“Denis, we’ve enough to discuss—”
“Yes, let’s discuss genuine failures.” There was no misreading his state now. Sir Chimpy was aware too, his head at an askance angle. “Aunt Belle called you hard.…”
Ramsey wanted to ask did she mean the word in the sense she had favoured it in her youth.
“… I said no, not him. He’s no Iron Chancellor. He’s certainly no Iron Director of Extension.…”
Alec’s big hands threatened to fly to the lapels of Leeming’s dinner-suit; the poet stood by, making noises of disgust, but those of a man who enjoys being in at a conflict. Alec announced that he was very remorseful at offending Mrs Leeming and that he would not risk doing it again.
But Leeming, touched on his paranoia, was looking for hidden barbs in everything that was said. “That’s an ambiguous enough statement,” he surprised Alec by saying. “Though they tell me ambiguity is built into you. I hear Morris Pelham and Eric Kable think so, anyhow.”
A dissenting Pelham and Sir Byron had begun to move in. But that creature of vulpine loyalty had already prowled up on Leeming’s left. She opened her mouth at the same time as the poet; there was a garbled outcry from both.
“No, no,” Ramsey said, restraining them. He actually feared a scene and had time to marvel wanly at this sign of new health.
Ella murmured, “Go away, Denis.” All the silent cast heard her, enslaved by her voice that, rarefied in anger, hinted at the gods of electric eloquence who preside over any stage. Then Sir Chimpy was there, calling on their good sense. The air of good sense he himself gave off diluted Ella’s Medusan presence. Then Pelham, telling Leeming he would make his own complaints, thank you. And the poet saying Ramsey himself hadn’t been well lately.
Leeming questioned the adverb.
Ella’s handbag was of a soft metal called Oroton. Hefty with a large part of Ella’s current bookkeeping, with brushes and toiletries and an old paperback novel, when swung against Leeming’s temple it stunned him and raised a few parallel scratches on his forehead. He stood back, cherishing one side of his head in both hands.
Ramsey was the first to him, and grotesquely sympathetic. The poet smiled discreetly; Sir Chimpy’s jaws fell away into bags of incredulity at this further instance of woman abusing man’s good faith, while the Kables frowned, eyes feverishly significant, swapping the ocular equivalent of a nudge.
Mrs Turner brewed up peace with the tea, and carried both to the wings where Sir Chimpy, the Kables and the Lysander youth were tending Leeming. The decent mercies of tea were then extended to the people on stage. Ella held cup and saucer stubbornly. “I won’t go home,” she warned Ramsey. Not till she had shown everyone that she didn’t blush for Leeming’s injuries.
“You know young Leeming?” the poet said, coming up fondling his cup in a confidential way. They could hear Valerie clucking over Leeming’s forehead and see Eric standing by, frowning in enchantment at this latest Ramsey atrocity. “Young Leeming is over thirty. One forgets that, hearing people, even people in Canberra, speak about him as if he hasn’t yet come into his estate, as if he can be expected to soon, and as if it will be some estate. People are continually saying, ‘When he learns.…’, and going on to mention this or that social virtue the marvellous lad still lacks. Well, how many social virtues do you pick up after thirty, unless they’re already there in germ? I tended to lose all mine.”
Ramsey said in self-judgment, “If you had you wouldn’t joke about it.”
Some minutes later he went himself to check on Leeming’s state and, finding that even Mrs Kable, her face rapt with a votive anguish, could not manage to predict worse than mild concussion, asked Sir Byron’s permission to go home. Given it, he felt bound by office to speak to these people. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he called.
“What right have you to stand, even, on this bloody stage?” Leeming was well enough to say. “How have you contributed?”
Ramsey prepared to fend Ella away, but she remained, a bleak lady, midstage. The shabby peace-making of these academics deflated her; she would have been a tower in the days when resentments were hoarded and written off in blood.
“There was a time when I did contribute to most things that happened here. I suppose that’s why I’ve been allowed to last beyond what a lot of people would say was all reasonable decline.”
Pelham rumbled a denial; Sir Chimpy swept the admission aside with a motion of his hand, seeming to think it not so much untrue as irrelevant. It was of course, as Ramsey could see, a mean sample of public self-flaying, designed to force his enemies and disadmirers back onto their hind-legs as they thought, “He’s culpable maybe; but at least he’s honest.” He thanked, in the partially successful hiatus he had thus created, the actors and Tim for the evening of enchantment they had created. This phrase pleased Sir Chimpy, who raised it to the level of legislation by fervently grunting. Ramsey ended in hoping they would excuse him.
He and Ella had already made the corridor when Leeming, trailing his nunlike Titania, caught up with them and placed himself in front of them. He had strangely reverted to his earlier, deep-frozen brand of anger.
“I’ll be looking after Aunt Belle’s interests in the matter,” he told them. “There’s the press and television.…” Like many scholars, he invoked the names of the media as hostile gods yet worth placating, present holders of the horn of plenty. “The funeral—presuming there is a funeral—will get a wide coverage.” Somehow he knew that Ramsey would be hurt by this news. “You’ll be expected to attend without causing trouble.”
“Indeed,” Ramsey told him, “the world will remember your uncle for unreal causes. Because his body surfaced intact after forty years. The world is interested in that sort of stunt.”
“I simply wanted to warn you,” Leeming claimed tolerantly. “We won’t tolerate any tantrums at the graveside.”
Valerie took him by the arm. The womenfolk led their knights off in opposite directions, uncertain of the extent of their injuries.
As he should have expected, Ella had forgotten her handbag, and now remembered that the theatre was used by the English Department during the day. It was reasonable enough, she argued, that she should not want to lose to some undergraduate such an item in her armoury and the papers it contained. Ramsey hoped he merely imagined that the bag seemed to have endeared itself especially to her on account of its having started Leeming’s blood.
She insisted on being driven back to the university. At first Alec suspected her: what woman ever forgot her handbag, such an intimate extension of herself? Ella raised both arms and flapped them, so that even under her coat the bag must have been most cunningly disguised not to rattle or drop.
Back at the stage-door, she refused to be taken inside, like someone under suspicion, by Ramsey.
She met Mrs Kable in the dressing-room corridor.
“I have to get out of this drag,” said Valerie. She sounded friendly, as if she was actually grateful to Ella for her having behaved true to form. “These our actors as I foretold you.…”
And on the fading pronoun she idled with regret into the ladies’ room.
Everyone on stage helped Mrs Ramsey in her search for the bag. They could tell that she was one of the people whom they must be rid of before a hard-core party could start. Sir Chimpy could not be seen, but Pelham was still there, tenacious, restricting the affair to a mere sherried function. It was Pelham who found the bag, against the leg of a table. It and an impression of gruff exhaustion Ella received from him.
Rounding the prop table into the corridor, she saw Denis Leeming edge out of the men’s lavatory and blink up and down the passage. She halted and breathed low. Her hip knocked Bottom’s ass’s head over, but she caught it as it fell. Its papier-mâché noises did not carry to furtive Denis Leeming.
By one of the dressing-rooms was a small properties cupboard. Leeming opened its door and entered. In lieu of the bedroom of his fellowship flat, Ella thought, occupied by Aunt Belle. She even m
uttered in the shadows, “Ah, Mrs Kable, I’m onto one of your earths.”
A fast survey of the ladies’ dressing-room showed it empty. Conclusion: Valerie had preceded her lover into a dusty tryst. And, given the unhelpful milieu, would not waste time becoming impassioned. Ella decided to wait two minutes and blunder into the pantry, an ingenue enlisting them for a search after her handbag, which she would leave here on the props table.
In childhood she had learnt to measure time by how long it took to say a Lord’s prayer. Even in her agnosticism she still used the method, seeing little that was absonant in prayer used as a rein on impatience until Titania should become ignited.
She was close to the pantry door, in the open corridor, without cover, when doubt found her. It suggested that Mrs Kable and Leeming, at love, would not be simply antic; there would be the strident physical realities to be faced which, when matched with the lovers’ flaws of personality, could or should bring one closer to nausea than to laughter. So she saw with some self-disgust that she was doing something less than supporting Ramsey by bringing discomfort to his enemies, that she was less than loyal; a mere rampant sense of grievance seeking an object.
This sense of grievance was, of course, keyed to break in on the male-female grotesqueries of Titania and Demetrius. It found in the first place darkness, and then, taking some seconds to locate the switch, two half-naked blinking males—Eric Kable with his cravat at least intact.
Her primitive sense of morality, bred matriarchally in a dairy farmhouse, saw this coupling as worse than sickening; she was horrified to the womb—horrified authentically and not in the sense in which some people use the word to mean mere moral titillation. Though their hairy, knotted, pallid-to-tan legs stood before her, it was a conviction of her own nakedness in front of their intention of seed directed away from the womb that set her running in her cowgirl lope directly out-of-doors. In the open, she remembered that her bag was still at the far end of the corridor, by Bottom’s ass’s head; but damned it to remain.
Next morning the small hours turned cold, and Ramsey, early to work, spent his time till ten secretly ordering his papers for a successor. Sometimes he heard people downstairs dimly braying about the weather, or loudly predicting a hard winter as they passed each other in the doorway of Extension. Despite these hints of the lateness of the season, it failed to occur to him that decisions about Leeming the elder would be made today, even the venomous decision to give him a home burial with honours. What most diverted Ramsey was Barbara’s shufflings in the outer office, Barbara serenely shuffling in the sure hope of at least another three years out of her figurehead. It was a pleasure, petty but sharp, to suck on the truth: that the king of Extension was withdrawing from the top, leaving Barbara a pygmy figure staring up through the slats of a vacant throne.
About ten o’clock, when Ramsey was relishing the triumph of having stopped Barbara from feeding him buttered bun with his tea, the poet appeared again in the outer office. He came in wary and amenable, rather like the poet Ramsey had met in the first place, on the steps downstairs last October. Today he would leave the office at Ramsey’s word if it were given; leave without any silly demonstration of power on Ramsey’s part, such as calling for George from the parking-area gate.
“Would you believe me if I said I was going home tonight?” the poet asked.
Ramsey laughed, on guard. He feared the man’s presence as something that would force him back to urgencies he had been free of that morning. “I’d take your word,” he said.
“You may hear rumours in the coming weeks that Mrs Turner and I have been … betrothed. It’s true. I’m coming back at Easter to marry Mrs Turner and raise our long-odds offspring as—of all damn things!—R.Cs.”
He waited for Ramsey to mock the news and point at the doubt it threw on his motives for visiting the tableland. But Ramsey was, as always, mutable and held silence.
“Now,” said the poet, “although my journey ended with Mrs Turner, it began with you.”
“And I’ve benefited by it,” Ramsey admitted, and was surprised to find it the truth. “You’re a meddling bastard, a real church elder. But I’ve benefited.”
“I have to admit I was hoping for a reward by the way. I was hoping for the drum on Antarctica, I was thinking you might cough up some Antarctic quintessence, something that can’t be learnt from the journals.”
“I won’t be giving you that.”
“I know. But at least I’m on my way to beard old Mrs Leeming. I believe there was a time when she would have given me some sort of quintessence with a vengeance.”
“Oh yes. But the worst thing she’s ever done to Leeming is this abdication of power over Leeming’s remains. Of course it’s for reasons that are adequate on paper. But utterly unbelievable.”
Ramsey thought suddenly of the mid-winter dinner in 1925, Leeming rising from the Swallow and Ariel pudding and holding up a glass of non-alcoholic cider. “To wives and sweethearts,” he had called.
Nettled by the memory of Leeming’s vulnerability, he picked up the nearest letter and was delighted to find it a weapon. “The Council,” it said, “is happy to tell you that it is willing to provide travelling expenses for the visit of Simeon Harper, English novelist and critic, to Australia.…” This Harper, Alec knew, had once published in the Observer a parody of the poet’s work. Ramsey flung the letter across to his guest.
“I hope he gets caught in Chimpy’s filtration system,” the poet said. Which was honest and blunt and therefore disappointing.
It forced Ramsey to admit, “I could never finish any of his, except one. And that didn’t have me with my legs in the air, begging for more.”
He received the letter back from the poet, who said, “You’re very busy. I’ll go.”
Suddenly ashamed at his own pettiness, Alec began to be helpful.
“Listen, there’s no such thing as this Antarctic quintessence you speak of. It’s a common mistake to think of Antarctica almost as if it was a moral state on its own. Man’s motives don’t change in those latitudes. After all, the latitude of the Oates Coast is seventy degrees south. At seventy degrees north, in Norway say, there are town councils whose perceptions, you can bet, don’t differ from those of their brethren further south. Anyone who has ever been either cold or prickly hot among snow, and anyone who has ever been ravished by hot soup after a day in high wind.…”
The telephone had been bleating for half this speech and Ramsey here gave in and picked it up. It was the exchange, with a call from Sydney. A quiet voice introduced itself as a feature writer whose name and prestige were known to Alec. It said it had been talking to Leeming, who had been sure that Mr Ramsey would have nothing to say about the location of the uncle’s remains.
“Mr Leeming was quite right, I’m afraid,” Ramsey told the man. Who began to press the idea of a Saturday feature on Ramsey himself, survivor for forty years; on the emotions let loose in him by the finding of what the journalist called “these pitiable relics”.
Ramsey became disrespectful. “There’s an account in the official history. I’m only a common-or-garden man-on-the-glacier and have no right to add to it.”
“Would you be pleased to see the body returned to its native soil?”
“Which is its native soil?”
The man was patient. “Pardon us. Fine weather is expected at the digging site.”
Alec felt immediate constrictions in his throat and belly; in this way paying for the spaciousness of earlier that morning.
“When?”
“Twelve to twenty-four hours.”
He had surmised wrongly that he might have ten days, and now could not imagine how he had come to such an ample figure. Umpteen times, he had presumed, he would stifle and his vision fill with blood before Leeming dreadfully came; but at least there was also room for leisure in ten days; he wanted time for leisure, for feeling wistful or grudging towards people like Barbara and the poet. But if they were raising the corpse now, this afternoon,
the very pace of it would suffocate, engorge him, split him open.
“So young Leeming doesn’t intend to visit the site,” he suggested.
“Oh yes. I believe the Americans have been asked not to raise the body, even if they find it, until Mr Leeming and the photographer arrive. It seems that this is very late in the season and that people at the site would normally have left ten days ago.”
It seemed to Ramsey that he had been given this much to provoke him to an interview; as if even the journalist found the detail concerning the photographer callous.
“What photographer?”
“A staff one. From Life.”
“My God!”
“And I believe he has employed an agent to sell the film rights in Dr Leeming’s journal.”
But Ramsey would not be interviewed. Every question he answered with the anonymous brand of stupidity shown by people pounced on in the street and asked their opinion of the effect of the European Common Market on the local dried-fruit industry.
The feature writer gave up abruptly, and Ramsey was drawing breath to tell the poet of the idiot nephew’s plans when the idiot nephew himself came in. Barbara, closing the door on them after Ramsey had asked Leeming in, gave the wry impression that she was doing it to foster Ramsey’s illusions of privacy.
Although he must have known that Ramsey would have heard of his dalliance with Kable, not one centimetre of his dominant presence stooped to taking account of it. Why should it, since his loves were sacred to him? Not so plans for putting uncle Leeming across to a hard world.
He had come to see the poet. “The girl on the desk at the hotel told me you’d mentioned you were seeing Mr Ramsey and Mrs Leeming. I’m sorry to say you’ll have to limit that to Alec here. My aunt will have to be excused.”
“I hope she isn’t ill.”
“No, but frantically busy and under a massive strain. This morning’s mail alone included nearly forty letters of what looked like condolence but turned into invitations to join or preside over or address this or that group when she had recovered from her nasty shock.”