The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  Morris Pelham winked sombrely at Ramsey; Ella made choking sounds and pleaded her sinuses. Valerie loomed towards them as if she had been waiting there for no one else. They praised her costume, and she performed for them one fairy-twirl. Alec knew that young men in the audience would lie awake tonight thinking of the brashly sweet concordance of her hips and belly as shown off by those jaguar pants.

  “Oh, Alec,” she said, “could you keep an eye out for Denis? He’s running about in a state of acute excitement bordering on lunacy.”

  Her concern for Leeming seemed uncoloured, something more valid than a mere preparation for scoring off people. Even the words “acute excitement bordering on lunacy” were a surrender of extensive information to the enemy, and therefore a gauge of her uneasiness. Ramsey concluded again that there was an affair at the basis of her concern. “You see, the aunt is here. Mrs Leeming.”

  Ramsey knew that Belle might be coming to the tableland, but had not told Ella. Now she searched his face for the hazards the news raised, while Alec choked an instant on the maniac resentment he had not felt for the Kables that morning, when their news-carrying had had an edge to it.

  “Here in the town?” he asked lightly; but the likelihood of Belle’s nearness did give him a squeamish feeling of being encompassed.

  Titania pulled a face that gave her a frazzled look. “She’s even staying in Denis’s flat at Parker College. Of course, he must put her up.…”

  Ella and Ramsey and perhaps even Pelham thought, “Ahha. One sports arena eliminated.” How ironic that Mrs Leeming, a wide-range lover (on quite subtle grounds) of past decades, should now be curtailing Valerie Kable in her bloom.

  At this point the much-bruited Tim came hustling down the corridor, calling crisply, “Good luck Valerie. Seen him?”

  Mrs Kable let her respect for art-on-legs, and her sense of having touched the golden bough with a small hoist from this man, generate a gush of special laughter. She intoned, “Bless you, Tim!” as huskily as Bacall. “We’re still looking for him,” and when he had gone, reverted instantly to the banal Ramseys and that quaint Englishman, Pelham.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Pelham said.

  “I don’t want to pester Tim, but the truth is Denis isn’t to be found. Eric has been hunting for him, but he isn’t anywhere here, front or back, and he isn’t with his aunt. And the fact is, he’s in this lyric state of excitement … well, we simply wonder where he could have got to.”

  Lightly teasing, Ella said she had never known anyone to come to harm in a lyric state of excitement. Perhaps she was taking revenge on Valerie for changing her evidence thus after beginning with “a state of acute excitement bordering on lunacy”.

  “I can’t leave here,” Valerie went on, bound by her own ingenuousness to fail to notice the malice of others, “but I wonder if you’d tell Eric to come and see me if he’s still at the lights. And if you should happen to see Denis.… I don’t know what sort of performance we can expect from him tonight, after all this unrest.”

  Ramsey knew he should not ask, but failed to curb himself. “What exactly is the cause of all this hithering and thithering?”

  “He may be going to Antarctica,” she whispered, eyeing the corridor up and down for eavesdroppers. “Just for a few weeks. All to do with arrangements for the uncle. If you could do the small favour of looking out for him. I know it’s presumptuous of me to requisition the director of the department and his wife and a senior lecturer.…”

  No, they said, it gave them pleasure. But first they must give their best wishes to the ladies.

  It had been hot in the quick forge of backstage, so they took a breath of the fresh evening on their way back to the front of the theatre. Pelham and Ramsey smoked, Ella stood breathing the unstressed night. Pelham was friendly again, and a good friend.

  Ella proposed a stroll, since they had seven minutes plus any delay that Leeming might be able to cause. There was an undertone of urgency in Ramsey—to meet Belle Leeming if she must be met. But his urgencies did not compel him any more; or so he hoped, commencing to saunter under the cool of the trees.

  He said, “Morris, there’s no need for you to say a word when I tell you that I intend to resign. Ella already knows.”

  Won over thoroughly, Pelham said he regretted it. Alec shoved such valedictions away from him with both hands and, checking on Ella, found her face peaked but acquiescent in the moonlight.

  “You shouldn’t look on this as a formal declaration but as a nod good—or so I hope—as a wink. At one stage I saw myself lasting until you got your doctorate, but you say that won’t be for a year yet. You see, I wanted you—and not certain persons unnamed—to take my place. I shall certainly make it clear to the vice-chancellor that you’re my choice, but I shan’t have a formal choice, you see. It’s up to the selection committee, some of whom will think well of a man considerably senior to you. Again, no names.”

  “But he has a formal connection with someone in panther’s pants?” Pelham suggested, sounding dour and rueful in the authentic Yorkshire tradition. Ella and Ramsey laughed frugally, for Ramsey was playing with Pelham’s career and Morris could not, at his age, consummate the ironic patterns of his life by retiring.

  “There’s an assistant directorship vacant in Queensland, so they tell me. If you looked like being passed over here—”

  “I won’t work under Kable.” Pelham said it with fervour and with a margin of censure in Ramsey’s direction. “I couldn’t take all that bedroom politics buggering up the works.”

  “Morris, I hope you’ll treat this as confidential.”

  “And as far from irrevocable,” Ella, who had been so understanding, still felt forced to add.

  Perhaps this waiver was lost on Pelham, though, for he began to point to a form below them on a hip of lawn beyond which stood the gallows shape of the stage put together for the graduation ceremony which would be held … “Christ!” Ramsey said below his breath, “tomorrow.” Meanwhile, there was certainly the outline of a well-clad male lying athwart the curve of the bank. He seemed to have taken up the primary position for relaxation as suggested by yogis or women in black tights from the Workers’ Educational. Perhaps he had been neatly spread-eagled, no less. Eric Kable, wronged once too often, pays off his wife’s lover with … possibly a sandbag from backstage. So, at one bound, Eric gets life and Pelham gets promotion without having to resort to Queensland.

  In the spirit of this whimsy rather than from any certainty, Alec said, “I think it’s Leeming.”

  It took a young man, Pelham, to walk down such a slope. There was no movement in the shape until Pelham was practically on it, when it rolled on its back, making such an abrupt change from slackness to control that Ella yelped.

  “Good night … who is it? … good night, Morris,” it said.

  “Good night, Denis.” Even Pelham had caught the national tradition: first names to the very death. “Are you well?”

  “Oh, yes.” Leeming got to his feet. He too wore dinner-suit as an Athenian gentleman should. “I fell asleep.”

  “You’re lucky we didn’t have a love philtre handy,” Ramsey called to him.

  Ramsey could see the scholarly Leeming face transmuted onto the skull of a very different man from uncle Stephen. The line of the mouth looked particularly long when broken up by Denis Leeming’s abiding sense of being threatened by lesser men.

  Ella explained how he had been missed by Mrs Kable, and the four of them turned back to the theatre together. Young Leeming seemed a little chagrined by Valerie Kable’s motherly fussing.

  “I felt I might have trouble with lines unless I could get away for a good bout of concentration. As you know, there are bigger things afoot in our family now than amateur dramatics.”

  “Now then!” Pelham contended. “The Extension Department has gone to expense to see that they’re more than amateur.”

  “Just the same,” Ella conceded, “you must be considerably disturbed.”

 
; Leeming ignored the censure and the appeasement. He chatted copiously about himself, seeming proud of his ability to fall asleep at curtain time while beset by aunt, uncle, and Mrs Kable’s overstated concern. “I took up the turtle position and lay there forcing everything from my mind. You see Arabs in the Levant do this—it sometimes stands them in stead of hours of sleep. Hess used to do it too—you know, the German leader who made that inexplicable flight to Scotland in 1940 to offer peace terms? He was a remarkable man, even though a Nazi. He could still handle a fighter plane at the age of forty-five.”

  “Hope yet, Alec,” Ella said while Leeming harangued on like a man under pep drugs. The reports of his enemies said he always conversed this way.

  “I had a Chinese friend in England who was given hell by his college tutor. When this uncouth Welshman had my friend properly riled, my friend would simply join his thumb and second finger, thereby making a closed circuit of his tensions, or some such thing. I don’t quite understand the physics of it, if physics is the word, but it used to do wonders for my Asian. So, combining these three exercises, I’m afraid I fell asleep.”

  “It sounds like a hybrid process,” Alec said. “Yoga, Arab, Chinese.”

  Leeming murmured, “Culture is always a cross-breed.”

  Ella approached a new topic, an adventurous one. “How is your aunt just at the moment?”

  “She’s inside now, in the theatre.” He turned to Alec. “I hope you won’t upset her.”

  Ramsey let a silence signify some measure of hurt. “Who told you I was likely to?”

  “Oh, Aunt Belle doesn’t give away secrets. But you’ve always been affected by my uncle’s death. That’s known.”

  “By the Kables, perhaps.”

  “No, generally known.”

  Ella told Leeming in a tight voice, “You can at least depend on Alec to attempt more tact than you seem capable of.”

  “They tell us you’re going to Antarctica,” Pelham intervened.

  “Yes. To be at the diggings.” Leeming said it clinically, as if uncle Stephen Leeming were a Greek vase on the Turkish littoral. “Nothing is definite yet, but I’ve applied for two weeks’ leave. The Americans have told us that if the weather lifts there’s to be a flight from Christchurch to McMurdo Sound the evening after next. It’s nothing more than proper that a member of the family should be there,” he ended chastely.

  Yet another silence rose around the masticating sounds their shoes made on gravel. The theatre hove before them, its foyer still thronged. On the edge of the night and in the open stood a roué at work, the rangy, elegant shape of Professor Sanders who had shared with them the discomfort of the poet’s night-out at the vice-chancellor’s. A pretty girl, her eye-sockets emphasized to the diameter of saucers by misery and the uncertain light, faced him. It was a private confrontation, so much so that instinctive decency had the Leeming rescue party skirting round the two, who scarcely noticed them in spite of the noise of trodden gravel. Sanders’ voice, level and intense, carried to them.

  “Look, I’m a man of principle. Anyone who lives beyond the normal rules has to be. Consistency of conscience. All I ask is that you should have a consistent conscience.”

  “It’s not the same sort of thing,” the girl muttered.

  Sanders put his hand to his forehead as the Ramseys and Pelham and Leeming passed. But it was the movement of a man in genuine puzzlement rather than of someone merely trying to hide his face. They heard him say in a scarcely lowered voice, “But how can I be expected to afford …?”

  Ella whispered, “The womanizer unmanned.”

  It appeared that the sight of his departmental head, Professor Sanders, debating some personal matter with a young scholar, possibly an undergraduate, had exhilarated Leeming further, almost to the point of geniality. He thanked them for waking him, patently convinced that he could have slept a long time on the methods of Rudolf Hess. They wished him well as he went off to lend his fairly inadvertent talents to Tim.

  As Ella and Ramsey came into the theatre through a side door they each searched earnestly but with mutual discretion for the aunt. Neither had succeeded by the time the lights were dimmed.

  Alec found it sweet to sit in the dark and whisper patronizing things about the production and the acting.

  “So much for the Reverend Bowdler,” he hissed as Mrs Kable whirled through fairydom exploiting double-entendres she wouldn’t have admitted to knowing in her offstage pose of guilelessness. “She isn’t saying it according to the verse pattern,” Ella complained. But a joyous audience didn’t give a damn.

  There is a point in the play where Lysander, whose eyes have been anointed with love-ointment, pursues Helena through the forest and awakens a similarly anointed Demetrius-Leeming, asleep there for the past two hundred lines. At the words “You love her not” Leeming was meant to rise and besiege Helena from her blind side; and the two upright actors implied that this course should now be taken by inclining their heads minutely towards the prone Leeming. Who still did not move. Encouraged by the lightness with which Tim had laid the play down before them and by the fluffiness of the acting, a group of students began to sing advice, and Leeming woke to find that his crossbred art of relaxation had betrayed him again.

  Yet he might have heard the prompter and made a recovery if he had not dropped the correctness of Athenian gentleman and classic lover and begun to argue with the youth who was Lysander. Lysander kept to the dramatic illusion and tried to argue in character, and so fought at a handicap.

  Ramsey, who had often enough made a fool of himself and gone on to compound the matter, still blushed for Denis Leeming. Yet there was at least a doggedness about the nephew this evening that reminded Alec of the uncle. Meanwhile, even the students fell embarrassed, and in the hollowness of the audience’s sense of shock, laughter and catcalls rang false.

  Then the curtain fell, but no lights came up. People began to chat and wait on explanations; which came from Lysander, breaking the curtains open and coming forward in a rush, as if either impelled or braking the momentum of a sudden escape from someone’s hands.

  Lysander begged their pardons and said that the delay followed an error of which he himself was primarily guilty. Someone’s voice, not necessarily Leeming’s, was heard from within the curtains: “… bloody hero of himself.…” When the curtain came up again, Leeming continued his Demetrius with a knotty sort of vigour; which made it impossible for people to forget that here was Leeming acting Demetrius with a knotty sort of vigour to show that he wasn’t intimidated by people’s opinions. Ramsey wondered whether the lapse hadn’t been caused by the thought of ice grids.

  Suddenly the interval lights were on, exposing Alec to the necessity of meeting Mrs Leeming and showing her to Ella. In a foyer full of undistinguished youth a sole old lady with classic face gone rather leonine and britannic with age was easy to locate. As was the due of so imperial a lady, Alec saw her. She did not, or did not seem to, see him.

  “We have to speak to her. You don’t mind, do you?” After all, he could have said, if there was argument, that at the time of his coupling with Belle Ella had been five years of age.

  None the less, as Ella advanced, her eyes were brittle with a good will alien to her. It was certain that she saw the physical grandeur of the old woman as something worth mistrusting.

  “Belle,” he said simply, conversationally, careful against sounding nostalgic.

  She rounded, uncertain. For forty years they had met only by accident, at intervals and never for long. “Alec,” she guessed now in the face of this rugged old man. “Yes, Alec. And this must be.…”

  “Ella,” Ramsey told her. Ella stood back a little, foolishly believing herself cheapened.

  “Oh, Ella,” Mrs Leeming said, and searched Ella’s face with the same direct brilliance that had undermined Ramsey decades past. Ella was saved from anger by seeing that one of those incisive irises was rimmed by an ugly yellow growth. “I’ve always wanted to meet you.”
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br />   “And I you, Mrs Leeming.” Which, despite Ella’s best efforts, sounded like something said at a showdown.

  “At the risk of being thought a mere flatterer,” Belle Leeming said, “I must comment on your complexion, dear. How many of these eighteen-year-olds can match it?”

  How many of them could match Belle’s? Ramsey thought. Her cheeks, mouth, and throat were startlingly shapely, her complexion even, though her temples gave a hint of sinking to purple basins. All this looked false on what was (it was somehow obvious) a very old lady, so that cynics would have incorrectly written it down to extreme care before the mirror, recourse to cosmeticians and even to cosmetic surgery.

  Ella was looking sideways at Ramsey, to see how the compliment had registered on him. She was too suspicious of mockery to attempt graciousness in return.

  “You’re afraid I’m being insincere,” Belle startled her by saying.

  “No, no,” Ramsey denied on her behalf. “For some reason praise always takes Ella by storm.”

  “Do you think I’d try sarcasm, Ella, when my closest relative has just made such a fool of himself?”

  Ella felt like the delinquent schoolgirl caught out by a meticulously just headmistress. It would have been preferable to be insulted. She seized on Belle’s proffered weakness.

  “You mean Denis?” she said.

  “I wish he didn’t have these unfortunate public mannerisms. It embarrasses his friends, but worst of all, it embarrasses him. So that he’s committed, then, to further inanities.”

  Ramsey tried to gloss the question over. “It’s simply because he mistrusts himself. And don’t we all?” he added for luck, in case the words might turn on him.

  “That’s characteristic of Denis. But living in the groves of Academe helped do this to him. The people who are so toffee-nosed about him now fêted him as the child-wonder once. All the laurels were his for the picking up, and pick them up he did. It’s ludicrous to see the letters after his name. Three master’s degrees, no less. Did you know that, Ella? Three, one of them honours from Oxford. Half a dozen diplomas. It’s freakish. When they go to so much trouble to shore the poor boy up, to stir him on to become a latter-day Da Vinci, the least they could do is finish the job properly and make him a doctor. Though I suppose he’d want a Ph.D.(Hons. Oxon.) then. Is there such a thing, Alec?”