The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  “We live in ghoulish times,” Alec muttered, with acrid intent.

  The poet asked, “And your aunt has to attend to that sort of thing? Mr Leeming, if a woman of your aunt’s age says she’s tired, she’s tired. If she says she’s sick, she’s sick. Might I plead, though, that I was interested in your uncle long before he became fashionable in this grotesque way? I was one of a small knot of true believers. I needed no imprimatur from the news services, like the people who are trying to waste her time now.”

  “Well, of course, we shan’t answer these people, except cursorily. But there are more important demands to be met.”

  Ramsey said politely, “I believe you wish to make your uncle’s name widely known.”

  “How do you mean?” Leeming said it as if waiting for the inevitable insult, one more flat joke from a tired old comic.

  Not to disappoint him, Ramsey spat it out. “Popularize him. Aren’t you trying to sell him to the films?”

  The poet whistled. “So much for my epic,” he murmured.

  “If you mean that a literary agent approached me and offered to try and sell film rights in my uncle’s journals, and that I couldn’t see any good reason why not, then you could say, however unjustly, that I was trying to sell him to the films.”

  Ramsey announced, “Ramsey can’t play himself. I thought I should tell you.”

  “If I may say so,” the poet ventured, “it seems a pity to take your uncle out of the ice and subject him to the banalities of a modern funerary orgy. He’s native to the ice and alien to the other.”

  Leeming smiled for the poet’s simple-mindedness. “The concept of my uncle seeping down gallantly through a glacier is at least as crudely sentimental as anything an undertaker could dream up.”

  The poet considered this. “No. No, I don’t think it is. It’s sentimental, but not crudely so. It has style. On the other hand, I’ve never been to a funeral that didn’t fill me with morbidness.… After all, this familiar old body that I’m always giving little presents to, they’re going to file away in a horrible little socket of red clay. Funerals demean you, make you hate institutional religion and the climate. The climate.” He murmured, implying an imminent risk to Ramsey and himself, “Most old men die at the height of summer. Blowflies desire them. I think Dr Leeming is lucky to have the ice.”

  Ploughing his own furrow single-mindedly, “There will be a state funeral,” Leeming told them. He seemed certain that the information made the poet’s arguments about clay and high summer irrelevant. Then he began to detail, with a gusto that would have fitted a public-relations man, some of the other arrangements: Life photographers, television stations approaching or being approached on matters preliminary to the finding of the corpse. It was hard to remember that this young man flushed by his encounters with the media was a career monk in the groves of Academe.

  Ramsey governed himself, ignored his own hysteria, choosing not to believe it. It demanded such things as bullying Sir Byron into preventing Leeming; it condemned the widow to persuasion by the fist. His fingernails dug into his palm, aching to strike the widow for her malice towards her husband.

  He said, “And Professor Sanders has given you leave to attend to all this?”

  “I haven’t heard officially. But I have what the army calls compassionate grounds.”

  Though one might wonder why, the poet was the most frankly angry of the three of them. “You’ve surely ‘been approached’,” he suggested, mocking the passive verb that Leeming had used, “by a tin-plate manufacturer with a tender to press a few thousand ‘I love Leeming’ badges.”

  But mockery did not bring even a silence.

  “I hope you understand about my aunt,” Denis honked. “As it is, I should be leaving for New Zealand this afternoon, but whether I get away or not depends—”

  The poet went blatantly admonitory. “This business of emerging so many years after death does seem to add a poetic roundness to your uncle’s story. But its dramatic aptness in any refined sense may not be what primarily interests the people who are pestering your aunt.”

  “Pestering?” Leeming shut his eyes; he specialized in gestures of withdrawal. “Notice from them pesters somehow, while notice from you somehow dignifies. Even though they so often offer cold cash.”

  “Leeming Polar Manifestations Inc.,” the poet muttered to himself.

  Leeming had news for the poet. “If that’s satire, it’s of a crudity you seem to think properly belongs to other forms of communication than poetry.”

  The poet blinked and claimed, “I talk about what is patently decent for your uncle.”

  Denis continued sharp. “You mean some such thing as artistically decent, I think. Unfortunately, life isn’t all art, neither is decency all art. The Americans, for example. The tone of their dealings in this matter is based on a presumption that the most natural thing to do with remains is to bury them at home. I suppose that as a race they spend more on military funeral arrangements than we do on our entire defence. You must have heard the story of that American aircraft carrier that plied between San Diego and Vietnam carrying nothing but bodies. Who is to say that their suspicions about what is decent aren’t the right ones? Anyhow, you’ll have to excuse me, Mr Ramsey. This visit begins to defeat its purpose.”

  When Leeming had gone, Ramsey and the poet glanced at each other, more or less offering to share the quiet, heady fury they each felt. Ramsey was the hesitant one, suspecting that the poet’s anger would pass, was of the haphazard type that might come close to stinging a man into writing a letter to the editor; while Ramsey had abiding reasons for opposing the boy. Besides the abiding pressure of dread, he had a sense that the crisis of resurrection on which his newfound balance hung and from which his liberation would date depended on conditions as stark and free of foolery as those under which he and Lloyd had deserted Leeming. And apart from that he cowered from taking a place at the panegyrics and rituals of Leeming’s home burial and from the lies he would have to tell to be exempted.

  “It’s simply not appropriate,” the poet said.

  But Ramsey wasn’t soothing his urgency with rhetoric. He hunted in the university gazetteer for the number of Leeming’s fellowship flat. He found and dialled it.

  “Why should you be so upset?” he asked the poet, while the far end of the line rang and rang far longer than it should have, even if Belle had been tottery, even if she had not had the makings of a centenarian.

  “I’m a conservationist by profession,” the poet explained. “Besides Leeming, Antarctica itself—I’m fascinated by them. And I am writing on the subject.”

  “Yes, but how seriously do you take that?”

  The poet was hurt, or pretended to be. “How seriously have I taken you?”

  “It’s Belle Leeming that has to be shifted. She’s being either mad or perverse. Guess which? She was always a woman of principle. Perhaps she is acting on principle now.”

  “Even though,” the poet said on the basis of rumours and anecdotes that must have been common in Canberra (old Belle and this, that, and the other distinguished old man), “even though in exercising her principles she sometimes took away those of others.”

  “Hello,” Belle said then, from Leeming’s flat.

  “Belle, it’s Alec.” He abstained from bluntness. “I said hurtful things to you last night.”

  “Yes. But I can forgive you, Alec. While you can’t reverse the favour.”

  “Belle, we’ve just now had a strange visit from your nephew.”

  “We?”

  He told her that the poet was there.

  “I hope he didn’t mind my not seeing him.”

  “Really he’s been writing about your husband. A long poem.”

  “Oh, Alec,” she said secretively, “what a bore.”

  “Belle, the more freedom you give Denis, the more painful the whole affair will be. For you as well as me.”

  “We’ve already spoken about this, Alec.” She seemed to be about to p
ut the phone down.

  “Belle, neither or us wants to be a guest at his funeral.”

  Then he told her of a conversation from their first summer in Antarctica when progress had astonished, even alarmed, Leeming.

  Four of them were running dog-teams into the latitude at which a hut was being made for the inland wintering planned by Leeming. The hut would be base to a party that would survey the hindside of the Victoria Land mountains and to the party of eight that would attempt a less valuable but more press worthy journey to the South Geomagnetic Pole. The weather was excellent, and this further disturbed Leeming.

  The four dog-sledgers were Leeming, Lloyd, O’Connor, Ramsey. O’Connor was a surveyor, gentle, wise, articulate, and sometimes pithy. He was devoutly Catholic without making too much ado about eating pemmican on Fridays or missing Mass. But if time allowed he read his Missal on Sundays. Leeming, who knew theology, respected him as a seemingly rational believer, but passed off this respect by teasing him for being very much like Cardinal Newman for someone called O’Connor.

  A brief snowstorm kept them to their tent one Sunday. The four of them being crowded into a tent built for three, Leeming, Ramsey and Lloyd became engrossed in O’Connor’s reading of his Missal. The book that each of them had brought had scarcely been chosen for the ennui of snowstorm, but ennui was irrelevant to O’Connor’s reading. They all kept glancing at the rapt Papist. Lloyd stole snatches of ritual from over O’Connor’s left shoulder. They were all doomed by these means to talk religion when O’Connor had finished.

  Lloyd began respectfully, asking O’Connor some honest Masonic type of question about the consecrating of bread and wine. O’Connor answered well, too well for Lloyd, who was frightened off by all this talk of real distinctions between the substance and accidents of bread and wine. Not that Lloyd was easily intimidated, but there was danger of argument over such an exotic belief and, since they were jammed hip to hip behind plosive canvas in a gale, nowhere for offended parties to stalk off to. So Lloyd remained sensibly unprovocative.

  In the same spirit, Leeming told O’Connor, “I can see that a belief in Christ’s presence as something that is achieved by the performance of the act of social ritual called the Mass is justified. But why must you persist in this old form of the belief?”

  “Old form?” said O’Connor. It was an old form for which he would have died. “All our beliefs are in the old form.”

  Leeming placated him. “What I mean is the belief that there is a Real Presence in the consecrated bread, that the accidents of the bread remain the same while the substance becomes the substance of Christ. Such a belief answers the needs of an age that is now dead and is expressed in terms of a philosophy, Scholastic philosophy, which has been passé for hundreds of years.”

  O’Connor said, “But surely, Stephen, you don’t mean to say that Saint Thomas Aquinas and all those other great philosophers discovered only falsehoods—”

  “Oh no, not falsehoods. It was simply that their vision of the world became superseded by other visions of men equally great. But your doctrine of the Real Presence took no account of these.”

  O’Connor frowned, not because he had doubts but to find that his unobtrusive devotions had made him a stranger among his brother dog-sledgers.

  “But please,” Leeming went on, sensing the breach they had made by breaking the rule, common to officers’ messes, that religion and politics should not be discussed. “I would like very much to believe what you believe.”

  And Lloyd wisely further soothed O’Connor. “To a simple man like me, it wouldn’t make any difference what philosophy it was in.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Leeming, “besides the pallid Anglican ones, I have only one sacrament and that’s an expensive one.”

  Lloyd smiled secretively, Ramsey saw, as if suspecting that Leeming was speaking of his wife.

  “Antarctica is a timeless sacrament, unlike the ones we receive in churches,” said Leeming. “It confers on me a sense of the absolute.”

  It was O’Connor’s turn to pick holes. He smiled. “You must pardon me now, but it sounds a little like ‘One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.’”

  Leeming laughed in agreement. “One is nearer God’s heart in Antarctica.… But no. Gardens, like rituals, are man-made. We humanize landscapes with gardens and humanize the unknown with rituals. But Antarctica can’t be humanized, except in little ways—by a tent we pitch here or there, by the hot nonsense of our talk, which soon condenses on the tent wall. So Antarctica is a sacrament of the absolute, the same as all deserts are. It’s a place for prophets, Arthur.” He winked at Lloyd.

  “Could have fooled me,” said Lloyd.

  O’Connor teased the leader. “If you’re trying to tell us that Antarctica is a religion to you, then of course we’d never have guessed.”

  All four chuckled. Leeming contended, “Of course, Australia is a country in the prophetic mould too, but we have done such a stale old European job of humanizing it.”

  Lloyd said something about how he would have liked to be in stale old European Elizabeth Bay looking north-east across the harbour at the ships edging into Sydney for our stale old European wool.

  In the light of this memory, Ramsey asked the widow not to remove Leeming’s remains and not to give their care over to Denis Leeming. The poet whispered urgently, “Tell her I support you.” Ramsey told her.

  He heard Belle sniff, and could imagine the well-bred head tossing, like a horse’s. “Two days ago, Alec, you tell me in a stricken voice that I must decide on my own what to do, that you can’t help me. So I make the decisions I think I should, only to find that now you’re full of all kinds of anecdotes that are meant to be symbolic or something. I suppose that last one was intended to imply that dear Leeming would have preferred to stay in the ice?”

  But the story of Leeming and O’Connor had rankled with Belle and, sniffing hope, Ramsey chose to stay moderate. “You say that at seventy-nine you’re beyond making the arrangements needed. I was rash to argue with you. But in handing matters over to Denis you’re condemning Leeming to an Australian burial that you yourself might find painful.”

  She repeated all her pleas, notably that of health. But Ramsey kept detecting an edge of dismay in her voice, testimonial enough to the validity of his story. Still she avoided the ultimate signs of bad faith, such as giving too many reasons.

  One she had to give concerned Denis. “He’s capable and has considerable respect for his uncle’s memory. I know you’ll think immediately of last night’s performance.…”

  Ramsey nearly asked which one.

  “… the fact is that in such serious dealings as these he’s a different person. This is precisely the sort of responsibility he needs to shake off the effects of that appalling doctorate affair.”

  Ramsey made, in the poet’s direction, eyes of disbelief. What he did not know was that while he spoke his mouth was set in lines of animal petulance that made the poet pity him.

  He said what he had merely thought once before in debate. “I think, and I think you know, that it makes pretty indecent mechanics to balance the recent loss of a doctorate with the mummified weight of an old doctor.”

  “If you’re quite finished, Alec.…” she said, but of course did not hang up with the insult unresolved.

  Waiting, calm now, Ramsey shook his head again at the poet and saw the small penny-pinching mouth bunched in genuine discomfort at Ramsey’s fears, or Belle’s, or his own. Again Ramsey wondered in how profound a sense the man was interested in preventing Leeming’s desecration. Perhaps he was given to transient moral enthusiasms, espoused loudly but with no hope of outdistancing Belle’s rugged intentions. All that he knew about the poet’s sense of Tightness was that it seemed peculiarly sensitive in an area where his did not seem to so much as operate. It expiated a garrulous drunkenness with days off, six hundred miles of travel, two days’ attendance on what passed for Ramsey’s conscience. While
Ramsey’s own reaction in those circumstances would be to avoid that place, those people, that brand of liquor, for ever more.

  “It’s my husband you’re talking about.”

  “My God it is! You were a grand sort of consort once. You tried to refine his pride in an almost outlandish way. You can’t sign him over now, merely on the grounds that forty years have passed.”

  “Alec, do you actually think I’m in bad faith?”

  “You haven’t sounded like yourself, that’s all. Not the old Belle. More like some old hen whose soul is troubled by a pulled thread in the Axminster.”

  “Indeed,” she told him, regaining some of her balance, “I have come to value my carpets more as time goes by.”

  He said, “I’m not above begging you, Belle. Don’t do it.”

  “Keep out of it,” said Belle. “Keep out of it, Alec.”

  In the fellowship flat a door banged. “Denis has just come in, so I can’t go on arguing about him. I mightn’t see you again, Alec. But how dare you presume you’re the only one who’s disqualified from touching the corpse?”

  On this rising question the line went dead so instantaneously that Ramsey suspected the gardening staff of carelessness with a spade. But he depressed the receiver-rest and heard a healthy dial tone.

  To the poet Ramsey seemed full of brittle hope, feverish. “Belle doesn’t care. If that Denis could be prevented.…”

  He shook his head and slumped. The fast machinations needed to prevent Denis—to call on Chimpy perhaps, to call on Professor Sanders, the broaching of the question, the defining of his motives in terms they would understand, the onus of professional bonhomie under which such calls would be made—all these prospects left him drained.

  It was the poet who said that they must do what they could. It was the poet who telephoned and asked to be allowed to see Sir Chimpy straightaway.

  “Well,” said the vice-chancellor, “say in twenty minutes. I’m just finishing my speech for this afternoon.”