The Survivor (19 page)

“Look, I'm a man of principle. Anyone who lives beyond the normal rules has to be. Consistency of conscience. All I ask is that you should have a consistent conscience.”

“It's not the same sort of thing,” the girl muttered.

Sanders put his hand to his forehead as the Ramseys and Pelham and Leeming passed. But it was the movement of a man in genuine puzzlement rather than of someone merely trying to hide his face. They heard him say in a scarcely lowered voice, “But how can I be expected to afford …?”

Ella whispered, “The womanizer unmanned.”

It appeared that the sight of his departmental head, Professor Sanders, debating some personal matter with a young scholar, possibly an undergraduate, had exhilarated Leeming further, almost to the point of geniality. He thanked them for waking him, patently convinced that he could have slept a long time on the methods of Rudolf Hess. They wished him well as he went off to lend his fairly inadvertent talents to Tim.

As Ella and Ramsey came into the theatre through a side door they each searched earnestly but with mutual discretion for the aunt. Neither had succeeded by the time the lights were dimmed.

Alec found it sweet to sit in the dark and whisper patronizing things about the production and the acting.

“So much for the Reverend Bowdler,” he hissed as Mrs Kable whirled through fairydom exploiting double-entendres she wouldn't have admitted to knowing in her offstage pose of guilelessness. “She isn't saying it according to the verse pattern,” Ella complained. But a joyous audience didn't give a damn.

There is a point in the play where Lysander, whose eyes have been anointed with love-ointment, pursues Helena through the forest and awakens a similarly anointed Demetrius-Leeming, asleep there for the past two hundred lines. At the words “You love her not” Leeming was meant to rise and besiege Helena from her blind side; and the two upright actors implied that this course should now be taken by inclining their heads minutely towards the prone Leeming. Who still did not move. Encouraged by the lightness with which Tim had laid the play down before them and by the fluffiness of the acting, a group of students began to sing advice, and Leeming woke to find that his crossbred art of relaxation had betrayed him again.

Yet he might have heard the prompter and made a recovery if he had not dropped the correctness of Athenian gentleman and classic lover and begun to argue with the youth who was Lysander. Lysander kept to the dramatic illusion and tried to argue in character, and so fought at a handicap.

Ramsey, who had often enough made a fool of himself and gone on to compound the matter, still blushed for Denis Leeming. Yet there was at least a doggedness about the nephew this evening that reminded Alec of the uncle. Meanwhile, even the students fell embarrassed, and in the hollowness of the audience's sense of shock, laughter and catcalls rang false.

Then the curtain fell, but no lights came up. People began to chat and wait on explanations; which came from Lysander, breaking the curtains open and coming forward in a rush, as if either impelled or braking the momentum of a sudden escape from someone's hands.

Lysander begged their pardons and said that the delay followed an error of which he himself was primarily guilty. Someone's voice, not necessarily Leeming's, was heard from within the curtains: “… bloody hero of himself.…” When the curtain came up again, Leeming continued his Demetrius with a knotty sort of vigour; which made it impossible for people to forget that here was Leeming acting Demetrius with a knotty sort of vigour to show that he wasn't intimidated by people's opinions. Ramsey wondered whether the lapse hadn't been caused by the thought of ice grids.

Suddenly the interval lights were on, exposing Alec to the necessity of meeting Mrs Leeming and showing her to Ella. In a foyer full of undistinguished youth a sole old lady with classic face gone rather leonine and britannic with age was easy to locate. As was the due of so imperial a lady, Alec saw her. She did not, or did not seem to, see him.

“We have to speak to her. You don't mind, do you?” After all, he could have said, if there was argument, that at the time of his coupling with Belle Ella had been five years of age.

None the less, as Ella advanced, her eyes were brittle with a good will alien to her. It was certain that she saw the physical grandeur of the old woman as something worth mistrusting.

“Belle,” he said simply, conversationally, careful against sounding nostalgic.

She rounded, uncertain. For forty years they had met only by accident, at intervals and never for long. “Alec,” she guessed now in the face of this rugged old man. “Yes, Alec. And this must be.…”

“Ella,” Ramsey told her. Ella stood back a little, foolishly believing herself cheapened.

“Oh, Ella,” Mrs Leeming said, and searched Ella's face with the same direct brilliance that had undermined Ramsey decades past. Ella was saved from anger by seeing that one of those incisive irises was rimmed by an ugly yellow growth. “I've always wanted to meet you.”

“And I you, Mrs Leeming.” Which, despite Ella's best efforts, sounded like something said at a showdown.

“At the risk of being thought a mere flatterer,” Belle Leeming said, “I must comment on your complexion, dear. How many of these eighteen-year-olds can match it?”

How many of them could match Belle's? Ramsey thought. Her cheeks, mouth, and throat were startlingly shapely, her complexion even, though her temples gave a hint of sinking to purple basins. All this looked false on what was (it was somehow obvious) a very old lady, so that cynics would have incorrectly written it down to extreme care before the mirror, recourse to cosmeticians and even to cosmetic surgery.

Ella was looking sideways at Ramsey, to see how the compliment had registered on him. She was too suspicious of mockery to attempt graciousness in return.

“You're afraid I'm being insincere,” Belle startled her by saying.

“No, no,” Ramsey denied on her behalf. “For some reason praise always takes Ella by storm.”

“Do you think I'd try sarcasm, Ella, when my closest relative has just made such a fool of himself?”

Ella felt like the delinquent schoolgirl caught out by a meticulously just headmistress. It would have been preferable to be insulted. She seized on Belle's proffered weakness.

“You mean Denis?” she said.

“I wish he didn't have these unfortunate public mannerisms. It embarrasses his friends, but worst of all, it embarrasses him. So that he's committed, then, to further inanities.”

Ramsey tried to gloss the question over. “It's simply because he mistrusts himself. And don't we all?” he added for luck, in case the words might turn on him.

“That's characteristic of Denis. But living in the groves of Academe helped do this to him. The people who are so toffee-nosed about him now fêted him as the child-wonder once. All the laurels were his for the picking up, and pick them up he did. It's ludicrous to see the letters after his name. Three master's degrees, no less. Did you know that, Ella? Three, one of them honours from Oxford. Half a dozen diplomas. It's freakish. When they go to so much trouble to shore the poor boy up, to stir him on to become a latter-day Da Vinci, the least they could do is finish the job properly and make him a doctor. Though I suppose he'd want a Ph.D.(Hons. Oxon.) then. Is there such a thing, Alec?”

Alec thought she dealt with her nephew at such length out of mercy towards himself. He had this and a great amount of other evidence to prove that in her singular way she was a loyal and discreet woman. Yet he wondered if it was even possible that she was being merciful to herself. Less rabid and doctrinaire than she used to be, she might also be a little less impregnable.

Ella did not care to leave the matter tacit. She asked without warning, “Mrs Leeming, how do you feel about this discovery?”

Belle did not pause. “My husband?”

“I'm sorry, but Alec suffers a great deal for his memory.” She felt contrite to see the old eyes, the one with the growth, flicker for an instant, as if altering focus.

“You've got every right to ask, Ella.”

“What will happen, then, Mrs Leeming?”

“I don't know. I'm an old woman, you see. I want to be advised by Denis.”

“He'll go south?” Ramsey said.

“We think it would be a good idea.” The widow shut her eyes.

Ramsey's own eyes made one conspiratorial sweep of the room before he gave her advice. “Perhaps I should tell you, Belle. Those who know him seem to think he's a little unstable at the moment.”

Belle remained in an aloof stance. “Denis? I trust my own. There's no one else to call on.”

Yet Alec could not believe that the old woman relied on any vein of good sense in Leeming the younger; nor could he imagine her as the fond aunt-by-marriage, blinded, in the face of her own decaying, to the oddities of her kin. As for her being an old woman beset by events in which she needed a mediator, he could see no evidence for it other than the mere statistical evidence of her years. And age came as close to being an irrelevance in her case as it could possibly be for mortal woman.

Again he found it intolerable that Leeming, immune up till now at his improbable latitude, should be required to rot in the earth to make a circus for Denis.

“Indeed there's no one else to call on, Belle,” he affirmed. “For God's sake don't fail to do what's needed yourself.”

The widow stared at him. The stare was read by Ella as something to do with pain; but such a reading was provoked by her belief that a funeral under the aegis of Leeming the younger was the very thing to exorcize Leeming the elder.

“Alec,” she pleaded. “Be decent.”

She was herself startled then to find the old lady's hand on her wrist. “No, no, no, Ella. He's within his rights.” It was toneless: the old lady thought Ramsey's rights funny ones.

Alec refused to be shamed. “You're the widow,” he insisted.

“It's a precise description,” Belle admitted.

“I don't think you of all people should consider that your age excuses you.”

The two women referred to each other's eyes. Ramsey's brashness had made Ella forget Belle's past whorings; they were entrenched in sisterhood, happily misreading each other.

“Alec, if I were senile and had lost control of my bowels, as thousands have at my age, you would certainly excuse me. But what you could never forgive is that a robust woman of seventy-nine years should attempt to preserve her health.”

“You surely don't mean that Mrs Leeming should go south herself?” Ella challenged him.

“Belle knows what I mean.”

Ella was reminded by this that Mrs Leeming and Ramsey had shared more than meanings. She resented Alec's flaunting of Christian names as token of intimacy, and did not know that he had always called Belle Mrs Leeming until they had again met by accident and innocently in a restaurant in 1938.

The old lady said, “Ella asked me what I thought about this discovery. Let me tell you that it's all grotesque and alien to me, as Leeming's ambitions always tended to be.”

Alec might have said some such thing as “So it seems”. But Belle still retained her asbestos air of candour, of the heroism of the straight talker. Before it, liars felt intimidated. Ramsey was a liar.

“You can't tell me there was any need for that last journey. Ella, if
you
had been his wife—a better wife, that is, than I was—you would have seen the nonsense in it. Oh I know, man's irradicable thirst for knowledge is invoked. But who can say man's soul does actually thirst to know the height and latitude of mountains in Victoria Land? That isn't knowledge, it's fact. Void fact, too. There is no human significance in the configuration of the hindquarters of those mountains.”

Ella blinked, but remained loyal to the old woman. She knew that she was not herself tolerant of Ramsey's fantasies. Yet she could not conceive of her intolerance extending itself to the dishonouring of Ramsey's memory.

“Now the ludicrous and tragic nature,” Belle continued, “of what was done by Leeming was that it could all have been done from the air within a short time. Quite a number of people have seen his abhorrence of aircraft as something odd, as if it was important to him to reproduce the conditions of earlier expeditions. You know yourself, Alec, he was offered a Hawker aircraft. His motives all had to do with some sort of self-testing. Let me speak bluntly about my husband. His death was in some ways less meritorious than if he'd drunk himself to death, because drinking wasn't in his nature. It was an excess that he would have had to work hard at to acquire. So you see, I was out of sympathy with him then, and feel alienated by what has happened now. And I won't be bullied in the matter, Alec.”

A handbell rang, calling them back to the enchanted forest. The Ramseys had nothing more to say but waited each in private possession of his belief, Ella seeing a nice funeral as salutary, Ramsey suspecting it as a sacrilege; Ella wanting bathos, Ramsey the revelation, both out of the same eventuality.

“Shall we go in?” Belle asked. The students hustling might have noticed her as one notices a town hall, something placed to encourage old-fashioned proprieties. A sweet old girl, the young might guess, fat with years and marital wisdom.

They had stood waiting for the press of people to thin. Now there were three or four couples left, making haste with cigarettes, although the unhappy girl who had been seen earlier in debate with Sanders was prominent, causing gentler but equal misery to a handsome boy talking low with her.

“Now that we're alone, Belle, when are you going to stop lying?”

“Alec, control yourself,” Ella barked. For she had seen the eyes change quality again; almost like a shift of pace, precisely managed. Yet perhaps in ten months or ten years the tensions that commanded such shifts might split the old brain.