Not knowing he had said it, “I must go and see him,” Alec said. At wide intervals over thirty years he and Lloyd had made what would be called conversation, but there had always been an undefined urgency in Ramsey to speak bluntly and at length. It was a demand that had been, up to now, always postponable. But he and Lloyd had been fused by the very fact of survival, and would ultimately, like two spouses, have to speak the truth profoundly.
He telephoned Lloyd’s house at Rose Bay and explained to the woman who answered why he had some right to visit the death-bed. She went away. At the end of the crackling line came the peculiar resonant silence of Dr Lloyd’s big house of stone. The woman returned, sounding unwilling in saying that Dr Lloyd cared to see Ramsey, but giving all manner of reminders about the man’s weak state. Ramsey would need the reminders more than, making faces in the phone-booth, he imagined.
On the street he was struck by a distaste and lassitude at the thought of seeing Lloyd again, and of seeing him dying practically, ruggedly. So he kept missing taxis and it took a sly one, nosing along the curb for victims, to catch him.
A desultory woman who called herself Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd met Ramsey at the door and left him in the vestibule for ten minutes. She returned with a middle-aged nun of some obscure order whose entire work was the nursing of terminal cases. Then she led Ramsey back upstairs.
The room was shaded by holland blinds drawn to knee-height. Two parallelograms of light nuzzled in under the blinds and reached for Lloyd’s big, grey hand. False sweet smells, the sort that come from cans, overlaid the stink of the alien organism that owned Lloyd now.
Ramsey had seen Lloyd rarely enough since 1926. He remembered a man as tall as but broader than himself and who, bearded from the South, resembled Tsar Nicholas II. This sunken face was a parody of that one, though the eyes seemed still vainly addicted to survival.
“Here you are, father,” Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd said, and left.
“Alec,” Lloyd uttered with a real warmth and raised two fingers of one hand off the bed.
“Arthur.” Ramsey shook the two fingers.
“I’m sorry if I smell,” Lloyd said because he meant it, not because he was trying to play the marvellously brave old patient. “These synthetic perfumes are no damn good. I asked Sister Antoine to bring along some of the incense her people burn in their ceremonies. She thinks I’m pulling her leg. I tell her I’ve never been anywhere near a nun’s leg. She laughs. She’s a good sport, that Sister Antoine.”
There was actually a copy of the Australian Medical Journal open on the bedside table. The page said, “Medicinal Control of Pterygia: a New Treatment”. Ramsey was disconcerted into privately acclaiming the bravery of keeping up on pterygia when you would never see another one.
Lloyd’s breathing came hard but the speech very clear. He was weak, but his concentration did not waver. Ramsey hoped to God that he was not so excessively valiant as to refuse pain-killers.
“Are you in much pain, Arthur?” he asked straight.
“A little. I don’t get my morphine until five. But it scarcely makes me drowsy now. Never mind. I’d rather go out in mid-sentence.”
It was true that the doctor seemed moribund, but very toughly so, and Ramsey resisted admiring him, remembering that the toughness was of the man’s fibre and went hand-in-hand with less likeable insensitivities. Lloyd demonstrated the major one immediately, by asking with his all-boys-together brand of malice, “Seen old Belle Leeming?”
“I’m afraid very little.”
“Yes. All the sting went out of knowing Belle, didn’t it?” There was an element left of the hard, intolerable mockery of Ramsey and himself that may have been the blunt man’s way of expiating. But the mockery faded quickly. “I’ll tell you what, though. We haven’t seen nearly enough of each other, Alec.”
“That’s right, we haven’t.”
“Of course, you felt under an obligation to me. That was bloody ridiculous.”
“I suppose it was.” He didn’t want to hurt the dying man, but suggested, “We weren’t the best of friends in ’twenty-six.”
“But that was Antarctica, Alec.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think Antarctica is a substantial state of existence on its own, as Leeming used to seem to think.”
“Do you really think I ever gave a damn for that sort of poetic balls? We should have seen more of each other, that’s all.”
Then Lloyd had a spasm. You could see how nearly dead he was by the feebleness of the head that wished to strain back into the pillows but lacked the strength. Like something wrung, the face shed gobs of sweat. Ramsey looked about for a bell, and thought of going to the top of the stairs to call that good sport, Sister Antoine. He was halfway to the door when he heard a loud snort of release. Lloyd was better, taking whooping mouthfuls of breath.
“Shall I call someone, Arthur? I hope I didn’t cause that.”
“Don’t be silly,” Lloyd told him in a reduced voice. “Funny thing, this cancer. I don’t think they’ll ever find a cure for it. A special cancer, all his own, for each man.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I am. There’s something very much like a compulsion about the way man goes on growing these dirty things. What did you think of my garden?”
“It’s a garden to be proud of.”
Lloyd was occupied with getting breath for some seconds, but Ramsey could tell he wanted to speak, and so waited for him.
Then Lloyd said, “You don’t have to talk as if you’re humouring me. I won’t act up if you didn’t like the gardenias.”
“I thought the gardenias were fine.”
“That’s what I mean. You only want to tell nice lies. The bloody gardenias aren’t even in bloom.”
In fact Ramsey had become inattentive through anxiety. He had come to test his own uneasy memory against Lloyd’s apparently commonsense one; Lloyd was the one point of reference. But how could Ramsey begin to use him for reference in the midst of all this talk of gardenias and smells? And even if an opportunity came, Ramsey would fear it. For one could beg off any apparent facts cast up by an infected memory, but there would be no begging off Lloyd’s sanely offered reminiscences.
Not that Ramsey even had, at the time he came into Leeming’s death-room, any coherent fears.
Meanwhile, Lloyd seemed to be growing paler. Soon crisp little Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd would come and decree that they had spoken enough. Now they chatted on for two or three minutes, with intervals of hard breathing. Ramsey felt alarmed when Lloyd said without warning, “But I guarantee you came just to talk about Leeming.”
Ramsey admitted it.
“What about Leeming?”
“I don’t know. I thought there might be something you wanted to say.”
“I suppose you think I shouldn’t be leaving you in this situation. I mean, leaving you to your own silly judgment.”
Ramsey’s feet went cold; it all sounded like something from a familiar and compulsive dream. He said, “That’s a dramatic way to put it.”
“You’ve got a taste for drama, Alec. But Antarctica was in real terms. So will the Judgment be.”
“The Judgment. I wish I believed in the Judgment, capital J.”
“The very one I’m talking about. It must happen, Alec, otherwise the Mrs Sherwin-Lloyds of this world would prevail over the Sister Antoines. And in a world where quite a few sensible things happen, that would be against all good sense.”
“You’re probably right,” Ramsey supposed, falling silent. He could not help allowing the onus of talk to fall on the breathless man.
In any case, Lloyd had much more advice. “Men are judged on a real basis, not on a poetic one, Alec. You see, God hasn’t read that literary rubbish you have. You can bet your bottom dollar the Judge is nothing like you. My advice is, forget Leeming. I’m dying, Alec, yet he doesn’t preoccupy me.”
Alec nodded at every sentence as if it was all a help. It certainly cost Lloyd an excess of pain. Ashamed, he scarc
ely heard Lloyd say, “Accept it that Leeming was virtually dead when we left him.”
The sense of the sentence occurred to him slowly, and even then it was merely a crystallization of his dreams, a crystalline formula for thirty years of unshapen moiling.
He said quietly, “You said … virtually dead?”
“Dead in any real sense. Deader than me, and I’m not even my own man any more. The crab owns me.”
“But virtually dead?”
“I’m saying it explicitly, damn it all. Not for my sake. I don’t need it said.”
“What is it you don’t need said?”
Arthur Lloyd did his best to be patient, though there was a hint of the spasm again. A knock on the door proved to be Sister Antoine, saying that it was time he rested. Indeed he was plainly tired and probably in pain, but said he wanted five minutes. Sister Antoine looked regretfully at Ramsey, and obeyed. It occurred to Ramsey that Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd probably made life hot for Sister Antoine.
Lloyd’s pajama’d shoulders were quivering imperceptibly in the bed, a casting-off of what he thought was Ramsey’s unwillingness to talk turkey after so many years.
Too loudly for a death-room, Alec called out, “You mean he wasn’t dead when we left him?”
Lloyd told him dryly, “You’re looking me over to see what are the possibilities of a death-bed confession. By me, I mean; prejudicial to you. Well, there’s no need to fear that.”
Alec was angry at this suspicion. “Are you planting a joke on me, Dr Lloyd?”
“All right, Alec. I was the surgeon. My responsibility.” Lloyd gave an impression of nursing his strength now that Ramsey had gone hysterical. The eye doctor had that wisdom for knowing one’s limits which is essential for journeyers. Meanwhile, Ramsey kept telling himself, “At least I’m innocent of that abandonment.” Yet he felt forced to admit his certainty: he had known, and had let an argument that Lloyd was the surgeon and Lloyd’s the responsibility, excuse him from finding Leeming alive. He could remember the massive gratitude swelling in him at Leeming’s death, and an unwillingness to look at the amply-wronged body. Whatever obsequies he had done had been done with face turned aside. But more compelling than his memory was the drift of his dreams, secrets carried in the blood.
Lloyd was honestly perplexed, there being indeed terrible accusation for Ramsey in the perplexity of a dying man of action. “But Alec, you kept away from me for thirty years. Thirty years your eyes have been slewing off mine. On the morning itself I saw your eyes slew away.” He gathered breath and further evidence. “You wouldn’t let the head of the sleeping-bag be covered.”
“And you would have?”
“No. Your zeal made any decision of mine on the matter unnecessary.”
Ramsey’s mind stretched out to re-interpret the facts. “You even rifled the body,” he said brutally, referring to a sachet, containing a list of names, that Lloyd had taken from Leeming’s throat.
The eye doctor murmured, “I took the poor man’s halter off. If you don’t believe me, you can go to hell.” There was a pain and an anger in Lloyd that he could not afford to voice. It shocked Alec to think that perhaps the doctor had always been hurt when he avoided more than perfunctory meetings.
Ramsey was still priding himself uselessly on being free of the treachery. Though it might unbalance the dying man’s conscience, he could not prevent himself from saying, “In Adelie Land, Mawson stayed by a dying friend for two days, feeding him food that couldn’t be replaced.”
Lloyd gave a small shrug that meant different circumstances. “Our man was past help, past pain. It would have been a silly piece of good manners to wait for his breath to give out.”
Lloyd’s invincible conscience chafed Ramsey. “Maw-son’s friend was virtually dead, but kept climbing out of his bag and convulsing.”
“It didn’t happen that way with Leeming.”
It was invincible conscience, it was capable, it dealt in realism as Ramsey’s could not. And what unedged Ramsey was that he knew it loved Leeming while his, Ramsey’s, was directed to himself, to some destructive demand his own nature made on him.
This pattern had been set years before in a gale at about fifty-seven degrees south latitude. The stoke-hold of the Westralis began to flood, and the steam pump and the hand pumps seized for long periods. After twenty hours, water lay in the engine room. When this or that pump became operable, Leeming, classically enraged, would dare the thing to give out. The failure of pumps and the weather he took as personally offensive to him and as proof of their aim to make him ridiculous or uselessly dead. So Leeming worked up and down the octaves of his stoical hysteria by a hand pump on the port side where Ramsey himself spent part of the day, catching Leeming’s tone, working in a fury, furiously accepting death and the spurious aggrandizement death offered. It did not occur to Ramsey, and may have ceased to occur to Leeming, that the pumps were not sibyls but worked on a vacuum using reparable parts fabricated by machine.
It had, however, occurred to Lloyd and the engineer, who had cut a hole in the engine-room bulkhead and climbed into the flooded pump shaft to remove the clods of oil and coal-dust that had done the choking. They went further, climbing in and out of the black stew, and cleared the suction roses and covered them with a hand-made mesh of wire.
Leeming and Lloyd became genuine friends that day, for Leeming had atoned for his mysteriousness by his hysteria while Lloyd had washed off, in the cold stink of the bilges, the aloofness he had shown, the clerkly business-letter brand of speech he had till then used with Leeming, when Leeming all along knew him to be a gay, honest, and profane man. So Leeming shook the doctor’s hand emphatically. Whereas Ramsey was left high and dry with a skinful of irrelevant emotions.
There was a second soft tap on the door and Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd appeared.
“Really, father!” she said, but looked directly at Ramsey.
“I’m not finished,” Lloyd told her, though in another sense it was precisely the way he looked. Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd made visibly, even ostentatiously, the decision to indulge his age and the hopelessness of his case.
“You must make it very quick, Mr Ramsey. You can see he’s exhausted.”
When she had gone, Lloyd made a wry mouth by which he meant that he would rout Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd except that his prospects made that futile. Ramsey himself moved to the head of the bed.
“Arthur …?”
“I take the whole blame. Before God.” Lloyd was fortunate, having no doubt that God was something to be argued with man-to-man. Ramsey sought the right hand and began to weep. At one period, from the age of fourteen to thirty-nine, he had never wept. Ella had more recently liberated him from the male fetish of dry eyes.
“I didn’t know,” Ramsey said. “Not about Leeming.”
Lloyd seemed to believe that. “You’re an innocent then. No wonder Mrs Leeming found you easy fodder.”
“But you know I’m telling the truth.”
“Ah yes.” The word was ambiguous, but Ramsey had to be satisfied to get any word out of this body subsiding into the mattress. “It doesn’t matter. I take full responsibility.”
“I would never have left him.”
“Not necessarily a virtue,” Lloyd murmured without breath, his eyes closing.
Ramsey felt terrified; it seemed that his blood had got onto the secret of Leeming sleeping but not dead and had raced away accepting it; certainty was therefore deposited like alluvia in the pit of his stomach. He made a formal, even sentimental, good-bye.
Sister Antoine wondered what he had done with her patient. Mrs Sherwin-Lloyd was cold on the stairs.
“It is not too much to say,” the minister ventured two weeks later, Arthur Lloyd’s casket stately on the conveyor that would speed it into the furnace, “that Dr Arthur Lloyd was one of our very finest contemporaries, a man of wealth and accomplishments, yet of simple faith and kindness. These qualities combined to make of Arthur Lloyd a superb Australian.”
Here the preacher, who
hadn’t taken the opportunity to know the superb Australian called Dr Lloyd while it lived, shuffled the biographical notes supplied by the family. “His name defines ice-bound Cape Lloyd in Antarctica. On that testing-ground of a continent he survived a perilous attempt on the South Geo-magnetic Pole from a base in Oaten Land.”
Someone in the family needed to be more careful with his s’s.
“He saw his leader, the gallant Leeming, die of complications from a stroke, and then, supporting another man …”
“Not worth naming,” supplied Alec, sotto voce.
“… won through to the sea and the rescue ship. This in a land where it is often easier to die than to live.”
Funnily, this had been one of Lloyd’s aphorisms in an argument he had had with Ramsey in the autumn of their survival.
“In this land, in which it is easier to live than to die, Dr Lloyd faced the necessity of death with the same positive courage with which, thirty years ago, he faced the arduous necessity of life.”
The sentiment, unlike most occasional ones, was not false. Ramsey remembered a four-day blizzard on the high plateau, some time before Leeming’s stroke; the tent full of a chill clamminess, temperatures reaching up into the plusses; and all the ice they had accumulated in baggage and clothing, all the moist that had hung frozen and tolerable in their gear, their boots, the folds of the tent, melting and seeping through to their skin. Lloyd’s answer to the swampiness of their existence was to be droll about it. The twice-daily shedding of socks, for example, was a chance for Lloyd to go all hearty and chat with his feet as if they were two of Rembrandt’s less erogenous ladies caught bathing at Manly. It was a method that did a great deal for anyone who did not have an itch within to match the outer one. By the third day Alec’s left hip was, from secret scratching, pink and raised in small violet-purple pustules; and he worried not so much at Lloyd’s dogged slapstick as at the fact that Leeming didn’t bind him to silence. As Lloyd himself said, there were certain tests.…
The Survivor Page 12
