The Survivor Read Free Page A

tantrum. Or more likely, he’s made of solider materials than me. You can’t make quantitative comparisons in these matters, Eric. In any case, it wasn’t a tantrum.…” He paused to wish it merely were so. “I took exception, that’s all. Holy Mother Texas is lucky not to be one cowboy short by now.” Suddenly he was professional enough to want to make sure that Kable had excused him satisfactorily to his hosts. “You told them I had a ruptured ulcer, I hope? And there’ll surely be no need to go back?”
    â€œI told them this had been coming on on the way here.”
    â€œGod bless you, Eric.”
    â€œI think you ought to go back, Alec.”
    â€œNo. You can substitute for me.” A last St Elmo’s fire of rancour played across the surface of his tongue. “Or get Lance to tell you all about the Burma Road.”
    â€œYou really are a deep-dyed bastard, aren’t you, Alec?” Kable had never been so blunt before. Never mind; Valerie would moderate him when he went home.
    In the meantime Ramsey chuckled for want of some more obvious gesture of despair. He said, “It would be something to think I was. I’m afraid I’m not consistent enough to fit the definition fully. But Leeming happens to be a fairly … personal subject to me. Could you possibly go back and give fuller apologies?” He added, “For your ailing boss?”

2
    He met Morris Pelham, senior lecturer in his department, on the front steps of the Extension building. A scholarship to a good English school and Cambridge had put paid to the rawer notes of Pelham’s Yorkshire accent, but the intonations placed him still, especially when he asked a question, as he did now.
    â€œHow did you get on with the heir-apparent?” By which Kable was meant.
    Often Ramsey could bring himself to speak only in an oblique, eye-avoiding way to Pelham, for he knew the young man had taken up some of the work he himself had neglected over the past year when so much energy had gone into domestic anguish shared with Ella. He feared that Pelham had undertaken these matters out of loyalty, actual loyalty to him, Ramsey, and out of a dour passion to see things functioning properly. He feared, too, that Pelham was sometimes secretly bitter but never said a bitter word outside the dining-room of the Pelhams’ weatherboard house in town.
    Today, newly home from Pinalba, full of the yeast of homecoming, Ramsey felt able to answer Pelham’s small, canny smile without flinching. They liked each other, and Ramsey sometimes thought of generations of Pelham miners or farmers behind Morris, all of them by way of the opening pages of The Rainbow out of Ealing Studios, all of them careful with their laughter and their friendship, their weekly two ounces of special mixture and their nightly pint. That was how he knew he especially liked Pelham: he didn’t bother dreaming up genealogies for his enemies.
    â€œThe heir-apparent?” he said. “Kable? I made him angry, Morris. I walked out of a maniac ritual called a Rotary Club dinner.”
    â€œIn Milton?”
    â€œIn Pinalba.”
    â€œWell, at least it isn’t his town.”
    â€œHe seemed to think I’d ruined the chances of that Duke of Edinburgh lot.”
    â€œOh, rubbish. They’re all snobs, those boots-and-all boys from the bush. They’ll turn out the best of everything for anything marked ‘Dukie’. He knows that.”
    â€œBut I wasn’t very tactful to some of them. I started to talk like a character in a Sartre play. They were polite over our stay, but I got ‘Mister Ramsey’ everywhere I went. The news got round, you see. That I was a smart bastard. Anyway, how’s the poet?”
    â€œMaking a phone call upstairs. He had a very successful visit to the C. of E. girls’ school this morning.…”
    Ramsey half-listened, and breathed the seasonable sweet