The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  “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.

  With ersatz sweetness the door chimes tolled. “The poet,” Sir Byron hazarded, while he and his wife churned about in the depths of their armchairs for leverage.

  “Could I answer it?” asked Pelham, and was permitted to.

  Meanwhile, restored to calm, Eric Kable threw a last opinion towards the vanishing question of Denis Leeming. “It does seem fashionable now to make catalogues of Denis’s eccentricities. But most of us could begin our lists with oddities closer to home for us than that.”

  “Indeed, indeed,” Ramsey chanted robustly, underlining Kable’s opinion and drowning it in assent.

  Then everyone began to take small urgent sips of their various liquors, fortifying themselves against meeting the bard. Ramsey watched sweet little Mrs Pelham take the alien sherry into her soft, shy, white body.

  “Sorryumlate,” said an entering voice. The poet’s. The sober, mercantile face had gone turbid, a pink almost hideous: he had had drink. He swayed aggressively on his two unpoetic legs, like a beaten fighter whose instincts for footwork remain. Edging around his flank, capable but taut, was Morris Pelham.

  “H’lo Chimpy, you ole bastard,” said the poet. “Sorryumlate.”

  The ceremonious Sir Byron went forward to test how the evening might unfold if he set an example by refusing to see the poet’s sovereign and incontrovertible drunkenness. “Don’t worry about that. Sit down. Oh, you know my wife and Mr and Mrs Pelham, Mr and Mrs Ramsey, Mr and Mrs Kable.”

  “Mrs Kable,” he said, his eyes dilating in Valerie’s direction. “God, wouldn’t I like t’wind her in a strand or two.”

  “You’ve been doing well for yourself,” Sir Byron went on, his eye on a deep chair towards which he was droving the poet. “With your verse. A regular subject of M.A. theses you are now.”

  “M.A. theses?” The poet stood with closed eyes and wavered, making and re-making a noise like a world-weary mammy. “Uh-huh, Lord! Uh-huh-huh, Lord!”

  “There’s a comfortable chair,” Lady Sadie called, abandoning her own seat for the poet’s sake and fortifying it with cushions. But her guest evaded her and fell into Pelham’s place, forestalling the husband, abashing the wife.

  “Wa’s your name, darling?” he asked her.

  “Sarah Pelham.”

  “Bloody nice, Sarah. Where’s the old feller?”

  He scanned about for Ramsey, as if he had to locate all parties before settling to an overly frank relishing of Mrs Pelham.

  “The ole feller’s present and correct,” Ramsey assured him and toasted him in whisky.

  “Def’nilly want a talk with you later, sport.”

  “Would you like something to drink?” Sir Chimpy was brave enough to say, consistent with his public good sense.

  “Got a beer, Chimp?”

  “Indeed I have.”

  Pelham said, “Might I?” and obtained beer hesitantly from the cabinet, ready all the time to drop bottle and glass and bound to his wife.

  “And look,” said Sir Byron to the poet, “most of the people here don’t know me as Chimpy.”

  “Well what? Your Excellency?”

  “No. Why don’t you just call me Byron?”

  “Isn’t in character.”

  The lower part of Chimpy’s face fell into a stoic pucker.

  “Hey, Sarah, what about the garden?”

  “It’s very nice.”

  “Yeah. Prolific.” It could be heard weaving prolifically in the night breeze. “But what about the garden for us?”

  “There’s no light,” Sarah Pelham claimed failingly.

  “I shall be, madam, your Lucifer and luminary. What about it?”

  There was some indulgent tittering about the room. It was hard to damn outright someone who might well have had the future’s ear.

  “Behave yourself,” said Ella.

  “Umbehaving badly?”

  “So far.”

  “It’s that black mick bitch Turner,” the poet urged in extenuation. He half-turned to Ella’s flinty beauty and pointed at Ramsey. “Your voice of the turtle-dove, your flower in the crannied nook, your lean-and-chubby, your ole man? Et? Cet? Er? A?”

  “He’s my husband,” said Ella. “He is not an old man.”

  “Well, Christ, I wouldn’ want to be as old as he is.”

  “No. It wouldn’t do anything for you.”

  Independently, the poet’s hand felt with fair competence towards Sarah Pelham’s knee. He still had the time to open a further front by saying, “Howsa career, Shelley, Byron, Chimpy—whatever they call you? Still at it hard?”

  The vice-chancellor was off-balance sufficiently to say, “It’s not a sinecure, you know. Not for a vice-chancellor who wants to be a vice-chancellor.”

  “To which I make reply, ‘My Gawd! Chimpy’s still the same old fraud,’” said the poet.

  “Of course,” Lady Sadie chuckled, wise to seem indolent, not to signal panic. “It’s the frauds who keep the whole structure turning, the old fabric weaving.”

  “While the visionaries run to fat,” added hard Ella. “Why do you think Mrs Pelham wants your hand on her thigh?”

  Pelham worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives, Ramsey thought. Any mere scholar or town clerk would have been punched by now. A very robust pink ran across Pelham’s jaws as he whispered twice from behind into the poet’s ear.

  “Umbehaving badly?” the poet again asked Ella, whom he recognized, with artistic infallibility, as his public conscience.

  The Mewses tried to laugh the plea off.

  “You’re acting atrociously,” Ella assured the man.

  “It’s that black mick bitch Turner,” he begged of the company. “She thinks it belongs to the Pope.”

  Everyone ignored the glaring pronoun, while he shook his head many times, his glass tilting beer in tiny libations on the carpet.

  “Uh-huh, Lord!” he said. “Uh-huh-huh, Lord!”

  For the febrile grey of a man about to die of sicking up drink alighted on the poet’s face; he closed his eyes, emitting “Phew!” at intervals.

  Ramsey felt unaccountable relief. “Come on, old fellow,” he said, lifting the poet by the elbows. The company drew in their feet as Alec steered him across the room by the shoulders.

  “Anything you need, Alec?” Sir Byron wondered.

  Alec said no. He was pleased to be escaping with honour fro
m a room that seemed to him to be dominated, not by the poet’s drunkenness, but by Ella’s willingness for fight.

  “An utter change of personality,” he heard the hard Yorkshire intonations of Pelham impress on Lady Mews.

  The poet tottered and barked once on the oil-heating grid in the hallway.

  “For God’s sake, not here,” Alec begged him.

  “Not anywhere, friend,” said the poet, and set his chin. He looked like a figure in a cheap recruiting poster. But certainly the sweat dried and he was garrulous again in the cool garden, by the cut crystal of Chimpy’s swimming-pool.

  Enclosed by rock-gardens, they sat largely beyond the reach of the wind, and could not hear the muffled speculation, the toned-down outrage of the company they had left.

  “Those the offices?” the poet said, gesturing uphill towards the unseen administrative block and the union, one of whose adobe flanks glimmered some hundreds of yards from where they sat.

  “That’s right.”

  “Christ. You can hear Chimpy’s comptometers sleeping.”

  Their example appealed to him and he slumped on the hard slats of the garden seat. Ramsey stood to give him room for stretching.

  “Your wife said um rude to people?” the poet confirmed.

  “Yes.”

  “Then damn ’em, mate. They’re lucky to have me.”

  “So you suspect you are—for want of a better term—a major poet?”

  “It’s a critic’ly def … defensible proposition.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “But it isn’t the poetry that’s out of me, in print, that counts. That’s all … spastic stuff. It’s the poetry still in me that counts. Travellin’ up the thousand-mile ovaries from the gut to the mouth. Eking down the Mississippis of creation. See? That’s the major stuff.” He stopped to sniff at the word and find it odious. “Major? Major? Ugh! That thousand-mile uphill river, see. Uh-huh, Lord! Uh-huh-huh, Lord! I reckon I’ve done about … five hundred and … ninety-six … point three miles of the journey.”

  He rolled his eyes in a way that signified what a rich day it would be for literature when his argosies came in.

  “So you’re not the humble bard, it seems? You’re quite proud?”

  “About the spastic stuff? Not on your life. I’m proud like a bloke won’t get his inheritance till he’s thirty. And at the moment I reckon I’m about … twenty-five years … eight months and … three days.” He rolled onto his side and suffered again the alcoholic grisaille. At last he said, “Must speak to you ’bout that Dr Leeming.”

  “I think it would be wiser if I took you back to your hotel.”

  “Well, I didn’t come to see you because of your bloody sagacity. See?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Look, if um rude to you s’because I feel I know you. I got your picture at home. You and Lloyd and Leeming. All toggled up for the cold. You were a big ugly bastard even then.”

  “I’ve always prided myself on being a big ugly bastard.”

  “Well you might as well, friend. There’s no getting away from it with them bulgy eyes of yours. Anyhow, now um going put ’em into verse.”

  “So you told me this afternoon.”

  “It must make you very happy.”

  “No,” said Ramsey, meaning it. “It doesn’t really.”

  “No?” The poet made noises of triumph like a detective at the dénouement of a bad thriller. Then, as if he had half-trapped Ramsey into some fatal admission, he feinted cumbrously.

  “Your wife now. She’s very.…”

  “Young?”

  “She’s no more young than I am. Tense is what I mean.”

  “She is tense tonight.”

  “Now there could be two reasons for that. Someone tells me you were ill once—‘ill’ meaning ‘psychywhatsit’.”

  “Someone was talking through his hat.” Ramsey detested that anyone should know he had once confessed to, depended on, a doctor.

  “I got a tenuous … you know, tenuous theory about that sickness.”

  “Good for you.”

  “All the same, it might be you’re not up to her. On the couch. You know?”

  “Look, I think we’d better fly you home tomorrow,” Ramsey decided.

  “Ah-hah! An admission.” The bardic head thrashed about recklessly on the seat. It was a movement of pure gusto. “I like you a lot, Alec. You’re an interesting old geyser.”

  “Instead of simply sordid.” It was Ella’s voice that dropped from the top of the rockery steps. Behind Ella the Kables bulked; and Eric Kable asked with knowing male solemnity how the poet was. The poet himself yelled his good health up at them and made eyes like a clown’s at Valerie.

  Then, “Hah! There’s old virgo intensa herself.”

  “Both the Mewses are on the telephone at the moment,” Valerie explained. “I think Mrs Turner is speaking to Lady Mews.”

  “Apologizing for people,” said Ella.

  “We thought we’d get a breath of fresh,” Eric Kable said. “Sanders is talking earnestly to the Pelhams.”

  “The way that man is prejudiced against Denis Leeming!”

  “Apparently,” went on Ella, “Mrs Turner is telling Lady Sadie that some people are nice as pie while sober but proper pigs when drunk.”

  “Does she think that’s news?” Alec muttered.

  The poet sat up and performed a loose mimicry of Alec. “Does she think that’s news? All right, you old poofter, here it is straight. You see little Miss Tensions up there? Say you’re virile as all get-out, so she’s not tense for that reason.…”

  Ella gave a loud cry of revolt from the steps.

  “Come on,” Alec told the man. “I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

  The acquisitive faces of the Kables seemed wide and blank as radar screens in the moonlight.

  “No, wait a second, wait a second,” the poet was demanding. “The altern … alternative. The alternative is that she’s tense because you’re psychywhatsit, and you’re psychywhatsit … this is the … you know, tenuous part … you’re psychywhatsit because of Leeming. And you’re psychywhatsit about Leeming because … ah, because, because, because you and that Dr Lloyd …! Well, question is, did you and that Dr Lloyd eat of Leeming?”

  “I beg your pardon.” If Alec was not straightaway outraged it was because the stressed preposition came to his ear with an almost biblical sound, innocuous to the sixty-two-year-old son of a Presbyterian pastor. Unless you eat of the flesh.…

  “How did you get back to the coast then?” the poet was insisting.

  “I hardly remember.” Ramsey stood enthralled by the concept that had aspects of profound and oblique truth in it, as the improbable crimes have of which one is accused in dreams. His extremities began to sweat and, behind his back, Ella’s resistance to the poisonous old subject of Leeming prickled him like something radiant.

  “No one would blame you, but if the provisions are divided by the daily sub-sist-ence ration,” the poet ground on, “you get an answer that—”

  Ella interrupted. “Now, Alec, don’t take notice of the drunken fool.” It was this voice of hers, so mandatory and fearful and taut with an inverted and poisonous pity, that furthered all his symptoms to the point where they became something like illness.

  “—implied you must have eaten of him,” the poet concluded. Even he seemed chastened by the boggling heft of the idea.

  Ramsey dared not move. That indigestible leader and unswallowable death flooded and exposed him at the one time; very like the similar vertigo and smotheration caused by the Antarctic phenomenon called white-out, when horizons are swept up into a murky opalescence that both coffins and threatens with infinitude. In such terms, in fact, almost visual, the accusation rebounded on Ramsey: such a whiteness, unmarred by dimensions, his fear took on now. On its coasts the skuas ranted and one’s breath crepitated to ice with an almost electronic sound. The hideous plateau lapped close to him.

  After a time he remember
ed that he had not in fact eaten Leeming, but the poet’s suggestion seemed to him one that he must urgently blend into what he already knew of Leeming and himself.

  As distant and quacking as voices at the far end of a cable, Valerie and Ella could both be heard. While he straggled a few yards along the edge of the pool, the skua-like hubbub climbed his blood and departed by the ears.

  It had all been a shock. He shuffled his feet once on the delicious solidity of the pool’s apron.

  Eric Kable told him in a gratified way that he shouldn’t let this sort of thing get at him.

  “Ella,” Ramsey said, “let’s say good night to Sir Byron and Lady Mews and take this man home.”

  The poet urged himself to his feet, and the excess of his desire to be informed overflowed into a silly little dance along the rim of the pool.

  “But you don’t understand. You were there, in a bloody saga. How many poets get an inside seat on a saga?”

  “I’m not interested,” said Alec.

  “None. Not. A. One. Because they’re bloody neurotics, see? But what’s the use of getting involved in a bloody saga if you won’t tell a poet about it? It doesn’t matter to me if you had to eat him. Do you think I’d judge you or something prissy like that?”

  Ramsey called out, “Now listen, no more of that.”

  Ella could tell that that idiot of a poet was starting the whole cycle of betrayal obsessions running again in Alec. “Get Morris to take him home,” she ordered her husband. She sounded implacable: in her eyes Alec was the culprit for having reacted to excess. “I’m going now, if you want to come.”

  The poet appealed up the stairs to Ella. “Does he think I’d cast stones?”

  “As if you could!” Ella ground out. The poet shied, as if her words fell downstairs with a physical impact. “Some people subscribe to the out-of-date romantic ideal of the artist as a man who is free to spew up on vice-chancellors’ carpets. Of course, that’s if you’re any sort of artist to start with—a proposition that seems to be under debate in your case.”

  “You’re a saucy bitch, aren’t you?”