The Survivor (18 page)

In two bunker-like rooms at the back of the stage, Athens lords and ladies and diverse supernatural agencies were nearly dressed for their play.

“Have you met the gentlemen of the cast?” Pelham asked the Ramseys formally. The gentlemen responded by swinging away from their mirrors to front on the visitors. Their faces shone with a more than cosmetic radiance, these men who had taken their annual holidays to come to the drama seminar and act in a kinky performance of Shakespeare. Ramsey felt reverent before the staying-power of their zeal. Since his own range of enthusiasms had been intimidated out of existence, he could no longer understand the ardours of the very people on whom his department relied for its being.

Ella, a traditionalist, called out, “But the costuming!”

A boy with a pitted face said votively, “Yes, nothing conventional. That's why it's such a privilege to work under Tim.”

Puck wore tight pants of tangerine, a paisley shirt, polaroids, a septic-looking beard. He did not seem especially credible as one who could put a girdle round the earth in forty seconds; but a stagily large hypodermic on his dressing-table seemed to imply that anything might be possible on lysergic acid. Next to him Oberon fondled a ten-gallon hat and filled out a tuxedo and sequin-studded cowboy boots. The Athenian lords were dressed in dinner suits, the Athenian workmen in khaki shorts, blue singlets, sweaty-brimmed hats.

Ramsey felt exhilarated by all of them, and humbled as well. They proved that, however he neglected his department, someone he'd never met would be going to the trouble of being thorough and invigorating and zanily original with the material at hand. He wouldn't hesitate to bet that they even knew their lines.

Then he saw that nearest the door was a vacant place, and on the make-up table a heap of three books. The top one said
Ice Motion—Its Constants and Variables
. Ramsey, waiting on Leeming's re-emergence now as on a liberation, had forgotten how liable he was to that same touchiness that had ruined an evening with the Pinalba Rotarians some months before. His best social grin strained as he bent to find the titles of the other two books. The second, opened at the graph of an ice-grid, was
The United States Ice Physics Manual
, the third
Antarctic Glaciation
.

For a second Ramsey's face tended into lines of mad affront; for it seemed that this roomful of men dressed for a high form of practical joke against the cash-paying customers had been encouraged by dear Tim's flippancy to make a fool of him, Ramsey. Yet after a second, sanity asserted itself physically, with an almost muscular sensation in his chest. So he smiled in time and remarked, “Someone studious missing?”

“That's Denis Leeming,” Oberon told him, and went on perfecting the dents in his Stetson. “I believe he's down the corridor.”

The concept of young Leeming boning up on his uncle's physical environment revolted him. Pelham and Ella wished the cast success and began to leave, Ella still easeful, unaware that Ramsey had had his surprise.

Outside, near the ladies' dressing-room, they found a phantasmagoric Mrs Kable, apparelled to within a millimetre of her life. A jaguar-coloured leotard defined her lower limbs; a silken cummerbund held her waist. A white shirt with bell sleeves combined to further the erotic image, which was perfected by a pith-helmet and a stockwhip held in the hands.

Morris Pelham winked sombrely at Ramsey; Ella made choking sounds and pleaded her sinuses. Valerie loomed towards them as if she had been waiting there for no one else. They praised her costume, and she performed for them one fairy-twirl. Alec knew that young men in the audience would lie awake tonight thinking of the brashly sweet concordance of her hips and belly as shown off by those jaguar pants.

“Oh, Alec,” she said, “could you keep an eye out for Denis? He's running about in a state of acute excitement bordering on lunacy.”

Her concern for Leeming seemed uncoloured, something more valid than a mere preparation for scoring off people. Even the words “acute excitement bordering on lunacy” were a surrender of extensive information to the enemy, and therefore a gauge of her uneasiness. Ramsey concluded again that there was an affair at the basis of her concern. “You see, the aunt is here. Mrs Leeming.”

Ramsey knew that Belle might be coming to the tableland, but had not told Ella. Now she searched his face for the hazards the news raised, while Alec choked an instant on the maniac resentment he had not felt for the Kables that morning, when their news-carrying had had an edge to it.

“Here in the town?” he asked lightly; but the likelihood of Belle's nearness did give him a squeamish feeling of being encompassed.

Titania pulled a face that gave her a frazzled look. “She's even staying in Denis's flat at Parker College. Of course, he must put her up.…”

Ella and Ramsey and perhaps even Pelham thought, “Ahha. One sports arena eliminated.” How ironic that Mrs Leeming, a wide-range lover (on quite subtle grounds) of past decades, should now be curtailing Valerie Kable in her bloom.

At this point the much-bruited Tim came hustling down the corridor, calling crisply, “Good luck Valerie. Seen him?”

Mrs Kable let her respect for art-on-legs, and her sense of having touched the golden bough with a small hoist from this man, generate a gush of special laughter. She intoned, “Bless you, Tim!” as huskily as Bacall. “We're still looking for him,” and when he had gone, reverted instantly to the banal Ramseys and that quaint Englishman, Pelham.

“I wouldn't worry,” Pelham said.

“I don't want to pester Tim, but the truth is Denis isn't to be found. Eric has been hunting for him, but he isn't anywhere here, front or back, and he isn't with his aunt. And the fact is, he's in this lyric state of excitement … well, we simply wonder where he could have got to.”

Lightly teasing, Ella said she had never known anyone to come to harm in a lyric state of excitement. Perhaps she was taking revenge on Valerie for changing her evidence thus after beginning with “a state of acute excitement bordering on lunacy”.

“I can't leave here,” Valerie went on, bound by her own ingenuousness to fail to notice the malice of others, “but I wonder if you'd tell Eric to come and see me if he's still at the lights. And if you should happen to see Denis.… I don't know what sort of performance we can expect from him tonight, after all this unrest.”

Ramsey knew he should not ask, but failed to curb himself. “What exactly is the cause of all this hithering and thithering?”

“He may be going to Antarctica,” she whispered, eyeing the corridor up and down for eavesdroppers. “Just for a few weeks. All to do with arrangements for the uncle. If you could do the small favour of looking out for him. I know it's presumptuous of me to requisition the director of the department and his wife and a senior lecturer.…”

No, they said, it gave them pleasure. But first they must give their best wishes to the ladies.

It had been hot in the quick forge of backstage, so they took a breath of the fresh evening on their way back to the front of the theatre. Pelham and Ramsey smoked, Ella stood breathing the unstressed night. Pelham was friendly again, and a good friend.

Ella proposed a stroll, since they had seven minutes plus any delay that Leeming might be able to cause. There was an undertone of urgency in Ramsey—to meet Belle Leeming if she must be met. But his urgencies did not compel him any more; or so he hoped, commencing to saunter under the cool of the trees.

He said, “Morris, there's no need for you to say a word when I tell you that I intend to resign. Ella already knows.”

Won over thoroughly, Pelham said he regretted it. Alec shoved such valedictions away from him with both hands and, checking on Ella, found her face peaked but acquiescent in the moonlight.

“You shouldn't look on this as a formal declaration but as a nod good—or so I hope—as a wink. At one stage I saw myself lasting until you got your doctorate, but you say that won't be for a year yet. You see, I wanted you—and not certain persons unnamed—to take my place. I shall certainly make it clear to the vice-chancellor that you're my choice, but I shan't have a formal choice, you see. It's up to the selection committee, some of whom will think well of a man considerably senior to you. Again, no names.”

“But he has a formal connection with someone in panther's pants?” Pelham suggested, sounding dour and rueful in the authentic Yorkshire tradition. Ella and Ramsey laughed frugally, for Ramsey was playing with Pelham's career and Morris could not, at his age, consummate the ironic patterns of his life by retiring.

“There's an assistant directorship vacant in Queensland, so they tell me. If you looked like being passed over here—”

“I won't work under Kable.” Pelham said it with fervour and with a margin of censure in Ramsey's direction. “I couldn't take all that bedroom politics buggering up the works.”

“Morris, I hope you'll treat this as confidential.”

“And as far from irrevocable,” Ella, who had been so understanding, still felt forced to add.

Perhaps this waiver was lost on Pelham, though, for he began to point to a form below them on a hip of lawn beyond which stood the gallows shape of the stage put together for the graduation ceremony which would be held … “Christ!” Ramsey said below his breath, “tomorrow.” Meanwhile, there was certainly the outline of a well-clad male lying athwart the curve of the bank. He seemed to have taken up the primary position for relaxation as suggested by yogis or women in black tights from the Workers' Educational. Perhaps he had been neatly spread-eagled, no less. Eric Kable, wronged once too often, pays off his wife's lover with … possibly a sandbag from backstage. So, at one bound, Eric gets life and Pelham gets promotion without having to resort to Queensland.

In the spirit of this whimsy rather than from any certainty, Alec said, “I think it's Leeming.”

It took a young man, Pelham, to walk down such a slope. There was no movement in the shape until Pelham was practically on it, when it rolled on its back, making such an abrupt change from slackness to control that Ella yelped.

“Good night … who is it? …
good night
, Morris,” it said.

“Good night, Denis.” Even Pelham had caught the national tradition: first names to the very death. “Are you well?”

“Oh, yes.” Leeming got to his feet. He too wore dinner-suit as an Athenian gentleman should. “I fell asleep.”

“You're lucky we didn't have a love philtre handy,” Ramsey called to him.

Ramsey could see the scholarly Leeming face transmuted onto the skull of a very different man from uncle Stephen. The line of the mouth looked particularly long when broken up by Denis Leeming's abiding sense of being threatened by lesser men.

Ella explained how he had been missed by Mrs Kable, and the four of them turned back to the theatre together. Young Leeming seemed a little chagrined by Valerie Kable's motherly fussing.

“I felt I might have trouble with lines unless I could get away for a good bout of concentration. As you know, there are bigger things afoot in our family now than amateur dramatics.”

“Now then!” Pelham contended. “The Extension Department has gone to expense to see that they're more than amateur.”

“Just the same,” Ella conceded, “you must be considerably disturbed.”

Leeming ignored the censure and the appeasement. He chatted copiously about himself, seeming proud of his ability to fall asleep at curtain time while beset by aunt, uncle, and Mrs Kable's overstated concern. “I took up the turtle position and lay there forcing everything from my mind. You see Arabs in the Levant do this—it sometimes stands them in stead of hours of sleep. Hess used to do it too—you know, the German leader who made that inexplicable flight to Scotland in 1940 to offer peace terms? He was a remarkable man, even though a Nazi. He could still handle a fighter plane at the age of forty-five.”

“Hope yet, Alec,” Ella said while Leeming harangued on like a man under pep drugs. The reports of his enemies said he always conversed this way.

“I had a Chinese friend in England who was given hell by his college tutor. When this uncouth Welshman had my friend properly riled, my friend would simply join his thumb and second finger, thereby making a closed circuit of his tensions, or some such thing. I don't quite understand the physics of it, if physics is the word, but it used to do wonders for my Asian. So, combining these three exercises, I'm afraid I fell asleep.”

“It sounds like a hybrid process,” Alec said. “Yoga, Arab, Chinese.”

Leeming murmured, “Culture is always a cross-breed.”

Ella approached a new topic, an adventurous one. “How is your aunt just at the moment?”

“She's inside now, in the theatre.” He turned to Alec. “I hope you won't upset her.”

Ramsey let a silence signify some measure of hurt. “Who told you I was likely to?”

“Oh, Aunt Belle doesn't give away secrets. But you've always been affected by my uncle's death. That's known.”

“By the Kables, perhaps.”

“No, generally known.”

Ella told Leeming in a tight voice, “You can at least depend on Alec to attempt more tact than you seem capable of.”

“They tell us you're going to Antarctica,” Pelham intervened.

“Yes. To be at the diggings.” Leeming said it clinically, as if uncle Stephen Leeming were a Greek vase on the Turkish littoral. “Nothing is definite yet, but I've applied for two weeks' leave. The Americans have told us that if the weather lifts there's to be a flight from Christchurch to McMurdo Sound the evening after next. It's nothing more than proper that a member of the family should be there,” he ended chastely.

Yet another silence rose around the masticating sounds their shoes made on gravel. The theatre hove before them, its foyer still thronged. On the edge of the night and in the open stood a roué at work, the rangy, elegant shape of Professor Sanders who had shared with them the discomfort of the poet's night-out at the vice-chancellor's. A pretty girl, her eye-sockets emphasized to the diameter of saucers by misery and the uncertain light, faced him. It was a private confrontation, so much so that instinctive decency had the Leeming rescue party skirting round the two, who scarcely noticed them in spite of the noise of trodden gravel. Sanders' voice, level and intense, carried to them.