The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  Griffith’s eyes lit when he saw the poet. They would have passed each other with a nod in Canberra, but Griffith made a bravura out of their acquaintance now, as if he were in a foreign country. The poet, obviously fearing a contradiction from Ella, claimed he was a friend of the Ramseys.

  Ella and Alec stood palely by and were introduced. The man from the Antarctic Division set to work on Ramsey’s hand. “What a pleasure this is. I’ve read the book, you see.” He said almost accusingly, “You were superhuman, you fellows. Superhuman.”

  Ramsey frowned. He would have been happy with the fruits of mere humanity. He wanted to tell Griffith that the book might soon read differently. Behind his back, Ella sighed audibly.

  “My husband isn’t very well at present. I meant to imply on the telephone he doesn’t altogether find this a festive occasion.”

  “I’m sorry. If you just sit where you are, and the public service bard will hold the parcels for me.…”

  Fetching the first of the parcels, Griffith was aware of the dependent silences behind his back, silences more positive than a mere lull. He thought how interesting this was, and began to make a number of guesses, largely improper, about the connection between the three. Ramsey startled him by erupting in the face of Ella’s stance of long-suffering.

  “All right, Ella. The best of things has happened, so you say. Why don’t you carry yourself like a woman to whom the best has happened?”

  “You make it hard for me to believe in that proposition, Alec.” The words rode in and out slackly on the breath, pretending to have achieved indifference. She was a very savoury bitch, the poet thought, but deserved to be beaten. “But we mustn’t hold up Mr Griffith.”

  Who at that moment was opening a parcel laid flat on the poet’s knees, easing the cardboard off with immense care.

  The poet said wryly, “Are you responsible to the minister for that stuff?”

  “Not at all.” Griffith looked around for Alec. “There are Antarcticans down there still who know their Antarctic history. Fortunately someone on this ice-physics excursion that discovered these … well, what are they? … relics? … I suppose so. Anyhow, one of those Americans knew the story of Leeming’s death in more than outline. If your identification is positive, Mr Ramsey, Mrs Leeming will be immediately contacted by our Sydney office. But I hope that all three of you will be good enough to regard this viewing as confidential until the news is announced.”

  All of them hostile, none of them answered. All Griffith did was to go on being provocatively careful with the corrugated cardboard. “Would you like me to buy you a roll of that?” the poet asked him.

  “No.”

  “It wouldn’t help you to take more risks with it?”

  “No.”

  Neither did it end with the corrugated. Alec began to suspect Griffith of malice when it was found there was a final layer of tissue around the relics. It seemed an improbable act of delicacy on the part of the Antarctic Division for what had been forty years closeted in the coarse-grained ice.

  “Two pieces of ski-wood,” the functionary said at last, and held them up. “The lacquer’s still in marvellous order, which would make some manufacturer very proud. You’ll see the initials S.L. hacked in one arm and filled in with indelible pencilling, which still shows. Remarkable. Well, we thought they answered the description of the cross you made for Leeming. But that’s up to you, Mr Ramsey.”

  Ella snorted when Ramsey accepted the pieces reluctantly, with a nearly rheumatic deliberateness. He felt bilious taking them, and the floor and the temperate latitudes swung out from beneath his feet for a second. What frightened him most was that the very taste of the morning returned to him. Lloyd standing by passively, all medical artifice suspended, himself pottering guiltily around Leeming. For a reason beyond his knowing, he would now and then chance the tip of his tongue out to his flawed lips—a racking thing to do—and taste his own death on them. His back to the mere thirty-knot gusts, he took off the mitts already frozen and sawed Leeming’s left ski in two. The dreadful season first threatened to split, then anaesthetized, his fingers in their thin inner-gloves as he managed a bad knot of lampwick. With a knife in his good hand, he willed the lettering to happen on the shaft and, holding a stub of indelible pencil in a maimed way, began filling in the hacked outline. Here was a young man so baffled by winds and immensities that he believed all his atoning work with saw, lampwick, knife, and pencil gave Leeming some permanence on the face of the glacier.

  Mr Griffith was busy with the larger parcel, and a careful shedding of tissue showed an aluminium cover, top and two sides, with lettering punched on one of the sides. Mr Griffith read it. “From the Worcester School, Sydney. 24/8/’24.” Then he picked it free of its wrappings, while Alec inhaled noisily, fearing frostbite for the careless man, forgetting that all the voracious cold of the glacier had now gone out of the thing. Next he damned the Worcester School for writing its silly pride on the edge of the cover. Griffith, unlike the headmaster, was at hand.

  “Why are you playing with me? Worcester School was Leeming’s old school. Do you expect me to tell you that this was left behind by Vivian Fuchs? What fool thought it necessary for you to come all this way?”

  “The director of the Antarctic Division is the fool in question. We’re not trying to waste your time, and we don’t think you want to look at relics of what must be a tragic day. But surely you remember that another party preceded you down the glacier? This may have been left by them. Anyway, we thought it kinder not to tell Mrs Leeming until we were sure.”

  Behind Ramsey’s back the poet made a diminuendo movement with his right hand, meaning “Don’t be provoked. He’s old, irrational and sick.” Ella did not see this hint given; she sat astounded by the sight of concrete elements of the Leeming tragedy which had been so rarefied in debate between herself and Ramsey that one almost ceased to believe in it as something that happened in an ordinary material sense. This wreckage was to her, as to Ramsey, an amazing endorsement.

  Meanwhile Ramsey was behaving very crochety. In the teeth of Griffith’s reasonable explanations he muttered on. “Perhaps the director considers Magellan is an old boy of Worcester College, and suspects he wandered too far south, dropping a cooker given to him out of what could be bilked from small boys.”

  “But I’ve already explained how it’s slightly more complicated than that. The question is whether you positively recognize these … relics … as the items you used … you and Dr Lloyd used in the burial of Leeming.”

  Ramsey glowered. He knew clearly that his emotions were exorbitant, but still had no control. “I did not allow him to be buried,” he declaimed at Griffith.

  Ella turned her head aside. She hissed briefly in disgust. “Give the man a chance, Alec. Bury was only a manner of speaking.”

  The man from the Antarctic Division showed he could be a diplomat. “Yes, Mrs Ramsey, but I can understand Mr Ramsey’s sensitivity on that point. After all, the official history is very explicit on the matter.”

  Ramsey shook his head, saying “Oh!” in a tone that cast doubt on the sanity of those who believed official histories.

  “According to the official history,” Griffith persisted, “you used the cooker top as the basis of a windbreak around Dr Leeming’s head. And after you had heaped up a mound, you drove the ski-wood cross in, wedging it with the camera you had decided to leave and with some exposed plates. The director wants to know if the official history correctly details the … obsequies you performed that day.”

  Alec chose to stand on his dignity in a cockeyed way. “I like the bloody director’s cheek,” he said.

  Ella found such bloody-mindedness insufferable in her spouse. “The director’s not trying to impugn your truthfulness, dearie.”

  “Oh no!” Griffith verified. “But you can get winds of a hundred and fifty knots and more down those glaciers.” Ramsey even considered sneering at the nautical pretentiousness of the word “knots” in the mouth of a man wh
o, perhaps, sailed of a weekend on Lake Burley Griffin. “So that the question is, were the markers of Leeming’s … resting-place blown away? Now you had no anemometer on the sledge, but the record says that on the day itself the wind seemed to Lloyd to be about thirty knots, and that the next day was still though very icy. Were these markers blown away, and if so, were they blown far? You were weak. How solidly did you ground these things? You can well understand that we don’t wish to trouble the widow if the chances are that the supposed relics are merely wind-drift.”

  Ramsey destroyed himself lightly. “They aren’t wind-drift. I planted these things very deliberately, solidly; a person does in Antarctica. Cairns, markers, mounds, and so on. You make them all to last.”

  He heard Ella utter a wry “Hurrah!” under her breath. He said, less grandly, “They may have been blown away. But the chances were in favour of their lasting.”

  “So you think Leeming is close to where these were found?”

  “Yes,” Ramsey said, and repeated the word, and nodded in a way almost ceremonial three or four times. This made Ella lose patience, seeing an altogether too reverent and ritual a manner of acknowledging an old corpse.

  “And there’s no ritual significance in the thing,” she told Ramsey. She sounded patient and minatory; her patience dwelt on each word and seemed to thumb-tack it to the ether. “He hasn’t been in limbo, he’s just been on ice.”

  “I assure you, Ella, I don’t see this as a mystery of religion.”

  “What has us wondering,” Griffith said smoothly, surmounting the family quarrel, “is that there was no trace of the camera and plates. Not that there needs to be, of course.”

  “The ways of glacial ice are no doubt strange,” supposed the poet.

  But Ella could not tolerate this sombre, parsonical axiom. She was up and pacing, but stopped by the window to gather herself. Seeing her, Ramsey wanted to cry out that he was the desperate one, he was the one who should rend garments, that it became her to stand by to soothe. He could have struck her for failing to see his need. “Ella,” he said, “if you would like to go out for a matronly breath of fresh.…”

  “Matronly?” She swept around. He could see the green, feline irises start in their peculiar way. “You said matronly?”

  “I said it would be better if you went outside.”

  “You said matronly.” She was frantic and triumphant; she had a pretext.

  “Well, if I did.… Look, Ella, why don’t you go and have some tea?” But he knew he had said one of the forbidden words and could not now avoid being made an even bigger fool of.

  “Perhaps your admiring friends would be surprised to find that you mock me with that word. In view of my cancer of the womb.…”

  “Christ!” Ramsey called. Both visitors stared. “Take her out,” he told the poet. “For God’s sake take her into the kitchen and hit her with something.”

  “You have rendered assault and battery superfluous, dear Alec.”

  “Take her out, will you,” he ordered the poet again.

  The poet made gestures of inadequacy: you might as well have asked the weather bureau to catch Valkyries.

  Blessedly, Ella went herself, in a rush and probably ashamed at letting Griffith know her secret imagery.

  In her electric absence Ramsey told the two men, “You mustn’t take any notice of that cancer-of-the-womb stuff. She only means it symbolically. Childlessness she means.”

  Griffith was blinking, still wondering why the occasion hadn’t been all wistfulness and reminiscence and how many lumps do you take.

  Ramsey said, “Here’s something for your epic, bard. Call it ‘The Afternoon of an Argonaut. Complete with Sibyl.’”

  The poet stared back. There was an air of righteousness about the man. Hadn’t he given up two days’ deferred leave just to expiate previous outrage? Yes, very much at ease he looked now; justified in his own eyes. The muse, Alec decided, provoked, might just as well have bedded down with Griffith as with this small accountant.

  “I suppose you came for some such purpose,” Alec surmised. “Or is Mrs T. less Papally aligned this month?”

  The poet excused himself. From the door he asked Griffith, “What plane are you catching back?”

  “This evening, ten-to-six. Connects with the quarter-past-eight to Canberra.”

  “Cool of the evening. See you on it. Good day.”

  Alone with Ramsey, Griffith devoted himself to re-wrapping the cover and ski-wood.

  “You’ve seen enough of these?” he remembered too late to ask.

  “Oh yes, enough is enough.” Ramsey felt sheepish and wanted to re-establish himself in Griffith’s eyes, in lieu of better ones. “I’m sorry for the way we’ve behaved. It’s probably impossible for you—and in another sense, for my wife—to realize how close to the bone this whole affair cuts.”

  “That’s understandable,” Griffith assented busily. “You were very young. It must have been harrowing.”

  But Ramsey didn’t want to be interpreted by Griffith. He shook his head. “No. The problem is that now I have to detail it all over again to people.”

  “I see.”

  “These events … coerce me in that direction.” He slapped the ham of his leg. “Hopeless. What about the press?”

  “They won’t be told until we’ve seen Mrs Leeming. It will all be well handled by the minister’s press secretary. After that, Mrs Leeming must be given a little time to decide what she wants done with the remains. In any case, this late in the season, a decision may be out of the question. She may well want a simple service held at the mouth of the pit, and no more. At her age that would be understandable and fitting enough.”

  At her age. Ramsey could tell that Griffith thought State funerals were best.

  “Anyhow, Mr Ramsey, I regret very much that it’s been so painful.”

  “No.” Alec made a face like a victim, a face that asked, Why me? “But the odds,” he said. “I’ve won an immense game of … of adverse chance. The odds are … prodigious.”

  Griffith, however, would not even let him have that much. “Not as prodigious as they seem, you know. Men have always tended to travel on established routes in Antarctica. The David Glacier has been travelled by Mawson and Edgeworth David, by you people … and did Griffith Taylor visit it? Or Campbell? I’m not sure.”

  “You seem to have an interest,” Ramsey said.

  In Ramsey’s house passion ran high enough without Ella and Alec resorting to the hearty sport of grudge-bearing. So lunch hour found them shame-faced and not very articulate, but forgivingly disposed. Ella prescribed that he should rest for half an hour, and he obeyed, spending his proneness on old magazines whose wiseacre commentaries and year-old political prophecies he could judge from a position of hindsight. Whenever he was in the furnace this sort of thing made his favourite reading.

  Ella had gone to the history department’s staff meeting, politely willing to call in at Ramsey’s office and say he might not be in during the afternoon. It would have gratified him to prove her message nonsense by gusting in five minutes after she had been there, yet there was no validity any more in that sort of gesture.

  He was still sunk in eighteen-months-old news from Saigon and Cape Town as someone—Mormon preacher, baker, insurance man?—rang the door-bell. He did not answer. Least of all he wanted to face some brisk creature who, wholesomely lunched, was already well into the afternoon’s achievements.

  The visitor persisted in pressing the chimes. Ramsey stalked into the living-room and up to the bay windows. Here a hatefully bright day filtered through the cretonne, and two of its most hatefully bright creatures could be seen from the flank, dressed informally, summer-school style, standing in the porch. The Kables. Mrs Kable, holding a sunhat fringed with carrots of felt, looked a cornucopian being, the impression of bounty heightened by very tight slacks. Eric Kable, in science-fiction shirt, seemed a well-shaven Martian.

  “Cool, man!” Ramsey muttered with an accent. He
saw Kable ask his wife for something and receive from her a small pad and pencil on which he wrote something before lodging a sheet of paper under the door. Then they went back to the university sedan they had come in, Titania swerving through the gate with a carp-like flick of the hips.

  It said, Dear Alec, that Mrs Leeming (and a fool of an exclamation mark after the name) had telephoned the office and been given his home number by Barbara. Mrs Leeming might not be immediately able to telephone but would be grateful if he could call her Sydney number as soon as possible. Mrs Leeming would accept the charges.

  He knew how gratified the Kables would have been to deliver a message implying that Ramsey was not where he could reasonably be expected to be. No wonder they had minced away in that self-congratulatory manner, relishing the suspicion that Alec was hiding indoors.

  But rather than indulge his almost religious hostility to the Kables, he telephoned Mrs Leeming in great haste. She had always been a most persuasively sane lady; and he felt that he would be comforted to find that she still was. As well, she had the say on what was to be done with Leeming.

  He heard Belle Leeming’s firm old voice say that she would accept the charges.

  “Alec?” she wondered affectionately.

  “Belle, how are you?”

  “How are you, you poor foolish fellow?”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard from External Affairs, if you mean that. But I’m still the same woman as ever.”

  Indeed. The same proportions of disdain and irony and pretended solicitude. The exactness of the blend reminded Alec of sailing-time, 1924, when fogged by all the lifting and stowing and perilous overloading of the old Albany whaler that Leeming had re-christened Westralis, Ramsey had been found by Belle Leeming as he mooned around the kennels forward of the galley. The same solicitude: it was the departure ceremony; and to reach Alec she had had to climb onto the deck-cargo in a violet calf-length gown and a cloche, clinging to a parasol. The same banter: “Alec, I could tell by the spirit in which you left last week that you are determined to work through the conventional rituals of guilt.”