The Survivor (28 page)

“You undervalue your husband,” he said, hoping to provoke her. “Just because there seems to be little connection between his brand of genius and the frequency of his erections.”

“You painfully virtuous people always consider you have the right to speak crudely to those who don't keep your codes.”

“And you people always demand tolerance of your vices but deny the same tolerance to the old-fashioned virtues of men like Leeming. Just the same, it wouldn't surprise me to find that you married Leeming precisely because you knew he'd be faithful to you.”

For a second Belle's eyes galvanized; yet there was no telling whether it was the unlikeliness or the closeness to the bone of Ramsey's claim that made her consider it for a little. But she delayed her answer, and their furies dwindled to embarrassment at having swapped so many insults. Ramsey wanted to go, was under a physical demand to stamp back and forth among the hills.

He excused himself, but was warned before going that there were to be no confessions from him on Antarctic themes. The remains, if found (she said), would be disposed and coffined in a sturdy casket and returned to the earth with the blessing of the Episcopalian pastor from McMurdo Sound. “So the Americans can be gratified—they've been very decent and mustn't be given a false impression of the antipodean widow. And on my side, it's more respectable than telling the Department of External Affairs not to pester me.”

“But,” Alec told her, “you ran the risk of having to dabble in the swamp yourself if Denis's schemes had matured.”

Belle shrugged. “I think I would simply have stayed home.” A shy smile took her mouth, forced and appearing to be, like so much else that Belle had said tonight, an offered clue. “At my age a person can get out of nearly everything.”

In an instant Ramsey understood, and was horrified by the way her old eyes crinkled with a look of irony usually found in the eyes of parrots. In a way more or less offhand, she had been willing to subject Leeming to an ornate burial at which his grotesque nephew would be chief mourner. It was a tableau she had worked to set up, worked perhaps with more than random energy based on a more than random jealousy of Dr Leeming's Antarctic distractions. And now her authoritative eyes were willing to say so.

“In fact, you don't even have Denis in your old age,” he surmised.

She laughed, secure in another ten years of profitable widowhood, of water views and visitings with other blooming widows along that sweet, moneyed shore from Elizabeth Bay to Vaucluse.

At length, and much earlier than he had expected, Ramsey went home to sleep. At a given hour during his rest the watch changed for those excavating what could be called Leeming's ice-pit. Two sailors were lowered to dig, three to shore up the diggings. They took a risk, those five, in the (however slowly) moving ice.

Dormant and a hundred yards from the pit stood a small Swiss excavating machine, powerful for the task but indelicate enough to eat the hero whole and spit him out minced.

Another day. Ramsey kept long office hours, and drugged with work his inchoate sense of something remaining to be said: the truth that evaded mere facts and the indifference of women.

At home Ella and Miss Bourke grazed on plans for the coming child, and seemed to feel consecrated in their course after an evening visit from Dr Sanders.

Sanders had on arrival been invited to sit but would not. “I thought I knew you better,” he said to Sally, “than to expect you'd be used by Leeming to take a private matter to a public authority.”

Miss Bourke said she had made a complaint on her own behalf because Professor Sanders had not known her well enough to believe that when she said he was the child's father he was the child's father.

He gave her an envelope. “I hope that covers things. It's a little bit over what you asked for.”

When the girl would not handle the money Ella took it in her place.

“Now then, Dr Sanders,” she said. “Don't try to capitalize on what's simply a matter of paying your debt.”

“You'll get it all back,” the girl muttered towards the carpet.

Sanders warded off her proud intentions with his two meaty hands. “It's got nothing to do with the money,” he said.

Ella suggested, “I suppose it's the principle? Then of course you'll readily understand how principle forced me to take Sally's cause to Sir Byron.”

There were monosyllables and anger, and Sanders quickly left.

Insomniac Ramsey had to cough in the night to cover the noise of the radio as he tuned in the hourly news. Not that a breathless world hung on tidings of the bizarre endeavour proceeding at seventy-five degrees south; there were rare reports that nothing had been found, and during the third night, of a blizzard of one hundred and ten miles, whipping south-west from the Pole down the back of the Victoria Land mountains and the contours of coastal glaciers. Although it was not now expected that the body would be found, digging would continue if weather and the declining summer allowed.

At an hour of the early morning when sleeplessness becomes a form of whimsical intoxication, Ramsey began to reproach himself for having thought of God as an artist. Things remaining as they were might not be skilful irony in a dramatic sense, but in the real world it could be the ultimate divine comment. With this insight came an understanding of his own arrogance in that he had believed that a crucible would be provided, a zone, a time-lock of intensity; that he would be made new through fire.

He slept, and woke with his belly feeling sore in a muscular way, as if his dream of sledges had been real.

Before him Ella stood smiling warily from above a prepared tray, offered with the warranty of her curdled love. He could not manage to be grateful as she fussed him into an upright position and ramified him with pillows. His lack of gratitude did wonders: she was somehow in the mood for expiation.

It was apparent, too, that she had secretly informed herself by transistor. She told him about the recommencement of digging; he pretended he hadn't heard.

“You told me blizzards lasted twelve days.” The statement sounded like a polite concession to one of his random interests.

“No. I wasn't thinking. There was one we had that lasted twelve days. They may last only twelve hours. Or thirty-six, say. This one lasted long enough.” He accused her. “I thought you wanted the thing settled, too? I thought you wanted him buried at Botany or somewhere?”
Somewhere
, in his mind, had to do with a dreadful schizoid-Gothic railway station among graves on the edge of Sydney, and summer cortèges honouring uncles of his, fifty-five years dead.

“We presumed he'd be found. That corpse is a god to us. But this blizzard settles it. It shows you can fail to find his remains, just as you can fail to find any man's.”

And, matronly since Miss Bourke had entered the house, she did not allow herself to be disabused, but tried to jolly him up with health small-talk and blind-raising and too much pillow-patting.

Pelham was in the office early to ask him questions of high seriousness, and Barbara harried him. He told Pelham, “God help Barbara's child if she ever has one. She'll keep its story-books in a filing-cabinet under
H for Hansel
, see also
G for Grimm.
”

And when Pelham laughed, he whispered, “This morning I write my resignation, Morris.”

The Englishman nodded, a nod of condolence. “I'll never work under Kable,” he muttered. There was no telling whether he meant this as an axiom of loyalty to Ramsey's memory or as a commonsense reminder to Alec to plant his name before the eyes of those who would choose successors.

An hour later Ramsey delivered the letter to Sir Byron's personal secretary and caught a ride into town with a lecturer from his own department. Business was poor in the town's travel agency, where he saw posters for Patagonia and for a cruise of Antarctic waters—the Ross Ice Shelf, McMurdo Sound, the Bay of Whales. They were letting anyone into the club he didn't care to belong to. He wondered if some squatter from that rich countryside had chased Adelie penguins over the shelf-ice.

“I want to go to New Zealand,” he told the girl. “To Christchurch.”

The girl said it could be done, direct from Melbourne.

“Can you arrange the entire thing from here?”

“Yes.”

“That's marvellous,” he said. “No wonder you have people going as far as Antarctica.” He nodded to the poster and she blushed as if its hanging might have been a little too fanciful of the management.

“When would you like to go, sir?”

How often did the Americans fly south from Christ-church? he wondered. Daily? Weekly? Had they given up for the summer? He would be patient in Christchurch if he had to be.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I know it's a rush.”

The manager, called in, thought it possible. Ramsey promised to call back at three for a verdict.

Outside, he found the eternal Kables pottering around their car, Valerie loading a string-bag of oranges for their return to Milton. Ramsey considered screening himself behind three sauntering townswomen, but knew he had been seen and cringed from the risk of Mrs Kable's yelp of discovery. Staunch in the end, he walked straight up to them.

Valerie put on a toothy grimace that pretended to have caught him in some truancy. “Away from the office
again
, Alec? I wish Eric could organize himself as well as you do.”

Eric Kable was doing something adept with the engine and, to compound the villainy, not getting much grease on his hands. “And being fitted for seven-league boots?” He smiled.

“I have a friend arriving from New Zealand this afternoon,” Ramsey told them. “I was checking the time of arrival.”

But if he had had a friend coming from New Zealand he would not have found it necessary to explain. He hoped the Kables were not perceptive enough to realize this.

“Well, Valerie,” Kable called above the crunch of the lowered bonnet, “no more of the wrong light coming on.” He muttered crisply to Alec, “Generator wires crossed.” It was a brutal reality and not for a lady's ears.

“I see,” Ramsey whispered, able to keep a secret.

Valerie marched up the footpath flank of the station wagon. “Well, Alec, it's been a delight. I suppose you're already hard at work arranging next year's schools for us culturally bankrupt seekers.”

“Yes,” Ramsey lied. “I've got even more radical plans for next year's.”

“Goodness, this one was adventurous enough for an old countrywoman.”

“You found it that way?”

Their cheap guise of simplicity again compelled them to swallow his cheap irony. It was all too mean for anyone to emerge the winner.

He visited the bank, and then sent the following telegram:

DIRECTOR

ANTARCTIC DIVISION

DEPT OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS

CANBERRA

FOR REASONS APPRECIATE YOU UNDERSTAND WISH TO PROCEED MCMURDO FASTEST EARLIEST STOP TRAVELLING CHRIST-CHURCH TOMORROW STOP APPRECIATE EXPEDITING WITH U.S. AUTHORITIES STOP RAMSEY LEEMING SURVIVOR

Back at the office, Barbara was pop-eyed from the size of that day's mail.

“And the vice-chancellor wants you to lunch with him at twelve-thirty.”

But before he could go to lunch and acquaint Chimpy with his Antarcticide, the telephone on his desk pealed. It was Ella, wanting to know what was this about a friend arriving from New Zealand; Valerie and Eric Kable had visited her to say good-bye and to explain that they mustn't keep her since they knew she was having a visitor.

“You don't approve of my telling fantastic lies to the Kables?”

But he felt endangered by the persistence of that Kable woman, who knew how to send lies home to roost.

Ella had only mild reproaches. “Perhaps we should decide what lies we're telling beforehand, so that we're at least consistent.”

“We've got better things to do than that.”

“Have we, Alec?”

He heard her voice go watery in the earpiece. She was like the Ella of the time before Sally Bourke blessed their house with her maternity.

“So there it is,” he told Sir Byron. “Never trust me on a glacier, Chimpy.”

For no reason he could understand he dropped the bread roll he had been splitting. As his stomach jumped once within him like a snake on the move, he began sobbing.

Chimpy let the spasm go its full length, and said nothing until it was time to mutter huskily, “Now you'll feel better.”

No wonder Lady Mews had left home, Ramsey wanted to say.

“Thank God I'm finished now.” He meant, as a man with a career.

Poor Sir Byron was not easy. He handed a butter pat to Alec as something that should be considered prior to rash decisions. “I want you to stay, Alec.”

Ramsey waited for the “But if you really feel you must go.…”

“I don't expect people to resign because they aren't well. If you're feeling the strain, why don't you delegate some of your authority?”

It was as if the man, a solid institutional man at that, accustomed to outright judgments, had not heard the part about Leeming. Ramsey wanted to remind him; but this delegation-of-authority business was absurd enough in its own right to call out for reply.

“If I delegated any more.… You see, that's what I mean. You haven't bothered to learn anything about my department because there's a sentimental tie with me based on eighty minutes of football played against Welshmen in 1922. But even if I could manage efficiently, there'd be this other question. If I was disloyal to Leeming, who was a prodigious man, how much more …? You finish the sentence, Chimpy.”

Chimpy kept his eyes on Alec and took from a drawer a book marked with hieroglyphics of the library. Ramsey hysterically recognized the book as one that everybody he spoke to seemed to have read.