The Survivor (3 page)

“… abused him afterwards for using slang,” Pelham was retailing. “Silly old cow.”

“Who?”

“Miss Fowler, the English mistress.”

“Abused the poet for using slang?”

“‘Abused' used in the local sense. Upbraided. As if those who give some increase to the language aren't entitled to use slang.”

“What did he say to them?”

“Oh, something about Australians not caring about the arts as long as they got their weekly screw.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, but I think Miss Fowler thought he was using the word in the American sense. One of the junior mistresses told me later that she'd lent the old lady a Norman Mailer novel, you see, where ‘screw' doesn't mean income, not by any means. Anyhow the girls thought he was marvellous. Not Mailer, of course. The poet.”

Who, at that moment, appeared in the lobby. An inquisitive-seeming little man, no apparent extravagances in him, a widower in tweeds and a knitted tie for his course of four lectures in the university town. Forty-eight he might have been; visaged like a corner grocer, pert- and chatty-looking; probably secretly varicosed beneath the wide-cuffed trousers. Yes. But a genuine metaphysician, begetter of metrical fire, super-being.

He had flown up from Sydney while Ramsey was in Pinalba. Now, as he came down the steps, he seemed to Ramsey to frown slightly at finding an ancient university buff with Pelham, his guide. Ramsey felt his blood jolt with exhilaration. At sixty-two he could have faced kings and tycoons, dowager empresses and sirens without a change of pulse. But he still savoured the handclasps of literary figures, for he thought of them as special phenomena. He could not, and hoped he never would, accept them as mere physical dross—but only on condition that they had written something that struck his own literary chords. On that subjective level, this man was for Ramsey a greater than William Butler Yeats, whom Ramsey disrespected. So he was impatient for the man to reach them and half-expected to be able to read absolutes in that face which was, fifteen yards away, pedestrian.

Pelham introduced them.

The poet smiled in a way that was frankly self-congratulatory. “But I was hoping it was you, Mr Ramsey. Let me tell you, you are a hero of my retarded boyhood.”

Ramsey smiled most unheroically, almost as if he was expecting a blow.

The poet explained, “I'm trying something to do with Leeming.” He blushed a little, outlining his ambitions. “It's a sort of poetic symphonic suite that deals with the realities of the expedition, but in terms of the master themes of Leeming's personality in so far as an outsider like myself can know them. Do you want to hit me?”

“Why would I want to hit you?”

“Well, I am an intruder, and everything I've written so far is based on my own presuppositions, which, I hope, will probably be killed by any chats I have with you.”

“No, no,” Ramsey said quickly. “I'd trust your presuppositions over anything I could say.” He grabbed for saner topics and apologized for the poor size of the lecture fee. Pelham then began to tell them with solemnity what he intended to urge the committee to do about improving the fee and paying the increase retrospectively to the poet.

The poet demurred. “It doesn't matter. I'm on holidays.
This
is my holiday, one of my little projects: meeting Mr Ramsey. And it's no use talking to poets about adequate pay. They've never seen it.”

“In any case,” said Pelham by way of compensating, “the vice-chancellor is having us all in for drinks after tonight's lecture. Alec, I didn't know if you'd be coming here this afternoon, so I had Barbara telephone Mrs Ramsey and she accepted in your name.”

Alec smiled specifically at the poet. “That will be fun, won't it?”

“The vice-chancellor? He knows how to keep me in my place.” The return smile was a little courageous, as if the vice-chancellor was well known but not well liked by the poet. “He worked on the Trust when he was in Canberra.”

“And you worked with him?”

“
For
him.”

“Of course.” Inwardly, Alec was playing with the concept of the two hemispheres behind the man's tidy and customary face. One hemisphere: the public service; secretaryship of a national reserve trust concerned with ecology and the spawning of trout; a bungalow of brick in a utopian little city ringed by worn primeval hills. The second hemisphere: the freakish region of Xanadu, a little ravaged by the Calvinism of the public servant but municipally intact. A man close to the vision, this little man; an eighteen-carat bolt from the blue, ectopic as hell.

Ramsey said nothing about Xanadu as an unlikely sister town to Canberra, but promised they would meet again at the vice-chancellor's and went upstairs to attend to his mail.

Upstairs, dumpy loyal Barbara waited with her hips just as big as he remembered them. In these latter days of his failing efficiency, she was dowager-empress of Extension as Pelham was regent. He suspected she did not resent her function as Pelham resented his, but her motives were almost certainly not as pure as Pelham's and derived perhaps from denied motherhood. He had taken thought frequently enough on what would happen to Barbara when he retired and she was left high and dry in her late thirties with a director capable of doing his own work, requiring a mere secretary, not a chatelaine.

He strode into the office, attempting to convey that he was feeling more
au fait
with the demands of the department than he had been when he left things in minor turmoil two afternoons past. He told Barbara, “Just met the poet, but I didn't ask him how to fit the rhythm to the vision.”

Barbara was down on her fat knees, ferreting in the bottom shelf of the steel cabinet; and Ramsey felt envious of her expertise, as if it were not his own office at all.

“Another lost opportunity,” she said in friendly contempt.

“Yes,” Ramsey told Professor Sanders that evening, “Chimpy and I played together in the 1922 team that beat Wales. Chimpy played like an immortal. And as Dylan Thomas would have said, ‘there was lamentation in High Street but laughter rearing in the Foundry Hotel where Mews the Chimp gives birth in loud labour to wild suppositions and Ramsey the line-out specialist brings up his deep Welsh beer in the landlady's second-best aspidistra bought lovingly at auction in Pontypool.'”

They all laughed—Lady Mews, Professor Sanders, the Pelhams, Ella. They probably enjoyed a smoking-in-church feeling, the delicious minor blasphemy of hearing Sir Byron Mews, the vice-chancellor (still upstairs), called Chimpy in his own living-room.

It was rarely now that Ramsey's whimsy had any exercise; it had been provoked by the savour of Ella's welcome to him and the less important savour of the meal they had had together. He wished now that the Kables were not expected any second and that Chimpy would stay wherever he was; the company was very pleasant as it stood.

But talk decelerated then: the Pelhams still seemed shy and shyly torn between admiration of Sir Byron and Lady Mews's contemporary panelling and the lights of colleges blazing the academic year away in end-of-term parties farther down the hill. Professor Sanders, polite wencher that he was, sat turning his eyes with prim asexuality from face to face, although even Ramsey responded to sweet young Mrs Pelham whose sherry-glass seemed stuck in her hand like the candle of an unwilling pilgrim.

Lady Sadie said, “I don't know what could be keeping Byron.”

If Pelham conjured up stoic generations of miners, Sadie's generations would have been (one would think) good horsewomen, brave girls at births and good-humouredly up to dealing with any horse-play behind the marquee. In fact she was a plumber's daughter and scholarship girl from Cricklewood. What had been her craggy loveliness, now verging on craggy venerability, condemned her to being suspected by middle-class girls such as Mrs Pelham. But Ramsey could sense a backwardness in accepting Lady Mews as a pleasant sixty-year-old not in Mrs Pelham but in Ella. There was that infinitesimal steeliness in Ella's manner that only he was accustomed to sensing. She was married to a man seventeen years senior to her, but the irony of this difference in age was not the same as that of old-man-young-wife jokes as much told and favoured by travelling salesmen. It was that she saw danger even in personable grandmothers. Part of her unalterable and Draconian view of love was that
she
would be wronged if anyone was. Yet Ramsey felt that apart from the child she had lost and the onset of obsessive periods in his own life, her anxiety had to do precisely with the fact of his age. An old man very nearly and every summer threatening him. While she might be able to deal with Lady Sadie's seasoned grace, she could do nothing when he left her bed for old bitch death.

Saving his dignity, she gave the seat beside her a little subliminal pat with the force of a loving request; that is, thought Ramsey, an edict.

Then, just as Mrs Pelham was daring to relinquish her glass for refilling, the Kables arrived. At their coming-in, Ella and Ramsey glanced at each other coyly, shamefaced at sensing that there was something to be learnt from them. This was that although Eric and Valerie did not nurture conjugal fidelity in the ferocious way Ella did, there was a fidelity in their public teamwork which the Ramseys could never hope to match. Their objectives were limited and sure. Eric wanted the directorship; to be a university baron instead of an outrider at Milton; to nudge (at least) the heart of university power and politics. Ramsey, irked to pithiness by the Kables, had once told Ella that Valerie K. wanted the directorship on the tableland for Eric because she preferred to be laid by scholars. None of this, though, detracted from the unison of their public bearing.

“Are you feeling better now, Alec?” she said. “Eric tells me you weren't yourself in Pinalba.”

Ella frowned in an extreme way, instantly convinced that she had been denied news to which she had right.

“Maybe I was suffering from being too much myself,” Ramsey told the Kables. “But I'm over it now. I believe we must congratulate you on an anniversary.”

Valerie turned matriarchal and implied decades of domestic heroism. Her unlined face, a little sun-raw from all her “dashing down to the coast”, gave the lie to this tiny spasm of histrionics.

“Eighteen years,” she murmured, but lingeringly, weighing her sacrifices.

“An old married woman,” Eric chimed in.

“Your old cheese,” suggested Alec, fully in the spirit of their Darby-and-Joan wistfulness.

Kable laughed. “That's right, Alec. My old cheese.”

Valerie said, looking Alec full in the face, “Soon we'll be making room for young people. Moving aside in the structure of things.”

“Surely Byron won't be kept much longer,” Lady Sadie said, perhaps to break up Valerie's attack.

“But where's the famous poet?” asked Eric Kable of Pelham.

“He's having dinner at some friend's place in town.”

“Mrs Turner's,” Ella told them. “The widow's. I believe he courted her at one stage.” The information came slackly, but Alec was gratified foolishly as he always was when Ella behaved in a traditional womanly way—knew some gossip, for example, as now. “She keeps a sort of shrine to the man. Photographs and reviews.”

Upstairs, distant but distinctive enough to betray Sir Chimpy's mortality, the cistern flushed.

Lady Sadie was well up to filling the silence so induced.

“I hope the poet feels free to bring Mrs Turner.”

“I don't think he will,” Pelham told her.

In came the vice-chancellor, wiping excess water from his straight grey hair. From the days of international Rugby he retained a barrel-chest and a good colour, but age-lines had brought the old nickname close to the bone.

He greeted his guests and let Alec pour him a whisky. Everything now waited on the poet. Sir Byron took stock of the room and headlined a topic for discussion by saying to the Kables, “Dreadful thing for your friend Denis Leeming.”

The Kables made doleful noises in the affirmative, a little like keening.

“Young Leeming's had his doctoral thesis rejected. On what you could call purely formal grounds.” Sir Byron was bent on newsing up the rest of his visitors. “They said it simply wasn't geomorphology, as nominated. I think they were a little severe. ‘Marks will be deducted if the question is not precisely answered'—that sort of stuff.” He turned to the Kables, “They say he isn't taking it so well.”

“Neither it nor anything else,” said a deep voice: Professor Sanders'.

“But of course,” said Lady Sadie, “young Leeming works in Professor Sanders' department.”

“I don't want to be fatuous, Lady Mews,” the professor said, “but I often wonder if he does.”

“Oh, but Denis is a compulsive scholar, Dr Sanders,” Mrs Kable claimed.

Until the past minute Ramsey had not known that the Kables and Denis Leeming were intimates. Neither, one could tell, had Sanders, who now shrugged as if conceding Leeming a good name for the purposes of the evening.

“And he had the devil's own job getting back from Canada,” Eric Kable said. “He had two months in hospital over there.”

Sanders shrugged again, regretting his earlier frankness.

Ella was the merciless one. “Took a token overdose, didn't he, Eric?” she suggested, for the second time that evening laying claim to inside information.

Eric swallowed. Anger came close to breaking up the team; and Valerie supplied for him.

“An overdose, yes. Token? No. Or at least, who could say?”

No one did dare say in so many words.

Ramsey could tell that the Kables' loyalty to Leeming had surprised the other guests, and Lady Sadie as well, to judge by the tiny bole of a frown she allowed to show between the eyebrows. Everyone presumed on the basis of this loyalty that an unlikely love affair raged between young Leeming and Valerie, and that Eric Kable was angry about that word “token” because he felt brotherly towards his wife's lover, as he had been brotherly to others of her lovers in the past.