart, down on one knee, listening to the greasy passage of the blade deeper and deeper into the solid trunk, and soon it was necessary to kneel down lower and rest on the free hand, until we could cut no nearer the ground. Even the two horses working together could pull only short-length loads of the heavy hardwood in that dense forest, and we made several more cuts before leaving the saw for the axes. I remembered with surprise the fire and the kettle; everything but the work had gone from my mind. Wiping of the chilly sweat, I went down with him to make tea. The dogs followed, after their fashion, ranging to hunt in the misty undergrowth but returning sometimes to see that all was well with us. On our left the little creek tinkled coldly unseen in the twisting depths of its rocky bed.

By the end of the day we had finished with that tree and got a lot of it down and stacked in the lean-to wood-shed on the north side of the barn, away from the weather. I felt wonderfully weary and cleansed in body and mind. Jack had not shed a drop of sweat nor shown anything but a lazy amusement as at some peculiar characteristic of his own of which no one else knew. While I ran off a bath and soaked my pleasantly-aching muscles, he put on his patched coat and fed his hens and milked his scornful-eyed cow. Donna sat on the bathroom stool with folded paws, drenched with mist and shuddering herself warm, and now and then, between brief dozes, looking down sceptically at my white skin under the colourless hot rainwater in the tub. She was no longer beautiful like a film star, and I told her so, while she wagged her feathered stub of tail frantically in acknowledgment of unexpected compliments. It was an hour of warmth, of profound and unthinking physical and mental peace; for this, and not for a woman or a ghost, I had come.

While Jack and I drank a glass of whisky by the kitchen stove, I remembered I had not brought his flask of rum. It was the first time I had forgotten it; and though I knew he did not depend on me for his modest supply of it, I was put out. He looked surprised.

‘Must have sumpin on your mind,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s this war they tell me’s officially opened.’

‘Maybe it is,’ I said; and I told him I should not be staying that night as I was on duty next morning. He may have remembered that that in itself had seldom been enough to prevent me staying, but I did not think even he, for all his shrewd and smiling silence, could have guessed that the quarter-hour following my arrival, the unused beds, the cloudy smoothness of the sheepskin hearth-rug, the lifeless and immaculate kitchen where once we had so gaily sat down to our meal in the lamp-light, and the whole clean emptiness of the cottage, without a trace of unaccustomed movement anywhere in it, had made me feel for the first time like a stranger there; and I could not stay just yet, after my coming and my animal-like searching about and about had been fruitless.

Yet he took me by surprise when he said, ‘You young fellers is all the same. Dress a bit o’ meat up with a few weird doodahs and give it a foreign name, and you’ll eat it every time, if it burns your guts out . . . Anyway, you’ll be takin’ a risk goin’ down in this,’ and he waved his glass at the window. To hide my consternation and to avoid answering the first part of his remarks at all, I went to look outside. Dusk had come invisibly. Beyond the dark reflecting panes there was only a hinted whiteness catching the light of the lamp behind me.

‘I have driven up and down in worse,’ I reminded him, and he answered after a while, somewhat obscurely, ‘Yes—but not when there’s a war on.’ In the window I could see the side of his face and his shock of flat grey hair in the lamp-light. He had not bothered to turn and look at me to see how I had taken what he first said. It was the first time I had ever heard him volunteer a comment in any way personal upon me and my affairs. No doubt he rested secure in his knowledge that with a smile and eyes and a voice as non-committal as his he could have said almost anything to almost anyone without causing more than a rapid, startled self-inspection. In any case, I liked his wry, probing wisdom, and his air of being mildly and constantly amused, even when he was alone. There could never be trouble of a personal sort between us; he was, in addition, twice my age and harder than I had ever been.

But at that moment I felt incapable of referring to Irma with anyone at all, in however indirect a way of speaking. Telling him to help himself to more whisky, I went out through the cold, moist air that was not yet darkness made tangible, as it would later be, and backed the car from its place among the farm tools and light machinery in the barn. When I returned through the dripping orchard to the kitchen, regretting its quiet warmth and light as though I had already left it behind me in the lowering night, he was still standing by the stove, his face, so ruddy and bright in contrast with the flat thatch of his grey hair, turned sideways still from the lamp as he looked at his thoughts in the corner of the room.

Unconcerned to dissuade me any further from driving alone down the difficult track in that mist and darkness, he spoke coolly of Irma.

‘What become of the little foreign lady?’

‘Nobody knows,’ I said. ‘She changed trains at Blacktown and disappeared west.’

‘I heard you go, that mornin’,’ he said. ‘You ain’t no fool.’

‘You can hear me go again now,’ I said. ‘Sorry about the rum.’

‘Think nothin’ of it,’ he said courteously. ‘I always got a drop left.’ He added, rather surprisingly, ‘Like the widder’s cruse.’

We briefly shook hands, and he said, ‘Well—take care o’ yourself. See you some time.’

It was several weeks before I did go again, however; partly because I was still disinclined to spend a night at the cottage, and partly because several changes were taking place in the office, and some of us were working overtime a good deal, covering a sudden brief staff-shortage, and unobtrusively keeping an eye on the settling-in of some newcomers. More men than might have been expected in a staff where the age-average was not low had been drawn into the slowly accelerating current of war running now through all human affairs. Individual changes near the top affected us all: when the news-editor’s assistant took on a liaison job with the navy, a complicated series of upward and sideways moves followed, for the Gazette of those days still held wholly to the policy of internal promotion from a careful if not always happy reserve of strength—a two-edged policy, some thought, which reaped both the sweet fruit of ambition and the sour fruit of discontent. The argument in its favour, a negative one, was that the discontent was not as bad as it would have been had we done as other offices did, and brought in new blood at the top rather than at the bottom, thus avoiding the disaffection so often caused by putting a newcomer in a high post and so arresting that subtle upward movement, slow though it may be, which keeps any office staff alive. Because of this policy, even today the Gazette seems to find outside replacements on the upper levels unnecessary; and only the Herald has lost good men less frequently. (The argument that both papers are resultantly dull misses the point, which is that the majority of newspaper-readers are dull too.)

Scott, in his booming voice of angry good-humour, put the administration’s attitude clearly.

‘If we can’t replace one of our own men with one of our own men, then we are short-staffed, and if we’re short-staffed we can’t go on producing a newspaper.’ And he added once to me: ‘If a man’s left hand doesn’t know what his right hand’s doing in this office, he’d better start teaching it at once.’ On another occasion, apparently concerned with this same matter of domestic policy, he shouted back into his room from the open doorway, to someone evidently still there within, ‘Any man here who thinks he’s indispensable had better seek other employment, by god!’ in a voice to be heard all over the building.

But with the development of world-scale war, for the second and perhaps not the last time in the lives of so many of us, things became different, even in the most conservative establishments. Promotions were sudden, and replacements at the ladder’s foot more frequent. As the war, with its calamitous false start that ended with Dunkirk, gathered more directed energy as opposed plans were made and put in motion, and the battles were joined, men were lost who had to be replaced abroad from the Sydney head-office staff, however indirectly. The newcomers at our end, many of them very young, many of them, as time went on, having been formerly in one or other of the services, needed careful handling and unobtrusive supervision as they adjusted themselves to the strange and exacting life.

The sudden Japanese threat in nineteen forty-two caused a long period of panic recruitment complemented by a panic wave of enlistment which together swept civilians of all ages and occupations, men and women both, into the ranks of the fighting services and the administrations behind them. During all those six years of war I and my colleagues were hard-worked and more highly-paid. Private relaxation became almost a public affair. We gathered together among ourselves more closely; pleasures were less decorous among the decorous, more uncontrolled among the carefree and the distressed; and as goods and necessities lapsed from plenty to scarcity—particularly those goods that helped to heighten the relief of worldly pleasures and for which there was thus an ever more urgent demand—what began to be called the black market came openly into being, and insidiously took its place in our lives and thoughts, prompting few protests because it was based—as it still is—on fear: the fear of being thought mean, or poorer than the next fellow, and the fear of not having what the next fellow had for his greater worldly comfort. Its persistence to this day makes it clear that it was never a wartime vice, to pass inevitably away after the ending of warfare, so much as it was from the beginning a characteristic if not of the whole nation then at least of the three eastern major states facing America across the troubled Pacific. Fear, the driving force behind most human endeavour in the democratic society of today, was keenly heightened, intensified, in those bloody and uncertain, shameful and despairing years; and mankind has so progressed, and improved its state so far, that the only soporific to comfort fear is money—more and more money, acquired no matter how.

I was fortunate in having a very modest private income assured to me by my father (‘to himself at least, my boy, a man must cut some sort of a decent figure’) whose active value varied with the times while its face-value remained unchanged; and I lived in such a way that even with the increased costs of Alan’s schooling I was able to save money and invest it for him in my turn. The knowledge that money is available, rather than the possession of it, is of considerable importance to a growing boy, and I was glad to think he would not have to suffer the small, distorting heartbreaks of any degree of poverty.

In my own mind, as in the minds of most thinking people in those days, the subsequently much-publicized and even more neglected ‘four freedoms’ had already been clearly defined as a proper objective for the whole activity of living. Secretly almost from myself, I had added one more—a freedom from love, as human beings mostly know and show it: as a misty shape of overpowering emotional claims, amorphous and terrible, upon the consciousness of the loved one, from the simple beginning—‘You must love me, for I love you’—to the last dreadful expedient, when the beloved seems about to escape finally from the talons of love, of spectacularly-acknowledged renunciation, in itself the boldest, most desperate and selfish claim of all.

I did not want to be loved, I thought, even by my son. By making provision for his freedom from at least the sharper material wants, and so perhaps from many worldly fears, I hoped to have enabled him, as he grew older towards manhood, to meet me when he chose and on his own terms, as two friends with disparate worldly interests may meet upon the common ground of humanity and warm mutual examination in speech and silence. I myself had always felt the lack of someone to whom I could talk and stammer out the record of my growth without making of confession a hostage to my freedom (it was what I meant when I spoke to Barbara of my own dear father as so often being ‘not there’), and it seemed possible that if I were supremely careful of my mind and heart, that they should not too much show in me, Alan might not suffer that lack, which is a fruitless, wry suffering not good for the soul.

This intention was always alive in me, even when I was with him. It survived many dark disturbances of mind when I was alone, and made tolerable even the black depths into which a man may find himself being drawn, now and then, when nervous exhaustion for a time spurs on self-criticism towards the shades of nightmare insanity, and the whole past of his life seems to stand in question, and to be damned as worthless. Even at such times, hearing the plash and suck of the blacked-out, starlit water of the harbour against the stone wall of the swimming-pool below my bedroom window, thinking that there, if anywhere, lay the gentle peace of oblivion and the merciful end of thought, I could think of Alan and not, in imagination, drown; I could sometimes recall Scott’s seemingly contemptuous epigrammatical obituary on a newspaper colleague who had committed suicide by drowning: ‘Water is no solution,’ and see the truth of it beneath the surface twist of wit, and know that death in that way would be for me not only the unholy thing my Mother Church so rightly held it to be, and not only a cowardly act of courage, but also comparable to that gesture of love’s ostentatious renunciation which I detested, and which would have placed upon the boy’s eager young shoulders a burden that must, like time itself, grow heavier as he grew older and more nearly understood what I had done, and why.

Looking back, I see and know that my sorriest lack in those years was of a wife. It is not that I wanted consciously a wife who loved me; my own private fifth freedom would make that plain. I had once been loved, with a young and joyous devotion as profoundly moving and impelling towards god as the music of Bach, or the smell of spring roses in the cold air of a starlit dusk, or a child’s face in the absolute innocence of sleep.

I had been given that love, and in moments of gloom I would fearfully imagine that the gift had exhausted the giver to death like sleep after a splendid toil. It was not this that I wanted ever again. I could not have borne it. What did I want, without knowing it, was a companion in the sleepless nights, a voice to answer mine if I cried aloud the many hidden cries of ordinary daily speech, and the untroubling presence always of a being not my own, a body and mind and soul all feminine to complete my masculine identity; in my care yet not of me; not for me, yet not withheld in ignorance that I too was a complementary being.

Twice in the weeks following my useless visit to Hill Farm, where Jack lived on in amused solitude far from the talk and stresses of war, I had to speak to other people of Irma.

I do not include there McMahon’s occasional monologues, for since the declaration of hostilities he had seemed to lose his former prying interest, and besides, he had much to do in keeping track of his excited State politicians, and in finding, in unpublishable detail, who was feathering his nest most warmly. Some of his stories were scarcely credible, shocking even to me in their revelations of small pettiness and insatiable self-interest; and I let him see this deliberately, for the more astounded and disgusted I became the more satisfaction he found in retailing his useless information; and the less likely he was to remember Irma.

Her name was first mentioned, after weeks in which it had sounded only in my own mind, by Miss Werther. That kindly and amiable person rang me at my home, where I could talk and listen without interruption. Even in the brief exchange of our greetings the lilt of her voice suggested that she had interesting news. As I sat back at my table in the firelit lounge room which was also my home office I could imagine vividly her black, polished eyes shining brighter with pleasure.

‘It is about Irma I am ringing,’ she said, ‘of course. Why else should I trouble you in these terrible times? Mr. Fitzherbert, I have had a letter. She is in Perth—very far away, is it not? Yes, but there she is, teaching French and German in a school for girls. And she lives at the school. I am so happy, Mr. Fitzherbert, you can imagine how happy this makes me. Are you pleased?’

‘Yes.’

‘Her name is different. She is now Miss Irma Francis, a French orphan. How clever she always is, you know. I myself could never have gone on so long. It is the gift of youth. She sends you her warmest greetings.’

‘Thank you—if you write please give her mine—my warmest greetings.’

‘She hoped you might write to her. I will give you her address. Have you a pencil and some paper there?’

My hand was trembling as I changed the receiver to my left ear; and it surprised me. I had not heard her name for so long.

The address, I found with a tremor of excitement, was that of a ‘select’ private academy for young ladies—a girls’ school—not far from Fremantle and overlooking Melville Water, one of the spacious salty lakes made by the Swan on its approach to the sea. I knew it at once, for the house, large and gracious and old in wide grounds, had belonged to an uncle of my mother’s. I had even lived there for a time as a child, during the other war, when wartime duties parted my father from us for long periods, and that kindly old man had asked my mother to cross the continent and run his diminished household for him; for he was a widower. Of all this I knew little at the time, for I remember only a childhood sense of ceaseless pleasure and well-being while the old world fell finally to pieces over our heads. My most welcome memory is of the sweet smell of pine needles in hot sunshine, and the smell brings back childhood now more vividly than any other reminder. In the gardens there were always flowers in bloom, always birds singing in the pines and the giant fig trees, doves by day and magpies day and night when the moon was near and past its fullness. On the smooth croquet lawn the painted hoops were as white as the white click of yellow mallets against coloured wooden balls, and in the near distance, beyond the privacy of the bookleaf cypress hedge, so lemon-scented in the sun after rain, Melville Water stretched blue and glittering between and above the peppermint trees’ dull green to the thicker blue of an horizon of low hills . . .

It all came in a thrilling flash as Miss Werther gave me the address. I had not thought of it for years, and now it was the more intimately pleasing, in a way I could not describe, because I had been there before Irma was born, and because she was there now where, in the midst of hellish war, I had been so innocent and so happy.

In a country always poor in school-teachers, it was little wonder that she had had no difficulty in finding that employment, with her easy command of languages and her modest demeanour; and later I realized that because of the discipline she herself had had to learn, and because she also had that small, complete air of authority on occasion—an authority rather of intellect than of will—she must have made a very good teacher indeed.

All I did at the moment was to throw the amiable Miss Werther into a passion of delight by telling her of my knowledge of the school when it was my home. This gave her immense satisfaction, and I felt grateful to believe how much and how unselfishly she cared for the fortunes of that young woman who had come to my country for no material gain but as to a refuge for the harassed spirit.

We ended our conversation with an agreement to meet for coffee soon so that she could show me the actual letter. I had not said I would write, and though I was often impelled to do so I never did, for what could I have said that would have made sober sense in a sedate girls’ school thousands of miles away on the other side of the continent? Nevertheless, at last and for the first time since I had known her I was able to imagine her moving in her smooth, youthful way against a real and (however altered) familiar background of walls and trees and dark-panelled halls, with the blue of Melville Water shining beyond the bookleaf cypress.

The second mention of her name was made by a man who was a stranger. We never found out who he was, though his ill-intentioned purpose in approaching me was fairly evident.

I had never seen him before, and I never did see him again. It is possible that McMahon knew who he was, but that too I let remain uncertain.

He was announced by a boy as ‘Mr. Martin’. The name itself was so often in my mind at that time that for a moment it meant nothing, spoken aloud, and I must have shown instinctive suspicion, for the boy repeated it, adding doubtfully, ‘That’s what he said, Mr. Fitz.’ It was, in fact, the boy’s tone of doubt, of allowing that it might not really be ‘Martin’, which brought me to my senses and the immediate present. The name is common enough among the groups of less usual christian-surnames, but I knew only one Martin, and that was not a man.

‘All right—show him in, please.’

When the boy brought him, I was already and by instinct on guard. The visitor’s hint of a stiff bow, from the waist, as his name was pronounced, made me more suspicious still. I seemed to have no doubt at all that the visit was to do with Irma; and in the same instant, in a flash of exact memory, I could hear Barbara’s voice telling me of McMahon’s private connection with the Communist Party.

‘Sit down, Mr. Martin,’ I said without rising.

‘Can we go some place where it is private?’ he said, rolling his dark eyes slightly at the crowded room.

‘You can speak here as privately as you can in Pitt Street.’

It was so exactly a repetition of the opening words between Irma and me on her visit to the office, all those months ago, that I could have laughed. This time I had no intention of using the wireless room, for something about him had already turned suspicion into dislike in me. It was always so—anyone in any way connected with Irma I accepted or rejected in a matter of moments, at the first meeting. While I tried to rationalize my feeling of dislike, I looked with care at the cause of it.

He was, quite evidently, a foreigner, very dark of eyes and hair, very pale of skin, the hair worn long and sleekly combed from a straight forehead horizontally lined and somehow too small for the rest of his face. His lips were red and wide, but petulant, not humorous, as he waited in vain for me to get up and go somewhere ‘where it was private’. His large eyes were the eyes of a liar or of a professional stage dancer; someone to whom words themselves meant nothing; and I observed already that he had difficulty in keeping his white, black-haired hands from gestures as he said softly, with a look meant to be full of mystery and promise, ‘It is a very personal matter.’

I nodded to the chair by which he stood.

‘Don’t be afraid, Mr. Martin. If you know anything about newspaper offices, you must know that in the general room it’s impossible to listen to other people’s private conversations.’

He seated himself, drawing down the corners of his mouth and raising his shoulders in a shrug of exaggerated resignation, as if he regretted, after all, having come. On his knee he rested a satchel of imitation crocodile skin which would have placed him fairly accurately even if he had not said a word in his rather thick foreign voice. As usual, I waited for him to speak, while I made a note in my mind of his clothes, from the wide shoes of foreign make over dark purple socks to the padded shoulders (‘self-raising shoulders’, my father would have called them) of his costly brown suit. He was one of those Europeans who seem to have been born to shrug, roll their guilelessly watchful eyes, and to do things with their mouths and hands in a fashion so hypnotic that, without remembering a word they ever say, one has a lasting recollection of them always doing those things, like images on a motion-picture screen not wired for sound. He might have been French, Hungarian, German Jew, or—except for his accent—a native of southern Italy, Cyprus or Malta; I never found out whence he came, but that was his sort of manners and dress and colouring.

‘I hope you may be able to help me,’ he said with a meaning flash of his eyes that meant nothing to me. ‘I am in search of someone very dear to me. A lady.’

He popped the word out impressively, with a following upward jerk of his mobile eyebrows; then, getting into the swing of it, held towards me one manicured hand, palm-upwards, in graceful supplication. ‘No, no—please, please do not laugh.’

I was not laughing, and I told him so; I had suddenly seen what was coming, and was waiting for it.

‘The lady is my sister. Irma. Irma Martin . . . little Irma.’

There were genuine wet tears in his eyes, and he was watching me so closely for a moment that he could not bear it himself, and had to rest those lustrous dark eyes by looking away from mine for a full second before resuming his intense stare, which I returned so irresistibly that I was able to see, as though magnified several times, the burning brown of the irides, minutely ridged and grooved like creased velvet under water, surrounding the mysterious receptive holes of the pupils, sooty black with a pin-point of light at the bottom of them. They made me think, irrelevantly, of some novel display in the window of a chemist’s shop, made of cloth and coloured glass in a setting of enamelled cardboard.

He must have leaned forward in order not to miss any slightest reaction of mine to that name; for I saw him slowly sit back on the wooden chair and avert his bold, hooded gaze to the satchel, which he began to open fussily on his knees. I still said nothing, for I now disliked him so heartily that I knew my face must have remained perfectly blank under his brutal inspection. I also knew without doubt that for all his soft and emotional manner he was probably dangerous.

‘You do not know her? Come—I think you do,’ he said coaxingly yet threateningly—as I thought—while he looked up from the satchel with a coming-and-going smile that had little to do with his eyes or his hushed voice. Then, with a positively melodramatic glance round the room behind him and on either side, he slowly withdrew from the metal lips of the leather bag a silver photograph-frame containing a portrait which he hid with his spread hand; but in doing this he accidentally allowed the satchel to slip to the floor, and, in leaning to snatch it up, afforded me a brief glimpse of the face of the sitter. It was, as I had known it would be, Irma’s face, grave as a ghost’s. Moreover, I knew enough about police photography to recognize even in that brief glance that it was a photostatic copy of an original photograph—not quite the sort of thing a loving brother would carry, frame or no frame, as a momento of his missing sister.

He had in one awkward movement recovered his satchel and turned the portrait face-down, not realizing he was too late. A more skilled scoundrel—for I was now convinced of his scoundrelism—would have withdrawn it face-downwards in the first place, if he had wished to conceal it from me.

‘Look,’ he said, unruffled by his little scramble, ‘I will show you her picture and you will remember her. No one could forget. Not even you, my friend, who must see so many faces . . . See.’

He held the thing out suddenly at me, as though, like his announcement of her name, the revelation must confound me into showing all I knew in my face. I had time to observe that a rubber stamp in the top right-hand corner of the original had been imperfectly erased.

‘Yes,’ I said slowly, very slowly and as it were thoughtfully, a man making an obvious effort to remember. ‘Yes . . . I seem to know that face. Irma Martin, you say?’ I shook my head with a smile. It is horribly easy, it is a pleasure, to lie to a man about whom one feels as I now felt about this creature before me, with his hypnotic gestures and his evil watchfulness.

‘I do not know that name, Mr. Martin.’

‘Never mind.’ He permitted himself to seem very excited. ‘You know her! My sister I begin to think is maybe dead, how do I know? She is here, my Irma! Tell me, please tell me where is she?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Ah.’ He sank back, snapping the smile from his lips. ‘But you have seen her.’

‘Perhaps—a long time ago,’ I said. ‘She arrived in some ship with hundreds of other refugees.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘the Empire Queen . . .’

‘How do you know that?’ I said abruptly. A man who is himself perfectly clear about the facts of the case can seldom help giving himself away if you omit one you believe he thinks important. ‘You thought she might be dead. You say she vanished. Yet you know what boat she travelled in. What else do you know?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ he said, pleading with his face and hands. ‘That is why I come to you, to beg you . . .’

‘Why not the police?’ I said. ‘It is their job, not mine, to trace missing people. You should go to the Missing Persons Bureau.’

‘Not the police,’ he said warningly. ‘Irma would be frightened—very frightened. Always in Holland she is frightened—the dam’ Gestapo, you know.’

‘The dam’ Gestapo’ must have sounded singularly weak even to him, for he made haste to cover it with an explanation he doubtless thought would convince my Australian simplicity: ‘We are—you know—Jewish, Irma and me.’ He rolled his eyes a little, and sighed.

Just for one moment I felt a bloody impluse to clench my fist and smash it into his insolently grimacing face. The words ‘Irma and me’ brought home to me as nothing less than witnessed violence could have brought home the fact that her former danger had never been imagined at all. I looked at the person calling himself Martin, and saw him clearly for what he was—a pimp, a back-alley killer who would use a knife or poison—women’s weapons—not for gain but because he was a coward and a hireling without hope of escape from his employers; a dangerously humble creature who would indulge to the full such appetites as were permitted to him; perverted in body, mind and soul ever since some fateful mistake of over-confidence had put him in the power of those who could find a use for him on such occasions as this . . . A feeling of sickness came into my throat.

‘If the police frighten her, she must have something to hide,’ I said coldly. ‘In that case, is it not unwise to come to me, on the faint chance that I might know where she is? The police are friends of mine.’

For all his prompt grimacing, he could not conceal the momentary look of hatred and contempt in his dark, full eyes; but again he had his answer ready.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘there is nothing. It is just she is frightened of even the name: police. For so long we have been . . . on the run, as you say in English.’

I perceived that he did know enough about Irma, or at least about people of her kind in similar circumstances, to give me cause to be careful.

‘What makes you think she should still be on the run in Australia?’

It stopped him only for a few seconds.

‘If the police are your friends, you must know, Mr. Fitzherbert, there have been Nazi agents even in your own wonderful country.’

‘That may be so, but they have not drawn attention to themselves by Jew-baiting. Is your sister a Communist?’

‘No, no,’ he said again hastily. ‘Not now. Once, you understand, we were all—sympathizers—but we have been betrayed.’ Once more the eyes upturned towards the ceiling, the little resigned sigh. He was in a quandary, for he could not be at all sure how much, if anything, I knew of Irma’s past. The photostat copy of her portrait, which he had put away with many cautious glances about him, was probably an N.K.V.D. one if what she had told me were the truth; and I had no further reason to doubt her on the facts. The camera had not missed those faint traces of a circular rubber stamp’s imprint in the corner, suggesting that the original was a file copy.

‘I do not quite understand all this,’ I said, purposely to provoke him. ‘You say your sister is not a Communist, which means she has nothing to fear from anti-Communist elements which may be in this country from abroad. You say first you had lost all trace of her and were beginning to think she was dead, yet you later tell me the name of the ship she arrived on. If you knew what ship brought her, you had only to go to the police and tell them. Sooner or later they would have found her. She need not even have known they were trying to trace her, if you had asked them to keep it dark. Our police may have different methods from those of the police you have had to do with in other countries’—I watched him blink at that—‘but they are not fools, nor are they gangsters. In spite of all this—and I assume you had the wits to think it out for yourself long ago—in spite of all this, you come to me, to tell me in a rather peculiar tone that you think I know your sister, even when I say I do not. Why?’

He was discountenanced, and showed it. Even the talk of Irma as his sister had been unreal from the start, a crude attempt to cover the fact that he had come—no doubt by direction—straight to me, which he would only have been told to do if there had been strong evidence somewhere that I knew more about her than I admitted to knowing, or at least that I had seen her more recently than on the distant August morning of her arrival. As far as I knew, only McMahon had seen us within speaking distance of each other, apart from Barbara, whom I trusted, and the wireless monitor . . . and of course the copy-boy—and Miss Werther—and Jack . . .

It was absurd. The only person in a position and at the same time with conceivable reason to betray to these unknown hunters the possible fact of any association between us since her arrival was McMahon, whom Barbara had described as an under-cover man. I would only need to mention him, with his notorious habit of drunkenness, to hear all knowledge of his very existence denied. Such a denial would make any explanation even more impossible to this sly, lying, dangerous sneak who was now obviously trying to think of a credible answer to my question.

‘Why come to me?’ I said again. He had lost his manner of caution and appeal, and began to look sullen, though not in the least frightened as I had hoped.

‘You were seen with her . . . recently,’ he said at last, bringing out the words unwillingly and with difficulty, like a man suddenly uncertain of the idiom of the language he is using.

‘Impossible,’ I said more coldly than ever; and then, to my own surprise, I began to laugh silently. The whole situation was absurd. He had mishandled his part from the beginning, and thanks to his careless lies I had him, as they say, on toast; and I was glad, I enjoyed watching his sullen discomfort, which was for himself alone, for his collapsing vanity, more than for the futility of his mission. He dared not tell me who had seen Irma with me, even if he himself knew. Mention of the always-intoxicated McMahon would not only have made him look ridiculous, but would have threatened or actually destroyed the future usefulness of that friendly under-cover gentleman.

‘Look here, Mr.—Martin or whatever your real name may be,’ I said at length, ‘you have come to the wrong man. In fact, I suggest you have come to the wrong country. Wherever your sort go, they expect to inspire fear, or to arouse a fear already dormant. In Australia we have never had to live in that sort of individual fear as yet. I doubt if we ever shall. You come to me with the obvious purpose of finding out the present whereabouts of someone you say is your sister. That alone shows how little you know of things here. No reputable newspaper man—no one but a drunken sneak,’ I said, for I was becoming angry again at the thought of McMahon, ‘would give your sort of person the information you seek, even if he had it to give, which I have not. On the contrary, he would, if he could, get into touch with the young woman at once and warn her of your presence and your inquiries. It seems to me you do not mean this young woman any good. Do you know what I shall do next? I shall telephone to the police—they are, as you know, my friends—and I shall give them a very careful description of you, and advise them to look into your papers and your history. Make no mistake, Mr. Martin—they will find you and find out all about you, and decide whether or not you, as an alien, are a desirable person to have at large in this country which you seem to think is populated only by fools, knaves and traitors like yourself.’

I was so angry, for the first time in years, that I was enjoying it without shame. The pompous words, however quietly spoken in that busy room, sped from my lips as glibly as any rehearsed speech, and with furious conviction. As for him, he actually shrank against the hard back of the visitors’ chair, his face paling to a faintly greenish tinge and the rubbery smile coming and going on his face with the effect of a nervous tic. He even held out one hand as though begging me to desist.

‘Recall,’ I said, ‘that we are at war with Nazi Germany, and so, technically, with her allies. If by any chance you come from either the one or the other party, beware. A nation at war, Mr. Martin, does not waste time arguing with spies and foreign pimps in its midst, not even a nation as easy-going, as slow to suspect strangers, as this one. As you give me the impression of being a liar employed by other liars who do not care to reveal themselves in person, you are probably everything else that is bad and contemptible. I suggest you go—not only out of this office, but out of the country . . . if you can get out of it fast enough with a whole skin. If I could find it in myself to do so, I should take every possible step to make you suspected by the people who hire you, and you know what that would mean. Read the papers, Mr. Martin. See how often one after another of you foreigners is beaten up or found mysteriously dead in some back room somewhere, or drowned in the harbour or fatally injured by an unidentified vehicle that failed to stop after the—accident. Read the papers, Mr. Martin. They do not tell one half of what happens in the shadows of this city or the other big cities of this continent. Think carefully of what I say, and take my advice and go—if you can—or join the Australian army where you have a chance of being lost even to your fellow-thugs, if the Army authorities do not decide to hand you over to the police at once. And now I must ring the police Aliens Squad.’

It was of course a shameless performance, but I have never been sorry for it. He was a sort of man one would actually regret having treated decently. While I spoke, rapidly and in a low voice with my released anger roaring in my ears like a far surf, he seemed to become smaller and more puppet-like, and by the time I had finished and was reaching for the house telephone, he was on his feet looking thoroughly frightened. I am quite unused to causing people to show fear or even to feel it; for all my deliberate reasoning to the contrary, I was still sore and sick at the thought, prompted by the innocent Miss Werther, that it was fear of me that had made Irma resume her blind flight which had brought her into my life in the first place. I realized with disgust that perhaps in her distracted mind there was little to choose between this wretched incompetent creature and myself now, even though she had said she loved me. It is not hard to love that which will destroy the lover, and earthly love and fear are in essence equally strong, equally self-destructive.

I lifted the receiver and said clearly, ‘Get me police headquarters please, Inspector Grimes of the Aliens branch,’ without letting him see I was holding down the trestle-bar. When I turned from the instrument I was rewarded with my last sight of him, walking with his padded shoulders slightly hunched, like a man who fairly expects a knife-blade in the back, through the doorway of the general room, and so out of my life.

I was glad to realize that my anger had vanished with him. I am not given to violence. From childhood I had been trained to believe, and later to understand, that violence achieves nothing against its object, while at the same time it inflicts a self-defeat upon him who gives way to the urge to do it. I had come to have a contempt for warmongers and a horror of war-making as a deplorable but ineradicable human characteristic, as inalienable in the human race as the compulsion to love. All the time now I was confronted with the evidence of this characteristic, day by day for six years, eight years, ten years—it seems for ever. My son grew up to know little of any world but a world at war, wholly or locally, from the time when he first understood what the word meant. Our glorious Russian ally—as one or two men like Winston Churchill always anticipated—grew to become a nursery terror of nightmare proportions in the United States of America, and in time the acknowledged potential enemy of the whole western world. Even in my own country the echoes of a frenzied violence sounded, as they sounded more loudly in other dwindling places of true freedom on the earth’s surface.

Without foreseeing all these things at the time, I sat there at my table and told myself I should be ashamed of the recent impulse to which I had nearly given way; and yet I was not ashamed.

It may have been that I felt a blow had been struck for Irma against fate in the person of a dapper and venomous representative of her persecutors. I may even have felt convinced that her safety was now more secured than it had been, flee though she might to the outer limits of oblivion. Whatever it was, I was pleased with myself as the anger left my blood, and happier in thinking of her than I had been for a long time.

Just before she lost consciousness for the last time, not very long after she had been confessed and received the benefit of extreme unction which is one of the kindliest ministrations of my Church, my mother’s fingers stirred in my hand and I saw she was looking at my face. It was a strange, traumatic look such as one might turn upon something as recognizable, evocative and lifeless as a mask of clay. Her eyes were aware of the surface of my face and nothing more; they moved from my hair to my lips, rested on my own eyes without entering them, strayed from side to side measuring the width of brow and cheekbones, and in fact went over my face several times as though not her eyes but her hands were searching it in the dark, as she sometimes used to do when she sat on the edge of my childhood bed, before saying goodnight, after she had put out the nursery light. In those days I would laugh softly at the moth-like touch in the warm secure darkness. Now, when she was about to die, I found it infinitely moving and pitiful, and to hide from her indifferent eyes my sudden grief at this foreseen yet unimaginable parting I raised the hand I held and passed it over my face in the way she had been wont to do.

‘So like Alan . . .’

That was the last thing she said, and I hardly heard the words; for she spoke with the dragging voice of a dreamer or a drunken person, and I remembered she had been given an opiate to make death’s coming less of a surprise to her fading consciousness.

This happened early in nineteen forty-five, and to this day I could not swear to whether she meant I was like my father or like my son, named Alan after him. The years of war had played havoc with her mind and body, for though she tried to conceal it I knew she had never recovered from the incredulous sorrow of my father’s death, and had little energy left from this concealment with which to resist the succession of days and years of peculiarly personal horror the war flung at her. More than once in moments of thoughtful privacy with me she had seemed to confuse me with my father, and had said things, incomprehensible to me, in an idiom he evidently would have understood.

There was little I could do for her, beyond ensuring that her failing bodily resources were properly cared for by a trained nurse poorly disguised as a genteel companion and housekeeper—for nothing would persuade her to separate Miss Molesley from Alan or Alan from me; and in any case she needed the skill and impersonal handling of a qualified nurse. All her life she had been regular in her observance of Church ritual, confessing herself modestly once a week and attending two Masses, as well as occasional special services on certain saints’ days, and vespers irregularly but often during the summer evenings, Like many intelligent women, she found a profound pleasure and self-fulfilment in the temporal and spiritual aspects of the Mass, and I took to attending her when I could, though our only regular engagement to worship publicly together was still the habit, which was rather an impulse than a habit, of joining in the lovely midnight ceremony of Christmas Eve.

She never mentioned my increased assiduity in going with her to church, and I wondered whether her occasional moments of confusing me with my father might not have been encouraged by having me with her far more often when she went to her devotions; for at such times during their marriage he had been with her always. Never during their long life together did he allow her to see the growth in himself of the scepticism which, he told me, was beginning to embitter his last years, and for which, as for my mother’s slow bodily weakening, I could do nothing.

He felt himself to be spiritually sick, yet he was not sure . . . His moments of doubt, which he attributed once in my hearing to having been over-zealous in his youth, became more frequent though never quite intolerable as he grew old (he was forty when I was born); and, while they made him impatient, of himself and of the value he came to set upon reason at the expense of faith, they never spoiled his enviable sense of humour. ‘I believe, my boy, I shall be glad to die and clear up this matter once and for all,’ he said to me. It was the sort of thing which, in his tender consideration for her, he never said to my mother; and so, though she never knew it, in the end he had begun to grow apart from her.

‘Women have the divine gift of faith in a degree which we shall never understand. If we perceive it in them, we should recognize and honour it, and attempt no more, lest we find that like earthly beauty it is the outcome of perfect bodily functioning.’

I found that in one of the Unselected Letters, a series of unfinished notes and fragments of thought which he began half-heartedly to put into publishable shape just before he died. Indeed, this scepticism of his had seeped more deeply than I realized into his whole life; that is to say, I never realized how obscurely distressed he himself was while he lived through those last few years of enforced retirement from the Bench and the judicial work which he had loved with a love he described as ‘both unseemly, my boy, and infinitely chaste’. All the important developments of his life happened belatedly. He had taken silk late, and married late, as marriages are made in Australia; my mother was thirty-five when she bore me, and he himself had only recently been appointed to the magistracy. When he was fifty-five he was appointed to the Supreme Court, from which he retired nine years later. Only his death, at seventy-two, was perhaps a little premature for the rest of us.

Unlike some of his colleagues and contemporaries, he held that the courts of law were no places for the parade of judicial wit, however sedate and austere; he maintained that a judge who was deliberately witty might be thought to betray boredom rather than an alertly following mind, and as a result he sometimes entertained us at dinner with remarks which, he said, he could have made while the court was sitting—if he had thought of them. These he noted down tidily in scattered notebooks under a proposed title, Best Left Unsaid. He never had a book published in his lifetime; and when, some months after his death, I carefully went through all these random writings of his I found that the only connecting thread was that widening lode of scepticism, which never became cynical because in him thought was balanced and profound as well as sharp and sensitively probing, but which nevertheless reflected the secret distress of his spirit. For this reason I made no attempt to carry out his part-serious, part-ironic plans for publication, and put the papers away until after my mother’s death, when, having culled them again, I stored the gleanings at Hill Farm, and with a little harmless grieving (for he was a good and gentle man) burned what remained.

It seemed to me that my mother, at the end, must have meant that I was ‘so like Alan’ the husband. The Fitzherberts, judging by old likenesses and copies of earlier portraits, had been pre-potent for generations. Not only the white skin and dark hair persist: the cranial and facial structure has changed little and imperceptibly if at all. Apart from this, I could not have been said to be very like my father. I never had his sense of humour, certainly never his easy wit with which he was always so careful never to hurt any human being except, in fun, himself. I was an only child, but he was not. As a younger son in a family of somewhat eccentric intellectuals, with a father and an elder brother and a sister who were for the most part talking over his head or making sly game of his serious church-going, he nursed his wit in the first place as a sort of defence of both himself and his mother, whose unfeigned piety he had inherited too young, and whom her brilliant barrister husband treated, I believe, to a good deal of verbal bullying mixed with sardonic courtesy in place of affection; and it was only later that his native good temper took conscious pleasure in being witty for what to most people was wit’s sake. In fact, he considered good wit a gracious aspect of good living, and symptomatic of a proper sense of leisure.

I inherited the aspirations but not the quality of his mind, which belonged to a more leisurely age than mine, and the inevitable, unconscious loneliness of a solitary childhood made me, too early, prone to a gravity that by no means became my years. He was the only one of the three children who had married; nor had I cousins of my own generation on my mother’s side, for she too was an only child. This small, restricted trio of relationships in my childhood made me quite incapable of forming easy attachments for the rest of my life. Human associations, as I knew them, were so tender and precious that it was impossible to believe they were not also very rare; until I married, most of the few friendships I did form for young men and women of my own age I myself overbalanced and let fall, by weighting them too readily, too soon, with too much value, too openly. I was that most embarrassing of creatures, a serious-minded young man.

In Alan, as he grew older and bloomed in the glowing warmth of adolescence, I saw more of my father than of myself. Of this I was continually glad; by it I was on occasions elated, for he promised to have his grandfather’s wit and temperament, without the underlying bitterness that blossomed, pathetic and barren, in the old man as we last knew him. In the year of my mother’s death and the war’s official ending in most parts of the world, he was fifteen, white-skinned where the sun had not lightly browned him, dark-haired and with the wide-set eyes which have been the Fitzherbert’s most persistent characteristic in a skull that seems never to have changed from its earliest depicted shape: so wide from temple to temple that the top of the head looks flattened, above a face that narrows from high cheek-bones to a long chin which deceptively makes the base of the lower jaw look narrow too. ‘The family jaws’ and ‘the family forehead’ must have been mentioned as often and as matter-of-factly in the hearing of my forefathers as they were in mine. It was almost certainly the reason why, for generation after generation, except for a time in the foppish days of the eighteenth century, the males of the line wore beards. A beard saves such a face from appearing to be a sly caricature of good looks, with every feature exaggerated. It gives a mildly piratical air that does not lack dignity and is not unduly noticeable.

Alan had the family forehead and eyes, but a better line of jaw and mouth more full and mobile, less repressed-looking, than his forebears’. His eyes in their wide-apart deep sockets under perfectly-marked eyebrows had an increasing penetration as he began to find and keep the inexpressible secrets proper to his age, the secrets no man has ever learned before; but above all, the arched brows gave them a delightful look of merry humour never overshadowed by the broad thoughtful pallor of the forehead above them, from which his dark hair was brushed aside in a thick curve. To me he looked what he was—a scholar and an athlete in the making, one who thought his own incommunicable thoughts and dreamed his own dreams untroubled by early introspection or any sort of doubt or fear. He was never lonely. He filled me with delight, the mere thought of him filled me with a delight that paid in advance for anything I might do for his sake.

At the same time, he made me wary of love. As he came nearer to me once again, and, paradoxically, became also more individual and apart from me and all others, the practice of that warm indifference at which I had always aimed stood me in good stead. By the end of the summer holiday which he turned fifteen, he showed signs of being willing to treat me as a friend, with a sort of respectful familiarity which I tried—and tried in vain—not to find flattering. A negative, tacit insistence on his association with friends of his own age and interests, which my continual absences at all hours of the summer days and nights made easy and unemphatic, merely added to this quite filial familiarity an unexpected but charming, amused yet tender show of sympathy for ‘the breadwinner’. He did not chatter, but he had sudden impulses to talk without ceasing for half an hour on end, about anything that had apparently been occupying his thoughts; and sometimes before, sometimes after these bursts of gay, irrelevant speech he would sit looking at me thoughtfully in silence, as though asking himself ‘Should I tell?’ or ‘Should I have told?’, or follow me about the flat idly without a word, uncertain in his own mind of something said or unsaid.

When he awoke, in those early mornings, he awoke wholly, apparently with forward-looking not retrospective thoughts, into a vitality of mind and body he must have found hard to check in that comparatively restricted space—what he wanted was a place of rivers and fields and mountains, as I knew from observing him during the occasional weeks and week-ends we spent at Hill Farm in the winter and spring months. In the flat that first summer of official peace I would hear him, through the lifting veils of my own sleep, busy in the kitchen at the coming of first light soon after four o’clock those December mornings. Later he brought cups of tea to my bedside where I slept in the corner of shadow between the eastward and the northward windows—a pleasure I had seldom known, outside country hotels on rare occasions of duty, for fifteen years. With his cup in his hands he surveyed through half-closed eyes the blinding brilliance of sunrise upon the harbour beyond the wide-open French windows and the stone balustrade outside, while doves bargained monotonously with each other in the garden of the building next door, and the gulls screamed their arrogant slate-pencil exasperation near and far above the sparkling water that reflected a blind stipple of flights up on the white ceiling.

It was a waking pleasure to watch him, angular and smooth in his swimming trunks there in the blaze of hot eastern light. Morning after morning, in the changeable summer days of that December and January, I found myself coming by varied ways of thought to the same point of unanswerable query: what would women see in him, a few—a very few—years from now? I saw him leaning in the frame of the open windows, his thick dark hair wet and brushed neatly aside, his deep, candid young eyes moving their regard, which changed so subtly as it moved, from me to the spectacle of sonorous and vivid day roughly cupped in the huge twisted hands of the harbour outside, and back from the day to me; I saw the duality of adolescence—the speaking, smiling boy, ageless and vivid as the morning light that swept across him into the room, and within the boy who seemed so conscious of me and the outside world the other, the brooding self, unconscious of its house of flesh, of the world, and of time.

There can of course be no certainty of what women will find, or fail to find, in some sorts of young man. Social manners change with the generations; circumstances of upbringing differ from father to son, and of the probable relationship of a man to women not much can be foresaid. Good looks, of which Alan would surely have more than either my father or I had had, seem to count for little, if there is not informing them a strongly masculine spirit, erect and positive in the presence of a woman. The existence of this spirit may not always be discernible in the middle years of adolescence, even in a country where bodies and minds mature early, at sub-tropical speed; but I imagined I could detect it sometimes in the boy: in his new, unostentatious modesty with Miss Molesley concerning such matters as his linen and the privacy of the bathroom, for all that he passed most of the year in the boldly-outspoken world of boarding-school boys—or because of that, it might be; in his masculine sensitiveness at this age to words and tones of voice, his frequent choice of solitude, and his carefully unemotional friendliness and affection towards me.

It was necessary to forget my own rather circumscribed and unnatural boyhood in order to approach an understanding of the boy’s present being and probable development in the society he would live in; and I found it hard to force myself to forget. It was necessary also to realize that the very fact of having been reared by strange hands among the bull calves of the coming herd would likely give him a normal physical, animal appeal to women, which I had certainly never had, during and following the sequestered, segregated years of my own first youth. This profound difference of our social selves each from the other put beyond likelihood all chance of friction between us. We thought and spoke one language most of the time, but beneath the surface of word and gesture and appearance there separated us a distance not only of time but, more mysteriously, of kind.

He was perhaps more nervously masculine than I had ever been. I knew I had never had much direct physical appeal to women—not enough of the bull there, and too much of the sacred hart; if they had been attracted, it was by the ordinary observances of cleanliness, good clothes, the manners my father had taught me, and my own pleasure in hearing them talk. My friendships, such as there had been, were rather of the intellectual sort, with speech and thoughts for currency. That was why the years-old attraction I had felt in myself for Irma and in her for me had taken me, against my will and judgment, by storm.

I wondered what would happen between that girl and me, were we to meet again now, after the long silence and the memories of six years, a silence and memories without calm. I wondered if my heart would beat again, as it did sometimes beat in her company, like a boy’s who again and again, half-disbelieving, sees his girl at his side; and whether she herself had changed with the violent, fretful changing of the times. I knew I myself had aged as a man does age when he watches a son grow towards manhood, and feels his sympathy and understanding of the coming man deepened by the keen remembrance of his own boyhood, his own dreaming youth with its decreed innocence and ignorances, its moments of instinctive foreknowledge, its gradual awareness of truth and error, right and wrong, as conscience is born like a kernel in the seed of the ripening fruit. These experiences a man relives, if he should take upon himself the task of true parenthood; and they, by a sort of paradox, both age him inwardly and make him younger; the rod of the husband becomes the more pliable bow of the father, and there is an enlarging of thought from its absolute discipline to a compassionate curve of reason.

Irma, the girl, would now be a woman of twenty-five. With an unholy pang of physical jealousy which I had felt more than once, and cursed, during these last years, I wondered what men had had to do with her, what flowers and scars must distinguish from the sapling I had known the maturing young tree she would now have become. All I did know of her was occasional word heard from Miss Werther. The amiable little Jewess had prospered during the war years, thanks to a native foresight in buying such stocks of furs as would have made any ordinary dealer lose sleep—and buying them before the war began. From time to time she rang me at my flat, and her lilting voice with its seemingly indestructible tones of kindly good humour brightened the moment always with the same words: ‘Mr. Fitzherbert, there is another letter . . .’ She would briefly outline the contents, and always there came the final almost reproachful ending—‘She sends you her warmest greetings and hopes some day you may have time to write.’

Well, in six years I had evidently had no time; and in six years her greetings could still remain her warmest. I had never written, for what could I have said? I saw her letters later, over cups of coffee or at some luncheon table, as each one arrived, half a dozen in a year perhaps, letters as fluent and neat as the handwriting in which they were set down. Of our eventual reunion and its outcome I could foresee nothing, or I might not have gazed with such dreaming content and self-commendation at the boy leaning his shoulders back in the white frame of the open French windows, with bright morning hot and eager as a promise behind him.

‘Sir,’ he said with a sort of tender impudence, ‘you are very broody this morning.’

‘If you had a boat,’ I said, ‘you could get round the harbour and see it at its best, from water-level. You could also visit some of the islands.’

‘Too much like hard work.’ He had picked up that expression from old Jack, for whom he had a respectful admiration that pleased me and amused Jack. He had few social and even fewer of the intellectual affectations of his age; sometimes I heard him telling Moley how he wanted his clothes pressed and his handkerchiefs folded, but he never minded copying Jack’s haphazard ways of speech, which he apparently accepted uncritically as part of the man. It was Jack who had taught him things I never knew myself: how to milk and handle a cow, and how to ride; to think of a dog as your equal in vital importance to itself, and your superior in natural dignity; how to sharpen tools and use them with a loose wrist; many useful things that trained body and mind to work together. Their association, which continued day-long and into the dusk whenever we were at Hill Farm, contented me deeply; in practical matters Jack was the ideal mentor for Alan, making fun of his mistakes as I would never have done, and sharing with him long periods of industrious silence in the paddocks or the barn or high up among the great trees that hid the mountainside. He learned to lay an axe to a tree as I had never learned, swinging the four-and-a-half pound head in such an exact imitation of Jack’s own classic style that because it was correct and easy, and he was very young, it became a habit. He could skilfully set rabbit traps in runs his own eyes assured him were used often, and conceal his revulsion under Jack’s cool miss-nothing gaze when he had to kill the hysterically screeching creatures next morning; but after the first experience of this necessary extermination of the pest he could never eat a rabbit dish again. It was no matter: he was learning, and to Jack’s delighted question: ‘What’s this? Mean to tell me when you’re a doctor y’ain’t ever goin’ to kiss a woman again after you cut the first one up?’ he could reply with a lofty air that made the old man choke with amusement, ‘Women are quite a different kind of animal, you see—don’t you always tell me so?’ It was the first time I had ever seen Jack laugh. In return, he spent half a day teaching the boy how to sharpen a knife and work leather. From Jack and Miss Molesley he even learned to cook. During all these fascinating exercises his classroom studies were set aside so completely in his mind that any chance scholastic allusions that might escape me as the three of us sat by the fire for a short hour before bedtime were met with a momentary blind incomprehension in his drowsy eyes.

Thus he had grown, in the tutelage of many masters of whom old Jack, his ancient sly sagacity untroubled by the remote chaos of a world he had done with, was not the least worthy; he had learned by the time he was fifteen to use his head and his hands together. To me his life, what I knew of it, seemed full and wholly good.

‘What then?’ I said, preparing to get up and change, and join him in the pool below where the water of the rising tide looked agreeably bitter and clear and cool against the cemented stone.

‘I was going to Ken West’s for the day—when you’ve gone to the office—to play tennis, if I may, please.’

‘Very good.’ I put my feet to the floor. He came to take away the empty cup from the top of a pile of books on the night-table, and to my surprise he ruffled my hair with his hand as he passed me. It was one of those rare gestures involving contact between us at which he was far more adept than I would have been had I ever risked volunteering them, a thing I had long ago ceased to do; for boys of that precarious age seem able to tolerate only the rough touch of other boys without embarrassment; and in Alan’s case there was also an inherited unreasonable wariness against actual physical contact with those of his own blood. I had felt the same with my own father, and to a less degree even with my mother; the old man once told me, when we were discussing the more inexplicable aspects of heredity, that one way his father had of reprimanding him had been by grasping him by the back of his neck with his naked hand. ‘After that, even to shake hands with him in later life was always a conscious effort, don’t you know?’ he said, adding thoughtfully, ‘Yet there was never a cleaner or a more honest man, according to his own standards, which were high enough in all conscience.’

Alan’s casual brief touch, daring yet innocent of familiarity, was like that of a friendly animal that has no cause yet to fear your weight of years or your human intellect. I did not look at him or speak, but smiled for him to see, thinking how it was very much a gesture not of his age but of the times and his generation—such a gesture as I, for example, would never have thought of making towards my own father, though I realized (by far too late, alas) that it would doubtless have pleased him, after his own brief surprise, as it had pleased me now.

While I closed the Venetian blinds to darken the room against the heat of early morning, and changed into swimming trunks, I listened to him in the kitchen whistling above the sound of running water; and at the opening of a door I heard him stop in the middle of a bar to say with sudden glorious gaiety, ‘Hullo Moley my dearest old darling. Why don’t you slip into a two-piece swim-suit and come for a paddle with the pater and me?’

Her reply had the comfortable, timeless security of a habit whose origins were forgotten by all but Miss Molesley herself; and even she could not exactly tell me how she had come by the one remark above all others that had confounded Alan since earliest childhood with its air of mad profundity.

‘There’s them as do, and there’s them as don’t, and I be one of them as do don’t.’

His summer laughter followed me into the cool sanctuary of the bathroom like a breeze.

Like most people who tend to be over-serious in their whole daily life, I have always been easily taken by surprise by circumstances which to another, livelier mind would not be surprising at all.

I was surprised in this way that it should have been Barbara who at last gave me first-hand information about Irma. Nothing could have been more natural, one might say inevitable, than that it should be she, of all people in the office, who saw the girl again before any of us—she who spent so much of her working time thinking and writing about new clothes for other women, and looking at the show of them. It was quite usual for her to go by air to Melbourne for the private showings of spring and autumn fashions, taking her own photographer with her and managing to make of it a short two-day or three-day holiday in the city she liked so much better than she liked Sydney.

At the end of April, when I was already allowing myself to look forward to Alan’s first-term holiday, Barbara flew up from Melbourne one Thursday forenoon, and telephoned me from her home across the harbour, where she had gone direct from the airport to recover from the effects of air travel, which invariably made her feel sick for some hours after landing.

‘Try to get over for dinner,’ she said weakly over the telephone. ‘We’re having a new dish, and you can have it whenever you say, if you’re busy. I want to show you something and tell you about Melbourne before I get all tangled up in the office again.’

At five o’clock I took a cab from the office, and was with her twenty minutes later, where she lay pale but alert under a rug on the cane lounge in the sunroom of her high Seaforth home. That room looked south and east fairly down beyond Middle Harbour to the vertical gateway of the Heads veiled today in an evening ocean haze; and the plains of blue water, darkening in the last full daylight, were stippled with the last of the failing north-east wind, the dying wind of summer.

‘Lloyd,’ she said, when her elderly Irishwoman had talked herself backwards from the still room that seemed made only of glass and polished wood and air, ‘I feel as though I’d been away a terribly long time, this time. Give me your hands—no, both of them, my dear boy—I feel very old at the moment, Lloyd, and I need your youthful support.’

She pressed my fingers against her forehead, first one hand and then the other, with her own warm fingers.

‘Nothing ever does any good,’ she said wanly, against the inner side of my wrist. ‘I’ve tried sedatives and glucose and goodness knows what else, and the only thing that ever helped me was a flask of whisky during the flight itself—and then I felt worse afterwards than usual. I think we should have a drink now. Brian will be here to dinner. The latest is, he doesn’t want to leave the R.A.A.F. now, having come through with a whole skin, the lunatic. In that cabinet there by the door—whisky and a siphon. I wish Con could see him now with all those ribbons and things. I do feel so proud of him, even if I don’t understand much about it. Con was a great one for colour in uniforms. He said it was the Scotch in him, and when I asked him what Scotch he simply laughed and said, “Imported.” Do you suppose he meant whisky or immigration?’

After fifteen years she still spoke of it as though it were yesterday’s conversation. I reflected, as I mixed two drinks, that I could not any longer feel that way when I remembered Jean. Men are more faithful to an idea, women to a remembered reality. Alan had at length replaced her as fully as possible in my life, and if there were still an emptiness, like unacknowledged physical hunger for food, to be felt in me at times I was too used to that now to be troubled any more by it—ever again, I thought with satisfaction.

No sooner had this satisfaction declared itself so complacently than I was called upon, with divine irony, to pay for it, when Barbara, having swallowed some of her drink thirstily, sighed and spoke again.

‘Do you ever hear from Miss Martin, Lloyd?’

‘No, only from her friend whom she writes to sometimes.’

‘If it’s not an impertinent question, how do you feel about her now?’

‘I hardly know if I feel anything, Barbara.’

‘I had to ask, because you never do show much—you don’t let on, as Molly says. One has to guess . . . Besides, I saw her and spoke to her in Melbourne, and I’ve brought back an off-the-record photograph she allowed us to take to show you. I hope you don’t mind. It was my own idea.’

‘How was she?’ I watched the day going peacefully away over the ruffled fields of dark water; it seemed at that moment the only peace left, in the world or in my senses. When I looked back at her, Barbara was smiling, and there was a faint return of colour to her face.

‘Very well. Really beautiful now. She has taken part of Melbourne by storm, all in a matter of weeks—the rich part. There is nothing of your refugee about her now, I assure you. All the same, I felt when I spoke to her, or rather when I listened to her, that she was still in search of a refuge. You know—that not-quite-happy feeling some beautiful girls seem to have?’

‘I know. We all have it, probably, but only the beautiful ones show it, because we look at them so much more carefully. We try to find what it is that we have not, and in the end we find what we ourselves have that they have not.’

She shook her head a little impatiently but with a look of laughter.

‘That drink has made me quite intelligent again, and it’s no good you being clever just to avoid the issue. The subject was Miss Martin—she’s known as Irma Francis professionally, by the way—and I still say she’s not as happy as she ought to be, considering her success.’

‘And I,’ I said firmly, ‘still say that is true of anyone you like to name. Frankly, I think you’re trying to draw me, Barbara, and I don’t quite know why.’

‘Frankly,’ she said, ‘I am, and I should have known you better, I should have known it was impossible as well as unfair.’

She took from the cane garden-table beside her a manilla folder which I had noticed was bulging with photographs, and put it on the rug over her knees.

‘I wasn’t really trying to draw you out, you know,’ she said. ‘Or was I? Dear me—the worst thing about a woman of my age is, she seldom knows what really goes on in her. The honest truth is—and this is the honest truth, Lloyd—I am so fond of you after all these years that I think I’m just slightly jealous of this girl. You don’t mind?’

‘I would be flattered if I could believe it.’

‘Not at all—it’s she who must be flattered, since it’s true . . . Oh dear—just for once, Lloyd, relax and give me a kiss. I’m still rather up in the air after that damned ’plane trip.’

She pulled me by the shoulders, and needed little effort, to get me near enough so that we could kiss one another warmly; and I had to think hard to realize that it was the first time we had ever done that, in a world where kissing is so easy as to have no longer the value even of a betrayal. She smelled very warm and sweet, very feminine, as though she had stepped out of a warm bath not many minutes before. I was aware of her long after she drew back and unconsciously rubbed her lips with the back of her hand.

‘One gets to like it, I believe,’ I said. ‘The French have a proverb about it—they say that kissing a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt.’

‘A man made that up, I’m sure. For a beard too, add pepper. Lloyd! Don’t look so shocked.’

‘I was not feeling shocked. I was thinking nothing so nice has happened to me for a long time.’

‘Well, here is something nicer still. I don’t so much mind giving it to you now.’ She slid out the photograph that lay uppermost on the pile in the folder. ‘Look at this. That is your reward for being sweet to me, and don’t say I’m not generous.’

The likeness was a seated full-length with a matt surface that gave it a positively tactile quality. Irma looked sideways at the camera and so at me, and Louise, Barbara’s photographer, had caught her in such a lively way that the direct, sidelong look along the high cheekbones made her seem about to turn her head fully and smile, no matter how long one continued to gaze at the face so perfectly portrayed.

Bones do not change. She was perhaps a little thinner, or perhaps only the studio lighting made it seem so; and there was delicate emphasis, not alteration, of the hinted shadows in temple and eye and cheek. I had never had such an opportunity to examine her face in detail at my ease, and my heart was overcome with a surge and thrust of infinite longing, infinite melancholy (encouraged no doubt by Barbara’s kiss still warm and full on my mouth), as I observed the fine generosity of her almost-smiling lips on which the light shone moistly, and the slanting set of her eyes that were not quite sorrowful like the eyes of an Oriental, and not quite sly, but rather could be said to resemble the eyes of a fearless wild animal. They too seemed about to smile.

This upward line of her face had been emphasized since last I saw her, I thought, perhaps for the occasion, perhaps by the firm touch of time. Her hair was long now, drawn smoothly back from brow and temple to show her ears, and coiled and rolled into a large dully-gleaming knot lying on the nape of her neck with the appearance of solid metallic weight that subtly enhanced by contrast the modelling of her throat and ears and the whole enigmatic yet mobile face. Her skin in the unglazed surface of the print seemed to glow from within, warmed and informed by her life.

Barbara, leaning back on the head-rest of her lounge, was looking at me as earnestly as I had looked at the portrait.

‘She let Louise take that as a favour,’ she said amusedly. ‘It isn’t for printing, of course. She still won’t be photographed if she can help it. It’s probably only a pose or a habit now.’

‘I never saw her in evening dress, of course,’ I said.

She laughed so delightedly that she took me completely aback.

‘Lloyd, you ass, that is a nightgown, and a very marvellous thing too—what we call a creation. Look again.’

I felt myself blushing like a boy. It was so, of course; my eyes had been intent only on the turning, me-recognizing face, and I saw now how the gown revealed in a half-concealment the white fullness and candour of her bosom, the arch of the unseen protecting ribs narrowing to the line of waist, spreading again to the weighted hips and thighs from which the stuff of the skirt fell in a shimmering rhomboid, like water in the sun, to the rug on which her slippered left foot rested before her. She leaned back on her left hand; in her right, slightly raised, was an elaborate hand-mirror into which she gave the impression of having glanced one moment earlier, and from which, as she let it sink to her knees, she was about to turn her face fully. The whole pose was formal, a stock pose of the shops, but I had never seen it caught before with such an effect of arrested or incipient movement.

‘Louise has excelled herself,’ I murmured.

‘Well,’ Barbara said, ‘I think so, but she’s a perfect subject, as you can see. Continental-trained—we don’t see many of them here yet, and none of our girls can quite catch that air of actually owning the gowns and things she wears. It’s not a matter of looks—Miss Martin is not a perfect beauty, like some of the Melbourne and Sydney girls. That’s why her face is so interesting. She has irregular features, as you’d find if you measured them as an artist does, but she also has life and character. That’s what counts. She must love the work—or else she is so well-trained that she can’t help it. Whatever it is, she’s made a name for herself in Melbourne in a very short time by selling everything she’s shown, so far as I could gather. She must be earning good money. There’s competition for her in the trade, I know that.’

It was like listening to the story of a stranger.

‘As far as looks go,’ I said, ‘she does not seemed to have changed much. She looks older, of course, and yet in some peculiar way she looks younger. It may be professional habit, but I see no sign of the not-quite-happy look you talked about. She looks, in fact, almost mischievous here.’

‘She had reason to look mischievous. But let me tell you from the start. After the show I introduced myself while we were all having cocktails—it was like most of those affairs, half-business, half an informal party, with buyers and the Press and various friends and relations. The models changed and came back to meet us, and Irma—everyone calls her Irma now—she was almost mobbed when she came in with some of the others—women as well as men, and myself among them. She took it very well. Just once I noticed her face change, when some man took her familiarly by the arm, and she rapped out in a low voice, “You would do well in America, sir.” You couldn’t tell whether she was angry or frightened—she tilted her head back and opened her eyes very wide—I could only think of a nervous horse. But most of the time she was smiling and talking with the rest of them . . . I’m trying to give you a picture of the goings-on.’

‘You are succeeding.’

‘She has peculiar eyes, Lloyd—you may have noticed them. A most unusual sort of blue, but quite suitable to that type of face with its slanting lines. The way she has her hair done in that photograph made her far the most remarkable-looking female in the room. I watched her, I suppose, more than was good manners—I was thinking all the time of what you’d told me about her and you—and really I think you acted very wisely. Now don’t misunderstand me, Lloyd. I am speaking my mind. I have a feeling she might not have been good for you. There’s something about her that is not—not you, if you know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, all right, you needn’t agree with me. Anyhow, I must have stared too obviously, for I suddenly found she was giving me a nice cool steady stare herself. I felt quite embarrassed. I felt my age and a bit more—like an inquisitive old woman. Women can look at one another in that way. The only thing to do was to introduce myself and explain what I supposed she thought were my bad manners. And in any case, I was curious because of you, as I say. I mentioned you straight away—said I was sure you would like to know I had seen her, after all this time. Of course it was clumsy. She looked away and said, “Oh—do you think so?” and she was blushing. Again I didn’t know whether she was angry. I felt perhaps I’d made a much worse mistake this time. When you think of it, it would sound condescending in those particular circumstances. I didn’t mean it that way. I was just trying to be friendly, Lloyd.’

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.

That night, and every night for the next two weeks, I slept badly, turning from dream to dream, tormented by uncertainties and doubts as never before in my life when they turned, as they soon did, from Irma to me as their object. There was an increasing desire in me, confusing thought, to leave the Gazette, Sydney, the State, the country itself: in fact, to cut and run from some incomprehensible situation poised implacably on the eve of development, dragging Alan with me to avoid calamity. It was a pity I did not give way to this one unreasonable desire of my life. Only the knowledge, in periods of normal mental control, that running away inevitably brings one face to face with the thing fled, the faster the sooner, and in a condition of exhaustion to boot, prevented me from taking some action which with part of my mind I knew I should quickly have regretted.

At the end of that fortnight, Alan came home from school for the May holiday; and Irma arrived unannounced and unexpected from Melbourne to spend a short week-end with her old friend Miss Werther.

When Miss Werther telephoned me that Saturday morning with her bubbling news, all confusion was swept from my mind so suddenly, so completely, that I felt weak and had to sit down. The feelings of threatened calamity that had shadowed me day and night since the evening of Barbara’s dinner went away like a cloud on a change of wind. In its place shone as it were a light of warm pleasure, emanating from a positive source of determination. Everything now seemed supremely simple. Alan was here. Irma was here. All that I most loved was now at hand, within call.

The relief of mind was momentous. I heard with joy the monotonous squealing cries of the pearl-grey gulls beyond the breakwater. In the kitchen Miss Molesley and Alan were washing the breakfast dishes in a cheerful communion of which the short clatter of plates and cutlery made a part. Through the closed leaves of the French windows I watched the knife-headed, knife-winged gulls, dagger-beaked, black-capped, red-eyed, ceaselessly hunt the grey water under the smooth grey of the sky, looking down and from side to side as they flew in a way that gave their quick, unhurried flight the perfection of absolute self-assurance maintained in complete unconsciousness of effort.

Miss Werther’s amiable lilting voice, excited and hasty on this occasion, still sounded in my head.

‘You must come to dinner, won’t you, please? Come early this afternoon. You will have so very much to talk about. Ah—what a happy surprise this is for me, Mr. Fitzherbert.’

It did not seem to me, at the moment, that I would have so very much to talk about. I felt it would be enough to see Irma again and be in her presence. As for conversation, to be easy in such a reunion at least some community of experience is needful, some mutual knowledge and shared continuity of thought; and between Irma and me, separating us solidly still like a wall which will transmit the futile rappings of attempted communication, but nothing more, there were over six years, mostly of war and strain and desperate self-preservation amid the inexhaustible, crashing debris of a whole world’s slow destruction.

I looked into my mind, to see whether the manner of our ancient and unreal parting after one hour—the first hour and the last—of joined embraces of body and mind would add its weight to the great bulk of this separation; and I found that it would not. It mattered no longer, except as a beginning (not an end), and beginnings, however awkward, take on with time’s passing a charm of the half-forgotten, the wishfully-distorted, and all memory of them is hazed and coloured by years of less and less anxious thought. It seemed to me, indeed, that we might start very well from that point of departure. If this meeting should prove, in spite of all my intentions, to be barren, then we would have a conclusion, six years old, ready-made, its purpose nearly completed now, in which momentarily to resume our roles, and withdraw.

If there were no barrenness, if imagined promise were to be realized, as I had determined it should be, then the point of departure became a point at which openly to resume what had never been abandoned—the nourishing of our mutual interest and attraction. There was now the difference made by her old, oblique confession of her love, and by my own admission, to myself at least, of mine. As for any future, I did not think of it. I merely felt that now, since we were about to meet again, free from the alarms and distractions that had once made us stiffly cautious of one another, there could be no more reserves of thought or speech, no more real separation.

Alan had his day planned, and Miss Molesley could enjoy one of her few worldly self-indulgences—that of preparing and eating dinner alone with him. Long ago my mother had explained to me that Moley’s joys were of the spirit, which made her an admirable companion for my mother; she never sought, yet never rejected, enjoyments of an earthly sort, but was mostly careless of them. I could not quite reconcile this with her firm addiction to card-playing. It may have been that to her the ages-old mysteries of the numbers in combinations in which she allowed no element of chance somehow proved in innocent visual forms the existence of the divine logic in which she happily believed.

Her care for Alan had for a long time made my own life easier to order. I felt once more the cat-like comfort and security of having a home which someone was running for me. She did for Alan most of the things a good mother would have done, without exciting or embarrassing him with any of a mother’s formidable shows of outlived but persistent gross affection. Deprived of Jean, that charming being now no more than a wraith in my memory, he could have had no better tender—he had only known and accustomed himself to a father considered by a lot of people to be ‘a little strange’, ‘a cold fish’, or ‘a reserved type’—you could take your pick. As I recalled to mind these descriptions of me that had come to my knowledge over the years, I could smile with not very happy satisfaction at the success of the mask I had contrived and worn—even though the sight of it in Barbara’s mirror so recently had filled me with exasperated fury at I knew not exactly what. The thought was in my mind, as I sat watching the gulls reel and recover for ever against a sky the colour of themselves, that this mask would soon be lifted, if only for a brief space.

Miss Werther lived comfortably at Edgecliff, within easy walking distance; it would take little more than half an hour to get there. I chose my way by Darlinghurst Road and the Cross. The day was still grey and windless, pressing down over the city with a belated warmth that presaged rain; but not even the weather, and the huge Saturday-afternoon reaction of faint, half-drunken melancholy that rose like a vapour from the vacant metropolis sprawling to north and east and south to meet the descending sky, could affect the Cross’s air of violent, intimate life. The clamour of taxi-cab horns rises above the swimming tide of voices that speak, one would say, all languages known to man, above the sound of the passage of feet that have trodden the streets of every country of the world. Not only Sydney, but Australia itself seems shut out from this place where the rest of the world is at home; yet figures show that Australians predominate. The thing is, they do not perambulate as naturally as do the Europeans and Asiatics here; they must, like me, be going somewhere, if it be only to the nearest bar or café, while the others are happy merely to be walking, to see and be seen, up and down the same few hundred yards of pavement, by brilliant fruit and vegetable stalls, flower shops clogged with colour too solid to have meaning here, dress-shop windows as passionately austere as the caged homosexual faces peeping round their enclosing, excluding curtains; libraries, antiques-dealers, cheap open-fronted cafés; and the shops, not closed today in spite of the Sabbath, selling kosher and imported foods.

It resembles a jovial nightmare, with undertones of rough passions and vitiated lusts and purchasable laughter. It never wholly sleeps; and just as at night there is a lurking illusion of unburied day, so by day there pervades it something of the less fettered freedoms of the night, and time becomes a different, wayward thing in which the hours can pass like minutes, the minutes like days.

Above all, it bestows the desirable gift of anonymity. All there are forever strangers whose caught fragments of speech, dropped on the air like scraps of innumerable torn-up letters, have no relevance and no more meaning than that of the detached words themselves. Here it is possible to hide, indefinitely and in a fashion not over-restricted, from all authority, but not from one’s own kind. It is possible here to die by violence in a locality where a scream may be a laugh or a laugh a scream, and where the muffled cries beyond the partitions may be of love or of death, and go unheard, or, heard, unconstrued. The strange air belongs, as though conditioned through the years by alien throats that have breathed it in and alien lungs and tongues expelling it in the airy transience of speech, and as though localized by the intensely personal quality of life here.

In one short block down Bayswater Road, all this has vanished, and even the receding sound of it is obscured by the noise of east-bound trams and the scurry of passing traffic heading eastwards for the immense stretch of richer and superficially more sedate residential suburbs marching in from the Pacific coast, set down but not crowded between the coarse and violent worlds of the city and the beaches. The traffic passes through the Cross without touching or being touched by it; and it is this feeling of a graver, potentially dangerous stream of wholly law-abiding life going by without pausing to intrude that gives the Cross itself, and the area of which it is the vigorous heart, much of their air of nonchalant, secure isolation and intimate privacy. It was this that had attracted Irma, as it attracted every other educated alien arriving for the first time at the port or the aerodrome of Sydney; it was here she had lived her obscure year of uncertainties and stifled impulses; from here fled, and almost here in the end returned.

Edgecliff is beyond the curiously desolate brightness which, like all waterside public reserves (mad name!), Rushcutters Bay Park has when the weather is fine; a brightness that on grey days becomes dulled and unreal, like the throng of racing and pleasure yachts spiking with their bare masts the high northern horizon from where they lie moored in the bay itself. No one cuts rushes there now. The swampy inlet of the harbour, where the convicts of a century and a half earlier bent to embrace the reeds under an alien and undreamed-of sun, has long since been reclaimed for sports and embraces of a happier kind. It lies sunk without character between two dwindling hillsides of roofs and windows, one sloping down from the east, the other from the west. Its north boundary is the harbour whose waters it scarcely clears, and the main artery taking the life-stream of traffic to and from the city arrests it on the south.

This day I saw consciously none of these things. Indeed, I was climbing the hill to Edgecliff from the bottom of Bayswater Road before the sense of increased effort woke me clearly to my whereabouts: as so often happened when my time was free, I had passed through the very centre of the Cross without realizing it, lulled in profound thought by the familiarity of the way.

I was, in fact, deliberately making myself wary of anticlimax, the empty reality that follows vivid and interrupted dreaming. Only the memory of my morning’s feeling of determination remained. What I had determined upon I still could not have said, other than that it was something the opposite of flight—not pursuit but a stand. My days of acting wholeheartedly the following, enamoured swain were past; they had been gone long before I met Irma the first and the second time. Rather this determination, it seemed as I walked, was in effect a change of my whole mind, from an attitude of rejection to one of readiness to accept whatever might come to pass between that strange young woman and me. As I realized this, the memory of the morning’s feelings reverted to an awareness made stronger yet, calmer yet, and yet more relieved; and in spite of the steepening hill into Edgecliff I lengthened and quickened my step.

Miss Werther’s flat is approached by a ramp leading down below street-level. Between the wicket gate and the entrance door which is for her private use stretches a narrow suggestion of a formal garden, as wide as the frontage and six or eight feet deep, symbolized into two standard rose trees without flowers, in two rectangles of smooth buffalo-grass lawn flanked on all sides and divided in the middle by strips of pale concrete roughened to make a secure footing in rainy weather. Her door, on the right of the ground-floor facade, had the word ONE neatly done in brass, screwed on its single panel in separate brass letters, and below it a small brass plate inscribed modestly in black, like a doctor’s, Linda Werther—Agent.

All these details I took in as I approached, that day, and I have never forgotten them: I could reach out my hand now, formally gloved, and touch with one leather finger-tip the snub black bell-button in its brass setting that showed minute traces of cloudy polishing-fluid round the sunken screw-heads. When this door was opened, it opened on a new life for me.

Irma had opened the door, wide.

Without a word, she stood back to let me pass, and closed it again, shutting us into a long, lighted hallway which appeared to run the full depth of the building, opening into a sunroom made, it seemed, all of glass from ceiling to floor. Through the glass, between pillar-like flutings of opened curtains, one saw at once a high-walled garden further screened by tall young maple trees whose remaining leaves, tenacious in the mildness of the early winter, were as bright as any of the scattered groups of dahlias that had lingered into May in the coastal warmth, and hotter in colour than the chrysanthemums blazing coldly yellow and white in the dead light against the warm tones of the brick wall.

All this I thought I had seen in that first instinctive glance investigating strange surroundings, but it is more probable that I saw it so clearly only later; for at the moment all I seemed to be aware of was Irma, silently there with me, her face very pale and her smooth hair very dark in the airy hallway, taking my coat and hat and gloves like a servant, but unlike a servant not looking at our hands, not for a moment looking away from my own look bent upon her; until she turned abruptly, and put the things down on a semicircular wall-table under an ancient, misty mirror, behind her. In the mirror’s depth her eyes still met mine, with a slightly mad look.

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.