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The Survivor
A Novel
Thomas Keneally
To W.H. CROOK
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Those familiar with Antarctic affairs will notice that liberties have been taken for the sake of this fiction. On the domestic scene, the Antarctic Division, even in the days when it was an agency of the Department of External Affairs, had no Sydney office. In a broader Antarctic context, one of Leeming’s parties should have discovered the Usarp Mountains, which were not in fact located until 1960. Nothing would have been achieved by forestalling fictionally the United States traverse party that made the discovery.
The characters of Leeming and Ramsey are not based on those of any historic Antarctic journeyers. Similarly, no don, living or dead, has a counterpart among the provincial academics who appear in this book.
I must thank, however inadequately, Rear-Admiral J. L. Abbot, USN, commander of Operation Deep Freeze, whose generosity enabled me to see the Antarctic continent, and the Commonwealth Literary Fund, with whose help this book was written.
1
At the beginning of his sixty-third, decisive summer, Alec Ramsey drove down from his university town on the tableland to the wheat, sheep, and cattle towns on the inland plains. Beyond Milton, where he picked up Kable, the browned fields and retarded crops of wheat seemed omens, strangers to this rich plain, wandered in from a remoter west for one bad season. Kable, assistant director of Extension (as he was called) and Ramsey’s lieutenant, was cheery. Ramsey had often heard that Kable coveted the post of director; and he would have given it up to Kable without much argument that summer. In the meantime, Kable directed the large Extension office the university kept in Milton, eighty miles from the campus itself. Kable’s succulent bride, Valerie, saw to it that when she and her spouse were in Alec Ramsey’s presence they maintained a sober tone of almost antiphonal, versicle-and-response naivety, luring others into forays of irony and self-betrayal. But away from Valerie, Kable could not manage to keep this front up. For instance, he asked with a directness Valerie would have found alien, “Alec, why didn’t Morris Pelham do this trip?”
Alec told him that Pelham’s wife was sick and that Pelham was already up to the ears in planning the programme of summer schools. Did Kable think Pelham could do a better job where they were going? Kable chuckled.
They were going to a town called Pinalba to make arrangements for a visit there by a Duke of Edinburgh study group. Both of them knew how the self-made men of Pinalba felt civically proud for the honour but sensed in their bones that the project was somehow quaint, precious. Pinalba was a town for selling irrigation equipment in, for shipping beef from, for the playing of bowls and the having of florid alcoholic adventures in. It was hard to imagine that something as familiar and earthy as Pinalba could be an object of disciplined study. If their wives had been offered film contracts they would not have been more suspicious. The mayor, informed by trunkline call from Ramsey, had, in the second before shire pride suffused him, said, “You’re not really bloody serious!”
Now Kable said he had a proposition to make to Ramsey, and put on a face of menial apology. He had conditionally agreed that Ramsey should speak to the Pinalba Rotarians that night.
“On what?” asked Ramsey, without needing to, since his rare and widely publicized lectures had given him a name in the north of the state as a professional survivor of what probably figured in the minds of the men of Pinalba as some damned expedition or other.
“The gentleman who arranges for guest speakers thought the Antarctic business … well, they’d be interested in that sort of thing. They’re men of action and, at the moment, it’s well worth our while to get them interested, if not enthralled.”
They crossed a wooden bridge thirty miles from the town. The timbers rang against each other and Ramsey would have had to shout to be heard. Instead he frowned all the way across without glancing towards Kable. He hoped this would undermine the man, but knew that Kable was more likely to be despising him for his primness about Leeming than having any genuine second thoughts.
Clear of the bridge, Ramsey said, “When was that particular conditional arrangement made?”
“This morning, by telephone. I took the liberty—”
“Liberty is the exact word for it.”
“Now look, Alec, I can’t speak to them.… I have already, four times in two years. But I made it clear, of course, the decision was yours. Just the same, since we depend on the population outside the university for the success of our work, I thought you would probably be willing.”
Ramsey was angry enough to put forward an argument that Kable would have no trouble pre-judging and precondemning. “Your father wouldn’t have made that presumption. Your father was very reticent about Leeming.” Kable’s father had been secretary to the 1924 expedition. Nor were Kable and Ramsey the only links within the university with that unaccountably forgotten journey, for Leeming’s nephew worked in the physics department. Ramsey thought in vague terms of this fact as something perverse.
Kable said, “My father was reticent by nature. Besides, he died a long time ago. I was seventeen, I think.” There were overtones to this, Ramsey was sure, overtones that meant, “My father died in 1932. Since then? The depression, the Spanish war, the rape of Central Europe, the decimation of Jews, the bomb, the ICBM, the computer, the Yangtze’s annual flooding to the tune of two million deaths. Isn’t it getting late in the century to go maidenly over the death of a polar death-seeker in the 1920s?”
About to lose his temper, Ramsey was sickened to sobriety by the vision of sharing two days’ meals with Kable in Pinalba, of showing the university’s flag with him, jollying up the graziers and the mayor, the local radio station and the editor of the tri-weekly paper. For his sanity’s sake, Ramsey needed Kable’s good will—or what passed, between Kable and himself, for good will.
Kable had at least the grace to suppress immediately the overtones, the comment they implied. He went on in a begging-to-inform sort of way, “If the study-group programme is to be properly planned, Alec, we’ll have to charm them into pledging facilities now—making their properties available for inspection and so on. What they do for the study group will be based on pledges they give us within the next few days, and the pledges will be based on how much good feeling we generate. I mean, look at it from their point of view. A person doesn’t necessarily rush at the idea of having royalty and assorted other people tramping through the homestead garden asking about sheep dip.”
Alec said, “I wish to God I knew something about Santa Gertrudis cattle.”
Kable chose to laugh. “A safer topic for Pinalba,” he agreed.
At the moment, ahead of their car, a farmer in an idling tractor talked with a farmer in an idling truck. Between them, they occupied without any self-consciousness half of the narrow highway, and Ramsey had to edge blindly round them on the wrong side of the tar. But before he had done even that, they focused his irritation at being expected to speak, after a mock-ritual dinner in a country pub, about the grotesqueries of the pure and dreadful continent. He saw them glance sideways as he honked them in passing, and chose to decide that they reacted to the university shield on the car door with a grain of off-hand awe and a ton of off-hand contempt, as if it were something as irrelevant as Kant’s theory of knowledge that was passing them by on wheels. Bloody frontiersmen! Endowed by accidents of history with six-cylinder cars, refrigerated beer, twenty-five-tine scarifiers, crop-dusting, a twice-daily flight to Sydney. Chagrined at them over Leeming, he envied them for exuding ownership as he had never been able to. Their sweat was
proprietorial sweat, their laughter owned towns and pastures.
Then, swinging the car into a clear vista of bitumen and what were, after all, ailing paddocks, he corrected himself and almost confessed his narrowness with a laugh. But, by managing briefly to care that Kable would be likely to use it against him in other company, he checked the admission. “As old Alec will admit himself in his more clear-headed moments.…”
So Ramsey kept his balance until that evening, when the Rotarians gathered for dinner. Then he was immediately irked by the way Eric Kable introduced him to the burghers of Pinalba.
“This is Alec Ramsey, my boss from the university.” (My world is not alien to yours of wool prices, departmental inspections, transport costs. I, too, strive on a level of reality. As witness, here is—not my director, not my departmental head—my boss!)
Yet Ramsey had ceased to worry about status and would not have resented the same quirk in Morris Pelham.
Everyone wore a round white badge three times the width of his lapel. The badges said such things as:
J. M. P. Harcourt
“Harker”
Classification:
Stud Beef Breeding.
When Ramsey and Kable first arrived, all these badges had been standing alphabetically in a rack on the wall, and M. T. Seagram (“Bantam”, Harvesting Equipment) had had charge of handing them to their proper owners: the Jims, Petes, Tossers, Midges, Lofties, and Skeeters who had found the promised land in Pinalba. Patient M. T. Seagram was hard put to it pressing a badge marked “Guest Speaker” on Alec, who tried to pocket it.
“It’s all right. Don’t be bashful, Alec—it is Alec, isn’t it? Yeah, don’t be bashful.”
The headmaster of Pinalba’s high school laughed and offered to pin the thing on.
“Is that straight?” Alec wanted to know, squinting down the line of his chest out of his salient eyes at the fatuous disc on his lapel. “Sure you wouldn’t like me to tie a bow of blue ribbon around my balls?”
The headmaster hooted. M. T. Seagram said, “Only on ladies’ nights.”
They sang the hymn “By Rotary means, in Rotary ways, Help us, dear Lord, thy name to praise.” Then those thin, embittered women who serve the meals in country hotels brought in the soup. The president rose and Brother Eric Kable was thanked for bringing along tonight’s guest speaker, Mr Alec Ramsey of the university, who was going to speak about an expedition he’d been on to.… Where was it, Alec? Alec told him, with secret malice, “Oates Land.” The man who arranged the speeches mumbled something which Alec hoped was a rebuke, but the invincible president merely blinked. “Yes, well I’m sure we’re all looking forward to hearing about it later on in the evening,” he said. Self-made, in making himself he had had no time to assimilate Antarctic geography and was now not ashamed for what was an honourable ignorance. Improperly, this was why, as he stood asking for volunteers to attend a field day in some distant town, Alec could easily have let himself rise up and strike the man.
The sergeant-at-arms forestalled him by standing and fining members for a range of esoteric offences. He was a Texan, some Pinalba girl’s dreamboat from a U.S. aircraft carrier, lost to Galveston, selling refrigerators on a plain beyond mountains in Australia. And rising during the second course of shreddy corned-beef and saying, “President Lance, I have it on good authority that Pete Hogben was seen carrying Nancy Spurling’s parcels for her in the Pinalba Mall last Saturday. Now Nancy being a far from undelectable girl and Clive Spurling being away in Sydney, it seems to me that Pete may be hatching something contrary to the sanctity of the matrimonial state and a little fine might make him think about that seriously.” And Pete rose calling some fellow Rotarian a bloody Judas and fumbling for twenty-cent pieces.
As everyone laughed through their pulpy mouthfuls, Ramsey went cold and was as homesick as a child for Ella and for his cool and different tableland.
“President Lance, I have it on similarly good authority that Russ Healey, when asked to navigate a carload of bowlers home from the Killarney open day, was so—shall we say?—inebriated that the vehicle finished in a ditch on a cotton farm that happened to belong to a fellow-countryman of mine. Just when the Prime Minister is busting a most venerable gut to further friendly relations with God’s Own Country, Russ undoes it all by this act of drunken aggression.”
Laughter, laughter. Well, hadn’t some of them been ditched along with sodden Russ Healey?
“I’ll tell you what,” one of the survivors was saying above catcalls. “It could of been serious, but by Christ it was funny at the time. You know what the bastard said when we came to a stop? The car’s on an angle of forty-five and the windshield’s gone and he leans back and says, ‘Well, that’s about as far as we’ll get tonight,’ and he goes to sleep.”
The demoniac Texan sat down for a moment to finish his vegetables. M. T. Seagram leant over to Alec. “Where was it he said you’d been?”
“Well, that was where the base was really. Oates Land.”
“Oh.” M. T. Seagram took a guess. “Africa?”
“Antarctica.”
“Antarctica?”
“Leeming’s last expedition.”
“Leeming? I’ve heard the name.…”
“You probably heard of him at school.”
“Bantam” nudged the man at his side. “Bloody intelligentsia, me.”
Stung to action by “Bantam’s” pretensions, the sad and craggy ladies began to serve jam tart with custard. Alec sat nursing his jaw and inhaling deeply while his stomach yawned in panic at the thought of violent, anti-social, and unprofessional gestures. “I’ll hit someone,” he mourned to himself. “I’ll hit that bloody ‘Bantam’, I’ll strangle that ugly American in his own nasal twang.” He felt sick, beyond work, febrile with hostility. It was the staple agony of his life that they were making mock of with their fines-box and mace. If it got beyond him he would hit somebody; so he promised himself, and cut the caterer’s paste of tart and custard with a casual spoon. And by an action at the back of the throat halfway between a yawn and a retch, he reduced it to a swallowable state while reading the Rotary banners that covered the walls. Rotarie de Le Mans, Rotarie von Hagen, Rotary Club of Akron, Ohio, all served to underline the brotherhood of Clive Spurling, Pete Hogben, Russ Healey and his ditched brethren. In Le Mans, Hagen and Akron, and in Saskatoon, Tampico, Spanish Town, Torquay and Groningen, the fellowship of J. M. P. Harcourt and M. T. Seagram was fortnightly concelebrated and mystically fortified. And someone who should have known better rose to bawl, “President Bert or Kurt, President Lance or Franz, I have it on good authority.…”
M. T. Seagram’s neighbour spoke over the bent back of jam-tart-savouring M. T. Seagram.
“Hey, didn’t Leeming die or something like that?”
“Something like that. Though tell me one damned thing that bears similarity to death.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That’s how you can always tell an Australian. He uses I beg your pardon interrogatively.”
By a hair’s-breadth, M. T. Seagram’s friend avoided begging it once more—just as interrogatively as last time. He was hurt, Ramsey couldn’t help but see. He was right to be hurt. Any man who interrupted a club dinner by means of metaphysics and a touch of language-use was a bastard.
“Leeming died on a glacier in Antarctica,” Ramsey called out in urgent politeness to the man two spaces away.
The Rotarian accepted this: his anger hadn’t had time to set, and he realized or suspected that Ramsey was, this way or that, one of the bereaved.
“He has my respect, going to that place.”
“He has mine too,” Ramsey responded with a belligerency that luckily passed for intense reverence.
“I suppose you must—”
But the sergeant-at-arms was up again, shooting the cuffs of his drip-dry, reaching for his box.
“President Lance, I have it on good authority that yesterday was Eric Kable’s wedding anniversary. It seems he’s
been paying for his mistake for eighteen years now, and …”
Ramsey whispered to Seagram, “Excuse me,” stood up urgently, rasping his chair and actually depressing Seagram’s shoulders in his apparently bilious urgency, and signalling with his eyes for the man who had thought Leeming had died or something to pull his chair in close to the board and make a passageway.
“… that since Valerie Kable is such a lovely lady and since his possession is our loss …,” the sergeant-at-arms was braying.
Ramsey considered calling to him in mid-flight something such as, “Don’t fool yourself, Davy Crockett. She’d take on anyone but the barber’s cat. And ask Brother Eric if he isn’t a queer?”
Behind him murmurs of awakening concern developed, so he took the stairs quickly. At the street door he failed by a fraction to have the courage of his anger, to turn into the saloon bar and later be found, quietly drinking there, by Kable and President Lance and the mace-rattling Texan who would no doubt try to fine him for sickening at dinner. He regretted that he was still too aware of his mission in the town to deliberately construct that insult, to make it clear that he favoured the drifting population of the bar against the communion of elders upstairs. Grudgingly, he turned into the street.
It was a night of dry warmth in Pinalba, whose town-lights scarcely restrained the sharp stars. All sounds were distanced, as he wanted them to be after the rowdy brotherhood upstairs. There was a lonely argument, high, forlorn voices, progressing in the doorway of the coloured peoples’ pub. The very way it came to the ear told you that you were in a flat town and a town that was at the hour of plate-scraping and tea-leaves.
Not his town. He fled it as far as the river, and was listening to a small weir functioning somewhere in the dark when Kable found him.
“Is there anything I can do, Alec?” Kable asked like someone lodging a complaint.
“They don’t give a damn.…” But he knew he was making himself even more absurd by saying it. In fact, shrouded in the long dying fronds of a willow that infringed the foot-bridge, Alec heard but did not see Kable despairing of him in the dark.