The Survivor (27 page)

Ella came back alone. “Toilet,” she whispered at Alec, as if their silence would assist Sally.

He said the girl couldn't stay: they were crowded in a sense that made the number of rooms they had available an irrelevance.

“That's the trouble,” she said, remembering Sanders' figures of speech. “We never let in any of the light of other people's preoccupations.”

He fabricated arguments. “Have you noticed that she's very beautiful and that her preoccupation doesn't show yet? When it does, people will think I'm responsible.”

Ella, flushed with do-gooding, laughed off the opinions of others. “That's a reputation you could be very proud of.”

A ringing telephone stopped him from giving her a chance to be compassionate towards him. She scooped up the receiver after a short robust walk of the type seen among successful corsetieres. But the frown she gave upon listening went down to the bone, was not staged.

“Oh, professor,” she said.

He saw the authentic frown (signifying, on top of all her landlady-like skittishness, that she had developed concerns of her own) as reason for leaving her. He was hundreds of yards away on a walk meant to last for hours and to impair health—for which reason he was busy-minded recording what pains there were in the right side of his belly and what indigestive, perhaps cardiac, stabs rankled under his left armpit—when he remembered she had said, “Oh, professor,” and wondered if it had been Sanders and why.

In fact Sanders was telling her that he loved and needed her, that her mature sense of irony was combined with a vestal quality, innate and precious to her, that girls lacked these days. Surely, too, she had needs … but no, he wouldn't mention her needs: he needed
her
stability, he would not presume needs in a woman so impressive as she.

She told him her needs were being met as well as she could humanly expect.

Yet he seemed to believe that the tensions in her voice were those of a lady, a
vestal
lady, under unexpected siege. He said that suddenly his criterion of behaviour was
her
. If she felt there was some benefit for her in Leeming's funeral arrangements, then he would have to give in in front of Chimpy.

She said tightly, “You have to do whatever your principles dictate.”

In spite of the arguable nature of his hopes, Sanders, no liar, next rang Sir Byron. The vice-chancellor himself answered the call.

Sanders told him, “Look, Byron, I've been rethinking this whole Leeming situation.…”

He could tell Chimpy was distracted by a gay female voice within the lodge that Sanders could hear on the line—speaking at Chimpy.

“Brian,” Chimpy said, “I have Sadie here, and she's not too well.” Sadie could even be heard, arguing that she'd never been better. “Wait a second and I'll speak to you on the extension in my study.”

Sanders began to sweat. Here was the same taut wariness towards his large gesture which he had already met with in Ella. In the humming vacancy of the telephone wires the woman's voice ground on remotely. Then, hollowly, Sir Byron's rose.

“Yes, Brian?”

“As I said, I've been rethinking.… As a matter of fact, I've been talking with Ella Ramsey.”

“Oh, yes?”

Sanders would have liked to lay a fist on Chimpy, who had been stung, probably by Sadie, to overtones.

“Well, all this is very close to the bone with the Ramseys, and Ella thinks it's important for her husband that I should permit Leeming senior to be exposed to Leeming junior. I must apologize for messing you about, but if I'd known that decent people like the Ramseys were involved, I'd have given in on the issue long ago.”

The vice-chancellor's voice sprang out at him. “Well, it's a bit too late for you to become magnanimous, Brian, just on the grounds that you've scored with Ella.”

“Listen, Byron, if I score with anyone I'll let you know. In the meantime, Ella Ramsey is a rare creature in this age. She's a woman of virtue.”

“Oh, my God!” Chimpy intoned. “As I was saying, it's a bit late to be magnanimous. I've already arranged that things should stay the way you decided. The Leemings have agreed to square things with the press. Besides, young Leeming's distracted by a letter that came this afternoon from an American publisher who wants to publish his failed doctoral thesis. So you see, he's going to get his spurs another way than by digging up his uncle. Of course, it's your department,” Chimpy added after a silence.

“Perhaps we'd better let things stand then,” Sanders admitted, feeling foolish, and therefore at least starting to sicken of vestal Ella.

“One other thing, though,” Chimpy said. “We've had a complaint from a research assistant of the female variety who says you offered her four hundred dollars to have a pregnancy aborted. Hullo! Are you still there? I was saying.…”

Sanders said, “All right then. But she was put up to it by someone. Someone she works with, I mean. Leeming, for example.”

“You know that's not the truth. He would have threatened you with it first, before bringing the girl to me.”

“He knew that isn't the sort of pressure I give in to.”

“That's heroic of you. Listen, I'm going to try to prevent this girl's story from getting out.”

“That's merciful of
you
.”

“But if it can be reasonably demonstrated that you
are
the father—”

“No need to demonstrate it,” Sanders said, established again on his old tack of moral bravery. “Unless her undergraduate's been at her, it's likely that I'm the father. But it's almost equally likely that her boyfriend's had a bash.” He could tell that Sir Byron, as a man who had strenuously tended his own career, was chastened, or at least amazed, by this frantic honesty. He said in grand derision, “The girl's religion, so the papers tell us, frowns on contraception.”

Chimpy was rendered fraternal. “Brian, I'd recommend a settlement. Could I suggest that.…”

The female voice intervened again, and a grating noise as of shifted furniture.

The vice-chancellor said, “Do you mind if I phone you back, Brian? Sadie seems to be going away for a few months' rest. Of course, at my suggestion.” Still, he sounded patently bemused. “It's thrown the household out a lot, though.”

He wisely cut the querulous background noises by hanging up on Sanders.

The night, Ramsey found, was uncongenial to deaths; mild and bright under a northerly rush of air with just a little of the breath of summits in it. For mortal man of sixty-two he made good time, though most of his way was uphill towards the university and ultimately into it. Here the union store was working late and doing trade in what Ramsey's mother called “forget-ables”: thread and toothpaste and shaving-cream.

For the sanguine student thirsts of the year's beginning, the cafeteria was serving coffee, and pineapple juice from Queensland in garish cans. It was more than half-full of boys and girls practising, in lumpy clothing, the air of unexcitement currently favoured by the young.

Among them, drinking a pot of tea at an exposed table, sat Belle. Her eyebrows were arched; she looked wistful, and while Ramsey stood outside watching her, she poured out her last half-cup from the pot in a manner almost ritual. If rite it was, the import of it redounded against Belle herself. Perhaps it was easier simply to decide that she appeared rarely pitiable, shaking the pot slightly, considering complaining or ordering more, deciding with her eternal equability that there was no increase for her in tea. He went in to her table.

“Oh, Alec,” she muttered. She saw clearly that there was no increase for her in Ramsey either.

“Good night, Belle. Out for a stroll?”

“The Kables are at the flat this evening. They're all eating some terrible indigestible meal bought in cartons in the town. It's a celebration. Denis's book … did you hear the news? Yes, uplifting news for him. He has his pride back.”

“So damn uncle now?”

“Oh no. Sir Byron won't intervene anyhow. His wife came to his office this afternoon—he'd had undergraduates out looking for her—and we were having a drink there—the vice-chancellor, the Kables, Denis and myself. She was visibly angry. She said she was sorry to force an issue in front of the Kables. They were dangerous, she said. For a little while pity for me played merry hell with her rebellion. But she came back strongly and said she wouldn't tolerate Sir Byron forcing the issue with this Sanders man, since his motives in the matter couldn't be proper. She finished up like a
real
woman. She told him she'd dropped the prescription for his
veins
in to the chemist, but he would have to collect it himself.” She laughed, fully and without ambiguity. The confrontation by Lady Sadie had been good give-and-take fun. Then she sobered. “I don't know about those Kables, though—whether they're good for Denis. Eric Kable's a pleasant enough man, but I'm sure Missus doesn't like me. We're both made of shark's skin.” She laughed, but falsely now. It was as if she was both parodying the part of a meddling aunt and expecting Alec to see through the parody.

“You don't even care for that boy, do you Belle?”

“He's not a relative by blood,” she conceded, whatever the concession meant.

He kept silence while a boy tanned from a summer on beaches steered his girl through the ruck of tables. As they passed Belle and himself, he heard the boy whisper, “God! Advanced-age scholarships.…”

“Belle,” Ramsey said in the wake of the unwelcoming youth, “Lloyd and I—I and Lloyd—left your husband before he was dead.”

She was annoyed by his emotionalism, and waved this talk aside with a mottled hand. “Yes, yes. I always knew there must be some such thing.”

“Belle, he was still breathing. I knew it; on some level or other I distinctly knew it. That was why I didn't go near the body. Near Leeming, I mean.”

“Lloyd was in charge,” the widow hissed in a dismissive way. “Lloyd was the doctor.”

“We left your husband when he was merely sleeping.”

Belle's eyes were down; she was furious over Ramsey's messy behaviour. She pushed her words through closed teeth. “I suppose that by ‘merely sleeping' you mean unconscious and dying. And if unconscious and dying, how were you to know he wasn't dead? Anyhow, you know what his sledging instructions were.”

Ramsey groaned.

“Ramsey,” she muttered, presuming a lively interest in old scandal on the part of the undergraduates, “I won't have you confessing this nonsense to people. You presume the whole affair turns on you. You presume it's your circus.”

“At some stages I've felt that I'm the only one who keeps his anniversaries. Your behaviour seems to have justified this impression.”

“Alec, control yourself. And don't bother with my behaviour. It's beyond your interpreting.”

He found it incredible that, as with Ella, a momentous confession was being leached down to backchat. He said again, slowly, as if deafness was a problem, that it was
her husband
who had been left.

“Stop trying to impress me, Alec,” Belle warned him through her teeth, secretive and nearly as urgent as Ramsey, yet urgent it seemed merely on the grounds of good taste and the balance necessary for continued health.

“The fact is—isn't it?—that you don't care enough about Leeming to judge me?”

“Oh God, do you want so badly to be judged? Have I
pretended
to be heartily involved in the business? Haven't I confessed my indifference?”

“You pretended an interest in the nephew.”

“I confess my insincerity then. And to my insincerity in wanting a funeral here, on so-called native soil. I confess to exploiting Denis's silliness. Anything, Alec, anything to make you behave.”

Ramsey fell silent and hung his head. He saw Belle's hand on his arm. “You want me to judge you, do you, and say what a pariah you are? There's always been a big slice of Calvinism in you, Alec, and behold you've made a way of life for yourself, a whole religion, simply on the basis that one afternoon I took you to bed with me. I don't know whether to be flattered or not that the old sin still rattles round inside you.”

Ramsey shook his head, but gave no clues, having none himself.

“Let me tell you about adultery,” Belle continued. “There was no such crime between Leeming and myself. You may remember that I had mystical theories about self-possession, a theology you could say that I've since dropped in case I come to believe it myself in my old age. It was necessary to my vanity to believe that what was hormonal in me chastened Leeming in the bowels of Christ—you remember we both favoured, Leeming and myself, an outré streak of theology? It was necessary to Leeming's self-esteem to believe that he was being chastened, that my affairs humbled him, refined him. So I fulfilled the convention of sinning in his absence. I think, though, that basically he would have been willing to let men in by the front door, tell them a depression was moving in from the Bight and go back to his study. We just didn't suit each other.”

Ramsey said, “To admit your indifference doesn't excuse you.” Nor did he mean that she was not excused her adulteries but rather the traditional obligations of cherishing and mourning, and of damning the man responsible for the death. Belle misunderstood his meaning.

“Listen, Alec. That husband of mine would have been a Cistercian monk in earlier times. The world and the flesh bemused him, so off he packed to a place where the world was a series of climatic clichés. And as for the flesh, your body doesn't smell, May's shirt is still clean in August, your excreta down in the permafrost offends no one. While with Leeming—equator or pole—the devil can be trusted to look after himself.”

Ramsey snorted. On top of his other urgencies, he found that it was important to him that there had been a bond and not a vacancy between Belle and Leeming.