The Refuge by Kenneth Mackenzie Page A

the kitchen, off the small passage that opened upon the service-staircase outside, I looked about for a small container. The complete tidiness of the place, scrubbed and immaculate as though never used, gave me again that subtle feeling of pleasure I had always had when looking at the indications of her manner of living; for she was tidy and clean to a truly exquisite degree, yet in so casual a manner that one never seemed to catch her at it. This was especially true of her person, though her natural physical perfection was nothing at all like the aseptic and repellent American magazine-advertisement sort, but arose and emanated rather from an abundance of good health and her use of leisure for being idle than from the pursuit either of health or of leisure so miserably characteristic of the age. I never knew a woman with her capacity for immobility and ease. Like her strange, animal ability to sleep at will, from which I think it sprang, it was at first disconcerting, though in time I learned its virtue and lost my earlier desire to make her move and speak; to ask—like any love-sick boy—‘What are you thinking about?’ Her reply, which in another woman might have sounded foolishly affected, was the simple truth: ‘I think of nothing at all. My mind is a blank, so do not talk to me, darling.’
    I could hear that voice with its light, strong, un-English inflections and accent as I opened the doors of the cupboard under the shining sink. It was so clear in my hearing, memory was so faithful and vivid, that an inadvertent thrill of intense, unreasonable happiness passed through my nerves and seemed to lodge like an obstruction in my throat, bringing a sting of tears, while I bent down to search for one of the small brandy flasks she kept for replenishments, to lace her morning and evening coffee with the spirits. I had forgotten she was dead.
    ‘Fine,’ Hubble said, when I took the little flat bottle in to him. ‘Did she drink much of this, by the way?’
    ‘Two tablespoons a day,’ I said. ‘One in the morning, one in the evening, always in coffee. She considered it a sort of tonic medicine. Otherwise, she drank wine sometimes with meals. Not always. She was as abstemious as—as I am myself.’
    Hubble laughed softly as he drained the porcelain coffee cup with delicate precision into the flask.
    ‘What a nice sober couple you must have been, then,’ he said. ‘Personally, I could do with a drink right now.’
    ‘When you are ready,’ I said, ‘we can go next door and you can have some whisky, if that will do. I have the caretaker waiting, if you want to see him.’
    ‘Fine,’ he said again without much interest. ‘Better see him, I suppose. He may be able to give us some idea of the time.’
    While he took the empty cup and its saucer to the kitchen to rinse them—for, like some fat men and not all police officers, he was a neat and tidy fellow in all things—I looked in at the bedroom. It was, of course, just as I had seen it last, like the rest of the flat, not many hours before. On the white dressing-table lay her hairbrush which I had picked up from where it fell out of her hands; and I thought I could see still on the bedcover the faint imprint of her half-conscious form, though I had smoothed the ruffled material after I got her off the bed and into a chair in the big room. Neither of us would ever wake again in that firm and comfortable bed, as until recently we had so often done when the light of dawn warned me that it was time to go softly back to my own flat. I supposed that to the rest of the world it would have seemed a fantastic marriage, had the facts of it been known; but as it was it suited us both very well, for there was something innocently clandestine about it besides the freedom of movement made possible by those two separate and adjacent establishments, each of which one of us commanded without question.
    Standing there just inside the doorway, breathing her most intimate