The Survivor (35 page)

“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.”

From the bedside table she made grunts of mock-anticipation. Yet why she was happy he could not fully tell; she had been promised these things before and had none of the internal evidence he had that this was finally freedom. Perhaps she had made a purely temporary millennium, as she had in the past, out of his return.

“We have to learn a new sanity,” he murmured, “within the limits of our old madnesses, because it hasn't made us desirable people when we've dwelt so fully in each other. We are not pretty, Ella, we are not nice to know. But there'll be no more of this cancer-of-the-womb business, and I won't let you look exploited, as if you and other women pay away more with their genitals than I and other men do.”

“Eric Kable,” she suggested as a good cross-sectional case.

“I'm serious, see!” He caressed her back, and there he was touching the contours of his womb and sister and wife, provoker, flagellator, patent emasculator.

The Ramseys drowsed the rest of the day away on their one-star bed, unaware that the one afternoon sun mocking the threadiness of the carpet mocked also their unideal limbs for whose golden age they still held some hopes.

EPILOGUE

By Eastertide Sally Bourke was unarguably with child and suffered morning sickness as frequently as Ella could have desired. Helped thus from the flank, Ramsey enjoyed a necessary dominance over his wife.

Then autumn turned his park sere in its imported varieties and cast a strong frost for those stoic native trees. Autumn brought, too, a postcard from Los Angeles. It read, “I have considered for some time whether I should write to you. This souvenir of a far city is not necessarily a token of regard, neither of hostility. I simply don't know. But one day I'd like you to try to explain what it was all about. Yours, David Hammond.”

Late in April the poet came again to town and visited Ramsey's office. He came spruce, and Barbara said he was perfumed, which for some reason alienated her finally from his verse. But he was, of course, a man in love and silly with toiletries.

He and Ramsey strolled down to the staff dining-room. In the chilly westerlies Alec too received the little man's nuptial savour. Which reminded him.…

“Weren't you and Mrs Turner to be married this month?”

“We were to have been.”

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't intrude—”

“I don't mind. The delay has proved temporary.”

“That's good.”

“Till Mrs Turner forgives me.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, for Valerie Kable.”

Ramsey winced, a reaction that amazed the poet.

“I thought old dead-eye Ella had seen that. I thought that was why she gave me all that hearty lack of respect.”

“Now that you mention it, I think she did make surmises.” He coughed and muttered, “I had no idea.”

“I ought to tell you that only once—or maybe there was a second time I can't well remember—did Valerie and I nurture our inappropriate and, I can swear to you, totally unsatisfactory flame. That was down in my part of the country last December. I was low, drinking, lonely, sapped, and so on. You'd have to be.”

“I'm pleased you said that.”

“And I swear too that I didn't know she was on the tableland when I came to you with news last February. I had to rebuff the lady. Anyhow, Mrs Turner got a letter from someone—I don't think Valerie; she's straighter than that, within her bounds. I think that little prick Leeming may have written it. Unless it was you,” he added for laughter.

There was a second to hope that Ella had not been the betrayer, as in another treachery of which young Leeming had been suspected.

“But you have hopes still? I mean, of Mrs Turner?”

The poet winked. He looked a genuine village-pump lover.

“I've just done a retreat in a Franciscan friary, and I have a monk writing to her to say I need her precisely to save me from unhappy adventures. I've even hinted that I am halfway interested in turning R.C. I shall continue to hint it throughout our married life, especially when Mrs Poet acts up.”

“You have the winning formula,” said Ramsey.

The poet agreed; you could forgive him his country cocksureness. “I have the winning formula. All the prescribed paperwork has been done. We should be able to marry within a week or two.”

So, knowing his duty towards bridegrooms, Ramsey bought white wine for their lunch.

“As for you,” said the poet. “Didn't you say in February that you were finished?”

“I was overstating,” Ramsey admitted. For which mistake Pelham had not forgiven him, and would take a post in Melbourne in July.

“I'm very pleased you were wrong.”

“Well, I was wrong too about Belle Leeming.”

“Yes, quite a performance—down to McMurdo Sound in a transport, up to the glacier by helicopter and the funeral service, and so forth.”

“I can remember,” said Ramsey, as if only now finding a new reverence for the motivation of preposterous human behaviour, “she had doubts about his burial at McMurdo Sound, because the place was too industrialized.”

“I saw her in the end.” The poet shrugged—one more quiet triumph. “When she came home. Alec, she tells me you actually believe you left Leeming when Leeming was still alive.”

Ramsey said nothing, but made up his face in a way that showed he would welcome more discretion.

“She told me,” the poet explained, “only because she knows you to be self-deceived. But you're offended.”

“I have to be frank; I've grown out of considering such things.”

“Yes, but I've been waiting two months or so to tell you about something that occurred to me in this very context. You placed the cooker top at Leeming's head because you didn't want to cover him. It was blowing thirty miles an hour and there was some drift. According to what everyone says, it was on a fairly even area of glacier—in fact, you were lucky in that regard; any other track down to the coast would have killed you all.”

“I've heard such analyses,” Ramsey admitted, sounding bored, sucking at his wine to cover a small fear for his own peace of mind.

“Well, they tell me that drift doesn't settle, except on the lee side of objects,” the poet climatically brought forth, believing that the fact gave one last severing blow to Ramsey's serpentine guilt.

“I see.” Ramsey came close to laughing at the poet's Maigret impersonation. The poet seemed vulnerable, and said with a minor petulance, “Drift settles on the lee side of mountains, huts, tents, sledges, and—I can't see why not—even cooker covers.”

“Oh, yes,” said Ramsey.

“The point is, you must have wanted his face covered if you put the cooker where you said you put it. Even dazed, you'd know that drift falls in the lee of obstacles, fair on Leeming in this case. Now, I can't imagine you compounding your supposed treachery in this way. To leave the man was not a crime in my book, but to put that cooker lid down required a malice and hypocrisy of which you aren't capable. So the answer is, you thought at the time that he'd died in the accepted bona fide fashion.”

There arose the temptation to tease the poet, who sat neglecting his food and lobbing prognostications of the past at Ramsey.

Ramsey said, “I don't know. I wasn't much of a hand at lees and downwinds.”

“Well,
would
drift have collected on the lee side of an obstacle such as the cooker lid?” the poet insisted.

“Perhaps.” But he was not altogether lying when he said, “It sounds something like an academic point to me.”

About the Author

Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) is an Australian author of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, best known for his novel
Schindler's List
. Inspired by the true story of Oskar Schindler's courageous rescue of more than one thousand Jews during the Holocaust, the book was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg, which won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Picture. Keneally was included on the Man Booker Prize shortlist three times—for his novels
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest
, and
Confederates
—before winning the award for
Schindler's List
in 1982. Keneally is active in Australian politics and is a founding member of the Australian Republican Movement, a group advocating for the nation to change its governance from a constitutional monarchy to a republic. In 1983 he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia for his achievements.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1969 by Thomas Keneally

Cover design by Drew Padrutt

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2676-5

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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