The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  Alec thought she dealt with her nephew at such length out of mercy towards himself. He had this and a great amount of other evidence to prove that in her singular way she was a loyal and discreet woman. Yet he wondered if it was even possible that she was being merciful to herself. Less rabid and doctrinaire than she used to be, she might also be a little less impregnable.

  Ella did not care to leave the matter tacit. She asked without warning, “Mrs Leeming, how do you feel about this discovery?”

  Belle did not pause. “My husband?”

  “I’m sorry, but Alec suffers a great deal for his memory.” She felt contrite to see the old eyes, the one with the growth, flicker for an instant, as if altering focus.

  “You’ve got every right to ask, Ella.”

  “What will happen, then, Mrs Leeming?”

  “I don’t know. I’m an old woman, you see. I want to be advised by Denis.”

  “He’ll go south?” Ramsey said.

  “We think it would be a good idea.” The widow shut her eyes.

  Ramsey’s own eyes made one conspiratorial sweep of the room before he gave her advice. “Perhaps I should tell you, Belle. Those who know him seem to think he’s a little unstable at the moment.”

  Belle remained in an aloof stance. “Denis? I trust my own. There’s no one else to call on.”

  Yet Alec could not believe that the old woman relied on any vein of good sense in Leeming the younger; nor could he imagine her as the fond aunt-by-marriage, blinded, in the face of her own decaying, to the oddities of her kin. As for her being an old woman beset by events in which she needed a mediator, he could see no evidence for it other than the mere statistical evidence of her years. And age came as close to being an irrelevance in her case as it could possibly be for mortal woman.

  Again he found it intolerable that Leeming, immune up till now at his improbable latitude, should be required to rot in the earth to make a circus for Denis.

  “Indeed there’s no one else to call on, Belle,” he affirmed. “For God’s sake don’t fail to do what’s needed yourself.”

  The widow stared at him. The stare was read by Ella as something to do with pain; but such a reading was provoked by her belief that a funeral under the aegis of Leeming the younger was the very thing to exorcize Leeming the elder.

  “Alec,” she pleaded. “Be decent.”

  She was herself startled then to find the old lady’s hand on her wrist. “No, no, no, Ella. He’s within his rights.” It was toneless: the old lady thought Ramsey’s rights funny ones.

  Alec refused to be shamed. “You’re the widow,” he insisted.

  “It’s a precise description,” Belle admitted.

  “I don’t think you of all people should consider that your age excuses you.”

  The two women referred to each other’s eyes. Ramsey’s brashness had made Ella forget Belle’s past whorings; they were entrenched in sisterhood, happily misreading each other.

  “Alec, if I were senile and had lost control of my bowels, as thousands have at my age, you would certainly excuse me. But what you could never forgive is that a robust woman of seventy-nine years should attempt to preserve her health.”

  “You surely don’t mean that Mrs Leeming should go south herself?” Ella challenged him.

  “Belle knows what I mean.”

  Ella was reminded by this that Mrs Leeming and Ramsey had shared more than meanings. She resented Alec’s flaunting of Christian names as token of intimacy, and did not know that he had always called Belle Mrs Leeming until they had again met by accident and innocently in a restaurant in 1938.

  The old lady said, “Ella asked me what I thought about this discovery. Let me tell you that it’s all grotesque and alien to me, as Leeming’s ambitions always tended to be.”

  Alec might have said some such thing as “So it seems”. But Belle still retained her asbestos air of candour, of the heroism of the straight talker. Before it, liars felt intimidated. Ramsey was a liar.

  “You can’t tell me there was any need for that last journey. Ella, if you had been his wife—a better wife, that is, than I was—you would have seen the nonsense in it. Oh I know, man’s irradicable thirst for knowledge is invoked. But who can say man’s soul does actually thirst to know the height and latitude of mountains in Victoria Land? That isn’t knowledge, it’s fact. Void fact, too. There is no human significance in the configuration of the hindquarters of those mountains.”

  Ella blinked, but remained loyal to the old woman. She knew that she was not herself tolerant of Ramsey’s fantasies. Yet she could not conceive of her intolerance extending itself to the dishonouring of Ramsey’s memory.

  “Now the ludicrous and tragic nature,” Belle continued, “of what was done by Leeming was that it could all have been done from the air within a short time. Quite a number of people have seen his abhorrence of aircraft as something odd, as if it was important to him to reproduce the conditions of earlier expeditions. You know yourself, Alec, he was offered a Hawker aircraft. His motives all had to do with some sort of self-testing. Let me speak bluntly about my husband. His death was in some ways less meritorious than if he’d drunk himself to death, because drinking wasn’t in his nature. It was an excess that he would have had to work hard at to acquire. So you see, I was out of sympathy with him then, and feel alienated by what has happened now. And I won’t be bullied in the matter, Alec.”

  A handbell rang, calling them back to the enchanted forest. The Ramseys had nothing more to say but waited each in private possession of his belief, Ella seeing a nice funeral as salutary, Ramsey suspecting it as a sacrilege; Ella wanting bathos, Ramsey the revelation, both out of the same eventuality.

  “Shall we go in?” Belle asked. The students hustling might have noticed her as one notices a town hall, something placed to encourage old-fashioned proprieties. A sweet old girl, the young might guess, fat with years and marital wisdom.

  They had stood waiting for the press of people to thin. Now there were three or four couples left, making haste with cigarettes, although the unhappy girl who had been seen earlier in debate with Sanders was prominent, causing gentler but equal misery to a handsome boy talking low with her.

  “Now that we’re alone, Belle, when are you going to stop lying?”

  “Alec, control yourself,” Ella barked. For she had seen the eyes change quality again; almost like a shift of pace, precisely managed. Yet perhaps in ten months or ten years the tensions that commanded such shifts might split the old brain.

  “Would you feel hostile towards giving me a fit funeral?” Ramsey asked Ella.

  “If I had been hurt enough.”

  Ramsey grunted and kept to himself his opinion that Belle was invulnerable. But even the old lady herself belittled Ella’s melodramatic claim.

  “Alec believes I’m not easily hurt. I think there’s evidence for such an opinion. But perhaps Ella has been hurt, Alec, by your silly concentration on my husband. Ella is a beautiful woman. You can’t expect her to consume her life on an ageing fool whose mind is three-quarters on what he considers to be debts, ancient and forgotten ones. Ella deserves you entire.”

  Ramsey filled with the kind of annoyance a non-believer might feel if a pontiff changed doctrine. “You didn’t believe in private possession once.”

  “Neither I did. I was an absolutist then. A lot of people fall apart without serene possession of someone else.”

  He continued ungenerous. “But morally inferior to you, these people? Aren’t they?”

  “Imagine my apologizing for Denis!” said the widow, raising her eyebrows.

  They were the only group left in the vestibule now, and heard the audience hush as music burst out inside. When Ramsey looked back to Belle there was a tear on each of her cheeks, utterly unheralded, apparitions. Her face was just as passive yet as vital as before.

  “I so wanted to see Denis in this second half,” she said levelly.

  Ramsey refused to honour the tears, but Ella whispe
red before them, “Of course, of course, Mrs Leeming,” and without blushing, put an arm around Belle’s shoulders for a second. “Get out of the road, Alec.”

  “There’s no need, darling,” the widow muttered, shaking Ella off, finding her own way into the dimmed theatre. But Ramsey had held Ella back too.

  “Let me tell you,” he whispered. “She’s no member of any sisterhood of wronged women. She’s tough, a loner, a regular monolith.”

  Ella defied him. “She’s a genuine lady. I like her style.”

  And she holds it against me, he thought, that I fell to a far more rousing Mrs Leeming.

  He knew, however, that she would forgive him his mere rudeness if he gave her time. Acts III and IV should suffice.

  Leeming presences had dominated the night, and it was only when sherries were served on stage that Ramsey saw Sir Chimpy had attended. Awarded a glass each by Pelham, the vice-chancellor and the cast eyed each other with some mutual shyness which Ramsey was surprised to see, especially on Sir Byron’s side.

  Ramsey stepped up to him and hoped he’d enjoyed the evening, being sorry only that Lady Sadie couldn’t have come.

  “She isn’t well,” Sir Byron claimed. He seemed a little furtive, as if unused to telling polite lies for Lady Sadie. The stealthiness was replaced by an amazingly frank-faced and legible desire to confide his worries.

  “I’m concerned about Sadie. She always knew what it was to be … well, to be the wife of a vice-chancellor. She’s refusing a lot of the customary jobs now, and she’s very neurotic. Hostility. Tears.”

  Ramsey was amazed to see that Sir Chimpy possibly had had no experience until now of women reacting to their chemistry.

  Alec took on, partially self-deceived, a pose of male stability. “I wouldn’t worry, Byron. Their biology must get them, sooner or later.”

  Seemingly conjured up by the word “biology”, Mrs Kable burgeoned at their side, demanding Sir Byron’s just estimate of the play. Faced with a woman whose chemistry was on the sunny side, he said, “You really were splendid, my dear.” So, honoured, she left them, and was succeeded by Pelham.

  “Leeming isn’t here,” Alec remarked.

  “He’s taken his aunt home.” Pelham frowned. “I believe he intends to come back.”

  Sir Chimpy asked, “Who was the boy he quarrelled with?”

  “He’s a law clerk from Pinalba. I think he’s waiting for an opportunity to spring on Leeming with apologies. He suffers from a now nearly extinct disease called reverence for academics.”

  “Silly boy,” Sir Chimpy laughed, but as if approving of the basic condition.

  “I hope you told him not to dare be abject to Leeming,” Alec told Pelham.

  “Indeed,” said Pelham efficiently, in a manner from which it was possible to suspect that the unfathomable Yorkshireman had read too much of a command, command late and irrelevant, into the stricture about the boy Lysander. To turn the talk, he drew on his small experience of stages.

  “It’s like acting to a hostile audience, isn’t it, standing up here on the stage, lights on, performing in front of all that dumb upholstery?”

  They were all three outstaring the theatre’s vacancy when the door of the treasurer’s office at the front of the theatre opened and Mrs Turner stepped out, chattering to someone over her shoulder. Someone proved to be the poet.

  The question of cosying up the party by bringing down the curtain died. In a state that could almost be called a renewal, Ramsey yet felt as little patience as ever at facing that catalytic gentleman. But the poet was doubly unwelcome because a walking souvenir of yesterday’s frenzies.

  “Wasn’t he going home?” Alec asked Sir Chimpy and Pelham, who may not even have known of his arrival.

  Sir Chimpy ignored the question. “I’m pleased to see,” he said instead, generously enough to suggest that the poet had made peace with the Mewses, “that Mrs Turner seems more receptive.”

  From across the room, where Tim was retailing his theatrical stories, Ella tried to gauge Alec’s response to this portentous entry. Her mistrust sharpened him against the poet.

  On the edge of the stage Mrs Turner was held up in business with the president of the town’s dramatic society. The poet came on alone and stopped before Sir Chimpy.

  “Well, you seem to be doing well for yourself,” the knight, all hearty, told him. It was obvious that Sir Chimpy considered the poet a wild boy, his lack of orthodoxy balanced by his talent; a lovable prodigal. There was no evidence for this reading in the poet’s industriously vacant face, scraped ruddy with a sedulous morning razor. Nor was Mrs Turner any artist’s skirt but a pleasant and pretty matron rasped by the sun and a little blowsy from the hard diet of widowhood.

  Ramsey said, “The people who arrange reservations at the travel agency here … you must be getting to know them very well.”

  “They’re quite tolerant.”

  “You’re staying longer than you thought?” Sir Chimpy asked, to make talk.

  “I will have to go the day after tomorrow.”

  The vice-chancellor went sly. “I suppose you didn’t want to miss our graduation ceremony.” The histrionic sentence called for nods and winks and nudges, which luckily Sir Byron did not sink to.

  “And I suppose you’re looking forward to resuming your own life,” Ramsey suggested.

  The damned poet was amused. “No, I remembered to bring it with me.”

  From Pelham came a small grunt of indefinite significance. “Well,” he said, “I never liked watching duels. I must go and mix. Sir Byron.” He went off. It was equally likely that he was showing tolerance and discretion or retiring piqued at the energies Ramsey spent on hostilities.

  They talked about the play, but Ramsey was in a fever for the vice-chancellor to move and share his presence around the stage. Against the poet, who had ever appeared only to augment the pitch of his mania, Alec must measure his new health. It could not be done with Sir Chimpy yammering at them about a West End production of Oedipus Rex.

  “… but altogether I rather disagreed with the interpretation,” he said at last. “Well, I must mingle, gentlemen.”

  He commenced mingling with expert grace.

  The poet said, like an intern on rounds, “Well, how are we?”

  “We’re very well. I hope you didn’t stay on for our … my sake.”

  “Ah, we don’t need soothing till next time,” the poet mocked.

  “You call it soothing? Never mind, I am grateful. You’ve been very kind up to now, but if you try to be kinder I’ll take it as an interference.”

  “You have failed to preoccupy me for the past twenty-four hours, Alec.” The poet looked around to see how Mrs Turner’s diversion was shaping. “One of the reasons I stayed is that I have an interview with Mrs Leeming tomorrow. I know it isn’t a felicitous time, but she’s seventy-nine, poor old thing. You never know when the chance will come again.”

  “There are no signs of last gasps at the moment.” He asked narrowly, “Why should you want to see her?”

  “I want to see the sort of woman Leeming had at home, that’s all. The ruins.”

  “They’re not ruins, damn her eyes. Not yet they’re not.”

  Someone made an impact between Ramsey and the poet. It was like the transposition of film. First a tranquil horizon of the poet and people’s backs, then, in midsentiment, Denis Leeming’s lozenge-shaped face flooding his sight with overintimate views of this or that (largely clean) skin-pore.

  “What did you say to my aunt at the interval?” Leeming called out, but neutrally, so that if others heard they would have thought it conversation.

  “You can’t expect me to answer if you’re going to hustle me.” The cutting tone of rationality that belongs to a man who keeps his temper was, for once, Ramsey’s prerogative. He took time to think how characteristic this style of anger, impassive, unemphatic when seen from a distance, was of the dead uncle; the slow-combustion hysteria that no one ten yards away could have ident
ified.

  “She is the man’s widow, you know. And even you make a show of being sensitive about him.”

  Ramsey corrected him. “Even I am sensitive about him.”

  “You think you own him. Don’t you think she’s plagued enough at the moment? The unequalled situation.…”

  “I didn’t know I had upset her,” Alec said. He felt contrite and meant to be seen to be. “How is she now?”

  “How is she now? She came to me after curtain call.”

  “Was she crying?”

  “She isn’t a crier. I thought you knew that much. She looked exhausted, grey, and she wanted to be taken home. On her way home she said something about your being a hard man.”

  “She’s wrong. We’re all upset and at sixes and sevens.”

  “I don’t understand you. No one has asked you to take any part. Or worse still, my aunt has and you’ve begged off.”

  Ramsey nodded; a risky impulse formed in him. He found the boy’s eyes set beneath a small frown, the vacant brand of eyes that turn up in royal houses through over-breeding. “And you should beg off too, Denis.” He wanted to say how alien nephew and uncle were to each other, but that was offensive and a fantastic way to talk; as if the dead man had an aura in need of solace. In a fever, he ended with the worst of puns. “You’re poles apart.”

  Leeming sniffed, equally for sinus as for contempt. “I can’t help my limitations.” Genuine passion was there now, streaky on the partially made-up face.

  “You’re angry now. But I wasn’t talking about your limitations.”

  “You’re willing to admit I have them, though. By the gross.” He was exploring the vein marked failed doctorate—one could tell.