The Survivor Read online

  Meanwhile, Mrs Leeming seemed bent on sending him to Antarctica properly self-questioning. She veered from the question of self-knowledge to the subsidiary one of self-ownership. He sat through a steady grilling in this topic and could not help believing that on one level she was laughing to herself. He wondered whether it was this constant Socratic rigmarole of hers that had driven Leeming to the poles.

  “It’s not hard for anyone,” she said, “to see Leeming as a great man. But he—and how much more so all other men?—has to beware of excursions like this Antarctic one and like the Great War, as highly organized attempts at getting round the necessity of self-ownership.”

  “You ought to tell the whole party that before they sail.”

  “The others wouldn’t understand. But Leeming’s temptations are hostile to his self-discovery. He often hides from himself in the almost frantic belief that the fates intend to humiliate him with disasters.”

  “What disasters do you mean?” Alec thought it was his business to know.

  “Oh, climatic disasters, or trouble with his men, or being sold spoilt stores by some corrupt merchant.” She smiled. “Or the dogs all dying at once. That sort of thing.”

  She stood and took her smock off. Beneath it she was wearing an old floral dress. Ramsey felt eviscerated by longing as she wiped her collar-bones with a small handkerchief. Saying, “But you’ll think I’m some sort of crank. You’ll have to attribute it to the fact that I’m about to lose my husband for at least sixteen months.”

  At this statement of wifely affection, Ramsey felt easier. The lady continued uxorious for a small while, giving her long hair an absent-minded pat that seemed to signify a conjugal and modest acceptance of Leeming’s polar interests.

  “But you see,” she continued, “Leeming and I, both of us Christians, don’t accept the concept that is condoned by our antique legal system—ownership by one spouse of another. All that too is a bar to self-discovery, because the business houses, the police force, the Oddfellows’ Lodge and so on are all afraid of what might happen if we found our true selves. That is why the definition of marriage in our laws is feudal, and true marriage has outgrown it. So I don’t make any complaint about Leeming’s Antarctic infidelities; if they are necessary to him they are not infidelities. Don’t you agree?”

  Ramsey did, out of politeness.

  “And since I am his equal, that raises the question of what is necessary to me.” She walked up to his chair and removed the beer tray. Holding it before her, she seemed to, but could not possibly be, positing a relationship between what was necessary to her, and Alec. “What is your first name, Mr Ramsey?”

  Strangely grudging, he told her.

  She said formally, “Alec, I like you very much. You are humble and intelligent. You are innocent because you see the greatness in dear Leeming and because you expect a revelation in Antarctica. Do you believe in God?”

  “My father is a Presbyterian pastor,” he admitted. “Sometimes I believe in God out of politeness to him.”

  She laughed a compassionate laugh that began like a cry, with a low moaning noise. “But I didn’t mean in your father’s God,” she explained, “though to escape that one it’s worth taking off to Antarctica. I can’t help but feel that Leeming’s polar experiences have helped him become more theologically sound. Do I sound like a blue-stocking, Alec?”

  He assured her, no.

  She said teasingly, “Well, if it comforts you Alec, I love you in the bowels of Christ. You have heard that wonderful phrase?” But she cut the wryness down to solemnity. “No, I do, Alec, I accept you in the bowels of mercy. I sounded flippant because I was afraid you might think I was eccentric if I spoke seriously. But if you want you can spend the afternoon with me. Of course, although I feel a great deal of affection for you, I can’t allow myself to take any responsibility for how your conscience might stand by four o’clock, say.”

  She looked at him with the sort of directness they tried to dissuade girls from in boarding-schools. Yet there was nothing that could be called specifically erotic about her. This was not only because she was dressed with bungalow decency and her face no more climatically disposed than if she were buying real-estate. It was that she too stood over in Cybele territory; or so Ramsey guessed. In Cybele territory there was no such extension of life as sexuality; sexuality was a European invention. Where she stood there was only the oneness of life; one trusted oneself all the time to the natural intuition, to the instinct informed by the phosphorus-flash of the click-exposure mind. In what he believed was such a flash, it seemed a perfectly decent thing to hug and be hugged by Mrs Leeming and rake her long hair with his hand.

  But the trouble was that Ramsey’s mind was a respectable, businesslike mind, governed by deduction and authority. He could not cease to respect marriage nor to suffer sexual guilt as ratified by the churches and the breathless details of genital hygiene given one by one’s hemming father.

  So, by taking Mrs Leeming in his arms, he was committing himself to fragmentation.

  “Wait there, wait there!” she said and fought free of him, taking her dress off with dignity, as if not to provoke him. The dress was put across an easy-chair and lay there like a mere statement of fact.

  “I must get back to the dogs,” Alec said fraudulently. He sounded as if he had run three miles.

  She reproved him for a silly one. “It seems to me that concern on a summer’s day for something that can sleep through a blizzard is excessive.”

  “The bulk of the travelling will be done with the dogs.”

  She laughed at him heartily, not at all like a vampire. Even to himself he’d sounded like a town-hall lecturer.

  A bare, beige-coloured shoulder presented itself. “There,” she said. It was not a moral being and to speak of it as aesthetic would have been cant. It was merely there for the kissing. He kissed it and felt the grotesqueness of his physical reaction. But she did not mock him. She respected him in the bowels of mercy.

  “Do you think,” she wondered, “it would be too disenchanting to go through into the other room, Alec? It’s very much like every other bedroom in this city.”

  He asserted that furniture would have no chance of infecting him with impotence; and, febrile, trailed behind her. In the hallway he leant and mouthed her upper breast. She became angry.

  “Come now, Alec.” But she had blinked as if touched by desire. “You are not to withdraw from me into lust. Lust is as good a middle-class plot as any to prevent us from self-discovery. People who fear self-discovery through sensual love retreat into this subhuman state called lust. If you intend to do that.…”

  He said how sorry he was. What he thought was that in the dreams of his puberty, of impossible encounters with ideal women, the dreamed-of woman never stood half-naked in a panelled hallway lecturing like an archdeacon.

  The bedroom was full of standard mock-Jacobean furniture, but, as he had said, he wanted no inspiration. Now, self-conscious over the disproportions of his body, he could not look her in the face. He kissed her furiously but with respect.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Otherwise there’s no tenderness left for me when you’ve been satisfied.” But it became almost too much for his home-bred prurience when she drew a hand over his loins. Later, he could remember being overcome by an anxiety to satisfy Mrs Leeming at this point; and the anxiety was as bad for them as any middle-class plot. He suffered an inconspicuous climax. Mrs Leeming seemed, above all, tolerant.

  At breakfast with Ella forty years later, he sustained the fiction that it was this adultery he had never confessed to Leeming in person that now made him sensitive about Leeming’s name. Fiction was how he thought of it. Legalistically speaking, it seemed to him perhaps half the truth. It was perhaps one-tenth of what his dyspeptic viscera accepted as truth deep-dyed and absolute.

  Some years before the morning on which he sat locked at heartless breakfast with his wife, Ramsey had made much—before her and before a given doctor—
of how dismaying it was to postpone a necessary confession and then find the one adequate confessor frozen (more or less) at your feet; of how dismaying it further was to find that he had died waiting for the confession. And though the word adultery no longer held the same Gothic prestige it once owned, to think of Leeming’s knowledge of Belle Leeming’s beddings iced up in Leeming’s frozen brain could still make Ramsey sweat. But that was only part of his malaise.

  In any case, Ella’s profoundest demands were not for elucidation, though she frequently asked for it. She wanted the illusion dropped, the illusion that reparations were owing to Leeming. For it meant a withdrawal from her, and that she resented.

  He slammed his spoon down. He heard it bounce against the breakfast impedimenta. Ella looked up in the pretended bafflement she never had any trouble adopting.

  “For Christ’s sake, Ella, let up!”

  He got up and strode, and leant against the refrigerator. There was a sauce stain on its door, left there some days now in what was probably some upside-down protest against her childlessness and what she considered to be her widowhood. Both these were nearly exactly seven years old and had undermined her by now to the extent that she would leave stains about as a reprisal; and keep current accounts rafted across the refrigerator top. A similar dune of bills had covered some dark piece of furniture in his childhood. It appalled him to have come all those years and yet be ending life with the same set of old bills.

  “Why don’t you let up?” she asked him.

  “We’ve made that exchange a thousand times. Just let up, for Christ’s sake. Will you? Ella?”

  “Listen, don’t try to convey urgency by means of for Christ’s sake.” She was old-fashionedly averse to blasphemy. “You sound like something from an Edward Albee play.”

  “At least I have literary precedents then. But no one would believe your attitude, Ella.” This he said in a manto-man, rational sort of way. “You accuse me of disloyalty and of withdrawing. But loyalty is an action, not a state of the emotions. In what action have I been disloyal?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Ella, I need you to understand.…”

  She grated her chair from beneath her and stood back shaking her head. Ramsey could see her full and beautiful left breast tremble, but nothing woke in him except the most abstract and inadvertent approval.

  “Me to understand?” she said. “You’d think that by marrying an older man a woman would at least have some security of affection.”

  He had had enough of his age as a subject of low fun. “If that was your only reason, you shouldn’t have married an older man. You should have married someone virile as all get-out, to quote the poet.”

  “Virility’s the least of my worries.”

  Ramsey decided to misunderstand. “Ah, taunt the old bastard. That’s right. Give the old man a mortal doubt or two.”

  She approached the table and said narrowly into his face, “You know I’m faithful to the death.”

  “Oh yes, you are. And you mean to point out too that there’s special virtue in being faithful to an old man. And you’re only faithful in the narrow, sexual sense.”

  “Oh yes, that’s easy, that is.”

  “It is easy, for you.”

  “Well, it’s nice to be valued.” She was too angry to see that in the course of the one debate Alec had pretended both fear and indifference over the question of her fidelity. She turned her back and walked like a retiring delegation to the far wall, to round on him and call out, “I might have been justified in expecting myself to be matrix of Alec Ramsey’s soul. Nothing like it. Guess who is? Someone mentions Leeming and you have to be sedated for a week.”

  “I’m not as extreme a case as all that. I can live with the idea of how much I owe Leeming. The trouble begins with your attitude.” But even in a fury it was not worth his skin to suggest that childlessness had diseased her attitude. “Certainly I am disturbed by Leeming.”

  “Because of fun in bed with old Belle!”

  “But it’s because I dread your massive reaction to my minor one that the name gives me the shudders.”

  “Minor? Minor? I think there was something queer about you and Leeming.” She gnashed her teeth. “The best of both Leemings.”

  “I wish it had been as simple as that.” He kept snatching up the bills one at a time and scanning them. Her hostility stifled him, and the plucking-up of dockets was the random act of a stifling man. To a bystander beyond the window it would have seemed an argument about money.

  Ella adjured him. “Well, did you eat him? You’ve never told me. Did you eat him?”

  The question again angered and harrowed him as would any preposterous accusation that happens to be a fraction of an inch wide of the preposterous truth. On account of her cruelty and because the question seemed to threaten to stampede him towards the truth, he kept silent and crushed his head between his hands. It was a tough nob, though; no fissures in the old skull, no misses in the old heart; and blood-pressure scarcely a point or two above what was ideal for a man of his age. The odds were against his embarrassing her with death or even a small collapse.

  “Listen, I have a surprise for you, Alec. This cannibal question raised by the poet isn’t a new theory. One day, it must have been 1926, my father gave me nightmares by bringing the story back from town one Friday. That the survivors had eaten Leeming. So it doesn’t matter to me what happened. Just digest him, as the poet says. Just digest him, that’s all.”

  Ramsey brayed once, cuffed the enamel and sank to the floor. A small flurry of bills followed him down. To prevent herself yielding, to evade the terror of having brought her big man into an absurd and yelping squat by the refrigerator, Ella strode out with the hard masculine walk she had learnt carrying milkpails as a child.

  She listened, pulling linen from the bed, for the sound of his gesture; he would put his fist into something. It was still a large, estimable fist. If applied to glass or panelling, it would bring another hardware account for filing above the refrigerator.

  She waited and heard his grief periodically mount. It was genuine grief, within its boundaries. The boundaries were set by his knowledge that it often made her relent, that he knew it brought on a rush of pity in her from the base of the womb.

  She looked purposefully out the window. “It won’t prevail this time, mate,” she said aloud. “It has to be settled.” No cherishing each other’s tears, no feverish caressings, no medicinal love-making with him dependent, unsure of himself, like a young man with an old tart. Not to mention any names.

  She heard his fist strike some not very frangible target. “Christ,” she said, clutching the dressing-table with all those futile beauty things that made her look enamelled and did not cure her saunter, “Christ, do the right thing for once and keep me away.”

  4

  Throughout a dreadful January, Ramsey found that he could not grapple with any simple series of engagements, that Ella was frequently apologizing for his absences. He rarely met Pelham except at staff meetings and by way of the telephone. He imagined that there was something more overt now about Pelham’s bitterness, something more carping about Pelham’s loyalty. He read his own sense of moral hollowness into Pelham, and began to dislike him.

  Late February brought on the last school, having to do with university drama groups, chaired by Eric Kable up from Milton. Valerie had come too, as an enrollee. Among the school’s projects was a production by a Sydney director of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. It was to be avowedly kinky. Ella, sitting through an early rehearsal, heard the director say, “You see, no one has ever been brave enough to admit why Titania wanted to sleep with an ass.” This he would attempt to say by means of Valerie.

  The performance would be early in Orientation Week, which came now with a rush. Hundreds of defensively arrogant boys and girls, tacking perfervidly away from the close lee-shore of their schooldays, leapt from trains. As if overweighted with its load of undergraduates, the Sydney plane flew low over
the Extension building on one of the last mornings of February. The sky grated with its approach, the blare of its engines thudded over Ramsey’s roof. Fate knocks on the roof, thought Ramsey in mockery.

  Barbara came in to him. She said, “It’s your friend the poet, Mr Ramsey.”

  She did not know why the poet had gone home early last October; she did not know he did badly with his liquor.

  Ramsey asked her was she serious? Barbara drew breath into her large bones and gathered herself together into a very fortress of seriousness.

  “You’ll have to tell him I’m out,” Ramsey said.

  “But you can’t tell lies to someone who wrote,

  ‘Cleft by the gold karate of the sun,

  The elements swing back again to one

  And hallow home.…’”

  Ramsey stared at the pretentious girl who had nothing but his weakness to feed her identity on. The fact was she was ashamed of her education; to prove her quality she learnt poets by heart; to prove her existence she quoted them.

  “I’ve read that too,” Ramsey told her. “I still don’t want to see him.”

  Barbara again thought he was being flippant. “Well, as he says it’s urgent, I’ll send him straight in.”

  “Listen, Barbara. I may only run this place in name. But I won’t see the man.”

  Barbara began to panic. “But you can’t tell him that.”

  “No? Well, you’ve got too reverent a view of literary men.”

  But he found that the poet had already entered the office. “Your manners are no more bloody suitable,” Alec said, “than they were last time.”

  Very fluidly for such a big girl, Barbara slipped out.

  The poet told him, “I’m sorry, but circumstances.…”

  He merely stood looking sympathetic, his form discrete in a linen suit. He looked like a joiner, the sort of man who buys a lot of superannuation and does not believe in the subconscious.