Free The Refuge by Kenneth Mackenzie Page B

northern winters.
    I had looked at her apparel, from the thin black leather slippers to the gold medallion at her throat, in one glance and entirely from habit. Even in those early years of my profession I had had to look at many dead bodies, and clothes had come to have a deep, probably an abnormal, significance in my eyes. In the two peaceful years of my marriage, which had ended with my wife’s death eight years before this when I was still a junior on the
Gazette
staff, I doubt whether I could have described any of her outer clothing with comprehensible accuracy, and her other garments remained to the end something of a mystery, though I suppose I could have enumerated them by name after looking at the clothing advertisements and the shop windows. We had both come from Catholic households which were strict in the matter of personal privacy, when we married. Always we had undressed separately, never had we beheld each other’s body wholly naked—it would have been unthinkable. All this had much bearing on my subsequent association with the young woman who now stood before me.
    When my gaze reached her face a second after she had gained her feet on the deck, I saw that it had been distorted by emotion, the wide full lips stretched in apparent anguish over startlingly white teeth, the eyes of curious opaque grey-blue staring at nothing under contracted brows. But abruptly, even as I looked, all expression vanished, and her youthful countenance became like a mask; even the eyes, those habitual traitors of the mind and spirit, contrived to express nothing. I had a moment to observe the cool adolescent perfection of her face and head as she brushed her dark hair back with the back of one wrist, before she spoke.
    ‘Police?’
    The word came, seemingly despite herself, in a sort of gasp.
    ‘No, no,’ I said, smiling to reassure her, as well as at the mad thought of an Australian policeman with a van Dyke beard and moustaches; for in spite of her lack of expression her voice had betrayed a stabbing alarm. ‘I happened to be passing, and thought perhaps you were in pain
—souffrante, vous comprenez
?’
    ‘Pain?’ she said, ignoring my offer of a French translation. ‘No pain . . . Oh—pain! Yes, here is pain.’
    She put her right hand to her heart so that under the thick stuff of the house coat her breast stood out innocently above the spread thumb and forefinger. Still I could detect nothing of feeling in the mask of her face, which I now saw was not only elusively beautiful but also tragically young for the habit of such immobility. Despite myself, I was moved by this attitude, and by the strange combination of beauty, youthfulness and self-command. When I was a youth myself we did not know such girls.
    ‘I am frightened,’ she said with a sort of indifference, as if we knew one another well, and never taking her regard from mine. Her English was precise, like the strange control she always had over her body’s attitudes and movements, no matter what was happening to her body: the perfect and natural control of a full-grown animal whose physical dignity you cannot destroy or pervert. She spoke in the light voice of a young girl, sweetly and with a marked but not distorting accent which she never quite lost; even among a crowd of her fellow-refugees her voice, with its buoyant quick precision, could be heard apart, idiomatic yet forever strange. Only in moments of deepest and most tender passion did it become slurred, as though by an extreme exhaustion which her body’s vigour frankly denied.
    ‘There is nothing to fear now,’ I said, and at once the words sounded foolish. How was I to know what would be fearful to her, what indelible terrors of memory and what vaguer terrors of anticipations she and all those in her position brought with them from Europe’s mounting nightmare of the flesh and the spirit?
    ‘You are in Australia now. You are safe. What is your name?’
    Self-assurance had come back to me. It