The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

“I’m a poisonous bitch, Mr Bard. I hope you find that out. Well, Alec?”

  “Please, Ella,” Ramsey asked her, almost without dignity, “I can’t unload him on the Pelhams.”

  “The trouble is,” the poet mourned in monologue, “you Antarctic buggers can’t be believed. You write your diaries and make it all sound like a Masonic Lodge on ice. Only, I admit you didn’t write any journal, Alec. And you won’t do his biography. See, to put it one way, you couldn’t bring yourself to digest him all over again.”

  Ramsey told him, “If you say any more I’ll kill you.”

  He was aware of yards of water to his right, their murderous potential.

  “That’s lovely,” said Ella in one of her cold, hard panics. “I’m going.”

  That her husband stood mouthing murder on account of Leeming was a measure of the extent to which the memory of Leeming possessed him. She could not forgive this obsession, just as, ultimately, she would not forgive his death.

  Lady Sadie now intruded speculatively from the porch. She saw the radically altered Ramseys and the engrossed Kables, and edged forward exactly like someone in a stream of uncertain depth.

  The poet sat pretty, like an almost civilized person, one arm over the back of the seat, saying with aggressive good reason, “Whoa there, don’t let her bully you, Alec boy. Wha’s use of being in a bloody saga if you’re going to let her bully you?”

  Lady Sadie risked asking was all well. Ella tramped up to her, face shut, waspish high-heels jabbing at the cement; and said a colourlessly polite formula of good-bye. It had been pleasant, she said. And could Lady Sadie possibly ask Pelham to take the poet home?

  Ramsey called out that no, he would.

  “Then you’ll walk.” Ella’s blind back was aimed at him. “I’m taking the car.”

  He imagined her cutting all the corners into town, chancing her outside wheels into the gravel, begging a skid, begging the ultimate demonstration, a death skid, crazily certain that the triumph of causing Ramsey to regret would outweigh the sharpness of laceration and lung-puncture.

  Ramsey stood above the poet, the pink slewing face whose focus could not quite keep up with his now definite movements. “Get up. We’re going.”

  The poet gave him fair caution, jiggling an index finger. “How about if you showed more respect?”

  Ramsey pulled him upright by the tweedy coat’s lapels; but the inadequacy of any devisable maiming kept him still. Pelham arrived, speaking softly, and removed the poet from Ramsey’s grip. With a lemurine look of discretion, Chimpy helped the senior lecturer hustle the poet in through the back porch. For all the threats, Ella remained by Lady Sadie, back on to the poet’s removal.

  “I should help Morris,” Ramsey told his hostess.

  “No. No need. But I’ll never read him again.” For Lady Sadie thought that writers, so often indecent in print, should be decent in living-rooms.

  At last they could hear the poet’s voice rising in the wind at the front of the lodge. Then Pelham’s choky old motor whirred and covered it.

  3

  Ramsey woke near Ella in the dove-grey morning, examined the graceless landscape of his bed with a muddleheaded conscientiousness, and rose in need of his morning newsprint lying furled, he could see, beneath an oleander bush outside. He longed for headlines and radio-pictures of distant violence: bomb outrages in Aden, earthquakes in Zagreb, mass murders in Ankara or Calabria—as if the insanity-level of the world were constant, as if the insanity of people and events at one end of the earth went to guarantee his own sanity at the other.

  He remembered how last night they had so adequately exposed themselves to the curiosity and malice of three couples and Professor Sanders; and left the bedroom without a glance at Ella.

  The worst that was happening in the wide world was that a millionaire had endowed the arts, brewery workers were threatening to strike, and General de Gaulle would visit the Pacific the very next month. He abandoned the newspaper and, resenting the world’s wire services, straggled into the living-room. In the cabinets beneath the glassed-in bookcase, Ramsey’s small Antarctic library was stowed away. Corresponding places in the homes of other university people were reserved for erotica smuggled home from sabbatical leave. The erotica of the Ramsey household were Borchgrevinck and Scott, Shackleton and Cherry-Garrard: the annals of all the Masonic lodges on ice.

  He opened at page 27 a book called Leeming’s Last Journey. Or the book furtively opened there itself.

  The expedition’s very capable dog-expert had the role thrust on him yet measured up to it like a life-long expert.

  “Christ!” intoned Ramsey aloud. After the life he had had, he detested phrases such as “measured up to”.

  His name was Alexander Ramsey, graduate of Sydney University and recent Rugby international; and he first met Leeming on a train from the country during the winter previous to the expedition’s departure. Leeming had taken an instant liking to Ramsey and, in September 1923, had regretfully rejected his application to join the expedition. The illness of the dog-expert Leeming had already chosen gave Ramsey his chance. During the expedition he became a fine skier as well as a superb dog-handler. Adaptability and physical strength were his especial qualifications. He was a quiet young man but never dejected.…

  Ramsey was once more loudly blasphemous, and his large hand threatened the furry old page.

  … and his regard for the Arts answered something in his leader’s temperament. He and Dr Leeming would sometimes argue about the talents of poets whose names other expedition members had never heard.

  In the polar night, from Lloyd’s bunk and half a dozen others, obscenities would rumble. “—Elroy Flecker.” “—Walt Whitman.”

  He would have blushed now for his callowness, except that Lloyd, O’Connor and the others had all joined Flecker and were one with Whitman.

  Given Dr Leeming’s friendship towards him, his outstanding strength and his capacity with the dogs, it was no surprise that the leader paid him the final honour of selecting him as a companion for the dash to the South Geomagnetic Pole.

  The ineptitude of “final honour” irked him, but did not have the power to bring on his symptoms. It was the sort of serviceable term that blanketed reality, a ritual term stolen direct from grammar-school annuals, absolving all parties from considering the oddness of the relationships between humans, advancing the story of miles covered, specimens gathered. No, the old page did not hurt at the beginning of this day in the sixties, with nothing worse than a brewery strike threatening.

  He found an ancient newspaper article yellowed in the back of the book. Scarcely optimum archival conditions. He began to read at the fold in the paper.

  Meanwhile, he read, matters went badly for the southern parties and for Leeming himself. His own party of three had to turn back with the South Geomagnetic Pole still two hundred miles off.

  They had found nothing but high white plateau. Their dogs were in a poor state, though they still had adequate sledging rations. Though he lacked proper reference points, Leeming had made a remarkably accurate calculation of the height of this central plateau.

  What he did not know was that, at the inland hut, a member of O’Connor’s support party was dying of ptomaine poisoning from the adequate but tainted supplies of tinned beef. This meat had caused some discomfort to all the members of the party that had wintered inland, but the consignment that had been sledged in from the coast in early summer was the fatal one. It is said that a prominent Melbourne merchant was in danger of prosecution in the months immediately following the return of the expedition.

  When Leeming reached the hut in mid-March, 1926, he found that O’Connor with seven others, including the three-man party that had surveyed the Victoria Land Mountains earlier in the season, had struck through the mountains for the Ross Sea. Only two of the eight were well; and they left behind them in a shallow ice-grave the body of a ninth.

  There was a note in the hut for Leeming explaining that a Morse Code
message from the Oates Coast had advised them to head for the Ross Sea, where the expeditionary ship Westralis would pick them up. The note further said that since O’Connor could not trust the meat he had had to take some of the sledging rations set aside for their journey home, but that if Leeming would consent to following them down the glacier to the Ross Sea, he ought to find that the pemmican and biscuit left for him was plenty.

  Earlier in the summer the three-man mountain party had partly surveyed the David Glacier and found satisfactory travelling surfaces for twenty miles close in on the south side. Down this glacier O’Connor led his five sick men and two healthy ones, and marked the path for Leeming with bamboo rods. Their morale increased as they marched, and although two later lost legs, they all reached the ice-tongue and the Westralis.

  O’Connor’s necessary action of taking away part of the geomagnetic party’s provisions compelled Leeming to follow the same path. Even if ice in the Ross Sea forced the Westralis out for another year, he and his two followers could probably survive a winter with the help of their tent and of the seal meat that could be found along the coast. All three men disliked the prospect though, and prayed that the Westralis would be able to wait.

  Leeming therefore led his party east into unseasonably bad weather. He had slaughtered the four remaining dogs, and carried sinewy dog meat as well as sledging rations.

  On a day of minus 54 degrees F. he collapsed, and Dr Lloyd told Alec Ramsey, the third member of the party, that it was a stroke. Though his speech was impaired and one foot lamed, Leeming insisted on stumbling on and became hysterical whenever Lloyd and Ramsey forced him to ride on the sledge. But the stroke had made him most susceptible to the low temperatures and his hands and feet became dreadfully frostbitten.

  On the evening of the fourth day he suffered a second and fatal stroke.…

  “Have you got enough light for it?”

  Ella had arrived bare-footed, firm shaven legs beneath the nightdress. She frowned. The planes of her face were out of harmony from long and not very happy dreams.

  Ramsey didn’t answer her. She walked softly to the blinds and snapped them open with one swipe of the hand.

  “Will porridge do you?” she asked, and prepared to go. He had in some odd way forfeited meat and said that porridge would do.

  “I’ve a busy morning. Come when I call you.”

  She stamped out, no sylph without shoes The page blew over in the breeze of her hard feminine passage.

  He had admitted to Ella this much: that he first became under a debt to Leeming at the close of 1924.

  At twenty-three Alec Ramsey was large and soft-featured and suspected himself of being ugly. He had never had the valour yet to ask anyone whether the ugliness was interesting or repellent, for if they told him repellent he would have been properly landed with the knowledge of his face for all the years to come.

  That August he had already become an ex-international; he had been teaching the whole year in a high school not far from the Queensland border, and the education authorities had not been concerned that this made it impossible for him to play. As his father had said, the education department was not run by even competent philistines. Ramsey had eventually grown out of the way of the strategic straining and grunting of the ruck, loose or otherwise. He had been receiving in secret all winter a series of literary magazines of extreme viewpoint.

  Now he was travelling south to Sydney. Somewhere, towards dusk on the coastal plain, a blunt-shouldered man with a tall man’s thin and fine-wrought face and features boarded the train and sat in his compartment. It was hard to say what the man was doing, boarding in that unlikely town with a sawmill grinding overtime in the dusk and the breath of rainforests in the air.

  This slightly microcephalic gent made Ramsey feel inferior, made him feel the brashness of his vestless suit and patterned sweater—the uniform of the unarrived. The man had stepped out of the timber town and onto the train in velour hat and raglan and cotswold suit of expensive insipidity, and was off-handedly in possession of some honour adequate to him. This was what Ramsey decided, asking himself, as a private but dedicated bourgeois, what two published Imagist poems (his own) meant beside the substance of this man?

  So the man sat, inappositely placed but not aware of it, while the people you expected to be there, tradesmen and their wives from cow and banana towns, sheathed themselves frantically in blankets and made noises of exaggerated sensuality at the presence of foot-warmers.

  The stranger read, but seemed to catch Ramsey staring at him. Ramsey was, in fact, trying to see the title of the technical-looking book in the man’s hands. He hoped that it was something mean and soiled with trade, such as The Double-U Drain Fitting in Modern Plumbing. He saw at last that it was Notes on the Glaciology of the Victoria Land Mountains, and sank back once more into his humanist inferiority.

  From which he was surprised by finding the man looking at him in an intense and attenuated way. Ramsey thought he had once before seen a face balanced in exactly that way between taut and slack, between will and daydream; the face of a nut-brown businessman with plenty of pubic hair who, in the dressing-room of the Domain baths, had put his hand on Ramsey’s naked thigh and whispered that he had a classic figure and such fine legs too.

  This unutterable incident, interrupted by other bathers, recurred now to him. He began to read again. What sort of man, he asked himself in alarm, saw sexual messages in other men’s eyes?

  When he looked again the man’s eyes were still on him. Or were they simply focused on the mid-distance, and would go on innocently focusing in this manner all through the night?

  Ramsey rose and made for the corridor. Within a minute the man followed him. Ramsey’s neck prickled, certain of the man’s strange lusts.

  “Can you ski?” the man said.

  He had at least left the compartment door open; but an asexual wife, grunting in surprise at finding herself warm in a train, closed it behind his back.

  “No,” said Alec.

  “Of course not.” The man chuckled in his private intense way. “Very little snowfall in the dairying areas, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  Ramsey read the grafted-looking head as a certain symptom of perversion.

  “I’ve been looking for someone like you.”

  “I’ll call the guard,” muttered Ramsey, turning away.

  Then the man understood Ramsey’s idea of this confrontation and began to laugh.

  “The penalty of monomania,” he admitted and then, lying but to prove his bona fides, “No, I assure you, I keep a beautiful wife very happy.” Perhaps he would not have said this if he hadn’t thought that Alec was a boy from some primitive town where you could hear the cows mourn all night for the bull. “You looked as though you’d be very good at hauling a sledge, that’s all. You remind me of my old friend Tom Crean. He was one of Shackleton’s Argonauts. You may be too young to have known much about that.”

  Alec nodded. “I haven’t heard of Tom Crean.” He wanted to say, “And I bet the name of Ezra Pound doesn’t mean anything to you.”

  Then the man said his name was Stephen Leeming. He was a university man on leave and was mounting an Antarctic expedition, the first post-war one. The sawmill Alec had heard rasping away at that country halt belonged to Leeming’s family. He had been five days up in the Divide, marking the hardwoods he wanted cut for expeditionary buildings.

  “I think aloud a lot. You get into the habit, putting on the donnish act for students. I suppose I came close to spending the night in jail in Grafton or Nambucca.”

  Alec introduced himself, and Leeming had heard of him as he had heard of Leeming. Alec hoped that Leeming read Imagist poetry; but no, it was Ramsey’s vulgar reputation that Leeming spoke of. And, of course, Leeming was very much what Ramsey’s mother called “physical”, with the sturdy-based throat favoured in statues of Renaissance condottieres.

  “I do some writing as well,” Alec said with all the maidenliness of
the newly published. “I have a friend who has promised me he’ll introduce me to Norman Lindsay.”

  But Leeming, unbeaten on the score of clothes, reading-matter, and morals, wasn’t now overcome by the prestigious name. “Oh yes,” he said. “Remember me to Norman and ask him if he’d like to winter in the classic groves of Oates Land. My wife used to model for some of Lindsay’s disciples, and ended by taking to art herself. Look, speaking of art, I could never understand why you literary chaps never exploited Antarctic material. Of course, Antarctic journals are rather physical records, nothing about what moves the men and what bigotries hold the work back. But the financiers of exploration don’t like to discover that their good money has gone to subsidize faraway conflict of character. Perhaps the bacillus antarcticus will bite you if you read something of the continent. Why don’t you apply when I advertise the vacancies? Not that I could promise a thing. But your shoulders would favour you.”

  And they laughed together about the earlier misunderstanding. Nor did Ramsey ever again have reason to suspect Leeming of sins against nature.

  From his father’s manse in Drummoyne, Ramsey made half a dozen raids upon Bohemia. He met Lindsay, and drank with companionable poets. He talked a full forty minutes with a painter who called him “Dearie” with intent, and felt himself to be urbane and tolerant of foibles like that; and woke one morning in a bed behind partitions in Darlinghurst to see two very pretty girls he could remember from the previous night racing out of doors half made-up, and apologizing to Ramsey and some man prone elsewhere in the big room.

  He felt depleted and saddened, and wanted verification of his improbable memories. “What’s happened?” he called to the other male.

  “Last night’s Caryatids,” the other one told him, careless of mythology, “must become this morning’s grade-two sales staff behind David Jones’ toiletries counter.”

  “But what happened?”

  “Oh.” The other artistic young man chuckled. “Sick three times and scuttled her twice.”

  “You did?”