The Survivor (14 page)

All was simplicity. It would take an exercise of courage and, above all, humility; and consciously Ramsey moulded himself to the exercise. He stripped Leeming's feet and opened his own clothing to that old carnivore, the polar wind. He unbuttoned the flesh of his chest as easily as any of the other layers of warmth so that Leeming should have the poor comfort of treading into the core of his vitals. So the leader, blind as an idol, trod about in Ramsey's guts.

The pain was sharp enough to wake him. “Christ, Christ!” he began to moan at it, for blasphemy's sake and not in verification of the poet's theories. By the normal rules of sleep, he should have awoken and sat upright, groping for a bedside light. Yet he clung with both fists to the major reality of the dream. His heart burst like fruit as Leeming tramped wildly as peasants showing off in vats at wine festivals. Blood as thin and hot as coffee ran down him and made steamy runnels in the ice. He uttered curses against Leeming while the geyser of sizzling blood ate the pinnacles down and sucked a moat deeper and riotously deeper into the foundations of the ice-throne.

At length it was shown to be a church sedile of banal make on which Leeming sat with a look of blind dominance on his face. On either arm of the sedile was written,
I have made my bed in the darkness. I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister
. Ramsey was startled to read this, and looked in question at Leeming. Were these words a profession of preference on Leeming's part, or had some zealous parson ordered them when the chair was still at the joinery works?

The face, whose monstrosities were actually arranged to convey smugness, made no admissions.

Pain forgotten, Ramsey was still puzzling when the sedile and its imperial figure began to slide in the wash of blood and rode away, not at all like flotsam, rather like a barge-of-state. He knew that it changed matters immensely for him to have caused that unwedging. It occurred to him to make a pun, he was so elated. “This is what they mean by a solution,” he said aloud.

When Ramsey woke the final time it was to the small stutter of the drawn Venetian blinds caught in a minimal breath of air. There was something about the noise and the air and the quality of the light that told him it was mid-morning. This fact, and the busy noises of diesels at the North Street depot, failed to reproach him for his late rise. He was refreshed and self-contained. He felt freed of obsessions, but was not: they had merely taken a more generous turn in his sleep.

He saw that the bed was medicinally tidy and tucked about, and that he lay in it tidily. Without anxiety, he wondered whether the dream had been heart-attack and if he was a patient.

There was talk from the living-room. Ella gabbling in drained monotone, and a specious lark of a voice tacking and swooping above Ella's: Mrs Kable; and listening again, he heard Eric Kable rumble out something interrogative.

He pulled on his bathrobe and stood performing guarded strong-man gestures before the full-length mirror, countenancing the gnarled calves below the robe. If the Kables had called as mourners, he would go in to them limbered.

In this spirit, dressed only to the knees, and all knots and nubbles below them, he passed into the hall. Here Ella's Inca head had waited gaping on the occasional table since the previous morning. The surprised Indian features had dust on them and didn't seem to Ramsey to be facing any more than a banal tragedy. He would not tell Ella; but he did make a mouth in imitation, and asked mockingly, “Anal thermometer broke, did it, friend?”

He lifted the face and took it in to Ella.

“You should hang this, dear.”

She told him he should still be sleeping. The peculiar harshness of her voice, which only he could recognize as contrite, delighted him. She could not be loving in a facile way, and she knew that their trouble was likely to recur. Looking wistful, she put out her hand and squeezed his wrist.

He welcomed the Kables with the rich hypocrisy their act called forth in him.

“Eric and Valerie called in to see how you were,” Ella explained. “I must have given them the wrong impression yesterday.”

“How kind,” he said. He was looking at Ella, who sat side-on and as if allied to him. Her loose summer shift, large enough to hide a pregnancy, gave her a Gauguin simplicity, and the sweet line of her shoulder giving on to her back and hips stirred his pulse. The legs, three-quarters visible and chastely joined at the knees, for once did not look too blatantly like the proud quarters of a dairy-farmer's daughter. Alec stood pulsing like an athlete beneath the bathrobe. “I feel a new man,” he claimed, not altogether figuratively.

“You've had so much trouble, you poor old thing,” Mrs Kable was telling him. “If it keeps up they may have to put you out to grass.”

“Reserve me for stud purposes,” he suggested. Everyone laughed. Mrs Kable twisted her hips at an excessive angle to the lie of her upper frame and appeared very much the sexual cliché Ramsey believed her to be. For proof he had Ella's infallible reactions. Ella, who could be jealous of Lady Sadie, was serene before Valerie Kable.

“But Barbara was telling us you've had some nasty turns,” the lady persisted. Eric Kable raised joined hands a little from his stomach in a sort of antiphonal concern.

“Nothing symptomatic of decline,” Ramsey told them.

“Will we see you at the
Dream
?” Eric Kable asked him. Alec wondered if, away from Valerie's direction, he might even have been provoked into saying, “If you're so bloody well then, come to the play.”

“The
Dream?
”

“The Midsummer's-Night's one,” said Valerie. “You've got no idea what the producer has made out of that old tissue of fairy-tales. It's as gay as a French farce.”

Both Ramseys cringed marginally before chuckling.

“Ella, you should be in this too,” Mrs Kable added.

Ramsey said, for the sake of having it denied by Ella, “The only role life with me has fitted Ella for is Lear's third daughter.”

Ella demurred quite satisfactorily.

Then, giving no warning, Kable himself unfurled the morning paper he had been holding in his lap and offered it to Ramsey. “Have you seen this, Alec?” A fuzzy picture was indicated of someone in a dinner-suit. Though Ramsey's eyes were still good, he had to do the old man's trick of finding his focus by tilting his head and extending the paper. When he had, the face that formed and pounced on him from the blotty photograph was Leeming's. He had expected it would be, but was angered by so blunt an attempt to unhinge him. He felt pity, too, for what the bitch goddesses of the media might do to that thin, somehow private face. There were some indications in the headline to one side of the photograph. “Hopes of Recovering Famous Antarctic Corpse,” he read aloud, showing the article lightly to Ella to prove that he had not been touched.

Ella relaxed into mere anger. Her voice quavered a little as she said, “Famous Antarctic Corpse! Next they'll be talking of eminent or distinguished corpses.
Who's Who in the Graveyard.
”

Ramsey took the paper from her and gave it back to Kable raggedly folded. “We've known for some time. Poor Leeming. The ghouls will be out in force.”

And though Eric showed hints of being routed, Valerie jumped in chattily. “We knew too. Denis Leeming told us. Last night.”

“Leeming is Theseus,” Kable explained, to show that they had not gone hunting for the news. “In the
Dream.
”

“He's extraordinarily excited.”

“Yes, Sanders claims he
is
of an hysterical cast of mind.”

“Sanders may simply be jealous. He was, after all, a mere senior lecturer until a year or so ago. A most insecure man.”

“I don't know,” said Ella. “I like people who are promoted late in life. It's a sign they do it by fair means.”

After a chastened interval of silence, Eric Kable dragged the debate back onto its keel. “Anyhow, whatever the relative stabilities of dons, Denis feels this is a chance to reassert the value of his uncle's work.”

And give him a sense of genealogical grandeur after his recent failure, Ramsey would have liked to add.

“Talking of promotion,” Alec said, just to fret them, knowing they could not afford to ask him what he meant, “how are all you drama buffs making out with Morris Pelham?”

His face ever full of a commercial brand of candour, Kable now willingly allowed his eyes to go devious. Having so signalled that he was about to tell untruths, he murmured, “Excellently.”

Valerie reproved the gallant lie. “Now you know, Eric, that that's not quite the truth, although you're hardly in a position to say otherwise.”

“Oh?” Ella said. Ramsey could tell she was enjoying the way the game was going.

“The boy is very puritan. Tim—the producer, you know—is all inspiration. His discipline seems a little loose, but this is because he deals with professionals who carry their own private discipline with them.” Valerie sighed a second, hankering for this nun-like capacity. At whatever risk, Ramsey winked at Ella. “Mr Pelham, not understanding the sort of talent that doesn't work to timetable.…”

Kable came in more moderately, lofting the ball to Valerie's forehand smash. “Morris does try to supplement Tim's deficiencies. He tends to round people up at the end of tea-breaks.…”

“Rounds them up? Corrals them! Which is an insult to Eric too, because Eric directs this particular school, even if Morris has charge of the entire programme.” She accented “entire” as a reproach to Alec.

“He's anxious for the success of the enterprise, of course,” Kable limply surmised.

“But it's deeper still than that, Eric. There's something dreadfully suppressed about that boy, something drastically misdirected.”

“Perhaps,” said Kable, and explained to the Ramseys, “Valerie's more perceptive than I am. I believe Morris does merely what he considers to be his duty.”

“No reasonable sort of man would consider that sort of boundary-riding as his duty. I can tell you, Alec, the members of the school resent it.”

“He wants to make sure, of course, that Tim's sweetness isn't wasted on the desert air.…” Kable again left his sentence hanging on a not over-subtle octave that bound his Valerie to “but's”.

She said, “But you don't get the best out of strictly creative talents by timing their tea-breaks and seeing that the kiddies don't answer teacher back.”

“Very well!” Alec said without warning and conclusively. Ella's quiet presence was full of applause. With two words Ramsey had given himself, although half-naked, the character of an examining magistrate who has concluded the taking of evidence; and exposed the Kables as over-eager witnesses. “I must go to the shower if you'll excuse me, Valerie, Eric.”

“Of course.” They would be very happy to see him go now.

“But if you mean by what you've told me that Pelham is guilty of the worst crime against education … I don't mean inefficiency, I don't mean lack of knowledge … what I mean is being out of tune with the spirit of the culture he's trying to transmit; if you think he's guilty of that crime.…”

Kable said, “Oh, I don't think we'd go so far as all that.”

“But if you're implying it, say, I couldn't agree with you less.”

Valerie smiled with rage. “But Alec, you're rarely there when these things happen, are you?”

“No, Valerie. To my shame. And my attendance record isn't likely to improve unless I wash and shave and get across to where the action is.”

So he excused himself again and went to wash. He was ashamed that the load he had laid on Pelham gave an edge to the Kables' malice. He was saddened to find such concert between a notorious cuckold and a randy wife. But the congratulatory emanations from Ella's direction helped console him.

Under the gush of water, Ramsey heard Ella come in.

“Alec, you don't mind, do you? I have to get ready to interview freshers.”

“Certainly,” he said, like one polite boarder to another. It was not that they were in any bodily sense afraid of each other or that they made love, when they made love, through holes in shrouds. It was that their recent estrangement subjected the new peace they had made in confronting the Kables, the new peace Ramsey had made by showing a healthy toughness, to certain rules of etiquette. Unreal ones, since he knew she might well want him to bound dripping from behind the curtain and force her down on the tiles. And, soaping his firm breast and thinking how sixty-two was no more than middle-aged these days, he felt adequate to the feat.

Because he must get to his desk within the next half-hour, he turned from vibrant memories of Ella's summer dress and concise legs, and flesh the hand threatened to skid on; he turned, for abstention's sake, to memories of the odious Kables.

“Something suppressed about Pelham, eh? Something misdirected. Perhaps old Valerie considers herself the panacea.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“And they're very strong on young Leeming.”

“Yes. A funny assortment, that.”

“Do you think la belle Valerie may be currently favouring young Leeming?”

“Leeming perhaps, though he's a pallid boy. Perhaps the poet.”

“The poet?”

“He has all the qualities. He's distinguished and he's sexually silly.”

“But you can't judge him in terms of Sadie's soirée.”

“Yes I can. You, drunk, would never reconnoitre up ladies' thighs. You'd insult everyone, but your hands wouldn't stray.”

Talk of thighs and straying hands did little for his self-control. “Anyway,” he told her in haste, “the poet's only been here since yesterday.”

“Of course.”

She sneezed, and dropped some bottled beauty aid in the sink.

“Ella,” he said. “I'm well again.”