The Survivor (10 page)

Ella too still smiled in her strained way. “If I don't, it's not through lack of tutoring, eh? You'd better both come inside.”

George was sent off with thanks. Ella led Ramsey and the poet in through the double front doors which the triumph of her entry from pottery class half an hour before had left open. With a slack hand Ramsey delayed her on the threshold. “Ella, thank God you're here.” But he knew she would not be so easily bought off. Both men followed her penitently into the living-room, where, Alec could tell, she was torn between showing her anxiety in her indecorous and grudging manner and playing the hostess. She brooded in mid-room. Ramsey had recently grown beyond the desire to explain to outsiders that this was not the genuine Ella but a later version, beset by her definitive childlessness and her imminent widowhood.

“Ramsey,” she legislated decisively this time, “this is a very good thing.” She waited till he had found a seat. She did not help to lower him; it was a dangerous ritual to help an old man before he needed help, to give his years and today's shock to his years official standing. It was the poet who stood by, discomposed by Ella's offishness and ready to fuss.

Ella continued, “Now you mustn't look upon this as anything drastic. I know you've suffered a lot on account of this man.” She displayed the steely deference that an enemy shows for an enemy's ailment. “But this will allay it all, because he'll be put to rest, given a respectable burial. And that must mean a lot to you.”

He had learnt that it was safer to ignore rather than mock her judgments. He nodded. But to his mind it was a dreadful resurrection that threatened. Not only did it edge him, as he had already sensed, towards the formulating of truth, but promised to finish him by drenching his evasiveness and fecklessness in such a flood of light that.… But he could not make out the results. (As for the truth, he did fear precisely its formulation, the task of utterance. Headlines and gossip around this town and any other could not touch him.)

“Don't you agree, Alec?”

“Of course, Ella,” he said as if parodying marital submission.

“Well, what do you mean by saying this finishes you? You said out there that you were finished. Where does that put me?”

The poet insisted, “It's merely the shock.”

“What might be finished are your Leeming tantrums perhaps. But to say you're finished is a tantrum in itself.”

The poet risked probing at their apprehensions about Leeming. “If I might dare interrupt, you both presume that the remains will be found.”

The Ramseys bore him with sullen politeness. For both of them, Leeming was a totem, a presence not subject to anticlimax. Some part of them believed that Leeming intended to emerge. The poet felt elated at making this discovery of a genuinely dramatic reaction.

The way they failed to answer their ringing telephone was also quaint. It persisted, though, and Ella rose to it at last. She said yes a few chary times and then clamped her hand over the mouthpiece.

“It's someone from the Department of External Affairs. He wants to see you urgently or some such thing.”

“He'd be the man. Griffith,” the poet told them. “From the Antarctic Division.”

Ella belittled the knowledge with a cast of the eyes. “I see. Can he visit you here, Alec?”

The poet mumbled at Alec, “I'd rest for a time. Take a sedative and have a doze. He can afford to wait.”

“Why is he coming here at all?” Ella demanded, but decided to ask the man from the Antarctic Division himself. “Why do you wish to see my … Mr Ramsey?”

An explanatory quacking prevailed for half a minute. “They want something identified,” she conveyed at last to Ramsey.

“I know, some items,” he said. “Tell him he can come.” There was even a brand of excitement in his willingness to see the flotsam that would verify his fantastic memories; and Ella too was full of some form of anticipation as she told Griffith to come, and put down the phone.

“Alec, this could be a marvellous development, it could be the best.…” She realized she was repeating an enemy's judgment, the poet's, and left it unfinished. She steeled herself to be patient, now that a little of the wreckage of that holy saga had come to the surface. When Ramsey saw it it would show itself to be a few trite scraps of waste, a few silly mementoes. Transplant them to a cemetery in the sardonic landscape of Australia, in flat Pinalba or in suburban Sydney, and they would weigh anyone's ghost down with bathos; they would outrival the pickle-bottle borders in the graveyards of her childhood. Knowing this, she must tolerate for a little time any of his symptoms of shock—weeping, pallor, sense of dread. Professional undertaking would lay Leeming's ghost; the dust of a poisonous myth would pour up the vent of the Northern Suburbs crematorium.

She saw without warning that the poet was a blessing, so conciliatory, wearing the false clothing of his station-in-life, wondering whether he should remain.

“Would you mind staying?” Ella surprised herself by asking him. He would be a guard against hysteria; he could treat hysteria in Alec with all sorts of patient manly liquors for which Ella had no time.

“Griffith will think it's strange that I'm here. But I'll stay.”

“Thank you. Alec—or rather, both of us—get very het up about things Antarctic.”

Griffith was a brisk man; he moved into the Ramseys' hallway with the vim and command of a technician, of a man come to repair their television set. The items under suspicion of concerning Leeming were leant against the hall wall within reach of the living area. His strenuous face had no reason not to suspect that the fragments should be identified without an excess of emotion and followed by morning tea. They were wrapped in corrugated cardboard and sealed with the departmental seal.

Griffith's eyes lit when he saw the poet. They would have passed each other with a nod in Canberra, but Griffith made a bravura out of their acquaintance now, as if he were in a foreign country. The poet, obviously fearing a contradiction from Ella, claimed he was a friend of the Ramseys.

Ella and Alec stood palely by and were introduced. The man from the Antarctic Division set to work on Ramsey's hand. “What a pleasure this is. I've read the book, you see.” He said almost accusingly, “You were superhuman, you fellows. Superhuman.”

Ramsey frowned. He would have been happy with the fruits of mere humanity. He wanted to tell Griffith that the book might soon read differently. Behind his back, Ella sighed audibly.

“My husband isn't very well at present. I meant to imply on the telephone he doesn't altogether find this a festive occasion.”

“I'm sorry. If you just sit where you are, and the public service bard will hold the parcels for me.…”

Fetching the first of the parcels, Griffith was aware of the dependent silences behind his back, silences more positive than a mere lull. He thought how interesting this was, and began to make a number of guesses, largely improper, about the connection between the three. Ramsey startled him by erupting in the face of Ella's stance of long-suffering.

“All right, Ella. The best of things has happened, so you say. Why don't you carry yourself like a woman to whom the best has happened?”

“You make it hard for me to believe in that proposition, Alec.” The words rode in and out slackly on the breath, pretending to have achieved indifference. She was a very savoury bitch, the poet thought, but deserved to be beaten. “But we mustn't hold up Mr Griffith.”

Who at that moment was opening a parcel laid flat on the poet's knees, easing the cardboard off with immense care.

The poet said wryly, “Are you responsible to the minister for that stuff?”

“Not at all.” Griffith looked around for Alec. “There are Antarcticans down there still who know their Antarctic history. Fortunately someone on this ice-physics excursion that discovered these … well, what are they? … relics? … I suppose so. Anyhow, one of those Americans knew the story of Leeming's death in more than outline. If your identification is positive, Mr Ramsey, Mrs Leeming will be immediately contacted by our Sydney office. But I hope that all three of you will be good enough to regard this viewing as confidential until the news is announced.”

All of them hostile, none of them answered. All Griffith did was to go on being provocatively careful with the corrugated cardboard. “Would you like me to buy you a roll of
that?
” the poet asked him.

“No.”

“It wouldn't help you to take more risks with it?”

“No.”

Neither did it end with the corrugated. Alec began to suspect Griffith of malice when it was found there was a final layer of tissue around the relics. It seemed an improbable act of delicacy on the part of the Antarctic Division for what had been forty years closeted in the coarse-grained ice.

“Two pieces of ski-wood,” the functionary said at last, and held them up. “The lacquer's still in marvellous order, which would make some manufacturer very proud. You'll see the initials
S.L
. hacked in one arm and filled in with indelible pencilling, which still shows. Remarkable. Well, we thought they answered the description of the cross you made for Leeming. But that's up to you, Mr Ramsey.”

Ella snorted when Ramsey accepted the pieces reluctantly, with a nearly rheumatic deliberateness. He felt bilious taking them, and the floor and the temperate latitudes swung out from beneath his feet for a second. What frightened him most was that the very taste of the morning returned to him. Lloyd standing by passively, all medical artifice suspended, himself pottering guiltily around Leeming. For a reason beyond his knowing, he would now and then chance the tip of his tongue out to his flawed lips—a racking thing to do—and taste his own death on them. His back to the mere thirty-knot gusts, he took off the mitts already frozen and sawed Leeming's left ski in two. The dreadful season first threatened to split, then anaesthetized, his fingers in their thin inner-gloves as he managed a bad knot of lampwick. With a knife in his good hand, he willed the lettering to happen on the shaft and, holding a stub of indelible pencil in a maimed way, began filling in the hacked outline. Here was a young man so baffled by winds and immensities that he believed all his atoning work with saw, lampwick, knife, and pencil gave Leeming some permanence on the face of the glacier.

Mr Griffith was busy with the larger parcel, and a careful shedding of tissue showed an aluminium cover, top and two sides, with lettering punched on one of the sides. Mr Griffith read it. “From the Worcester School, Sydney. 24/8/'24.” Then he picked it free of its wrappings, while Alec inhaled noisily, fearing frostbite for the careless man, forgetting that all the voracious cold of the glacier had now gone out of the thing. Next he damned the Worcester School for writing its silly pride on the edge of the cover. Griffith, unlike the headmaster, was at hand.

“Why are you playing with me? Worcester School was Leeming's old school. Do you expect me to tell you that this was left behind by Vivian Fuchs? What fool thought it necessary for you to come all this way?”

“The director of the Antarctic Division is the fool in question. We're not trying to waste your time, and we don't think you want to look at relics of what must be a tragic day. But surely you remember that another party preceded you down the glacier? This may have been left by them. Anyway, we thought it kinder not to tell Mrs Leeming until we were sure.”

Behind Ramsey's back the poet made a diminuendo movement with his right hand, meaning “Don't be provoked. He's old, irrational and sick.” Ella did not see this hint given; she sat astounded by the sight of concrete elements of the Leeming tragedy which had been so rarefied in debate between herself and Ramsey that one almost ceased to believe in it as something that happened in an ordinary material sense. This wreckage was to her, as to Ramsey, an amazing endorsement.

Meanwhile Ramsey was behaving very crochety. In the teeth of Griffith's reasonable explanations he muttered on. “Perhaps the director considers Magellan is an old boy of Worcester College, and suspects he wandered too far south, dropping a cooker given to him out of what could be bilked from small boys.”

“But I've already explained how it's slightly more complicated than that. The question is whether you positively recognize these …
relics
… as the items you used … you and
Dr Lloyd
used in the burial of Leeming.”

Ramsey glowered. He knew clearly that his emotions were exorbitant, but still had no control. “I did not allow him to be
buried
,” he declaimed at Griffith.

Ella turned her head aside. She hissed briefly in disgust. “Give the man a chance, Alec.
Bury
was only a manner of speaking.”

The man from the Antarctic Division showed he could be a diplomat. “Yes, Mrs Ramsey, but I can understand Mr Ramsey's sensitivity on that point. After all, the official history is very explicit on the matter.”

Ramsey shook his head, saying “Oh!” in a tone that cast doubt on the sanity of those who believed official histories.

“According to the official history,” Griffith persisted, “you used the cooker top as the basis of a windbreak around Dr Leeming's head. And after you had heaped up a mound, you drove the ski-wood cross in, wedging it with the camera you had decided to leave and with some exposed plates. The director wants to know if the official history correctly details the … obsequies you performed that day.”

Alec chose to stand on his dignity in a cockeyed way. “I like the bloody director's cheek,” he said.

Ella found such bloody-mindedness insufferable in her spouse. “The director's not trying to impugn your truthfulness, dearie.”

“Oh no!” Griffith verified. “But you can get winds of a hundred and fifty knots and more down those glaciers.” Ramsey even considered sneering at the nautical pretentiousness of the word “knots” in the mouth of a man who, perhaps, sailed of a weekend on Lake Burley Griffin. “So that the question is, were the markers of Leeming's … resting-place blown away? Now you had no anemometer on the sledge, but the record says that on the day itself the wind seemed to Lloyd to be about thirty knots, and that the next day was still though very icy. Were these markers blown away, and if so, were they blown far? You were weak. How solidly did you ground these things? You can well understand that we don't wish to trouble the widow if the chances are that the supposed relics are merely wind-drift.”