The Survivor (23 page)

“Could have fooled me,” said Lloyd.

O'Connor teased the leader. “If you're trying to tell us that Antarctica is a religion to you, then of course we'd never have guessed.”

All four chuckled. Leeming contended, “Of course, Australia is a country in the prophetic mould too, but we have done such a stale old European job of humanizing it.”

Lloyd said something about how he would have liked to be in stale old European Elizabeth Bay looking north-east across the harbour at the ships edging into Sydney for our stale old European wool.

In the light of this memory, Ramsey asked the widow not to remove Leeming's remains and not to give their care over to Denis Leeming. The poet whispered urgently, “Tell her I support you.” Ramsey told her.

He heard Belle sniff, and could imagine the well-bred head tossing, like a horse's. “Two days ago, Alec, you tell me in a stricken voice that I must decide on my own what to do, that you can't help me. So I make the decisions I think I should, only to find that now you're full of all kinds of anecdotes that are meant to be symbolic or something. I suppose that last one was intended to imply that dear Leeming would have preferred to stay in the ice?”

But the story of Leeming and O'Connor had rankled with Belle and, sniffing hope, Ramsey chose to stay moderate. “You say that at seventy-nine you're beyond making the arrangements needed. I was rash to argue with you. But in handing matters over to Denis you're condemning Leeming to an Australian burial that you yourself might find painful.”

She repeated all her pleas, notably that of health. But Ramsey kept detecting an edge of dismay in her voice, testimonial enough to the validity of his story. Still she avoided the ultimate signs of bad faith, such as giving too many reasons.

One she had to give concerned Denis. “He's capable and has considerable respect for his uncle's memory. I know you'll think immediately of last night's performance.…”

Ramsey nearly asked which one.

“… the fact is that in such serious dealings as these he's a different person. This is precisely the sort of responsibility he needs to shake off the effects of that appalling doctorate affair.”

Ramsey made, in the poet's direction, eyes of disbelief. What he did not know was that while he spoke his mouth was set in lines of animal petulance that made the poet pity him.

He said what he had merely thought once before in debate. “I think, and I think you know, that it makes pretty indecent mechanics to balance the recent loss of a doctorate with the mummified weight of an old doctor.”

“If you're quite finished, Alec.…” she said, but of course did not hang up with the insult unresolved.

Waiting, calm now, Ramsey shook his head again at the poet and saw the small penny-pinching mouth bunched in genuine discomfort at Ramsey's fears, or Belle's, or his own. Again Ramsey wondered in how profound a sense the man was interested in preventing Leeming's desecration. Perhaps he was given to transient moral enthusiasms, espoused loudly but with no hope of outdistancing Belle's rugged intentions. All that he knew about the poet's sense of Tightness was that it seemed peculiarly sensitive in an area where his did not seem to so much as operate. It expiated a garrulous drunkenness with days off, six hundred miles of travel, two days' attendance on what passed for Ramsey's conscience. While Ramsey's own reaction in those circumstances would be to avoid that place, those people, that brand of liquor, for ever more.

“It's
my
husband you're talking about.”

“My God it is! You were a grand sort of consort once. You tried to refine his pride in an almost outlandish way. You can't sign him over now, merely on the grounds that forty years have passed.”

“Alec, do you actually think I'm in bad faith?”

“You haven't sounded like yourself, that's all. Not the old Belle. More like some old hen whose soul is troubled by a pulled thread in the Axminster.”

“Indeed,” she told him, regaining some of her balance, “I
have
come to value my carpets more as time goes by.”

He said, “I'm not above begging you, Belle. Don't do it.”

“Keep out of it,” said Belle. “Keep out of it, Alec.”

In the fellowship flat a door banged. “Denis has just come in, so I can't go on arguing about him. I mightn't see you again, Alec. But how dare you presume you're the only one who's disqualified from touching the corpse?”

On this rising question the line went dead so instantaneously that Ramsey suspected the gardening staff of carelessness with a spade. But he depressed the receiver-rest and heard a healthy dial tone.

To the poet Ramsey seemed full of brittle hope, feverish. “Belle doesn't care. If that Denis could be prevented.…”

He shook his head and slumped. The fast machinations needed to prevent Denis—to call on Chimpy perhaps, to call on Professor Sanders, the broaching of the question, the defining of his motives in terms they would understand, the onus of professional bonhomie under which such calls would be made—all these prospects left him drained.

It was the poet who said that they must do what they could. It was the poet who telephoned and asked to be allowed to see Sir Chimpy straightaway.

“Well,” said the vice-chancellor, “say in twenty minutes. I'm just finishing my speech for this afternoon.”

“He'll be full of the euphoria of having prepared a good solid rant for his brother-man,” the poet promised Ramsey.

Yet it seemed to Alec fantastic that they should approach the vice-chancellor: the indecency of young Leeming's intentions could not be shown by argument.

“I don't know if we should even try,” Ramsey confessed. His stomach secreted apathy; he wanted to rest somewhere with drawn blinds. It was so complex, the cure he was undertaking; he wished he could go back to the tainted intimacy of his unresolved illness, his safe illness that no one tried to excoriate in a rush, that people pretended not to see, or wrote off as ulcers or overwork. Even at sixty-two one could
grow out
of one's ruinous preoccupations rather than be concussed. “In the world where Chimpy lives,” he claimed, envious of Chimpy, “this matter is purely the Leemings' affair. And rightly so.”

Yet the poet rubbed his hands, with some appetite for the confrontation. Sir Byron was an institutional man, he said, and could be made afraid of follies young Leeming might commit in the south: of tantrums, of frenzied likes and dislikes he might take to the American scientists, all to this university's disgrace.

“Dislikes, yes,” said Ramsey. “And likes.” He remembered the sexual revulsion Ella had brought home with her last night.

They were three minutes early at the vice-chancellor's rooms, and the girl in the outer office told them that, if they didn't mind waiting, Mr Leeming had promised to be no more than a few minutes. They sat feeling forestalled. But no more than a minute passed before they heard equable voices raised in good-byes, perhaps in pledges. Leeming came out, the long Leeming mouth held taut, a line of tough complacency above eyes bent to the task of closing the door as if in token regard for Sir Chimpy's good sense.

Ramsey wondered what it meant. Had Leeming been given permission to wear the university crest on his wind-proofs? Or to plant a copy of the vice-chancellor's
Fabian Socialism in Australian Politics
at the South Pole?

The young man recoiled before the blank eyes of the newcomers, but muttered something conventional and went off in good heart. An instant later Sir Chimpy negatived all his careful work with the door handle by sweeping the office door open and asking Ramsey and the poet in.

The poet pushed the argument based on decency and on the nephew's imbalance as preventing him from identifying what was fitting. He amplified it, counterpointed it far more strenuously than Ramsey would have dared. His passion if not his reasoning made Sir Byron sober. But slowly the vice-chancellor's face was forced into a gibbonous leer, the face of a man straitened by petitioners.

“I ought to tell you that young Leeming was here just now to appeal against the head of his school. Professor Sanders has gone so far as to refuse leave-of-absence.”

“Ah then!” the poet said, seeming familiar with university protocol. “That settles it.”

Sir Byron made further, if moderate, faces of lemurine anguish. “Yet it seems in some ways an unfortunate refusal. Certainly Leeming is in charge of the departmental programme and he was something like three months late home from sabbatical leave. The case you gentlemen put is impressive. But I have to be honest. To an outsider it all seems one—what you want, what Denis Leeming wants. Isn't it Mrs Leeming's affair? And as for his behaviour … well, we all of us seem to be having behavioural problems lately.”

Alec grunted furiously in affirmation. Sir Chimpy heard it as protest.

“For God's sake, Alec, when I say all of us I mean all of us.” He narrowed his eyes at them from beneath scrubby eyebrows, a gnarled figure of wisdom of the type usually found to have spent their lives in the saddle between Victoria Downs and the Channel country. “I intend to make these points to Sanders at the first opportunity, but since that may not be until this afternoon, I'd be grateful if you said nothing of it to him beforehand.”

Yet Sir Byron was given his chance within seconds. Sanders was, at fifty, a pleasant man, his square jaws only just beginning to fall away into jowls that still bespoke a straight talker and a man of rapid decision. Over the past few seconds his rapid decision had been to pretend not to have heard the secretary say that Sir Byron was engaged, to knock tentatively like a secretary, to be bidden in and freeze in mid-entrance.

“I'm sorry, Byron,” he said. “I thought I heard the girl say—”

Sir Byron asked him could he wait.

But Sanders stood pat. His eyes glinted with what seemed an excess of brotherhood but was probably anger. So he had to fire some of his ammunition off.

“It's simply the question of Leeming. He says he's been to see you and received certain assurances. Now I know he often overstates, but I thought I should make it clear that there are reasons why Leeming shouldn't go that I didn't, for peace' sake, reveal to him. The other reasons are adequate of course. He overstayed his sabbatical by three months, he was supposed to be preparing a timetable which, like his return, is still overdue. We're understaffed, and lectures begin in a few days' time. I don't apologize for refusing him leave on these grounds alone. But there's a better one, and that is that if he takes time off it should be to obtain medical treatment, that the man is bloody-well deranged; and the godlike stunt of resurrecting a snap-frozen corpse in front of the world's cine-cameras is going to do nothing to cure that.”

Sir Chimpy let his irregular mouth be seen to waver on the edge of ordering Sanders out. But air was inhaled like wisdom, and savoir faire prevailed, or, once again, was seen to.

“But I'm intruding,” Sanders mumbled. “Forgive me, Byron, Alec.”

He left; and before long, so did Ramsey and the poet. Ramsey drooped; he wanted to find a room with a couch and blinds and old issues of
Time
, somewhere to spend four slack, secret hours and let his apprehensions sink to a sediment that could be seen and measured. He had had such a retreat planned for that afternoon, graduation afternoon, promising himself that his tarnished M.A. (Sydney) colours would not be missed on the platform. Yet, perhaps in reprisal for the minor impasse over Leeming, Chimpy had called after him, “I shall, of course, be seeing you this afternoon, Alec.”

On the way down the path he wished for some convincing badge of illness, something that suppurated before the beholder's eyes, something that gave him permanent defence against formal occasions. Yet an after-taste of success kept rising in his throat. “Sanders won't give in. Perhaps Leeming might resign, but Sanders won't give in. And with young Leeming blocked.…”

He did not spoil the chances by voicing them; yet surely they would compel Belle to take on and discharge her responsibilities with a wave of her healthy hand. Which left dear Leeming where Alec suspected he should be. And so, for some reason, did the poet.

Then, at midday, the town's random transistors and the one that Ella and Ramsey tuned in with a false off-handedness announced the romantic news that nephew would resurrect uncle. Alec, fearing that the story's transmission made it fact, felt again the customary and amorphous sense of peril. Dressing for the afternoon's occasion, he was morose.

Ella tried to shake this state by asking him about the facts he had said he could remember now and utter. He was a conciliatory man by nature; yet her probing proved in no way curative, and simply maddened. He told her to stop bloody-well hovering.

Later he begged her pardon; but she was still full of hurt. It was a good pretext for her to tell him that she had gone to see Belle that morning.

“Why?” It was clear he was tantalized, not angry. He had squandered anger on a minor grievance and so put himself on a penitential footing, with less cause to protest at a secret meeting over which he had a right to protest.

Again he asked her gently why she had gone.

Ella was aggressive enough to tell the truth. “I wanted to see what she thought of her husband.”

“Ah, yes.”

“And let me tell you,” she said as one giving him real grounds for fear, “she wouldn't mind if they exhibited old Leeming at agricultural shows.”

“I can't understand it.” He had become accustomed to this particular bafflement, but in his rush to make peace again with Ella he begged now for her interpretations of Belle.

Ella was thereby made bolder still. “I wanted to tell her, too, that it would be an excellent turning-point for us the day Leeming was buried by a minister of the—”

“Anglican Church,” Ramsey supplied. “And you should leave it to me to decide what the turning-points will be.”