The Survivor (15 page)

“Then I am too.” But she sounded tired. “Alec?”

“Yes.”

“I get angry because I don't want to lose you to this unbelievable thing. I get angry to think of the possibility. I won't tolerate this … decomposition. In fact, I can't tolerate it.”

He turned the taps off and asked for his towel. Ella passed it to him without violating the modesty of the drawn curtain. “I'm sorry, Alec. It will all happen again though.”

“No. It's the way you said. The best thing, Leeming turning up.”

“Turning up?” she questioned, as if she didn't herself think of Leeming in active terms. “Being found. In either case I don't know what dangers are involved for us. I never do. All I know is that dangers there are, enough to do for us, Alec.”

“No, it's the solution. But you must accept the solution in my terms.”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you mind if I left this university?”

“For another?”

“I fear not.”

“To retire?”

“Not in the azalea-growing sense. I can think of two or three journals I could review books for. Even a daily paper. I could lecture for the W.E.A. I could even teach in a school.”

“Today's youth?”

“I'd rein the little bastards in. Well?”

She said flatly, “Whatever you like.”

He heard the bathroom chair pulled out from beneath the towel rack and the moan she made in sitting. At length she said, “Two days ago you were hysterical. Now you're happy as a young buck. None of it's any good. It all comes from the one central lunacy.”

“Oh no.” He came out dressed in a towel and stood above her. “Has this old, old trouble ever manifested itself before in
happiness
? You don't need for me to be director of Extension, do you?”

So endearingly and provokingly young he seemed then to Ella that she laid her head against his towel-girt belly. She meant to signify that she had despaired, but wistfully. “Before I knew you,” she told him, “I used to be always meeting boys who because of a dream or a chemical shift in the blood would assure you their lives were changed, that they'd beaten themselves, that they were fated to manipulate lesser men, to become moral giants or mystics or extend the limits of the novel. Over beer, in town, at the Imperial, they'd tell you these things. Prior to stumbling out the back. You remind me of them.”

They argued this point for ten more minutes with rare sanity, until even Ella began to hope that he might have become substantially less vulnerable. There were things he could utter now, he said, things he could remember, that he had not been able to utter or remember before, but he mustn't keep her from her freshers. He assured her that he would not lose his power to articulate them.

For the sake of being punctual they broke off some likely love-skirmishing. The young, he said, the eager youths she would advise all afternoon, deserved a sight of her cowled shift.

They could even speak of Belle Leeming and the likelihood of her coming to the university; and, clinically, of Ramsey's forty-year-old adultery. She asked could news of it, one quaint way or another, arise out of Leeming's emergence. There was a list of names that Dr Lloyd had had. What had become of that? Alec said he didn't know, but that a list of names was merely a list of names and had no meaning in itself.

He explained how what he feared was the reappearance itself. The eroded deity that dwelt in Ramsey's consciousness was a force of irony that would bring ironic consummations to his life. He supposed that the modern equivalent of being “saved” (in the sense the term had once been used in the Drummoyne Manse) might well be to see and accept this one pattern of which a life was capable, a pattern of irony. This completed, a man was at last his own man; but he could not then sit at the same desk as before.

“Well,” Ella told him, “to presume so completely that Leeming will be found and base your future on it … that's insane.” Yet they both knew that she was willing to compromise and accept this less virulent madness.

So he was hopeful and cubbish. She must shake her dislodged breasts back into their buckrammed cups and insist on going. From the door she said wryly, “Perhaps if I didn't ask questions there'd be time for you to say those unutterables you mentioned.” She could see that he was still frightened by them.

“Not now, Ella.”

She made a chirping cynical noise. “I'll give you odds, Ramsey, that after all this secrecy and posturing I won't even be shocked.”

Seven years before, in the summer of 1956, Ella had—in that quaint term implying inadvertence—fallen pregnant. She began to bleed dangerously, as often as once a week, from the time her state was confirmed by a doctor. There was never any soothing her when she found herself bloody. Ramsey stood in the hallway calling comfort to her while she evaded all his clichés of hope and cleansed herself in private. It was her grief as much as her sluicings that were too intimate for him to intrude upon.

The rate of bleeding increased, yet the embryo continued to develop. Fearing a monster, Ramsey began to insinuate the idea of abortion. In view of her long sterility, Ella saw such talk as a betrayal.

At five months, the doctor could hear a heart-beat, but bleeding went on. Ramsey was told that whatever frantic hopes Ella held the child could not be born healthy and would probably come before its time. The doctor suggested a city hospital. In the seventh month, in a vast baby-farm of a hospital, the child died in the womb and was released by Caesarean section.

Ella did not mourn the loss in any accepted sense of the word; she was gay at visiting times. Yet it was the end of her youth. She had, until that time, worked at a career in the history department, gathered material for a doctoral thesis, been stung by ideas, and otherwise favoured the illusion that the future was without limit. Now she saw the apparent but specious infinitude of her mind narrowed down—to one dreary lumber yard of cut-rate ideas—by the very excesses of enthusiasm she had committed when young.

Her primitive nature rejected the idea of adoption. This she thought of as redressing the balance of her own barrenness by calling in someone else's fertility. It was futile to tell her that within a few days the child would seem as if born of her, that to ensure it was fed it would ingratiate itself frantically. Ella might well have had a doctorate planned, but her pride and shame were as basic as those of a tribal woman cursed with a dead womb.

Ramsey already felt that he provided only the poorest vistas, yet Ella persisted in even more intense hopes of possessing him as her universe, her race, her tribe, her brood.

Stepping at that time from a Castlereagh Street boutique with a present for her, Ramsey was struck on the ham by an electrician scuttling into a café, swinging the compartmentalized tool-tray that had done the damage. The electrician turned his small eroded face back to Ramsey. Ramsey found it at least evocative.

“Hey, it's Alec Ramsey.”

“That's right.” Alec strained after the name. “Steve. Steve?”

“Steve,” the little man admitted. “I was base electrician, remember? Used to help you fillet the seals. Real cordon bleu job. Me? The place finished me. Ain't over it yet. Ulcer, see.” He whispered. “Not enough tart. You know. I need tart. Regular. I did then, anyway.”

“You don't look past the need yet.”

“God, I'm not neither. But that place … I get nightmares about it.”

“Not many of us left to have nightmares, Steve.”

While Ramsey chatted with the dyspeptic little electrician he wondered what Steve was doing, hustling over Sydney's rabid pavements to fix fuses in Greek cafés and Magyar coffee houses. Didn't someone in Canberra know he was an historic relic, one of Leeming's last men?

“How's Dr Lloyd?” Steve asked Ramsey.

“I think he's well.”

A fretful young Greek came to the street end of the café's counter. “Ey, we got today's holl milk goan bad.”

“O.K. Adonis, keep your feathers on.”

“Thas awright about feathers. We lose the business while you chatter-chatter.”

“Who do you think you are? Bloody Onassis?” And to Ramsey: “Didn't you know about Dr Lloyd? No? He's full of cancer, poor old bugger.” He enjoyed being able to alarm Ramsey with Lloyd's fatal state. He would have been disappointed to have been limited to saying that Lloyd was merely half full of cancer. “They opened him, but there wasn't anything left untouched. So they sewed him up again and sent him away to die of it. I thought he'd just been sick, you know, and he used to do the wife's eyes and hardly charge us anything. So I sent him a get-well card, not knowing. And I got this toffee-nosed letter back from some junior bint in his family, Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd, saying it was feared Dr Lloyd wouldn't recover, so they hadn't given him the card. But I don't think the old Arthur would've minded, do you? I mean, he was never morbid.”

Not knowing he had said it, “I must go and see him,” Alec said. At wide intervals over thirty years he and Lloyd had made what would be called conversation, but there had always been an undefined urgency in Ramsey to speak bluntly and at length. It was a demand that had been, up to now, always postponable. But he and Lloyd had been fused by the very fact of survival, and would ultimately, like two spouses, have to speak the truth profoundly.

He telephoned Lloyd's house at Rose Bay and explained to the woman who answered why he had some right to visit the death-bed. She went away. At the end of the crackling line came the peculiar resonant silence of Dr Lloyd's big house of stone. The woman returned, sounding unwilling in saying that Dr Lloyd cared to see Ramsey, but giving all manner of reminders about the man's weak state. Ramsey would need the reminders more than, making faces in the phone-booth, he imagined.

On the street he was struck by a distaste and lassitude at the thought of seeing Lloyd again, and of seeing him dying practically, ruggedly. So he kept missing taxis and it took a sly one, nosing along the curb for victims, to catch him.

A desultory woman who called herself Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd met Ramsey at the door and left him in the vestibule for ten minutes. She returned with a middle-aged nun of some obscure order whose entire work was the nursing of terminal cases. Then she led Ramsey back upstairs.

The room was shaded by holland blinds drawn to knee-height. Two parallelograms of light nuzzled in under the blinds and reached for Lloyd's big, grey hand. False sweet smells, the sort that come from cans, overlaid the stink of the alien organism that owned Lloyd now.

Ramsey had seen Lloyd rarely enough since 1926. He remembered a man as tall as but broader than himself and who, bearded from the South, resembled Tsar Nicholas II. This sunken face was a parody of that one, though the eyes seemed still vainly addicted to survival.

“Here you are, father,” Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd said, and left.

“Alec,” Lloyd uttered with a real warmth and raised two fingers of one hand off the bed.

“Arthur.” Ramsey shook the two fingers.

“I'm sorry if I smell,” Lloyd said because he meant it, not because he was trying to play the marvellously brave old patient. “These synthetic perfumes are no damn good. I asked Sister Antoine to bring along some of the incense her people burn in their ceremonies. She thinks I'm pulling her leg. I tell her I've never been anywhere near a nun's leg. She laughs. She's a good sport, that Sister Antoine.”

There was actually a copy of the
Australian Medical Journal
open on the bedside table. The page said, “Medicinal Control of Pterygia: a New Treatment”. Ramsey was disconcerted into privately acclaiming the bravery of keeping up on pterygia when you would never see another one.

Lloyd's breathing came hard but the speech very clear. He was weak, but his concentration did not waver. Ramsey hoped to God that he was not so excessively valiant as to refuse pain-killers.

“Are you in much pain, Arthur?” he asked straight.

“A little. I don't get my morphine until five. But it scarcely makes me drowsy now. Never mind. I'd rather go out in mid-sentence.”

It was true that the doctor seemed moribund, but very toughly so, and Ramsey resisted admiring him, remembering that the toughness was of the man's fibre and went hand-in-hand with less likeable insensitivities. Lloyd demonstrated the major one immediately, by asking with his all-boys-together brand of malice, “Seen old Belle Leeming?”

“I'm afraid very little.”

“Yes. All the sting went out of knowing Belle, didn't it?” There was an element left of the hard, intolerable mockery of Ramsey and himself that may have been the blunt man's way of expiating. But the mockery faded quickly. “I'll tell you what, though. We haven't seen nearly enough of each other, Alec.”

“That's right, we haven't.”

“Of course, you felt under an obligation to me. That was bloody ridiculous.”

“I suppose it was.” He didn't want to hurt the dying man, but suggested, “We weren't the best of friends in 'twenty-six.”

“But that was Antarctica, Alec.”

“Maybe, but I don't think Antarctica is a substantial state of existence on its own, as Leeming used to seem to think.”

“Do you really think I ever gave a damn for that sort of poetic balls? We should have seen more of each other, that's all.”

Then Lloyd had a spasm. You could see how nearly dead he was by the feebleness of the head that wished to strain back into the pillows but lacked the strength. Like something wrung, the face shed gobs of sweat. Ramsey looked about for a bell, and thought of going to the top of the stairs to call that good sport, Sister Antoine. He was halfway to the door when he heard a loud snort of release. Lloyd was better, taking whooping mouthfuls of breath.

“Shall I call someone, Arthur? I hope I didn't cause that.”

“Don't be silly,” Lloyd told him in a reduced voice. “Funny thing, this cancer. I don't think they'll ever find a cure for it. A special cancer, all his own, for each man.”