The Survivor (24 page)

“… Anglican Church in some place like Botany cemetery, within spitting distance of gasometers and the jail, and only a short drive from South Sydney Leagues Club.”

“Except that we'd have to attend. Or compose lies. And I can't compose one that anyone's likely to believe for this afternoon, least of all for a burial like that.”

“Anyhow, Belle tells me Leeming's old school has offered to have him buried, at their expense, under the floor of its chapel.”

“God!” He clouted the back of an armchair. “Do you enjoy passing on these absurdities?”

“Are they absurdities?”

“What
is
she at?”

“You know her better than I do.”

“She's playing around, the old freak. I wouldn't be surprised, only bloody appalled, if she made him an eternal schoolboy in that way. The idea of college chaplains invoking him in appeals against masturbation!”

“Perhaps Belle thinks his name could very properly be invoked for that.”

There was no argument for him to win, just as there was no room with shutters. He asked her for time; but her anger was absolute again, and extended no credit. It damned her to be a thorny partner all afternoon.

In sharp daylight and mocked by bush flies, the colours of numberless degrees floated to the platform on the backs of dignitaries. Four rows of seats below the dais were similarly splashed and Benjamin-coated with doctorates and masters' degrees. Ramsey himself sat on high, squinting, with the high sun splashing into the corners of his eyes, trapped beyond all failures of bladder and nerve between the professors of agricultural science and geography. The big flies, gorged on a summer's sheep droppings, thudded against all these scholarly heads as abruptly as flung gravel.

Sir Byron spoke of the newly formed National Council of Student Health, of which he was a member, and fretted over the high incidence of problem drinking within this very university. The Dean and Lady Desideria, the knighted graziers on the senate, Sanders and all the heads of department, drowsed in antiseptic approval as if they were not passion's slaves or had never split wide with ripeness.

A sherry party followed on the lawns outside the administration block. New staff lined up to present their wives to Chimpy, whose doctoral cap rode quaintly that face seamed as a fisherman's. Yet it frowned, too, and took glances over its shoulder, perhaps not satisfied with the fall of the doctoral gown.

“Alec,” Chimpy called as Ella and Ramsey went by. “Excuse me,” he said to a new lecturer in English, and took Ramsey by the shoulder. “Look, Alec, Sadie's fifty yards away chatting with some old biddy from a cow stud.” Ramsey spotted Lady Mews, seeing her to be indeed mindlessly gossiping with some breeder's wife. “She knows she should be here to speak to all these people.” For a man of distinction he seemed lost; manners maketh the man, and Sadie had always been one of his best manners. “Just ask her can I see her.”

While they both closed in on Lady Sadie, Ella was mumbling. “He asked us because he knows we're too unhappy to gossip.”

Showing a grand coldness, Lady Sadie considered her husband's summons for an odd time. The grazier's wife became engrossed in Sadie's failure to obey. When Lady Mews at last decided to go, seeming falsely youthful because of the grudges she bore, Alec knew that Sir Byron had not yet had his last surprise.

Professor Sanders beckoned to the footloose Ramseys, who were forced to join him. In intractable mood, Ella allowed herself to be steered by the elbow, like a convalescent forced to take fresh air.

Ramsey both liked and mistrusted liking Sanders, who was one of those men who at fifty looked thirty from a distance. The face, beaten about by the good life and somehow vacant with institutional loneliness, masked a discernible younger face. He looked like a young man done up for an old part, his smile a smear of cynicism over a raw innocence.

Innocence, or at any rate frankness. You suspected he found Ella desirable; that he had an eye for penetrating the dowdiness of academic gowns. But first he had his anger to tend.

“Did you hear the heart-warming midday news?”

“Yes.” Alec, who had no appetite for revelations, said warily, “What will happen?”

“Chimpy was furious enough to begin with. Either he backs up the news report or he doesn't. If he doesn't, the dailies will find out the monstrous fact that Leeming's been refused leave. If he does, he has to persuade me. And persuaded is what I won't be.” He seemed something of an ancient mariner, ready to give his story to any wedding guest who might be willing to stay and listen. “It's principle with me. I can't afford to sell out my principles as cheaply as Chimpy does, because my reputation has suffered enough as it is.”

Both Ramseys were reminded of the girl last night who had been told much the same.

“But surely young Leeming won't be easily forgiven?”

“Won't he? When Chimpy called him in he came sloe-eyed with terror and dragging on auntie's hand. The old lady was contrite as hell and said she'd released the news thinking her nephew had definitely been given leave. So Chimpy's pacified now, and trying to swing me.”

“Why not?” Ella muttered. Sanders did not bother to answer; Ramsey saw the question as a flexing of the bitter sinews of Ella's tongue. He felt afraid.

“Chimpy's trouble,” Sanders ground on, “is that he doesn't understand how mad Leeming is in the strict sense. He thinks Leeming's objectives are just a nice little bit of nepotic carry-on. He sees me as the one who stands in the way of a reasonable settlement. He'll be one physics professor short if he keeps at it.”

To check on the vice-chancellor's intentions, Alec glanced away to the fig-tree where Sir Byron had been holding court. Lady Sadie was in dutiful place, speaking with a newcomer while Chimpy managed the wife. On Chimpy's side of the tree the Kables, Belle, and Denis Leeming all waited as if for a massed audience.

Ella said, “What prevents you from a reasonable settlement?”

Sanders blinked, finding her intensity exhilarating, a thing of promise.

“Alec's deranged on the topic,” Ella fought on, “and your pride is at stake. How can you dare to presume that Leeming isn't acting out of an honest understanding of what's fitting?”

Ramsey was hurt, but allowed himself to laugh. “After your recent experience of Leeming's honest understanding of what's fitting—an apt word, by the way—I thought you might be willing—”

“Don't appeal to my prejudices, Alec. I try to rise above them.”

Which Alec thought too fantastic a claim to dare reply to. “Does Chimpy know your feelings?” he asked Sanders.

“He does. And he won't be able to let his decision hang, either. I don't know when Leeming would have to leave for New Zealand if he's to go to Antarctica.…”

“As a matter of fact Mrs Leeming told me it should be this very afternoon,” Ella told them. “So you see, you may have already won out over what Alec has the cheek to call Leeming's hysteria.”

Here the debate was aborted by a new member of Sanders' staff who came up to bore them with his recent grain research. “It might occur to you to wonder,” said the brilliant young drone on whom depended the wheat plains of tomorrow, “to wonder why someone interested in wheat-growing in low-rainfall areas would want to research the question in Wales.…”

But Sanders' face had fallen blank of the passions of low-rainfall grain and was aimed sadly at Ella. Ramsey swayed on his feet, agreeing at drowsy intervals that Wales was just the place and nothing matched the claims of Aberystwyth. The summer's afternoon had entered his mind, the fair translucent day and all its kin of bright days that transcended all this scholarly braying. Such were the days he would inherit or be initiated into by the settling of the question of Leeming's wronged body. His senses, in the meantime, felt strangely bound, as if his seeing was not value-for-money seeing, his hearing and touch marred, his experience of love synthetic. He was, entire, a slave to the event.

He looked again to see how, in its more banal ramifications, the event was shaping with Chimpy. Now the Kables had the vice-chancellor's ear, but Ramsey wondered at Lady Sadie's absence and was answered straightaway by her voice on his right.

“Might I speak with you a moment, Alec, if Ella doesn't mind?”

She was suppliant and old beneath the peachy falsity of make-up. She had only just passed into venerability from an era when she had always looked forty-five and what young scholars called an experienced-looking lay. Now she was young-old. On that account Alec reacted to her with an extra zeal. This reaction saddened him on reflection; Sadie had always unassailably connoted girlishness.

He was nevertheless perversely happy to join her now in her age and leave Ella to Sanders.

Chewing at her bottom lip, Sadie led him briskly towards the back of the administration building. Here, and in a sort of deference to her pallor, he took off his M.A. gown and slung it over his shoulder. A caterer's truck was parked at the back entrance, and a swarthy boy ran upstairs carrying two trays of canapes.

“Tomorrow's bitter women,” said Lady Sadie, nodding at big-thighed girl undergraduates who were lobbing a ball about the courts below. She shuddered. “Not only did I have to get away from him, but I had to find someone reliable to talk to as well. You're eminently a person one can talk to, Alec. No doubt that's why you haven't gone as far in the world as he has.”

“There are other reasons,” Alec assured her, “not so creditable as that.”

Lady Sadie uttered a small yelp of bitterness. “Do you think his brain is going? He stands there listening to pleas from the Kables about young Leeming. He listens on the grounds that Kable's father was connected with the expedition somehow and they feel there's no hope of an apotheosis for the great explorer unless young Leeming is let loose on him. Byron pretends to see their point, but all the time she stands there the old buffer's hopes are rising. Blatantly. He drags his eyes away from her to listen to solemn denunciations from Eric Kable.” She said in a thin prayerful voice, “God help us. He's been down to Milton once a week since that awful night the poet was at our place. On the flimsiest pretexts.” She began to splutter. “She's just not the right kind of adventure for a vice-chancellor. I'm simply more elegant than she is. It doesn't matter. The year will come when he'll bury me without a thought.”

Ramsey did his best to explain the handicaps of the male mind when faced with something so immediately savoury but ultimately poisonous as Valerie Kable. Lady Sadie said politely that male cant did not convince her. “It's not anything positive like hot blood that makes him behave the way he does. It's the vacancy of men, the lack of a gift for personal relationships. One always forgives their extramural ardours for the sake of what little sap there is in the marriage one has.” With surgical care, her sharp-tied shoe calmly divided a heap of gravel. “There's nothing I fear so much as the marriage I've had.”

Ramsey said that it would bewilder and possibly kill Chimpy if she left him. “Do you think Chimpy regards you as outweighed by that baroque compilation of hips and breasts?”

Suddenly Lady Mews was angry. “We all have to sacrifice one thing for another. But you think men are allowed to prefer one thing to another and indulge a list of whims in order of preference.”

Her hand gave up fury, though, and lay on her knee like something stray, to be lifted and petted. He tried to do such things, but may have had too much the air of the worldly-wise male quashing silly feminine fears; for she would not allow this mercy.

“Look, Sadie, you have him worried. Perhaps you've always been too reliable. You haven't taught him subtle female ways.” Perhaps that was why he fell to unsubtle Mrs Kable. “Believe me, your new qualities engross the poor old man, one way and another.”

She shook off Ramsey's casuistry. To win on these terms would never again satisfy honest Sadie Mews. “It's the lack of dignity. The vice-chancellor is agog. While that slut stands in front of him pleading for a lover more recent, or perhaps just more regular.” The rare spite with which she spat out the last word suggested that she may have been let down by Sir Chimpy's dwindling vital powers.

Ramsey soothed her to the extent of telling her there was reliable evidence that young Leeming was not Valerie's lover but Eric's.

A great part of Sadie's anger was drained by the scandal-power of his news. “I'm too simple-minded,” she marvelled. “There's a funny loyalty there, between the Kables, and an amazing compatibility.”

“They're held in balance by the tensions of their own mutual queerness,” Alec glibly diagnosed before seeing through himself and confessing, “It's better than nothing.”

“Well, I intend to rout them. Will you come with me, Alec?”

His status as confidant had Alec almost elated and almost wise. “My position is difficult,” he said. “I don't want Chimpy to think I've primed you for the act. We're allies, Sadie, you and I. As you don't want to be humbled in public, I don't want to have Leeming the elder dug up and vulgarly exposed by his nephew.” Who was he to be Nemesis to a vice-chancellor? “I've already spoken to Chimpy, you see, precisely on this point. Also, he's confided in me. About the change in your attitude, I mean.”

“He hasn't seen half of it,” Sadie told him. She kissed his cheek and strode off in her firmest gait.

It was surprising that once Ramsey had gone the young grain-buff sensed the submerged furies of Mrs Ramsey matched by Sanders' dreaminess; in fact, a joint hostility to grain research. So he left.

Sanders, too, felt that he was standing near a dynamo whose bearings ran hot, though not in any sense favourable to him. He said with proper male humility, “You people are very wrapped up in this Leeming business.”