The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  In the airport building he had caught fleeting sight of an inappropriate old man being fussed over by a lieutenant-commander in dress uniform. The soft, unlikely face, already wrapped in a fur-lined hood, was yet one that Ramsey felt he should be able to name; perhaps a face well-aired by the media.

  Now the old man was helped into the aircraft, and to a seat, by the same officer. The hood was still in place about a face that, although free of greasepaint, seemed to demand it. A queen’s face, yes; and it had a strange breed of decision on it. There would, at least, be no absurd flirtations when smooth-faced orderlies brought round the turkey-loaf at lunchtime. Since rows of seating ran down either wall and two more lay back-to-back down the centre of the aircraft, Ramsey, strapped in close to a starboard porthole, found the old man sitting back-on to him. The officer spoke softly; so did the old man; but Ramsey heard the officer say, “… the bunk in the cockpit straight after take-off.” Then a salute. And outside Ramsey’s window an engine found its step after a few unwilling seconds. Survival information—how to don the orange emergency-suit, how to enter the raft, how long you would last in Antarctic waters—was broadcast and demonstrated while they rolled down the morning tarmac; and inattentive Ramsey watched a commercial plane take off for the pleasure slopes of Mount Cook.

  All that niggled at his makeshift peace was the old gentleman seated erect, hood now cowled back around his ears, distinguished enough to be promised the use of the cockpit bunk. Had the Christchurch command gone as far as inviting visiting choreographers or couturiers to visit its Antarctic stations?

  Lulled by the petty question, he did not look for the lift of the wheels or for the slowly spinning city below. By the time he bothered to use his port the cratered harbour of Lyttelton could be seen distantly beneath the tail. Propellers butted into radiant cloud. For five and a half hours nothing would be sighted but their own colder and colder wingtips.

  Hammond roused himself and went aft in need of the limited diversions of flying blind. Ramsey saw him chatting at a shout with the flight orderlies, visiting what the Navy called “the head”, squinting out of rear ports, inspecting the cargo—a braced steel bean of fuel, amidships and dominant. It was clear that Hammond respected the tank, feeling its steel stays with his thermal boot, rat-tat-tatting here and there on its surface.

  Meanwhile sailors read, or made beds for themselves along the harsh webbing seats, and one of the flight crew descended and helped the choreographer up a companion-way and into the cockpit. “Long as he doesn’t goose the pilot,” Ramsey murmured aloud in the safe din of engines.

  Making himself a pillow, he slept then, and woke to find Hammond composed and staring at him. Outside, chiller clouds were still shot with sun.

  Hammond said, “I didn’t realize it’d be so hard to be heard in here.”

  “Maybe we oughtn’t to talk then,” Ramsey articulated. “Feeling better?”

  “Thanks. Too much whisky last night. Never like take-offs anyhow. Especially with people warning you about how easily you’re going to die.”

  Ramsey’s watch told him he had slept for half an hour only, but he judged that in that time Hammond had become newly conversational and had something like a profile interview in mind.

  “I’m going back there,” he told the arts-festival specialist, and rose to edge down the flank of the fuel-bean. Yet the large time he spent in the head, languorously washing his hands, laying them against the pulsing fuselage, inspecting the Playboy nude pasted behind the door and wondering aloud who it thought it was fooling—all his delay failed to throw Hammond off. The man had cut off both the port and starboard escape routes by taking station squarely against the rear node of the bean. Ramsey took to a port and watched the wings saw at cloud mysterious enough to hint at genuine metamorphoses. The newsman appeared at his elbow.

  “Remarkable—being able to fly through this.”

  “They have instruments,” called Ramsey instructionally.

  Hammond allowed this information to settle the matter. Communally, they stared for some seconds at the outer mists. Then Hammond spoke again.

  “I suppose even you, Alec, sometimes wonder where the strength came from. The strength to survive, I mean. I’ve merely read of such things, but there seems to me to be a time when a man is delirious and apparently beyond volition, at which an automatic and fixed will to survive—or die, but after all you survived—you know, this automatic and fixed will comes into operation and operates the man like little more than machinery.” He shrugged then in apology. “There, I sound as if I’m taking all the merit out of your performance.”

  “I’m not jealous on the question,” Ramsey reassured him without tone.

  “Yes, but what do you say … about this … well, let’s call it an automaton theory?”

  Ramsey begrudged thinking about it, but had uncertain ambitions about putting the press in its place.

  “Man isn’t as simple as all that. How I behaved in crisis was governed by how I behaved at earlier times when my control over what I did seemed very self-aware. But even what I did then was governed by follies that were written into me, into my guts. So earlier on I had no choice but thought I did, and in the crisis I had no choice but hardly knew either way. I was acting out the patterns of irony that were involved in the sort of person I was and what was my historic setting. I was acting out the patterns with all the cunning of a shit-house rat, believing myself in control.”

  The journalist breathed in. He hadn’t bargained on metaphysics, on determinism shouted above the hubbub of engines. “If I had done what you’ve done, I’d be very proud.”

  “Pride is forbidden because it’s irrelevant and doesn’t meet the facts.”

  On a limited scale, Ramsey was enjoying himself, thinking, that’s telling the bastard. He did wonder, though, that if pride was irrelevant, why wasn’t shame?

  Hammond said lamely, “I think you’re the one who’s underestimating your achievement now.”

  “I don’t underestimate the fact of my survival, though. My survival was of importance, so that I could be shown up fully later. And that’s of importance to someone—God or my wife, or both of them.”

  “You believe in the immortality of the soul, then?” Hammond said, almost automatic about it, as if he were nearing the miscellany section of his interview with Dietrich or Malcolm Muggeridge.

  Ramsey shrugged and issued a challenge. “Come on then. What are the things you really want to ask me?”

  Hammond shrugged in return, and implied rash judgment in Ramsey.

  “Come on,” Ramsey baited him. “Anything you think your readers might like to know.”

  The journalist seemed mildly hurt. “There are a lot of things my readers might like to know that I’ve never told them. It isn’t one of my ultimate criteria.”

  “I’m sorry. Still, feel free.…”

  “There are matters that interest me as an individual, though I suppose I have to admit that my years of journalistic wheedling have made them easier for me to ask.”

  “Go on.”

  “Before I met you last night I would have presumed this was a sentimental journey. Is it, though? Is it just a journey to attend the funeral of an old friend?”

  “Would it sound artificial if I said I came on an impulse?”

  “Not if that’s the way it was.”

  “I came on an impulse.”

  “We’re both very late getting to the scene, you know. In my case the delay’s due to NPA’s staff man’s ulcer, of course. Why did you leave it so late?”

  “I’ve told you. The impulse wasn’t there earlier.”

  “Tell me if this question offends you. I have seen the supposedly incorruptible limbs of Italian saints.” Hammond visibly considered saying that he had been repelled and thought that type of incorruptibility not worth the having, but desisted, on the uncertainty as to whether Alec was casual mourner, or pilgrim, or one bereaved. “How is Leeming likely to look? Physically, I mean?”

&
nbsp; There had been a time when Alec had been vulnerable to such a question; now he simply resented it for its crudity. He had settled himself to answer without emotion when his imagination froze. It was even more unexpected than a coronary, which in any case he believed this to be; for he seemed powerfully prevented from breathing and Hammond’s agog face wavered before him, acknowledging that he, Ramsey, was undergoing some bodily derangement. And all it was was the baulking, the first and only petrifaction of his imagination.

  The result being that there was an echo of his dream suffered the evening before in the hotel, the dream of a criminal vacancy in the glacier dug up by diggers. The echo did not profit his breathing, which continued stricken. But all this smotheration had, he again suspected, to do with finding a new utterance: he had the inane image in his mind of a tremulous old pierside machine whose mechanics try in loud travail to produce a card marked, Though you do not make friends easily, you are normally respected.…

  So now, too, he felt the new and adequate truth to be deposited in the pit of his belly, an organ which, to speak it fair, had always been more acutely interested in the truth of Ramsey than in his food. Next he found to his surprise that there was no physical hindrance to his breathing.

  “Is it heart, Alec?” Hammond insisted on knowing, and urged Ramsey to lie down on the slatted cargo bay slanting upwards behind them towards the tail.

  “Blame the poor bloody brute organs.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, blame the brute organs, pick on poor bloody dumb things, when all the time there are bastards like you about, causing pain.”

  “I must apologize, Alec, but is it …?”

  Imperilled towards shouting the outré truth—the message on the weighing-machine tab—in Hammond’s face, Alec rushed away, trembling, down the port side of the tank and concentrated on the port-side murk beyond the windows. He felt reproachful on technical grounds rather than because of Hammond. Hadn’t this journey been meant to be painless, a subliminal experience? His grievance was that of the patient for whom the anaesthetic fails. Meanwhile the words he had come close to shouting at Hammond recurred to him in waves, turned his panic on and off. He knew that if this had been a train he would have pulled the emergency cord and gone sprinting away down the rails.

  All he could do was move forward to the passenger area. A sailor slept before him, a cold nimbus of light framing the face. A zealous orderly smiled sideways at Ramsey and took off earphones to say, “The captain tells me, sir, that yourself and the other gentlemen are welcome to visit the cockpit.”

  Alec nodded, eager as any foreigner in a strange city, certain that the broader view of the miasma he would have from the flight deck would soothe him.

  “Just up the stairs there.”

  Ramsey climbed as indicated. The width of cold light before the plane dazzled him, showing up on his retina the aftershadow of the muffled shapes he had seen downstairs. Hands in laps, both pilots sat back in high seats. The controls quivered ever so delicately; two airmen read steady needles on the starboard side. Behind Ramsey was a small sleeping-bay, and turning to inspect it, he tripped over the thermal boots of the man who sat there, staring levelly ahead.

  “I beg your pardon,” he stated, and found his balance as fast as he could. For he knew it must be the evocative old man whose face could now be closely viewed, even if no introduction resulted. The hair was worn arty-long, he noticed first. Like Robert Graves’s. For an instant he watched the eyes glance up wryly from beneath long brows. Ramsey’s stomach bounded like an animal. It was Belle Leeming there in possession of the sleeping-bay.

  He shouted her name. Even above the engines, the flight engineer and navigator both heard it, and turned their heads an indolent fraction. Her presence brought to Ramsey again the certainty that he was butt to some wide-ranging joke. The poisonous farcicality of it brought sweats of anger out of him—Alec Ramsey encapsulated above the southern ocean and caught between Hammond in the tail and the widow in the cockpit!

  He bent to her ear. “Why wasn’t I told?”

  “I asked them not to.”

  “April fool, eh?”

  “Not at all.”

  Ramsey shook his head resentfully and put his fingers to his ears full of the thud of engines.

  “Sit down then, Alec, and be calm.”

  He obeyed out of the hopelessness of his fury. He knew it gave his mouth a constricted look that he thought of as odiously Presbyterian. He wanted vainly to be able to hide his fuming and let it jump at her from hiding.

  He and his old love bent to hear each other.

  “I didn’t know why you wanted to go, Alec, but I felt it was for your good, worth the risk of the odd behaviour you seem to think you have a right to. I didn’t want you to put it off just for the artificial reason that I was going too.”

  Ramsey said nothing. Now, growing out of anger, he felt a suspect need to redefine Belle’s moral status.

  “Besides,” the lady went on, “I didn’t want to be delivered up to the journalist they tell me is on this plane. Not yet, anyway.”

  “I think you’d get on marvellously, you two.”

  “By which you mean he’s a swine.” She patted his hand. “Never mind. I really am so pleased I came. They respect poor dear Leeming so much; it isn’t a front. You know I’m the oldest woman ever to visit the continent? But not the oldest person. The extraordinary thing is they took an eighty-three-year-old survivor of Scott’s expedition. Only last year. So I have to be satisfied with being the oldest woman.”

  Openly Ramsey sneered at this late taste for record-breaking.

  “Oh, I don’t enjoy the fact for its own sake, but I think it’s an indication of their esteem for Leeming. They’re so much more gracious than Australians, too.”

  “Especially when they’re dropping napalm on people,” Ramsey perversely growled.

  “Don’t be political. What I mean is that they remind me of cavalry officers out of an old film, something with Leslie Howard in it. The crew has given up their toilet to me, and this berth. And I found out, listening to some of the sailors at the airport, that this is their only plane that has a walk-in toilet down the back. Usually they simply have a trough that men urinate in.”

  It proved hard for him to keep his anger intact, Belle being so genuinely touched by the amendments these sailors had made to their coarse male world for her sake and Leeming’s. Not that he was not irked on that account, suspecting her right to be simple in heart.

  “If I had only known you wanted to take this journey,” he lied, “I wouldn’t have complicated matters by coming myself.”

  For a few seconds Belle laid her eyes lightly on him, correctly reading in him that his present rancour rose from this new challenge to his pride, his pride in being at least Leeming’s one true mourner.

  Meanwhile the pilot had turned in his seat to motion his flight engineer to the controls and had risen and moved back with inquiries about Belle’s health. Ramsey was introduced; the long and barren debate Ramsey desired had now to wait for a polite Major to cease briefing his two guests.

  “… so even though we’re flying well over the height of the mountains, we’ll be making a dogleg round Cape Adare. That’s somewhat safer.”

  In a sight-seeing fervour, Belle grasped Ramsey’s arm, distracting him from the officer. She pointed past the navigator’s back through the floor-level pane of glass to her right front. Two miles below, through lazy cloud almost transparent in the sun of early afternoon, a distinct berg, big as an atoll, spined and contoured to make two peaks, was passed or seemed deliberately to pass them by. Both its mountains cut the thick and, to Ramsey’s mind, transmogrifying fog, exposing it as a merely climatic state, exposing Ramsey as the same flat man, unendowed with new substance.

  “In another fifty minutes or so,” the lieutenant-commander told them, “we’ll actually cross the circle.”

  To compound this lack of transformation, McMurdo Sound brightened befor
e them all afternoon, and the Erebus volcano stood up, engaging as a ski-resort, when they banked across its slopes at five o’clock. Ramsey squinted at the broad normal sky, like bright winter skies over sheep towns he had taught in when young. The world, he told himself, was growing less and less diverse, more and more pointlessly uniform.

  A brusque landing was made on steel skis. The forward door opened, white glare and the cold swept in. Belle, already stationed for her Antarctic entrance and encouraged at the elbow by a boy orderly, stepped out first; then, threatened by the light and fumbling for sun-glasses, Ramsey. His eyesight adapting, he saw Belle being helped down the steps, setting dazed feet on the ice-shelf, making wading movements with her arms, clearly doubting that her senses and her lungs could get the measure of the foreign air. A massed welcoming party seemed to be assuring her, but she continued dubious. Capable of all the pomp of judgment, Ramsey followed on, enjoying the apt stumble of those soft traducing feet.

  And as if her discomfort were a judgment on her, he felt justified in his rudeness to her earlier that afternoon when, after a talk with Hammond, Belle had come and sat beside him. At the time, Ramsey had been looking west through the lifting vapour at the wan mountains of Victoria Land; an impressionist sun lay painted in four complex strokes of saffron on an ice-floe beneath him.

  “Alec, did they tell you that there are cameramen and three journalists at McMurdo Sound?”

  “I knew there were a few pressmen. I didn’t know the exact numbers.”

  “Yes, well they’re the numbers. Actually three, and Hammond makes four.”

  He did not resent her any the less, and had thought of asking her whether four sufficed.

  “A regular task force,” she had said, “ready to document our every quirk. So you have to allow me to say it, Alec; I beg you and I demand that there’ll be no quirks. Really, I won’t stand for them.”