“Indeed he was strong.”
Ramsey groaned. “Don’t expect not to be insulted if you keep on this tack.” But he kept on it himself. “Don’t believe the official history. Don’t believe his journal. They both deal in the species of lies that are known as facts. Leeming was no conventional leader. The same as no great poet is a conventional poet.” He drank again, and asked narrowly, “You’re a pretty conventional poet, aren’t you?”
“It might save you a lot of wasted irony if I tell you I’m not vulnerable on the score of poetry.” And he topped up Ramsey’s glass for vengeance’ sake. “You mention his journal. It really is so limited. So plausible and untrue, just like Scott’s as edited.”
“Of course it was limited. The journey was potentially a saga. If he’d written too perceptively about anyone, it might stand against that man in myth and legend and school textbooks for ever.” The liquor and his cavorting heart stirred him to metaphysics. “He seemed to believe that behaviour in the south proceeded on a different plane from behaviour elsewhere. Well, almost a different plane. He didn’t see why his journal should be perceptive and literary just for the sake of outsiders who didn’t understand the springs of behaviour in that other world. See?” From all this Ramsey lost syllables here and there; his legs were numb; his chest felt dissociated, like a balloon stuck in his hand at someone else’s none-too-joyous birthday party. He said, more or less, “Leeming didn’t do it for the titillation of dilettantes.”
“Who merely wanted to write poems on the subject?” the poet suggested.
“Who merely wanted to write poems on the subject. Nothing personal … well, nothing too personal … but literary midgets are always attracted by moral giants. Moral giants are one of the things that help make up for the limitations of art. Another is death. Young writers are keen on moral giants and on death as a means of saving their talents from having to stand on their own feet.”
“I bet you review in quarterlies. ‘Mr Schmaltz introduces a new vein into the Australian novel.’”
“Yeah, genius. That’d be a new vein. Christ it would!” Ramsey took a long mouthful, as if the poor state of the native novel entitled him to this compensation. “But how many great works deal with moral giants? How many, eh? Scarcely a one. Let that be a warning.”
Which the poet accepted with a pucker of the mouth. Meanwhile, Ramsey clucked to see that nearly half the bottle was gone. “Fast work,” he said.
The poet corked the bottle.
“Mrs Ramsey will have a grievance against me.”
“Mrs Ramsey? I don’t know any shrew of that name.”
“Ella.”
“Ella? Married to the director of Extension?”
“Yes.”
“Well, do I look like the director of Extension?”
“I think you’d prefer me to say no. So no.”
“When are you going to go home, anyhow?”
“Tomorrow morning’s plane. But I can cancel it if you feel you need me.”
“Ha!”
“Your trouble is you don’t pray.”
“Pray? I pray in season, don’t you worry. You couldn’t find a nicer chap to pray to than my God. He’s solid. He has collateral.” Ramsey remembered. “He’s secretary of Rotary. He reads an article a day from the Reader’s Digest and fears the Yellow Peril. What else can a man ask of the merely divine?”
“Yes, but that’s not prayer. That’s social observance, not prayer.”
Ramsey croaked venomously, “By Rotary means, in Rotary ways,/Help us, dear Lord, thy name to praise.”
“You don’t pray to your Christ.”
“My Christ? My Christ? Are you some sort of revivalist? I assure you, dear bard, I wouldn’t do anything so ill-bred as to claim proprietary in the Lord.”
“Leeming is your Christ.”
“And who am I? Just which Apostle?”
“I would say Saint Paul. The road to Damascus. Via Oates Land.”
Ramsey whistled, a startling blast, the sort farmers reserve for their cattle-dogs. “I forgot. It’s the mode to have a Christ figure. Any bumble-footed litterateur can spot one at a great distance. But I ask you again, how many great works feature Christ figures, Judas figures, Alphonsus Liguori figures, John XXIII figures or Archbishop of Canterbury figures? How many? Ah, a judgment on you literary people again.”
The poet laughed; a man who had pre-judged himself as mediocre and needed no one else’s crapulous judgment to fortify his sane sense of failure. Uneasily, Ramsey recognized the man’s humility.
“Your Leeming,” the poet was busily asserting, pleased with the literary neatness of it all, “fulfils all the puritan requirements of a Christ. He is morally perfect and divinely illumined … has a charism, as people say now and used to say in the first century. Besides, he has not fallen to the grave’s corruption. He has died for virtue and for many, but his sacrifice is not properly esteemed. And you are very sensitive about his death. Eric Kable tells me a story relevant to that. I met him at the Drama School today. I believe we’ve met before, but I wasn’t very self-aware at the time.…”
“Drama School!” Ramsey tried to bark. The poet’s symbolist cocksureness made him furious, but he felt disjointed, almost glutinous, unable to direct an attack. “Mrs Turner?”
“I have to admit it. I was there with Mrs Turner. I give you permission to write ‘The bard loves Mrs Turner’ on lavatory walls, if you have to.”
Ramsey gave up this right with a tiny movement of his hand.
“I was saying, you are very sensitive about his death, as if you had added dimensions to his passion and death. And now, behold, he will come again to judge the living—you. And the dead—Lloyd.”
Ramsey stood at the second attempt. The mountains shivered again and there was actually a tranquil madonna with child and baby-carriage in the park. “That’s clever,” he said. “So you wouldn’t care that it’s so bloody objectionable.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You come to me waving a banner that reads, ‘Don’t jolt the old man, don’t rub him up.’ But that’s only a blind for forcing your ratbag eschatology on me.”
“Your ratbag eschatology, Alec. We’re talking about the way you see the man.”
Ramsey moaned through closed teeth, took up the stapling machine and hurled it at the poet. The poet raised his guard, taking the stapler on the pad of the shoulder. It fell to the floor with a pernicious clatter.
Instantly Barbara was rat-tat-tatting shortly and repeatedly on the office door. “Mr Ramsey. Mr Ramsey!”
“It’s all right,” the poet called. “Mr Ramsey dropped the stapler on his foot.”
But Barbara was baffled, otherwise she would have been in the room by now. “Is it all right, Mr Ramsey?” she wanted to know from Alec’s own mouth. She asked tremulously and as if she would never be taken in again by any gold karate of the sun.
Ramsey told her to go away. From the outer office came the shufflings of her considerable disillusionment.
At last the poet said, “Our trouble is that we’re still capable of making firmaments and ultimates for ourselves, but have lost the gift of praying and making oblations.”
“Oblations? To Leeming?”
“Yes.”
“You sound like some sort of bloody queer.”
“Said like a true atheist Manichee. But tell me what your sweat’s about, what’s your shuddering? Acceptance, prayer, oblation aren’t any more grotesque than they are. On the question of Leeming you have a fanatic’s sense of reverence, a votary’s hysteria. That’s bad, because the man was interesting, but not without precedents. When I recommend you to undertake some ritual of expiation as a cure, you ask me with a sensitivity the gutter press would be proud of whether I’m some sort of bloody queer. Well, you may have doubts about me, but I know about you. You’re just a poor de-mythologized Protestant being beaten to death by your own myth.”
Ramsey, far gone in liquor and drugs alone, hissed, “And what are you, yo
u smart Robert-Gravesy bastard?”
“I’m a poor de-mythologized Protestant whose main protest is that Mrs Turner won’t take a tumble with me. But if I were in thrall, like you, I’d take a ritual way out of it. I would perform rituals of expiation.”
“Are you joking?”
“Rites are better therapy than tranquillizers.”
“And epigrams are no bloody use at all.”
The exultation of his body seemed to have run on ahead of him, shuddering. The speed of the blood and the chugging of the heart went to create distances between him and reality: the walls, the atmosphere. He sat panting.
“It is no use my being glib, is it?” the poet admitted. “You should never have come back to work. A doctor should see you.”
Ramsey did not answer. The poet composedly searched for and found Ramsey’s number and rang it. Alec was surprised to hear his unhappy Ella chirp at the other end of the line.
At last, the doctor harried him to sleep with an injection. While he lay drowsing and relatively content with the postponement induced by drugs, the slow corners of his mind licked at one crucial memory of Leeming.
Ramsey was out along the ice-foot killing one of the hundred and fifty seals the dogs would devour that winter. It was no sport; the Weddells died negligently, receiving the bullet with curiosity. Hauling them uphill to the seal-meat depot was also no sport. To help him he had Steve, the base electrician who had meant to winter with his girl in Hobart, but who, when the regular electrician sickened, had been coerced into landing. Steve was twenty-one years old, plaintive, small help.
Steve and Ramsey were pulling a carcass up the contour of a hill when all shape and shadow vanished, all hint of rise and fall. Both men were affected much the same. There was a catch of hysteria in their throats; they wanted to break out. For they seemed to be locked in the belly of a muddy pearl; and further, the irrepressible conviction was carried to Ramsey that he was standing on a brink with a long flight of stairs threatening his heels.
Each man slipped off his harness and withdrew to the unavailing shape of the dead seal.
It quickly occurred to them that they must leave this poor point of reference. At every step Ramsey dropped the rifle ahead of them to see where the earth was. The shadowless length of the weapon floated at their feet in miasma. Grimacing, they took the step.
Somewhere to their left front and no more than four hundred yards away stood the hut. They must turn left at the crest of their hill. Having done this, but too early, they stumbled on ice slopes. Steve went frenzied at each of his falls, and Ramsey dragged him upwards to a better surface. In the south, where the uniformity of the vicious pearl was streaked with a threatened blizzard, they could hear wind brewing. Ramsey longed for the more accustomed blindness of the high wind to break on them. When it came, though at more than seventy knots, it soothed them.
Three hours later they were still raking the blizzard for their hut and both had the club-footed sensation of frostbite. They shouted and cut the blindness diagonally, travelling what they guessed to be north-east, turning back to what they guessed was south-west, turning back again after what they guessed to be a few hundred yards. They were still busy at their besotted transversals when a line of men from the hut, roped to each other by the waist, ran into them.
Then the ravishment of warm soup and indoors, where decent shadows were thrown by everything, even the Bovril pot on the table; such a neat little belly of shadow that you could cry at its beauty.
They kept holding a hot-water bottle to Ramsey’s nose, and took off his finnesko and the two socks on each foot. Leeming broke through the ring of attendants and made a mouth at the livid state of Ramsey’s right foot. Then he untoggled the front of his union-suit and the cardigan and raked up the inner garments of Jaeger fleece to expose his chest. It was clear to Ramsey that Leeming intended to take the dead foot against his own body and, closing all the clothes again, nurse the blood back to the ghastly flesh. The concept was intolerable: for Ramsey to plant his foot in the black hair above Leeming’s heart; for Ramsey to condone this intimacy which Leeming offered in ignorance of the true and sad kinship they shared in Mrs Leeming.
The ankle struggled in Leeming’s grip, and in the end escaped. Leeming readjusted the layers of his clothing without question. Everyone fell silent, sensing a sexual reference in the refusal, but unable to define it. There was an air of assent in the hut that Leeming’s motives had been questioned. Ramsey could read it in the men who continued to knead his frostbites. They felt none the less that after his morning in the blizzard he was excusable.
In a dusk of sleep forty years later, Ramsey was still disturbed by his refusal to accept decently this mercy that, as he had later discovered, was knowingly offered.
Asleep, he dreamt of this same ritual. No dithering dream of subfusc colour and inchoate event, it was of the rare sort by which the wisdom of the mind that lies beneath articulation forces change upon the mind that speaks. The scene was broken ice on a glacier primitively caricatured into a white presence with pinnacles. Similarly caricatured was dying Leeming, whose face Ramsey looked at once only, shredded as it was into neat iced tassels of hanging flesh, the eyes stagnated to umber gluten of no meaning whatever.
Leeming sat as in his last days on what was likely to prove a sledge but was iced up, bolsters of ice encroaching round the sick man’s thighs to give, sardonically, the appearance of a throne.
Into the dream was written the knowledge that Leeming had suffered stroke and that his extremities were five times more liable to the winds that prefaced the close of the sledging season. A love of religious proportions moved Ramsey and pardoned Leeming for his blunt eyes and bizarre face. The religious quality was inevitable, for Ramsey naturally thought that the sufferings of great men consecrated their bodies. So the threat of ice to the feet and hands seemed to Ramsey barbarous, not to be countenanced.
All was simplicity. It would take an exercise of courage and, above all, humility; and consciously Ramsey moulded himself to the exercise. He stripped Leeming’s feet and opened his own clothing to that old carnivore, the polar wind. He unbuttoned the flesh of his chest as easily as any of the other layers of warmth so that Leeming should have the poor comfort of treading into the core of his vitals. So the leader, blind as an idol, trod about in Ramsey’s guts.
The pain was sharp enough to wake him. “Christ, Christ!” he began to moan at it, for blasphemy’s sake and not in verification of the poet’s theories. By the normal rules of sleep, he should have awoken and sat upright, groping for a bedside light. Yet he clung with both fists to the major reality of the dream. His heart burst like fruit as Leeming tramped wildly as peasants showing off in vats at wine festivals. Blood as thin and hot as coffee ran down him and made steamy runnels in the ice. He uttered curses against Leeming while the geyser of sizzling blood ate the pinnacles down and sucked a moat deeper and riotously deeper into the foundations of the ice-throne.
At length it was shown to be a church sedile of banal make on which Leeming sat with a look of blind dominance on his face. On either arm of the sedile was written, I have made my bed in the darkness. I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister. Ramsey was startled to read this, and looked in question at Leeming. Were these words a profession of preference on Leeming’s part, or had some zealous parson ordered them when the chair was still at the joinery works?
The face, whose monstrosities were actually arranged to convey smugness, made no admissions.
Pain forgotten, Ramsey was still puzzling when the sedile and its imperial figure began to slide in the wash of blood and rode away, not at all like flotsam, rather like a barge-of-state. He knew that it changed matters immensely for him to have caused that unwedging. It occurred to him to make a pun, he was so elated. “This is what they mean by a solution,” he said aloud.
When Ramsey woke the final time it was to the small stutter of the drawn Venetian blinds caught in a min
imal breath of air. There was something about the noise and the air and the quality of the light that told him it was mid-morning. This fact, and the busy noises of diesels at the North Street depot, failed to reproach him for his late rise. He was refreshed and self-contained. He felt freed of obsessions, but was not: they had merely taken a more generous turn in his sleep.
He saw that the bed was medicinally tidy and tucked about, and that he lay in it tidily. Without anxiety, he wondered whether the dream had been heart-attack and if he was a patient.
There was talk from the living-room. Ella gabbling in drained monotone, and a specious lark of a voice tacking and swooping above Ella’s: Mrs Kable; and listening again, he heard Eric Kable rumble out something interrogative.
He pulled on his bathrobe and stood performing guarded strong-man gestures before the full-length mirror, countenancing the gnarled calves below the robe. If the Kables had called as mourners, he would go in to them limbered.
In this spirit, dressed only to the knees, and all knots and nubbles below them, he passed into the hall. Here Ella’s Inca head had waited gaping on the occasional table since the previous morning. The surprised Indian features had dust on them and didn’t seem to Ramsey to be facing any more than a banal tragedy. He would not tell Ella; but he did make a mouth in imitation, and asked mockingly, “Anal thermometer broke, did it, friend?”
He lifted the face and took it in to Ella.
“You should hang this, dear.”
She told him he should still be sleeping. The peculiar harshness of her voice, which only he could recognize as contrite, delighted him. She could not be loving in a facile way, and she knew that their trouble was likely to recur. Looking wistful, she put out her hand and squeezed his wrist.
He welcomed the Kables with the rich hypocrisy their act called forth in him.
“Eric and Valerie called in to see how you were,” Ella explained. “I must have given them the wrong impression yesterday.”
“How kind,” he said. He was looking at Ella, who sat side-on and as if allied to him. Her loose summer shift, large enough to hide a pregnancy, gave her a Gauguin simplicity, and the sweet line of her shoulder giving on to her back and hips stirred his pulse. The legs, three-quarters visible and chastely joined at the knees, for once did not look too blatantly like the proud quarters of a dairy-farmer’s daughter. Alec stood pulsing like an athlete beneath the bathrobe. “I feel a new man,” he claimed, not altogether figuratively.