The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  Sanders said, “I saw you running up the slope from the bridge, Alec. I hope you weren’t worried. The truth is I should have left a message, but Mrs Ramsey seemed so tired—with good reason, I can tell, since she’s confided in me. Her condition.”

  “Condition.”

  Behind Sanders’ back, Ella made gestures of urgency, winks, wry faces.

  “Yes. I do hope the treatment does the trick.”

  Ramsey was both annoyed at Ella’s foolery yet grateful for being asked to partner her in drollery.

  “What do you mean by treatment?” he asked Sanders. Ella again made antic faces of pleading. “Oh, I see. No, it shouldn’t cause much trouble.”

  “Well, you both seem very brave about it. I detest the very word cancer.…”

  “Cancer? Of the womb, you mean?” Alec asked him in a staccato, unsettling way.

  Sanders nodded.

  “Oh, that,” Ramsey said dismissively.

  “She thinks I should let Leeming have leave.”

  “Oh, yes. But don’t let her affliction influence you.”

  Ella giggled silently while continuing to ply the Helena Rubinstein into the sides of her nose.

  “How about sitting down after that hard run you’ve had. Would you like a beer, or some tea?” Sanders was disturbed by Ramsey’s sparse and ambiguous intonations.

  “Now I’ve found Ella, professor, I’d prefer to take her home.”

  “Yes, I had better get,” Ella admitted. She packed up her cosmetics like the enamelled lady both men knew her not to be.

  Sanders was leaning forward to open the door for them when it knocked. He opened it to the tall girl whom last night he had lectured on questions of principle. She was hot and sick from, Ramsey supposed, the same walk he had done.

  At the sight of her Ella stiffened, for the girl was ashamed and apologetic and, Ella judged, misused, one of the sisterhood. Somehow her arrival so soon after Ella’s own near-miss infidelity underlined Sanders’ culpability and shallowness for her, even though he didn’t seem pleased at the young lady’s coming.

  Her name was Miss Bourke, and she was a research assistant in Sanders’ department.

  “Well, you do have busy afternoons,” Ella told Sanders.

  “The Ramseys were just going, Sally,” Sanders said.

  Yet, shown out and locked out, Ella would not leave the top landing.

  “I came close to losing my virtue to that man,” she told Ramsey. “I want to know what he’s doing to that girl. Besides, she works with young Leeming.”

  “For Christ’s sake, he’ll be at his window to see that we really do go away.”

  “Rot. He gets paralytic with desire.”

  He became furious at her knowledge of Sanders’ processes and went away and sat on the bottom step. Even there he could occasionally hear Sanders’ voice raised, though not in anger. Perhaps on principle. Without warning, he wanted to tell Ella about Leeming. One of his visible reasons was that she had wronged him today herself and had some small knowledge of the lineaments of betrayal. But this was merely a reasonable cause invoked after the decision had taken him by the throat.

  “Ella, for God’s sake come down here. I want to tell you about Leeming,” he called.

  Ella hushed him. He came close to weeping.

  After ten minutes she came downstairs rampant, distracted by Miss Bourke’s trouble. Hustling Alec downhill, she kept telling him, “But first let me tell you.… That swine.…” Her pallor was as unwholesome as Miss Bourke’s, though not, it seemed, for the same reason. For Miss Bourke was pregnant to Sanders. She had met a student who wanted to marry her and raise the child as his own, but who had no means. Miss Bourke’s income was small. She wanted Sanders to make some settlement on account of the unborn. “I think she said three thousand dollars, nothing massive, enough to last them until the stepfather graduates and starts work. She obviously feels degraded to have to struggle with Sanders like this.”

  “Pity she didn’t feel degraded when he propositioned her.”

  “Well, you know well how it is with the young.”

  “For God’s sake, Ella.”

  He was amazed that the things that had been unspeakable for forty years were about to slip out in the middle of banter; the banter itself emerging in the middle of rage, Ella’s rage against Sanders, and pique, his pique at Ella.

  Ella hissed on. “He says he’ll pay for an abortion but he won’t pay for a child who may not even be his. He says that’s a matter of principle.”

  Ella waited for the now familiar words to settle. “She won’t have an abortion because she’s Catholic and holds the old-fashioned and unprincipled view that it’s murder.” Which old-fashioned and unprincipled view Ella shared. “But our friend says that her beliefs forbid fornication too. If she fornicated she should be willing to murder. Although he uses a nicer word than murder.” Continually she punished her own thigh with her weighty handbag. It was a movement that fitted her self-disgust. “He can’t see the difference between a random lapse and a plotted course of evil.”

  “Yes,” said wan Ramsey.

  “I hope she reports him.”

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “Perhaps Leeming would if he knew. I hope he knows.”

  “Oh, don’t wish that on anyone, Ella.”

  “The girl hadn’t graduated at the time; she was still an honours student. It is required of a steward that he be found faithful.…”

  Ramsey said, “Ella, listen. You know Arthur Lloyd, recently deceased? Well, Lloyd and I—no, I shouldn’t put it that way, as if the guilt were mainly Lloyd’s—I and Lloyd left Leeming while he was still alive.”

  He studied the stones at his feet. He heard Ella titter.

  “I’ve found myself, strictly speaking, incapable of saying that,” he muttered, and raised his eyes. “You’re the only one I’ve ever told.”

  Incredibly, Ella gave a sort of unpretentious shrug. “Is that what has you by the throat?” She went on quickly, as if to clear away a minor point for the sake of a quick return to the subject of Sanders and his girl. “You may not believe me, but I’ve read Leeming’s instructions to his sledging parties. You obeyed him. As he deserved to be obeyed.”

  “You’re an absolutist, Ella, and you know a conscience isn’t bound or excused by sledging instructions. He would never have obeyed them himself. No one can realize how indecent it is to leave a living thing there.”

  Ella declaimed, “The priesthood of Antarcticans! You mean to tell me this is the core—the thing that’s taken half a lifetime to get said?”

  “Well, since Lloyd died, anyhow. I had somehow forgotten it until then. I was very hazed at the time of Leeming’s dea … well, of Leeming’s final illness. Everything I felt about it was undefined, hazed, you know. Until when Lloyd was dying, he mentioned it—that Leeming had been left like that. He mentioned it to say that it had been the right thing and that I wasn’t to let it distress me as it seemed to have done in the past. The moment he spoke I knew I’d always known; the fact crystallized. Look, Ella, I’m running out of breath.” They waited for breath in a groin between the hills. There was a low summer creek brewing scums and withered thorn bushes. “It was like having your illness diagnosed by an expert and when he tells you what’s wrong you realize he’s exactly right and you say, ‘Yes, that’s the thing I’ve been dying of all along.’”

  “I don’t believe it,” Ella told him.

  Alec persisted. “It happened, we left him.”

  “I don’t give a damn if you did. That’s reasonable enough. I don’t believe that all this frenzy stems from something so simply said and excusable. But it’s more than excusable. It’s right and sensible. Now isn’t it?”

  “You think your enemies are beyond all moral consideration. And Leeming’s your enemy.”

  She sneered. “I must apologize for that. You see, he’s been falsely represented to me.”

  “For Christ’s sake keep the thing quiet, Ella. The Mo
rton College students will be coming down here.…”

  “What was Leeming’s opinion of being left?”

  “He had none. He was sleeping.”

  “In a coma?”

  “I’m not a medical man.”

  “Ah, that’s a point.”

  “You win, Ella. He was in a coma and—”

  “In a death coma.”

  “Who could say that? I’m afraid, Ella. Terrified.”

  “Lloyd pronounced him dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you couldn’t, could you? Lloyd was the doctor.”

  “Legalism cures nothing. I left him.”

  “I left him,” Ella mocked. “Honestly, you talk as if you were his lover.”

  “That should be the least of your fears. And while we’re talking about fear, yours about this Leeming business … that I was withdrawing from you and all the rest of it … surely you can’t believe that any more?”

  Ella stamped away a few yards, another excessive rage in what had been an afternoon of excess. “You mean I should believe you when you say that what has always plagued you is as simple as Leeming being five-sixths or nineteen-twentieths dead when you called it a day on the mere pretext that you were both starving? And you mean to say you didn’t even know about it in those terms until I was in hospital failing to bring forth anything.…”

  “Until Lloyd was dying,” Ramsey amended.

  “It’s easier to believe you hate me as a wife.”

  “With your gift for hysteria—”

  “Don’t talk to me about hysteria.”

  They began to walk again. There was no one to be seen. Uphill, the trees of Administration formed a barrier beyond which dons and graduates made pretence of civilized enthusiasms. Ramsey clenched both fists. He was eager to be judged; his thirst for judgment surprised him.

  “What sort of moral monster are you?” He was too frantic to see the contradictory nature of the question: What sort of moral monster are you not to see that I’m a moral monster? He felt insulted, like a criminal who comes into a police station to confess to unsolved murders and finds that everyone is too busy tracing stolen handbags to take down his confession. “You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “It’s a bore,” she said, to insult his sense of having sinned prodigiously.

  “I swear to you, Ella, I’m not deluded. Please, Ella. I’m amazed myself at how … well … unmomentous, comparatively speaking, it all sounds. But it’s very hard to bring out the importance, the quality of these things, in so many words.”

  “Quieten down,” she told him. A straggle of undergraduates wearing or carrying gowns with the distinguishing stripes of Morton College had appeared round the flank of the hill on a course that would take them within ten yards of the Ramseys. Ella would not look at them but ambled forward bent, inspecting the track. Their passage downhill for some reason left her disturbed, chastened. Meanwhile, Ramsey became happy in a surface way that the mystery had been said; yet he knew in the blood that he was deceived. There was a new urgency in him to speak it right. For this purpose the limits of words would have to be broken.

  He found Ella was calling on the objective evidence. “It sounds like a case of suggestion to me. I mean, Lloyd was old and under drugs. You didn’t know in so many words until Lloyd told you. Under drugs—”

  “No, he was lucid, clear-headed.…”

  “Perhaps it was a story that just answered your neurosis. You seized it as the cause for certain feelings you had. Perhaps all you’ve done is lay old Belle—which doesn’t seem to have harmed the lady at all.…”

  She could see, because he was glowering at the track now, that her contempt for his crime had hurt him. She said gently, “Anyhow, nobody will blame you for it. No one.”

  For Ramsey, it somehow stood as proof of the insanity of their relationship when, later that evening, Ella took the car and came home, after an hour and a half, with Sally Bourke. To her credit the girl looked wary. It was possible that Ella had said things so contrary to Sanders’ suggestions of abortion that Miss Bourke felt, as never before, irrevocably with child. The Ella who tramped ahead of the girl was flushed and appeased, and distracted utterly from Ramsey’s crisis.

  “I’ve asked Sally could she stay with us a while,” she told him. “We have all this space.…”

  “Mrs Ramsey was so insistent,” Sally Bourke told him in extenuation.

  “She shouldn’t be paying rent, with the child coming on.”

  Sally Bourke blushed, and Ella had the grace to rein herself in. “Alec knows. Please don’t feel uneasy. Alec and I, we’ve made our sexual mistakes at our appointed seasons.”

  Alec blinked and wondered when Ella’s seasons had fallen.

  “Come through here and I’ll show you your room.” She made a jerky, dominant guide; with such a dowager as well as the Catholic mysteries all riding vigilante over her motherhood, Sally Bourke might as well acquiesce in layettes.

  Ten minutes they were gone, while Alec tramped and gestured to himself, finding it hard to believe that there was not malice and contempt behind this dragging of new issues into a house drum-tight with old ones.

  Ella came back alone. “Toilet,” she whispered at Alec, as if their silence would assist Sally.

  He said the girl couldn’t stay: they were crowded in a sense that made the number of rooms they had available an irrelevance.

  “That’s the trouble,” she said, remembering Sanders’ figures of speech. “We never let in any of the light of other people’s preoccupations.”

  He fabricated arguments. “Have you noticed that she’s very beautiful and that her preoccupation doesn’t show yet? When it does, people will think I’m responsible.”

  Ella, flushed with do-gooding, laughed off the opinions of others. “That’s a reputation you could be very proud of.”

  A ringing telephone stopped him from giving her a chance to be compassionate towards him. She scooped up the receiver after a short robust walk of the type seen among successful corsetieres. But the frown she gave upon listening went down to the bone, was not staged.

  “Oh, professor,” she said.

  He saw the authentic frown (signifying, on top of all her landlady-like skittishness, that she had developed concerns of her own) as reason for leaving her. He was hundreds of yards away on a walk meant to last for hours and to impair health—for which reason he was busy-minded recording what pains there were in the right side of his belly and what indigestive, perhaps cardiac, stabs rankled under his left armpit—when he remembered she had said, “Oh, professor,” and wondered if it had been Sanders and why.

  In fact Sanders was telling her that he loved and needed her, that her mature sense of irony was combined with a vestal quality, innate and precious to her, that girls lacked these days. Surely, too, she had needs … but no, he wouldn’t mention her needs: he needed her stability, he would not presume needs in a woman so impressive as she.

  She told him her needs were being met as well as she could humanly expect.

  Yet he seemed to believe that the tensions in her voice were those of a lady, a vestal lady, under unexpected siege. He said that suddenly his criterion of behaviour was her. If she felt there was some benefit for her in Leeming’s funeral arrangements, then he would have to give in in front of Chimpy.

  She said tightly, “You have to do whatever your principles dictate.”

  In spite of the arguable nature of his hopes, Sanders, no liar, next rang Sir Byron. The vice-chancellor himself answered the call.

  Sanders told him, “Look, Byron, I’ve been rethinking this whole Leeming situation.…”

  He could tell Chimpy was distracted by a gay female voice within the lodge that Sanders could hear on the line—speaking at Chimpy.

  “Brian,” Chimpy said, “I have Sadie here, and she’s not too well.” Sadie could even be heard, arguing that she’d never been better. “Wait a second and I’ll speak to you on the extension in my study.”


  Sanders began to sweat. Here was the same taut wariness towards his large gesture which he had already met with in Ella. In the humming vacancy of the telephone wires the woman’s voice ground on remotely. Then, hollowly, Sir Byron’s rose.

  “Yes, Brian?”

  “As I said, I’ve been rethinking.… As a matter of fact, I’ve been talking with Ella Ramsey.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Sanders would have liked to lay a fist on Chimpy, who had been stung, probably by Sadie, to overtones.

  “Well, all this is very close to the bone with the Ramseys, and Ella thinks it’s important for her husband that I should permit Leeming senior to be exposed to Leeming junior. I must apologize for messing you about, but if I’d known that decent people like the Ramseys were involved, I’d have given in on the issue long ago.”

  The vice-chancellor’s voice sprang out at him. “Well, it’s a bit too late for you to become magnanimous, Brian, just on the grounds that you’ve scored with Ella.”

  “Listen, Byron, if I score with anyone I’ll let you know. In the meantime, Ella Ramsey is a rare creature in this age. She’s a woman of virtue.”

  “Oh, my God!” Chimpy intoned. “As I was saying, it’s a bit late to be magnanimous. I’ve already arranged that things should stay the way you decided. The Leemings have agreed to square things with the press. Besides, young Leeming’s distracted by a letter that came this afternoon from an American publisher who wants to publish his failed doctoral thesis. So you see, he’s going to get his spurs another way than by digging up his uncle. Of course, it’s your department,” Chimpy added after a silence.