The Survivor (11 page)

Ramsey destroyed himself lightly. “They aren't wind-drift. I planted these things very deliberately, solidly; a person does in Antarctica. Cairns, markers, mounds, and so on. You make them all to last.”

He heard Ella utter a wry “Hurrah!” under her breath. He said, less grandly, “They may have been blown away. But the chances were in favour of their lasting.”

“So you think Leeming is close to where these were found?”

“Yes,” Ramsey said, and repeated the word, and nodded in a way almost ceremonial three or four times. This made Ella lose patience, seeing an altogether too reverent and ritual a manner of acknowledging an old corpse.

“And there's no ritual significance in the thing,” she told Ramsey. She sounded patient and minatory; her patience dwelt on each word and seemed to thumb-tack it to the ether. “He hasn't been in limbo, he's just been on ice.”

“I assure you, Ella, I don't see this as a mystery of religion.”

“What has us wondering,” Griffith said smoothly, surmounting the family quarrel, “is that there was no trace of the camera and plates. Not that there needs to be, of course.”

“The ways of glacial ice are no doubt strange,” supposed the poet.

But Ella could not tolerate this sombre, parsonical axiom. She was up and pacing, but stopped by the window to gather herself. Seeing her, Ramsey wanted to cry out that he was the desperate one, he was the one who should rend garments, that it became her to stand by to soothe. He could have struck her for failing to see his need. “Ella,” he said, “if you would like to go out for a matronly breath of fresh.…”

“Matronly?” She swept around. He could see the green, feline irises start in their peculiar way. “You said
matronly?
”

“I said it would be better if you went outside.”

“You said
matronly.
” She was frantic and triumphant; she had a pretext.

“Well, if I did.… Look, Ella, why don't you go and have some tea?” But he knew he had said one of the forbidden words and could not now avoid being made an even bigger fool of.

“Perhaps your admiring friends would be surprised to find that you mock me with that word. In view of my cancer of the womb.…”

“Christ!” Ramsey called. Both visitors stared. “Take her out,” he told the poet. “For God's sake take her into the kitchen and hit her with something.”

“You have rendered assault and battery superfluous, dear Alec.”

“Take her out, will you,” he ordered the poet again.

The poet made gestures of inadequacy: you might as well have asked the weather bureau to catch Valkyries.

Blessedly, Ella went herself, in a rush and probably ashamed at letting Griffith know her secret imagery.

In her electric absence Ramsey told the two men, “You mustn't take any notice of that cancer-of-the-womb stuff. She only means it symbolically. Childlessness she means.”

Griffith was blinking, still wondering why the occasion hadn't been all wistfulness and reminiscence and how many lumps do you take.

Ramsey said, “Here's something for your epic, bard. Call it ‘The Afternoon of an Argonaut. Complete with Sibyl.'”

The poet stared back. There was an air of righteousness about the man. Hadn't he given up two days' deferred leave just to expiate previous outrage? Yes, very much at ease he looked now; justified in his own eyes. The muse, Alec decided, provoked, might just as well have bedded down with Griffith as with this small accountant.

“I suppose you came for some such purpose,” Alec surmised. “Or is Mrs T. less Papally aligned this month?”

The poet excused himself. From the door he asked Griffith, “What plane are you catching back?”

“This evening, ten-to-six. Connects with the quarter-past-eight to Canberra.”

“Cool of the evening. See you on it. Good day.”

Alone with Ramsey, Griffith devoted himself to re-wrapping the cover and ski-wood.

“You've seen enough of these?” he remembered too late to ask.

“Oh yes, enough is enough.” Ramsey felt sheepish and wanted to re-establish himself in Griffith's eyes, in lieu of better ones. “I'm sorry for the way we've behaved. It's probably impossible for you—and in another sense, for my wife—to realize how close to the bone this whole affair cuts.”

“That's understandable,” Griffith assented busily. “You were very young. It must have been harrowing.”

But Ramsey didn't want to be interpreted by Griffith. He shook his head. “No. The problem is that now I have to detail it all over again to people.”

“I see.”

“These events …
coerce
me in that direction.” He slapped the ham of his leg. “Hopeless. What about the press?”

“They won't be told until we've seen Mrs Leeming. It will all be well handled by the minister's press secretary. After that, Mrs Leeming must be given a little time to decide what she wants done with the remains. In any case, this late in the season, a decision may be out of the question. She may well want a simple service held at the mouth of the pit, and no more. At her age that would be understandable and fitting enough.”

At her age. Ramsey could tell that Griffith thought State funerals were best.

“Anyhow, Mr Ramsey, I regret very much that it's been so painful.”

“No.” Alec made a face like a victim, a face that asked, Why me? “But the odds,” he said. “I've won an immense game of … of adverse chance. The odds are … prodigious.”

Griffith, however, would not even let him have that much. “Not as prodigious as they seem, you know. Men have always tended to travel on established routes in Antarctica. The David Glacier has been travelled by Mawson and Edgeworth David, by you people … and did Griffith Taylor visit it? Or Campbell? I'm not sure.”

“You seem to have an interest,” Ramsey said.

In Ramsey's house passion ran high enough without Ella and Alec resorting to the hearty sport of grudge-bearing. So lunch hour found them shame-faced and not very articulate, but forgivingly disposed. Ella prescribed that he should rest for half an hour, and he obeyed, spending his proneness on old magazines whose wiseacre commentaries and year-old political prophecies he could judge from a position of hindsight. Whenever he was in the furnace this sort of thing made his favourite reading.

Ella had gone to the history department's staff meeting, politely willing to call in at Ramsey's office and say he might not be in during the afternoon. It would have gratified him to prove her message nonsense by gusting in five minutes after she had been there, yet there was no validity any more in that sort of gesture.

He was still sunk in eighteen-months-old news from Saigon and Cape Town as someone—Mormon preacher, baker, insurance man?—rang the door-bell. He did not answer. Least of all he wanted to face some brisk creature who, wholesomely lunched, was already well into the afternoon's achievements.

The visitor persisted in pressing the chimes. Ramsey stalked into the living-room and up to the bay windows. Here a hatefully bright day filtered through the cretonne, and two of its most hatefully bright creatures could be seen from the flank, dressed informally, summer-school style, standing in the porch. The Kables. Mrs Kable, holding a sunhat fringed with carrots of felt, looked a cornucopian being, the impression of bounty heightened by very tight slacks. Eric Kable, in science-fiction shirt, seemed a well-shaven Martian.

“Cool, man!” Ramsey muttered with an accent. He saw Kable ask his wife for something and receive from her a small pad and pencil on which he wrote something before lodging a sheet of paper under the door. Then they went back to the university sedan they had come in, Titania swerving through the gate with a carp-like flick of the hips.

It said, Dear Alec, that Mrs Leeming (and a fool of an exclamation mark after the name) had telephoned the office and been given his home number by Barbara. Mrs Leeming might not be immediately able to telephone but would be grateful if he could call her Sydney number as soon as possible. Mrs Leeming would accept the charges.

He knew how gratified the Kables would have been to deliver a message implying that Ramsey was not where he could reasonably be expected to be. No wonder they had minced away in that self-congratulatory manner, relishing the suspicion that Alec was hiding indoors.

But rather than indulge his almost religious hostility to the Kables, he telephoned Mrs Leeming in great haste. She had always been a most persuasively sane lady; and he felt that he would be comforted to find that she still was. As well, she had the say on what was to be done with Leeming.

He heard Belle Leeming's firm old voice say that she would accept the charges.

“Alec?” she wondered affectionately.

“Belle, how are you?”

“How are
you
, you poor foolish fellow?”

“Answer
my
question.”

“Yes, I've heard from External Affairs, if you mean that. But I'm still the same woman as ever.”

Indeed. The same proportions of disdain and irony and pretended solicitude. The exactness of the blend reminded Alec of sailing-time, 1924, when fogged by all the lifting and stowing and perilous overloading of the old Albany whaler that Leeming had re-christened
Westralis
, Ramsey had been found by Belle Leeming as he mooned around the kennels forward of the galley. The same solicitude: it was the departure ceremony; and to reach Alec she had had to climb onto the deck-cargo in a violet calf-length gown and a cloche, clinging to a parasol. The same banter: “Alec, I could tell by the spirit in which you left last week that you are determined to work through the conventional rituals of guilt.”

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.”