The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  Ramsey did his best to explain the handicaps of the male mind when faced with something so immediately savoury but ultimately poisonous as Valerie Kable. Lady Sadie said politely that male cant did not convince her. “It’s not anything positive like hot blood that makes him behave the way he does. It’s the vacancy of men, the lack of a gift for personal relationships. One always forgives their extramural ardours for the sake of what little sap there is in the marriage one has.” With surgical care, her sharp-tied shoe calmly divided a heap of gravel. “There’s nothing I fear so much as the marriage I’ve had.”

  Ramsey said that it would bewilder and possibly kill Chimpy if she left him. “Do you think Chimpy regards you as outweighed by that baroque compilation of hips and breasts?”

  Suddenly Lady Mews was angry. “We all have to sacrifice one thing for another. But you think men are allowed to prefer one thing to another and indulge a list of whims in order of preference.”

  Her hand gave up fury, though, and lay on her knee like something stray, to be lifted and petted. He tried to do such things, but may have had too much the air of the worldly-wise male quashing silly feminine fears; for she would not allow this mercy.

  “Look, Sadie, you have him worried. Perhaps you’ve always been too reliable. You haven’t taught him subtle female ways.” Perhaps that was why he fell to unsubtle Mrs Kable. “Believe me, your new qualities engross the poor old man, one way and another.”

  She shook off Ramsey’s casuistry. To win on these terms would never again satisfy honest Sadie Mews. “It’s the lack of dignity. The vice-chancellor is agog. While that slut stands in front of him pleading for a lover more recent, or perhaps just more regular.” The rare spite with which she spat out the last word suggested that she may have been let down by Sir Chimpy’s dwindling vital powers.

  Ramsey soothed her to the extent of telling her there was reliable evidence that young Leeming was not Valerie’s lover but Eric’s.

  A great part of Sadie’s anger was drained by the scandal-power of his news. “I’m too simple-minded,” she marvelled. “There’s a funny loyalty there, between the Kables, and an amazing compatibility.”

  “They’re held in balance by the tensions of their own mutual queerness,” Alec glibly diagnosed before seeing through himself and confessing, “It’s better than nothing.”

  “Well, I intend to rout them. Will you come with me, Alec?”

  His status as confidant had Alec almost elated and almost wise. “My position is difficult,” he said. “I don’t want Chimpy to think I’ve primed you for the act. We’re allies, Sadie, you and I. As you don’t want to be humbled in public, I don’t want to have Leeming the elder dug up and vulgarly exposed by his nephew.” Who was he to be Nemesis to a vice-chancellor? “I’ve already spoken to Chimpy, you see, precisely on this point. Also, he’s confided in me. About the change in your attitude, I mean.”

  “He hasn’t seen half of it,” Sadie told him. She kissed his cheek and strode off in her firmest gait.

  It was surprising that once Ramsey had gone the young grain-buff sensed the submerged furies of Mrs Ramsey matched by Sanders’ dreaminess; in fact, a joint hostility to grain research. So he left.

  Sanders, too, felt that he was standing near a dynamo whose bearings ran hot, though not in any sense favourable to him. He said with proper male humility, “You people are very wrapped up in this Leeming business.”

  “If you knew.…” Ella said.

  One of the things he didn’t know was that as indemnity against Ramsey she had begun to savour his own pleasant masculine looks. He would have been pleased to be admired even on such negative grounds.

  “If you knew,” she was saying, “you’d let that boy go and take his uncle’s carrion out of what is, after all, a fairly accessible pit in Antarctica.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She explained in acid syllables that made a counterpoint to her sampling of his face. “As far as Alec sees it, that man in the ice is a power to be propitiated. He preoccupies himself with the myth he has made of Leeming. What he fears most of all, though, is that the myth might be taken away. Young Leeming will reduce old Leeming to the level of mere man. In my eyes, that’s a pretty valuable service. To my husband, it’s desecration.”

  There was a bitter, bruised look about Ella’s eyes that Sanders judged as pure neurosis. He had a roué’s narrow-mindedness about what intense women wed to old men needed. Ella’s ardent demand that ice-bound Leeming be demythologized seemed to him a conceit, something too intensely asserted for the sake of covering more primal needs.

  Though he knew in his bones that he had never aggrandized any woman by unselfishly attending to her primal needs, perhaps he thought that, with Ella’s dark, farm-bred body before him, the thinking man who could not manage a little mental lie would be wanting.

  “You’d like me to go to Chimpy and give in?”

  Ella stared straight ahead, shaking her head. No visible blandishments. He could in fact see the makings of middle age in her and was humbled by pity; but waited for the sexual illusion to reinstate itself.

  “I can see you wouldn’t easily do that,” she told him.

  “No. I don’t know what stories you may have heard of me, Mrs Ramsey. But the very existence of such stories makes it necessary for me to be a man of principle. One of my principles, though, isn’t pride. It isn’t mere pride that stops me giving in.”

  “Stout lad!” Ella mocked.

  “I know I must sound like a town clerk defending the location of a new sullage works,” he admitted.

  Ella sniffed and looked away up the garden through which a few early leave-takers were filtering to the gate. “Never mind. But what is the good clean fun of principles to you is death to me.”

  For the vagrant excitement of it, she might accept coffee in his nearby flat when he offered it. If he did offer it; if she hadn’t frightened him too thoroughly.

  While she was faced away, Sanders took the chance to check her for hints of dewlaps or fallen gullet. No signs. He said, “I know, I know.” With his reputation, he had to say the next lines with gusto. So played, they sounded reliable, humane, too obvious to involve danger. “I’m sick of this hubbub. So must you be. What if we were to talk this whole question out in my flat? We could have tea and some fruit-cake.…”

  That would have to do, she decided. At least Ramsey-would presume worse things than fruit-cake.

  There was something endearing about Sanders’ flat in college. They were a dreary few rooms for a man old enough for grandparenthood to call his home. Yet, bravely as a young bachelor, he had made them home. Ella thumbed through the humanism Sanders had nurtured all down one wall of his library: Patrick White and Iris Murdoch, A. J. P. Taylor and Robert Frost. She wondered why humanists themselves failed to be as tolerant of science.

  “Ah, that’s better,” said the professor, returning from the kitchen with tea and finding her browsing.

  “I was thinking that you rarely find a big science section in the bookshelves of all those humanists who rave about the barbarity of technocrats.”

  “That’s very flattering.” He growled with pleasure at her compliment. “Let’s sit.”

  Through a few inches of opened bedroom door Ella could see the notorious Sanders bed looking lumpy and superannuated with the sun across it. But the easterly view of hills and forests growing into the sempiternal easterly afternoon fitted the spirit of dalliance well. Ella was losing bitterness, and wanted to be pleasant and even appetizing. She sat with her knees and ankles locked. Mrs Kable sat that way—to some effect, apparently.

  Ramsey and Leeming the elder were their conversation; and, in case he had any doubts on the question, she repeated how she had a sense that it was important for Ramsey that Dr Leeming should undergo the bankrupt rituals of modern burial on the Australian continent.

  “And you say your husband has a conviction to the contrary?” Sanders asked her. “You’re a very symbolic pair.”

/>   “I know it sounds extreme,” she challenged him.

  “No, I can see it.”

  Her fever of belief, aimed through eyes that tended to become stark, somehow made her more desirable. He hoped that he might be allowed to dabble scot-free behind the ramparts of her massive obsession.

  “And you think that if I unleash young Leeming.… Mrs Ramsey, don’t be offended please, but do you think Alec should see a doctor?”

  Ella’s legs came unstuck, and frank annoyance made her seem very young. “Drugs can’t put a gloss over this sort of thing. Anyhow, doctors merely tell you to play golf.”

  “They do, don’t they.”

  By means of their shared secrets they were brother and sister; he put a hand fraternally on her shoulder. “Look, I really do need young Leeming. I’ve refused leave to men with better claims than he has.” Rising to take her empty cup he more or less took its place on her right hand, and ventured a slack, asexual hand right round her shoulders. “To be frank, Ella, the relationship between yourself and your husband seems to me like a first-class furniture-exhibition room into which no light has been let for a long time. All the furniture of your backgrounds become shadows and the shadows become demons. You know, perhaps he should play golf, that husband of yours. But I put it badly.”

  He had. Yet she had listened to the shape of the words and not their poor imagery, and Sanders, given her engrossed air, thought that it had all made some impact. For the healthy always believe that their figures of speech are some succour to the ailing.

  He said, tightening his arm at each stressed syllable, “And I have to stand by what I’ve said.”

  To emphasize the point even more deeply, he drew her against his chest. Ella came limply, admiring the indefinable musk of his maleness. And the innocence! Or its illusion anyhow, for her sad head leant from a decent distance and only tipped the suited pad of fat that was his left chest.

  “So I don’t think your salvation lies along the lines you suggest,” he affirmed softly and brushed his lips across the chemical stiffness of her made-up hair.

  “I know you say that in good faith,” she said, at pains not to be breathless. “But I know what my troubles are. I’ve felt their sharp edges. I’ve had seven years’ leisure to define them.”

  Such a long speech made her sound off-handed. Under cover of her inadvertence, his mouth made a quick pro forma raid down one side of her cheek. Ella sat up straight in surprise at its wholesomeness—he had been chewing chlorophyll gums in the kitchen. She actually felt flattered. This was his greatest success so far; yet he misread her surprise.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “They shouldn’t let women over forty look so attractive.”

  With the right shade of cynicism, Ella told him to be more careful in future.

  He murmured, “I think that if I had any suspicion that I could contribute to your peace of mind, I’d give in. I can see—any fool could—that there’s a genuine agony there, behind your insistence. If I could do anything for that agony.…”

  He made quietly to reach for her cheeks with both hands and, as if from the very humanity of his feelings towards her, let the near hand slide away down her right breast.

  Ella, one of those women who think that, come the crisis, their very organs would remain devoutly monogamous, was shocked at how much she, or her right breast anyhow, relished his hand. Flurried, she almost decided that Alec Ramsey deserved betrayal. She lolled side-on to Sanders’ big chest and let his hand again and again take that one breast and leave it. His bear-fisted brand of tenderness, like his furnishings, endeared. Yet she was frightened to see, down the ham of his left leg, that the male mysteries were at work. Alec could be easily dissuaded at any point in the growth of desire, but Sanders might not be so reasonable.

  She was reassured by the fussy way he began the unbuttoning of her suit. He loosened two cleats, and began to sigh for the impersonal teguments of her foundation.

  An abstract frown held the lady’s face; she sat as still as the victim in a clinic and murmured, “But what about the Leeming business?”

  She felt she had only just enough contrariety left to manage the question.

  “Oh Christ,” he said tenderly but far gone. “We’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”

  “So it isn’t as much a matter of principle as you thought?”

  “You didn’t come here just to show me up as shallow, did you?”

  “Well,” she said, “no. I simply mention it.”

  He would have been pleased to know that her stomach had actually begun on the positive business of distilling affection for a large professor of physics rather than mere bile against Ramsey. As long as she kept her eyes away from Sanders’ large square face and grimacing mouth, the passion was manageable. But how or when, short of adultery, you ended the interview she could not guess.

  “But you could let Leeming go then?”

  Sanders still worked on fasteners; she didn’t dare to verify which ones. In acknowledgment of selling himself, he began breathing desperately. She wanted to reassure him that she was no monomaniac but was only making conversation. “Yes, yes, Ella,” he said. “It’s not that important. I don’t know why people like me stand on their dignity when any second they’re likely to find themselves in the delicious … grotesque state … we’ll find ourselves in very soon. Or so I hope.”

  Ella found herself seconding the wish by taking a long draw at his lips, making that oral vacuum-lock so popular with lovers. Then her shoulders were exposed and Sanders chewed at them.

  “I suppose you’ve got those bloody step-in things on.”

  They were some defence, hard for anyone but the wearer to take down. Ella could very nearly have taken them down in a half-conscious flurry of lust, and even seemed to herself to wait for one to sweep over her. When it failed to, “Very big step-ins,” she panted defensively.

  “Bloody undergraduates don’t do themselves up in all that stuff.”

  “The undergraduate backside isn’t as big as mine,” she said, and jumped as his hand reached up under the elastic device and notched its fingers into the base of her left buttock.

  “Christ,” Sanders whispered. “Like cushioned ivory.”

  Both Sanders and Ella herself believed she was more tenderized than she truly was. When his hand passed under her crutch she found the desecration jarring. Instantly the occasion became inhuman; he worked frenziedly, though the corselet scarcely budged to his sudden, big-fisted blatancy.

  She said, “Heavens!” above his grizzled head lowered to her breasts with what seemed cannibal intent.

  “There!” she said, discovering she was upright.

  He had been forcing her against pillows and she had merely stood in a south-westerly direction. There she was, gazing down past the frou-frou of pawed clothing to the big knees that had plagued her since girlhood.

  Half-standing himself, Sanders had the sense to know how absurd he might look upright. “Ella, darling,” he said like the saddest of compulsive lovers, and she was amazed to register that despite the cataleptic streakiness of his face and the way he sat as if assailed by physical pain, it might not take many “Ella, darlings” to make her slip her buckram defences and go to him naked.

  He kept calling on her. She covered her ears.

  “I should tell you, Professor,” she said, “I have cancer of the womb.”

  Tears came easily as a substitute for the orgasm that would have done her so much harm, would have perilously confused the centripetal forces of love and resentment that buffeted while they united herself and Ramsey.

  “I hope you can forgive me.”

  Sanders nodded, looking idiotic, paled by the horrendous news, stung close to petulance by his braked passion.

  “Please forgive me.”

  He mightn’t have if it hadn’t been for that magic lethal word.

  “There’s no question of forgiveness,” he said. “Sit down there.”

  Ramsey sat a long time watching the
big-beamed girls at their tennis. Then he lifted himself with an old man’s groan and went searching for Ella.

  She could not be found, so he looked then for Sanders. Sanders could not be found. “Ah-hah,” he formulated to himself in self-mockery, “seduction!” He sauntered towards the car-park, and had time even to talk to the professor of English about a new study of Housman. Then, at the gate, he realized that Ella, his wife, was actually embittered; and embittered ladies were a prime mark for the lecher. He thought, as Ella had, of punitive adultery. He felt sick with pity for her, and then a sense of dispossession such as he’d rarely felt since, during two estrangements before they were married, he’d seen her in the company of men of her own age.

  He began to shamble across-country then, towards Gamma block of Morton College where Sanders had his flat. And, fearing himself cuckolded, he grieved for himself in an objective way: international footballer, man-hauling hulk, dilettante, bookman, educator, at the end of all his promise, stumbling in a parody of his Antarctic self, an equivocal and brittle gent. At last he was ambling uphill through the staked shrubs of Gamma block’s garden. Sweat made him peevish, and he swore not to come panting into Sanders’ rooms. But this conceit cost him a long half-minute. If that thirty seconds gave her time to perfect the act she was welcome to it.

  Upstairs, even before knocking, he could hear Sanders talking soberly inside—in a voice far from bated with unlawful ardour. He answered Ramsey’s knock almost immediately. There was an unwilled cringe of the eyes for a mere second, but then an easy movement of welcome with the free hand. Ella, all in order, sat in a large armchair, powdering the line of her jaw in a languorous, intimate way that implied that this foreign room had become part of her history. He suspected that she had begun to behave this way only a second before the door opened, and so was mutely telling him, “Don’t dare predict that come what may I’ll never take lovers.” Alec knew that, in the book of her nature, the difference between adultery and her present behaviour was merely a matter of degree.