The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  Without warning, Abrams stepped out from behind the winch.

  “Sorry Mr Ramsey, the lieutenant told me to stop you.”

  His fist struck Ramsey’s cheek with an amazing impact. There was a roar as when a train enters a tunnel. On his back, Alec fought to keep the view he had of the stretcher clear of the blues and yellows of the blow. Before sleeping, he tried to explain how he had merely been trying to prove his mind’s word to his guts, that there was nothing wrong with his mind.

  He slept. Somewhere warm, he opened his eyes to a fearful noise and shut them again. His head throbbed, and he felt an instant’s acute unhappiness, as if he wondered how he would fill in the years remaining, now that he had lost his reasons for expiation.

  It was such a conventional hospital he woke to that he believed himself to be back in Christchurch or perhaps never to have left it. By the door, though, sat Hammond in layered trousers and coats and stockinged feet. Ramsey winced without sound or movement, lying doggo. Waking to Hammond, he thought. Mrs Hammond did it daily, except during cultural events.

  As it was, Hammond had seen the twitch of eyebrows, and moved to the bed.

  “How are you, Alec?”

  I am different, Ramsey told himself. The mad dynamo of his belly was still. There was nothing to worry about, and nothing to threaten. He was a bemused vacancy, as if he had existed only in relation to the ice-bound Leeming.

  He raised his head. His skull ballooned with pain; bile rushed into his mouth. The fierce effects of Abrams’ strong arm. Ramsey subsided and asked at last, “Is it night yet?”

  Hammond smiled, sly in his knowledge of time gone. “Daytime-nighttime.” He implied a vigil of supreme length.

  “The same day, is it?”

  “Oh yes, the same day. Some day you must tell me what it was all about.”

  “What what was all about?”

  “Your claims about Leeming.”

  “Oh Christ! Must I? Why must I?”

  “They have Leeming in a room here.”

  Ramsey was merely angry with Hammond for being so blunt with a sick person. Perhaps he was under orders to be blunt, a sort of home-psychiatry suggested by the McMurdo surgeon.

  Ramsey kept cool. He dryly thought how immune to the impact of past resurrections the bulk of humanity seemed.

  “Leeming’s been thawed out of his bag. He’s entire. Absolutely entire. What were you trying to do?”

  “Don’t be such a nagging bastard,” Ramsey advised the newsman.

  “I have the doctor’s word for it. And they’re letting Belle identify him.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “She insists. A mighty old woman, that one! They can’t very well stop her. She’s his wife.”

  Ramsey muttered, “People should have more consistently realized that. She should have herself.”

  He wanted to pass water. “Where are my boots?”

  “They make you take them off at the door. They won’t let you wear them in here. How do you feel, anyway?”

  “I feel I want my boots. Humour me. You know I’m mad. I bet they’ve warned you, as my fellow-national, Keep that odd-ball quiet, queue-eye-ett!”

  “Why did you say that … about Dr Lloyd and yourself?”

  Ramsey was off-hand with the answer. “It was symbolically true. It was sacramentally true. My father was a Presbyterian minister, you see, and if you grow up with someone who is religiously convinced, you come to see that symbolic truth is the highest form of truth.”

  He paused, R.I.P. for his father. “She ate him, too.”

  “In a manner of speaking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” said Hammond with some harshness. “But surely you knew the U.S. Navy and the newspapers are rather heavily committed to literal truth.”

  “I was constantly forgiven the literal truth. But the things I did to him … I didn’t find them forgivable.”

  “That’s no reason to act up. Why, we all—”

  “Damn what you all do. Where’s the gents’?”

  “I’ll get you a pan.”

  “No. Tell your readers that Lloyd and I left him while he was still alive.”

  Hammond chuckled. “Good God, what am I supposed to believe? As for readers, they probably think you did leave him anyhow. Or at least they know it’s what they would have done in your place. They can’t be shocked, Alec, and they make a rotten tribunal. Watch out, or you’ll become one of these people who confess regularly to the murder of the hour.”

  In came a doctor, conventionally white-coated, drill trousers on his legs. An orderly followed, bearing a tray with a glass of water and a measuring-glass full of blue capsules.

  “Your nightcap, sir,” the doctor told Ramsey, “and we’ll have you back in Chi-Chi by dusk, day after tomorrow.”

  “That thought must make you very happy.”

  Laughing, the doctor signalled to his orderly, who came forward offering the blue capsule.

  “I wonder do I need that,” Ramsey asked.

  “I think so, sir.”

  “You said I’d find my boots at the entrance, Mr Hammond?”

  “I didn’t say yours. I said mine.”

  He swung his socked feet to the floor. Immediately his stomach rose. His vision went the sepia colour of photographs of dead relatives. The faces of the three men slewed burning across his brain. But he avoided being sick.

  The doctor blocked his way. “Please co-operate, sir. You’ll find everything you want here. Mr Hammond has moved your kit across from your hut.”

  “You’re all such nice boys,” Ramsey said. “Sir and Mr Ramsey. I suppose, though, you’ll flatten me again if I don’t do as I’m asked.”

  “There’s no question of anything like that, sir.”

  “Well I’m going out then, down the corridor. I’ll stay in your bloody hospital or sick-bay or whatever it is. Because my head hurts. But I’m not going to take pills or be shut in.”

  He was allowed to go. It occurred to him that they may have been given explicit orders not to use force and that the lieutenant on the glacier might have been reprimanded for his approach. Ramsey hoped not. The good intention to write to the admiral, explaining that fists had been quite in order, withered in his hollow insides.

  From the hall he had a view, through the front door, of an Antarctic dusk, the sun as low as it would go tonight, its crest above the silent mountains they had visited that day. The clock above the vacant reception desk said eleven-thirty.

  Opposite the desk two sallow boys sat, comforter and comforted, their heavy clothing soiled, boots off like Hammond. They sat there in their socks, which were also not clean.

  “What’s the trouble?” Alec asked because they looked such waifs.

  “My friend here, a drum rolled on his hand.”

  “Oh?”

  “Been out, right out. Brought him round with hospital brandy. We got the mitt off, but we can’t budge the inner glove. Except it makes him scream.”

  A gloved hand of black leather was held to the sufferer’s chest, like a small limp animal culpably damaged.

  “God, it looks swollen,” Alec agreed. A strangely reminiscent brand of pity filled him, a tender feeling in the diaphragm, keeping tempo with the boy’s hot and cold, fading and awakening pain. It was clean male pity, far from the world of women and the feminine myth that only women are vulnerable. He would have liked to treat the boy’s injury in this simplified environment. “How’s the pain?” he asked.

  “A lot better,” the victim muttered. His eyes rolled. He was about to vomit or faint, while the orderly, tracking Ramsey, stood by with a suspect tolerance for this eccentric Limey.

  “Why aren’t you looking after the boy’s hand?” Ramsey asked with genuine heat.

  “Sorry, sir, that’s not the orders I’ve got.”

  “Where’s the toilet?”

  “Head’s straight on down the corridor, sir.”

  “Head my.… And you’re not going to come in there
with me, either.”

  He had reached the right door at the corridor’s end when one halfway between him and the sufferer opened and ejected, as if she had been pushed or helped too energetically from behind, Belle. The way she stood, her head tilted back, seemed to signify the least painful way of bearing the weight of her brain. Because she was still and at a distance he was able to take stock of how much hair she had had shorn off for the sake of this journey. It would not quickly grow again, back in Elizabeth Bay, where such a cut was worn only by the very young.

  The officer Ramsey had met at table the evening before followed Belle, and then an orderly. The men took station, one at each elbow, presuming the old lady’s collapse.

  The widow impressed Ramsey in the same way as the sailor had. “Belle,” he said, but was not heard. Belle staggered off between her satellites.

  “Belle,” he called again through the heavy dusk of the hallway.

  “Oh, Alec,” she muttered over her shoulder, recollecting him and his paranoic whims and for the moment finding them, or their possibility, too much to face. There occurred to him the surprise that perhaps she had always been capable of hurt, her reserves of strength no higher than those of any solidly ageing person.

  The officer turned to keep one raised sly eye on him.

  “Poor old Belle,” Ramsey muttered.

  As if his new insight into Belle had been immediately perceived by her, she said, “I want to talk to Mr Ramsey.”

  “Now, do you think that’s wise?”

  “You’re very kind, Commander. But I want to speak to old, old friends.”

  But the commander did some preliminary testing on his own account.

  “You feeling OK, sir?” he asked Ramsey.

  “Yes, I am.” He felt compelled to tell the commander that he no longer had a daemon to bait Belle, but that would mean giving a case history.

  “You know, you acted up strange out there this afternoon.”

  “I know,” said Ramsey. “I don’t lack insight.”

  With a trace of pique, Belle announced, “If it’s going to cause so much trouble—”

  “No, no, no. You can use Lieutenant Christie’s office. I’ll wait for you. If you want anything.…”

  The office was in shadow, and so small that the presence of chairs forced you to sit. Alec reached for her old, limp hand.

  “It’s him, Belle?”

  “Yes. He’s startlingly recognizable. Not fully thawed yet. The face shut up with pain. The points of the cheeks in a mess. He looks very old.”

  He nodded. He had contributed to Leeming’s finite agony, and finitely paid for it.

  For a minute Belle wept, tears in full flood. They cut off without warning.

  “Alec,” she said, “couldn’t you have done more for the poor fool?”

  “I don’t know, Belle. Perhaps if I hadn’t cuckolded him and worried about it.… But no one could have saved him.”

  She wept again, like deeply suppressed laughter.

  “What was he doing there with Lloyd and you? If ever there was a man who wanted to be vulnerable! I’ve been dreading to look at him—an old woman looking down on a man of forty-two. But what was the worst shock was to see how he’d aged along with me … more than me. The journey, or the strokes, or even the ice.… They’ve made him look very old.”

  In his sense of vacancy towards Leeming he found Belle’s intensity disquieting, especially when it centred on an agony forty years gone. It would do her good to meet the boy outside, to feel the immediacy of his pain.

  “The three of us suffered,” he said.

  They were silent. Ramsey examined, on the lieutenant’s desk, a photograph of a homely girl. She wore a summer dress and stood before a shady stoop. Framed cameo-fashion, she promised a wealth of mothering, simple goodness on tap in some rural county ten thousand miles north. That’s the sort of girl to marry, he told himself. Not the ones who infest the blood and occupy the grain, not the contrary and complex ones, the ones who hated you the more they loved, whose intentions were a mystery, mainly to themselves.

  How strange it was to think of the widow and Ella as kin.

  Belle freely began to talk.

  The trouble had been Leeming’s impotence. Not that he wasn’t capable of begetting children, of some sexual result. But it was not, in a lover’s terms, a result at all. Leeming fretted, prayed, saw doctors, achieved insight but not orgasm. He declared Belle purer than he, for it took the pure to enjoy unreservedly their sexual nature. Conventionally, she had taken him at his word and become mistress to a stockbroker. When Leeming’s reaction to her confessed adultery had been similarly conventional, in the midst of the standard recriminations between cuckold and bad wife, she had been forced to an ultimate cliché. “Physical solace is necessary to me. Who are you to judge me for it?” She was not sure, she told Ramsey, but she believed she could remember feeling cheated, baffled that the truism shot home. She had wanted him to beat her, to possess her by chastisement; she was willing that a climax of blows should serve for defective climaxes elsewhere. He said she was of course right, and he could accept that she needed physical pleasure, though perhaps not as much as she thought. But he knew by an instinct that she would need to work her way through her sexual needs to attain more thoroughly human relationships—something the conventionally pure could not always achieve. He wanted her always to think of him in a kindly way.

  “Kindly,” she said, shaking her head in Lieutenant Christie’s office. “God in heaven—kindly!”

  His response, Leeming had gone on to say, had been the possessive one, the middle-class one, one that required chastening. But she must not deceive him.

  She had not deceived him. She had provided him with names—he had accepted them. The thorn in his flesh. All the time she hoped, perhaps without knowing it as fully as she did now at four-score-minus-one, for fury, his judgment, some mad statement of his sovereignty. She continued with her diverse loves in the vacuum of his forbearance.

  Ramsey sat silent and startled. She was Ella, wanting to be devoured, gnashed with the teeth—the eucharist of woman.

  No system of thought formed the base for her adulteries. It was as Alec had often said, that one part animal pride and one part appetite were her only metaphysics.

  So she was sensual, yes, but there were more nuns than those in convents, and stranger vows of chastity; she could have been faithful. She sought Alec’s wrist and held it in an avian way. “I was capable of fidelity,” she told him.

  “Is this the first time you’ve grieved in front of people?” he asked at last.

  “What do you mean, grieved?”

  “Wept. Said passionate things.”

  She closed her eyes. She was still enraged with Leeming. It was obvious; it was credible, too, that she wished to tend him as much as she wished to resign him to some buffoon such as Denis Leeming. “He should have shot the two of you,” she said, “and survived on your meat.”

  Ramsey felt light. He knew that she would go on, burning for Leeming all her days, a votive woman, adequate to Leeming’s memory. She would never be consoled that Leeming had neglected to make them pay in primal terms, in terms of blood.

  She asked him to leave her alone.

  Outside, the commander still waited.

  “She’s finding it difficult,” Ramsey told him. “She was remarkably attached to Leeming.”

  At dawn Leeming was mourned and buried. Later in the day Ramsey assumed Hammond’s name and found a place on a flight to the Pole. Great mountains marked the way up the Beardmore Glacier, improbably large when seen from the ports of the aircraft. Within a few hours Ramsey was squinting at the boggling nullity of the polar plateau. Given this god’s-eye view, he suspected all the enterprises that had touched the void below and left it unchanged. It seemed indecent that men should be eaten by the white glare ceasing a whit this side of endlessness.

  To him, their motivation had become a blank.

  As warned, a succulent, bitter
Ella, wearing sunglasses with the same air and purpose as most other bitter, succulent women—to cover what marriage has done with eyes—waited for him at the Sydney terminal.

  His buoyancy was this afternoon, however, capable of rallying her straightaway. She said, “Alec, what are you trying to do to us both?” But there was no rebuke in the way she hugged him. He felt nuptial, and patted her fine, suited hip; he felt free, a private man, his own man, and despite the black farce of his second Antarctic journey, he had never felt freedom so privately attained, privately enriching, of such a personal vintage.

  He sat her on a lounge and told her he was emancipated. She need not hurry to believe it; her face told that she did not. He found it easy to weep without discomfort. For in an international terminal passers-by would look on them as a reunion; and Ella held him widely, motheringly, or like a daughter.

  “Excuse me,” a tiny blonde woman told them. “I’m from the press.”

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, you’ve been none too tardy.” He thought unkindly of Hammond, who must have alerted the newspapers.

  The small woman could distinguish Anglo-Saxon resignation when she saw it. “You are Mr Pelliadakes and his daughter, aren’t you?”

  Pungently Ella said they certainly were not. He had often enough teased her on her ability to be mistaken for an Aegean.

  “God,” intoned the lady, and scuttered away with a photographer to hunt the elusive Pelliadakes’ sob story.

  Ella said little of Leeming. She said chastely she hoped that this ended it all for him.

  Other matters fretted her. “I hope the hotel is up to standard. It’s only got one star in the motorist’s handbook. If I’d only known what the occasion was, I could have booked something much better.”

  Driving there, Ramsey suggested, “I suppose the one star is a punishment for my disappearance.”

  Ella nodded. “And abrupt return.”

  It was the arid task of hanging shirts that seemed to make sleep necessary. As he drowsed he told her, “I don’t propose to follow a spent trajectory to the grave. Not any more. I intend to begin to live and be very demanding of a night.”