The Survivor (5 page)

After a time he remembered that he had not in fact eaten Leeming, but the poet's suggestion seemed to him one that he must urgently blend into what he already knew of Leeming and himself.

As distant and quacking as voices at the far end of a cable, Valerie and Ella could both be heard. While he straggled a few yards along the edge of the pool, the skua-like hubbub climbed his blood and departed by the ears.

It had all been a shock. He shuffled his feet once on the delicious solidity of the pool's apron.

Eric Kable told him in a gratified way that he shouldn't let this sort of thing
get at
him.

“Ella,” Ramsey said, “let's say good night to Sir Byron and Lady Mews and take this man home.”

The poet urged himself to his feet, and the excess of his desire to be informed overflowed into a silly little dance along the rim of the pool.

“But you don't understand. You were
there
, in a bloody saga. How many poets get an inside seat on a saga?”

“I'm not interested,” said Alec.

“None. Not. A. One. Because they're bloody neurotics, see? But what's the use of getting involved in a bloody saga if you won't tell a poet about it? It doesn't matter to me if you had to eat him. Do you think I'd judge you or something prissy like that?”

Ramsey called out, “Now listen, no more of that.”

Ella could tell that that idiot of a poet was starting the whole cycle of betrayal obsessions running again in Alec. “Get Morris to take him home,” she ordered her husband. She sounded implacable: in her eyes Alec was the culprit for having reacted to excess. “I'm going now, if you want to come.”

The poet appealed up the stairs to Ella. “Does he think I'd cast stones?”

“As if you could!” Ella ground out. The poet shied, as if her words fell downstairs with a physical impact. “Some people subscribe to the out-of-date romantic ideal of the artist as a man who is free to spew up on vice-chancellors' carpets. Of course, that's if you're any sort of artist to start with—a proposition that seems to be under debate in your case.”

“You're a saucy bitch, aren't you?”

“I'm a poisonous bitch, Mr Bard. I hope you find that out. Well, Alec?”

“Please, Ella,” Ramsey asked her, almost without dignity, “I can't unload him on the Pelhams.”

“The trouble is,” the poet mourned in monologue, “you Antarctic buggers can't be believed. You write your diaries and make it all sound like a Masonic Lodge on ice. Only, I admit you didn't write any journal, Alec. And you won't do his biography. See, to put it one way, you couldn't bring yourself to digest him all over again.”

Ramsey told him, “If you say any more I'll kill you.”

He was aware of yards of water to his right, their murderous potential.

“That's lovely,” said Ella in one of her cold, hard panics. “I'm going.”

That her husband stood mouthing murder on account of Leeming was a measure of the extent to which the memory of Leeming possessed him. She could not forgive this obsession, just as, ultimately, she would not forgive his death.

Lady Sadie now intruded speculatively from the porch. She saw the radically altered Ramseys and the engrossed Kables, and edged forward exactly like someone in a stream of uncertain depth.

The poet sat pretty, like an almost civilized person, one arm over the back of the seat, saying with aggressive good reason, “Whoa there, don't let her bully you, Alec boy. Wha's use of being in a bloody saga if you're going to let her bully you?”

Lady Sadie risked asking was all well. Ella tramped up to her, face shut, waspish high-heels jabbing at the cement; and said a colourlessly polite formula of good-bye. It had been pleasant, she said. And could Lady Sadie possibly ask Pelham to take the poet home?

Ramsey called out that no, he would.

“Then you'll walk.” Ella's blind back was aimed at him. “I'm taking the car.”

He imagined her cutting all the corners into town, chancing her outside wheels into the gravel, begging a skid, begging the ultimate demonstration, a death skid, crazily certain that the triumph of causing Ramsey to regret would outweigh the sharpness of laceration and lung-puncture.

Ramsey stood above the poet, the pink slewing face whose focus could not quite keep up with his now definite movements. “Get up. We're going.”

The poet gave him fair caution, jiggling an index finger. “How about if you showed more respect?”

Ramsey pulled him upright by the tweedy coat's lapels; but the inadequacy of any devisable maiming kept him still. Pelham arrived, speaking softly, and removed the poet from Ramsey's grip. With a lemurine look of discretion, Chimpy helped the senior lecturer hustle the poet in through the back porch. For all the threats, Ella remained by Lady Sadie, back on to the poet's removal.

“I should help Morris,” Ramsey told his hostess.

“No. No need. But I'll never read
him
again.” For Lady Sadie thought that writers, so often indecent in print, should be decent in living-rooms.

At last they could hear the poet's voice rising in the wind at the front of the lodge. Then Pelham's choky old motor whirred and covered it.

3

Ramsey woke near Ella in the dove-grey morning, examined the graceless landscape of his bed with a muddleheaded conscientiousness, and rose in need of his morning newsprint lying furled, he could see, beneath an oleander bush outside. He longed for headlines and radio-pictures of distant violence: bomb outrages in Aden, earthquakes in Zagreb, mass murders in Ankara or Calabria—as if the insanity-level of the world were constant, as if the insanity of people and events at one end of the earth went to guarantee his own sanity at the other.

He remembered how last night they had so adequately exposed themselves to the curiosity and malice of three couples and Professor Sanders; and left the bedroom without a glance at Ella.

The worst that was happening in the wide world was that a millionaire had endowed the arts, brewery workers were threatening to strike, and General de Gaulle would visit the Pacific the very next month. He abandoned the newspaper and, resenting the world's wire services, straggled into the living-room. In the cabinets beneath the glassed-in bookcase, Ramsey's small Antarctic library was stowed away. Corresponding places in the homes of other university people were reserved for erotica smuggled home from sabbatical leave. The erotica of the Ramsey household were Borchgrevinck and Scott, Shackleton and Cherry-Garrard: the annals of all the Masonic lodges on ice.

He opened at page 27 a book called
Leeming's Last Journey
. Or the book furtively opened there itself.

The expedition's very capable dog-expert had the role thrust on him yet measured up to it like a life-long expert
.

“Christ!” intoned Ramsey aloud. After the life he had had, he detested phrases such as “measured up to”.

His name was Alexander Ramsey, graduate of Sydney University and recent Rugby international; and he first met Leeming on a train from the country during the winter previous to the expedition's departure. Leeming had taken an instant liking to Ramsey and, in September 1923, had regretfully rejected his application to join the expedition. The illness of the dog-expert Leeming had already chosen gave Ramsey his chance. During the expedition he became a fine skier as well as a superb dog-handler. Adaptability and physical strength were his especial qualifications. He was a quiet young man but never dejected
.…

Ramsey was once more loudly blasphemous, and his large hand threatened the furry old page.

…
and his regard for the Arts answered something in his leader's temperament. He and Dr Leeming would sometimes argue about the talents of poets whose names other expedition members had never heard
.

In the polar night, from Lloyd's bunk and half a dozen others, obscenities would rumble. “—Elroy Flecker.” “—Walt Whitman.”

He would have blushed now for his callowness, except that Lloyd, O'Connor and the others had all joined Flecker and were one with Whitman.

Given Dr Leeming's friendship towards him, his outstanding strength and his capacity with the dogs, it was no surprise that the leader paid him the final honour of selecting him as a companion for the dash to the South Geomagnetic Pole
.

The ineptitude of “final honour” irked him, but did not have the power to bring on his symptoms. It was the sort of serviceable term that blanketed reality, a ritual term stolen direct from grammar-school annuals, absolving all parties from considering the oddness of the relationships between humans, advancing the story of miles covered, specimens gathered. No, the old page did not hurt at the beginning of this day in the sixties, with nothing worse than a brewery strike threatening.

He found an ancient newspaper article yellowed in the back of the book. Scarcely optimum archival conditions. He began to read at the fold in the paper.

Meanwhile
, he read,
matters went badly for the southern parties and for Leeming himself. His own party of three had to turn back with the South Geomagnetic Pole still two hundred miles off
.

They had found nothing but high white plateau. Their dogs were in a poor state, though they still had adequate sledging rations. Though he lacked proper reference points, Leeming had made a remarkably accurate calculation of the height of this central plateau
.

What he did not know was that, at the inland hut, a member of O'Connor's support party was dying of ptomaine poisoning from the adequate but tainted supplies of tinned beef. This meat had caused some discomfort to all the members of the party that had wintered inland, but the consignment that had been sledged in from the coast in early summer was the fatal one. It is said that a prominent Melbourne merchant was in danger of prosecution in the months immediately following the return of the expedition
.

When Leeming reached the hut in mid-March, 1926, he found that O'Connor with seven others, including the three-man party that had surveyed the Victoria Land Mountains earlier in the season, had struck through the mountains for the Ross Sea. Only two of the eight were well; and they left behind them in a shallow ice-grave the body of a ninth
.

There was a note in the hut for Leeming explaining that a Morse Code message from the Oates Coast had advised them to head for the Ross Sea, where the expeditionary ship
Westralis
would pick them up. The note further said that since O'Connor could not trust the meat he had had to take some of the sledging rations set aside for their journey home, but that if Leeming would consent to following them down the glacier to the Ross Sea, he ought to find that the pemmican and biscuit left for him was plenty
.

Earlier in the summer the three-man mountain party had partly surveyed the David Glacier and found satisfactory travelling surfaces for twenty miles close in on the south side. Down this glacier O'Connor led his five sick men and two healthy ones, and marked the path for Leeming with bamboo rods. Their morale increased as they marched, and although two later lost legs, they all reached the ice-tongue and the
Westralis.

O'Connor's necessary action of taking away part of the geomagnetic party's provisions compelled Leeming to follow the same path. Even if ice in the Ross Sea forced the
Westralis
out for another year, he and his two followers could probably survive a winter with the help of their tent and of the seal meat that could be found along the coast. All three men disliked the prospect though, and prayed that the
Westralis
would be able to wait
.

Leeming therefore led his party east into unseasonably bad weather. He had slaughtered the four remaining dogs, and carried sinewy dog meat as well as sledging rations
.

On a day of minus 54 degrees F. he collapsed, and Dr Lloyd told Alec Ramsey, the third member of the party
,
that it was a stroke. Though his speech was impaired and one foot lamed, Leeming insisted on stumbling on and became hysterical whenever Lloyd and Ramsey forced him to ride on the sledge. But the stroke had made him most susceptible to the low temperatures and his hands and feet became dreadfully frostbitten
.

On the evening of the fourth day he suffered a second and fatal stroke.…

“Have you got enough light for it?”

Ella had arrived bare-footed, firm shaven legs beneath the nightdress. She frowned. The planes of her face were out of harmony from long and not very happy dreams.

Ramsey didn't answer her. She walked softly to the blinds and snapped them open with one swipe of the hand.

“Will porridge do you?” she asked, and prepared to go. He had in some odd way forfeited meat and said that porridge would do.

“I've a busy morning. Come when I call you.”

She stamped out, no sylph without shoes The page blew over in the breeze of her hard feminine passage.

He had admitted to Ella this much: that he first became under a debt to Leeming at the close of 1924.

At twenty-three Alec Ramsey was large and soft-featured and suspected himself of being ugly. He had never had the valour yet to ask anyone whether the ugliness was interesting or repellent, for if they told him repellent he would have been properly landed with the knowledge of his face for all the years to come.

That August he had already become an ex-international; he had been teaching the whole year in a high school not far from the Queensland border, and the education authorities had not been concerned that this made it impossible for him to play. As his father had said, the education department was not run by even competent philistines. Ramsey had eventually grown out of the way of the strategic straining and grunting of the ruck, loose or otherwise. He had been receiving in secret all winter a series of literary magazines of extreme viewpoint.