The Survivor Read online

  Ramsey told him that they had nothing to talk about. The poet said very confidently that they had. But four months after the night at the vice-chancellor’s, Ramsey was still frantic to humble this man.

  “Look,” he explained, “we have a very big fellow on the gate of the parking area. He’s available for moving trespassers. I can either ring him immediately or do the job myself.”

  The poet actually sat down then, humbly enough but as if in humble possession. “I don’t blame you for being angry, especially against a man of inaction. Even one who has taken two days’ leave to come and warn you.”

  “To warn me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of what?”

  “I can’t tell you while you’re in this state.”

  Ramsey sat up and began to dial the extension number of the parking area. He was afraid that if he didn’t the poet might prove his credentials and evade the humiliation of being hustled down the hill.

  “I know it will be considered a scandal to remove everyone’s darlingest doggerel-merchant from one’s office. But I’ll accept that opprobrium.…”

  “Besides, there’s always time to cancel your request or tell him you don’t really want me dragged down the drive.”

  Ramsey said into the telephone, “George, I have an intruder in my office. I’m sorry. Alec Ramsey, Extension. Very well, George. Soon as you can.” Looking up, he saw that the poet was gazing speculatively out of the window, perhaps to locate the threatened George. He spoke absently to Alec.

  “You know, I have something to expiate with you, a bizarre suspicion harboured for the sake of its own oddness.”

  “You may stick it!” Alec articulated.

  “Now something’s happened that will be a pleasant shock to you, but a shock just the same. I believed I owed it to you not to allow this … pleasant, as I say, shock to be broken to you by someone unaware of your state of mind.”

  Across the top of a letter received that day, Ramsey pretended to be writing a memo. What he wrote was, “Cleft by the gold karate of the sun.…”

  “You’ve won what you may consider a minus-quantity lottery at first. In fact, no horse ever came in at the odds your good fortune has.” The poet seemed to have forgotten the expiatory side of his visit and to be enjoying the role of pundit. “I say good fortune because although it may take your breath away, it gives the lie to reckless bastards such as myself.”

  Ramsey hung his head, joining his large hands across the nape of the neck. “Come on, come on. What about this damned lottery?”

  “Well, you’re prepared now, and I swear there’s no need for you to be shocked.”

  “God in heaven!” said Ramsey.

  And while the poet dithered along the edge of the revelation George arrived, a lump of a man with the university badge on his cap. “Mr Ramsey?”

  The poet swayed, making ready for the onslaught. Not all the geniality of George’s bruin-like bulk would make him go peaceably.

  “George,” Ramsey murmured, “I tried to ring you again.”

  “We got rid of that fellow,” the poet said. “He was a tough one.”

  “Not the fellow that I removed for Professor Meekin last week? Reckoned the world was flat? Tall, red-haired.…”

  “Not the same one,” Ramsey said.

  The poet entertained himself. “This one was about my size. Smelt of drink. Wanted to be financed to do a lecture tour. The arrogance of the drunk!”

  George unpocketed a notebook and took down the poet’s solemn and incomplete description. Ramsey smouldered, assenting for the sake of getting George out of the room, when there would be a chance for private violence.

  At last the man went, not satisfied but too polite to say so. Alec stood. “Get up,” he said. “Little poet mocks big philistine. Big philistine rips the tripes out of little poet. You understand?”

  “Don’t take yourself so seriously, Alec.”

  “Stand up. No? Well, I’ve always considered your verse a proper fuck-up of decent sensibilities. And it seems there isn’t much to you except your verse and a schoolboy sense of fun.”

  “Ah-hah, you’re on to me! But are you ready for the tidings, Brother Alec?”

  “Stand up and I’ll write you over the wall like the genuine bit of shit-house humour you are.”

  “Very well. But I must tell you they think they’ve found Leeming.”

  Alec, confused, said, “What Leeming?”

  “Leeming’s corpse. They think they’ve found it. No need for alarm, Alec. I simply didn’t want you to be taken by storm.”

  After some seconds Ramsey began to cry. He was terrified of this emergence—or exhumation—no matter how little or how much it might mean to outside eyes. But he found he was weeping, in part, for poor Leeming. For it seemed to him then that he had always been consoled by Leeming’s incorruptibility in the ice. It was as crude an intuition as this: he sensed that it diminished his guilt. Now he thought instantly that they must not force those pitiful remains to make any deferred payment of decay.

  The poet had made a manly handful of part of Ramsey’s right shoulder, and uttered soothing noises. When Ramsey quietened, the prosy little man said, “Understand they haven’t actually found the remains themselves, but think they’re likely to be no more than feet away, from certain … relics they discovered. They’re going to wait for old Mrs Leeming to make a decision on what she wants done. She may well want to leave the remains undisturbed, sailing down through the ice-cap, you know. That, by anyone’s imagining, is a fair simile for eternity.” He sighed. “You see what I mean by odds.”

  Ramsey shivered. His fear of the resurrection, of the mere event, recurred. He fought it with his reason. There was no chance of pundits reading betrayal in the way the corpse was laid; there was, he admitted, some danger that the prismatic strands of his obsessions would be focused to lunatic unity by that eruption. Yet his dread evaded analysis and ran free.

  “What are the details?” he asked.

  “A gentleman—or rather, a public servant—from the Department of External Affairs arrived here by this morning’s plane with a few items that were believed to be connected with the death of Leeming. If you verify this theory, then Mrs Leeming will be allowed to make one of three decisions. Fill in the pit again—in view of its having been so long. Or exhume Leeming and re-bury him in Antarctica. Or exhume him and bury him at home. That is, of course, if they do locate the remains.”

  “You speak of a pit.”

  “Yes, in a place known to you, the David Glacier. The Americans took an ice-physics team there at Christmas time. I don’t know what their purpose was exactly, but one of the things they did was to sink a deep ice-pit in what seemed a fairly open area. They sank it fifty feet down. They found two short lengths of ski-wood with initials hacked into the shorter length.”

  “Ah,” Ramsey said. “Ah.” Somehow his sense of Leeming having died had never been so pungently verified as now, by the poet’s stating of these few crude particulars. “Sweet Heaven,” he muttered, “the odds. The odds!”

  “Yes,” the poet admitted, properly reverent. For the odds were six million square miles multiplied by the depth of the ice-cap and divided by the length by breadth by height of Leeming in a sleeping-bag.

  Ramsey decided, “This finishes me.”

  “No, not at all. Why don’t you go home for a rest?”

  “Yes.” He felt frightened too that Leeming’s reappearance would bend and incite him powerfully towards publicly saying the truth.

  And he thought of the truth as of an unknown baggage that would be forced on him by this last ploy of Leeming’s, this resurgence. He seemed to be afraid, therefore, of matters yet unknown to him, matters for which he would feel culpable yet which would surprise him as much as they would surprise anyone.

  “What else do you know?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I know this much because I have a friend who is secretary of the Antarctic Division. Griffith is the man from External Aff
airs who has been sent to see you.”

  “With the … items?”

  The poet nodded indolently and rushed to other topics. The things that Ella did for her sanity were lecturing somewhere between part- and full-time in the history department and a weekly potting class. That noon she had come home with a fish-gaping Inca face. It looked genuinely primitive, it looked an artefact. She hoped to hang it up in the living-room.

  She fetched wire and, trying to plait it through the notches behind the face, ran it into the pad of her index finger. She swore, and returned to the damp box where Alec kept his tools. These were an immediate sign of Ramsey’s diminishing powers of control over his life. The box was not often opened and had once filled with rain when left out in the weather, so that there rusted at the bottom hammers and braces which Alec had occasionally replaced with newer ones on top.

  Ella could find no pliers. This had become a mark of their rare domestic endeavours; Alec’s rusting box could be depended upon to provide a plethora of unwanted equipment.

  She returned to the face, to torment the wire with her fingers. An understanding of the features diverted her in the dimness of the shed. Savouring the ovoid line she had given the mouth, and the emphatic eyebrows above shut eyes, she thought of Ramsey and told herself that this face was the face of a human sacrifice the moment the knife goes in. She wanted to ward off the omen by perhaps blessing herself.

  Seconds later a university sedan, driven by George the university guard, wheeled fast in through the gate and propped at the front of the house. For some reason, it was clear, George thought an instantaneous arrival was of the essence. He jumped from the driver’s seat, his big flank by accident toppling a staked hydrangea. Arrived at the offside back door, he took delivery of Alec, who had been eased into the open by the poet. Alec seemed ill, and the poet and George began to convoy him up the pathway.

  “God,” Ella said. She suspected this was the ultimate, whose details she had been schooled in by a hundred widows. Poor Alec Ramsey, busy about Adult Education, stops in mid-stride and wavers. Barbara rises to help him, but his brain fades and his heart says enough of blood. He wakes blue-lipped and impaired and is helped home by strangers to settle down industriously to the business of dying.

  She dropped the agonized face she had made in ignorance. The poet saw her sprint unevenly down the side of the house. She said, “Give me him!” and took him by the shoulders and peered into his face. Somehow he seemed chastened, but no older than he had at nine o’clock.

  “Hullo, Ella,” he said. “Ella, I’m finished.”

  “No, he’s not,” the poet pronounced. “He’s had a shock, that’s all.”

  “Yes,” Ella said, inculpating the poet. “Yes, often. What is it Alec?”

  “They’ve found Leeming.”

  “They think they’ve found him. The remains.” The poet told his story and, wary of Ella, let her know the decency of his motives.

  Ella accused him, just the same. “You brought this on.” She believed in ghosts and the conjuring-up of ghosts.

  “We mustn’t be superstitious,” the poet reasoned. “I admit to you I have no right to comment on the matter. But I think this is the best thing that could have happened.”

  Ella paused, for no adequate reason, on this hideous cliché by which both the indifferent and the grief-stricken reconciled themselves to somebody’s lingering death or broken marriage. An absolute assent rose in her: it was the best thing that could happen that the incorruptible Leeming might now be removed from his preserving element and, in some municipal cemetery, made to come to terms with his mortality.

  “Maybe,” she told the poet, and pressured Ramsey’s shoulders gently with her hands, telling him softly, “You’re not finished. What makes you say that? This is a good thing, a good thing.”

  Ramsey widened his eyes in response to her sympathy, but did not recant his fears.

  “Thank you, George,” Ella said, and to the poet, “Will you be going back with George?”

  Ramsey marginally protested. “No. Stay for a while.” For he knew how her pity might sour.

  Already she pretended to be more amused than she was. “Look how my enemies have become my friends.”

  Ramsey smiled a little, begging indulgence. “Yes. Well, he’s acted as if he understands the matter.”

  Ella too still smiled in her strained way. “If I don’t, it’s not through lack of tutoring, eh? You’d better both come inside.”

  George was sent off with thanks. Ella led Ramsey and the poet in through the double front doors which the triumph of her entry from pottery class half an hour before had left open. With a slack hand Ramsey delayed her on the threshold. “Ella, thank God you’re here.” But he knew she would not be so easily bought off. Both men followed her penitently into the living-room, where, Alec could tell, she was torn between showing her anxiety in her indecorous and grudging manner and playing the hostess. She brooded in mid-room. Ramsey had recently grown beyond the desire to explain to outsiders that this was not the genuine Ella but a later version, beset by her definitive childlessness and her imminent widowhood.

  “Ramsey,” she legislated decisively this time, “this is a very good thing.” She waited till he had found a seat. She did not help to lower him; it was a dangerous ritual to help an old man before he needed help, to give his years and today’s shock to his years official standing. It was the poet who stood by, discomposed by Ella’s offishness and ready to fuss.

  Ella continued, “Now you mustn’t look upon this as anything drastic. I know you’ve suffered a lot on account of this man.” She displayed the steely deference that an enemy shows for an enemy’s ailment. “But this will allay it all, because he’ll be put to rest, given a respectable burial. And that must mean a lot to you.”

  He had learnt that it was safer to ignore rather than mock her judgments. He nodded. But to his mind it was a dreadful resurrection that threatened. Not only did it edge him, as he had already sensed, towards the formulating of truth, but promised to finish him by drenching his evasiveness and fecklessness in such a flood of light that.… But he could not make out the results. (As for the truth, he did fear precisely its formulation, the task of utterance. Headlines and gossip around this town and any other could not touch him.)

  “Don’t you agree, Alec?”

  “Of course, Ella,” he said as if parodying marital submission.

  “Well, what do you mean by saying this finishes you? You said out there that you were finished. Where does that put me?”

  The poet insisted, “It’s merely the shock.”

  “What might be finished are your Leeming tantrums perhaps. But to say you’re finished is a tantrum in itself.”

  The poet risked probing at their apprehensions about Leeming. “If I might dare interrupt, you both presume that the remains will be found.”

  The Ramseys bore him with sullen politeness. For both of them, Leeming was a totem, a presence not subject to anticlimax. Some part of them believed that Leeming intended to emerge. The poet felt elated at making this discovery of a genuinely dramatic reaction.

  The way they failed to answer their ringing telephone was also quaint. It persisted, though, and Ella rose to it at last. She said yes a few chary times and then clamped her hand over the mouthpiece.

  “It’s someone from the Department of External Affairs. He wants to see you urgently or some such thing.”

  “He’d be the man. Griffith,” the poet told them. “From the Antarctic Division.”

  Ella belittled the knowledge with a cast of the eyes. “I see. Can he visit you here, Alec?”

  The poet mumbled at Alec, “I’d rest for a time. Take a sedative and have a doze. He can afford to wait.”

  “Why is he coming here at all?” Ella demanded, but decided to ask the man from the Antarctic Division himself. “Why do you wish to see my … Mr Ramsey?”

  An explanatory quacking prevailed for half a minute. “They want something identified,” she conv
eyed at last to Ramsey.

  “I know, some items,” he said. “Tell him he can come.” There was even a brand of excitement in his willingness to see the flotsam that would verify his fantastic memories; and Ella too was full of some form of anticipation as she told Griffith to come, and put down the phone.

  “Alec, this could be a marvellous development, it could be the best.…” She realized she was repeating an enemy’s judgment, the poet’s, and left it unfinished. She steeled herself to be patient, now that a little of the wreckage of that holy saga had come to the surface. When Ramsey saw it it would show itself to be a few trite scraps of waste, a few silly mementoes. Transplant them to a cemetery in the sardonic landscape of Australia, in flat Pinalba or in suburban Sydney, and they would weigh anyone’s ghost down with bathos; they would outrival the pickle-bottle borders in the graveyards of her childhood. Knowing this, she must tolerate for a little time any of his symptoms of shock—weeping, pallor, sense of dread. Professional undertaking would lay Leeming’s ghost; the dust of a poisonous myth would pour up the vent of the Northern Suburbs crematorium.

  She saw without warning that the poet was a blessing, so conciliatory, wearing the false clothing of his station-in-life, wondering whether he should remain.

  “Would you mind staying?” Ella surprised herself by asking him. He would be a guard against hysteria; he could treat hysteria in Alec with all sorts of patient manly liquors for which Ella had no time.

  “Griffith will think it’s strange that I’m here. But I’ll stay.”

  “Thank you. Alec—or rather, both of us—get very het up about things Antarctic.”

  Griffith was a brisk man; he moved into the Ramseys’ hallway with the vim and command of a technician, of a man come to repair their television set. The items under suspicion of concerning Leeming were leant against the hall wall within reach of the living area. His strenuous face had no reason not to suspect that the fragments should be identified without an excess of emotion and followed by morning tea. They were wrapped in corrugated cardboard and sealed with the departmental seal.