The Survivor (32 page)

The pit was marked by a windlass and four red flags on bamboo. A small petrol-motored winch chuffed unattended. Beyond the windlass, a sailor with a hand-model radio waited for communiques from below.

“The edges are presumed to be firm,” said the lieutenant. “But don't go too close.”

At once the cameramen danced forward for footage of the burial pit. Hammond and his brothers stretched their necks for a view, on one side, of the blue-white terraces and, on the other, of the straight, blue-grained depth that was the wall. Ramsey and Belle edged least of all, taking quick, wary squints that sensed but did not verify a hint of fluorescence at the bottom, where the digging soundlessly went on.

The officer called across the mouth. “Anything?”

“Nothing, sir.”

He came to Belle's side and within earshot of Ramsey. “We can't afford to be too hopeful. I hope you don't mind those people.…” He gestured obliquely at the pressmen. “I suppose it's their version of reverence. But things are being done better down below.”

Belle nodded. Weak in the knees, cringing within, Ramsey still heeded how the slow, weighty nod signified grief in the fibre, grief taken in and made so intimately part of her essence that tears were beside the point.

Awed by her, the lieutenant led the press team back to the edges of the site and left both mourners huddled in remembrance. Forced thus to take his passive part in the tableau, Ramsey listened to the murmur of shutter mechanisms somewhere behind him. In the name of networks, the pious moment was recorded.

“Belle,” said Ramsey, forestalled by the whirring voice of public opinion at his back from speaking as ironically as he should, “do you think, perhaps, after all this, you ought to take a rest indoors?”

“Yes.” Her voice was even. “Isn't it startling the way one's glasses ice up on the insides?”

What, of course, he feared from Leeming's removal, was a change in the essence of his life, a change as absolute as death. His fear felt strangely deep, as if room was left on upper levels for a show of politeness to the press and a thin crust of sanity. Modified hope and disappointment had simultaneously risen in him, now that he had seen the icecap that sat on Leeming, the barrenness of the pit, the poor tools to hand.

So he answered the questions of the pressmen, all the while playing with what was a grotesquely diverse lunch to be served on a glacier—rice and meatballs, slaw and chilli, corn and peas. When they asked him what he had thought when he saw the pit he managed them without panic.

“I was numb,” he murmured. “Please.…”

“Yeah,” they agreed, understanding all and nothing. They would drain him in season. For the moment, they tried more chilli.

There were glaciologists, too, at table, men from the neighbour pit to Leeming's. Like the sailors who came in for coffee, they were going home soon, their data complete, their kudos increased, carrying stuffed penguins for their kids—made-in-New-Jersey penguins that were sold in the PX at McMurdo. The season had been looted of its best days; no presumption gripped the mess that anything more would be yielded up. The atmosphere of coming departure soothed Ramsey.

The lieutenant came round, telling his guests that their helicopter had just left McMurdo Sound.

All lumbered to the pit again. The mourning party of Belle, Ramsey, and the officer went ahead; the witnesses followed. Deserts were suggested by the harsh afternoon light, the winch made small, dry noises, drew up a hodful of ice, and dumped it on the north side of the pit. Helped by such tired sounds, Ramsey sensed the presence of all the elements that go to make a non-event. He might not have been able to itemize them, yet they subsisted in the perduring light, in the afternoon that would not end but grow to dusk at midnight, in the unzealous mechanisms detailed for the dead's recovery, in the shuffle of sixteen inexpectant feet. There would be no apt resurrection today, at Ramsey's feet and Belle's. No flair for the appropriate resided in the corpse: perhaps Ramsey had visited the glacier simply to verify the powerlessness of those remains. If he felt let down by the fact he felt also reprieved, readmitted to the warm nastiness of the concrete world. What especially appealed to him was that he
would
use the return page of his Melbourne-Christchurch air-ticket, that it had validity to bring him back from the zone of metamorphosis.

There was a large youth pouncing towards them at the trot who stood at last before the lieutenant. Urgent mutterings shuttled between the two of them. Ramsey heard the boy say, “… so hard they're digging round it with their hands.”

The officer spoke to Belle, who gave quick, acquiescent nods as if she was one of the lieutenant's men. “I'm going down,” the lieutenant then said aloud. “There seems to be something.… This man will take you all on to the pit.”

Immediately Hammond was at Ramsey's elbow.

“Alec, what was it he said? Are there indications …?”

Ramsey's legs seemed gone. He felt himself to be fettered in the viscous manner of dreams.

“He's gone down to see. Oh, ghouls rejoice!”

“They will indeed,” said Hammond, presuming easily that Ramsey was making a judgment on a national basis. Ramsey turned his back.

Before him the pit gave out thin metallic noises of haste rising to the surface with something like a fluid speed. Like a clockwork ascension. He felt some iron bubble of panic fly up from his belly and stick at the narrow gate of his throat. Yet even as the clamour reached climax he mocked his lack of reason. Was it, he asked himself, the crude possibility of an ice-harrowed Leeming rising in his sight, flat and brown as a Byzantine Christ?

It proved to be the lieutenant on the ladder. Before fully emerged he began broadcasting orders; the evening watch to be roused, recovery gear to be fetched. And a chair for Mrs Leeming. At glacier level he peered concernedly at Belle and asked her if she was wise to remain. Momentarily, Belle's face crumpled, an old page licked by flame. One tear was given off by her left eye.

“Well?” she said.

“It seems this is it.”

“
Seems?
” She sounded brisk.

The officer sighed. “It's him. No doubt at all.”

“How does he seem? Crushed?”

“He's completely done up in a sleeping-bag. He doesn't look big.…”

“He was only five foot nine,” Belle explained.

“That's right,” said the lieutenant. “In answer to your question, Mrs Leeming, everything seems normal.”

There was silence. Once more the pit seemed to Ramsey to be supremely unproductive. His disbelief became a medicinal balance to the authentic panic in his blood, a counterweight called forth perhaps by his desire not to be judged mad. So no one judged him mad as he strolled across the glacier.

“Belle,” he said into Belle's ear, “you have to stop this comedy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You have to stop this
circus.
” He used words which, he sensed, had barbs to them, knowing himself within range of hurting a widow whom, until two minutes before, he had considered invulnerable.

“Shut up,” she told him. “If you ruin this, Alec.… Shut up!”

She sat hunched and intense as a mother cat.

“God,” he complained, “you were never like this.…”

But, with a snort, he gave up reasoning.

Even so, he stood composed by Belle's side, though it came to him as more and more viable that he could make the officer call off the retrieval.

Sailors were lowering a stretcher with the petrol-driven winch.

“Aren't they premature?” Ramsey asked of no one.

“Please be quiet, Alec. They're the experts.”

The officer came to Belle's side. “They've practically dislodged the mass. I should have told you this: my orders are not to interfere with the remains. We have a large canister here.…”

“The insides of those aircraft are so hot, Lieutenant,” Belle said. “Have you thought of the effect of melting …?”

Ramsey silently laughed at this funerary nicety.

The lieutenant murmured, “We have been instructed to pack the canister with ice.”

She appeared grateful to have her husband's frozen flesh at the mercy of their capabilities, their forethought.

Again the wondrous boy made for the pit, and both cameramen placed themselves to record the descent. Ramsey stumbled at speed behind him.

“Lieutenant!”

“Sir?”

“Don't you think it's time to stop this lunacy?”

The lieutenant pulled his features into a fast frown that meant not that he hadn't heard but that he was extending to Ramsey a chance to revoke.

“Come again, sir?”

A sailor intervened. “They say do you want it held, sir?”

“Didn't I say so? Tell them I'm coming down.”

“No,” said Ramsey. “Listen. You can't go any further with this stunt.”

The lieutenant stared diagnostically at Ramsey. Ramsey went on.

“For one thing, have you considered what he'll look like?”

He had borrowed the question from Hammond, and realized it. As well, he knew it to be dangerous, the very question that had brought on a catalepsy of the imagination in the southbound aircraft.

His belly pounded. He had never been so actively afraid.

“All the experts seem to suggest that he should be quite tolerable to look at, reminiscent of the Dr Leeming you knew. Excuse me.”

As the lieutenant turned away to business, Ramsey's mind fumbled with the image the young man had provoked in him. For the second time his imagination seized, constricted like a windpipe. So that again there was, yet seemed not to be, breath; again he suffered the terror of smothering yet could speak. At the same time, he felt the new and final statement of the truth bound epileptically from his belly into his throat and chest and arms. Believing himself, then, to be strangling, and jerking like a convulsive, he was still able to reach out for the lieutenant's elbow and say, “Wait there! I think I ought to tell you.…”

“Yes?”

“Well, perhaps not in Mrs Leeming's hearing.… Could I speak to you in private?”

“You must realize, Mr Ramsey, how inopportune this is.”

Belle had come up. There were remarkable signs of impotence about her. Her jaws trembled.

“I've warned you, Alec,” she pleaded. “Can't you …?”

“Perhaps if Mrs Leeming could go back to the mess?” Ramsey suggested.

“You can't be serious, sir. Abrams. Take Mr Ramsey back to the mess. Just relax, Mr Ramsey. Get Abrams to pour you coffee with a shot—ask the cook, Abrams. What about you, Mrs Leeming? Are you cold?”

Belle explained that she wasn't. The lieutenant smiled at her.

“It won't be long.”

Large and pitted-faced beneath his furred hood, Abrams neared Ramsey and played at being solicitous.

“Let's go, Mr Ramsey sir.”

Abrams' mitted hand was an offered insult. Ramsey pushed it aside. He called to the lieutenant, “You can't wait, can you, to round out the little sideshow?”

“I don't understand.” The officer glanced over his shoulder, and saw that Ramsey was all fever and resistance. As a result he stood still.

“Look, you need to go in and have a rest, sir. Abrams, go on.”

Abrams put giant mitts around Ramsey's arm.

“Keep your hands off me,” said Ramsey. “I'm not some bloody Asian peasant to be pushed round.”

“I never pushed round no Asian peasants, sir.”

“You've got to pull yourself together,” the officer firmly called, and still did not move.

“I keep together well enough. But I want to talk to you about Leeming.”

“For God's sake move him, Abrams.”

“Ah, the crack in the Emily Post etiquette! I warn you, I'll make trouble if you don't call him off.”

When they had heard the substantial, the truest truth, they would fill in the pit.

“The truest truth!” he wanted to shout at the young man as an incentive, but what would the words mean to a capable and busy officer?

When Abrams tried to take firmer hold of him Ramsey threw a punch at the hooded face. It was one way of impressing the lieutenant that an interview was urgently sought. Abrams hugged him with both arms. Composedly enough, he became aware that the officer had snatched the radio and was calling a Slavonic name into it. Then he, too, moved close to hold the madman. Two large bodies smothered Ramsey's violence.

“God Almighty,” he said crazily. “These aren't the right circumstances for talk.”

Hampered by his gloves, he worked hard to dislodge Abrams' arm and Abrams' concerted good temper. But a third man came up, pondering what part of the foreigner to grab. Ramsey saw Belle standing back with a neutral face.

“Don't shoot this!” yelled the lieutenant to two cameramen who were recording the unlooked-for, intrusive event.

Ramsey found himself being carried away in a professional manner. Meanwhile the essential truth chafed in him. “Hammond,” he called as they passed the huddle of journalists, people for whom he had a surprise. “Come wherever they're taking me.”

Hammond made hesitant steps.

“No, come on. It's going to be worth it.”

All the journalists made the beginnings of avid movements, as if they had forgotten sentiment and thought they might have one of those delicious cases of service brutality. “No,” he told them. “Hammond. You!”

Though toted like a marble pedestal, he was for some reason obeyed.

“I think it's just that I'm a fellow-countryman,” Hammond explained to the officer.

“How well do you know him?” the lieutenant, still burdened, grunted.

“Only the last few days, but we became pretty close.”

“That's a damned lie,” said Ramsey.

Hammond opened the clapboard door onto the mess porch and the further one through into the fuggy warmth of the mess itself. Ramsey was conveyed through and placed in a chair. Coffee was called for.