The Survivor (2 page)

The headmaster hooted. M. T. Seagram said, “Only on ladies' nights.”

They sang the hymn “By Rotary means, in Rotary ways, Help us, dear Lord, thy name to praise.” Then those thin, embittered women who serve the meals in country hotels brought in the soup. The president rose and Brother Eric Kable was thanked for bringing along tonight's guest speaker, Mr Alec Ramsey of the university, who was going to speak about an expedition he'd been on to.… Where
was
it, Alec? Alec told him, with secret malice, “Oates Land.” The man who arranged the speeches mumbled something which Alec hoped was a rebuke, but the invincible president merely blinked. “Yes, well I'm sure we're all looking forward to hearing about it later on in the evening,” he said. Self-made, in making himself he had had no time to assimilate Antarctic geography and was now not ashamed for what was an honourable ignorance. Improperly, this was why, as he stood asking for volunteers to attend a field day in some distant town, Alec could easily have let himself rise up and strike the man.

The sergeant-at-arms forestalled him by standing and fining members for a range of esoteric offences. He was a Texan, some Pinalba girl's dreamboat from a U.S. aircraft carrier, lost to Galveston, selling refrigerators on a plain beyond mountains in Australia. And rising during the second course of shreddy corned-beef and saying, “President Lance, I have it on good authority that Pete Hogben was seen carrying Nancy Spurling's parcels for her in the Pinalba Mall last Saturday. Now Nancy being a far from undelectable girl and Clive Spurling being away in Sydney, it seems to me that Pete may be hatching something contrary to the sanctity of the matrimonial state and a little fine might make him think about that seriously.” And Pete rose calling some fellow Rotarian a bloody Judas and fumbling for twenty-cent pieces.

As everyone laughed through their pulpy mouthfuls, Ramsey went cold and was as homesick as a child for Ella and for his cool and different tableland.

“President Lance, I have it on similarly good authority that Russ Healey, when asked to navigate a carload of bowlers home from the Killarney open day, was so—shall we say?—inebriated that the vehicle finished in a ditch on a cotton farm that happened to belong to a fellow-countryman of mine. Just when the Prime Minister is busting a most venerable gut to further friendly relations with God's Own Country, Russ undoes it all by this act of drunken aggression.”

Laughter, laughter. Well, hadn't some of them been ditched along with sodden Russ Healey?

“I'll tell you what,” one of the survivors was saying above catcalls. “It could of been serious, but by Christ it was funny at the time. You know what the bastard said when we came to a stop? The car's on an angle of forty-five and the windshield's gone and he leans back and says, ‘Well, that's about as far as we'll get tonight,' and he goes to sleep.”

The demoniac Texan sat down for a moment to finish his vegetables. M. T. Seagram leant over to Alec. “Where was it he said you'd been?”

“Well, that was where the base was really. Oates Land.”

“Oh.” M. T. Seagram took a guess. “Africa?”

“Antarctica.”

“Antarctica?”

“Leeming's last expedition.”

“Leeming? I've heard the name.…”

“You probably heard of him at school.”

“Bantam” nudged the man at his side. “Bloody intelligentsia, me.”

Stung to action by “Bantam's” pretensions, the sad and craggy ladies began to serve jam tart with custard. Alec sat nursing his jaw and inhaling deeply while his stomach yawned in panic at the thought of violent, anti-social, and unprofessional gestures. “I'll hit someone,” he mourned to himself. “I'll hit that bloody ‘Bantam', I'll strangle that ugly American in his own nasal twang.” He felt sick, beyond work, febrile with hostility. It was the staple agony of his life that they were making mock of with their fines-box and mace. If it got beyond him he
would
hit somebody; so he promised himself, and cut the caterer's paste of tart and custard with a casual spoon. And by an action at the back of the throat halfway between a yawn and a retch, he reduced it to a swallowable state while reading the Rotary banners that covered the walls. Rotarie de Le Mans, Rotarie von Hagen, Rotary Club of Akron, Ohio, all served to underline the brotherhood of Clive Spurling, Pete Hogben, Russ Healey and his ditched brethren. In Le Mans, Hagen and Akron, and in Saskatoon, Tampico, Spanish Town, Torquay and Groningen, the fellowship of J. M. P. Harcourt and M. T. Seagram was fortnightly concelebrated and mystically fortified. And someone who should have known better rose to bawl, “President Bert or Kurt, President Lance or Franz, I have it on good authority.…”

M. T. Seagram's neighbour spoke over the bent back of jam-tart-savouring M. T. Seagram.

“Hey, didn't Leeming die or something like that?”

“Something like that. Though tell me one damned thing that bears similarity to death.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That's how you can always tell an Australian. He uses
I beg your pardon
interrogatively.”

By a hair's-breadth, M. T. Seagram's friend avoided begging it once more—just as interrogatively as last time. He was hurt, Ramsey couldn't help but see. He was right to be hurt. Any man who interrupted a club dinner by means of metaphysics and a touch of language-use was a bastard.

“Leeming died on a glacier in Antarctica,” Ramsey called out in urgent politeness to the man two spaces away.

The Rotarian accepted this: his anger hadn't had time to set, and he realized or suspected that Ramsey was, this way or that, one of the bereaved.

“He has my respect, going to that place.”

“He has mine too,” Ramsey responded with a belligerency that luckily passed for intense reverence.

“I suppose you must—”

But the sergeant-at-arms was up again, shooting the cuffs of his drip-dry, reaching for his box.

“President Lance, I have it on good authority that yesterday was Eric Kable's wedding anniversary. It seems he's been paying for his mistake for eighteen years now, and …”

Ramsey whispered to Seagram, “Excuse me,” stood up urgently, rasping his chair and actually depressing Seagram's shoulders in his apparently bilious urgency, and signalling with his eyes for the man who had thought Leeming had died or something to pull his chair in close to the board and make a passageway.

“… that since Valerie Kable is such a lovely lady and since his possession is our loss …,” the sergeant-at-arms was braying.

Ramsey considered calling to him in mid-flight something such as, “Don't fool yourself, Davy Crockett. She'd take on anyone but the barber's cat. And ask Brother Eric if he isn't a queer?”

Behind him murmurs of awakening concern developed, so he took the stairs quickly. At the street door he failed by a fraction to have the courage of his anger, to turn into the saloon bar and later be found, quietly drinking there, by Kable and President Lance and the mace-rattling Texan who would no doubt try to fine him for sickening at dinner. He regretted that he was still too aware of his mission in the town to deliberately construct that insult, to make it clear that he favoured the drifting population of the bar against the communion of elders upstairs. Grudgingly, he turned into the street.

It was a night of dry warmth in Pinalba, whose town-lights scarcely restrained the sharp stars. All sounds were distanced, as he wanted them to be after the rowdy brotherhood upstairs. There was a lonely argument, high, forlorn voices, progressing in the doorway of the coloured peoples' pub. The very way it came to the ear told you that you were in a flat town and a town that was at the hour of plate-scraping and tea-leaves.

Not his town. He fled it as far as the river, and was listening to a small weir functioning somewhere in the dark when Kable found him.

“Is there anything I can do, Alec?” Kable asked like someone lodging a complaint.

“They don't give a damn.…” But he knew he was making himself even more absurd by saying it. In fact, shrouded in the long dying fronds of a willow that infringed the foot-bridge, Alec heard but did not see Kable despairing of him in the dark.

“You make it sound as if he did it all for Pinalba Rotary and they—swine that they are—don't appreciate it.”

“Don't you worry. I know he didn't necessarily do it for anybody. But what he went through is its own monument.”

“
They
don't deny that. Besides, it's such an old, old monument.”

“It doesn't deserve to round off an evening of Pete Someone making up to Clive Spurling's wife in the Pinalba Mall. It doesn't deserve to land in a ditch with Russ Healey.”

“It could do a lot worse.”

But he didn't listen to Kable; rather to water edging over the soft lip of the weir, renewing him. Not a basic renewal, of course, but an excellent
ad hoc
one.

Softly he quoted the president, mocking the man across the man's town. “An expedition to.… Where was the expedition to exactly, Alec?”

Kable, baffled but never berserk, gave three or four comforting pats to the bridge handrail. “My God, you know that fellow spent three years under the Japanese? He worked on the Burma railway. You had to see one friend die, Alec, and admittedly that friend was a man among men and it seems to have had an … irradicable effect on you. But that fellow watched dozens of friends die. The difference seems to me to be that he wouldn't … he wouldn't throw a tantrum if you didn't know the geographical details of what he went through.”

Alec was not angry. He had taken a seat on the parapet and could read the fluorescent river-marker below. Three feet one inch, it said; and for the men still convened at the hotel thousands of dollars were involved in that river level, so low with the summer still to come. But they had the grace, the humility, to be gay after their fashion.

Alec said, “Perhaps he should throw a tantrum. Or more likely, he's made of solider materials than me. You can't make quantitative comparisons in these matters, Eric. In any case, it wasn't a tantrum.…” He paused to wish it merely were so. “I took exception, that's all. Holy Mother Texas is lucky not to be one cowboy short by now.” Suddenly he was professional enough to want to make sure that Kable had excused him satisfactorily to his hosts. “You told them I had a ruptured ulcer, I hope? And there'll surely be no need to go back?”

“I told them this had been coming on on the way here.”

“God bless you, Eric.”

“I think you ought to go back, Alec.”

“No. You can substitute for me.” A last St Elmo's fire of rancour played across the surface of his tongue. “Or get Lance to tell you all about the Burma Road.”

“You really are a deep-dyed bastard, aren't you, Alec?” Kable had never been so blunt before. Never mind; Valerie would moderate him when he went home.

In the meantime Ramsey chuckled for want of some more obvious gesture of despair. He said, “It would be something to think I was. I'm afraid I'm not consistent enough to fit the definition fully. But Leeming happens to be a fairly … personal subject to me. Could you possibly go back and give fuller apologies?” He added, “For your ailing boss?”

2

He met Morris Pelham, senior lecturer in his department, on the front steps of the Extension building. A scholarship to a good English school and Cambridge had put paid to the rawer notes of Pelham's Yorkshire accent, but the intonations placed him still, especially when he asked a question, as he did now.

“How did you get on with the heir-apparent?” By which Kable was meant.

Often Ramsey could bring himself to speak only in an oblique, eye-avoiding way to Pelham, for he knew the young man had taken up some of the work he himself had neglected over the past year when so much energy had gone into domestic anguish shared with Ella. He feared that Pelham had undertaken these matters out of loyalty, actual loyalty to him, Ramsey, and out of a dour passion to see things functioning properly. He feared, too, that Pelham was sometimes secretly bitter but never said a bitter word outside the dining-room of the Pelhams' weatherboard house in town.

Today, newly home from Pinalba, full of the yeast of homecoming, Ramsey felt able to answer Pelham's small, canny smile without flinching. They liked each other, and Ramsey sometimes thought of generations of Pelham miners or farmers behind Morris, all of them by way of the opening pages of
The Rainbow
out of Ealing Studios, all of them careful with their laughter and their friendship, their weekly two ounces of special mixture and their nightly pint. That was how he knew he especially liked Pelham: he didn't bother dreaming up genealogies for his enemies.

“The heir-apparent?” he said. “Kable? I made him angry, Morris. I walked out of a maniac ritual called a Rotary Club dinner.”

“In Milton?”

“In Pinalba.”

“Well, at least it isn't his town.”

“He seemed to think I'd ruined the chances of that Duke of Edinburgh lot.”

“Oh, rubbish. They're all snobs, those boots-and-all boys from the bush. They'll turn out the best of everything for anything marked ‘Dukie'. He knows that.”

“But I wasn't very tactful to some of them. I started to talk like a character in a Sartre play. They were polite over our stay, but I got
‘Mister
Ramsey' everywhere I went. The news got round, you see. That I was a smart bastard. Anyway, how's the poet?”

“Making a phone call upstairs. He had a very successful visit to the C. of E. girls' school this morning.…”

Ramsey half-listened, and breathed the seasonable sweet climate of this high town and university where, he liked to think, he had set like a jelly. It was a temperate place to work if you discounted the bitterness of the winters; and Extension faced a park full of thick British trees secreting deep cool beneath their heads of foliage. In Pinalba, he thought, they never saw shade so emphatic.