“Perhaps we’d better let things stand then,” Sanders admitted, feeling foolish, and therefore at least starting to sicken of vestal Ella.
“One other thing, though,” Chimpy said. “We’ve had a complaint from a research assistant of the female variety who says you offered her four hundred dollars to have a pregnancy aborted. Hullo! Are you still there? I was saying.…”
Sanders said, “All right then. But she was put up to it by someone. Someone she works with, I mean. Leeming, for example.”
“You know that’s not the truth. He would have threatened you with it first, before bringing the girl to me.”
“He knew that isn’t the sort of pressure I give in to.”
“That’s heroic of you. Listen, I’m going to try to prevent this girl’s story from getting out.”
“That’s merciful of you.”
“But if it can be reasonably demonstrated that you are the father—”
“No need to demonstrate it,” Sanders said, established again on his old tack of moral bravery. “Unless her undergraduate’s been at her, it’s likely that I’m the father. But it’s almost equally likely that her boyfriend’s had a bash.” He could tell that Sir Byron, as a man who had strenuously tended his own career, was chastened, or at least amazed, by this frantic honesty. He said in grand derision, “The girl’s religion, so the papers tell us, frowns on contraception.”
Chimpy was rendered fraternal. “Brian, I’d recommend a settlement. Could I suggest that.…”
The female voice intervened again, and a grating noise as of shifted furniture.
The vice-chancellor said, “Do you mind if I phone you back, Brian? Sadie seems to be going away for a few months’ rest. Of course, at my suggestion.” Still, he sounded patently bemused. “It’s thrown the household out a lot, though.”
He wisely cut the querulous background noises by hanging up on Sanders.
The night, Ramsey found, was uncongenial to deaths; mild and bright under a northerly rush of air with just a little of the breath of summits in it. For mortal man of sixty-two he made good time, though most of his way was uphill towards the university and ultimately into it. Here the union store was working late and doing trade in what Ramsey’s mother called “forget-ables”: thread and toothpaste and shaving-cream.
For the sanguine student thirsts of the year’s beginning, the cafeteria was serving coffee, and pineapple juice from Queensland in garish cans. It was more than half-full of boys and girls practising, in lumpy clothing, the air of unexcitement currently favoured by the young.
Among them, drinking a pot of tea at an exposed table, sat Belle. Her eyebrows were arched; she looked wistful, and while Ramsey stood outside watching her, she poured out her last half-cup from the pot in a manner almost ritual. If rite it was, the import of it redounded against Belle herself. Perhaps it was easier simply to decide that she appeared rarely pitiable, shaking the pot slightly, considering complaining or ordering more, deciding with her eternal equability that there was no increase for her in tea. He went in to her table.
“Oh, Alec,” she muttered. She saw clearly that there was no increase for her in Ramsey either.
“Good night, Belle. Out for a stroll?”
“The Kables are at the flat this evening. They’re all eating some terrible indigestible meal bought in cartons in the town. It’s a celebration. Denis’s book … did you hear the news? Yes, uplifting news for him. He has his pride back.”
“So damn uncle now?”
“Oh no. Sir Byron won’t intervene anyhow. His wife came to his office this afternoon—he’d had undergraduates out looking for her—and we were having a drink there—the vice-chancellor, the Kables, Denis and myself. She was visibly angry. She said she was sorry to force an issue in front of the Kables. They were dangerous, she said. For a little while pity for me played merry hell with her rebellion. But she came back strongly and said she wouldn’t tolerate Sir Byron forcing the issue with this Sanders man, since his motives in the matter couldn’t be proper. She finished up like a real woman. She told him she’d dropped the prescription for his veins in to the chemist, but he would have to collect it himself.” She laughed, fully and without ambiguity. The confrontation by Lady Sadie had been good give-and-take fun. Then she sobered. “I don’t know about those Kables, though—whether they’re good for Denis. Eric Kable’s a pleasant enough man, but I’m sure Missus doesn’t like me. We’re both made of shark’s skin.” She laughed, but falsely now. It was as if she was both parodying the part of a meddling aunt and expecting Alec to see through the parody.
“You don’t even care for that boy, do you Belle?”
“He’s not a relative by blood,” she conceded, whatever the concession meant.
He kept silence while a boy tanned from a summer on beaches steered his girl through the ruck of tables. As they passed Belle and himself, he heard the boy whisper, “God! Advanced-age scholarships.…”
“Belle,” Ramsey said in the wake of the unwelcoming youth, “Lloyd and I—I and Lloyd—left your husband before he was dead.”
She was annoyed by his emotionalism, and waved this talk aside with a mottled hand. “Yes, yes. I always knew there must be some such thing.”
“Belle, he was still breathing. I knew it; on some level or other I distinctly knew it. That was why I didn’t go near the body. Near Leeming, I mean.”
“Lloyd was in charge,” the widow hissed in a dismissive way. “Lloyd was the doctor.”
“We left your husband when he was merely sleeping.”
Belle’s eyes were down; she was furious over Ramsey’s messy behaviour. She pushed her words through closed teeth. “I suppose that by ‘merely sleeping’ you mean unconscious and dying. And if unconscious and dying, how were you to know he wasn’t dead? Anyhow, you know what his sledging instructions were.”
Ramsey groaned.
“Ramsey,” she muttered, presuming a lively interest in old scandal on the part of the undergraduates, “I won’t have you confessing this nonsense to people. You presume the whole affair turns on you. You presume it’s your circus.”
“At some stages I’ve felt that I’m the only one who keeps his anniversaries. Your behaviour seems to have justified this impression.”
“Alec, control yourself. And don’t bother with my behaviour. It’s beyond your interpreting.”
He found it incredible that, as with Ella, a momentous confession was being leached down to backchat. He said again, slowly, as if deafness was a problem, that it was her husband who had been left.
“Stop trying to impress me, Alec,” Belle warned him through her teeth, secretive and nearly as urgent as Ramsey, yet urgent it seemed merely on the grounds of good taste and the balance necessary for continued health.
“The fact is—isn’t it?—that you don’t care enough about Leeming to judge me?”
“Oh God, do you want so badly to be judged? Have I pretended to be heartily involved in the business? Haven’t I confessed my indifference?”
“You pretended an interest in the nephew.”
“I confess my insincerity then. And to my insincerity in wanting a funeral here, on so-called native soil. I confess to exploiting Denis’s silliness. Anything, Alec, anything to make you behave.”
Ramsey fell silent and hung his head. He saw Belle’s hand on his arm. “You want me to judge you, do you, and say what a pariah you are? There’s always been a big slice of Calvinism in you, Alec, and behold you’ve made a way of life for yourself, a whole religion, simply on the basis that one afternoon I took you to bed with me. I don’t know whether to be flattered or not that the old sin still rattles round inside you.”
Ramsey shook his head, but gave no clues, having none himself.
“Let me tell you about adultery,” Belle continued. “There was no such crime between Leeming and myself. You may remember that I had mystical theories about self-possession, a theology you could say that I’ve since dropped in case I come to believe it myself in
my old age. It was necessary to my vanity to believe that what was hormonal in me chastened Leeming in the bowels of Christ—you remember we both favoured, Leeming and myself, an outré streak of theology? It was necessary to Leeming’s self-esteem to believe that he was being chastened, that my affairs humbled him, refined him. So I fulfilled the convention of sinning in his absence. I think, though, that basically he would have been willing to let men in by the front door, tell them a depression was moving in from the Bight and go back to his study. We just didn’t suit each other.”
Ramsey said, “To admit your indifference doesn’t excuse you.” Nor did he mean that she was not excused her adulteries but rather the traditional obligations of cherishing and mourning, and of damning the man responsible for the death. Belle misunderstood his meaning.
“Listen, Alec. That husband of mine would have been a Cistercian monk in earlier times. The world and the flesh bemused him, so off he packed to a place where the world was a series of climatic clichés. And as for the flesh, your body doesn’t smell, May’s shirt is still clean in August, your excreta down in the permafrost offends no one. While with Leeming—equator or pole—the devil can be trusted to look after himself.”
Ramsey snorted. On top of his other urgencies, he found that it was important to him that there had been a bond and not a vacancy between Belle and Leeming.
“You undervalue your husband,” he said, hoping to provoke her. “Just because there seems to be little connection between his brand of genius and the frequency of his erections.”
“You painfully virtuous people always consider you have the right to speak crudely to those who don’t keep your codes.”
“And you people always demand tolerance of your vices but deny the same tolerance to the old-fashioned virtues of men like Leeming. Just the same, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that you married Leeming precisely because you knew he’d be faithful to you.”
For a second Belle’s eyes galvanized; yet there was no telling whether it was the unlikeliness or the closeness to the bone of Ramsey’s claim that made her consider it for a little. But she delayed her answer, and their furies dwindled to embarrassment at having swapped so many insults. Ramsey wanted to go, was under a physical demand to stamp back and forth among the hills.
He excused himself, but was warned before going that there were to be no confessions from him on Antarctic themes. The remains, if found (she said), would be disposed and coffined in a sturdy casket and returned to the earth with the blessing of the Episcopalian pastor from McMurdo Sound. “So the Americans can be gratified—they’ve been very decent and mustn’t be given a false impression of the antipodean widow. And on my side, it’s more respectable than telling the Department of External Affairs not to pester me.”
“But,” Alec told her, “you ran the risk of having to dabble in the swamp yourself if Denis’s schemes had matured.”
Belle shrugged. “I think I would simply have stayed home.” A shy smile took her mouth, forced and appearing to be, like so much else that Belle had said tonight, an offered clue. “At my age a person can get out of nearly everything.”
In an instant Ramsey understood, and was horrified by the way her old eyes crinkled with a look of irony usually found in the eyes of parrots. In a way more or less offhand, she had been willing to subject Leeming to an ornate burial at which his grotesque nephew would be chief mourner. It was a tableau she had worked to set up, worked perhaps with more than random energy based on a more than random jealousy of Dr Leeming’s Antarctic distractions. And now her authoritative eyes were willing to say so.
“In fact, you don’t even have Denis in your old age,” he surmised.
She laughed, secure in another ten years of profitable widowhood, of water views and visitings with other blooming widows along that sweet, moneyed shore from Elizabeth Bay to Vaucluse.
At length, and much earlier than he had expected, Ramsey went home to sleep. At a given hour during his rest the watch changed for those excavating what could be called Leeming’s ice-pit. Two sailors were lowered to dig, three to shore up the diggings. They took a risk, those five, in the (however slowly) moving ice.
Dormant and a hundred yards from the pit stood a small Swiss excavating machine, powerful for the task but indelicate enough to eat the hero whole and spit him out minced.
Another day. Ramsey kept long office hours, and drugged with work his inchoate sense of something remaining to be said: the truth that evaded mere facts and the indifference of women.
At home Ella and Miss Bourke grazed on plans for the coming child, and seemed to feel consecrated in their course after an evening visit from Dr Sanders.
Sanders had on arrival been invited to sit but would not. “I thought I knew you better,” he said to Sally, “than to expect you’d be used by Leeming to take a private matter to a public authority.”
Miss Bourke said she had made a complaint on her own behalf because Professor Sanders had not known her well enough to believe that when she said he was the child’s father he was the child’s father.
He gave her an envelope. “I hope that covers things. It’s a little bit over what you asked for.”
When the girl would not handle the money Ella took it in her place.
“Now then, Dr Sanders,” she said. “Don’t try to capitalize on what’s simply a matter of paying your debt.”
“You’ll get it all back,” the girl muttered towards the carpet.
Sanders warded off her proud intentions with his two meaty hands. “It’s got nothing to do with the money,” he said.
Ella suggested, “I suppose it’s the principle? Then of course you’ll readily understand how principle forced me to take Sally’s cause to Sir Byron.”
There were monosyllables and anger, and Sanders quickly left.
Insomniac Ramsey had to cough in the night to cover the noise of the radio as he tuned in the hourly news. Not that a breathless world hung on tidings of the bizarre endeavour proceeding at seventy-five degrees south; there were rare reports that nothing had been found, and during the third night, of a blizzard of one hundred and ten miles, whipping south-west from the Pole down the back of the Victoria Land mountains and the contours of coastal glaciers. Although it was not now expected that the body would be found, digging would continue if weather and the declining summer allowed.
At an hour of the early morning when sleeplessness becomes a form of whimsical intoxication, Ramsey began to reproach himself for having thought of God as an artist. Things remaining as they were might not be skilful irony in a dramatic sense, but in the real world it could be the ultimate divine comment. With this insight came an understanding of his own arrogance in that he had believed that a crucible would be provided, a zone, a time-lock of intensity; that he would be made new through fire.
He slept, and woke with his belly feeling sore in a muscular way, as if his dream of sledges had been real.
Before him Ella stood smiling warily from above a prepared tray, offered with the warranty of her curdled love. He could not manage to be grateful as she fussed him into an upright position and ramified him with pillows. His lack of gratitude did wonders: she was somehow in the mood for expiation.
It was apparent, too, that she had secretly informed herself by transistor. She told him about the recommencement of digging; he pretended he hadn’t heard.
“You told me blizzards lasted twelve days.” The statement sounded like a polite concession to one of his random interests.
“No. I wasn’t thinking. There was one we had that lasted twelve days. They may last only twelve hours. Or thirty-six, say. This one lasted long enough.” He accused her. “I thought you wanted the thing settled, too? I thought you wanted him buried at Botany or somewhere?” Somewhere, in his mind, had to do with a dreadful schizoid-Gothic railway station among graves on the edge of Sydney, and summer cortèges honouring uncles of his, fifty-five years dead.
“We presumed he’d be found. That corpse is a god to us. But th
is blizzard settles it. It shows you can fail to find his remains, just as you can fail to find any man’s.”
And, matronly since Miss Bourke had entered the house, she did not allow herself to be disabused, but tried to jolly him up with health small-talk and blind-raising and too much pillow-patting.
Pelham was in the office early to ask him questions of high seriousness, and Barbara harried him. He told Pelham, “God help Barbara’s child if she ever has one. She’ll keep its story-books in a filing-cabinet under H for Hansel, see also G for Grimm.”
And when Pelham laughed, he whispered, “This morning I write my resignation, Morris.”
The Englishman nodded, a nod of condolence. “I’ll never work under Kable,” he muttered. There was no telling whether he meant this as an axiom of loyalty to Ramsey’s memory or as a commonsense reminder to Alec to plant his name before the eyes of those who would choose successors.
An hour later Ramsey delivered the letter to Sir Byron’s personal secretary and caught a ride into town with a lecturer from his own department. Business was poor in the town’s travel agency, where he saw posters for Patagonia and for a cruise of Antarctic waters—the Ross Ice Shelf, McMurdo Sound, the Bay of Whales. They were letting anyone into the club he didn’t care to belong to. He wondered if some squatter from that rich countryside had chased Adelie penguins over the shelf-ice.
“I want to go to New Zealand,” he told the girl. “To Christchurch.”
The girl said it could be done, direct from Melbourne.
“Can you arrange the entire thing from here?”
“Yes.”
“That’s marvellous,” he said. “No wonder you have people going as far as Antarctica.” He nodded to the poster and she blushed as if its hanging might have been a little too fanciful of the management.
“When would you like to go, sir?”
How often did the Americans fly south from Christ-church? he wondered. Daily? Weekly? Had they given up for the summer? He would be patient in Christchurch if he had to be.
The Survivor Page 21