A Victim of the Aurora (11 page)

That was his principle. He had stated it to me twice before I went to my bunk.

What a wondrous day-night it was in which we stood officially remembering Victor. As a congregation, we faced that brilliant prospect of the sound and the far Victoria Land Mountains. The starlight was bright as moonlight on those far glaciers and the moonlight bright as moonlight in any desert. Unlike yesterday, no aurora fluttered above the sound but its absence drew our eyes to the volcano called Erebus, rising on our left, three miles high and trailing a spume of smoke above its frozen lip. Closer to our south we could see the convulsed and rugged ice shapes of the Barne Glacier, feeding itself from the higher slopes of Erebus, grinding as a slow and barely plastic river down to the frozen sound. I could talk of the ice shelf beyond that, but I don't want to press your patience. We will come in any case to the ice shelf. Enough to say this, to stand in McMurdo Sound in the clear dead of winter was to step beyond the normal laws of perception, to stretch the senses, to threaten perspective. It depended on your temperament whether it enchanted, or frightened the pants off you.

We stood in a semicircle at the base of the weather-vane hill to the north of the hut. On the lower slopes of the little rise stood Quincy, the priest, and Sir Eugene, the panegyrist. Quincy prayed that although Victor had fallen subject to the corruption of the grave he would one day rise glorious. I find such hopes hard to share. Even if Victor had not been a seducer of Mulroys and Chukchees, the idea of this waspish journalist rising glorious in the fields of judgment day would not have seemed plausible.

Besides, Antarctica being what it is, Victor had not become subject to the corruption of the grave. He lay ice solid and impermeable in a pouch of sailcloth in the ice-cave behind the hut. Even in the summer it would be impossible to bury him in the frozen earth around the foreshores and, perhaps for the sake of some future civilized trial, Sir Eugene did not wish to commit the body through an ice-hole into the depths of the sound.

Now that I am close to the last dark cave myself, I think of Antarctica as the consummate burial place. A lot of people aren't afraid of the oblivion of death. A lot are frightened of the awesome choice of subjecting their flesh either to the rot of interment or the blast-furnace of cremation. About ten years ago, one of my favourite grand-daughters was living with a likeable young man, an unemployed pilot who was sniffing about for a way to make a fortune. I got him alone one night at a party.

‘Do you know that Antarctica is an ice mass of six million square miles?' I asked him.

‘I didn't, sir,' he said.

‘I suppose then you also hadn't realized that seven million cubic miles – miles, mark you – of ice lie atop the six million square miles of continent? There's a fortune to be made in Antarctica, from all that ice.'

‘I suppose so, sir,' he muttered politely, evasive around the eyes in a way that said, all too obviously,
why
don't they can this old dingaling?

‘I mean, a fortune for a pilot.' I explained to him how some people worry about corruption, although no human should need to have
that
explained to him. ‘If you offered to drop corpses by parachute into that great ice mass, the wealthy would know that their bodies could ride in the ice for hundreds of years. People would pay a great deal to be dropped in a dignified manner on to the polar ice cap or even on to one of the glaciers. You could initiate a famous service, and as long as you did it well, no one could interfere with you, because all governments have – by the Twelve Nation Treaty of 1959 – suspended territorial claims over Antarctica.'

‘What about Greenland?' he asked. I could tell by the way he said it that he was not taking me seriously. ‘Greenland has an ice cap.'

‘It belongs to Denmark,' I told him.

I was disappointed. I thought that if I put up the money for this quite serious undertaking I would be able in my turn to sleep above the Beardmore Glacier or lie in state in Victoria Land.

Despite his belief in the resurrection, there was a tension of distress in Brian Quincy's voice that morning. That tautness of grief, missing in most parsons at most such ceremonies, was good for all of us. We began to feel it ourselves – that fruitful grief that lies just this side of the moment when you say, yes there has been a death, yes he is gone and we must keep the stove going, mend our long-johns, eat our lunch.

Quincy would, before the war began, give up the priestly life, and that morning the vestments hung on him in the manner of clothes hastily donned and about to be hastily taken off. He had spent the first part of the morning unsuccessfully helping Byram Hoosick to break a hole in the ice of the sound. They had used augers and picks at a point at which they knew the ice was thinner, perhaps only five feet thick. For this work they had had to wear windproofs and smear their faces with seal grease against frost-bite. Quincy's face still looked greasy above the cassock, stole and surplice. At the same time, the bulk of windproofs beneath his robes made him thicker, massive, a Druid, a magic priest in the way few Anglican clergymen ever are, and therefore – somehow – an outsider to his profession.

Yet he stepped back so humbly when he had finished, yielding up to the vast sound and to the forces that had terribly shaped it, the spirit of his brother, Victor. I had no doubt that he knew nothing of friend Victor's secret tendencies.

Sir Eugene's elegy was brief. ‘Victor Henneker,' he said, ‘was a famous figure and a challenging man to work with. Others more eloquent than I will utter panegyrics for him when the wide world hears of his death. If only we could have him back to ask him why he went out alone on such a day. I will not discuss the metaphysics of this event. I think of banal matters. Such as: that I do not want to repeat this ceremony for any more of my men. Whenever anyone leaves the hut, no matter how benign the weather, he must take someone else with him. I know that is an awkward rule to make. Mr Webb often has to come out to the dogs, Dr Warwick often comes out to the weather screen or Lt Beck to ski cross-country. I must make it a rule however until further notice.'

On that pedestrian phrase, he shook hands with Quincy to show that the ceremony was over.

I was standing near Beck and thought it might be time to begin my duties for the committee of three. ‘Par-axel!' I called.

He stared at me without smiling. I didn't know whether it was the death or the ban on solo ski-ing that made him look that way.

‘If you need a ski-ing partner …' I said, just as a way to begin the conversation.

He nodded. ‘Thank you muchly,' he told me. ‘But Beck is not enjoying the cross-country as he did in the pasts.'

‘Don't say that.' I could feel the false smile on my lips. ‘You must see so much on a good cross-country run.' But I was immediately at a loss to name some of them. ‘Mountains, ice, even some winter seals perhaps. Old Forbes-Chalmers …'

He shook his head. ‘I still am doing the repair jobs on skis.' It was his continuing complaint, the way we treated our skis. Once he had lectured us. ‘All the time I ask you all to leave each his skis either in the racks in porches or in nature room. You can hang them on rafters in there. How else can I keep tracks of them if you don't put them each in his same place every time. But I find them anywhere. Under bunks. In stables. Even in latrines find I a pair one damn day.'

Now he shook his head and said to me, ‘If I go, I come and tells you.'

As I turned away I was blushing that my small investigative sally had ended so inanely. I walked back to the hut behind Barry Fields and Peter Sullivan, the cinematographer.

‘It was a strange speech,' I heard Barry say. ‘I thought the Leader liked poor bloody Victor. I thought he thought Victor was a lovable rogue or something. You know, puckish or something.'

Sullivan's reddish nose sniffed, his ginger moustache jerked. Once he had made a feature film which Victor and a half-dozen other columnists had mocked. He muttered wistfully into his scarf. ‘There was a day in '06 when I spent the whole morning thinking I'd go round to his place in Cheyne Walk and beat the bejesus out of him. However … a nice service of Quincy's. Very fine.'

Barry said, ‘Well, of course. Not that that stuff means anything to me. I'm a bloody socialist.'

Behind them I groaned. Not at Barry's habitual statement. But because, after the crime, I had the burden of weighing even idle conversations.

On a shelf above Alec Dryden's bed lay a small mummified seal. Alec had found this dried and incorruptible body some forty miles inland in the Taylor dry valley. He also told us that it was at least two hundred years dead, a little crab-eater who took an inland course, driven by an evolutionary impulse or by some short-circuiting of instinct. Once when he'd had two brandies he toasted the small mummy as either a zoological fool or hero. Its eyes however were glazed and humbled by the decision it had taken one southern autumn in the reign of Queen Anne. In its shrunken face was no quotient of reward for its errant intention to live far from the coast.

I watched it as Alec spoke tactfully to me. ‘I don't think we should seek each other out,' he said. ‘I don't think we should draw attention to the fact … that we're helping Sir Eugene … that we're …
serving
together.'

It seemed to me that we had drawn attention when the curtain was pulled across Sir Eugene's alcove. But I said nothing. I could not myself understand why, as soon as I entered the hut, I had come to Alec's corner, to his table covered with pages of handwriting and fine naturalist sketches and zoological works of reference.

‘I was wondering,' I said, looking about me for an excuse. I picked up a pencil drawing of the organ and blubber areas of an Adelie penguin. ‘I was wondering …'

The blood in my jaws crepitated and smouldered.

‘It's all right,' Alec said. ‘It's shock, you know. Sit here a while.'

As I lolled, nursing my brow, at Dr Dryden's desk, Norman Coote the tractorman had begun to cross the room towards us, was about to add further definition to the killing.

I am not the first to comment on the decline of murder as a rational exercise. In the first ten years of the century the world and society seemed well ordered and reasonable and murderers, even if acting in passion and on impulse, paid tribute to the rationality of their universe by committing rational murders. The motives themselves were appreciable and rational, having to do with gain or clear sexual goals or freedom from a real, not a paranoid, threat. No one seemed to climb a steeple and, for reasons the sniper himself could not guess at, snipe at people. You would not, on emerging from a barber's shop say, be shot dead by a stranger for causes neither the shooter nor you would ever fathom. Murder seemed not haphazard but an outlying planet in a clockwork solar system.

We expected therefore that the killing of Victor, even if it were the work of Forbes-Chalmers, partook of the orderliness of the world.

It seemed, when Norman reached Alec's desk, that he was presenting one of the elements of the order of our grand Edwardian polar murder, or even that the crime, being its own animal, were giving us a glimpse of its pervasive organs by sending Norman to us.

He stood above us. His square dark face was fixed in a frown and there was a hiss of air between his set teeth. He always hissed somewhat.

‘I believe you two gentlemen are more or less Victor's executors.'

It was the idea he had picked up from last night's frantic conferences.

‘You have his property in hand,' he suggested further.

‘That's true,' said Alec. He invited the tractorman to sit on the bunk.

When Coote found a place to squat, he asked in his lock-jawed monotone, ‘All his documents?'

Alec lifted a folder. ‘Articles. Letters. Yes.'

‘You must have seen his gutter-press journal then. And in that case you probably know about my £1000 from Cave tractors. But then, I've never made a secret of it. Sir Eugene's aware of it. I don't want Sir Gavin Cave frightened though. Frightened by any snide comments in the rags.'

We stared at him, comprehending nothing.

‘You must know,' he stated.

‘No, Norman, we don't.' Alec handed him the folder. ‘Look in that, if you want.'

But Norman didn't want to. He seemed to be moved by broader purposes than simply to safeguard his connection with Cave the tractor-maker. He asked, ‘You remember the day the ship left?'

It had been in mid-February. The
McMurdo
, not buoyant even when unloaded, wearing sail and putting out steam yet still making slow headway, cruised hooting up the sound. Making for Tasmania which, by an irony, had once been Britain's farthest convict hell. As I watched
McMurdo
go, I had a convict hollowness in my bowels. The sound, without that human landscape of forecastle, masts, mesh of rigging, main-deck meathouse and stubby quarterdeck, seemed deathly vacant.

I remember that Sir Eugene, understanding the state of our souls, issued eight bottles of brandy. This meant a quarter-bottle each, enough in most cases to steam out of us our sense of exile.

That clear and sunny evening of late summer, the hut was not quite ready to be occupied and we were camped in tents on the black volcanic scree close by.

Victor and Coote had shared a tent and sat up in their sleeping bags that evening with a stomachful of brandy, chatting. And we all knew how badly Victor held his liquor considering he was a man of the world.

Norman catalysed Victor's quick tongue by projecting his own success. If the tractors out-hauled man, dog and pony, Sir Gavin Cave would pay him a thousand-pound bonus, and with that amount you could start an engineering works of your own. The pleasure Norman took in this promise of a bonus was child-like and endearing to most of us, and since dragging supplies in man-harness, though excellent for the belly muscles, quickly lost its aura, we hoped yet doubted the tractors would succeed.