The Survivor (29 page)

“As a matter of fact, Alec, I happened to be reading the relevant section only last evening.” And he began to read aloud Leeming's instructions on what would be expected of those who could no longer travel. “And no doubt,” he ended, “you'll cite the lie about Leeming's death, the lie given in this book. But what is a record like this, anyhow? A sort of report to the investors. I understand that. Other people would too. There are things you simply don't put in a report to the investors, things they don't even want to hear. Anyhow, this Lloyd, he was the medical man, wasn't he?”

It seemed to Ramsey to be characteristic of Chimpy that he then put a finicking smear of butter on the rind of his bread roll: a declaration that neither the senate nor thrombosis would catch him with his pants down, his books out of order, his luxuries (generally speaking) inordinate. Such a man made it difficult for others to act out whatever extreme rituals their sanity demanded. Ramsey saw with terror that such a man might make it hard also for him to retire: the department's work was proceeding under someone's (Morris Pelham's) impetus if not under Ramsey's, and Chimpy would make all manner of appeals to sense and convenience and the proper forms and the need of six months' notice so that the position could be advertised; and about all these appeals a palpable light of sanity would flicker. Like Lady Sadie, Ramsey panicked at the thought of being argued back into the old ways.

Barbara had taken a telegram for him. It read:
ARRANGED REPORT TRANSIT OFFICER DEEP FREEZE CHRISTCHURCH GOOD LUCK TYRRELL DIRECTOR
.

It took an effort of belief to accept that he was in fact going back. Yet the idea of facing the dimensions of the real Antarctica scarcely disturbed him. It was the highly caricatured continent of his dreams that he feared; and he was all afternoon comforted in disproportionate ways by facts he had got hold of from reading old
Life
magazines—McMurdo was quite bare of snow at this time of year and barer perhaps than it had been for millennia; a school of scientists suspected the Antarctic ice-cap of shrinkage, and thaw streaked the flanks of Ross Island.

When he got home, Ella and Sally and Sally's boyfriend were all sitting in the living-room, drinking coffee. Everyone but Ella seemed uneasy. Before long he excused himself and went to the bathroom, hunting up shaving-gear for his trip. Soon Ella joined him.

“Watch out,” he warned her. “You'll miss some fruitful exchange between little Miss Labour and her boyfriend.”

She smiled, but it was a gamble, placed on the possibility that he was not mocking her. She said, “Chimpy rang up half an hour ago and said he'd seen you. He's anxious for you to take a holiday. And why don't we go somewhere—not just down to the coast?”

“Perth, for the wildflower festival?” he suggested mercilessly. “People seem conspired to keep you informed of my every twitch.”

“Noumea's closer than Perth. Fiji's just as close. Even New Zealand.”

For a second he considered whether the travel agency had exposed him. But it seemed that Ella had offered New Zealand as a bona-fide tourist alternative.

Then he told her of his separate arrangements: that he might go to Sydney, even beyond. “No
even
about it, it will be New Zealand. I should only be away a fortnight.”

The luck was that she was in a contrite phase, was pale and tolerant. He could see her striving to sound like the sort of matron whose good sense keeps the diverse forces of a family together willy-nilly. “Well, I think it's a good idea for you to take a holiday on your own.”

Her false sunniness called into doubt whether he could manage himself in public places without her, and included somehow the riling sense of certainty that she'd be going in the end in any case.

He disillusioned her. A separate person even
she
was, and she should demonstrate it by developing a passion for Professor Sanders while he was away.

After he had inveighed against fuss, taken care of his own packing and deliberately left out the nasal spray, he heard Ella drive away.

“Yes, drive to cause an accident,” he muttered aloud, “or get yourself raped behind the Imperial Hotel. Make the old bastard really feel sorry.”

Twenty minutes later she came back, tat-tat-tatting at the bedroom door.

She didn't want to interfere, she called, but she'd brought him some of his favourite Havanas. Knowing he should tell her to smoke them herself, he opened the door, imagining himself haughty but fair. Instantly she was in his arms, shuddering, wanting to be cherished.

“Yes,” he kept saying, “yes, yes, yes. But I won't let you come, I won't let you pack.”

6

It was a waking dream. The diggers found no corpse but a vacancy, and stood back, their faces all what he would call classic Antarctic faces, the type that squint out of their incommunicable suffering through the glossy skin of a coffee-table book on exploration. Of such an order was their foreignness; they would rather not have worked in the polar dusk to resurrect this blankness. Ramsey himself, dreambound on the first floor of a hotel in Christchurch, went limp at seeing the hands they had risked with digging. One of his knees slid towards the carpet. Warnings of lost balance bounced in his ears; his eyes flew open, out of their doze.

His tiredness had stopped him walking and leant him against the wall. Perhaps the dim, mothering noises of the air-conditioning had untimely lulled him. Whatever, he was still squatting when a man with chef's hat and tunic, apron, neckerchief and starchy little gut, came from the manager's office. Ramsey yawned and pretended to have trouble with a shoelace. He was content, until the chef had passed, with the characteristic Anglo-Saxon joy of having avoided being made a fool of. Then he saw that his journey was insane and that insane gestures, once done, mightily conduced to internal and genuine, bottled-in-bond insanity. And that was why he had suffered his threatening vision.

He went on down into the lounge for a whisky.

It had been drizzling all evening in Christchurch, and at the Deep Freeze installation the stylized cigar-shape of a transport plane stood out in the wet, looking finally immobilized. The scene had all the comfortlessness of a fairground closed for the winter, and the national blitheness of the young Americans who brought him illogically good weather reports from McMurdo Sound and Cape Hallett irked Ramsey. An officer made him sign a form absolving the United States of any liability for his death, told him that another Australian, representing National Press of America, was going south with him, and cast him up full of lassitude and self-doubt in the plush hotel across from the airfield.

It was fashionably built for tourists; in its downstairs bar you heard mainly senior American accents. Their strangeness made it easier than ever for him to presume that the gaiety of the Clipper Bar was conspiratorial, that he was the butt of the conspiracy. Such a presumption lasted only a manic second; yet he was grateful to hear New Zealanders talking loudly from a knot of tables in one corner. Here the conspiracy was patent; from the blazers and boasting of the men he could identify a pre-season meeting of a Rugby club. All that was being ineptly plotted was a football premiership.

He sought a lone table. There was a precedent for loneness. In a corner at a table of his own sat a thin, tanned man of about thirty-five, chewing on a savoury omelette and being served coffee and liqueur. The panting kinship of the Rugbyesque men and women and the tourists' zealous talk of travel left this young man unabashed. He seemed at ease eating alone in public places.

Ramsey suspected him for his worldliness of being a journalist and for his sunburnt look of being Australian; the southbound NPA man.

Ramsey sat down and ordered a drink, and when the waiter had gone for it there was the younger man standing at Ramsey's elbow.

“You'd be Mr Alexander Ramsey.”

“Yes.”

“This is an honour, sir. I'm David Hammond. I'm going south for NPA. They were actually sending a staff man, but he's in hospital here with a perforated ulcer.” He added with what he no doubt thought was the correct solemnity, “I hope we're both in time. It's marvellous that you can be there. Would you like to join me?”

It was easiest to do that, to shamble across to Hammond's table and get through the weary business of assuring him you didn't want a Spanish omelette, even at NPA's expense. Hammond was a freelance journalist from Sydney; interviews with great artists seemed to be his penchant, and reviews of the more important cultural events; but he was always willing to travel for the larger newsagencies.

Not that he told all this in a gush; he answered with a crisp sort of respect Alec's dutiful questions, rising bluntly and artificially from the older man's silences. By the time Hammond began to ask questions for himself, they had drunk three whiskies.

Hammond wanted to know whether Ramsey had ever been back before.

Ramsey told him no, and noticed that Hammond's eyebrows registered this, though not blatantly. “Take notes if you want to,” he told the journalist, to shame the man.

“I ask out of personal interest,” said Hammond, and fell away defensively into anecdotes about interviewing Marlene Dietrich. Ramsey laughed precisely; he was even a little grateful for the company, being still disturbed by the phantasmagoria on the stairs and being also tired beyond sleep. Nor had the boy made any demands on him—but would, you could be sure.

To block such demands, Alec began to speak of aeroplane flights, for here was a travelling man who, like freelancers as a race, must have had a crop of stories about propeller failure, fuel-blockage, diverted flight, and stuck landing-gear. Certainly Hammond told a few such, making much of his fear. Ramsey stubbornly refused to be won over by such admissions.

But later on, in Hammond's room, steadfastly drinking Hammond's liquor, he went to excess in praising photographs of Hammond's pleasant-looking wife and children. He found himself, too, making dissociated trips to the window to squint out onto the road that ran towards the centre of the city.

“It looks damper than it really is,” Hammond told him.

Ramsey kept forgetting in any case that for him, for this journey, there were no weather portents in that street. Turning back to Hammond, he began to think how good it was to have a friend. The intimacy of the thought made him recoil when he found, for the second time that evening, Hammond at his elbow. This time the journalist had the inevitable book in his hand, the book with which the poet, Ella, Belle, and Chimpy had shown a quoting familiarity.

“It's a remarkable story, Alec, and if you could inscribe it.…”

Alec, in a mood of black humour, wrote “Don't believe everything you read” on the fly-leaf.

Hammond laughed at it, and his eyes gave promise that he would often produce the official history at the ends of evenings of Antarctic films, for a movie-camera lay casually on his bed, and what must have been hundreds of feet of film, done up in fifties, spilt over the counterpane from an insulated container. The frankness of the small domestic camera alarmed Alec, reminded of the perilous off-hand interest that made men buy newspapers and feed without shame on secrets of lust and weakness in prelates and cabinet ministers. Such an interest, he felt, might well provoke him to a new and ultimate statement of the truth of Leeming in relation to himself, something that might take him by surprise as much as it would Hammond.

He stood up. “I must go. You'll want to ask questions, reasonably enough, I suppose. That won't prevent me unreasonably resenting it. Perhaps tomorrow.…”

But he felt a vacancy in his midriff, not knowing how, other than by drinking Hammond's whisky, he would manage to sleep.

“It's all right,” Hammond smiled, and picked up the bottle and made gestures of good faith with it, as if its amber transparency was the measure of his intentions. “Let's talk politics and religion. Or even culture.” He laughed. Ramsey laughed too, and sat down to take his nightcap.

Sailors woke him early, knocking on his door to take care of the luggage he would leave behind in Christchurch. They left him with his thick whiskified head, his own underwear, and swathes of U.S. polar issue. Watching a full morning sun light up the night's rain on the roofs of the naval base, he felt genial about the journey. For eight hours he would ride dormant, the navigational bias of his eyes and ears and instincts all cancelled by a mesh of electronics in the snub nose of their transport plane. Yet his elation was not simply that of the played-out businessman jet-bound between selling-stops. For the aircraft across the road promised not only to move you a given number of miles but to land you in what your illusions and elusive experience told you was not simply a polar village but a distinct state of being—the state of being
homo Antarcticans
.

Early breakfasters downstairs, looking twice at his lined jacket and baggy pants and white thermal boots, seemed possessed by no such metaphysical excitement; nor, already sipping coffee, did Hammond, who was engrossed in a headache. Nor were the sixteen Navy personnel, already seated when Ramsey and Hammond quit the translucent morning and climbed into the dim forward of the plane. Ramsey knew, seeing their calm inexpectant faces above crisp shirt-collars, that the sailors were right. It was for the sake of dulling last night's dream and of his fear of being forced close to an essential statement of truth that he went on nurturing his sense of being about to be taken somewhat further than mere mileage.

In the airport building he had caught fleeting sight of an inappropriate old man being fussed over by a lieutenant-commander in dress uniform. The soft, unlikely face, already wrapped in a fur-lined hood, was yet one that Ramsey felt he should be able to name; perhaps a face well-aired by the media.

Now the old man was helped into the aircraft, and to a seat, by the same officer. The hood was still in place about a face that, although free of greasepaint, seemed to demand it. A queen's face, yes; and it had a strange breed of decision on it. There would, at least, be no absurd flirtations when smooth-faced orderlies brought round the turkey-loaf at lunchtime. Since rows of seating ran down either wall and two more lay back-to-back down the centre of the aircraft, Ramsey, strapped in close to a starboard porthole, found the old man sitting back-on to him. The officer spoke softly; so did the old man; but Ramsey heard the officer say, “… the bunk in the cockpit straight after take-off.” Then a salute. And outside Ramsey's window an engine found its step after a few unwilling seconds. Survival information—how to don the orange emergency-suit, how to enter the raft, how long you would last in Antarctic waters—was broadcast and demonstrated while they rolled down the morning tarmac; and inattentive Ramsey watched a commercial plane take off for the pleasure slopes of Mount Cook.