The Survivor (17 page)

The point was that two Ramseys would not have survived while two Lloyds would have. Certainly Ramsey had had invigorating daydreams, himself become a man to be taken most seriously by Leeming, the man to whom his wife fell, and, after his initial anger, an equal and special friend.

At other times he innocently accepted that Belle had no other lovers, or that she had others from whom he would capture her, or that she would be rendered down to docility by his love. He believed he loved her, and once imagined Leeming painlessly dead, and himself the strong family friend taking the widow's troubles on himself. He dreamt sometimes that she was his woman whom he protected. At others the authentic Belle imposed herself across him. His thighs drew heat as if from hers. His troubled seed woke him.

These dreams were negatived by the mere fact that he never told Leeming about Belle and himself. The expedition
seemed
to be the reason. The overall impact of an expedition on the mind of an outsider is of a mystical unity and compactness of endeavour. But the fate of a leader is to face one banal detail after another. You could go to Leeming with your will to confess formed, and he would ask you, straightaway and with urgency, about sores on a given dog's flank, or shrinkage of a cork liner in some tin or other. How could Ramsey then say, “By the way, I've been meaning to tell you …”?

By this neglect, and by his dreams, he was not well set up to face Leeming's illness and death.

So Leeming was declared dead.

After his first collapse, Leeming lived six days. He was irascible, resisted being loaded onto the sledge like baggage, tried to march. Often they let him. They too were weary, Ramsey wearied for life. And Lloyd thought that to struggle with Leeming to make him accept passenger status on the sledge would be more dangerous to him than to let him march. Ramsey suffered from finding himself aggressive against the leader who shambled through those days, the sort of brute wreckage that makes you want both to succour and lash out with your fists. Ramsey could sense perversity in the dying man's stamina, and condemned himself for sensing it, whenever he ceased hating him totally.

He felt liberated on the man's second and lethal collapse.

It was the end of March, 1926.

They were on fairly open ice with ridges running west-east. This counted as a good travelling surface: in fact, someone had surveyed the glacier earlier in the summer and recommended it as such.

Ramsey had loaded the tank on the sledge while the polar wigwam still stood upright, and had to work pieces of cooker and Lloyd's and his own sleeping-bags and the provision box up the funnel-entrance to the outside. He worked in this overdone way so that he could find it easier to build up a good head of resentment against Lloyd.

The canvas box they called the tank was frozen and the tank strap no more pliable than, say, a medium-tensile metal.

There was a terrible flesh-eating wind and he began and kept on whimpering for his fingers in useless inner gloves. The drift was beside the point, since they had to travel.

Without cease he swore against Lloyd.

The reason was that Lloyd was a doctor and had the, for the moment, soft work of attending Leeming inside and nodding over Leeming's feet. These had become especially liable to frostbite since Leeming took his first stroke.

Lloyd was competent, and called the strokes cerebral vascular accidents. Ramsey told himself that Lloyd used these terms to give a technical grandeur to his reasons for not strapping up the tank.

When he had packed, he wormed back under canvas, full of bad weather news.

“There,” he intended to say and show Lloyd his mitts. “Freezing up already.”

Lloyd was toggling Leeming's sleeping-bag at the neck and face. Ramsey could see through for a second to the face within. It was livid and elsewhere canvas-coloured. Shredded skin hung from the lips like a moustache.

He asked if the man had moved. Lloyd said he had died. Lloyd seemed self-disgusted, as if his lack of skill had brought on the death. He was, in fact, an expert physician.

Ramsey's scalding hands engrossed him. Therefore he postponed any grief. It would have been better, he could remember thinking, if he had had time to speak to Leeming about his wife. And he had a woolly sense that Lloyd was wrapping up a wronged body. He felt that to be sure he ought to listen to Leeming's heart, but that meant a job of untying and untoggling and un-press-studding Leeming's clothing—the zip-fastener era had not dawned—and he was still bending over his hands, which were stuck into his clothes against his Jaeger fleece, returning to life and to their million daily pains that were all to do with chafing and split skin.

He was afraid besides that he might find the heart had begun beating again—and then they would have had to put up with his shambling again and waste food on him.

They removed the tent from him and folded it—it took forcing, and went together like a metal concertina. Ramsey thought Leeming looked hateful. Exposed like that in his grey sleeping-bag, he looked like some animal's hateful excreta.

Lloyd said they mustn't waste strength by the body. But he ran through some of the service for the dead—he'd learned it in France and knew it was the acceptable thing at such a time, as one sends cards at Christmas.

Then he went to the sledge and stood stiffly looking east, where, the maps had it, was the ice-tongue and the sound still ice-free (perhaps) and the
Westralis
. If the
Westralis
had not been there they would have made a hole in the ice and lived off seal-meat. And Ramsey would easily have gone mad.

He found he could not leave Leeming straightaway. Though he avoided looking at him, he put some markers at his head.

Lloyd was patient. He said nothing at all that day that could be remembered.

But at night in the tent he took out a small leather sachet and let it fall in front of Ramsey's face as if he would immediately find significance in it. He didn't. Lloyd said, “My God, aren't you just an innocent? Did you ever speak to him about Belle?”

Ramsey felt sick: he hadn't known Lloyd was privy to the fact of Belle and himself. He had to say no, he hadn't spoken to him. Lloyd stared at him and he stared back, warning the man to keep those eyes of superior morality off him. Lloyd had a wealth of the sort of virtues that have social value. While Ramsey hated him he was also encouraged about their chances because of Lloyd's straightforward moral anger of the moment.

Lloyd took a wad of paper from the sachet. It was rolled tight. He unwrapped it for Ramsey.

The paper began with a quotation from St Paul, the one about lest St Paul consider himself exalted by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given him in the flesh, and so on. Belle had speciously used this text and put beneath it a name list, a who's-who nearly, except that Ramsey was included. And Lloyd. There were politicians and writers and others—Ramsey felt first sick, then hollow, then brimmed with revulsion.

Lloyd said it wasn't right of her to send her husband that sort of bloody thing and it was beneath Leeming to wear it. He said this was the greatest wrong, as if the two of them there had practised many wrongs on Leeming but couldn't match Belle. For a second he wanted blood and attacked the interests Ramsey and Leeming had shared. But he instantly returned to sense and the question of survival. While Ramsey thought of Leeming's perverse endurance and suspected that the husband had, too late, decided to settle accounts, Lloyd spoke of the same suspicion. “He travelled with me and he travelled with you, with both our names round his neck. Makes you wonder whether he wanted to travel or was making a bloody pilgrimage.” He reminded Ramsey that he'd said once there were certain tests a man had to pass before he was considered a man in his, Lloyd's, book.

Ramsey said yes, he recalled that.

Lloyd told him, “Well, that bastard hardly passed any of them.”

Ramsey had no idea what his own intentions were at the time, whether to live or die. He was, above all, tired. Books and ideas would never have for him the same bouquet. He wanted to protect his hands and feet. Lloyd's bullying brought him home.

As the burying parson was to say, Lloyd's bullying was a great gift.

When the undertaker's men came forward from the aisle to strip the casket of its florals—including a band of lilies inscribed, “To the memory of Arthur Lloyd, who led me to the ship, Antarctica, March 1926”—Ramsey felt the claustrophobia of the corpse, and was unable to stay.

Once outside, he smoked, as if for antiseptic reasons, what was for him a rare cigarette, while the fumes of Arthur Lloyd scudded south from an imitation belltower chimney.

The parallel between the ice's possession of Leeming and the fire's of Lloyd made him whimsical, but also brought to a point the numbness of a funeral earlier that month, when his child had been buried.

Mourners began to emerge, signifying a swift end to matters involving the late Dr Lloyd. Arthur Lloyd's son sought out and cut off Ramsey's line of departure to tell him how touched they all were by what had been written on Ramsey's tribute.

Ella quickly became his woman again. It was Ramsey's attempts at tenderness that were characterized by wavering followed by a hedonist roughness by which he meant to emphasize that although he thought himself less than a man, she was none the less his.

Ella read another meaning into Ramsey's harsh physicality: in losing her child she had been diminished in his eyes to merely one other woman; all purpose in their mating had been abridged. His new fierceness took her into areas of sensuality she had always coveted; yet she woke in the middle of nights feeling scarified by the gymnastics of excess.

By the light of day, Ramsey lacked force, postponed staff meetings, failed to fetch an electrician for two weeks after the water-heater broke down (thus questioning the right of his body to warm water), ceased to read, wallowed in cryptic crosswords in the small hours. He let loose his previously well-controlled talent for fecklessness, mislaying documents, breaking most of the rules by which the records were kept straight. Letters from every State begged to draw his attention to proposals that had been made by neglected letters two months before. Since order was an image of a moral rightness he could not pretend to, his desk became a documentary abattoirs.

Again Ella reacted to his decline and withdrawal as if they were reproaches on her barrenness. Ramsey tried to placate both Ella and Leeming's ghost by sketching his unworthiness in abstract terms—calling himself talentless, treacherous, slothful. But nothing could be expiated or fended off in those terms. On her parallel line, Ella became so insistent on the question of barrenness that when he was driven past endurance, it was the first stick he took up to beat her with. Which all the more convinced her of his contempt.

Within four months he was sicker than he would be again until the poet told him of the Antarctic findings. While Ella hastened to misjudge the cause, his colleagues rushed to excuse him on the grounds of his stillborn. Cornered by doctors and the visits of his wife, he threw them at last the news of his historically real adultery with Belle Leeming. Both Ella and the doctors were variously enriched by the confession; and, the doctors in particular, diverted by the neatness of the pattern made by Calvinism, Belle, and the dead child, ceased to press him for worse news, news of deeper than mere historic strength, news of Leeming left sleeping.

5

On play night they ate a fast dinner together. Ella did not trouble him about his hint of further admissions concerning Leeming. Even if she had not had a taste for the tranquillity of the moment, she believed that all she could possibly be given would be some new face of his abiding hysteria.

Meanwhile, Alec thought of what he had to say as
deep
truth; but it was at last accessible to his tongue. There was no need to gabble it out. So they both felt a frail gaiety when the Union Theatre, beleaguered by undergraduates, loomed through their windscreens.

Ramsey found that the evil aspect of meeting Pelham when he was feeling well was that he felt twice as guilty for what seemed unnecessary burdens he was putting on the boy. Pelham greeted them in the foyer; there was certainly a brand of tolerant resentment in him now. He said, with a seeming lack of purpose that probably meant he was testing Alec, “I wondered whether you wanted to meet the cast.”

They made for the side door. Ella whispered to Ramsey behind Pelham's gratified back, “We can show the Kables how well we persist in being.”

Yet what had they against the Kables except a tidy revulsion over Valerie's sexual nomadism, and Eric's behaviour at a university dinner a year ago when, tipsy in Valerie's absence, he had called on Ramsey to resign? The outcry had eaten into Ramsey at the time. But hadn't it since given Ella and Alec many an hour of delightful antipathy to Mr and Mrs Kable?

Professionally speaking, Eric Kable was an unflinching worker graced with wide interests and even (Ramsey would have denied it if he could) sound literary taste. Why should he feel as passionately as he did that Kable should not succeed to the directorate he himself had ceased to care about? Kable would sharpen up the office; the names of Pinter and Modigliani would thrive in the living-rooms of distant farms, together with a thorough understanding of the future for self-government in West Irian.

But he sidestepped the demands his reason was making on his prejudices. He told himself that in the hierarchy of his present mind Pelham was a son of light, Kable a yokel. There was no arguing it; a man as harassed as he had been could not afford to tire himself arguing the ground plan of his mind.

They found, in any case, that Kable wasn't available for baiting. Beyond the props table, he sat (a little pink in the face and wearing a cravat) on a stool before a battery of dimmers. He called to someone on stage, “Number-seven has to be put straight onto three-quarter power then.” A man of wide interests, polishing up his lighting plan. His concern for number-seven rheostat convicted the Ramseys of their own pettiness. But Pelham firmly led them on.