The Survivor Read online

  He’d told her, not at all. To admit otherwise would have been to seem to recriminate. Apart from his small inroad into Bohemia, experience with girls, city and country, had borne out that it was somehow always the fault of the male and that the ultimate sin was recrimination.

  Seas of moral difference lay, of course, between Mrs Leeming and the Bohemian girls. For Ramsey, hurt done against the man who would lead you into that absolute human state known as Antarctica partook of the mysterious sin against the spirit.

  “I can tell,” she insisted. “Alec, what we experienced won’t have any benefit for you if you think that way.”

  “I didn’t think it was intended to have benefit for me.”

  “So you think I was selfish?”

  “No. I didn’t mean not intended by you. I meant not intended by the scheme of things.”

  “The scheme of things? The natural law?”

  “I suppose I mean something like the natural law.”

  “Oh Alec, you still are a rather horrendous Presbyterian.”

  He could remember having explained comfortlessly that he had said nothing to Leeming. Leeming had been so engrossed in business on the Westralis and so feverish with dinners and presentations and the need to say the correct things to businessmen in Melbourne. Leeming was frantic to begin, in fact. To make confessions to him would have been to savage him from the flank. But Ramsey may have had also a half-recognized fear that the lady told the truth when she said that she and Leeming allowed each other infidelities, accepting that if they were necessary they were no longer infidelities. To Ramsey’s putatively free-thinking mind, one did well to be afraid of a leader who claimed to transcend the moral scheme, it being no less rigid than the physical or meteorological. He remembered keeping his face averted and knowing that she was smiling about this Protestant expedient that would save the gross memories from coiling out of him, save him from going aft to meet the Governor-General with a distorted trouser-fork.

  He could remember her saying, before three hoots signalled that His Excellency was at the Williamstown dock, “Do you think I would commit a genuine infidelity against Leeming with you?”

  Forty years later she repeated her claim into the longdistance line. “The same woman. And they tell me you viewed what the silly man from their Sydney office persisted in calling relics?”

  Ramsey admitted it.

  “Now this is no excuse for foolishness over Leeming.” She was acquainted with the focus of Ramsey’s ills. “You understand?”

  The same Belle Leeming. The knowledge of her wrongs was deposited deep in Leeming’s brain. But no sweat, Belle, no sweat.

  He said the six words aloud.

  “Not to make too much of the fact, Alec, it is characteristic of him, isn’t it?” It seemed for a second that she too considered the event as the deliberate act of a revenant. For all her air of wisdom, perhaps she was afraid like himself. “The persistence of it, the staying power. If he’s there, of course. But if he is, what are we to do with him?”

  At that instant Ramsey’s tongue seized. It was unprecedented. He had never had before this experience of some perceptive organ in himself, some subliminal wisdom for which he could take no credit, quelling intended sentences in his throat. He had meant to recommend that the pit be filled in or left alone. There were adequate reasons for leaving the prestigious corpse untouched. Someone in Antarctica even thought so, otherwise the digging might not have been suspended.

  In the strictest sense, this opinion was unutterable. Being an answer merely and not a resolution of issues—what he most wanted and least needed—it would return him to the accustomed and strangely beckoning impasse of last week and last year. There seemed to be a law of almost metaphysical decency compelling him to see that this amazing epiphany should not be prevented. But if he was unable to save himself from it, he was too afraid to damn himself to it at his own word.

  He said, “I don’t know, Belle. I simply can’t say.”

  “You know, I don’t think Leeming had a very strong sense of funerary aptness, Alec. I mean to say, it is a rather suburban consideration. But in so far as he thought of it at all, I believe dear Leeming would have liked the idea of floating down the ice-cap for an untold time and reaching the sea long after all of us were topsoil.”

  “I think he might have, too,” Ramsey ventured.

  Ritually, she always called Leeming “dear Leeming” now. This may have been symptomatic of a growing cosiness of age. But it was not an affectation or the half-cynical accolade of the professional widow whose spouse has become a pallid god-of-the-hearth, worthy of a mild canonization.

  She went on. “I don’t know, though. You see, I’m like Leeming when it comes to these matters. I don’t know much about what makes a fitting funeral. Here I have been, discreetly undermining society—”

  “From your plush Point Piper flat,” he mocked her.

  “Indeed. Discreetly undermining society and abstracting myself from the passage of time, which changes the fashions in funerals; and up pops dear Leeming and lands the undertaking problem of the century in my lap. Did he ever say anything to you, Alec? Anything that I can quote now as indicative of his wishes?”

  “No. I can’t remember anything. It was never presumed that what did happen would happen. It was never thought of as more than an abstract possibility.”

  “There’s a family vault here in Sydney. It’s still well tended. It holds his father and grandfather and sundry relatives. No need to tell you what the architecture’s like.”

  Leeming’s grandfather had established the family confectionery fortune. His burial place, which Ramsey had chanced on at the time of his first wife’s death and burial, was in the spirit of his trade.

  Ramsey said something noncommittal.

  “I wouldn’t put him in the vault,” Belle mused on. “He warrants a grave of his own. Though that’s what he’s got, isn’t it?” She said, as if it were a random fact with which she was not particularly impressed, “He was a great man. So if he is to be buried, he should have his own grave. Would the barbarity of the vault be cancelled by the decency of his lying near his fathers? I wish to God I had stronger apprehensions of propriety about interment.”

  He had no reason not to believe her confused. “This has tossed you, hasn’t it, Belle?”

  “It’s so perplexing. And so unlooked-for.”

  He felt for her a petulance that was nearly pity. “I can’t help you, Belle. I have no prerogative.…”

  “But you have, you have,” she insisted. “You were with him at the death.”

  The prospect of becoming an honoured mourner frightened him. “No, please, Belle. Can’t you see I give you only those answers I can’t avoid giving.” He was still obsessed with the thought of his recent auto-censorship.

  “Now Alec, you mustn’t let it touch your health. Keep that inviolate.” Her earlier doctrine of self-sovereignty had been withered by the years to a furiously defensive cherishing of self-health. Somewhere over seventy she had taken to leotards and yoga.

  “Listen, Belle, there must be no pressure put on me to attend … whatever and wherever.”

  “Very well, very well. You know I’ll honour that wish.”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s Ella?”

  “She doesn’t understand. She makes scenes. I could control matters if she could only understand.…”

  “She’s mystified. You should tell her things.”

  “She knows about you.”

  The widow laughed. “About me? You make it sound as if we’ve been meeting at country hotels for the past twenty years.”

  “I suppose I do. But we’ve got no common sense in these matters. Ella hasn’t. Ella is an absolutist.”

  During a silence they heard the twitter of the timing-device mounting up a bill for Mrs Leeming, whose decision would not be advanced no matter how long she spoke with Ramsey. Alec was on the verge of taking time off from his own anguish to think poor old thing. The silenc
e grew around her loneliness and unwillingness to admit to it.

  “I have a nephew there,” she said. “I may wish to visit him at this time. I’ve no one to help me. Most of my circle are dead or dying.”

  “Please don’t feel you have to have my permission to visit your own folk.” But he was not fervent at the likelihood.

  Belle continued to dither about her nephew. People fell out with him because they were mere technocrats while he was an Elizabethan, a Renaissance man.

  Alec threw his head in a tortured arc, but ended by saying softly, “Belle, I wish I could help you. But it’s beyond me. You have all my … unavailing sympathy, Belle. Believe me.…”

  “All right.”

  “Belle, the truth is I’m afraid.” Fear and the moist locked-up air of the house raised an itch on his arms which he raked with hooked fingers.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Of the light it casts on us. When we thought we were finished with the business.”

  There was some more costly silence. At last Belle said, “Don’t get yourself too involved in all this. Preserve yourself for Ella’s sake. You’ll live to eighty-five if you don’t abuse yourself in this way.”

  “Mere survival is no triumph. Even if a hundred years of it are good for a royal telegram.”

  Belle tried a tougher line. “Behave yourself, Alec. This is no more than an unearthing. You mustn’t seek overtones in it. Dead Leeming is merely dead Leeming. He died of his own necessity; and he would have had the insight to see that.”

  For what must have been the fourth or fifth time, the pips signified that Leeming’s widow was up for another three minutes’ worth. Belle seemed to be struck by a sudden thrift, and ended the talk. Even through his engrossment with Leeming, Ramsey could sense that she was being kind and loyal to an old flame.

  Back at the Extension building by mid-afternoon, he shied away from Barbara’s concern in the outer office. To defend himself, he was all briskness.

  She sang, “I have a number of messages, Mr Ramsey. Do you want them now?” She was a little hurt as well as solicitous, the same blend as Belle and Ella. She had decided with his other woman that he wouldn’t be working that afternoon, yet here he was, making a joke of their judgments. They were all earth-mothers, he told himself. Having eviscerated you, they nailed your hollow pelt to the wall and devoted themselves to seeing that it was never too cold, too hot, too tired, or in need of a cup of tea.

  “Ten minutes, eh, Babs?” he called, very much like a man in control of himself. Inside, he shook from a bottle four habituating stimulant pills and swallowed three of them. He stared out of the window at the park. In happier days he used to make a joke out of pretending it was illusory with its British trees and rich lawns and arbors. You never caught anyone in the act of tending it or, perhaps because of its ambiguous position, between university and town, a rate-paying backside there seeking a garden-seat.

  Beyond the park stood the bush-Gothic Anglican cathedral and, beyond it, an unflurried corner where an ancient department store called Jennings’ retailed impassibly. Within five minutes his heart outdid Jennings’ in pace by far. He felt tipsily fortified. He had never been able to root out the presumption he had that Leeming’s corpse displayed auguries which, if they were ever read, would somehow be to his, Ramsey’s, disgrace. With seventy-five milligrams of happiness beginning to besot his blood, he felt most convincingly that the world was merely a finite progression of parks and pulpits and Jenningses; that it did not particularly signify what was said of you on a limited and mortal number of corners. Some limited disgrace he could stand; and so could Ella, who would be challenged by it, whose potent motherliness would thrive on cherishing him in the face of the world. The drug helped him discount all the human elements that lay below his window: concrete, power-poles, red brick, all minced in with the native elements of the town: the river and willows and ridges to the north from which hulking stalks of red cedar came down to the town clamped on trailers. “Be at peace with the everlasting hills,” he thought as the massed dose shook his heart, “and the towns will look after themselves.”

  But to say all that was to say nothing. It did not touch those certain elements in himself which were now busily gathering to crisis. He thought it was time for him to look at his mail.

  “Only a handful,” said Barbara, bringing it in. She began expertly to deal them, giving him a précis of each. Soon, he thought directly into the girl’s gabbling face, you’ll have a director who won’t stand being directed. You’ll become weepy and sleepless and lose weight (though not from the hips) or put on unhappy weight.

  “And Sir Byron accepts our invitation to tomorrow night’s performance, but regrets Lady Mews cannot be there.”

  “Ah, the old Chimp on the track of home-grown culture.”

  “And Mr Pelham rang up very angry because the drama group staged a party for some of the incoming undergraduates and the masters of two colleges have lodged complaints about it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mr Pelham blamed the director of the Drama School.”

  “He must have been angry! He isn’t a man for recriminations.”

  “He said he was fed up. The whole summer-school programme is too much for one man to set up and supervise. That’s what he said.”

  Ramsey felt, for a second, maudlin at having overloaded and alienated a friend.

  “I’ll telephone him, Barbara. And thank you. I’m very grateful.”

  She raised one eyebrow.

  “For keeping the office afloat,” he said as a penance.

  Her eyes took on an intense and spurious chastity. “I only do what I’m paid for,” she lied in going.

  He sat nursing his pharmaceutical intoxication. Now and again the reality would break on him that they would indeed take that wronged and entire flesh out of the deep ice; the utter body, all the wronged blood solid in the veins, the brain frozen to that core of knowledge by which Ramsey had been known.

  He was trying to telephone Ella at the history department when Barbara came again to the door. Beside her stood the poet. They waited in a concerned and polite stance; a surgeon and a nurse.

  “I can’t see anyone now,” Ramsey complained.

  The surgeon and the nurse swapped professional glances, as if a symptom had been handed them.

  “Damn it all, come in and sit down then.” He was not unwilling to have company that knew some of the rules. The poet qualified. Ramsey put down the telephone.

  For some time they merely sat. Ramsey made the mouth of a man with acidosis.

  “Stomach off?” the poet asked.

  Ramsey believed he could afford to be ironic. “It’s Leeming’s hand. I shouldn’t have gulped it down. It has me by the lower bowel.” His jangled stomach felt very much that way.

  The poet merely coughed and came across the room to put a new bottle of whisky on Alec’s bookcase. “I thought you might need something like this and be too upset to get it.”

  “I’ll give you the money,” Ramsey insisted. He fumbled hopelessly in his fob-pocket. He must have had perhaps thirty-five cents there. “You were going home on this afternoon’s plane.”

  “I may as well stop till tomorrow.”

  “Have some luck with the widow Turner?”

  “I didn’t come to have luck with the widow Turner. I think you’d better have a glass of this stuff.”

  Ramsey speculated about the effect of whisky on his already pelting system. “Thanks.” Close to friendliness, he toasted the poet as the whisky was passed.

  “As a matter of fact,” the poet admitted, “I couldn’t get a seat on the plane. And of course I wanted to see how you were this afternoon.”

  “There’s nothing you can do, thank you.” Ramsey held his glass out, none the less, and the poet obliged him.

  “Do you think you should even be at work?”

  “No. Certainly not taking up a chair in which a younger backside could profitably sit.”

  “You’ve
always had trouble with Ella over the Leeming affair?”

  “You can’t be discouraged from impertinent questions, can you?” Ramsey stared at the blue hills. They quaked for a second in time with his heart. Liking to see the quake effect in an old, worn-down, settled continent, he drank again.

  “You were very young though at the time, weren’t you? The desirable minimum age for men working in Antarctica is supposed to be about twenty-five.”

  “You’ve been reading your American Antarctic Handbook or some such thing.”

  “Well, you were considerably younger than that, weren’t you?”

  “I was a big boy. I was dedicated. I was a polar monk and Leeming was my abbot.”

  “Have you ever read the official history?”

  “I even wrote part of it. Not the part you’re probably speaking of. But I wrote some. For Lloyd, who wasn’t very literate. Like many not very literate people, he died rich.”

  “Have you read the official history lately?”

  Ramsey claimed to have done so, and again held out his glass.

  “Do you think it’s wise?” the poet asked, meaning another glass. Ramsey claimed to think it was.

  “I’ll take your word that you’ve read the official history recently. Surely you can see it’s no great human document? Reading that, you might come to see Leeming as a rather shrunken figure.”

  “Shrunken? Leeming?” Ramsey filled with glee to see the mountains shake again.

  “He was a leader of talent, and single-minded. But single-minded people are limited, you know.”

  Ramsey leered without inhibition. The poet had made himself a flogging-post by his behaviour at Sir Chimpy’s and his present extravagant exhibition of concern. “You’re not single-minded then, you’re trying to tell me?”

  “No. My limitations are due to less classic causes. But leaders are not as rare as other classifications of talent.”

  “As poets, say?”

  “I’m not a poet’s wishbone. Poets are rare.”

  “Look, believe one who knows and leave it at that: Leeming was a moral giant. He walked and walked—after a stroke. He never stopped … testing himself.”