The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  “You’ve had so much trouble, you poor old thing,” Mrs Kable was telling him. “If it keeps up they may have to put you out to grass.”

  “Reserve me for stud purposes,” he suggested. Everyone laughed. Mrs Kable twisted her hips at an excessive angle to the lie of her upper frame and appeared very much the sexual cliché Ramsey believed her to be. For proof he had Ella’s infallible reactions. Ella, who could be jealous of Lady Sadie, was serene before Valerie Kable.

  “But Barbara was telling us you’ve had some nasty turns,” the lady persisted. Eric Kable raised joined hands a little from his stomach in a sort of antiphonal concern.

  “Nothing symptomatic of decline,” Ramsey told them.

  “Will we see you at the Dream?” Eric Kable asked him. Alec wondered if, away from Valerie’s direction, he might even have been provoked into saying, “If you’re so bloody well then, come to the play.”

  “The Dream?”

  “The Midsummer’s-Night’s one,” said Valerie. “You’ve got no idea what the producer has made out of that old tissue of fairy-tales. It’s as gay as a French farce.”

  Both Ramseys cringed marginally before chuckling.

  “Ella, you should be in this too,” Mrs Kable added.

  Ramsey said, for the sake of having it denied by Ella, “The only role life with me has fitted Ella for is Lear’s third daughter.”

  Ella demurred quite satisfactorily.

  Then, giving no warning, Kable himself unfurled the morning paper he had been holding in his lap and offered it to Ramsey. “Have you seen this, Alec?” A fuzzy picture was indicated of someone in a dinner-suit. Though Ramsey’s eyes were still good, he had to do the old man’s trick of finding his focus by tilting his head and extending the paper. When he had, the face that formed and pounced on him from the blotty photograph was Leeming’s. He had expected it would be, but was angered by so blunt an attempt to unhinge him. He felt pity, too, for what the bitch goddesses of the media might do to that thin, somehow private face. There were some indications in the headline to one side of the photograph. “Hopes of Recovering Famous Antarctic Corpse,” he read aloud, showing the article lightly to Ella to prove that he had not been touched.

  Ella relaxed into mere anger. Her voice quavered a little as she said, “Famous Antarctic Corpse! Next they’ll be talking of eminent or distinguished corpses. Who’s Who in the Graveyard.”

  Ramsey took the paper from her and gave it back to Kable raggedly folded. “We’ve known for some time. Poor Leeming. The ghouls will be out in force.”

  And though Eric showed hints of being routed, Valerie jumped in chattily. “We knew too. Denis Leeming told us. Last night.”

  “Leeming is Theseus,” Kable explained, to show that they had not gone hunting for the news. “In the Dream.”

  “He’s extraordinarily excited.”

  “Yes, Sanders claims he is of an hysterical cast of mind.”

  “Sanders may simply be jealous. He was, after all, a mere senior lecturer until a year or so ago. A most insecure man.”

  “I don’t know,” said Ella. “I like people who are promoted late in life. It’s a sign they do it by fair means.”

  After a chastened interval of silence, Eric Kable dragged the debate back onto its keel. “Anyhow, whatever the relative stabilities of dons, Denis feels this is a chance to reassert the value of his uncle’s work.”

  And give him a sense of genealogical grandeur after his recent failure, Ramsey would have liked to add.

  “Talking of promotion,” Alec said, just to fret them, knowing they could not afford to ask him what he meant, “how are all you drama buffs making out with Morris Pelham?”

  His face ever full of a commercial brand of candour, Kable now willingly allowed his eyes to go devious. Having so signalled that he was about to tell untruths, he murmured, “Excellently.”

  Valerie reproved the gallant lie. “Now you know, Eric, that that’s not quite the truth, although you’re hardly in a position to say otherwise.”

  “Oh?” Ella said. Ramsey could tell she was enjoying the way the game was going.

  “The boy is very puritan. Tim—the producer, you know—is all inspiration. His discipline seems a little loose, but this is because he deals with professionals who carry their own private discipline with them.” Valerie sighed a second, hankering for this nun-like capacity. At whatever risk, Ramsey winked at Ella. “Mr Pelham, not understanding the sort of talent that doesn’t work to timetable.…”

  Kable came in more moderately, lofting the ball to Valerie’s forehand smash. “Morris does try to supplement Tim’s deficiencies. He tends to round people up at the end of tea-breaks.…”

  “Rounds them up? Corrals them! Which is an insult to Eric too, because Eric directs this particular school, even if Morris has charge of the entire programme.” She accented “entire” as a reproach to Alec.

  “He’s anxious for the success of the enterprise, of course,” Kable limply surmised.

  “But it’s deeper still than that, Eric. There’s something dreadfully suppressed about that boy, something drastically misdirected.”

  “Perhaps,” said Kable, and explained to the Ramseys, “Valerie’s more perceptive than I am. I believe Morris does merely what he considers to be his duty.”

  “No reasonable sort of man would consider that sort of boundary-riding as his duty. I can tell you, Alec, the members of the school resent it.”

  “He wants to make sure, of course, that Tim’s sweetness isn’t wasted on the desert air.…” Kable again left his sentence hanging on a not over-subtle octave that bound his Valerie to “but’s”.

  She said, “But you don’t get the best out of strictly creative talents by timing their tea-breaks and seeing that the kiddies don’t answer teacher back.”

  “Very well!” Alec said without warning and conclusively. Ella’s quiet presence was full of applause. With two words Ramsey had given himself, although half-naked, the character of an examining magistrate who has concluded the taking of evidence; and exposed the Kables as over-eager witnesses. “I must go to the shower if you’ll excuse me, Valerie, Eric.”

  “Of course.” They would be very happy to see him go now.

  “But if you mean by what you’ve told me that Pelham is guilty of the worst crime against education … I don’t mean inefficiency, I don’t mean lack of knowledge … what I mean is being out of tune with the spirit of the culture he’s trying to transmit; if you think he’s guilty of that crime.…”

  Kable said, “Oh, I don’t think we’d go so far as all that.”

  “But if you’re implying it, say, I couldn’t agree with you less.”

  Valerie smiled with rage. “But Alec, you’re rarely there when these things happen, are you?”

  “No, Valerie. To my shame. And my attendance record isn’t likely to improve unless I wash and shave and get across to where the action is.”

  So he excused himself again and went to wash. He was ashamed that the load he had laid on Pelham gave an edge to the Kables’ malice. He was saddened to find such concert between a notorious cuckold and a randy wife. But the congratulatory emanations from Ella’s direction helped console him.

  Under the gush of water, Ramsey heard Ella come in.

  “Alec, you don’t mind, do you? I have to get ready to interview freshers.”

  “Certainly,” he said, like one polite boarder to another. It was not that they were in any bodily sense afraid of each other or that they made love, when they made love, through holes in shrouds. It was that their recent estrangement subjected the new peace they had made in confronting the Kables, the new peace Ramsey had made by showing a healthy toughness, to certain rules of etiquette. Unreal ones, since he knew she might well want him to bound dripping from behind the curtain and force her down on the tiles. And, soaping his firm breast and thinking how sixty-two was no more than middle-aged these days, he felt adequate to the feat.

  Because he must get to his desk withi
n the next half-hour, he turned from vibrant memories of Ella’s summer dress and concise legs, and flesh the hand threatened to skid on; he turned, for abstention’s sake, to memories of the odious Kables.

  “Something suppressed about Pelham, eh? Something misdirected. Perhaps old Valerie considers herself the panacea.”

  “Yes, perhaps.”

  “And they’re very strong on young Leeming.”

  “Yes. A funny assortment, that.”

  “Do you think la belle Valerie may be currently favouring young Leeming?”

  “Leeming perhaps, though he’s a pallid boy. Perhaps the poet.”

  “The poet?”

  “He has all the qualities. He’s distinguished and he’s sexually silly.”

  “But you can’t judge him in terms of Sadie’s soirée.”

  “Yes I can. You, drunk, would never reconnoitre up ladies’ thighs. You’d insult everyone, but your hands wouldn’t stray.”

  Talk of thighs and straying hands did little for his self-control. “Anyway,” he told her in haste, “the poet’s only been here since yesterday.”

  “Of course.”

  She sneezed, and dropped some bottled beauty aid in the sink.

  “Ella,” he said. “I’m well again.”

  “Then I am too.” But she sounded tired. “Alec?”

  “Yes.”

  “I get angry because I don’t want to lose you to this unbelievable thing. I get angry to think of the possibility. I won’t tolerate this … decomposition. In fact, I can’t tolerate it.”

  He turned the taps off and asked for his towel. Ella passed it to him without violating the modesty of the drawn curtain. “I’m sorry, Alec. It will all happen again though.”

  “No. It’s the way you said. The best thing, Leeming turning up.”

  “Turning up?” she questioned, as if she didn’t herself think of Leeming in active terms. “Being found. In either case I don’t know what dangers are involved for us. I never do. All I know is that dangers there are, enough to do for us, Alec.”

  “No, it’s the solution. But you must accept the solution in my terms.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would you mind if I left this university?”

  “For another?”

  “I fear not.”

  “To retire?”

  “Not in the azalea-growing sense. I can think of two or three journals I could review books for. Even a daily paper. I could lecture for the W.E.A. I could even teach in a school.”

  “Today’s youth?”

  “I’d rein the little bastards in. Well?”

  She said flatly, “Whatever you like.”

  He heard the bathroom chair pulled out from beneath the towel rack and the moan she made in sitting. At length she said, “Two days ago you were hysterical. Now you’re happy as a young buck. None of it’s any good. It all comes from the one central lunacy.”

  “Oh no.” He came out dressed in a towel and stood above her. “Has this old, old trouble ever manifested itself before in happiness? You don’t need for me to be director of Extension, do you?”

  So endearingly and provokingly young he seemed then to Ella that she laid her head against his towel-girt belly. She meant to signify that she had despaired, but wistfully. “Before I knew you,” she told him, “I used to be always meeting boys who because of a dream or a chemical shift in the blood would assure you their lives were changed, that they’d beaten themselves, that they were fated to manipulate lesser men, to become moral giants or mystics or extend the limits of the novel. Over beer, in town, at the Imperial, they’d tell you these things. Prior to stumbling out the back. You remind me of them.”

  They argued this point for ten more minutes with rare sanity, until even Ella began to hope that he might have become substantially less vulnerable. There were things he could utter now, he said, things he could remember, that he had not been able to utter or remember before, but he mustn’t keep her from her freshers. He assured her that he would not lose his power to articulate them.

  For the sake of being punctual they broke off some likely love-skirmishing. The young, he said, the eager youths she would advise all afternoon, deserved a sight of her cowled shift.

  They could even speak of Belle Leeming and the likelihood of her coming to the university; and, clinically, of Ramsey’s forty-year-old adultery. She asked could news of it, one quaint way or another, arise out of Leeming’s emergence. There was a list of names that Dr Lloyd had had. What had become of that? Alec said he didn’t know, but that a list of names was merely a list of names and had no meaning in itself.

  He explained how what he feared was the reappearance itself. The eroded deity that dwelt in Ramsey’s consciousness was a force of irony that would bring ironic consummations to his life. He supposed that the modern equivalent of being “saved” (in the sense the term had once been used in the Drummoyne Manse) might well be to see and accept this one pattern of which a life was capable, a pattern of irony. This completed, a man was at last his own man; but he could not then sit at the same desk as before.

  “Well,” Ella told him, “to presume so completely that Leeming will be found and base your future on it … that’s insane.” Yet they both knew that she was willing to compromise and accept this less virulent madness.

  So he was hopeful and cubbish. She must shake her dislodged breasts back into their buckrammed cups and insist on going. From the door she said wryly, “Perhaps if I didn’t ask questions there’d be time for you to say those unutterables you mentioned.” She could see that he was still frightened by them.

  “Not now, Ella.”

  She made a chirping cynical noise. “I’ll give you odds, Ramsey, that after all this secrecy and posturing I won’t even be shocked.”

  Seven years before, in the summer of 1956, Ella had—in that quaint term implying inadvertence—fallen pregnant. She began to bleed dangerously, as often as once a week, from the time her state was confirmed by a doctor. There was never any soothing her when she found herself bloody. Ramsey stood in the hallway calling comfort to her while she evaded all his clichés of hope and cleansed herself in private. It was her grief as much as her sluicings that were too intimate for him to intrude upon.

  The rate of bleeding increased, yet the embryo continued to develop. Fearing a monster, Ramsey began to insinuate the idea of abortion. In view of her long sterility, Ella saw such talk as a betrayal.

  At five months, the doctor could hear a heart-beat, but bleeding went on. Ramsey was told that whatever frantic hopes Ella held the child could not be born healthy and would probably come before its time. The doctor suggested a city hospital. In the seventh month, in a vast baby-farm of a hospital, the child died in the womb and was released by Caesarean section.

  Ella did not mourn the loss in any accepted sense of the word; she was gay at visiting times. Yet it was the end of her youth. She had, until that time, worked at a career in the history department, gathered material for a doctoral thesis, been stung by ideas, and otherwise favoured the illusion that the future was without limit. Now she saw the apparent but specious infinitude of her mind narrowed down—to one dreary lumber yard of cut-rate ideas—by the very excesses of enthusiasm she had committed when young.

  Her primitive nature rejected the idea of adoption. This she thought of as redressing the balance of her own barrenness by calling in someone else’s fertility. It was futile to tell her that within a few days the child would seem as if born of her, that to ensure it was fed it would ingratiate itself frantically. Ella might well have had a doctorate planned, but her pride and shame were as basic as those of a tribal woman cursed with a dead womb.

  Ramsey already felt that he provided only the poorest vistas, yet Ella persisted in even more intense hopes of possessing him as her universe, her race, her tribe, her brood.

  Stepping at that time from a Castlereagh Street boutique with a present for her, Ramsey was struck on the ham by an electrician scuttling into a café,
swinging the compartmentalized tool-tray that had done the damage. The electrician turned his small eroded face back to Ramsey. Ramsey found it at least evocative.

  “Hey, it’s Alec Ramsey.”

  “That’s right.” Alec strained after the name. “Steve. Steve?”

  “Steve,” the little man admitted. “I was base electrician, remember? Used to help you fillet the seals. Real cordon bleu job. Me? The place finished me. Ain’t over it yet. Ulcer, see.” He whispered. “Not enough tart. You know. I need tart. Regular. I did then, anyway.”

  “You don’t look past the need yet.”

  “God, I’m not neither. But that place … I get nightmares about it.”

  “Not many of us left to have nightmares, Steve.”

  While Ramsey chatted with the dyspeptic little electrician he wondered what Steve was doing, hustling over Sydney’s rabid pavements to fix fuses in Greek cafés and Magyar coffee houses. Didn’t someone in Canberra know he was an historic relic, one of Leeming’s last men?

  “How’s Dr Lloyd?” Steve asked Ramsey.

  “I think he’s well.”

  A fretful young Greek came to the street end of the café’s counter. “Ey, we got today’s holl milk goan bad.”

  “O.K. Adonis, keep your feathers on.”

  “Thas awright about feathers. We lose the business while you chatter-chatter.”

  “Who do you think you are? Bloody Onassis?” And to Ramsey: “Didn’t you know about Dr Lloyd? No? He’s full of cancer, poor old bugger.” He enjoyed being able to alarm Ramsey with Lloyd’s fatal state. He would have been disappointed to have been limited to saying that Lloyd was merely half full of cancer. “They opened him, but there wasn’t anything left untouched. So they sewed him up again and sent him away to die of it. I thought he’d just been sick, you know, and he used to do the wife’s eyes and hardly charge us anything. So I sent him a get-well card, not knowing. And I got this toffee-nosed letter back from some junior bint in his family, Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd, saying it was feared Dr Lloyd wouldn’t recover, so they hadn’t given him the card. But I don’t think the old Arthur would’ve minded, do you? I mean, he was never morbid.”