The Survivor by Thomas Keneally

erupting in the face of Ella’s stance of long-suffering.
    â€œAll right, Ella. The best of things has happened, so you say. Why don’t you carry yourself like a woman to whom the best has happened?”
    â€œYou make it hard for me to believe in that proposition, Alec.” The words rode in and out slackly on the breath, pretending to have achieved indifference. She was a very savoury bitch, the poet thought, but deserved to be beaten. “But we mustn’t hold up Mr Griffith.”
    Who at that moment was opening a parcel laid flat on the poet’s knees, easing the cardboard off with immense care.
    The poet said wryly, “Are you responsible to the minister for that stuff?”
    â€œNot at all.” Griffith looked around for Alec. “There are Antarcticans down there still who know their Antarctic history. Fortunately someone on this ice-physics excursion that discovered these … well, what are they? … relics? … I suppose so. Anyhow, one of those Americans knew the story of Leeming’s death in more than outline. If your identification is positive, Mr Ramsey, Mrs Leeming will be immediately contacted by our Sydney office. But I hope that all three of you will be good enough to regard this viewing as confidential until the news is announced.”
    All of them hostile, none of them answered. All Griffith did was to go on being provocatively careful with the corrugated cardboard. “Would you like me to buy you a roll of that? ” the poet asked him.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt wouldn’t help you to take more risks with it?”
    â€œNo.”
    Neither did it end with the corrugated. Alec began to suspect Griffith of malice when it was found there was a final layer of tissue around the relics. It seemed an improbable act of delicacy on the part of the Antarctic Division for what had been forty years closeted in the coarse-grained ice.
    â€œTwo pieces of ski-wood,” the functionary said at last, and held them up. “The lacquer’s still in marvellous order, which would make some manufacturer very proud. You’ll see the initials S.L . hacked in one arm and filled in with indelible pencilling, which still shows. Remarkable. Well, we thought they answered the description of the cross you made for Leeming. But that’s up to you, Mr Ramsey.”
    Ella snorted when Ramsey accepted the pieces reluctantly, with a nearly rheumatic deliberateness. He felt bilious taking them, and the floor and the temperate latitudes swung out from beneath his feet for a second. What frightened him most was that the very taste of the morning returned to him. Lloyd standing by passively, all medical artifice suspended, himself pottering guiltily around Leeming. For a reason beyond his knowing, he would now and then chance the tip of his tongue out to his flawed lips—a racking thing to do—and taste his own death on them. His back to the mere thirty-knot gusts, he took off the mitts already frozen and sawed Leeming’s left ski in two. The dreadful season first threatened to split, then anaesthetized, his fingers in their thin inner-gloves as he managed a bad knot of lampwick. With a knife in his good hand, he willed the lettering to happen on the shaft and, holding a stub of indelible pencil in a maimed way, began filling in the hacked outline. Here was a young man so baffled by winds and immensities that he believed all his atoning work with saw, lampwick, knife, and pencil gave Leeming some permanence on the face of the glacier.
    Mr Griffith was busy with the larger parcel, and a careful shedding of tissue showed an aluminium cover, top and two sides, with lettering punched on one of the sides. Mr Griffith read it. “From the Worcester School, Sydney. 24/8/’24.” Then he picked it free of its wrappings, while Alec inhaled noisily, fearing frostbite for the careless man, forgetting that all the voracious cold of the glacier had now gone out of